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This chapter argues that two prominent approaches to ethics that are often thought to be rivals of a divine command ethic are actually complementary to a divine command ethic. In particular, a divine command ethics presupposes a natural law ethic, or some comparable account of the good. A natural law ethic, such as that developed by Mark Murphy, provides a good foundation for a divine command theory by providing an account of the good, and a divine command theory helps a natural law ethic give a convincing explanation of moral obligations. A divine command theory is also consistent with reasonable forms of virtue ethics. It is not consistent with extreme forms of moral particularism, but these views are not essential to virtue ethics. A virtue ethics can be linked to a divine command theory in that the virtues can be understood to provide the telos or goal of moral obligations.

This chapter offers a reflection on the treatment in Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) of the question how the basic human goods and requirements of practical reasonableness are related to, or in Mark Murphy's words ‘detachable from’, the rational affirmability of God's existence and nature. (About that nature, the book was too austere and agnostic.) There is ‘detachability’ just to the extent that (say) physics can be done well without raising and pressing further questions about the origins of physical realities and laws. But rationality norms applicable across the whole field of human questioning require that when those questions are raised, in the appropriate (philosophical) discipline, they be answered by affirming the existence of divine causality in tandem with the natural causalities and intelligibilities known to the diverse human fields of inquiry and scholarly disciplines. Neither natural moral law nor any other intelligible order is safe for non-theists. The affirmation that God is love is not foundational, but dependent.

This chapter engages with a recent book by Mark Murphy in which he argues that a correct understanding of the ethics of a perfect being renders arguments from evil for atheism effectively defanged. Murphy contends that God’s baseline attitude toward human persons is indifference and, indeed, that it is consistent with the nature of God for God to allow evils to befall rational and sentient creatures for no reason whatsoever. To the contrary, this chapter argues that God counts as an absolutely perfect being only if by God’s very nature God is such that God cares for the rational and sentient creatures in existence and prevents us from suffering pointlessly. In support of this view, the author delineates two arguments, thus defending the conception of God as essentially perfectly morally good. In light of an appropriate conception of God’s ethics, the argument from evil retains its power.

This chapter responds to challenges from theistic philosophers, most notably William Craig. Craig claims that if God does not exist, then nothing is truly good or bad, all human lives are meaningless, moral obligations and rights do not exist, and even if moral obligations do exist, we have no reason to care about fulfilling them. Also discussed is the oft-made claim that religious believers tend to be more moral than non-believers. The chapter examines the relevant available empirical evidence and argues that it does not bear out the aforementioned claim. Later sections of the chapter discuss various contemporary approaches to theistic ethics, including the divine command theory of Robert Adams and Stephen Evans, and Mark Murphy’s natural law theory. This discussion identifies some important challenges that such views face, thereby providing indirect support for non-theistic robust normative realism by describing weaknesses in some of its theistic competitors.

Natural law’s view that the function of law is to reproduce or precisify the requirements of reason for a given community is explored. Strong and weak readings are distinguished. Focus is placed on the weak reading as better able to accommodate functional failures. The explanation of deficient examples appears to require building “characteristic activities” into the notion of function itself. This is based on the view that functional explanations must articulate functions as sufficient conditions for membership—a mistaken view that it is law’s function that must distinguish it from other areas of human activity. Explanatory uniqueness is a requirement for the explanation as a whole and not necessarily the function used in the explanation. This leads theorists to see the functions explaining law as akin to biological functions or Cummins functions more generally, with their attendant problems. The remaining distinctions between weak natural law and legal positivism are explored.