Adam's Way-out in Defense of Divine Command Ethics

The divine command ethics which make ethics dependent on religion always had and still have some proponents but it has not a unified form. Rather it is articulated in different forms. This paper deals with the divine command ethics articulated by Robert Mary Adams. His divine command theory firstly limited the domain of dependency to obligatory concepts like ‘ought’ and ‘right’ and secondly didn’t accept the conceptual dependency but hold only that without religious concepts we can not explain the essence of these moral concepts. Finally his divine command ethics allowed for the independency of some non obligatory concepts like ‘good’ and ‘bad’. This independency allowed him to refute some famous objections to Divine Command ethics like the problem of ‘arbitrariness’ of morality.