Divine command theory

There is no single account that we can neatly identify as ‘the’ divine command theory.Footnote ¹ For reasons of its systemic depth and central importance in the contemporary philosophical literature on divine command theory, my argument will focus on the version proposed and developed by Adams (Reference Adams1987, Reference Adams1999). Explaining some of the details of his approach will therefore help us identify the morally grounding features that orient virtuous motivation. According to his theory, moral obligations derive in part from the institutions of command and obedience woven into the fabric of everyday social life for human beings. When a mother orders her son to clean his room, for example, she does not necessarily impose a moral obligation, though she certainly imposes a social one by virtue of her authority to issue a command and the motivational force it carries. According to Adams, these are the ‘pre-moral’ sociological components of moral obligation (Reference Adams1999, 243). These components are pre-moral because they are based on contingent relationships with people who themselves have only an imperfect grasp of what is good and worth commanding within cultures that likewise make available only fragmentary understandings of absolute goodness. Matters change, however, when considering the structures governing a relationship with God. This relationship provides the objective, transcendent character that moral obligations are also supposed to carry.Footnote ²

It is important to emphasize here that Adams has in mind not an obedience of fear (at least, not primarily), but rather an obedience of love that makes up his Platonic theory of God’s moral authority.Footnote ³ On this view, goodness and value are not reducible to what is good ‘for me’ or valuable ‘for me’, but rather refer to things that are good and valuable in themselves by reason of their similarity to God, the supreme Good (Adams Reference Adams1999, 245). It is not God’s supreme power, but rather God’s supreme goodness that makes our social bond with God different from our pre-moral bonds and thereby grounds God’s moral authority. This is why Adams writes that his metaethics is ‘not a theory of the nature of the good, but presupposes a theory of the good’ (Adams Reference Adams1999, 250). Morality begins not with fear, then, but with love, and specifically with the desire to be in right relationship with those whom we love, most of all the one whose supreme goodness is most lovable. ‘We do not begin with a set of moral principles,’ Adams writes, ‘but with a relationship which is immensely valued for its own sake’ (Adams Reference Adams1999, 240). I take this idea that God’s commands are authoritative because of the structure and value of right relationship with God to be the central feature of Adams’s divine command theory, and as such within its framework we ought to understand right relationship with God (expressed through obedience) as the central, grounding moral value that explains the nature and structure of moral obligation.

Reasons, virtues, and non-believers

Just as there is no single account of divine command theory, there is no single account that we can readily identify as ‘the’ theory of virtue. At its broadest, a virtue can be understood simply as a valuable habit or character trait. Supposing only this very thin meaning, there is no problem saying that non-believers can be virtuous, but most accounts of virtue go well beyond this definition. I will focus here on what Julia Annas labels ‘classical’ theories of virtue (Reference Annas and Copp2007, 515).Footnote ⁴ Virtue theorists in this tradition generally hold that possession of moral virtue depends in part on having (as a matter of habit) the right motivation when acting (Hursthouse Reference Hursthouse1999, 124; Ratchford et al Reference Ratchford, Pawl, Jeffrey and Schnitker2023, 2601; Annas Reference Annas and Copp2007, 516). A crucial part of this theory therefore hinges on what it means to act for the right reasons. A common view on this matter claims that acting for the right reasons means performing an action for the reasons that make it right (Arpaly Reference Arpaly2002, 226; Markovits Reference Markovits2010). While Zoë Johnson King proposes and defends a theory of acting for the right reasons that gives more weight to merely de dicto reasons of rightness, she also maintains that the moral worth of an action depends on an agent’s de dicto concept of rightness having sufficient connection to the de re features that make that action right (Reference Johnson King2020, 422). Her theory therefore still gives the morally grounding features of right action an important role to play in the moral psychology of the virtuous agent (a claim I will further develop later). If it is a condition of virtue that an agent not only habitually do what is right, but also habitually act for the right reasons, and those reasons are defined at least in part by the features that make an action right, then the divine command theorist who identifies an act’s connection to right relationship with God as the central feature of its rightness has reason to doubt that non-believers are fully virtuous.

Consider the following example: A son sees a note from his mother that reads ‘remember to grab some eggs from the grocery store today’ and then mistakenly thinks that he had written the note to himself. If he followed the note’s instructions, he would attribute his coming to think ‘I should get some eggs’ to his own prior thinking, when (causally speaking) it really results from his mother’s directive. Supposing he picked up the eggs, then he did, in fact, obey her instructions, but it would be odd to call his act obedient, because ‘following my mother’s instructions’ would not have been his reason for performing that action. In fact, he would probably have done the same thing even if he were profoundly disobedient and resented his mother, so long as he was fully convinced that he was following only his own prior thinking. This counterfactual claim reflects what I take to be a deeper point about the agent’s values: the fact that the son is only accidentally obeying his mother’s instructions in this case indicates that his action is not expressing any value that he places in properly conforming to the normative structure of his relationship with his parent. Even if he does in fact have that value, his having that value is not what explains or causes his action in this case. If we took obedience to his mother to be the central feature that made the action right, this omission would be morally significant. On this understanding, acting for the reasons that make an action right is important because it means that one is valuing an action for the reasons that make it morally valuable, rather than for some other reason. As Anne Jeffrey writes, ‘most of us, when we try to act morally, aren’t just trying to act excusably. We’re trying to act and live well. We want to respond appropriately to the moral goods there are’ (Reference Jeffrey2019, 37). This means that perfection in the moral life depends upon one’s ability to appropriately recognize, understand, and thereby appreciate the real reasons that the acts one performs are good.Footnote ⁵

From the perspective of divine command theory, non-believers seem in general to be in the position of the accidentally obedient son who performs an action in accordance with obedience, but not as an expression of the values that an obedient person would have. As Morriston notes, ‘the non-believer places no value on her relationship with her creator, since she doesn’t know that she has one’ (Reference Morriston2009, 8). Ferhat Yöney, who defends his own version of divine command theory, likewise concedes this problem when he writes that ‘although God’s relationship to [non-believers] is necessary, this relationship is not one of their values’ (Reference Yöney2023, 16). C. Stephen Evans, another divine command theorist, also concedes that at least some non-believers do not hold a relationship with God to be one of their values, writing that ‘some people do not care or care enough about God or a God-relationship, even if it is the case that such a relationship is the greatest good a human can have’ (Reference Evans2014, 31). This concession seems plausible and makes especially good sense within the context of a debate about the status of the obligations of non-believers. According to Erik Wielenberg, divine command theorists’ ‘standard reply’ to this issue holds that ‘as long as God is able to instill in non-believers an awareness of the content of moral demands and the authoritative nature of those demands, God has indeed issued commands to non-believers and thereby imposed moral obligations upon them – despite non-believers’ ignorance of the divine origin of such obligations’ (Reference Wielenberg2020, 544). Note, however, that this formulation only requires that non-believers believe that the commands of God are authoritative, not that they be right about what makes a moral principle authoritative. As far as obligations are concerned, divine command theorists can concede that non-believers fail to value a relationship with God without undermining their argument, because it is sufficient that the principles that are in fact God’s commands feel binding and authoritative, even if non-believers act on those principles for nontheistic reasons or values. However, if virtuous motivation involves valuing the morally central values when acting, then this concession threatens the divine command theorist’s attribution of moral virtue to non-believers.

It might be replied that this argument places the bar for virtue far too high, and that ordinarily we are willing to say that people exhibit virtue even when they lack conscious, reflective understanding of what they ultimately value so long as they are genuinely striving to do the right thing under some plausible description and are generally reliable in actually doing the right thing. While I argue that the divine command theorist cannot ascribe full or complete moral virtue to non-believers, I see no problem for the divine command theorist in ascribing partial or approximate moral virtue to non-believers. In other words, my argument does not hinge on the idea that someone needs to have personal values that perfectly align with all of the features that determine right action in order to possess any degree or sense of virtue at all. The main point is that someone is more virtuous (or more closely approximates virtue) to the degree that one’s values align more completely with the features that make an action right.

Johnson King’s partial credit approach to morally worthy action helps illustrate what I mean by partial virtue. Her account rests on a crucial metaphysical point: ‘the [first-order] right-making features [of an action] are not fundamental’ (Reference Johnson King2020, 413). If moral rightness really consists of fairness, then it is also the case that fairness consists of further objects of consideration, like the proper distribution of wealth, and the principles according to which that proper distribution is to be achieved. ‘The same metaphysical relationship … that moral rightness bears to the right-making features’, Johnson King explains, ‘is in turn borne by the right-making features to further features of acts’ (Reference Johnson King2020, 413). It does seem implausible to demand that a person be tracking, even implicitly, the entire metaphysical hierarchy of moral action in order to be considered morally praiseworthy to any degree, and so Johnson King proposes a system of partial credit indexed to the degree of understanding one has of that hierarchy. She writes that ‘people are praiseworthy for having motivations whose objects approximate the content of the true moral theory, and people are more praiseworthy the closer this approximation is’ (Johnson King Reference Johnson King2020, 424). While her argument focuses on morally worthy action rather than virtue or morally worthy character per se, the issue of how to evaluate moral motivation properly is an overlapping question for both discussions.

This framework leaves a great deal of room even within the structure of divine command theory for a non-believer to be credited with some degree of proper moral motivation, even while insisting that some morally significant elements are missing. The more features of right relationship with God get baked into the non-believer’s motivating understanding of rightness and obligation, the more virtuous the non-believer will be. With the partial virtue approach, I am arguing that divine command theory entails a perspective that is far less revisionary of our ordinary moral intuitions than it may initially appear to be. It is compatible with thinking that non-believers can and often do express a high degree of moral character. This perspective insists only that there is something (perhaps quite marginal, depending on the non-believer in question) lacking in the non-believer’s understanding of the nature of rightness qua non-believer that affects their moral motivation in some way. Evans seems to adopt such a perspective when he writes that ‘if a DCT provides the true account of moral obligations, then it does follow that someone who fails to know that truth misses out on something of importance … but the fact that something is lost does not imply that all is lost from a moral point of view’ (Evans Reference Evans2014, 116). My conclusion is not out of line, then, with arguments already present in the literature on divine command theory.

This conclusion also seems to be well in line with some interpretations of the Aristotelian tradition of virtue according to which full virtue is rare, perhaps vanishingly rare (Lott Reference Lott2014; Kristjánsson Reference Kristjánsson2008, 67). Certain strands of the Platonic tradition of virtue go even further and describe full virtue as in principle unrealizable within the limitations of human life. Adams himself seems to fall into this camp. ‘The quest for virtue’, he writes, ‘cannot yield more than an always and necessarily incomplete and fragmentary approximation to a transcendent goodness (the goodness of God, I would say) which is its reference point’ (Reference Adams2006, 173). He is joined by Iris Murdoch, who describes growth in the moral life as ‘an endless task’ (Reference Murdoch2001, 27). If it is true that very few or no people possess full moral virtue, then the claim that non-believers cannot be ascribed full moral virtue may come out seeming rather trivial. This appearance of triviality may itself be philosophically significant insofar as it suggests that the present argument alone need not be a reason for rejecting divine command theory. It can also help clarify the connections between divine command theory and the precise theory of virtue that one adopts, even within classical theories. Insofar as the Aristotelian tradition generally holds complete or perfect virtue to be rare but attainable in principle, then my argument would suggest that having the right theistic attitude (valuing right relationship with God) is a necessary condition of complete virtue. This additional claim would make the argument less apparently trivial, but for the same reason it may also pose more of a problem for the plausibility of divine command theory depending on what one takes to be the moral phenomena that it ought to accommodate and explain. Alternatively, the more Platonic theory of Adams and Murdoch, which frames complete virtue as an ideal towards which we endlessly aspire without attaining, may establish more general moral parity between believers and non-believers, but also for that reason may make the argument appear more trivial. Even for the more aspirational understanding of complete virtue, however, I think there is a further point to draw out of this argument. Supposing that divine command theory is true, then this framework for virtue suggests that theistic attitudes play a crucial role in securing the right aspirational orientation towards the organizing value of moral life. Lack of theistic belief on this account could be seen as morally significant because it inclines an against an orientation of proper openness and flexibility for continual moral reintegration around the proper summum bonum that grounds moral authority.

Moral value and moral integration

To understand the meaning and importance of moral integration within the aspirational framework for virtue, it will be helpful to better understand some of Adams’s own theory of virtue. He distinguishes between particular virtue and holistic virtue, referring to the latter as ‘capital V Virtue’ and defining it as ‘the holistic property of having a good moral character’ (Adams Reference Adams2006, 32). Having holistic Virtue means that one’s particular virtues are organized into an overall excellent whole. In general Adams defines virtue as ‘persisting excellence in being for the good’ (Reference Adams2006, 6), and he further distinguishes particular virtues into motivational and structural virtues (Reference Adams2006, 33). Having motivational virtue is a matter of loving things appropriately. Having structural virtue is a matter of acting in accordance with one’s loves. Holistic Virtue combines both types, as the integrated person loves the proper things, in the proper order, with the proper expression. The proper ordering of one’s loves is particularly important for moral integration. As Adams writes, the

This coherence is provided by a summum bonum or supreme good towards which relations and orders of further goods can be recognized, organized, and internalized.

Consider, for example, the experience of a first-year college student who has to decide how to balance a number of goods competing for her time and attention. Supposing that she values (among other things) her studies, connecting with friends, trying out new activities, maintaining her health, and volunteering for organizations that serve the poor, she has to decide how in action she will express her values for all of these things. On Adams’s account, to reason about this question in an integrated way would involve some understanding of how these goods fit into an overall life project aimed at a summum bonum, whether that is personal flourishing, right relationship with God (or the Good), or something else. If it is the case, for example, that this student centrally values right relationship with God as the summum bonum of her life, then moral integration will mean valuing particular, subordinate goods in a way that is structured around the realization of the highest good. If this student understands herself to have a particularly intense calling from God to her studies during her college years, then integration would mean giving greater time and attention to her studies while maintaining appropriate but a comparatively smaller space in her practical life for expressing her values for connecting with friends, serving the poor, and the rest.

Moral integration on this view would involve having habits of feeling, reflection, and action that express this priority structure organized around one’s summum bonum. Disintegration, on the other hand, would mean acting in a more haphazard, less organized way, without coherent principles and values that are accessible and responsive to careful reflection. If, for example, this first-year college student simply prioritized whatever values her moment-to-moment inclinations most strongly recommended regardless of whether this method of prioritization reflected their objective relation to the summum bonum, then this overall framework of virtue would identify her as morally disintegrated. Note that this framework would still identify her as having some degree of moral disintegration even if she accidentally happened to do what the morally integrated person would do, even if she did so consistently. Perhaps, for example, she tends to feel inclined to do whatever her friends are doing, and her friends are virtuous and morally integrated people who rightly relate to the right summum bonum. If we further suppose that she would still do whatever her friends were doing even if they were not consistently interested in doing the right things, then the case makes it even clearer how accidental her doing the right thing is to the habits that would express the integrated and organized value of a summum bonum in one’s particular values and pursuits. One could also go wrong by being morally integrated around the wrong summum bonum, but this form of integration would count as what I will later call moral idolatry.

Divine command theory is not neutral with respect to the summum bonum that ought to organize one’s life and values. By making right relationship with God the central moral value, divine command theory also defines right relationship with God as the summum bonum around which one ought to integrate one’s life (according to some theories of virtue, especially a Platonic, aspirational model). Therefore, according to some theories of virtue there is a moral issue for the non-believer who either lacks integration by having no organizing summum bonum, or who does not treat right relationship with God as their organizing summum bonum. However, this sort of obstacle to moral integration is not exclusive to non-believers. An avowed believer may believe in God, and value right relationship with God, but not treat that value according to its status as summum bonum (out of weakness of will or pride, for example), in which case they would also count as morally disintegrated. A believer may also have an inappropriately rigid concept of God or God’s relationship to moral principles that prevents truly open aspiration towards a transcendent and inexhaustible ground of goodness. However, it still seems that the non-believer, according to this overall framework, can only progress so far towards proper moral integration while remaining someone who cannot reflectively avow right relationship with God as their summum bonum.

It might be replied, following the standard reply, that just as non-believers are bound by God’s commands without knowing that authoritative moral principles are God’s commands, so non-believers can morally integrate their lives around a right relationship with God by another name. This would have to mean, however, that a non-believer could value a right relationship with some kind of entity sufficiently similar to God to secure the right kind of moral integration, but not so similar that they would simply count as a believer, which does not seem possible. It seems more like believing that the right kind of entity exists such that one could value a right relationship with it, simply is to believe in God, even if by another name. To take any other object as one’s summum bonum is not to value a right relationship with God obliquely but rather to replace it with another connected or similar value that happens to participate in a relationship with God in only a limited sense, meaning that relationship with God is also valued in only a limited sense.

For better clarity on the obstacles to moral integration faced by non-believers, we can consider Rachana Kamtekar’s account of ‘imperfect’ virtue in Platonic moral philosophy. She describes imperfect virtue as ‘virtue without wisdom’ (Reference Kamtekar1998, 315). By this she means virtue that is cultivated apart from knowledge of the good and its connection to virtue. She writes that ‘it does not take philosophical knowledge to value virtue for its own sake’ (Kamtekar Reference Kamtekar1998, 316), and goes on to explain that ‘valuing the good for its own sake does not require already having a correct conception of it; “guessing what it is” suffices’ (Reference Kamtekar1998, 323). However, valuing virtue for its own sake without understanding its essence means that one is dependent on fallible mediators and favourable circumstances for the acquisition of virtue. With respect to the auxiliaries described in Plato’s Republic, who love honour but do not have the kind of knowledge of its essence possessed by the philosophers, Kamtekar writes that ‘the stability of the auxiliaries’ true beliefs about virtue depends on their being honored by their society for performing virtuous actions’ (Reference Kamtekar1998, 319) and that

Likewise, a non-believer who is said to value right relationship with God obliquely through fallible mediators has, at best, a kind of moral integration that is less accurate and less stable than a person who knows what it means to have right relationship with God and that right relationship with God is the centre of moral value. Note that this framing still allows that non-believers can make moral progress and meaningfully participate in some kind of morally valuable relationship with God, but that their progress and participation will be limited to some meaningful extent by their nonbelief. Under the Platonic, aspirational framework of virtue, these limitations are especially significant insofar as they affect the aspirational attitudes of the moral agent and incline against ongoing reintegration around divine command theory’s understanding of the proper moral ideal.

Moral idolatry and moral reintegration

One limitation of the moral character of even a perfectly behaved non-believer is that her behaviour is integrated (when it is integrated) into her character and values around an avowedly different summum bonum from the true centre of moral value. In holding another value as the point of ultimate moral integration, the non-believer makes a sort of idol out of it. In his discussion of moral idolatry, Adams notes what is lacking in such a stance: ‘one thing that is missing in such a case can be seen as a kind of heteronomy or theonomy – the aspiration to relate one’s life to a standard of good that transcends all one’s desires, feelings, beliefs, and commitments, though one cannot be related to it except through them’ (Reference Adams1999, 213). Elsewhere, Adams further elaborates this proper attitude (which he calls the critical stance) by stressing the importance of orienting ourselves towards a ground of moral reality that we cannot entirely grasp. He contrasts his approach with the naturalism of Richard Boyd, for instance, by writing that

On this framework, proper aspiration orients the agent towards a standard of goodness with two crucial features: it is grounded in a reality beyond ourselves, and it cannot be grasped exhaustively by our powers of reflection. Obedience to this kind of a standard ensures that we continually seek to conform our interior attitudes to it rather than to derive our standards of morality from our own attitudes and their patterns as the ultimate ground of moral authority. Not just any secular alternative will effectively secure this feature in an agent’s moral psychology.

Consider, as an illustrative example of where a secular alternative would fail to secure such integration, what it might mean to hold something like authenticity to be the central moral value and summum bonum of one’s life. From this perspective, there is no identity I have other than my organic psychological development, influenced as it is by a combination of natural and environmental factors, and no further, more fundamental perspective from which to examine moral questions than my ‘authentic’ intuition or judgement about them. This settlement on a hard floor of self-referential moral authority makes one vulnerable to moral idolatry. According to the divine command theorist, the non-believer’s sense of identity and authentic intuitions concerning moral questions are only contingently connected to the true centre of moral value. Even if someone with this kind of summum bonum arrived at patterns of moral intuitions and behaviour that happened to perfectly align with divine commands because they were born with the right natural temperament for it and were brought up in a culture that habituated these characteristics, there would remain a sense in which their reaching this state depended on chance. Had the perfectly behaved non-believer been brought up in a different cultural environment and come to have a different pattern of moral intuitions, she would have been equally confident in her moral rightness and lacked the orientation to the true summum bonum that would help her improve her character or correct her reasoning by its light.

The divine command theorist need not deny the importance of authentic responses to moral questions nor the importance of relying on the moral education of one’s surrounding community, but she would caution against a kind of reliance that establishes an inappropriate stopping point for critical examination. As Evans writes,

Without reason to question and critically examine how far one’s moral education and moral intuitions actually line up with divine commands, the good behaviour that results from a non-believer’s unfailing alignment with divine commands seems troublingly dependent on good fortune, since the divine value of those commands is not playing enough of a role in the non-believer’s confidence in and commitment to her own moral judgement and performance of right action. This is one reason why Adams writes that ‘without [proper moral aspiration] one lacks an important defence against rigid commitments that constitute a sort of idolatrous alternative to love of the Good’ (Reference Adams1999, 213).

Even supposing the non-believer’s summum bonum needs to be sufficiently transcendent that it can provide an ongoing basis for continually evaluating one’s moral attitudes and commitments, even the most deeply held ones, it might be replied that there are avowedly secular alternatives that secure this kind of moral integration. For example, one might think that such a role could be fulfilled, as a neo-Kantian might suggest, by something like the summum bonum of rationality realized in the transcendent ideal of the fully rational self. From this perspective, we could legitimately examine our deeply held attitudes and how they have been shaped by the cultures, or collection of cultures, that educated us, asking whether they conform to the principles of rationality. Could we not, it might be asked, consider obedience to the ideal (rational) self a legitimate means of obliquely rendering obedience to God? While such an ideal secures one of the necessary functions for moral integration, it fails to secure others. Specifically, it fails to secure the fully independent and extrinsic character that a truly transcendent summum bonum is supposed to have, and it also fails to secure aspiration to a conceptually inexhaustible summum bonum.

We can further clarify this obstacle to ongoing reintegration facing the non-believer by leveraging insights from Murdoch’s Platonist moral philosophy to better understand what it means to take a transcendent Good as the ground of moral value and authority within an aspirational, Platonic framework for virtue. For a Platonist like Adams or Murdoch, the transcendence of the Good means that it is not fully graspable by any of our theories, concepts, or ideas, but is only seen in glimpses and images. This understanding of transcendence secures an important characteristic of moral integration as a process of ongoing and aspirational reintegration. ‘Moral integration must be for us ever and again,’ Adams writes, ‘a project rather than an achievement, and must be in no small part an ability and appetite for ever renewed reintegration’ (Reference Adams2006, 209). It is along these lines that we can understand a claim by Murdoch that I mentioned earlier: her description of growth in the moral life as ‘an endless task’ (Reference Murdoch2001, 27). The moral life is an endless task, on this framing, not simply because reaching the fullness of our highest moral ideal is an arduous task that we are unlikely to achieve. More strongly, Murdoch denies that a moral ideal grounded in absolute Goodness is a settled thing that we can fully capture with a stable concept. She writes that ‘moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because “within,” as it were, a given concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing’ (Murdoch Reference Murdoch2001, 27). While the moral ideal of a perfectly rational self transcends our occurrent attitudes, it does not transcend our concepts, and it does not find grounding that is ultimately extrinsic from the self. For this reason, Adams and Murdoch would caution that such an ideal fails to secure the right kind of aspirational orientation that fits a truly transcendent Good.

Reflection on the rational self as a moral ideal motivates an aspiration of efforts but not the continual evolution of concepts. While one’s understanding of the nature of the perfectly rational self might develop over time, the derivation of norms from such an ideal seems to depend on the idea that the principles that the rational agent would follow when acting are all accessible to the right kind of self-reflection. To put it another way, on this theory the right kind of person could discover the full range of one’s moral obligations (and their grounds) from the comfort of an armchair. According to the divine command theorist, however, a new obligation could always be discovered as something new is communicated or revealed from without the confines of the self, even the idealized self. On this basis a divine command theorist would say that when the non-believer does the right thing but does so for the sake of a moral ideal that is transcendent in only a limited sense, that agent acts with some admixture of idolatrous overconfidence in this ideal.Footnote ⁶ Part of the reason one might have rigid confidence in the accessibility of the moral principles of the perfectly rational self is that in reflecting on such an ideal, one is still ultimately thinking about oneself, albeit in a highly refined mode of consideration.

Within the Platonic, aspirational framework for virtue, it is important for full (i.e., fully integrated) moral virtue that we recognize that our moral obligations originate from a reality fundamentally other and independent of us. Morality, properly considered, is something that appears in our lives as striking us ultimately from without. Murdoch stresses this point when she describes the central role played by the concept of God (insofar as God represents the Good) within the Platonist framework of ethics that she defends. She writes that God denotes ‘a single, perfect, transcendent, non-representable, and necessarily real object of attention’ (Murdoch Reference Murdoch2001, 55). God’s independent, necessary existence pushes the locus of moral reality outside of the self, and according to Murdoch, the central threat to moral virtue is our unrelenting egoistic impulse to recentre moral reality on ourselves. This impulse threatens not only non-believers who are simply trying to do the right thing without sufficient understanding of what that means, but also believers who nominally identify doing the right thing with relating rightly to God. ‘Any religion or ideology’, Murdoch warns, ‘can be degraded by the substitution of self, usually in some disguise, for the true object of veneration’ (Reference Murdoch2001, 98). This is why, as we have discussed, the aspirational quality of virtue is so important, orienting us to a truly transcendent reality that we grasp only imperfectly and refusing to settle on any concept of that reality as if that concept could exhaust it. This also explains why the origin of moral reality cannot be understood as an ideal whose reality is of and about the self. As it is contemplated in the moral life, the ideal of the rational agent by its very nature is answerable to the whims and inclinations of the self, because rationality is not so much a guide for choice as a structure for it (Guyer Reference Guyer2002). That structure does not even explain its own value, but relies instead on the value of choice itself. Rational choice is worth choosing because it is choice proper, the ideal form of choice, and choice itself is worth choosing. To say that proper choice is worth choosing, though, is really to say that the self’s proper choice is worth choosing, which is another way of locating moral reality ultimately in the self as it understands itself through the reflective structure of idealization. This is why Murdoch criticizes certain interpretations of Kantian ethics as idolatrous, writing that ‘Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead’ (Reference Murdoch2001, 78), and that ‘the center of this type of post-Kantian moral philosophy is the notion of the will as the creator of value’ (Reference Murdoch2001, 78).Footnote ⁷ In these instances, then, the summum bonum of right relationship with God is replaced in crucial respects rather than obliquely valued.

This discussion is meant primarily to be illustrative of the kinds of limitations that would apply in principle to all of the secular alternatives to aspiration towards the summum bonum of right relationship with God. While a moral ideal centred on conforming to the natural law, for instance, would satisfy the condition of grounding moral value in a reality apart from the self, it would not satisfy the condition of conceptual inexhaustibility that secures the continual, endless evolution and deepening of our moral concepts. The general point, then, is that the theory that morality is grounded in a relationship with God along with an aspirational framework for virtue naturally aligned with divine command theory’s Platonist structure in totality suggests a kind of ideal for proper moral aspiration not satisfied by aspiration towards any secular alternative that only partially approximates this ideal, because such ideals lack one (or both) of the two aforementioned conditions. It is worth noting here that these conditions do not demand commitment to a particular religious doctrine or tradition. They can be satisfied by someone who holds only a thin sense of theistic belief. That is, proper moral aspiration on this account could be attained by someone who believes that morality is grounded in a reality identical to the ‘omniGod of perfect being theology – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being’ (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2019, 2), with the major substantive addition being the Platonic clarification of God’s transcendence as including conceptual inexhaustibility.Footnote ⁸

In none of what I have argued do I mean to imply that the divine command theorist who adopts an aspirational framework for virtue must deny the value of having conceptually specific moral ideals. The problem is treating such ideals as loci of ultimate or central value and thereby as the source of moral authority, rather than treating them as subordinate mediators of a greater, more centrally important, more truly transcendent moral authority upon which those determinate ideals are dependent in value and authority. However, particular moral ideals can still be transcendent in a more limited sense (i.e., in their independence from immediately occurrent emotions and desires), and they still serve an important role in mediating divine commands. For this reason, there is still a lot that the non-believer gets right when following these moral ideals on the basis of which the divine command theorist can ascribe partial virtue to the non-believer and say that she has quite admirable objects of moral integration while also insisting that she faces certain limits and obstacles that inhere to the structure of her nonbelief.