What if God commanded something horrible? A pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics

Abstract

The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God's necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss's reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands.

Conversational implicatures cannot save divine command theory from the counterpossible terrible commands objection

“…Kremers (2021, 608) provides his own example from the Bible where Esther says, ‘If I perish, I perish’ (Esther 4:12). Kremers notes that Esther's statement is a mere tautology when taken literally.…”

“…Therefore, Kremers thinks that the intuition that TCC is false is actually the intuition that TCC* is false. So, Kremers (2021, 608–610) thinks that DCT proponents can still maintain that TCC is actually true.…”

“…It would be odd to interpret critics as implicating TCC* which is about God* because God* is not morally perfect, but critics of DCT have specified that they are talking about a necessarily morally perfect God. As Kremers (2021, 609) himself notes, the context is one in which God's necessary goodness is specified already. It would also be odd to interpret critics as implicating TCC*, an ordinary counterfactual, given that critics have specified that they are talking about a counterpossible.…”

“…There is an ongoing complex debate between proponents of vacuism and proponents of non-vacuism (the view that some counterpossibles can be false, and some can be non-vacuously true). Kremers (2021, 607) says, ‘For this reason, a lot more work would need to be done in order to prove that the underlying mistake of the [counterpossible terrible commands objection] is its tacit commitment to non-vacuist semantics.’ Hence, Kremers ( ibid .) proposes a new reply that does not rely on vacuism.…”