Lets start with the position that the perfect being: all powerful, all knowing, all loving, is the wellspring of morality. Can’t we simplify this? After all – why does God need to be all powerful to define right and wrong? Surely it’s enough that he be all knowing and all loving.

But wait! Why does he need to be all knowing? After all, it’s morally right to do something which you think will (for instance) save someone’s life, *even if* that act in fact kills them.

All-loving is enough. Morality reduces down to “doing what an all-loving being would want you to do”. Or simply “to act as love would motivate you to act.

Which is ok. But it’s only the case that a traditionally theistic God accounts for morality if you have to be all powerful and all knowing in order to be all loving.

For the theist, this is a given. “God is love”, says the bible, and that’s all you need.

But for the nontheist, we’d like to take it a little further. Science tells us a great deal about love, the chemicals that produce loving feelings and acts, the evolutionary roots of altruism. And anyway, how shall we define love? I’ll settle for “to desire the wellbeing of something”.

But either way, theistic moral realism boils down to “it’s not possible to be all-loving unless you are also all-powerful and all-knowing. Luckily, there is such a being: God.”

(an alternative is an all-knowing but powerless good deity and an evil, active deity. Which, on inspection, looks much more like the universe we actually live in).

The real underlying issue is that deep down, theists think that morality comes out of God like cookie dough out of an extruder, that it’s some sort of “thing” that he “makes”. You have to be all-powerful to accomplish a thing like that, you know. I blame the english language and it’s habit of reifying things.

Anyway, this doesn’t address the title of your paper. I’ll read a bit further.

… actually, I think the answer to the question in the title is “yes, if you want to be taken seriously”. The alternative is “I think morality is a real thing, but I really don’t know all that much else about it or have any particular reason for thinking that.”

Not that poking holes in the theist position is not fun.

However, all of the same considerations apply to God’s counterpart who is not loving. So all of these considerations that support the DCT also support the Divine Counterpart CT.

So, my objection really takes the form of a challenge: If the commands of an essentially loving Supreme Being can constitute moral obligations, then why cannot the commands of a Supreme Being who is not essentially loving?

That is to say, I don’t see that speaking of counterparts commits us to the existence, actual or possible, of the counterparts.

Suppose I identify wrongness with the commands of a loving and just God.

You point out that although there is no possible world where a loving and just God commands torture of children. There is a possible world where some other being like God in certain ways does. How would that count as a counter example to the theory? after all the theory does not identify wrongness with the commands of the counterpart it identifies them with the commands of God.