QuestionsWhat makes something right?The good is what God commands
What makes something right?God's will

The good is what God commands

Divine command theory

Guillaume d'Ockham c. 1287 · c. 1347The good is what God wills: his will is subject to no outside rule.
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What it claims

Moral goodness is what God commands, and God could have commanded otherwise: had he commanded what we call theft or adultery, those acts would have been good and meritorious.

Why

God can command anything that is not contradictory, and theft or hating God are not: they are bad only because he forbids them.

The same idea through history
Guillaume d'Ockham1318Commentary on the Sentences (c. 1317-1319): theft, adultery and even hatred of God would be meritorious acts if God commanded them. Nothing binds God except non-contradiction.
Robert Merrihew Adams1973"A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness": "wrong" means "contrary to the commands of a loving God". If God commanded cruelty for its own sake, the notion of wrong would stop working.
Robert Merrihew Adams1999Finite and Infinite Goods: the Good itself is God; things are good by resembling him. Obligations, for their part, come from the commands God addresses to those he is in relationship with.
In short

"The good is what God commands" is an argument by Guillaume d'Ockham (Ockham, Reportatio II, q. 15 and IV, q. 16 (c. 1318); Adams (1973, 1999), 1318) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: god's will). Its claim: Moral goodness is what God commands, and God could have commanded otherwise: had he commanded what we call theft or adultery, those acts would have been good and meritorious. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Ockham, Reportatio II, q. 15 and IV, q. 16 (c. 1318); Adams (1973, 1999)
Valid with an implicit premise

Why is murder wrong? For William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century English Franciscan, the final answer is: because God forbids it. God is all-powerful, and nothing binds him except logic: he cannot make a thing both be and not be at the same time. The acts we call theft or adultery are not bad in themselves; they are bad because they go against a command. Ockham goes all the way: God could command that we hate him, and that hatred would then be meritorious. The thesis shocks, but it has a strength: it explains why morality truly binds, and why it depends neither on our tastes nor on society. In the twentieth century, the American philosopher Robert Adams proposed a modified version, much discussed today.

P1God can command anything that involves no contradiction. He could even command a creature to hate him.
P2The acts we call theft, adultery or hatred of God involve no contradiction in themselves. These words refer to them insofar as they go against a command of God: that is what makes them bad.
P3 · implicit premiseWhat holds for these acts holds for all of morality: there is no standard of goodness above God's will, or beside it, that could judge it. If wrong consists in going against his commands, right consists in following them.
Therefore moral goodness is what God commands, and God could have commanded otherwise: had he commanded what we call theft or adultery, those acts would have been good and meritorious.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a world where God could command theft and where theft is bad only because it is forbidden, but where other things are good in themselves, with no command: for example love of God, or kindness. This is the path Adams takes: only duty comes from commands, the good comes from God's nature.
Valid with P3. P1 and P2 only show that God could command these acts and that their wrongness comes from a prohibition. To infer that all moral goodness comes down to commands, P3's generalisation is needed. Beware of caricaturing Ockham: he did not think God would actually command theft, and historians (such as Alfredo Gatto) stress that he keeps limits on the divine will, non-contradiction and God's very nature. The debate is mainly about the conclusion (is a morality that could have been the reverse still a morality?) and about P3 (is there really no good independent of command?).
Analogy. In football, a handball is a foul because the rules forbid it: in handball, the same move is the normal play. For Ockham, morality is like a rulebook, and the supreme referee is God. The question is whether cruelty is really like a handball in football.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Plato (the Euthyphro dilemma) 399 BC · attacks the conclusion

Is the good good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? Ockham chooses the first horn, and then morality becomes arbitrary: if God commanded cruelty for its own sake, it would become a duty. And saying "God is good" would mean nothing more than "God does what he commands himself". (See the argument "The Euthyphro dilemma".)

d'Ockham replies
Robert Adams 1973 · Adams's reply: the theory must be modified
Adams grants the point: he finds it unacceptable that cruelty would become a duty if God commanded it. So he modifies the theory: "wrong" means "contrary to the commands of a loving God". If one really believed God commanded cruelty for its own sake, our notion of wrong would stop working altogether: one could no longer say any act was right or wrong.
Erik Wielenberg 2018
In his debate with Craig, who defends a position close to Adams's, Wielenberg replies that the theist too stops at a fact he does not explain: that God is loving, and that this is good. The theist too needs a moral starting point accepted without proof. The atheist who starts directly from basic moral truths ("gratuitous cruelty is wrong") is therefore in no weaker position.
The debate goes on (our summary) Adams's defenders reply that everyone stops somewhere, and that a perfect, loving being is a better stopping point than a list of abstract rules. Critics reply that arbitrariness has not gone away: it has moved from God's commands to his nature. This debate is also developed in the argument "The moral law points to a lawgiver".
Thomas Aquinas (natural law) 1270 · attacks premise 3

A law that does not accord with reason is not really a law. For Aquinas, the moral law is not an arbitrary order: it is God's eternal law, that is, his wisdom, as our reason shares in it. The good is known by reason, starting from human nature, and God commands what is good because it is good. (See the argument "The natural law".)

d'Ockham replies
We have not yet found a direct reply by d'Ockham in the texts.
Robert Adams 1973 · Adams's reply: the theory is only about duty
Adams does not defend the idea that everything must be understood through commands. A divine command theory need not say that all value concepts, or even all moral concepts, are to be explained by God's commands. It is about obligation, what it is wrong to do.
The debate goes on (our summary) Ockham did not answer Aquinas on this precise point. Adams's modern version in fact comes closer to Aquinas: the good comes from God's nature, not his will; only duty comes from commands. A disagreement remains: for Aquinas, our reason is enough to know the main precepts; for Adams, an obligation in the strong sense requires someone who commands.
Kierkegaard (Johannes de silentio) and the case of Abraham 1843 · attacks the conclusion

God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son. If the good is what God commands, Abraham simply does his duty, and there is no drama. Yet Fear and Trembling shows it is not so simple: either Abraham is a murderer, or we must admit something higher than morality. Ockham's theory erases a horror every reader feels. And Kant adds: how can one be sure the order comes from God? (See the argument "Abraham: faith above morality?".)

d'Ockham replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1843, after the author's death (1347).
Robert Adams 1973 · Adams's reading: a mere logical possibility
We should not imagine Ockham ready to practise cruelty on command. For him, God is surely opposed to such acts: that he could command them is a mere logical possibility, not a real one.
The debate goes on (our summary) Adams's answer explains Ockham, but does not settle the case of Abraham, where the order is actually given in the story. Divine command theorists reply that, in the Bible, God stops the sacrifice, and that a loving God does not command the death of an innocent for its own sake. Critics reply with Kant: when an order seems contrary to morality, the only safe conclusion is that it does not come from God, which amounts to putting morality before the command.
What today's voices say
Criticize it
Alex O'Connor"Religious morality is subjective even if God does exist": a morality based on God's commands would only be God's preferences.
Peter SingerDefining good as what God wills was refuted long ago, in Plato's Euthyphro.
Bart EhrmanHe says the Bible's God starves and kills people to bring them back (as in Amos), so morality cannot be based on God's actions. We know good and evil from what is good for one another, and the golden rule needs no God.