5.1.1 Some Implications of DCT

In recent years there has been much debate surrounding attempts to display the Ten Commandments in public places, such as on the wall of a courtroom in Alabama, or outside the state legislature building in Oklahoma. Defenders of this idea clearly are relying on ideas like those expressed by DCT. They reason that the authority of the law embodied in a court room or legislature is weakened if it is not ultimately based on divine authority. The only way, they claim, to emphasize the binding character of human law is to remind us that it is based on, or should be based on, a higher, divine law. So the first implication of DCT is that, if it is true, then moral laws would be absolutely binding on us. It would not be up to us what is right and what is wrong, but up to a higher authority. As a result this would provide an absolute basis for human law, and, in addition, enable us to escape from relativism for good.

This may seem appealing, especially in the light of the relativist’s difficulty with moral decision-making. If the relativist has a hard time taking a stance on anything, no matter how obviously appalling it seems, DCT more than makes up for this by insisting on absolutes. If moral language is really a series of divinely issued commands, then there would be no question about whether something is wrong. To find out we just consult God’s explicit commands.

This solution to the problem of morality, however, presents several problems. First, how can we be sure that we really know what it is that God commands? For devout followers of a particular religion, this problem usually never arises, since religious texts such as the Bible are often very explicit about what God commands. To find out what God commands us to do, we need simply consult the Bible. But then what about people of different faiths? Christians, for example, are commanded to honor the Sabbath or day of rest and not to work on Sundays. But Jews are commanded to do the same thing by not working on Saturdays, while Muslims can only honor the day of rest by not working on Fridays. All these commands cannot simultaneously be absolutely binding on us, unless we opt for mandatory three day weekends (not necessarily a bad thing). And the same problem arises regarding other more serious matters and even within a particular religion. On the one hand, the God of Christianity seems to command us to kill certain people – according to the Old Testament book of Leviticus, this would include people who commit adultery, people who work on Sundays, and even our own children if they curse us. But then there is the First Commandment which says simply, “Thou shalt not kill.” In the Old Testament there is the famous demand for “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” as pay-back for crimes committed. But then in the New Testament we find Jesus advising his followers, to “turn the other cheek,” and explicitly not seek pay-back for others’ crimes against them. Certainly we can’t be expected to take conflicting commands literally and put them all into practice.

Now none of this completely undermines DCT, but it certainly presents a challenge to backers of the theory. If DCT is going to offer a reasonable approach to ethical decision making we will have to sort out quite a bit of the content of religious teachings. We will have to figure out which body of religious ideas really reflects God’s commands and what those commands are really telling us to do. And this of course requires interpretation – hopefully with some guidance from moral principles, but I am getting ahead of the argument here.

In addition, DCT has an added implication that some people may find troubling. That is, since it claims that morality can only be based directly on the commands of God, then someone who does not believe that a God exists cannot have any real basis for moral decision making. Although it is true that an atheist may act in a way that appears to be moral, in fact, without an absolute authority figure to motivate this action, there is really no reason for her to do so. Advocates of DCT do not usually see this a much of a problem, since they insist that the atheists out there are obviously incapable of being moral unless they secretly harbor the suspicion that there may be an ultimate enforcer and hedge their bets accordingly. But is this really true? Is it possible to be a moral person in the complete absence of belief in a supreme being who is the ultimate authority figure enforcing moral rules? Is there any humanly accessible reason for being moral that does not reduce to culturally relative local customs?

We will return to this question later. At this point, we need to examine the arguments in favor of DCT because, as we saw with relativism, the implications of a theory do not by themselves determine whether we should accept that theory. These implications only show us what is at stake with the theory and do not yet give us any reason to conclude that its claims are either true or false. To come to that kind of conclusion we need to see the back up for the theory.