Abstract

The claim that they are the ‘Divine Command Theory of Morality’ might seem to be the neatest and most obvious way to account for the moral force of divine commands. In this paper I shall argue that the Divine Command Theory fails as an account of God’s relationship with morality, both in terms of coherence and in terms of fidelity to the traditional theist practice of obedience to God, while a more modest account of how God is to be understood as having a special moral authority can be successful on both counts.