Robert Merrihew Adams

Background

Robert Merrihew Adams (b. 1937) is an American analytic philosopher — with career appointments including UCLA, Yale, and Oxford — and the principal architect of the modern divine command theory (DCT) of moral obligation. The SEP credits "the revival of divine command theories" mainly to "the work of Philip Quinn (1979/1978) and Robert Adams (1999)," judging Adams' version "particularly influential" (SEP 'Moral Arguments' §3).

Adams' mature position is a reduction thesis: following the Kripke-Putnam line on necessary a posteriori identities, "the property being wrong is identical to the property being contrary to the commands of (a loving) God" because that property "best fills the role assigned by the concept of wrongness" (Adams 1979a, 133–142; 1999, 252–258, at SEP 'Theological Voluntarism' §2.4). Restricting the theory to obligation — with the good analyzed as resemblance to God — is what lets it slip the classical Euthyphro dilemma.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Moral Argument for God — the strongest formulation of the argument's first horn: obligations are broadly social requirements, and only the relation between creatures and a loving Creator can constitute obligations that trump every merely human demand. The article's assessment of the Euthyphro exchange turns on Adams' good/right distinction, which the SEP judges "successfully meets this 'Euthyphro' objection."

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Adams' books and papers are copyright-locked; the moral-argument material is reconstructed from the SEP entries above. One Adams argument is discussed in corpus: the in-corpus appearedtoblogly preprint on Churchland outlines the "why-this-rather-than-that" argument from the irreducibility of qualia, quoting Adams' "Flavors, Colors, and God" and naming Adams, Swinburne, Chalmers, and Kim as its defenders (appearedtoblogly preprint 2012, p.1).

Principal critics

• J. L. Mackie — error theory flanks the argument: if there are no objective obligations, the theory has nothing to explain; yet Mackie himself granted that if morality is objective, theistic grounding is intelligible where naturalist grounding is "queer."
• Friedrich Nietzsche — the genealogical attack on the moral data (obligation, guilt, conscience) the theory takes as given.
• Erik Wielenberg — non-natural moral realism as the atheist's alternative grounding; proponents reply his brute moral facts are queerer than theistic ones (SEP 'Moral Arguments' §3).
• Patricia Churchland — reductionist critic of the qualia argument (engaged in the in-corpus preprint above).

See also

• William Lane Craig — the argument's most visible public advocate; Adams supplies its metaethical machinery.
• William P. Alston, Richard Swinburne — allied analytic theists in the DCT research program's orbit.
• Immanuel Kant — the practical-reason alternative; Adams himself pressed the obligation-weakening reply to Kantian arguments.