Overview of Chapter 2
2
Medievals from Augustine
to Ockham
Two Middle Age thinkers we must briefly discuss are Augustine (354–430) and Aquinas (1225–1274), one from the beginning of the period, the other near the end. They were not just theists but Christians, and we want to make a few quick observations about them and their thoughts about ethics and God. We will also talk about a few other figures from around the time of Aquinas—namely, Anselm (1033–1109), Duns Scotus (1266–1308), and William of Ockham (ca. 1287–1347).
Before discussing Augustine, we begin with a quick word about Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–ca. 395), one of the Cappadocian Fathers who importantly shaped the theology and approach to philosophy of the Eastern (Orthodox) churches for many centuries. Gregory thought that our natural knowledge is based on sense experience; but since God cannot be known via the senses, God’s essence is beyond our ken. No positive words are adequate to describe God, and so the famous via negativa, or way of negation, became central to his philosophical theology. On this view, God is known less through speculative thought than through mystical contemplation and devotion. In light of the historical importance of this view, which will recur again, we wanted to mention it quickly at this juncture of the chronology.
Augustine: The Doctor of Grace
Augustine was heavily influenced by Plato, probably indirectly because of the Neoplatonists (likely Plotinus and Porphyry). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the goodness of God was a central if not the central feature of Augustine’s thought. Augustine endorsed the classical moral psychology, according to which we do all that we do in relation to what we take to be our summum bonum (highest good). Augustine referred to the supreme good as something that we seek, the good that somehow serves as the foundation of all we do. He thought we desire it not for the sake of something else but for its own sake—something of intrinsic value, not merely instrumental. It is truly called the “end” because we want everything else for its sake, but we want it only for itself. What is the highest good that everyone is ultimately seeking? God himself, Augustine thought. Recall this famous passage from his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”1
In book 8 of On the Trinity, Augustine’s aim was to show that God is good and that humans find happiness when they love God. Augustine assumed that loving what is good is a natural and obvious thing to do. This is the human telos. Augustine then noted that there are different goods found in different finite things. There is the good of friendship and of the beauty of nature, for example. Humans prefer some of these goods more than others, and rightly so. In light of this, Augustine thought two points in need of explanation: the human ability to distinguish among the goods and a way to make sense of the ranking of different goods. He suggested that God as the ultimate good explains both of these. God impressed on the human mind “some notion of good itself.”2 God is also the standard by which all finite goods are ordered so that God is properly thought of as the good. Since the human telos is loving the good, and God is identical to the good, human happiness or eudaimonia is found in loving God.
Augustine also thought quite a bit about the requirements of moral transformation. This was important to his own spiritual development. Before his conversion, he struggled with the moral demands of sexual purity. His famous prayer, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” has caused many a knowing chuckle. Augustine recognized that the moral demand is a high and uncompromising one, beyond our capacity to meet. Yet, as the common deontic refrain goes, “Ought implies can,” so how can we be responsible for meeting a demand beyond our capacities? Here Augustine thought the prescription is God’s enabling grace. These words are often attributed to him: “God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him.” It’s God’s grace that enables us to meet the moral demand, which, as we will later see, is an ingredient of a performative variant of the moral argument. Although the moral requirement exceeds our natural capacities, it can and should be met by reliance on additional resources that God provides, a theme that Kant will pick up centuries later.
Augustine wrote, “If you cling to [God] in love, you will straightway enter into bliss,” and, “For this is the will of the best and most wise Creator, that the spirit of a man, when piously subject to God, should have a body happily subject, and that this happiness should last forever.”3 This motif will prove relevant to a recurring point in the history of the moral argument that provides a theistic rationale for what Thomas Reid would later call the “coincidence theory,” which says that there is deep correspondence between happiness or fulfillment, on the one hand, and a moral and virtuous life, on the other.
As the ultimate reality, the Good served as a surrogate for God in Plato’s metaphysical system. With the advent of Christian theism, the Good became identified with God himself by Augustine and various church fathers. On such a picture, God is our true end and highest good, and happiness is found in seeking him. God also enables us to recognize various goods that are good in virtue of relating to the highest good, which is God himself. This Augustinian notion of equating or conflating God and goodness is a key motif in much subsequent history of Christian thought.
An important part of the moral life, for Augustine, is exhibiting “ordinate” affections rather than “inordinate” ones. As competing passions fluctuate within our hearts, actions should align with those that deserve primacy. Augustine refers to this prioritization as the ordo amoris, the ordering of loves, which “requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things; to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved or have a greater love for what is to be loved less, or equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.”4
Despite Plato’s influence on Augustine, especially in his early writing, Augustine rejected the Platonic notion that there is a fundamental conflict between spirit and body, one good and one evil. His demotion of evil to the state of a privation or perversion of the good was an important way in which he came to see that they were not merely equal and opposite. However, a conflict does arise when a person loves self more than God, preferring the gratification of bodily desires over submission to God’s law. This condition involves disordered loves, loving a lower good more than a higher good. He thought a person’s loves can be ordered properly only when God is loved most of all, as Matthew 22:37 describes: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Once more, such a condition comes about only through the operation of God’s grace.
The idea he was getting at here and in his Confessions is to have the right sorts and amounts of love for various objects. To love something “ordinately” is to have an ordered love: loving something to an appropriate degree and in an appropriate way. To love something “inordinately” is to accord to it a value it does not possess. This runs the risk of something like idolatry. This is tantamount to a failure to properly exercise the will; it amounts to a rejection of rightful authority, reason, and moral truth. Of course, to his thinking, nothing deserves the same commitment, devotion, and fealty that we should have to God himself.
The last point for now to emphasize about Augustine is the divine ideas tradition. This marked another pivot away from Plato, replacing Plato’s views about recollection and the myth of preexisting souls with a theory of divine illumination. The human mind can grasp universal truths that mirror the divine ideas in the mind of God. Since human beings are made in God’s image, they are conferred this capacity to grasp something about these eternal truths. In addition to that epistemic point, there is also a metaphysical component. All beings depend on God for their existence, a truth rooted in doctrines like creation and trinitarian theology. This picture of radical dependence on God at least suggests, Alvin Plantinga argues, a sort of synthesis that would be later endorsed by most of the theistic tradition and given succinct statement by Thomas Aquinas. That synthesis is that truth is independent of the intellectual activity of human beings but not of God.5 Such a conviction functions centrally at the heart of most moral arguments.
That is a relevant smattering of ideas found in Augustine, at any rate, that will prove relevant to the history and development of the moral argument. Before we turn our attention to a later medieval thinker, Anselm, a quick word is in order about one additional figure (and of course all of this is a radically streamlined history). Likely contemporary with or subsequent to Augustine was Pseudo-Dionysius, a scholar much read and discussed during the Middle Ages. He followed Gregory in conducting mystical theology in terms of the via negativa, describing God best, on that analysis, by denying or removing all things that are. So God is not in time and does not have a body, for example. We recognize God best when we realize that he defies our categories and exceeds our ideas. Yet Pseudo-Dionysius still thought that we can make some positive affirmations about God concerning his goodness and being because God is the source of goodness and being. God is not just Beauty or Goodness as we know them, though, but is rather “superessential Beauty or Goodness, a kind of Goodness or Beauty that exceeds our comprehension,” as Evans puts it.6 This was a reminder that talk of God historically has often featured elements of transcendence that resist domestication and carve out room for mystery and awe.
Anselm: The Scholastic Doctor
Saint Anselm of Canterbury lived from AD 1033 to 1109. He was a vitally important figure in the history of thought, but the specific reasons we make mention of him here pertain to the nature of God. When discussing moral arguments for God’s existence, questions of God’s nature are important to delineate. What sort of theology is operative? Earlier we discussed the gods of Euthyphro’s pantheon, and such gods do indeed seem eminently susceptible to intractable arbitrariness objections. Not all gods are equal.
The question of what God is like is important when two people have a discussion or dialogue about God’s existence. One person might believe in God, and the other does not. Still, it is important that they share some common definition of God. Otherwise, what is the nature of their debate? It would not be clear what is meant by either affirming or rejecting the existence of God. Some gods are too small. So what sort of conception of God are we using?
Anselm can help on this score. Although Anselm himself was a Christian and a strong believer in special revelation, he was also a firm believer in general revelation. Much of his work was an intentional effort to appeal to the deliverances of reason rather than just to the teachings of Scripture. This is helpful to do when attempting to appeal to those not already convinced of the reliability of the Bible or any other alleged sacred text. Since Anselm himself was a Christian, he was altogether open to a posteriori teachings from Scripture, but as a philosophical thinker he also accorded great importance to what can be known a priori (on the basis not of experience but rather of reason). Anselm for one did not discern difficulty reconciling these two conceptions of God. In his work, he aimed to bring together both rational cogency and biblical integrity.
Anselm is probably best known for offering, in his Proslogion, an ontological argument for God’s existence. The atheist Colin McGinn, in his autobiography, reports how reading about the ontological argument as a teenager helped inspire his love for philosophy. He was fascinated that by merely thinking hard, philosophers were potentially able to glean insight into questions about ultimate reality. Later he became more skeptical of the ontological argument and rejected belief in God, but the argument continued to occupy a warm place in his heart (or perhaps mind).
One need not accept the ontological argument, however, to use some of the resources of Anselm’s analysis in laying out how one thinks about God. Although Michael Huemer and others scorn the ontological argument predicated on Anselm’s famous definition,7 it is important to see that conceiving of God as the greatest possible being in no way commits one to the cogency of the ontological argument. Norman Geisler taught those of us who were his students that even if one does not regard the ontological argument as a successful piece of natural theology, Anselm’s argument can still be of tremendous value as a guide to a robust concept of God as a being who is metaphysically necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, and the like.
The basic idea driving Anselm’s agenda was this: God is the greatest possible being, which is to suggest that God has all the great-making properties to the maximal degree possible. This is a quite exalted understanding of God, and it would preclude our conferring the status of deity on, say, the gods of Euthyphro. Great-making properties are those properties thought better to have than not to have, like power or knowledge or goodness. Goodness in this context can refer to either moral goodness or metaphysical goodness. The latter pertains to a picture of absolute ontological completeness; the former, to God’s moral perfection. But important to note is that such moral perfection does not derive from God’s conforming to a moral rulebook. That would make ascriptions of goodness to God altogether anthropomorphic, Richard Davies is right to point out.8
Our main point for now is that defending theistic ethics does not entail defending just any and every conception of God. Some conceptions are philosophically more powerful than others. That the Euthyphro Dilemma falsifies certain conceptions of deity does not mean that it vitiates them all. The operative conception of God that we will use in our analysis is Anselmian—the God of the “omni” qualities. It is also, on occasion, Anselmian in the broader sense of fidelity to biblical insights, since we are of the view that the a priorist and a posteriorist approaches in philosophical theology are reconcilable. We will make it clear when our appeals go beyond the limits of general revelation alone.
We will draw our brief mention of Anselm to a close for now, with just two quick mentions. He introduced a distinction between affections for justice and advantage that Scotus would later tweak and take up; we will discuss that some more. Anselm also offered a solution of sorts to the Euthyphro Dilemma, arguing that it is a false dichotomy. God is taken to neither conform to nor invent the moral order but to embody it: In the case of each of his attributes, God’s having that attribute is precisely that attribute itself.
Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox
The medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) famously proposed five ways of proving God’s existence in his Summa Theologica I.2.3. Thomas’s Fourth Way might be seen as a type of moral argument. He observed that we find in the world a gradation of values: Some things are more good, more true, more noble, and so forth than other things. Such comparative terms describe the varying degrees to which things approach a superlative standard: the most good, most true, and so forth. There must therefore exist something that is the best and truest and noblest thing of all. Aquinas believed that whatever possesses a property more fully than anything else is the cause of that property in other things. Hence, there is some being that is the cause of the existence, goodness, and any other perfection of finite beings, and this being we call “God.” We do not bring up Aquinas here, though, mainly for that particular argument, as suggestive as it might be. We are rather more interested in his particular brand of theistic ethics.
Aquinas was born about eight hundred years after Augustine, and he is often cast as the original “natural law” theorist, paving the way for a long history of natural law in Christian thought ever since. Augustine was more in the tradition of Plato, whereas Aquinas was more Aristotelian. Theistic natural law theorists, motivated by Aquinas, believe that God has manifested his moral law by writing it into human nature and into other aspects of his ordered creation. What we intend to do here is offer, in broad compass, an overall interpretation of natural law as inspired by Aquinas, without preoccupation over fraught fine-grained disagreements. We will have more to say later about the sketch provided, but it will suffice for present purposes to identify the salient feature of Thomas’s moral thought to bear in mind as we move along. Again, our goal in this aerial snapshot is far from providing a comprehensive account or discussion of natural law at this juncture. There is much in Aquinas to appreciate; our synopsis must be quite selective.
The natural law is made up of those precepts of the eternal law that govern the behavior of beings possessing reason and free will. Understanding natural law as an account of practical rationality, the natural law theorist aspires to show how actions can be “practically intelligible” (showing that actions have a purpose and are worth pursuing) and to figure out which among potential actions should be performed. A theory of the good accomplishes each of these goals because, according to Aquinas, the fundamental principle of the natural law is that the good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. As Evans puts it, “For Aquinas this is a ‘first principle,’ like the principle of non-contradiction for theoretical reason, and as such, is regarded as self-evident and not in need of argument.”9 (Theoretical reason is authoritative over belief, whereas practical reason applies somehow to action.) In this way, natural law theory, at least characteristically, assigns priority to the good, which is what furnishes both the point of actions and knowledge of rational action.
Such an abstract first principle is not enough to provide specific guidance, though, so more needs to be said. Natural lawyers typically point to various goods that are universally and naturally good, and many if not most have followed Aristotle’s account of the good for humans in terms of what completes or perfects human nature or what enables human flourishing. So, what are basic goods for human beings? Natural lawyers offer slightly different lists of such goods, but what follows are some of the typically mentioned goods: life and health, knowledge, beauty, friendship, community, fulfilling work, play, inner peace, self-integration, practical reasonableness, and in some cases religious faith and experience. Although natural law is essentially teleological, it is distinguishable from a consequentialist insistence on maximizing some good or other or some aggregate of goods. Persons are rather to respond appropriately to the actual goods they encounter or could actualize.10
In Thomism, the school of thought following Aquinas, God functions as an ineliminable part of this picture. For now, we wish to focus only on the most obvious sense in which this is true. Obviously, although this means that what will be said is not all that could be said on the matter, it will be enough for now. If natural law holds true in something close to how Aquinas conceived of it, then an important sense in which God functions centrally in the moral life is that he is the one responsible for having created human beings, and everything else, with the natures they possess. So far we have focused on what natural law has to say about moral goodness, but consider now the issue of moral obligations. Natural lawyers think that serious reflection on human nature can offer insights into our moral duties too. For example, in virtue of human beings’ having been created in God’s image, they possess great value and worth, which entails that there are authoritatively normative ways in which people should, and should not, be treated. This can help explain, say, the wrongness of torturing children for fun.
This sort of appeal to human nature and assignment of primacy to human flourishing can serve as an example of theistic ethics distinguishable from, say, divine command theory (DCT). The latter is just one sort of theistic ethic, and not all theistic ethicists need agree on the fine-grained details of their accounts in order to see eye to eye on the broader principle that morality importantly depends on God in one way or another. Interestingly enough, some thinkers have attempted to integrate aspects of divine command theory and natural law. Evans does so, as we will see, by dividing the labor in a particular way: He constructs his DCT on the foundation of a natural law account of the good.11 In a similar spirit, Hanink and Mar argue that “the best expression of divine command morality and the best expression of natural law ethics . . . form a structural unity.”12 Aquinas himself counted obedience to divine commands as the highest virtue.13
On the Thomistic analysis, at least the minimal sense in which ethics is theistic is its appeal to creation. On this view, again, God is the one responsible for having made the world and created entities within that world with the particular natures that they have. Arthur Holmes, sounding like a natural lawyer, once wrote that “the biblical direction is rather that the creation bears witness to the moral law, that creational indicators point to good ends God intended in making us as he did, and that God’s law is the law of creation.”14
On Christian theologian John Wesley’s view, the moral law, flowing from the fountain of God’s love and goodness, will, if followed, contribute to well-being and happiness. Wesley saw that it was adapted to the nature of things as God created them. If the standard of morality depends on the nature and relations of things, then it must depend on God himself because those realities themselves are the works of God’s hands. Moreover, since no account of human flourishing that does not include communion with God is complete, man’s summum bonum is impossible apart from reconciliation and fellowship with God. Several classical theologians have recognized that the final end of human beings is union with God, an experience in which we will become co-lovers with God and enter into the love that exists between the three persons of the Trinity.
A question arises of how it is that human nature points to natural law. One stance says an understanding of what is good must be derived from an understanding of human nature; this has been called “derivationism.” An alternative perspective is “inclinationism,” a view like that of John Finnis, according to which one’s grasp of basic goods is something immediate and self-evident and internal to the life of practical reason. Mark Murphy subscribes to the “real identity thesis,” which claims that the insight into the good we have through our inclinations and the knowledge we have about human flourishing through our understanding of human nature represent two alternative ways of grasping the same goods. If he is right, then there is no need to choose between the options because a rapprochement between them can be effected.
This central focus on human nature occasionally raises a concern among those theorists convinced that there is something flawed or broken about human nature. Adherents, for example, of something in the vicinity of the doctrine of original sin, or perhaps even total depravity, are understandably reticent to accord too much authority to the deliverances of human nature. Even what those deliverances themselves are is complexified, potentially, by a fallen human condition that might skew perspectives, warp noetic faculties, and color our moral inferences. This concern recurs as natural law theories of various stripes are subjected to critical scrutiny.
For now, the point to emphasize from this all-too-quick synopsis of a central strand of Thomistic thought is that if God himself is responsible for having conferred on human beings their essential nature, then God could be argued to be at least mediately responsible for knowable moral truths derived from the natural law. In itself, this is not enough on which to construct a strong version of the moral argument for God’s existence; but it at least resides in the vicinity and may well function as a part of a more robust variant of theistic ethics that is a necessary ingredient of moral apologetics.
Duns Scotus: The Subtle Doctor
Another important medieval thinker, Duns Scotus, deserves mention. He agreed with Aquinas on several matters but not on the question of whether positive concepts about God can apply only analogously. Unlike Aquinas, he thought ascriptions of goodness or love to God are neither equivocal nor merely analogous. They are essentially univocal. This is not to say that humans are as loving or good as God is; God is, unlike humans, perfect and infinite. Nevertheless, there is an essential sameness of meaning when it comes to such concepts. This is a matter that will recur in the history of the moral argument.
Scotus also demurred from Aquinas on the metaphysical matter of whether each substance can possess only one substantial form. Because he thought, contra Aquinas, that a substance can possess more than one form, this allowed for a quite robust theory of individuation. He held that in addition to human beings’ sharing in their essential humanity, they also each possess individual forms. Scotus held that substances possess a “thisness,” or haecceity. God creates persons with both a common human nature and a unique individual character. This is a crucial notion to bear in mind when we later talk about issues concerning human value, both in the aggregate and in individuals.
Scotus also seemed to endorse something of a libertarian view of free will, according to which the will has genuine options from which to choose. This does not entail arbitrary decisions; rather, we may have reasons for a variety of actions. Whichever choice we have, we can adduce reasons for it. But the reasons do not entail the choice as some “intellectualist” accounts would have it. Rather, our reasons do not determine us to do just one thing. There is a parallel in this regard, Scotus thought, with God, when he issues commands. Although some of God’s commands are necessary, others may well be contingent. In Scotus’s case, he thought the commands in the second tablet of the Decalogue were contingent. Whether or not he was right about that, the general point is an interesting one to consider. Some divine commands may be contingent but, like libertarian human choices, not arbitrary.
Following Anselm, Scotus also distinguished between two motivations within us, the affection for justice and the affection for advantage, although he took the distinction in a slightly different direction from that of Anselm. Scotus not only distinguished them but prioritized them, insisting that the former, the affection for justice, deserves primacy. The affection for justice is about pursuing the good, doing good for others, doing our duty, and such, whereas our affection for advantage is about assigning primacy to our own best interests. Our natural inclination is to give priority to advantage over justice, but morality dictates just the opposite, while carving out important space for both.
Because we may need to stifle or resist the affection for advantage on occasion, Scotus rejected the “eudaimonistic” conception of ethics that Aquinas took from Aristotle, in which the end of human life that guides moral decisions is simply happiness. As Evans puts it, “Paradoxically, the route to ultimate happiness requires me to value something more than my own happiness, at least when happiness is understood in temporal, this-worldly ways.”15 Scotus was a divine command theorist when it came to spelling out the requirements of justice. He avoided arbitrariness concerns by affirming that some moral truths are necessary truths that not even God can alter. But some moral obligations are made true by divine commands, commands that fit or are appropriate in relation to the good. The main difference from Aquinas is that Scotus thought that God has more discretion over what he commands than did Aquinas. Aquinas saw God’s commands as fixed by God’s understanding of what is good and good for us, given the natures he has given us. To use terms from earlier, Scotus would embrace the discretionary hypothesis, whereas Aquinas would reject it, a topic to be discussed in more detail later.
Ockham: The Venerable Inceptor
The last medieval to discuss for now, a contemporary of Scotus, is William of Ockham (ca. 1287–1347). Most have heard of “Ockham’s Razor,” a principle of simplicity—if two theories equally well explain the facts but one is simpler, opt for the simpler theory. Amazingly enough, it seems to be a quite good epistemic principle in a lot of areas—elliptical orbits free from Ptolemaic epicycles come to mind as a salient example. This important epistemic principle is traceable to Ockham, and it is a principle that is often useful in forming defensible theories in a range of disciplines. Sometimes an appeal to Ockham’s Razor is called the principle of parsimony—the notion that we should exclude extraneous hypotheses and opt for simpler theories that explain what needs to be explained at least equally well. This matter will come up from time to time as we discuss both the moral argument and the case for moral realism on which moral arguments are based.
Less favorably, often associated with Ockham is a stance in ethics that has actually been named after him: that of “Ockhamism.” This at least colloquially is taken to represent radical voluntarism, according to which morality is whatever God says it is. This position is an endorsement of the horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma that says that whatever God commands is moral in virtue of God’s commanding it. Many call this “voluntarism,” and we will follow suit. This notion of voluntarism can be a bit ambiguous, so we can take this occasion to make a useful distinction to help disambiguate it a bit.
Recall the Euthyphro Dilemma: Either God commands something because it is moral, or it is moral because God commands it. Sometimes the former is called a “guided will” theory, and often the latter is called a “pure will” account. Let us consider the “pure will” account for now: Something is moral because God commands it. Now, ethicists tend to distinguish between matters of the (moral) good and right, so the term “moral” might mean one or the other, or both. So the “pure will” account might mean moral goodness is what God wills or commands it to be, or that moral rightness (primarily moral duties) is what God wills or commands it to be, or both.
A radically voluntarist account would say God’s will or commands dictate the content of both the good and the right. A voluntarist account of the moral good is axiological voluntarism; a voluntarist account of the right (moral duties) is deontic voluntarism, or divine command theory (DCT). So DCT, on this view, entails that moral duties come about as a result of divine commands. We have much sympathy for DCT, but we will not defend axiological voluntarism. For the purposes of our own account, we will confine the moral relevance of DCT to the matter of moral duties or obligations.
Ockhamism is often associated with radical voluntarism, in a couple of senses. One of those senses is thinking that voluntarism applies to both the good and the right, both axiological and deontic realities. The other sense is thinking of such voluntarism, in each case, as containing no essential constraints. So, in the case of moral goodness, if God were to say that torturing children for fun is good, then it would be good. In the case of moral rightness, if God were to command us to torture kids for fun, then doing so would be morally obligatory, in virtue of God’s commanding it.
Set aside axiological voluntarism and consider now a voluntarist account of moral duties, divine command theory. Even though such an account is not radically voluntarist in the first sense, it remains vulnerable to the charge of making morality arbitrary. If there are no constraints on what God commands, then there are no limits on what God can command. This is the most notorious recurring charge against divine command theory. Sometimes such voluntarism goes by the name of “Ockhamism,” named after Ockham, and this for a few reasons. One reason was Ockham’s pivot from Thomism, shifting the focus away from God’s mind or nous and toward God’s will. A second reason was that some (in)famous phrases found in Ockham’s work suggest there are no constraints on what God can command. This led plenty of interpreters of him to think that he was suggesting that God can licitly command acts that, apart from an express divine command, would count as adultery, murder, and the like, or that God might command someone to hate him (God).
In Good God, Jerry Walls and David Baggett characterized Ockham as a radical voluntarist in this second sense, suggesting that morality is whatever God says it is, before criticizing the view. John Hare, in a review of the book, argued that while such an interpretation is commonplace, a better understanding of Ockham is on offer. He directed readers to the magisterial, two-volume work of Marilyn McCord Adams on Ockham16 and, even more, to the work by Lucan Freppert that she endorses.17 A better understanding of Ockham, in Hare’s words, is this:
The command to not love God, though its content is possible in itself, is pragmatically incoherent (a practical contradiction) because it cannot be disobeyed; this is because to disobey it is already to love God: “The created will cannot elicit such an act during this time” (Quodlibetal Questions III.14). A content can be non-contradictory in itself but contradictory as commanded. This seems to be the view of the preponderance of Ockham’s texts on the issue, in which he teaches that to obey God and to love God are the same thing. A content can also be non-contradictory as commanded, but contradictory as commanded by God.18
In light of these exegetical complexities, here is what we propose. We will use the phrase “radical voluntarism” to refer to an extension of voluntarism to both the good and the right and/or to a version of divine command theory that includes no constraints on God’s commands whatsoever. Voluntarism with respect to moral goodness, axiological voluntarism, is a view that we will not discuss further, since it is a view we reject wholesale (although we will argue for a different sort of dependence relation). When we discuss DCT, it will be the notion that God’s commands generate moral obligations. Some divine command theories are radically voluntarist in the problematically arbitrary sense, but some are not, as we will see. In deference to work by scholars like Adams and Freppert, we will refrain from equating Ockhamism with radical voluntarism in either sense.
Overview of Chapter 2
This chapter covered five significant figures from the medieval era: Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Points about Augustine most germane to the moral argument include that the greatest good for human beings is God himself, the source of our truest and deepest joy and flourishing. Right living involves recognizing that some goods are higher than others and that we should love things in an appropriate way and to the right measure, neither too much nor too little, which requires the operation of God’s grace. Augustine also rejected the Platonic notion that the empirical world, including the body, is inherently evil. He also intimated a notion that would develop subsequently that truth is independent of the intellectual activity of human beings but not of the intellectual activity of God. Regarding Anselm, what we took as his primary import for now was his greatest possible being methodology, an a priorist approach to describing God in terms of the great-making properties. This is an important aspect of the operative theology of our own analysis. Regarding Aquinas, we emphasized, among other things, his practice of natural law, a historically important variant of theistic ethics. Natural law comes in different forms, but theistic adaptations agree that God is the one responsible for having made the world and created entities within that world with the particular natures that they have. Regarding Scotus, he deployed a distinction from Anselm between affections for justice and those of advantage, arguing that the former should take primacy; affirmed that there is more than analogical language in our descriptions of God; emphasized not just human nature generally but the uniqueness of each person; and endorsed a divine command ethic that allowed for some of God’s commands to be contingent. Ockham is best known for something like radical voluntarism; opinions vary on whether this is exactly right. Even if this was not quite Ockham’s own view, the notion that all of God’s commands are contingent is an important view for consideration in the history of the moral argument and is likely a view susceptible to intractable arbitrariness objections.
1 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991), book 1, chap. 1.
2 Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, in St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Arthur West Haddan, vol. 3 of A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, first series (Buffalo, 1887), 244.
3 Augustine, On the Trinity, 223.
4 Augustine, Teaching Christianity or De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Edmund Hill (New City, 1996), 118.
5 Alvin Plantinga, “How to Be an Anti-Realist,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 56, no. 1 (September 1982): 52.
6 C. Stephen Evans, A History of Western Philosophy (InterVarsity, 2018), 151.
7 Worth noting is that it is false that the ontological argument claims that “God exists” is an analytic truth. No existential assertion is analytic, and construing it as such would make it impossible to assert that God really does exist. By the same token, current versions of the ontological argument (like Plantinga’s) do not try to define God into existence but rather are modal arguments asserting that it is possible that God exists, from which metaphysical possibility it follows that God does exist in light of certain axioms from modal logic. Thus, the old claim that the ontological argument proves only that if there is a God, then God exists necessarily, fails to take cognizance of the modal versions. Such a deficit in understanding the ontological argument often looms surprisingly large in the rejection of grounding moral values in God.
8 See Richard Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum, 2006). Davies entertains reservations about attributing the quality of moral goodness to God, but we do not share his reservations. See Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–58.
9 C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2013), 59. See as well Mark Murphy, Natural Law and Practical Rationality (Oxford University Press, 2001), 2–3; and Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II.94.2.
10 Evans, God and Moral Obligation, 61.
11 Evans, God and Moral Obligation.
12 James G. Hanink and Gary R. Mar, “What Euthyphro Couldn’t Have Said,” Faith and Philosophy 4, no. 3 (1987): 254.
13 Evans actually considers Aquinas a divine command theorist, albeit one who rejects the “discretionary hypothesis,” a topic we will discuss under “A Problematic Disjunction” in chap. 12.
14 Arthur Holmes, Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions, 2nd ed. (InterVarsity, 2007), 66.
15 Evans, History, 218.
16 Marilyn McCord Adams, William of Ockham, 2 vols. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).
17 Lucan Freppert, The Basis of Morality According to William Ockham (Franciscan Herald Press, 1988).
18 John Hare, “Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 19, 2011, https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/good-god-the-theistic-foundations-of-morality/.