In a previous post, Divine Commands and Pyschopathic Tendancies, I said I would look in more detail at Sam Harris’ charge that Divine Command Theories (“DCT”) of meta-ethics are psychopathic. In this, and in several forthcoming posts, I will attempt to deliver on that promise.
In Harris’ debate with William Lane Craig at Notre Dame, transcript here, Harris offered three direct lines of argument against a DCT. (I say direct lines because many of Harris’ rebuttals did not address DCT at all; rather he engaged popular objections to Christian doctrines about exclusivism and hell.) The first direct argument was as follows:
“According to Dr Craig’s Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties; God doesn’t have to be good. Whatever he commands is good, so when he commands that the Israelites slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.”
Here Harris makes three claims. First he argues that according to a DCT God does not “have to be good”. Second, he infers from this that God can therefore make any action at all intrinsically good. Third, he alludes to an incident in the book of Samuel where, on the face of it, God commands the killing of the Amalekites.
Turning to Harris’s first claim, according to DCT a person has a duty to a person to do some action only if that person is commanded by God to do it. As God does not issue commands to himself he is not bound by moral duties. Harris infers from this that “God doesn’t have to be good”.
Whether this is inference is sound depends on what Harris means by “have to be good”. There are at least two possible things he could mean by this.
Sometimes when we say someone does or does not “have” to do something, we mean they are not morally obligated to do it. When I tell my children they have to tell the truth, for example, I am saying they have a duty to tell the truth. In other contexts however, when we say that someone does or does not “have” to do something we mean it is possible for them to do it.
If Harris, in saying “God does not have to be good”, means God is not under an obligation to be good then his inference is sound; if God is not bound by duties then he obviously does not have an obligation to be good. This, however, does not entail that it is logically possible for God to lack goodness.
If, on the other hand, Harris’ claim that “God does not have to be good” carries the implication that it is possible for God to do evil then it is a a flat out straw man.
Craig’s position is that our moral obligations are constituted by God’s commands. He explained what he meant by the term ‘God’ earlier on in the debate:
“As St. Anselm saw, God is by definition the greatest conceivable being and therefore the highest Good. Indeed, He is not merely perfectly good, He is the locus and paradigm of moral value. God’s own holy and loving nature provides the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. He is by nature loving, generous, faithful, kind, and so forth. Thus if God exists, objective moral values exist, wholly independent of human beings.”
Craig specifies that he is using the definition of God proposed by 11th century theologian Anselm of Canterbury. On this understanding the word God functions more like a title as opposed to a proper noun. Just as the title “Ceasar” designated whoever is Emperor of Rome, “God” is the title given to any person who is “the greatest possible being”, who is “worthy of worship”. Craig is also clear that in order to be worthy of worship or maximally great the person in question must be “morally perfect”, by which be means he must have certain character traits of being loving, generous, kind, faithful and so on.
So, as Craig has defined his terms it is impossible for God to not be good, in the same way it is impossible for Ceasar to not be the Emperor of Rome. A person might claim there is another person who currently holds this title, and one might dispute as to who at a particular point in time in fact did – rejecting that Nero is Ceasar as opposed to Claudius let’s say – but one cannot claim that if someone is Ceasar that he is not the Emperor of Rome. Similarly, as Craig has defined his terms, it is impossible for anyone to be God and not be perfectly good. One can deny that any existent being is God, and one can deny certain candidates such as Yahweh or Allah are God, but if a being is God then he is good.
This brings us to Harris’s second claim. The inference he attempts to draw that God can make any action at all intrinsically good simply by commanding that it be done.
Harris states, “when he commands that the Israelites slaughter the Amalekites, that behaviour becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it.” This, however, is false. Pretty much all major versions of a DCT defended today are accounts of the nature of the moral obligations, not accounts of goodness in general. To say an action is obligatory is not the same as saying it is instrically good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger but it is not an act I am obliged to do. For something to be obligatory it must be more than intrinsically good; one must be required to do it so that failure to do it without an adequate excuse renders one blameworthy and appropriately subject to censure.
No DCT I know of defended today, and certainly not Craig’s version, claims that an action can be made instrinsically good because God commands it. Goodness is an attribute God possesses essentially; it is antecedent to any commands he issues. Because God is essentially good he cannot command just anything; it is logically impossible for an essentially good person to command something that is incompatible with him being a good person.
It follows therefore that God cannot make the killing of the Amalekites intrinsically good by commanding it. God can make killing the Amalekite obligatory by commanding it, but he can do this only if it is possible for a good person to issue such a command. If it is not then a DCT does not entail that this action could be obligatory.
This brings us to Harris’ third claim. The questions around the biblical account of Saul killing the Amalekites are strictly speaking irrelevant to the defensibility of a DCT. This is because a DCT is simply the thesis that moral obligations consist in divine commands. By itself, this thesis says nothing about whether God’s commands are accurately revealed in the Bible or the Koran or any written revelation at all. Of course, some divine command theorists, like Craig, are biblical inerrantists and hold that the Bible is the infallible word of God. However, many, such as Robert Adams and Philip Quinn, are not. Biblical inerrancy is a separate thesis compatible with either the affirmation or the denial of DCT. Craig pointed this out earlier in his debate with Harris.
“Here the only response that I detected from Dr. Harris was to refer to the atrocities in the Hebrew Bible. But I think this is quite irrelevant to tonight’s discussion; there are plenty of Divine Command theorists who are not Jews or Christians and place no stock whatsoever in the Bible. So this isn’t an objection to Divine Command theory that I’m defending tonight.”
At the point in the debate that Harris raised the issue of the Amalekites it had already been pointed out this question was irrelevant to the truth of a DCT. At no point subsequent to this did Harris attempt to refute Craig on this and show that a DCT entails or rationally commits one to believing in biblical inerrancy. Instead, he just repeated the Old-Testament atrocities argument.
Unfortunately when it has been pointed out to you that a particular line of argument is irrelevant, repeating that argument does not counts as a rational rebuttal – even if you are repeating a popular canard.
Harris’ first direct refutation of a DCT fails.
In my next post, Is a Divine Command Theory Pscyopathic? Sam Harris on Divine Commands: Part II, I turn to Harris’ second line of criticism of a Divine Command Theory. Then I look at Harris’ final remarks in Is a Divine Command Theory Psychotic? Sam Harris on Divine Commands Part III.