should turn out that God's will makes what's right to be right. Acts are right/wrong
because of the will of God. A plausible version of the intended relation has been
proposed by Robert Adams (1993), who argues that the relation between God's
commands and the rightness/wrongness of acts is akin to the relation between water and
H 2 O in the theory of direct reference defended by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and
others in the 1970s.^10 “Water” and “H 2 O” do not mean the same thing. To think so is to
misunderstand the importance of the discovery that water is H 2 O. This was certainly not
the discovery of the meaning of a word, nor a change in meaning of a word. Nonetheless,
it is not a contingent fact that water is composed of H 2 O. The discovery that water is H 2
O is the discovery that being H 2 O is essential to water. We think now that nothing ever
was or will be water that is not H 2 O, even though nobody was in a position to
understand that before the seventeenth century. Similarly, the moral properties of acts
could be essentially connected to God's commands even though many people are not in a
position to realize the connection and perhaps nobody was at some periods of history.
The theory I call divine motivation theory makes the ground of what is morally good and
morally right God's motives rather than God's will. Because I think of a motive as an
emotion that is operating to initiate action, the divine motives can be considered divine
emotions. However, in philosophies influenced by Aristotelian psychology, such as that
of Aquinas, emotions are thought to be essentially connected to the body and therefore do
not apply to God. I see no reason to deny that emotions are components of the divine
nature, but the theory does not require that. It requires only that there are states in God
that are analogous to emotions in the same way that there are states in God analogous to
what we call beliefs in human beings. Virtually all theists attribute to God states such as
love and compassion. Whether or not these states are properly classified as emotions,
they are motivating. God acts out of love, joy, compassion, and perhaps also anger and
disgust. These are the states that I propose constitute the metaphysical basis for moral
value. They are components of God's virtues. The shift I advocate from God's will to
God's virtues results in a shift from a theological deontological theory to a theological
virtue theory.
The overall structure of the theory is exemplarist. Moral properties are defined via
reference to an exemplar of goodness. God is the ultimate exemplar, but there are many
finitely good human exemplars. In this respect, the theory is similar to that of Aristotle,
(2000, bk. 2, ch. 6, 1107a), who defines virtue as what would be determined by the
person with phronesis (practical wisdom), and morally virtuous acts as acts that the
phronimos would do in the circumstances in question. For Aristotle, then, the exemplar is
the person with practical wisdom. In religious traditions, the exemplar is the Christian
saint, the Buddhist arahant, the Jewish tzaddik, and so on.^11
To get a more careful rendering of the way reference to an exemplar defines moral
concepts, let us return to Putnam and Kripke's theory of natural kind terms
end p.357
(Putnam 1975, Kripke 1980). They defined a natural kind such as water or gold or human
as whatever is the same kind of thing or stuff as some indexically identified instance. For
example, they proposed that gold is, roughly, whatever is the same element as that; water
is whatever is the same liquid as that; a human is whatever is a member of the same