Divine Commands and Moral Requirements by Philip L. Quinn (review)

502 BOOK REVIEWS As a sample he claims that, although we may rightly accept them on pragmatic grounds, we can never be certain that the guiding principles of our knowledge of reality (e.g., the assumptions that our memories are valid, that the future will resemble the past) are true. It is within this context that he asserts that science and religion are equally based on faith, the principle of which, according to him, is the will to live. In his final chapter (16) he sums up the results of his discussion. Generally stated they are: (1) The foundation of theism is an imaginative vision of existence which can be of deep significance for life but which cannot be verified by reason; (~) what determines belief, therefore, is an existential acceptance, so that, actually, there are no more rational grounds for believing theism to be true rather than its opposite; and (3) one chooses the belief which allows expression to one's authentic self. In concluding, this reviewer feels obligated to offer some remarks about the merits of this book (a "much revised" version, he neglected to mention , of Hodges's Gifford lectures delivered at Aberdeen in 1956-57) . Aside from its lack of internal unity of thought development (a reflection, perhaps , of its original lecture form), what is most disturbing about the book is its obvious violation of the rule of internal consistency. While the author often offers instructive statements concerning our natural knowledge of God and its limits-and argues them as though he thought them of value-their value is ultimately negated by his deeper scepticism. What is also confusing philosophically is that, despite his uncritical acceptance of the Humean concept of cause, Hodges will continue to refer to God as "All-Agent" and Personal Creator even when describing the mystic's awareness of God. It might be said in his defense, perhaps, that these references are based upon the author's religious faith; even so, this does not prevent them from being quite unintelligible from the standpoint of what Hodges has claimed reason can know. Finally, one might also wish to express his dismay that a Christian and a philosopher would have so completely succumbed to this radical form of skepticism without apparently having given too much thought to its logical epistemic consequences. THEODORE J. KoNDOLEON Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania Divine Commands and Moral Requirements. By PHILIP L. Qu1NN. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Pp. viii + 166. $19.50. In this study, which defends the status of divine command theories of ethics without positively advocating such theories, the author is concerned to set forth a view according to which propositions expressing moral requirements may be coherently and illuminatingly regarded as necessarily BOOK REVIEWS 503 equivalent to propositions expressing the content of those same requirements as divine commands. Divine command theories have fallen on hard times. Thus the author, in defending such theories against objections, has in a sense offered a conceptual account of moral requirements modeled on decrees of God in much the same way that recent philosophy has used alternative worlds and states of worlds to explicate propositional modalities. He begins with a simple theory stating the terms of equivalence and proceeds to amplify the simple theory according to the views of God presupposed by various forms of theism. In the simple theory, it is necessary that for any proposition p it is required that p if and only if God so commands; it is permitted that p if and only if God does not command the denial of p; and it is forbidden that p if and only if God commands that not-p, where the name " God " designates a singular across the class of worlds in which that singular exists and nothing in worlds in which that singular fails to exist, He then takes up ten objections to divine command theories, disposing of them clearly and cogently, in the reviewer's opinion; he urges at length that the most serious objections can be treated so as to show that it is at least more reasonable to suspend judgment on the truth of divine command theories than to reject them. We shall return to this later...