Abstract
We have seen in recent decades a series of books about divine command theory in analytic philosophy. Notable among them are Philip Quinn’s Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (1978), Robert M. Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods (1999) and C. Stephen Evans’s God and Moral Obligation (2013), all from Oxford University Press. In God’s Command, John E. Hare, the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School, manifests a version of divine command theory as part of this series. However, this book is also one in a trilogy in which Hare presents an ethical theory based on the Trinity. The Moral Gap (Oxford University Press, 1996), which argued for the implications for ethical theory of the doctrine of the second person of the Trinity, in particular those of atonement and justification, was the first volume. God’s Command, which is about the work of the first person of the Trinity, is the second. In his God and Morality (Blackwell, 2007), Hare announced that the third volume would be about the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification.
God’s Command has eight chapters along with an impressive summary at the end. Although their main shared topic is divine command, the chapters are formed independently of each other. The questions of why we should be moral people and what is the foundation of our moral truths are the most significant drivers of this book. Hare basically defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it and what makes something morally wrong is that God prohibits it. In his view, moral law cannot be deduced from our nature, but it fits our nature exceedingly well.
In the first chapter, Hare explains various kinds of relationship of morality’s dependence upon religion and offers three arguments about this dependence, to do with providence, grace and justification. The argument from providence holds that if we don’t doubt that we are under moral law, we are entitled to believe in the existence of a ruler of the world who makes the evil in the world subordinate to the good. The argument from grace maintains that there is a gap between moral demand and human capacity. For Hare, the key solution to the problem of the moral gap is to accept that, even if ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can by our own faculties’ (p. 13). It is possible to be moral agents but only with assistance from outside. The argument from justification is about how the moral demand can be justified. Hare indicates that loving God is not simply to repeat God’s will in our will, because there are things God wills that God does not will for us to will.
The main concern of the second chapter is how divine command should be understood as associated with the obligatory. Hare holds that God has both objective and subjective authority. Objectively, when God commands a person to do something, this brings about a reason for acting in accordance with the command, even if the person subjectively does not acknowledge this reason. Only God’s commands make obligatory the good things that God prescribes, all of which take us to our proper end by the path God has selected for us, and our obedience is an expression of our love for God that is good in itself. Hare accepts that there is circularity here: God has rightful authority because God’s commands give us the reasons for action that we ought to have, and we ought to have them because God’s commands have authority. But the circularity is not vicious, because the chain of justification terminates in the principle known from its terms that God is to be loved and hence God is to be obeyed.
Eudaemonism, the view that all our choices and actions are properly aimed at our own happiness, is the main topic of the third chapter. Hare rejects eudaemonism, arguing by way of a contrast between a single-source view and a double-source view. The former, defended by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Jean Porter, focuses on just the agent’s happiness, with pursuit of this seen as a perfecting activity of the agent. The latter, defended by Duns Scotus and Kant, argues that humans have two opposite tendencies: affection for justice and affection to advantage. Although Hare accepts that we start from self-preference, that single-source view of motivation is unconvincing to him, not because we are human per se, but because of a disorder of our wills.
Deductivism, the view that moral obligations are deduced from facts about human nature, is the major topic of the fourth chapter. If moral obligations can be deduced from facts about human nature, divine commands are unnecessary for determining the content of the moral law. Referencing Scotus, Hare holds that the precepts in the first table of the Decalogue are known by people from their terms, but the precepts in the second table are not. Additionally, Hare discusses and rejects Robert Adams’s deductivism that claims that humans cannot be deeply wrong about good and evil because we fix the reference of the terms by our ordinary use of them, just as we fix the reference of ‘water’. The main evidence for Hare’s rejection of deductivism is that Aristotle and Jesus did not agree about what is the chief good or about humility.
Karl Barth is the main figure discussed in the fifth chapter. Hare focuses on certain aspects of Barth’s approach to divine command, notably particularism, which assumes that the paradigmatic divine commands apply to particular people at particular times and places, and how we know what divine command is being addressed to us. Barth underlines the particularity of divine command and consistently emphasises that our reception of the divine command and our responsiveness to it are conditioned on our election and on God’s gracious action towards us. Hare comments, ‘It is true that God can choose which good things to command, but in interpreting the command, and deciding what to take as a command, we are within the narrative about God’s choosing that is given in our own religious tradition’ (p. 153).
Divine command and natural law theories in medieval Islamic theology are the basic issue of the sixth chapter. What makes this chapter distinctive is Hare’s focusing on al-Māturīdī, a very brilliant theologian in Islamic thought who is, however, neglected not just in scholarship in English but also in Arabic Islamic literature. Hare properly locates al-Māturīdī against the background of a dispute between Mu‘tazilites and Ash‘arites. His position in this discussion gives us an opportunity to interpret al-Māturīdī as a soft divine command theorist, that is, between al-Ash‘ari, a hard or pure divine command theorist, and Abd al-Jabbar, a natural law theorist. Hare shows that al-Māturīdī gives the place of a junior partner to reason in relation to divine command. Hare also draws attention to some similarities between al-Māturīdī’s and Duns Scotus’s theologies in a very inspiring way. In contrast, Hare’s use of only English translated literature for these discussions leads to his omission of al-Māturīdī’s Taʾwilat al-Qurʾan, his commentary on the Qurʾan, which includes important considerations regarding his theological and ethical perspective.
In Chapter 7, Hare treats some recent Jewish writers, focusing on works about Jewish natural law theory and its relation to Maimonides, one of the most influential theologians in Jewish tradition. Hare starts with Marvin Fox, continues with David Novak, and finishes with Franz Rosenzweig’s views on Maimonides’s ethics according to his most striking work, Guide for the Perplexed. Throughout the chapter Hare discusses the cognitive aspect of Maimonides’s natural law theory, and generally rejects both Fox’s and Novak’s assessments of this, while approving Rosenzweig’s.
The relation between our morality and evolutionary history is discussed in the last chapter of the book. Hare puts forward four different suggestions that explicate this relation, arguing against the first three and approving the fourth. The first, advocated by Herbert Spencer, Larry Arnhart and Jonathan Haidt, is that human evolution has given us a set of moral capacities. The second, advocated by John Mackie, Michael Ruse, Sharon Street and Paul Bloom, is anti-realist about morality. The third, advocated by Joshua Greene and Philip Kitcher, is that there is indeed a gap between what morality now demands and how we originally evolved, but we do not need an appeal to God’s command to bridge between them. The fourth brings in our relation to God and gives us a good explanation for how we are morally obligated and how we might have developed to appreciate such obligation. God commands us in a way that fits our evolved capacities, though we cannot deduce the commands from these capacities.
Throughout the book we can find the tracks of Hare’s own version of divine command theory. However, when we look at the details of this, we can see that he doesn’t reject all precepts of natural law theory. Therefore, it seems to me, Hare’s position can be described as a soft divine command theory. This is generally inspired by Duns Scotus and can be located in Christian ethics between Ockham’s harder divine command stance and Aquinas’s natural law theory. Its main thesis is that moral values cannot be deduced from our created nature, but these fit our nature exceedingly well. In this theory, God’s supreme goodness has critical importance since God’s character negates the allegation of arbitrariness in God’s command. But this approach raises the question: if God commands only what is good, is God’s command redundant? The way of defending Hare’s theory against this objection is to make a separation between good and obligation. Even if human beings can understand what is good, the only thing that makes some good obligatory is God’s command. This is also a very significant point for comprehending the separation between divine will and divine command.
A distinguishing feature of this book is that it addresses a wide spectrum of different doctrines regarding divine command and natural law, including, as we have seen, those of some Islamic theologians and Jewish thinkers. Furthermore, even though evolutionary psychology is quite a different area from theology and philosophy of religion, Hare sufficiently defends his theory against those that reduce moral demand to human evolution. On the other hand, this wide spectrum could lead readers sometimes to lose a sense of the integrity of the book as a whole.
Moreover, given the discussion of three medieval Islamic theologians, readers might expect to see a similar comparison of medieval Christian theologians, notably Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. This would be a better choice in terms of the integrity of the book than discussing Karl Barth, despite his great influence. In this way, the reader could compare medieval discussions on divine command and natural law by influential theologians across the Abrahamic faiths.
The last thing that should be said about God’s Command is that it is an outstanding defence of a version of divine command theory. This is closer to some kinds of natural law theory than readers might expect; hence it can be described as a soft divine command position, as I suggest above. In this way, the book is a major contribution to the discussions of divine command in both philosophical and theological ethics.