16 Problems with Divine Command Theory

4) Defies everyday moral reasoning and intuition (in, say, consequences)

In other words, what makes rape wrong, for us, is roughly what harm it causes. For the DCTer, it is because God commanded us not to rape. Although, he kind of did in the Old Testament! We will look about the world and say, “Look how horrible rape is! Look at the harm it does.” But this in no way makes it wrong! This carries no moral value. Of course, this seems patently ridiculous. None of this plays well with our sense of moral intuition. We feel we are being good for X and Y reason, and yet this is supposed to be reflective of God, and this is what makes it good. Yet most everybody being good on a daily basis believes this or thinks of God in this way when being good.

Indeed, as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong states in Morality Without God (p. 107-108):

Larry Nucci found that almost all Amish teenagers said that if God had not commanded them to work on a Sunday, then it would not be wrong to work on Sunday. In his terms, they saw this wrongness as conventional and dependent on authority. When asked why it was wrong to hit other people, many of these Amish teenagers replied that hitting is wrong because God commanded them not to be aggressive or violent. Luckily, Nucci did not stop there. He went on to ask these same Amish teenagers whether it would still be morally wrong to hit other people, if God had made no rule about hitting other people. More than 80 percent of these Amish teenagers replied that hitting would still be immoral. In Nucci’s terms, they treated the wrongness of hitting as moral rather than conventional (or authority dependent) even though they had talked about it as if it were conventional. Their responses, thus, show that even teenagers who were brought up in a strict religious way and who espouse the divine command theory still recognize that morality has a sound foundation outside of God’s commands.