Ethics Without Divine Command

This affirmation distinguishes humanist ethics from the divine-command moralities of the theistic religions, which root obligation in the will of God. Humanists argue that morality can stand on human foundations and even that grounding it in welfare makes it more responsive to actual human good, echoing the ancient question of whether the good is good because a god commands it. The belief follows from the humanist commitment to reason and to this life, and it is presented here as the ethical stance humanists hold. The question, whether an act is good because God commands it, or God commands it because it is already good, was first posed with lasting force in Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, written in the fourth century BCE, and it remains a live technical debate in philosophy of religion rather than one settled by antiquity.

Contemporary theistic philosophers have developed more sophisticated versions of divine command theory to answer it, notably Robert Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999), which grounds moral obligation in the commands of a God whose own nature is essentially loving, arguing this escapes the dilemma's force; humanist ethicists respond that such moves ultimately concede the humanist point, that some standard of goodness must be intelligible independently of the mere fact of a command.