St.John Lambert

Lambert (2022) argues that theism and moral error theory are compatible. He does so by rejecting what he takes to be the best argument for incompatibility, the divine goodness argument, on the grounds that its key premise, that theism entails God instantiates the moral property of being good, can be rejected. I argue that Lambert's case for rejecting this premise fails. The failure reflects a systematic difficulty with the stripping operation his argument requires, the separation of God's descriptive properties from moral ones. I argue for this in four stages. First, I argue that Lambert's central thought experiment smuggles in moral content through thick ethical concepts like benevolence and concern for wellbeing, compromising the intuition the thought experiment is meant to generate. Second, I develop an intuition pump that takes Lambert's amorality stipulation seriously and shows that a genuinely amoral God would not be recognizable as God or worthy of worship. Third, I argue that Lambert's claim that worship-worthiness is normative but not moral rests on a normative/moral distinction that is unstable. Fourth, I argue that Lambert misreads the method of perfect being theology, which, properly understood, entails that moral goodness is an essential divine attribute. Taken together, these four arguments show that Lambert has not established the compatibility of theism and moral error theory.