By Jimmy Stephens

Subjectivism and Moral Facts

It makes no sense to talk about a being that controls the facts of creation as a subjectivist. Subjectivism is a problem for humans because human opinions, preferences, and other conscious states do not cause moral facts. God’s mind determines all facts. So what distinction is even to be made between subjectivism and objectivity for God? I don’t understand that last sentence.

Equivocation in Moral Facts

However, I think it’s equivocation to say moral facts are agent-subjective (to God). If it’s just meant that moral facts are determined by God, sure. That’s trivial and doesn’t support the objection. If it’s meant that moral facts are not objective, that’s clearly false since what is determined by God are facts. Like so many silly objections to Christian theology, it assumes a univocity about meta-ethics. Namely, it assumes that God and man are on the same metaphysical playing field with respect to moral facts.

A Middle View Between DCT and NLT

Christians should cut ties with Divine Command Theory (DCT) and take up a middle view, neither DCT nor Natural Law Theory (NLT). This view can, with caution, be thought of as a middle-way between DCT and NLT. Like DCT, it is God’s unique beauty and status as Sovereign that makes moral facts possible. And moral facts are certainly created. You’re missing the Creator/creature distinction. Moral facts are objective because their truth is necessarily independent from human minds.

God as the All-Conditioner

Now, are moral facts dependent on God’s mind? Yes. Does this make the matter subjective? No, not unless we want to equivocate. This is because there is no objective/subjective distinction in God. He is the sovereign Creator Himself. A certain theologian, Cornelius Van Til, used the word “All-Conditioner,” and it’s quite apt here. God is the All-Conditioner because He conditions and predetermines every fact of reality, placing them in fruitful relationship with one another. This includes moral facts.

Moral Facts and Actualization

You write, “But my sentence ‘which leads me to consider the relationship between moral propositions being true but not actualized’ is that if a divine property actualizes a wall then why do we not live in a perfect world considering the attitude of a divine agent toward moral propositions is what makes them true, why are they all not actualized?” We’re working with two different thoughts here. The divine thoughts that are actualized as moral facts are something like “X is good.” A perfect world, on the other hand, if by that you mean a world with perfect moral agents, would require the actualization of the thought “All men act in accordance with X.” Moral facts can be true even while agents ignore them, irrational as that might be.

Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Moral Facts

If the proposition is true, it is actualized. But in the case of moral facts, there’s a clear and unambiguous difference between the following two thoughts:

• (P) You ought to X.
• (D) Men act in accordance with P.

So, God can actualize one but not the other, and that without conflict. The first is prescriptive and the second is descriptive.

Agent-Subjective Thoughts

If there is no distinction between objectivity and subjectivity in God, just what does it mean to say that God’s thoughts are agent-subjective? Either there is such a distinction, or there is not. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Why bother blocking the inference from agent-subjectivism to moral anti-realism when you can easily (and more accurately) block the inference from DCT to agent-subjectivism?

Grounding Moral Facts

According to which moral facts – like whether it’s legally permissible to allow genetic modification – are grounded in the synthesis of God’s nature, man’s nature, and the covenant God mediates between the two. My strategy is to bite the bullet and accuse the objection of deepity. The strategy can either be categorized as a defense of DCT or a separate view. I take the latter interpretation. We can call it Divine Law Theory (DLT).

Moral Facts Beyond Spoken Imperatives

The key difference is that moral facts are not grounded in spoken imperatives. Rather, the imperatives reveal moral facts grounded in the threefold system of God’s character, man’s nature, and the law instituted to connect the two. So the obligation to obey God is grounded in the conjunction of God’s inherent worthiness, man’s inherent function of worship, and the law’s norms that facilitate instances for or against those natures.

Moral Obligations and God’s Commands

Why can’t moral facts just include or entail moral obligations? I take the second approach: God’s commands presuppose or constitute the instituting of a moral law, which He is uniquely able to do. Isn’t that distinct from DCT, though? It seems to me that means moral facts aren’t strictly identical nor reducible to God’s commands. Rather, moral facts are explained in terms of God’s law, which His commands convey imperatively. So the obligation to obey God’s command not to murder follows of necessity from the fact that you ought not to, which fact is a created law no different than other creations, like the fact that the sun is hot or that De Morgan’s Laws support certain beliefs.

Balancing DCT and NLT

That strikes me as something that cuts between both DCT and NLT, no? Like DCT, God in His creatorhood is sufficient to ground moral facts. Like NLT, these facts are not commands and they might be contingent on facts about, say, the nature of man, which of course God designs. Probably, but I wonder what a DCT has in mind. Necessary for what? What role do they play? Seems to me your question warrants a yes response because God judges the world. You can’t really work out divine justice without divine law, and that seems to necessitate commands or the equivalent legal imperative analog. But I don’t really think that grounds the moral facts. It’s more like the exigency of God using or applying or interacting with us through those moral facts than making them exist.

Commands and Moral Values

At the risk of talking too much, I think the issue here is what our theory is trying to accomplish. Are we talking about “truth maker” like things – “morality makers,” call them? If so, I don’t think commands play that role in metaphysics. Commands ontologically presuppose the moral values that inform the commandments. But in a sense, you couldn’t really have the values without the commands. Not because they “make them exist” or whatever, but because of the same kind of reason as God making people in His image and then having them all get killed by a meteor. That just makes God defeat His own purposes.

Human Virtues vs. Divine Virtues

The problem with that view is that it identifies human virtues with divine. Although it’s unintentional, that concedes the Euthyphro. Because then, God’s moral perfection is defined either by creation or by some third category God and creation share in common. What we ought to do is recognize a division in goodness. There are fundamentally two different kinds of moral good – God’s and creatures’. In this way, the Euthyphro has a subtle univocism motivating it.

Avoiding the Euthyphro Dilemma

If we don’t think of the Good as some one-for-both-God-and-creatures thing in the first place, then the dilemma falls apart. The question is still there, but it needs to be disambiguated, and once it is, it will no longer be an objection. The problem is that God has no shared (read: condescended) motivation for the commands. Ask this: What are God’s commands providing that is not already present in His virtues? Normativity? If yes, then the reason humans ought not rape, why that’s a norm, is because God commands it. But then, when God exemplifies faithfulness to His own commands, His motivation for not raping is only because He commands humans not to? That’s not the picture we get from Scripture. God’s commands, like not to rape, are obviously motivated by certain values, like natural rights. It defaces the image to perform sexual crimes. Are the rights belonging to humans or the value of humans the same as God’s? No, so to say the commands are motivated by God’s nature alone fails.

Divine Commands and Obligations

Imagine God says to a rock, “Don’t fall on someone!” Is the rock now obligated to do anything? If not, the imperative isn’t sufficient. So commands aren’t sufficient. Minimally, commands plus moral agents is what grounds obligation. Now, I don’t think that’s sufficient either, but I’m just saying, it’s easy to see that divine commands aren’t magic hats to pull out moral norms like rabbits. But we just saw that God plus His command ≠ moral oughts. If God commands a rock, nothing happens. There’s no obligation. We all agree you (keyword:) need to have the right audience, namely moral agents, for obligations to obtain.

Natural Law Theory vs. Divine Command Theory

It’s not clear how, at that point, Craig’s not just a natural law theorist. If the nature of God in conjunction with the nature of man is sufficient for moral obligations, how is that not NLT instead of DCT? There is a lot to say about the Euthyphro. I can’t hope to cover much on Discord. I’ll just make three quick remarks:

1. That DCT/NLT can mimic each other is itself evidence that both views are mistaken. The right view will be the one that explains the falsity of the other in such a way as to nod to its persuasiveness, better account for its perceived merits, avoid its pitfalls, and negate its central tenets. Instead, it seems the best DCT or NLT can do is prefer some merits over others.
2. I think it’s extremely problematic to say God has no obligations. God is Trinitarian, Father, Son, and Spirit, and I suggest a natural ramification is that God eternally possesses the meeting of right moral expectation, which is from-the-hip stipulative language for whatever the divine analog of obligation is. If we remove this idea, our concept of God’s goodness flattens, risking a static view of His life, when God describes Himself again and again in terms of intrinsic (that is, eternal) moral agency.
3. Were I to engage in the topic seriously, I think the issue of covenant and of its ground in God’s unity in trinity is being neglected by both sides. DCT focuses on normativity to the neglect of value and agency. NLT focuses on value (qua function) to the neglect of normativity and agency. We need an account that balances all three, norm, value, and subject, without falling into the unbeliever’s trope of deifying parts into an idol-substitute for the original divine whole.

Triperspectivalism and the Euthyphro

I submit the “components” to that end are God, man, and covenant. You need an intrinsic Good Agent, a derivative good agent, and the law sovereignly established between – hence, a more fully developed triperspectivalism. On this view, the Euthyphro is answered twice. First, it univocizes divine Good and creational good. Second, regarding “good,” the voluntarist worry is resolved with a respect for God’s intrinsic trinitarian agency grounding the historic particulars of God’s covenant-moral law.