Robert Adams

Robert Merrihew Adams was an American philosopher who taught at UCLA, Yale and Rutgers and wrote on ethics, philosophy of religion and Leibniz. He developed a modified divine command theory: moral wrongness consists in being contrary to the commands of a loving God, so that a command to do cruelty for its own sake would not generate obligation. In Finite and Infinite Goods he set this within a theistic Platonism, identifying the Good itself with God.

Key ideas

• Moral obligation is constituted by the commands of a loving God.
• Because God is good, the theory is not open to the charge that anything at all could become obligatory.
• Excellence is resemblance to God, who is the Good itself.
• Virtue is persisting excellence in being for the good.

Major works

• "A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness" (1973)
• Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (1994)
• Finite and Infinite Goods (1999)
• A Theory of Virtue (2006)

In the conversation

• Question If morality depends on God, what is my atheist friend doing when she keeps her promises? Fajar Nugroho · 4 replies
• Debate Atheists should retire the logical problem of evil: Plantinga answered it Arvind Poojary · 5 replies
• Debate Robert Adams’s modified divine command theory answers the ‘God could command cruelty’ objection Aoife Brennan · 5 replies