Is Divine Command Ethics and Legalism the same?
Divine Command Theory suggests that what the divine declares to be good is the ONLY thing that makes something good or not. This means that there necessarily can’t be any rules about what is good or not that the Divine follows, or the Divine is subject to the rules instead of making them. Legalism is almost the opposite: it suggests that there is a set of completely inflexible rules that determines what is right or not and nothing is above the rules. Not even the gods. Legalism doesn’t directly answer where it is that these rules come from, so they can seem arbitrary. And because life is so varied and new situations keep coming up, that means either you need so many rules that most people can’t know them all, or an overly-simplistic system that fails to account for a lot of subtle differences and new situtations.
