January 1, 2025

Can a Divine Command Theory Vindicate the Objectivity of Morality?

Key Points

Divine command theories provide a defense for objectivity in moral judgments, despite criticism of being subjective.
Key critique examples include appraiser independence, stance independence, and observer independence, none effectively undermining DCM.
Critiques of divine command metaethics often rely on misunderstandings of moral thought's objectivist features instead of substantive arguments.
The paper underscores that divine command theory remains a viable framework for understanding the objectivity of morality.

Abstract

Defenders of divine command metaethics ethics (DCM) have argued that one advantage of such theories is their ability to vindicate the objectivity of moral judgments. Some critics of DCM have contested this; they argue that divine command theories are subjectivist theories and inherit the problems such theories have in accounting for apparently objectivist features of our moral thought. I will examine and critique three examples of this criticism. David Brink’s appeal to appraiser independence, Elizabeth Tropman’s appeal to stance independence and Michael Huemer’s idea of observer independence, I will argue that none of these criticisms succeeds.

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