My Argument about Pizza and God

I’m writing a paper right now that I’m pretty excited about. One in which I actually come to the defense of Divine Command Theory. The allegedly damning argument contra DCT says “If God has reasons for commanding some action A, than it is God’s reasons, and not God’s having commanded thusly, which make A morally correct.” Put that together with a line about how if God doesn’t have reasons, he’s arbitrary, and morality can’t be arbitrary, and you seem to have put the nail in the coffin, wrapped the DCTist in an inescapable dilemma. I think both of those premises are false.First, to assume morality can’t be arbitrary is problematic. However, I’ll leave that aside. Rather I want to say that there’s nothing incompatible with BOTH God having reasons for Commanding ɸ, and it being the case that ɸing is morally correct because God commands ɸ.Let’s say I order a pizza. I order it with mushrooms. Why do I order it with mushrooms? Well, perhaps it’s as simple as “I like mushrooms”. Perhaps I used a list of ingredients and a random number generator to decide. Perhaps I value the nutrients in mushrooms. Perhaps my arch nemesis is at the party, and I know that she hates mushrooms.The point is, I could have good reasons, bad reasons, or no (mushroom-specific) reason at all to pick mushrooms. Nonetheless, when the pizza person shows up at my door with a pepperoni pizza, S/he has done something incorrect. The incorrectness of the delivery doesn’t trace back to my reasons. Consider the following absurd way of construing the counterpoint…so absurd that it might be a straw man, but I’ll be careful.God commands honesty because honesty maximizes utility. It is utility maximization, and not the fact of God’s command, that makes honesty morally correct. Your lie did not maximize utility, and so it is a moral mistake.I ordered mushroom pizza because I like mushrooms. It is my having liked mushrooms, and not the fact that I ordered mushroom pizza, that makes mushrooms the correct thing for the pizza chef to put on my pizza. I don’t like pepperoni, so by bringing a pepperoni pizza, the pizza deliverer has made a mistake.But this can’t be right…It doesn’t matter whether I like pepperoni. The pepperoni pizza is wrong because I get to decide what the correct pizza toppings are. That’s what a command is, and what distinguishes from suggesting or entertaining.Now, this does have a not-too-different problem, a felt gap between our meta-ethical intuitions (do we have any of those?) and a modal implication of DCT: Even if God has reasons for commanding ɸ, it’s disconcerting (?) that ɸ would have been morally correct in the absence of such reasons, just by virtue of his having commanded.But of course, this is only disconcerting to the person who found DCT disconcerting in the first place, I suspect. Ultimately my point is that DCT is logically coherent (not that it is true) and that it can be maintained as long as one is willing to bite a series of bullets. This latter modal implication is one, I suspect, that wouldn’t be too hard to bite.  UPDATE: A paper that investigates this matter more fully can be found on the papers page.

This entry was posted on 12. February 2009 at 06:11 and is filed under Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.