divine command ethics an ethical theory according to which part or all of morality depends upon the will of God as promulgated by divine commands. This theory has an important place in the history of Christian ethics. Divine command theories are prominent in the Franciscan ethics developed by John Duns Scotus and William Ockham; they are also endorsed by disciples of Ockham such as d’Ailly, Gerson, and Gabriel Biel; both Luther and Calvin adopt divine command ethics; and in modern British thought, important divine command theorists include Locke, Berkeley, and Paley. Divine command theories are typically offered as accounts of the deontological part of morality, which consists of moral requirements (obligation), permissions (rightness), and prohibitions (wrongness). On a divine command conception, actions forbidden by God are morally wrong because they are thus forbidden, actions not forbidden by God are morally right because they are not thus forbidden, and actions commanded by God are morally obligatory because they are thus commanded.
Many Christians find divine command ethics attractive because the ethics of love advocated in the Gospels makes love the subject of a command. Matthew 22:37–40 records Jesus as saying that we are commanded to love God and the neighbor. According to Kierkegaard, there are two reasons to suppose that Christian love of neighbor must be an obligation imposed by divine command: first, only an obligatory love can be sufficiently extensive to embrace everyone, even one’s enemies; second, only an obligatory love can be invulnerable to changes in its objects, a love that alters not when it alteration finds.
The chief objection to the theory is that dependence on divine commands would make morality unacceptably arbitrary. According to divine command ethics, murder would not be wrong if God did not exist or existed but failed to forbid it. Perhaps the strongest reply to this objection appeals to the doctrines of God’s necessary existence and essential goodness. God could not fail to exist and be good, and so God could not fail to forbid murder. In short, divine commands are not arbitrary fiats.
See also ETHICS, LOCKE, OCKHAM. P.L.Q.