Is Divine Law Indispensable to Moral Obligation? A Reply to Elizabeth Anscombe

Abstract

This paper assesses Elizabeth Anscombe’s influential argument in her 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy,” which holds that secular moral obligation is metaphysically incoherent without a divine law framework. This paper reconstructs her argument—dubbed the “divine indispensability argument”—in standard form and then presents eight targeted objections that fall under three general types—challenges to its intelligibility, internal and external inconsistency, and substantive improbabilities—demonstrating that each strand refutes her thesis. Finally, it shows that her proposed remedy inherits the very defects she attributes to secular ethics and concludes that moral obligation remains fully coherent within nontheistic frameworks.

1. Introduction

The question posed in this Special Issue, “Is an ethics without God possible?”, is metaethically ambiguous. Interpreted epistemologically, it asks whether it is possible to know moral values, duties, virtues, and so on without God. Interpreted metaphysically, it asks whether an ethics can be grounded without theism. Because I take the second sense of the question to be much more interesting than the first, in this essay I will focus on the metaphysical question. In particular, I will treat Elizabeth Anscombe’s divine law conception of ethics as one of the most sophisticated twentieth-century defenses of the claim that morality is impossible without God, using it as a test case for assessing the coherence of secular moral obligation.

Arguments for and against metaphysical claims can be divided into three types: incoherence arguments, inconsistency arguments, and improbability arguments. Incoherence arguments claim that a concept or property is unintelligible (e.g., “The volume of 3 meters is lavender”). Inconsistency arguments claim a proposition entails a contradiction, either internally or with known facts (e.g., theism vs. the existence of evil). Improbability arguments claim some fact makes a proposition less probable, overall improbable, or less probable than a rival claim.

Corresponding to these three types of arguments are three types of responses. Incoherence arguments invite conceptual clarification. Inconsistency arguments invite consistency responses, in which the defender of a view shows that the alleged inconsistency does not exist. Improbability arguments, by contrast, invite explanatory responses, in which the defender accounts for the relevant data in a way that blocks the alleged improbability conclusion.1

The so-called “logical” argument from evil is a paradigmatic external inconsistency argument (Mackie 1955; Smith 1997, pp. 148–56; Sobel 2004, pp. 436–98; Schellenberg 2013; Sterba 2019, 2024).2 It alleges that one metaphysical proposition, theism, is inconsistent with a second, external metaphysical proposition, “Evil exists.” Plantinga’s (1977) so-called “Free Will Defense” is the corresponding paradigmatic consistency response.

Among these formulations, the external inconsistency argument advanced by Sterba is of particular interest, as it provides a perfect foil for the central challenge posed by Elizabeth Anscombe. Sterba’s argument weaponizes the very concept of ‘moral requirements’ to demonstrate an inconsistency in theism. He argues that if we take our duties seriously, we must conclude that God does not exist.

In a remarkable inversion of this logic, Anscombe’s influential essay attempts to mount an external inconsistency argument in the opposite direction: against atheism, on the basis of moral obligation. She contends that the very notion of a ‘moral requirement’ or ‘obligation’ is incoherent unless we presuppose a divine law conception of ethics. In this essay, I will examine her argument and provide a series of consistency responses to her charge, defending the coherence of secular moral obligation.

2. Exposition

2.1. Introduction and Motivation

The idea that God somehow grounds moral obligation is not new, but the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe reinvigorated the idea in 1958 with the publication of her broadside essay, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (MMP). In MMP, Anscombe defends three provocative theses. Her second thesis is relevant to this article; I will call it the “Problem of Moral Obligation.”3 She describes it as follows:

The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 1)

This passage suggests that Anscombe believes the problem with modern moral philosophy’s use of deontic concepts like moral obligation is that it is merely imprudent or ill-advised.4 But that characterization is misleading, in two ways. First, it is an oversimplification of her thesis. Anscombe did not oppose modern moral philosophy’s use of deontic concepts per se. Rather, as Christopher Miles Coope puts it, “she was merely inveighing against those who invested notions of ‘Ought’ and ‘Must’ and ‘Duty’ (capital initials supplied) with a purely mesmeric force” (Coope 2006, p. 22). Second, that characterization understates the strength of her claims. Later in that same essay, Anscombe herself frames the issue in terms of intelligibility: in modern moral philosophy, she claims, we have “the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one” (Anscombe 1958, p. 5). So the Problem of Moral Obligation amounts to the view that modern moral philosophy, insofar as it makes use of deontic concepts with purely mesmeric force, is not “intelligible.”

But what does Anscombe mean by “intelligible” or “unintelligible”? In ordinary language, to say that some sentence S is unintelligible is to say that S is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Does Anscombe mean, then, that she finds modern moral philosophy’s use of deontic concepts extremely difficult to understand? Evidently not, for she compares the Problem of Moral Obligation to the following.

It is as if the notion “criminal” were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten. A Hume [i.e., a Humean philosopher] discovering this situation might conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by “criminal,” which alone gave the word its sense. So Hume discovered the situation which the notion “obligation” survived, and the notion “ought” was invested with that peculiar for having which it is said to be used in a “moral” sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of Reformation. The situation, if I am right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 5)

This analogy demonstrates that Anscombe likely uses “intelligible” to mean “coherence.” If criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished, then the concept of “criminal” might, indeed, be difficult to understand for those who had “forgotten” or never learned the context in which the concept was applied. For those who understood and remembered the context, however, the concept of “criminal” would be intelligible, but not applicable. Any institution or linguistic practice which made essential reference to “criminal,” while at the same time denying the existence of criminal law and criminal courts, would be engaged in a practical inconsistency. Thus, we may restate the Problem of Moral Obligation as the view that modern moral philosophy, insofar as it makes use of moral obligation while denying the presuppositions of moral obligation, is incoherent. This interpretation, call it the “incoherence interpretation,” seems to be the dominant view among contemporary Anscombe commentators (Graber 1974; Darwall 1987, p. 75; Baier 1988, p. 129, quoted in Richter 1995, p. 73; Richter 1995; Solomon 2008, p. 111; Lagerspetz 2010; Blamey and Thompson 2017, p. 28; Njoroge 2018, p. 55; Misso 2022, p. 12).

Having clarified that Anscombe’s second thesis in MMP (the Problem of Moral Obligation) is the position that (secular) modern moral philosophy is incoherent, let us now turn to Anscombe’s support for that claim.

2.2. The Etymology Theory

Anscombe’s provocative thesis immediately raises several questions. What, precisely, is the “earlier conception of ethics” to which she refers? And how does modern moral philosophy deny that conception? In order to answer those questions, I will first need to introduce the different senses of “ought” she recognizes.

Nowadays, among moral philosophers, it is conventional to distinguish between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. Hypothetical imperatives are a two-place relation with the following grammatical form:

HI: ‘If you want X, then you ought to Y’,

using ‘X’ as a noun describing an agent’s goals, and ‘Y’ for a verb phrase which identifies the conditional or hypothetical obligation. Larry Arnhart has proposed an expansion of the grammatical form of hypothetical imperatives into a three-place relation:

HI: ‘Given what we know about T, if you want X, then you ought to Y’,

where ‘T’ is a noun phrase referring to relevant background knowledge about some topic T (e.g., human nature, how things work, etc.). While the two-place relation is the canonical form of hypothetical imperatives, Arnhart’s expansion has the advantage of making explicit the background beliefs about means-ends connections that is often left unstated. Arnhart provides the following example:

Given what we know about the nature of human beings and the world in which they live, if we want to pursue happiness while living in society with each other, then we ought to adopt a social structure that conforms to human nature in promoting human happiness in society. So, for example, given what we know about human vulnerability and human propensities to violent aggression, if we want to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity in our society, then we ought to have laws against murder, rape, assault, and theft.5

(Arnhart 2017)

Likewise, it is evident that Anscombe (1958, p. 4) describes a hypothetical imperative when she writes that machinery “ought to be oiled.”

The terms “should” or “ought” or “needs” relate to good and bad: e.g., machinery needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled, in that running without oil is bad for it, or it runs badly without oil.

Using the expanded grammatical form of a hypothetical imperative, this example may be restated as:

HI-A: “Given what we know about machinery, if you want machinery to run well, then you ought to oil it.”

Anscombe designates the ‘oughts’ tied to hypothetical imperatives as “ordinary oughts.”

In contrast to hypothetical imperatives, an agent’s goals play no role in categorical imperatives. Categorical imperatives are ordinarily expressed as:

CI1: ‘You ought to Z”,

where Z identifies the unconditional or categorical obligation. For instance, Anscombe (1958, p. 4) uses the example:

CI1-A: “A man should not bilk.”

She interprets such uses of “should” as “absolute” or “emphatic” (Anscombe 1958, pp. 4 and 11, respectively), by which I take her to mean categorical. This raises an important point: categorical imperatives, when expressed using the grammatical form of CI1, are ambiguous. They do not explicitly state whether the “ought” or “should” is hypothetical or categorical. It is possible for a competent English language user to state a hypothetical imperative in abbreviated form by treating the ‘Given what we know about X, if you want Y, then’ clause as implied or elliptical. In order to account for this possibility, it will be useful to restate categorical imperatives with a revised grammatical form:

CI2: ‘You ought to Z [regardless of your desires or intentions]’,

where the clause ‘[regardless of your desires or intentions]’ is usually unspoken. Anscombe’s bilking example may therefore be restated unambiguously as:

CI2-A: ‘You ought not bilk [regardless of your desires or intentions].’

The distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives enables me to introduce a parallel distinction between Anscombe’s claims about the presuppositions made by two periods of Western moral philosophy, which I will call “Aristotelian” and “post-Aristotelian.”6 Anscombe argues that Aristotelian moral philosophy consists entirely of hypothetical imperatives, while categorical imperatives are central to post-Aristotelian moral philosophy. Thus, we have two theories.

The Aristotelian Hypothetical Imperative Theory: Aristotelian moral philosophy is a system of hypothetical imperatives; it has no concept of categorical imperatives.

The Post-Aristotelian Categorical Imperative Theory: Post-Aristotelian moral philosophy is committed to categorical imperatives.

Why the change after Aristotle? Western moral philosophy adopted a “law conception of ethics.” Anscombe thinks that moral obligations, like their legal counterparts, are categorical, not hypothetical. She supports this claim by appealing to etymology: deontic words like “ought” have acquired this special sense because they were previously “equated” with legal expressions like “is obliged,” “is bound,” or “is required to” (Anscombe 1958, p. 11). So one key part of her case is what I will call the Etymology Theory.7

The Etymology Theory: The post-Aristotelian concepts of moral obligation and moral duty originated from legal obligation and legal duty.

That forms a nice segue to Anscombe’s concept of “law.” If legal obligation just is an obligation to obey the law, one wonders: what does Anscombe mean by “law”? That question is the topic of the next sub-section.

2.3. The Law Theory

While the Etymology Theory explains the origins of moral obligation, Anscombe’s Law Theory explores the conceptual underpinnings of such obligations in a law-based framework. According to Anscombe, categorical obligation is a “notion of obligation which only operates in the context of law” (Anscombe 1958, p. 15). But what does that mean? Her remarks are equivocal. On the one hand, in several places she explicitly refers to divine law. In addition to the passage quoted above (“belief in divine law”), there are several others.

A divine law theory of ethics is reduced to an insignificant variety by a footnote telling us that “the best theologians” (God knows whom he meant) tell us that God is to be obeyed in his capacity of a moral being.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 9)

Now let us remember that “morally wrong” is the term which is the heir of the notion “illicit,” or “what there is an obligation not to do”; which really belongs in a divine law theory or ethics.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 15)

On the other hand, in other passages Anscombe (1958, pp. 4–5) suggests the possibility of a “law conception of ethics” that is not based on divine law.

To have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua craftsman or logician)—that what is needed for this, is required by divine law.

Anscombe does something very interesting in this passage. She begins her sentence by referring to a “law conception of ethics” but then ends it by stating that “divine law” is “needed” for that conception of ethics. The interesting feature of this passage, a feature which most Anscombe commentators have not recognized (Doyle 2018, p. 32), is that Anscombe argues for two related but distinct claims, one pertaining to the necessity of a law conception, and another about the most suitable version of a law conception. I will call these two claims the “Law Theory” and the “Metaphysical Theory,” respectively.

She offers two clues about her concept of “law.” First, laws are categorical, not hypothetical, requirements.8 When governments enact legislation to criminalize actions, they never or virtually never word the laws hypothetically. Because laws describe categorical requirements, legal obligations are categorical obligations. Second, Anscombe insists that laws are imperatives issued by an authority and backed up by the risk of sanctions (Crisp 2004, p. 77). The “concept of legislation requires superior power in a legislator” (Anscombe 1958, p. 2).

We are now in a position to formally state the Anscombian definition of a “law conception of ethics.”

The Law Theory: Necessarily, if moral obligation exists, it is grounded in moral law which (i) consists of categorical requirements; which are (ii) issued by an authority and backed up by the risk of sanctions.

So defined, the Law Theory is consistent with a secular moral law, if one exists. Anscombe, of course, rejects secular moral law. At the same time, she seems to allow that the idea of a secular moral law is at least coherent.

Those who recognize the origins of the notion of “obligation” and of the emphatic, “moral,” ought, in the divine law conception of ethics, but who reject the notion of a divine legislator, sometimes look about for the possibility of retaining a law conception without a divine legislator. This search, I think, has some interest in it.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 11)

Thus, it is clear that Anscombe recognizes a distinction between a “law conception of ethics,” as a genus concept, and a “divine law conception of ethics,” as a species concept. She then proceeds to argue that divine law is superior to various putative secular conceptions of moral law. Let us take a look at that argument next.

2.4. The Metaphysical Theory

Having clarified the conceptual nature of “law” implicit in the Law Theory, let us now consider Anscombe’s second claim, which I will call the Metaphysical Theory.

The Metaphysical Theory: Moral law is divine law.

In defense of the Metaphysical Theory, she considers several alternatives to divine legislation: societal norms, self-legislation, the laws of nature, social contractualism, and Aristotelian virtue ethics (Anscombe 1958, pp. 11–12). Let us briefly review Anscombe’s objections to each of these rivals to divine law.

Regarding societal norms, Anscombe (1958, p. 11) takes it to be so obvious that they are not plausible grounds of moral law that she leaves it as an exercise for the reader to discover the reason why.

Perhaps the first thing that suggests itself is the “norms” of a society. But just as one cannot be impressed by Butler when one reflects what conscience can tell people to do, so, I think, one cannot be impressed by this idea if one reflects what the “norms” of a society can be like.

Nor does she take seriously the idea, famously defended by Kant, of self-legislation:

That legislation can be “for oneself” I reject as absurd; whatever you do “for yourself” may be admirable, but is not legislating.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 11)9

Next she considers the idea that the laws of nature somehow ground obligation. Unlike the previous ideas, it is not entirely clear what this option means. She describes it as a sort of “as if” legislation: the laws of nature ground legislation “as if the universe were a legislator.” This is a puzzling description. Not only is the universe as such not a sentient being (and so incapable of literally being a legislator), the “laws of nature” as ordinarily understood are descriptive, not prescriptive. Anscombe does not press this objection; instead, she objects that moral laws grounded on the laws of nature “might lead one to eat the weaker.” But even if we assume that descriptive natural laws ground prescriptive moral laws, it is far from obvious the laws of nature ground the putative moral law, “Eat the weaker.” Another law of nature is that “Mammalian mothers care for their young.” So why pick out the law of nature, “The stronger eats the weaker,” and not something more benevolent, such as “Mammalian mothers care for their young”? Anscombe never says. This point might simultaneously undercut Anscombe’s stated objection and suggest a stronger one: if laws of nature ground moral law, it is indeterminate which laws of nature should be the grounds of moral law.

Turning to social contractualism, Anscombe’s (1958, p. 12) language is more tentative:

Just possibly, it might be argued that the use of language which one makes in the ordinary conduct of life amounts in some sense to giving the signs of entering into various contracts. If anyone had this theory, we should want to see it worked out. I suspect that it would be largely formal; it might be possible to construct a system embodying the law (whose status might be compared to that of “laws” of logic): “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” but hardly one descending to such particularities as the prohibition on murder or sodomy.

Thus, Anscombe thinks that even if the linguistic data from the ordinary use of deontic concepts (such as ought, duty, and obligation) supports social contractualism, the resulting social contract is likely to be morally inadequate. Furthermore, she objects to social contractualism on the grounds that we are not aware of having agreed to the contract (Anscombe 1958, p. 12).

Finally, she rejects the idea of grounding moral law in Aristotelian virtue ethics.

It might remain to look for “norms” in human virtues: just as man has so many teeth, which is certainly not the average number of teeth men have, but is the number of teeth for the species, so perhaps the species man, regarded not just biologically, but from the point of view of the activity of thought and choice in regard to the various departments of life—powers and faculties and use of things needed—“has” such-and-such virtues: and this “man” with the complete set of virtues is the “norm” as man with, e.g., a complete set of teeth is a norm. But in this sense “norm” has ceased to be roughly equivalent to “law.” In this sense the notion of a “norm” brings us nearer to an Aristotelian than a law conception of ethics. There is, I think, no harm in that; but if someone looked in this direction to give “norm” a sense, then he ought to recognize what happened to the notion “norm,” which he wanted to mean “law—without bringing God in”—it has ceased to mean “law” at all; and so the notions of “moral obligation,” “the moral ought”, and “duty” are best put on the Index, if he can manage it.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 12)

This is a puzzling passage. Anscombe holds that grounding moral law in human virtues amounts to a mere redefinition of moral law in large part because Anscombe does not explicitly state what she takes the difference between a “norm” and a “law.” If my earlier analysis of what I call Anscombe’s Law Theory is correct, then Anscombe rejects grounding moral law in human virtues because conformity with the virtues is not a categorical requirement issued by an authority and backed up by the risk of sanctions.

As Robert Stern (2014, p. 1099) observes, when one reflects upon the nature of Anscombe’s objections to rivals of a divine law conception of ethics, a clear pattern emerges. Anscombe applies two tests to each alternative to a divine law conception of ethics: “are they coherent as sources of law, and if we took them to be such sources, would we end up with a form of morality that is objectionable?” Corresponding to these two tests are two types of objections. First, it is evident that Anscombe objects to several rival ethical theories on conceptual grounds. For example, she ridicules self-legislation as “absurd.” Whatever it is that one does when self-legislating, she says, it “is not legislating” (Anscombe 1958, p. 11). If “self-legislating” is not genuine legislating, then it cannot be a source of law. Likewise, she rejects social contractualism in part because we do not seem to have agreed to the social contract in any manner resembling the way ordinary business contracts are accepted. By contrast, other objections are substantive. Consider, for example, societal norms. Nazi Germany had norms that told its citizens to do things which were morally wrong, to say the least. Similarly, consider that nature is red in tooth and claw. This is offered by Anscombe, not as an objection to the coherence of “moral laws come from the laws of nature,” but as an example of an ethical theory with a morally objectionable consequence. Accordingly, as Stern suggested, all of Anscombe’s objections to rival theories fit into these two groups.

But, Anscombe says, modern moral philosophy rejects the divine law conception of ethics. By “modern moral philosophy,” I take Anscombe to refer to the contemporary moral theories of her time which affirmed moral obligation but denied that obligations were identical to (or grounded in) divine law. For clarity, I will call such theories “secular theories of moral obligation.”

To recap, Anscombe’s second thesis in MMP holds that secular modern moral philosophy is incoherent. Each purported secular theory of moral obligation fails, she insists, because it is either incoherent or morally objectionable. She supports her thesis on historical, etymological, conceptual, and metaphysical grounds. The next two sections will critically assess Anscombe’s argument. The first will reconstruct Anscombe’s argument in standard form. The second will show that the argument is based on highly controversial assumptions.

3. The Divine Indispensability Argument Formulated

As noted in the introduction to the previous section, Anscombe’s article, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (MMP), has been enormously influential. As Jennifer Frey writes, “MMP has the distinction of being one of the most widely read and cited essays of Anglo-American analytic philosophy; its publication is often hailed as a watershed event” (Frey 2020, p. 61; see also Irwin 2023, p. 667). Indeed, it has spawned an entire corpus of secondary literature, including journal articles (Alvarez and Ridley 2007; Bond 1966; Cremaschi 2017; Frankena 1980; Graber 1974; Lagerspetz 2010; O’Reilly 2010; Pigden 1988; Solomon 2008; Stern 2014; see also Teichmann 2008, pp. 103–12), anthology chapters (Chappell 2022; Crisp 2004; Puryear 2021; Sportiello 2022; Wolf 2009), Ph.D. dissertations (Cantrell 2009; Misso 2022; Njoroge 2018; Regan 2016), and full-length books (Blamey and Thompson 2017; Darwall 2006, 2023; Doyle 2018; Richter 2000). In spite of the sheer volume of scholarly work on her article, both proponents and critics of Anscombe’s argument have largely neglected the essential task—a task also neglected by Anscombe herself—of reconstructing the argument in a way that displays its logical structure. This is made even more surprising by the fact that a recurring theme in the secondary literature is that Anscombe’s argument is unclear or that it has been misunderstood.10 When philosophers discuss the logic of the article, they tend to focus on making sense of how Anscombe’s second contention—that moral obligation presupposes a divine law conception—relates to her first (that modern moral philosophy should be abandoned until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology) and third (that virtue ethics should be revived) contentions (Frey 2020; Doyle 2018). They rarely touch upon the logic of her argument for the second thesis; when they do, they present the argument without much discussion (Irwin 2023; Lagerspetz 2010).

As we saw in the last section, Anscombe’s second thesis amounts to a pair of grounding claims: moral obligation is grounded in moral law (the Law Theory), and moral law is grounded in God (the Metaphysical Theory). I will call this the “double ground.”11 This suggests the following argument, which I call the “divine indispensability argument.”12

(1)

Necessarily, if moral obligation exists, it is grounded in moral law. [Law Theory]

(2)

Moral law is either societal norms, self-legislation, the laws of nature, social contractualism, human virtues, or divine law.

(3)

Moral law is not societal norms, self-legislation, the laws of nature, social contractualism, or human virtues.

From (2) and (3), it follows that:

(4)

Moral law is divine law. [Metaphysical Theory]

From (1) and (4), it follows that:

(5)

If moral obligation exists, it is grounded in divine law.

Defenders of the “incoherence of secular moral obligation argument” add three additional steps:

(6)

If a secular theory of moral obligation is true, then it is false that moral obligation is grounded in divine law. [From the definition of “secular theory of moral obligation”]

(5) and (6) entail:

(7)

If a secular theory of moral obligation is true, then moral obligation does not exist.

It follows that:

(8)

It is impossible for a secular theory of moral obligation to be true.

The inferences in this sub-argument are deductively correct and the first premise (step 6) is true by definition. Thus, if the conclusion of the earlier (divine indispensability) argument is true, the conclusion of this (secular incoherence) argument necessarily follows. But does the divine indispensability argument succeed? That is the topic of the next section.

4. Assessment

There are well-known objections to the first two steps of the divine indispensability argument.

4.1. The Failed Analogy Objection

Having clarified the conceptual nature of “law” implicit in the Law Theory, let us now consider Anscombe’s case for divine law theory rests on an analogy: just as legal obligations are constituted by the commands of a legislator, so too moral obligations must be constituted by the commands of a divine legislator. To evaluate the force of this analogy, it is insufficient to note surface similarities; one must also weigh the disanalogies and ask whether they undermine the inference.

On the side of similarity, law and morality both generate requirements and obligations, both employ a shared vocabulary (“obligation,” “right and wrong,” “responsibility,” “excuse,” and “blame”), both regulate conduct through imperatives, and both are embedded in practices of accountability. These analogies suggest that moral obligation might be modeled on legal obligation, with the upshot that genuine moral duties would require a moral legislator.

Yet the disanalogies are no less striking, and in some cases they are decisive. Legal obligations are contingent in two important respects: jurisdictionally, they vary from one polity to another, and modally, they could have been otherwise, since legislatures enact, amend, and repeal them. Moral obligations, by contrast, present themselves as both universal and necessary: they apply to all rational agents and at least some seem unrepealable (Mayberry 1971, p. 368). Similarly, legal obligations are sustained by institutional structures—legislatures, courts, police—that give them social reality and enforceability. But nothing analogous exists for morality: moral duties lack promulgation by an identifiable authority, judicial procedures for adjudication, or coercive enforcement mechanisms (Mayberry 1971, p. 368). Of course, one might object that legal and religious institutions do support and enforce aspects of morality, but this confuses an overlapping role with a constitutive one. The institutions of law create legal obligations, while the moral wrongness of an act like murder is held to be independent of any court that may happen to also forbid it. This is not a novel claim but a point Anscombe herself (and many others) would accept.

Other contrasts reinforce the point. Legal norms can be arbitrary, unjust, or tyrannical (Mayberry 1971, p. 368); moral norms, by contrast, cannot be so characterized without contradiction. Legal rules can be as specific as the legislature pleases, spelled out in extensive documents with fixed penalties; moral rules resist that kind of detail and codification. Legal rules are jurisdictional, applying only to those subject to a sovereign’s authority; moral norms purport to bind all rational agents without exception. These disanalogies cut to the heart of the issue: they show that the very features that constitute the obligatoriness of law are absent from the moral domain.

If so, the legal model misleads rather than illuminates. To insist that morality must resemble law is like demanding every family rule be debated in a city council and enforced by the police simply because municipal ordinances work that way. It mistakes the institutional apparatus of one system for the defining feature of the other. From the law–morality analogy, one would predict that morality exhibits features such as contingency, institutionality, and coercive enforcement. Yet within the non-subjectivist traditions that Anscombe herself inhabits, the very grammar of moral judgment reveals a claim to universality and necessity. Moreover, these contrasts reinforce the concern raised by the Self-Defeating Objection: if moral obligation is modeled on law, then the obligatoriness of any action depends wholly on legislative command. In that case, there is no room for the intrinsic wrongness of certain actions; murder, cruelty, or betrayal would be wrong only because commanded against, just as theft is illegal only because proscribed by statute. But the notion of intrinsic wrongness is not, on Anscombe’s view, an optional embellishment to morality—it is part of its very grammar. This is implicit in her criticisms of rival theories: she rejects social-norm accounts precisely because norms can prescribe atrocities (e.g., Nazi Germany), and she dismisses appeals to nature because they would reduce morality to the contingencies of “red in tooth and claw.” These criticisms presuppose that some actions (murder, cruelty, betrayal) are intrinsically wrong. Yet if moral obligation is modeled on law, then the obligatoriness of any action depends wholly on legislative command, just as theft is illegal only because prohibited by statute. The law–morality analogy thereby undermines the very notion of intrinsic wrongness that Anscombe herself treats as a fixed point in ethical theory.

4.2. The Hypothetical Imperative Objection

Regarding the first step, premise (1), some philosophers deny that moral “law,” in Anscombe’s sense of “law,” is a necessary ground for moral obligation and thus reject premise (1). While moral duties may present themselves with a sense of necessity, as argued above, their underlying structure may not be categorical at all. Here again is what Anscombe means by “law.”

The Law Theory: Necessarily, if moral obligation exists, it is grounded in Anscombian moral law which (i) consists of categorical requirements; which are (ii) issued by an authority and backed up by the risk of sanctions.

Philosophers have objected to both parts of this theory. Some philosophers deny that moral obligation is necessarily categorical; they allow at least the possibility of hypothetical moral obligations, viz., moral obligations based upon hypothetical imperatives. This was the position of Anscombe’s friend Philippa Foot, most famously in her article “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (Foot 1972), though her later work (Foot 2001) shifts away from that view.13 Whether morality involves categorical imperatives depends on whether moral oughts apply to us independently of our desires. Because of my externalist sympathies, I am skeptical that putative categorical imperatives can have normative force wholly independent of an agent’s desires. And notice that, contrary to Anscombe, theism does not help here. If theism is true, it may well be the case that the set of available rewards and punishments is expanded in a way that connects to the motivation set of more humans. But that does nothing to show that, on theism, so-called categorical imperatives have a special kind of “force” that Anscombe says is unintelligible in a secular framework.

4.3. The Self-Obligation Objection

Philosophers have also raised numerous objections against an exclusively sanction-based theory of obligation, a theory which premise (1) presupposes. One objection maintains that there can be obligations to oneself, such as a duty of self-care or a duty of self-respect, without such obligations being based on laws. The concept of an obligation to oneself was not taken seriously when Anscombe wrote MMP, so it is unsurprising that Anscombe herself does not mention it.14 But the concept is now enjoying something of a renaissance among contemporary philosophers. As argued by Daniel Muñoz (2022), the case against an obligation to oneself is not nearly as strong as many philosophers have believed it to be. For example, suppose that one makes a promise to oneself to lose weight, thus creating an obligation to lose weight. The possibility of self-release does not negate the binding nature of the obligation to oneself. To see this, G.A. Cohen invites us to imagine a sovereign enacting a law which binds all citizens in the sovereign’s jurisdiction, including the sovereign. Such a law would bind the sovereign unless and until the sovereign repeals it (Cited in Muñoz 2022). This is not a merely hypothetical point: it reflects the core principle of the rule of law, namely, that even legislators are bound by the laws they enact. Similarly, an obligation to oneself continues to bind unless and until it is either fulfilled or nullified. While interesting, I do not place much weight on this objection. Even if there are moral obligations to oneself, I doubt that such obligations constitute all of our moral obligations.

4.4. The Nonsocial Obligation Objection

Another objection maintains that obligations may be based, not on social phenomena like sanctions, but instead on nonsocial phenomena. Allow me to illustrate this objection with a couple of examples. My first example is obligation based on reasons. For example, Erik Wielenberg implicitly rejects premise (1) because he believes that some obligations are directly grounded in intrinsic values; neither divine laws nor commands are needed as an intermediate step in the chain of grounding from intrinsic value to moral obligation. In support of this position, Wielenberg (2005, p. 64) offers the following example:

If I know that I can prevent some intrinsic evil without thereby introducing a greater evil into the world—or sacrificing some good, or violating some obligation, or doing anything else morally untoward—then I have a moral obligation to prevent the evil in question. If I can prevent an innocent baby from being tortured merely by lifting my finger (and doing so will have no morally untoward consequences) then I have a moral obligation to prevent the baby from being tortured. This obligation does not derive from any relationship between the baby and myself, or from any relationship between myself or the baby and some third party. Rather, it derives from the fact that an innocent baby being tortured is a fantastically bad thing. This is an obligation I have regardless of whether I stand in any interesting relationship to any other being—including a divine creator.

Thus, Wielenberg denies that obligations must be issued by an authority qua personal being.

Furthermore, although Wielenberg was not discussing Anscombe’s argument, the above passage might satisfy (or come very close to satisfying) both the categoricity and sanctions criteria of Anscombe’s Law Theory. Wielenberg’s obligation to prevent an innocent baby from being tortured is categorical: it does not depend on Wielenberg’s desires, goals, or ends. Likewise, Wielenberg’s account mimics Anscombe’s ‘sanction’ structure, if we allow guilt to function as an internal sanction: Wielenberg, like the vast majority of human beings who are not sociopaths, would feel an overwhelming demand to lift his finger to prevent the baby from being tortured. If he did not lift his finger, he would experience a sanction in the form of an overwhelming feeling of guilt. So once again, I have doubts about whether premise (1) is true.

My second example concerns obligations based on human nature. According to Natural Law Theory (NLT), the moral law is concerned with the fulfillment of the nature of created beings. Accordingly, the concepts of obligation, rightness, and wrongness may be summarized as follows, for any agent S with nature N, and action A:

• A is obligatory for S if and only if A is required to pursue basic human goods and is consistent with principles of practical reasonableness.
• A is right for S if and only if A is a reasonable action that respects and promotes basic human goods without arbitrarily sacrificing one another.
• A is wrong for S if and only if A directly violates or undermines one of the basic goods or disregards practical reasonableness.

Thus, NLT is yet another moral theory in which moral obligations are directly grounded in nonpersonal phenomena, namely, facts about human nature. Additionally, some authors have interpreted some versions of NLT as positing natural moral obligations that are hypothetical, not categorical (Arnhart 1998; Crowe 2024). If correct, natural law rejects both aspects of Anscombian law. Furthermore, although NLT has historically been associated with theism, there are versions that purport to be secular. For example, Arnhart (1998) develops an explicitly naturalistic account grounded in evolutionary biology. Finnis (1980) also claims to present a version of natural law accessible without theological premises, though some critics argue that his account smuggles in theistic assumptions.15 Precisely because of this secular orientation, some theistic philosophers have argued that NLT is theologically unacceptable (e.g., Hare 2015, pp. 250–51). Whatever one ultimately thinks of NLT, it clearly represents a distinct view not captured by Anscombe’s list of rival theories.

4.5. The Fallacy of Exhaustive Hypotheses Objection

A fifth objection is that Anscombe’s eliminative strategy depends upon a false assumption, namely, that the rival theories she considers constitute an exhaustive set of possible alternatives to divine law. Her argument, recall, proceeds by listing several candidates for the ground of moral obligation—societal norms, self-legislation, laws of nature, social contracts, Aristotelian virtue ethics— and then dismissing each as either incoherent or morally objectionable. Having exhausted the list, she concludes that only divine law remains.

But this reasoning commits the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses. There are additional candidates for the ground of moral obligation, other than those in Anscombe’s list. Consider, for example, Erik Wielenberg’s (2005) robust nontheistic realism, according to which some moral obligations are metaphysically grounded in objective values such as the prevention of great evils. On his account, my obligation to prevent the torture of an innocent baby (when I can do so at little cost) is directly grounded in the intrinsic badness of that torture. Similarly, some versions of natural law theory purport to be secular, grounding moral obligations in facts about human nature and practical reasonableness rather than divine legislation. The most prominent representative is Finnis (1980), though some critics contend that his “new natural law” theory smuggles in theistic assumptions, particularly in applications to sexual ethics (see Danaher 2012). By contrast, Arnhart (1998) develops a more explicitly naturalistic version. Whatever the differences, the Aristotelian core of these theories resembles Foot’s account in emphasizing human flourishing. Neither of these options are captured by Anscombe’s list, and so her eliminative strategy does not establish her conclusion.

4.6. The Failed Refutations Objection

Another line of criticism targets the adequacy of Anscombe’s engagement with secular alternatives to divine law theory. Even if one grants her claim that the concept of “moral obligation” historically drew its sense from a law conception, it does not follow that all nontheistic rivals collapse on their own terms. Her brief dismissals, while rhetorically forceful, often fail to engage the strongest versions of those views. A charitable reconstruction suggests that she had reasons for her skepticism, but these reasons do not decisively eliminate all of the alternatives.

1. Kantian autonomy (self-legislation). Anscombe remarks that “legislating for oneself” is absurd, as though Kantian autonomy were nothing more than an individual’s idiosyncratic fiat. But this misses Kant’s claim that the moral law is the legislation of pure practical reason itself—law that binds all rational agents precisely as such. Anscombe’s suspicion, however, is not unmotivated: because she defined “law” in terms of a superior who issues commands backed by sanctions, any view without such a legislator could only look to her like disguised voluntarism. From her perspective, then, Kantian autonomy collapses into mere self-will. However, a charitable interpretation of Kant shows her dismissal to be superficial. To genuinely refute the Kantian position, one must demonstrate precisely why the universality of reason is insufficient to ground categorical authority; it is not enough to merely point out the absence of an external, personal lawgiver. Subsequent Kantian theorists have sought to defend this line more rigorously. For example, Alan Gewirth (1978) and Deryck Beyleveld (1991) develop arguments that morality is dialectically necessary for any rational agent, a view that makes no appeal to divine agency. Their principle of generic consistency, or “dialectical necessity of morality,” argues that all rational agents, on pain of inconsistency, must recognize and respect certain basic obligations.16 This shows that a serious secular Kantian tradition exists that makes no appeal to divine agency, contrary to Anscombe’s suggestion.

2. Social contract/contractualism. Here Anscombe’s objection is stronger. As she observes, it seems incoherent to be bound by a contract one does not recall having signed. No one alive today explicitly consented to the founding of their state. And the idea that one has “tacitly” signed a contract—by simply residing within a state’s jurisdiction (or using its language)—strains credulity. This seems to be a decisive refutation of a Hobbesian-type social contract theory that requires actual or tacit consent. But Anscombe’s attack did not cause the extinction of social contract theory; rather, it seems to have spurred its evolution. Around the same time as MMP’s publication, a number of philosophers developed contractualism, the modern successor to classical social contract theory.

Consider, for example, John Rawls and his work, A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971). While Rawls did not explicitly reference MMP, he began developing his ideas in the 1950s, with his paper “Justice as Fairness” (Rawls 1958) appearing in the same year as MMP. Rather than try to prove the existence of a forgotten historical contract, Rawls reimagined the social contract as a purely hypothetical agreement. The binding force of the principles of justice does not derive from the claim that we, or our ancestors, actually agreed to them in some distant past. The contract is explicitly hypothetical. The argument is not “you are bound because you promised,” but rather “you are bound because these are the principles you would agree to if you were to choose under conditions that are fair.”

While Anscombe never responded directly to Rawls, it is hard not to read Ronald Dworkin’s famous claim in her voice: “a hypothetical contract is not simply a pale form of an actual contract; it is no contract at all” (Dworkin 1978, p. 151). Far from being a mere verbal dispute, at its core Dworkin’s remark presses a substantive challenge: hypothetical agreements, unlike actual contracts, lack the power to generate binding obligation. Yet it is doubtful that Anscombe’s 1958 essay supplies the materials for a successful attack on Rawls. Her critique diagnosed the “moral ought” as a psychological force without an intelligible basis, but Rawls’s project is precisely to supply such a basis: the rational justification of the Original Position and the psychological stability of the sense of justice. For him, the force of obligation does not need to be top-down (imposed by a lawgiver) or peer-to-peer (arising from promises). Instead, it is bottom-up, rooted in the developed sense of justice of persons who desire to live fairly with others.

Later contractualists refine this model more directly into an account of moral obligation itself. For example, Scanlon (1998) argues that an action is wrong if it cannot be justified to others on principles that they could not reasonably reject. Southwood (2010) goes further, developing a metaphysical foundation for contractualism that addresses concerns about the adequacy of Scanlon’s account. Together, these contractualist theories show how “bottom-up” accounts of obligation remain viable alternatives to Anscombe’s eliminative strategy, grounding moral authority in the shared standpoint of rational agents rather than in divine legislation.

3. Natural law and neo-Aristotelian ethics. At first glance, Anscombe’s rejection of “norms” may appear surprising, given her Catholic commitments to Thomistic natural law. The key lies in her sharp distinction between genuine law and Aristotelian hypothetical imperatives. As we saw in Section 2.2, Anscombe thinks that the hypothetical nature of the Aristotelian “ought” cannot underwrite the categorical bindingness she considers essential to moral obligation. This explains her resistance to purely neo-Aristotelian approaches. Yet contemporary natural lawyers and virtue ethicists (Foot 2001) argue that moral norms are not merely hypothetical but grounded in objective features of human flourishing and rational evaluation. To show that these cannot generate categorical normativity, one would need more than the assertion that they lack a divine legislator.

In sum, Anscombe’s critiques display genuine insight: she rightly perceived difficulties in grounding categorical obligation in autonomy, contract, or Aristotelian flourishing as she understood them. Yet her objections typically presuppose her own contested definition of “law” or engage weaker forms of the theories in question. This limits the reach of her attempted refutations. Far from showing that nontheistic ethics is incoherent, she at most demonstrates that a subset of nontheistic theories of obligation are problematic. Hence her eliminative strategy fails. The failure of Anscombe’s eliminative argument might be sufficient to undermine her case, but there is a deeper problem. Even if her critiques of secular alternatives were successful, her proposed remedy faces difficulties that mirror those she identifies in rival theories.

4.7. The Self-Defeating Objection

Another objection states that Anscombe’s argumentative strategy against nontheistic ethics is self-defeating—indeed, self-defeating two times over. As noted in Section 2.4, Stern distinguishes between two kinds of objections Anscombe deploys against rivals to a divine law conception: conceptual objections and substantive objections. Yet she failed to notice that her own divine law theory is vulnerable on precisely the same grounds. This objection has two strands, one conceptual (Promulgation) and one substantive (Intrinsic Wrongness).

1. The Promulgation Objection. Anscombe dismissed contractualist ethics on the grounds that it is unreasonable to be bound by a contract one has never signed, or even been aware of signing. Yet divine law theory is vulnerable to an analogous conceptual problem. If obligation is constituted by God’s commands, then, as with any genuine law, those commands must be promulgated to those subject to them. To obligate an agent by a statute she has never heard of, and could not reasonably have access to, would be to subvert the very idea of law. But this is precisely the situation that arises on the divine law conception: countless nonbelievers, or adherents of traditions that never received the relevant revelations, are nonetheless said to be bound by divine legislation.

Anscombe explicitly acknowledges the promulgation requirement in a passing reference to scholastic natural law theorists:

Now, you cannot be under a law unless it has been promulgated to you; and the thinkers who believed in “natural divine law” held that it was promulgated to every grown man in his knowledge of good and evil.

(Anscombe 1958, p. 12)

Anscombe cites scholastic natural law theorists here, not to endorse their view, but to illustrate how they tried to meet the promulgation requirement. Yet she failed to recognize that her own divine law theory does not satisfy this requirement. It is plausible that there exist reasonable nonbelievers who, through no fault of their own, do not believe that God exists (Schellenberg 1993, 2007). Lacking belief in God, divine commands cannot plausibly be said to have been promulgated to them (Morriston 2009). On the combined assumptions of Anscombe’s theory and the existence of reasonable nonbelievers, it would follow that such agents literally have no moral obligations whatsoever. Thus, by her own lights, divine law theory fails the conceptual test of being a genuine law conception.

A number of philosophers sympathetic to divine command theory have replied to the promulgation objection. Unfortunately, some of these replies proceed by undermining the binding force of moral obligation. For example, Robert Adams (1999, pp. 268–69) suggests that recognition of an obligation does not require recognition of that obligation as a divine command. On this approach, the promulgation requirement is satisfied so long as nonbelievers know what morality requires, even if they cannot identify the divine source. More radically, Glenn Peoples (2011) insists that reasonable nonbelievers “do not even need to know that [what is being communicated to them] is a command, provided the command can be conveyed to him.” Even if these replies were successful in showing how nonbelievers could know what morality requires, they would do so at the cost of severing obligation from its supposed legislative source. In the context of Anscombe’s argument, this undermines the very binding force that makes obligation law-like: if one does not know a requirement as divine legislation—or, in Peoples’s case, legislation at all—then it is unclear how it could function as the kind of categorical law Anscombe thought morality required.

The second camp accepts the objection’s starting point and tries to meet it head-on. Evans (2013, p. 114) argues that God may communicate his commands “through conscience,” so that recipients experience them as authoritative and binding even if they do not recognize their divine source. While this move might succeed in Evans’s own context—defending a Modified Divine Command Theory concerned primarily with the accessibility of obligations—it ultimately fails in Anscombe’s framework. For her, law is not merely a matter of epistemic recognition of duties, but the issuing of categorical requirements by an authority and backed by the risk of sanctions. By appealing to conscience without requiring recognition of its divine legislative source, Evans preserves the felt force of obligation but undermines the very law-conception of morality that Anscombe herself took to be essential.17

2. The Intrinsic Wrongness Objection. Anscombe also criticizes consequentialism for its denial of intrinsic wrongness. On her view, the very grammar of moral discourse presupposes that some acts—murder, cruelty, betrayal—are wrong in themselves, not merely wrong because of their consequences. A theory that reduces wrongness to outcomes, she argues, thereby hollows out the moral concept it seeks to explain. Whether or not one finds this persuasive, it is clear that Anscombe treats intrinsic wrongness as a fixed point against which consequentialism fails. What she overlooks, however, is that divine law theory is vulnerable to the same objection. On her own account, an action like murder is not intrinsically wrong; it is wrong solely because God has prohibited it. If consequentialism fails for denying intrinsic wrongness, divine law fails for the very same reason.

Accordingly, divine law theory fails both of Stern’s tests: it is conceptually dubious (Promulgation) and substantively objectionable (Intrinsic Wrongness).

4.8. General Objections to Theistic Grounding of Moral Obligation

As discussed in Section 1, arguments against metaphysical claims can be divided into three types: incoherence, inconsistency, and improbability. Anscombe herself made use of each style in critiquing secular rivals, yet she nowhere acknowledges—much less grapples with—the fact that divine law theory is itself vulnerable to the same difficulties. Her eliminative strategy thus presupposes the adequacy of divine law precisely where it is most contested. Four objections, in particular, illustrate the depth of the problem.

1. The Prior Obligation Objection. If “Obey God’s commands” itself constitutes a moral obligation, it cannot plausibly be the product of a divine command without circularity. But if that obligation is prior to God’s commands, then not all moral obligations derive from divine legislation. Either way, the set of claims that divine command theory requires—(a) that all moral obligations are grounded in God’s commands, and (b) that one is morally obligated to obey God’s commands—is inconsistent. At best, divine commands could be sufficient for some obligations but cannot be necessary for all.

2. The Promises Objection. Promises seem to generate genuine obligations independent of divine legislation. If I promise to return a borrowed book, I am obligated to do so even apart from divine command. The very institution of promising shows that obligations can arise interpersonally without appeal to divine fiat. In this respect, divine command theory is inconsistent with what is arguably a basic fact of moral practice: that promises generate obligations independent of legislation.

3. The Arbitrariness Objection. Two distinct arbitrariness worries arise. First, if God has no reasons for commanding what He does, then morality appears arbitrary. Second, if God’s commands are contingent (even if constrained by His nature), then one must ask why some goods are elevated to the status of obligation while others are left merely supererogatory. Unless a substantive account is given of this selective elevation, the theory risks being explanatorily uninformative. In both respects, divine command theory appears morally implausible when compared with rivals that ground obligation in more transparent relations (e.g., reasons, flourishing, or promises).

4. The Emptiness Objection. If God is not Himself subject to moral obligation, then divine command theory renders statements about God’s moral perfection empty. If God has no duties, then He cannot be praised for fulfilling them. In that case, the claim that God is morally “perfect” reduces to vacuity. Here divine command theory faces an incoherence worry: its account of moral perfection ceases to be intelligible.

Together, these objections illustrate that divine law theory is vulnerable across all three dimensions: it faces incoherence worries, internal and external inconsistencies, and substantive improbabilities. This vulnerability is reinforced by recent jurisprudential critiques, which argue that command-based theories of law are untenable and that the same flaws infect divine command theories of morality.18 Anscombe deployed each of these styles of critique against secular rivals, but they apply with equal if not greater force to her own preferred theory.

To be sure, proponents of theistic grounding, particularly defenders of Modified Divine Command Theory, have developed sophisticated responses to each of these concerns over the past several decades (see, e.g., Evans 2013). For the purposes of evaluating Anscombe’s project, however, the ultimate success of those replies is beside the point. Recall that Anscombe is mounting an external inconsistency argument, alleging that secular moral obligation is a concept that has survived “outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one”. Such an argument requires demonstrating that the secular position is incoherent. The very existence of this long-standing, complex debate shows that theistic grounding is far from the unproblematic solution Anscombe’s argument would require; on the contrary, it is a highly contested position with its own deep conceptual difficulties. That Anscombe’s critique proceeds without ever acknowledging these well-known problems is the decisive failure. She presupposes the adequacy of a remedy that is, at best, gravely underdefended, and in doing so, she fails to meet the high burden of proof that her own external inconsistency argument requires.

5. Conclusions

This paper has argued that while ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ remains a landmark text for its role in reviving virtue ethics, its celebrated polemic against secular deontology fails. The critique proceeded in four stages.

First, it exposed the weakness of Anscombe’s foundational analogy between legal and moral obligation, demonstrating that the profound disanalogies concerning contingency, institutionality, and intrinsic wrongness cause the legal model to mislead rather than illuminate. Second, it established that there are possible ways to ground moral obligation that do not require categorical, sanction-based law. Third, it argued that her eliminative argument for divine law is structurally defective: it relies on an incomplete list of rival theories and dismisses the candidates it does consider with arguments that are either too brief or presuppose her own contested definitions. Finally, the analysis demonstrated that even if her critique of secularism were successful, her proposed remedy—a divine law conception—is itself deeply problematic. It is vulnerable to a self-defeating objection parallel to the one she levels against consequentialism and fails to address a battery of powerful, well-known critiques of theistic grounding.

Therefore, the central claim of Anscombe’s second thesis—that secular moral obligation is incoherent—is not sustained. At every critical stage, from its initial setup to its final conclusion, the argument rests on highly controversial assumptions that fail to withstand scrutiny. Far from being a harmful relic, the concept of moral obligation remains both coherent and fertile within nontheistic ethical frameworks. What possesses merely “mesmeric force” is not the secular use of deontic concepts but Anscombe’s own genealogical critique of them.

This, of course, does not rule out the possibility that theism and atheism have very different ethical implications, nor does this essay rule out the possibility that some other incoherence argument from moral obligation (e.g., Hare 2000) might succeed. Moreover, there may be other reasons for believing that some fact about morality requires God. Perhaps it could be shown that a deontological ethical theory is correct and that some version of the divine command theory provides the best explanation of the various features of moral obligation (Baggett and Walls 2011; cf. J. Koons 2012; Wielenberg 2014; J. R. Koons 2022). Conversely, facts such as the alleged heinous moral implications of Biblical ethics may provide evidence against God’s existence (Anderson 2007). What can be said with confidence is simply this: Anscombe has not shown moral obligation to be inconsistent with atheism.