even though the idea of likeness to God can be found in many traditions including some
that are not religious in the usual sense (e.g., Stoicism, Platonism).^12 In Christian
theology, the problem is solved in part through the doctrine of the Incarnation. The God-
man is both the perfect exemplar from whom all value derives and is a human person
who can be imitated. The life of Christ is a narrative that illuminates a point of view from
which we can see a number of exemplary acts, and especially exemplary motives and the
virtues of which they are constituents. DM theory gives a theoretical foundation to
Christian narrative ethics.
An important objection to DC theory goes back to Plato's Euthyphro, where Socrates
asks, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is
holy?” (10a). As applied to DC theory, this question produces a famous dilemma: if God
wills the good (right) because it is good (right), then goodness (rightness) is independent
of God's will and the latter does not explain the former. On the other hand, if something
is good (right) because God wills it, then it looks as if the divine will is arbitrary. God is
not constrained by any moral reason from willing anything whatever, and it is hard to see
how any nonmoral reason could be the right sort of reason to determine God's choice of
what to make good or right. The apparent consequence is that good/bad (right/wrong) are
determined by an arbitrary divine will; God could have commanded cruelty or hatred, and
if he had done so, cruel and hateful acts would have been right, even duties. This is an
unacceptable consequence. It is contrary to our sense of the essentiality of the moral
properties of acts of certain kinds, and the goodness of a God who could make cruelty
good is not at all what we normally mean by good. It is therefore hard to see how it can
be true that God himself is good in any important, substantive sense of good on this
approach.
To solve this problem, Robert Adams (1979) modifies DC theory to say that the property
of rightness is the property of being commanded by a loving God. This permits Adams to
allow that God could command cruelty for its own sake, but if God did so he would not
love us, and if that were the case, Adams argues,
end p.359
morality would break down. Morality is dependent on divine commands, but they are
dependent on the commands of a deity with a certain nature. If God's nature were not
loving, morality would fall apart.
Although Adams's proposal may succeed in answering the objection it is designed to
address, it has the disadvantage of being ad hoc. There is no intrinsic connection between
a command and the property of being loving, so to tie morality to the commands of a
loving God is to tie it to two distinct properties of God. In DM theory there is no need to
solve the problem of whether God could make it right that we brutalize the innocent by
making any such modification to the theory, since being loving is one of God's essential
motives. The right thing for humans to do is to act on motives that imitate the divine
motives. Brutalizing the innocent is not an act that expresses a motive that imitates the
divine motives. Hence, it is impossible for brutalizing the innocent to be right as long as
(1) it is impossible for such an act to be an expression of a motive that is like the motives
of God, and (2) it is impossible for God to have different motives. (2) follows from the
plausible assumption that God's motives are part of his nature.^13