Ethics: Rules, Obligations, and Wellbeing

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Ethics is the determination of moral value by actors in situations, of acts by agents, and of ethical, moral, and political logics and their applications.

Jacques Derrida

Axiology Epistemology Ethics Metaphysics

March 10, 2022

Jean-Paul Sartre

Axiology Epistemology Ethics The Existential

March 10, 2022

Søren Kierkegaard

Aesthetics Epistemology Ethics The Existential

March 10, 2022

Socrates

Ethics Metaphysics

March 10, 2022

Ethics is the determination of moral value by actors in situations, of acts by agents, and of ethical, moral, and political logics and their applications.

To understand ethical evaluation, we must begin with the frameworks which are most often use even to supply us with criteria for applying the terms “right” / “good” and “wrong” / “bad.”

Moral Subjectivism

Moral subjectivism is the view that moral truths do not have “essences,” and are produced merely by individual psychology. Richard Double, for example, argues that if there were such a thing as moral objectivism, “there would be answers to … moral problems that we acknowledge to be not only unascertainable, but to lack answers altogether.” ¹

For example, if two men make a $100 wager about a football game—Jones bets Red will win, Smith bets Blue will win—and the game is stopped in the 3^rd quarter due to hail, with Red winning so far 21-7, who ought to pay? Doubleday insists there is no determinable answer to this question on the basis of any ethical theory which, by one example, disproves the ultimate legitimacy of them all in their present form. ²

Philosopher J. L. Mackie gives two arguments for moral subjectivism: that the multiplicity of moral theories mitigates against there being a unitary account, and that moral quality must serve, on all moral accounts, both to metaphysically subsist and psychologically compel in all instances, which would make moral theory an epistemological sine qua non. ³

Most criticisms of moral subjectivism offer sound proofs for certain moral theories in certain situations, but all the moral subjectivist must do is to offer a simple hypothetical scenario in which one particular ethical theory or another does not clarify right and wrong action. ⁴

Doubleday concludes that the “disorderliness” of ethical theories “makes subjectivism a better explanation for them than objectivism.” ⁵

Ethical Egoism

Ethical egoism is the view “that to act morally, individuals should act solely so as to promote their own best interests.” ⁶ Championed by Ayn Rand in the mid-20^th century, ethical egoism holds that every moral agent “is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose in life.” ⁷

To assume that one must be altruistic toward one’s neighbor is based on a “‘malevolent universe’ metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed. … As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics … observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.” ⁸ Ethical egoism’s payoff is that, by compliance to the basic principle of selfishness—what Rand herself calls “The Virtue of Selfishness”—one avoids a lifetime “of tortured years spent in progressive self-destruction.” ⁹

Virtue Ethics

Virtue is “a disposition … to behave rightly,” ¹⁰ which means that “virtue is best understood as a kind of goodness rather than rightness.” ¹¹

It is perhaps the most ancient moral model, having endured with a strong legacy beginning with Aristotle and being revitalized by Aquinas in the Middle Ages. ¹²

Virtue ethics is composed of two concepts symbiotically related: a certain conception of good and bad personal character traits and practical wisdom (phronesis, which knows how to turn a “good” trait into “right” action). The purpose of virtue is not primarily to create positive moral value in the universe, but rather to make oneself a morally valuable person. ¹³

This is the way to speak about a flourishing human being from an ethical perspective. The word Aristotle uses for this flourishing is eudaominia, which means generally a fittingness with one’s purpose. ¹⁴

Virtue plays a central role in most moral philosophies, but is treated as a small component rather than an organizing principle. David Solomon comments that virtue is usually accommodated by other ethical theories: “virtue has been invited into the house of contemporary normative theory, but told to stay in its place—typically some subordinate or secondary place within the overall structure of the theory.” ¹⁵

Virtue theory places the concept of virtue—more deeply conceived, the symbiotic outworking of character traits and phronesis—at the center of its moral philosophy, which runs against the intuitions of those who would rather treat moral philosophy as the quest to determine right, wrong, and their respective criteria. ¹⁶

Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

Consequentialism is the view that “good results are the most important factor” in determining the moral value of a choice. ¹⁷ On the consequentialist view, it is incumbent upon moral agents to perform acts which produce the greatest “sum total of priority- or equality-adjusted wellbeing.” ¹⁸ Put more simply, “the moral rightness of an act is determined solely by the consequences of the act and its alternatives.” ¹⁹ Some have argued that it is impossible to develop a universal consequentialist ethic that takes into account human rights, but this is not the case since human rights can be philosophically established separately from the determination of which model of moral criteria either works best, or is irrevocably operational. ²⁰

Utilitarianism, however, is not a separate ethical theory from Consequentialism, but rather a version of Consequentialism, which says that the greatest consequence that should serve as the unitary moral criteria for human action is utility. ²¹ The idea of utilitarian ethics bucks against commonly held moral sensitivities because of its name—perhaps suggesting that it is morally right to trample over human dignity as a mere means to an end—but one of the reasons John Stuart Mill contrived the system is because “in every age of philosophy, he thought, one of its schools had to be utilitarian.” ²² Weaker versions of utilitarianism are often used as a foil for consequentialism generally, yet critics of consequentialism do not give enough credit to the fundamentally consequentialist assumption that all moral “calculation” makes.

Deontological Ethics

Deontological ethics is a view developed by Immanuel Kant in which morality is measured by moral obligation (from the Greek δέον, meaning “obligation, duty”). There are three categories of moral value based on “deontic evaluation” — obligatory actions (“required”), wrong actions (“contrary to duty”) and optional actions (“merely permissible”). ²³

What is striking about Kant’s moral model is how empty it is of actual morality. Much like his epistemology, he wanted the idea of perfect morality to be indistinguishable from perfect rationality—in other words, to be more rational about one’s actions is to be more moral. The singular criterion that Kant established to determine whether an action was moral (i.e., rational) is universalizability. Kant explains it this way: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” ²⁴

This “ought” is called the Categorical Imperative. ²⁵ A “hypothetical imperative” directs a moral agent to action based on his desires—“Go to the doctor if you want to be well.” A “categorical imperative” directs the moral agent to right action based on reason regardless of his desires.

Kant made a distinction between “Principles” and “Maxims.” The principles of right reason could reduced to a single maxim—“If everyone performed the action I am about to perform, would humanity flourish or self-destruct?” Kant explains:

A maxim is the subjective principle of acting, and must be distinguished from the objective principle, namely the practical law. The former contains the practical rule determined by reason conformably with the conditions of the subject (often his ignorance or also his inclinations, and is therefore the principle in accordance with which the subject acts; but the law is the objective principle valid for every rational being, and the principle in accordance with which he ought to act, i.e., an imperative. ²⁶

The most popular and fundamental criticism of Kantian ethics is that, from the system itself, one cannot necessarily deduce in any given scenario most of the moral intuitions moral models seek to justify. ²⁷ There is, in Kant, this problem of “the guise of the good,” which is the notion that what is important is that “one sees what one is doing as good.” ²⁸

Thomas Hobbes was at the weaker end of this, stating that good was produced by intent, rather than existing as an objective standard “out there.” ²⁹

But Kant’s whole purpose in creating an ethical system was to ethically ground practical reason without a material dependence upon a religious appeal. ³⁰

Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of debate. Whether his ideas were accepted is not. Kantian ethics certainly is the norma normans of moral theory, even though there is serious debate about the plausibility of his theoretical foundations. ³¹

Divine Command Theory

Divine command theory does not denote what the name connotes—that the only right or wrong actions are those which God has explicitly commanded.

Rather, divine command theory proposes that whatever is morally right is right because God has either explicitly or implicitly commanded it by some means—a command ascertained either by the appropriation of revelation or by inference from nature. A “full-fledged divine command theory of moral obligation” holds that “all truly moral obligations owe their status as moral duties to the fact that God commands them.” ³²

The strength of divine command theory, for a theorist such as C. Stephen Evans, is that moral duties can retain the qualities of “objectivity and overridingness” that Kant seeks to establish by means of the Categorical Imperative, but bypasses the burdensome criterion of universalizability, which enables an ethical system to become plastic in some degree to the unique ethical relationships that God has with such subsisting entities as communities, families, and individuals. ³³ Moreover, while the term “Divine Command Theory” sounds like a collection of inflexible and arbitrary rules with no organizing structure, what it really does is allows theorists to take an eclectic approach to moral theory. Thus, rather than using DCT to endorse a single moral approach, it can liberate moral reasoning from “an imperialistic, reductive theory that tries to make others unnecessary.” ³⁴

Mark C. Murphy argues for a broader category called “theological voluntarism, a genus of moral theory of which divine command theory is but one species.” ³⁵

Murphy explains: “To be a theological voluntarist is to hold that there is some moral status M that stands in a dependence relationship D to some act of the divine will A.” ³⁶

On this account, theological voluntarism refers to the enterprise of answering Euthyphro’s dilemma a certain way: Good is good because God determines what is good.” ³⁷

John E. Hare, a proponent of divine command theory, states that the best version of divine command theory is one that is Kantian in structure and Christian in content. He argues that Kant is essentially correct, whether he was consistent or not, to say that commonsense moral duties are God’s commands, and that autonomy ought to be conceived less as a state of freedom and more as a mode of compliance—instead of tapping into the Wille by way of the Willkür, one taps into the divine will by means of contingent appropriation of that will. ³⁸

For Hare, one of the strengths of divine command theory is that it justifies a moral realism of the sort that is difficult to justify in other scenarios, and circumvents, to some degree, some of the more broad sweeping critiques moral subjectivism issues of unitary moral theories. It is for this reason that Hare calls his view of Divine Command Theory “prescriptive realism.” ³⁹ However, does one’s justification for believing a moral reality—or of conceiving of morals as realities—really change the moral model all that much? Hare argues that it does in the following way: Imagine that there are two hypothetical worlds in which both the populations are moral realists and, in one world, morality does have an objective basis in the external world, and in the other, their moral realism is merely a subjective construction. John E. Hare comments, “from the realist perspective … only a person who already accepts that it does not make sense to talk of the existence of values in the things outside us rather than in our evaluation of them will accept the claim that there is no difference between the two worlds in question.” ⁴⁰

Therefore, this substantive justificatory relationship that God has to the substance of morals in Divine Command Theory is, for Hare, the lynchpin for the legitimacy of moral theory. ⁴¹

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	Richard Double, Metaethical Subjectivism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.
↑2	It may seem absurd that by the presentation of only a single paradox, a whole system—even an entire discipline—is thrown into jeopardy, but it is important to note that logicians have functioned this way for centuries. The discipline of logic has always been characterized by one-upmanship from generation to generation with Frege, Russel, Gettier, and so on, who by means of a single paradox would reduce a logical system to absurdity—for instance, Russell’s barber paradox, and Gettier’s infamous “ten coins” dilemma. See Gottlob Frege, “On Concept and Object,” Mind 60, no. 238 (April 1951): 168-180, translated by P. T. Geach, revised by Max Black; Adam P. Kubiak and Piotr Lipski, “Getting Straight on How Russell Underestimated Frege” Annals of Philosophy 62, no. 4 (2014): 122 [121-134]; John Turri, “In Gettier’s Wake” in Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology: The Key Thinkers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 214-229; Stephen Hetherington, Knowledge and the Gettier Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); David Dolby, “The Reference Principle: A Defence,” Analysis 69, no. 2 (2009): 286-296; P. Geach, Reason and Argument (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976); Harold W. Noonan, “The Concept of Horse” in P. F. Strawson and Arindam Shakrabarti (eds.), Universals, Concepts and Qualities: New Essays on Meaning and Predicates (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 165. Martin Pulido, “The Place of Saying and Showing In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Some Later Works,” Aporia 19, no. 2 (2009): 11-32.
↑3	J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977).
↑4	See Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Objectivism, Subjectivism and Relativism in Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). This volume offers a somewhat embarrassing smattering of defenses for objectivism that do not so much weaken the moral subjectivist’s position as supply a case study of the very eclecticism in moral theory to which moral subjectivists appeal as evidence. One article, Tibor R. Machan’s “Why Moral Judgments Can Be Objective” (pp. 100-125) appeals to Ayn Rand’s critique of David Hume in order to substantiate objectivism, which most moral subjectivists would find laughable, since Rand’s ethical egoism relies on Aristotle who, as a virtue ethicist, believed in kalokagathia as a virtue in which many other altruistic virtues could be attained. See Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. and ed. Brad Inwood and Raphael Woolf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 160.
↑5	Richard Doubleday, Metaethical Subjectivism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2.
↑6	Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau (eds.), Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2013), 685.
↑7	Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Penguin, 1992; orig., 1957), 1075.
↑8	Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” in Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 56 [49-56].
↑9	Ayn Rand, “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” in Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 81 [79-81].
↑10	John Henry McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 50 [50-74].
↑11	Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5.
↑12	Modern virtue theory has not developed much—for instance, as much as Kantianism. Modern work on virtue theory has been called “an embarrassment of riches.” David Solomon, “Virtue Ethics: Radical or Routine?” in Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski, Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 57 [57-80].
↑13	Virtue ethics is therefore not enslaved to the calculating criteria of consequentialism, which always asks what is the “greater good” which the universe’s ineradicable imperfections and evils can serve. Christina Swanton comments, “Virtue ethics is a type of non-consequentialist normative ethical theory, because not all virtues have as their point or rationale the promotion of good, or value. … Consequences … are not the only things that matter morally for the virtue ethicist.” Christina Swanton, The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), xv.
↑14	Thus, conceptions and principles of “right” and “wrong,” oddly enough, do not necessarily govern what is the virtuous (i.e., wise) thing to do in any given moment. In Aristotle, an act can be morally upright, “even if the agent knows that it will be accompanied by an unwelcome and (in some sense) evil effect.” Kevin L. Flannery, Acts Amid Precepts: the Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), xiii.
↑15	David Solomon, “Virtue Ethics: Radical or Routine?” in Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski, Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 70 [57-80].
↑16	“Virtue ethical positions take the virtues to be among the central ethical concepts and typically use them to ground an account of morally right actions. But even consequentialists, Kantians, moral pluralists, and advocates of other competing views have realized the importance that the virtues should play in their overall level.” Christian Miller, The Philosophy and Psychology of Moral Character (2013), 23.
↑17	Naomi Zack, “Lifeboat Ethics and Disaster: Should We Blow Up the Fat Man?” Ethics for Disaster (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 33 [33-48].
↑18	Martin Peterson, The Dimensions of Consequentialism: Ethics, Equality and Risk (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), vii.
↑19	Martin Peterson, The Dimensions of Consequentialism: Ethics, Equality and Risk (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), i.
↑20	Philip Pettit, “The Consequentialist Can Recognise Rights,” The Philosophical Quarterly 38, no. 150 (January 1988): 42-55. For example, a consequentialist could philosophically establish that the best criteria by which to apply a consequentialist ethic is what Naimo Zack calls “deontology criteria” for consequentialism, such as SGN (Save the Greatest Number) or SGNW (Save the Greatest Number Who ______). See Naomi Zack, “Lifeboat Ethics and Disaster: Should We Blow Up the Fat Man?” Ethics for Disaster (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 33 [33-48]. The notion of the deon is fairly essential to most consequentialist ethicists. Cf. Martin Peterson The Dimensions of Consequentialism: Ethics, Equality and Risk (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
↑21	There are also subversions of utilitarianism, such as “Act Utilitarianism” (John Stuart Mill) — “posit one fundamental principle from which all other subordinate principles and rules can be derived,” “Mixed Deontological Theory” (W. D. Ross) — “there are a number of fundamental moral principles none of which is more basic than the others,” and “Preference Utilitarianism” (G. E. Moore) — “there are a number of objects of moral value (e.g., friendship and aesthetic experience) and these are valuable independently of whether they contribute to human happiness. According to preference utilitarians what is ultimately of value in life depends on the rational preferences people happen to have.” Wilfred J. Waluchow, The Dimensions of Ethics: An Introduction to Ethical Theory (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2003), 21-23.
↑22	Geoffrey Scarre, Utilitarianism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2. John Stuart Mill, “Bentham,” in Mary Warnock (ed.), Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including Mill’s Essay on Bentham and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003; orig., 1838), 52-87.
↑23	Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 7-8.
↑24	Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15 (4:403). “To be truthful from duty, however, is something entirely different from being truthful from anxiety about detrimental results, since in the first case the concept of the action in itself already contains a law for me while in the second I must first look about elsewhere to see what effects on me might be combined with it. For, if I deviate from the principle of duty this is quite certainly evil; but if I am unfaithful to my maxim of prudence this can sometimes be very advantageous to me, although it is certainly safer to abide by it.” Ibid.
↑25	Kant breaks down the Categorical Imperative into four subsidiary formulas: 1. (FLN): Formula of the Law of Nature: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.” 2. (FH): Formula of Humanity as End In Itself: “So act that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end never merely as a means.”3. (FA): Formula of Autonomy: “…the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law.” 4. (FRE): Formula of the Realm of Ends: “Act in accordance with maxims of a universally legislative member for a merely possibly realm of ends.” Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31 (4:421). Kant uses the example of suicide here. He elucidates the philosophical presupposition of suicide, which is: “from self-love I make it my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more troubles than it promises agreeableness.” He argues: “a nature whose law it would be to destroy life itself by means of the same feeling whose destination is to impel toward the furtherance of life would contradict itself and would therefore not subsist in nature; thus that maxim could not possibly be a law of nature and, accordingly, altogether opposes the supreme principle of all duty.” Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32 (4:422). For all the formulations, see Ibid., 39 (4:431)., 44 (4:439), 45 (4:439). This basic taxonomy and these summaries are from Allen W. Wood, Kantian Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 66-67.
↑26	Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31 (4:421).
↑27	Roger Sullivan comments: “Kant believed that there is no way in which to apply the Categorical Imperative so as to generate many of our moral obligations, particularly positive duties to ourselves, without reliance on the natural law.” Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 150.
↑28	Thomas E. Hill, Virtue, Rules, & Justice: Kantian Aspirations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.
↑29	Hobbes, Leviathan Pt. 1, Ch. 6, Para. 7. “For these words Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the Person of the man … or … from an Arbitrator or Judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his rule sentence the Rule thereof.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; orig., 1651), 39 (Pt. 1, Ch. 6, Para. 7).
↑30	This spirit has been championed by Kantians today as well. Willliam Frenkena argues, for instance, for Kantianism over against virtue ethics in order liberate the ethical project of building a moral model from the concept of “self-interest.” However, Stanley Hauerwas responds that an ethical theory explained entirely by rationality presupposes a personal interest in being right—an interest Kant himself admits in his comments in Metaphysics of Morals (1797) about a shortcoming of Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). See William K. Frankena, Thinking About Morality (Rexdale, Canada: The University of Michigan Press, 1980); Stanley Hauerwas, “Obligation and Virtue Once More,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 3, no. 1 (Spring, 1975): 27-44.
↑31	Andrews Reath explains a distinction in Kant between Will [Wille] and Choice [Willkür], conceived as separate but related faculties, such that “Wille legislates the moral law for Willkür.” Andrews Reath, Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 97. In Kantian terms, the Wille refers to noumenal free will (or, the transcendental of practical freedom), and Willkür to the implementation of that free will via compliance with maxims (phenomenal choice). However, Henry Sidgwick critiques these two notions of the will as incompatible since the very idea of the Wille is as a transcendental, and thus always rational, and therefore unable to err—and, consequently, unable to choose contrariwise. Yet, the Willkür, retains properties of counterfactuality and fallibility—yet, is enabled as a willing faculty by the Wille. These two concepts are in this way contradictory accounts of the will, yet Kant “invokes the former concept of freedom whenever he has to deal with the question of moral responsibility, and the latter whenever he has to establish hour ability to act disinterestedly on the moral law.” Julian Wuerth, Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 237. See Henry Sidgwick, “The Kantian Conception of Free Will,” in Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7^th ed. (London: MacMillan, 1907), 509-514. First published in Mind 13 (1988): 405-12. While Sidgwick’s criticism and misquotation of Kant is infamous—Sidgwick cites Kant as identification of Wille with pure practical reason, when in fact he only identifies it with practical reason (praktische Vernunft). The solution, as Wuerth explains, is one that must overcome in the “one agent that both legislates and is subject to the moral law and …. Therefore autonomous in following the moral law …a gap within this one agent, between their role as legislator of their moral law and their executive role in deciding whether to choose to act on this law.” Julian Wuerth, “Moving Beyond Kant’s Account of Agency in Grounding,” in Lawrence Host and Julian Wuerth, Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 157 [147-163].). The answer is: pleasure, which is the metaphysical synapse in moral psychology that bridges one’s correct, subjective awareness of the noumenal principles (a proper understanding of Wille) and the choice to act in accordance with them. Pleasure is, for Kant, “not the basis for reason’s authority and so basic to the determination of desire: this feeling is instead the response to our recognition of reason’s authority.” (Ibid., 159). Therefore, there exists at least prima facie a resolution to the tension between freedom understood as ultimate rationality and freedom understood as counterfactual power.
↑32	C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands & Moral Obligations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15.
↑33	C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands & Moral Obligations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15 n. 15.
↑34	C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 53.
↑35, ↑36	Mark C. Murphy, God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100.
↑37	Any theological approach to ethics that evaluates the goodness of God on the basis of any other answer to Euthyphro’s dilemma, therefore, is not a species of theological voluntarism, on Murphy’s account.
↑38	John E. Hare, God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001),96. Or, if Hare is correct, Divine Command Theory is merely a theological way of stating an idea that some believe was developed as a critique of Divine Command Theory. Hare argues further: “If, like most contemporary exegetes, one reads Kant’s argument as an attack on divine command theory in general, it will naturally be construed as presenting the following two-horned dilemma. We have two choices on the divine command theory: Either we derive the notion of God’s perfection from our moral concepts or we do not. If we do (the first horn), then the derivation which the divine command theory proposes is crudely circular. It says we have moral obligations because God commands them, and we should obey God’s commands because they are morally right. But if we separate (on the second horn) our notion of God’s will from the moral concepts, then the explanation of our obligation will depend merely on our ability to please God and God’s ability (if we do not) to hurt us. The relationship between us, when stripped of right, will reduce to one of power. But then morality will be based on self-interest, and will not be what (on Kant’s view) morality in fact is. So neither choice is available to us, and so the divine command theory should be rejected.” Ibid., 104. Hare clearly opts for the first notion as a normative moral model, in order to maintain Divine Command Theory.
↑39	John E. Hare, Why Bother Being Good?: The Place of God in the Moral Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 108.
↑40	John E. Hare, God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 3, n. 1.
↑41	Hare also draws upon John Duns Scotus for the theological aspect of his modified Kantian theory. The difference between Scotus and Kant is that, for Scotus, “what distinguishes humans from each other is more valuable than what we have in common.” Kant’s ethics are metaphysically grounded but situationally weak—for example, it cannot justify why a parent has a moral duty to help their infant in pain over against another infant who is not their child, should they be required to choose. John E. Hare, Why Bother Being Good?: The Place of God in the Moral Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 106.

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