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

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.