Mike asked:

I had some questions regarding "Moral Monotheism". Consider the following:

A. Which actions are right is not arbitrary, but objectively valid.

B. There is a God, who is the ultimate moral authority.

C. An action is right if and only if God commands us to perform it.

Q1. Why would a theist find it difficult to give up any of A,B or C?

Q2. How can A, B or C be rejected?

Q3. If I am able to reject one of the premisses, what would be the strongest objection against me.

Q4. And how will I defend my view point against this objection?

Hope to hear from someone soon. Thank you. This is a wonderful site to learn about philosophy.

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I do not understand. Who says that all theists find it difficult to give up any of your A, B, or C? God is
not seen by all as a puritan judge. This may be the view of some puritan pastoral theologies but,
concerning the Christian tradition, it is interesting to observe that when Jesus Christ was invited to act
as a judge, he refused to condemn the "woman caught in adultery" and said to the scribes and
Pharisees; "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." (Cf John 8. 3-11)

Jean Nakos

Preliminary matters:

1. I am assuming that Mike intends A, B & C to express a syllogism, of which A and B are the
premisses and C is the conclusion; i.e. A and B if true together entail C's truth.

2. As regards premiss A, validity is generally taken in philosophy and logic to be a property of
arguments/ syllogisms, not actions. What A is trying to express is probably that there are
mind-independent facts, about which moral judgements can get things right.

Q1 and 2. It would depend on what kind of theist we were talking about. In fact, I'm not even sure how
to define "theist"; maybe a rough and ready definition would be someone who believes that there is at
least one god. If we're talking about polytheism, all sorts of questions arise about how the gods limit
each others' authority. Even ifwe limit ourselves to monotheisms, I don't think that the mere fact of
being a theist of itself necessitates believing god to be the ultimate authority in any sphere, whether
we're talking about omnipotence, omniscience, or moral authority. The Roman atomist Lucretius
thought that the gods lived in either total ignorance of or blissful indifference towards (I forget which)
the affairs of man. Even with a less avowedly hands-off deity, it could quite easily be the case that the
creating being, if such be the god, bestows moral authority on the creature's of his/ her/ its creation.
You don't have to look far to find Christian philosophers who believe that humankind possesses moral
autonomy. Immanuel Kant is the example springing most immediately to mind.

So, depending on what kind of theist we're talking about, they could reject B.

B says that god is the ultimate moral arbiter. Another way of putting this is to say that an action is
right if and only if god says so; which, of course, is exactly what C says. So a theist who believed B
would be committing himself to C and vice versa.

I think it's possible for theists of one stamp or another to reject A, on similar grounds. There's no
particular reason why some theist somewhere shouldn't believe that god created a morally relativistic
universe, a universe where there were no mind-independent facts of the matter about the rightness or
wrongness of actions.

Q3. If you were to reject B or C, the strongest objection would probably be that if it's not the case that
actions are right just because god says so, it's very difficult to see what does make them right. Moral
properties begin to look "Queer" (qv J.L.Mackie's Ethics, Inventing Right & Wrongp.35).

Q4. Difficult question (and I'm an atheist!). Several possibilities:

(1) G.E. Moore (famous for Principia Ethica1903) wrote a paper called "In Defence of Common
Sense". Common sense "thick concepts" tell us that, for example, recreational torture is wrong. This
is a fact the truth of which is more manifest than any argument we could adduce in support thereof.

2) Utilitarians — Bentham, the Mills, Sidgwick — hold that actions are right insofar as they promote
utility. How utility is defined is another matter: desire-satisfaction utilitarians, pleasure utilitarians,
interest utilitarians, would all take different attitudes towards practical ethical questions. For example,
desire-satisfaction utilitarians would oppose, and interest utilitarians support, the force-feeding of
anorexics.

3) Psychological egoists like Thomas Hobbes (who wrote Leviathan) believe that ultimately we're all
concerned ultimately with the promotion of our own interests/ well being. Hence, the natural state of
man is one of incessant mutual conflict over scarce resources. Morality is a mere social construct
evolving in response to the recognition by individuals that their own lives are less nasty brutish and
short if they enter into contractual relations with their peers, under which system all are enabled to
live as constrained maximisers of their own well-being.

Richard Craven