Julia Sweeney on Divine command theory
Sweeney rejected divine command morality after recognising that the Bible's moral commands include directives she found deeply immoral.
Julia Sweeney's rejection of divine command theory was intimately connected to her experience of reading the Bible. Once she encountered the full range of biblical commands — including the endorsement of slavery, the subjugation of women, the execution of disobedient children, and the command to commit genocide against the Canaanites — she could no longer accept the framework that morality is whatever God commands.
Sweeney's approach was characteristically personal. She did not engage with the Euthyphro dilemma as an abstract philosophical problem but as a lived experience: she had spent decades trying to align her moral intuitions with the commands of a God whose behaviour, as described in Scripture, she found increasingly indefensible. The breaking point came when she realised that her moral judgment was consistently better than the God she was being asked to obey.
This insight — that she was already using her own moral compass to select which divine commands to follow and which to ignore — meant that her morality was not actually grounded in God's commands at all. She was the one doing the moral work, and God was, at best, an unnecessary intermediary. The realisation was liberating but also vertiginous: if God was not the source of morality, what was?
“I realised I was picking and choosing which of God's commands to follow based on my own sense of right and wrong. Which meant my sense of right and wrong was the real foundation all along.”