Robert Merrihew Adams

1. Introduction

Robert Merrihew Adams (b. 1937) is an American analytic philosopher whose work connects technical debates in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of language with a substantive theistic outlook. Writing largely within late twentieth‑ and early twenty‑first‑century analytic philosophy, he is best known for a modified divine command theory, a theistic axiology in which finite goods are understood as resembling God, and influential accounts of possible worlds, properties, and truth.

Adams’s contributions are frequently treated as paradigmatic examples of how explicitly religious commitments can be articulated in a rigorously analytic, non‑polemical style. His work engages central metaethical questions about the nature of moral obligation and value, metaphysical questions about modality and the structure of reality, and philosophical‑theological issues concerning divine perfection, creation, and the problem of evil. Across these areas he often draws on historical figures—especially Leibniz—while aiming to formulate views that are live options in contemporary debates.

Within ethics, Adams develops a virtue‑centered framework organized around “resemblance to God” and “being for the good.” In philosophical theology he argues that a perfectly good God need not create a “best possible world,” reshaping discussions about divine goodness and evil. In metaphysics and philosophy of language he defends an actualist treatment of possible worlds and a nuanced version of correspondence about truth.

Because his work systematically links these domains, Adams is often situated as a bridge figure between analytic philosophy and Christian theology, and between abstract metaethics and ordinary moral experience, without collapsing philosophical inquiry into confessional theology.

2. Life and Historical Context

Adams was born on 8 September 1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and received his A.B. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1959, followed by a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1965. His academic career unfolded primarily in the United States, with major appointments at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and later Yale University, where he served as Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics (2002–2009).

2.1 Career Milestones

2.2 Intellectual Climate

Adams’s formative and middle years coincided with the “metaphysical revival” in analytic philosophy (Kripke, Lewis, Plantinga) and the revival of analytic philosophy of religion. Many philosophers were re‑examining the status of modal notions, the viability of robust metaphysics, and the place of religious belief in public philosophy.

Within ethics, his career overlapped with the rise of neo‑Aristotelian virtue ethics, sophisticated non‑naturalist realism, and constructivist approaches. Adams’s theistic virtue ethics and divine command metaethics interacted with these developments, offering a religiously explicit alternative that still engaged shared problems, methods, and argumentative norms of mainstream analytic philosophy.

3. Intellectual Development

Adams’s intellectual trajectory can be divided into several overlapping phases, each marked by shifts of emphasis rather than wholesale discontinuities.

3.1 Early Metaphysical Orientation (1950s–late 1960s)

Educated at Princeton and Cornell during the heyday of analytical rigor, Adams initially worked on issues in properties, individuation, and modality. His early writings display engagement with debates over universals and haecceities, and with the emerging use of possible‑worlds semantics in logic and language, setting up later intersections with theism and ethics.

3.2 Turn to Philosophical Theology (early 1970s–1980s)

From the early 1970s, Adams began addressing explicit questions in philosophy of religion. “Must God Create the Best?” (1972) questioned traditional assumptions about divine obligation to create an optimally good world. Essays later collected in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology develop accounts of faith, prayer, divine command, and the nature of God, often using tools from modal metaphysics and the philosophy of language.

3.3 Ethical Systematization and Theistic Axiology (late 1970s–1990s)

Parallel to his theological work, Adams progressively elaborated a distinctive divine command account of moral obligation and a resemblance‑to‑God theory of the good. Early articles such as “A Theory of Virtue: A Divine‑Command Account” gave way to the more comprehensive framework of Finite and Infinite Goods (1999), where value theory, obligation, and virtue ethics are integrated.

3.4 Historical and Integrative Phase (1990s–2000s)

Adams’s study Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (1994) reflects a mature engagement with historical sources, read through analytic lenses. Later works, including Truth and Predication (2004) and A Theory of Virtue (2006), further integrate his views on truth, language, virtue, and theistic value. During this period, his teaching at Yale contributed to consolidating his system and disseminating it among younger philosophers.

4. Major Works

Adams’s major monographs and key articles form a relatively unified corpus, though each emphasizes different aspects of his thought.

4.1 Overview of Principal Works

4.2 Thematic Interconnections

Although these works span different subfields, commentators often note that they are unified by several recurring concerns:

• The attempt to articulate a theistic metaphysics of value in dialogue with secular analytic ethics.
• A commitment to actualist metaphysics and a non‑inflationary account of possible worlds.
• An interest in truth and representation that parallels his concern with moral and religious attitudes such as faith, love, and hope.

These texts are frequently used as reference points for contemporary discussions in metaethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics.

5. Core Ideas and Theistic Framework

At the center of Adams’s philosophy is a theistic framework that seeks to integrate metaphysics, value theory, and ethics without reducing one to another.

5.1 Infinite and Finite Goods

Adams’s theistic axiology holds that God is the infinite good, and that all finite goods are good “by virtue of a resemblance, however remote, to the infinite good that is God.” This resemblance may involve likeness in love, excellence, creativity, or other admirable features. The resulting picture is pluralistic among finite goods yet unified by their relation to the divine.

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“Finite goods are good by virtue of a resemblance, however remote, to the infinite good that is God.”

— Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods

5.2 Moral Obligation and Divine Commands

Within this framework, moral obligation is constituted by the commands of God, but Adams insists that such commands issue from a perfectly loving and good divine character. The normative authority of these commands is grounded not in arbitrary will but in God’s nature as the supreme good.

5.3 Love, Virtue, and “Being for the Good”

Adams characterizes virtue as “excellence in being for the good”: a stable orientation of character and motivation towards what is genuinely valuable. Love—both love of God and neighbor—plays a central organizing role. The core idea is that a good life is structured by attitudes appropriately responsive to the infinite good and its finite reflections.

5.4 Theistic Metaphysics and Actualism

In metaphysics, Adams favors an actualist account of possibility and properties that fits naturally with his theism: possibilities, essences, and values are grounded in actual entities, divine concepts, or ways the actual world could have been, rather than in a realm of non‑actual concreta. This underlies his treatments of modality, creation, and divine knowledge.

6. Ethics, Value, and Divine Command Theory

Adams’s ethical thought combines a sophisticated divine command metaethics with a broad theory of value and virtue.

6.1 Modified Divine Command Theory

Adams defends a “modified” divine command theory in which:

• What is morally obligatory is what a loving God commands.
• The moral goodness or excellence of persons, actions, and states of affairs is not identical to God’s will, but to resemblance to God’s character.
• God’s commands are thus constrained by and expressive of divine goodness, avoiding a simple identification of the right with arbitrary divine fiat.

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“Roughly, my view is that what is morally right is what a loving God commands, and that the goodness of God’s character rather than sheer power is what makes those commands authoritative.”

— Robert Merrihew Adams, “Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again”

6.2 Theistic Axiology and Plural Goods

In Finite and Infinite Goods, Adams develops a detailed axiology:

• God is an unsurpassable, incomparable good.
• Finite goods—such as friendships, aesthetic experiences, and acts of justice—are valuable as participations in or resemblances of this infinite good.
• The domain of the good is plural and incommensurable in many respects; there may be no single ranking that orders all goods.

This framework is designed to accommodate common moral intuitions about the diversity and richness of human goods while integrating them into a theistic picture.

6.3 Virtue and “Being for the Good”

Later, in A Theory of Virtue, Adams clarifies virtue as “excellence in being for the good.” Virtues are stable character traits that reliably orient agents toward what is genuinely good. This approach is often situated in relation to neo‑Aristotelian virtue ethics, but distinguished by its explicit grounding in a theistic account of value and its focus on love and humility as central virtues.

6.4 Relation to Non‑Theistic Ethics

Adams intends his framework to engage secular ethical theories on shared terrain. He discusses how a theistic account can respect moral insight outside religious traditions and argues that many moral truths are accessible independently of explicit belief in God, even if, on his view, their ultimate grounding is theistic.

7. Metaphysics, Modality, and Truth

Adams’s contributions to metaphysics and the philosophy of language are closely connected to his interest in theistic questions but can also be read independently.

7.1 Properties and Haecceities

In early and later work, Adams defends the existence of properties and particularly emphasizes haecceities—thisness‑properties that individuate particular entities (for example, “the property of being Socrates”). He argues that such entities help explain individuation across possible worlds and support talk about de re modality.

7.2 Actualist Accounts of Possible Worlds

Adams endorses an actualist understanding of possible worlds. On his view:

• Possible worlds are not concrete universes alongside ours.
• They are abstract entities—such as maximal consistent sets of propositions or states of affairs—grounded in what actually exists and could have been different.
• This approach aims to preserve the explanatory power of possible‑worlds semantics while avoiding a commitment to a plenitude of non‑actual concrete worlds.

This stance is often discussed alongside alternatives such as David Lewis’s modal realism and more deflationary or ersatz accounts.

7.3 Truth and Predication

In Truth and Predication, Adams investigates:

• The nature of truth, defending a broadly correspondence‑inspired view that nonetheless responds to classic semantic paradoxes and deflationary critiques.
• The problem of predication: how subject–predicate sentences can be true in virtue of the world’s structure.
• The metaphysics of universals and the role of properties in making predications true.

His treatment aims to secure an ontological basis for truth and predication that fits with his views on properties and avoids both extreme nominalism and overly robust Platonism.

7.4 Connections with Theism

While Truth and Predication is not a theological work, commentators sometimes note that its actualist metaphysics, property theory, and correspondence intuitions sit comfortably with Adams’s theistic commitments, offering a unified picture of reality, language, and value.

8. Philosophical Theology and the Problem of Evil

Adams’s philosophical theology addresses divine nature, faith, and the problem of evil, often in close dialogue with historical theists such as Leibniz.

8.1 Divine Perfection and Creation

In “Must God Create the Best?” Adams challenges the assumption that a perfectly good God must create a best possible world. He argues that:

• There may be no such thing as an overall best world if goodness admits of unbounded improvement.
• Even if there is no best, a perfectly good God can reasonably create a very good world without being open to moral criticism for not creating something better.

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“There may be no such thing as the best of all possible worlds, but that does not impugn the goodness of a God who creates a very good world.”

— Robert Merrihew Adams, “Must God Create the Best?”

This move has been influential in re‑framing certain versions of the logical problem of evil and debates about divine obligations.

8.2 The Nature and Rationality of Faith

In the title essay of The Virtue of Faith, Adams characterizes faith as a morally significant attitude of trust rather than a purely epistemic state:

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“Faith, as I understand it, is not a blind leap but a venture of trust that can be reasonable even when it goes beyond what evidence strictly compels.”

— Robert Merrihew Adams, The Virtue of Faith

He explores how such trust can be both epistemically responsible and ethically valuable, even in the presence of unresolved doubt or incomplete evidence.

8.3 Evil, Suffering, and Divine Love

Adams’s theistic axiology and divine command theory inform his reflections on evil:

• Because God’s goodness is understood primarily in terms of love, he gives special weight to how God relates to creatures who suffer.
• He examines how human virtues such as forgiveness, humility, and hope may be responses to evil that reflect, in limited ways, aspects of divine character.

While not offering a single, comprehensive theodicy, Adams’s work contributes nuanced distinctions and conceptual resources—such as the rejection of the “best‑world” requirement—that other philosophers employ in discussions of evil and divine goodness.

9. Methodology and Use of Historical Sources

Adams’s methodology is characteristically analytic—emphasizing clarity, logical structure, and argument—yet it is also notably historically engaged and theologically informed.

9.1 Analytic Method and Theological Content

Adams typically proceeds by:

• Formulating precise theses and counterexamples.
• Distinguishing multiple senses of key notions (e.g., goodness, obligation, faith).
• Considering modal and counterfactual scenarios.

What distinguishes his work is the way these techniques are applied to theistic and ethical questions traditionally discussed in theology and moral philosophy, while still addressing an audience of secular as well as religious philosophers.

9.2 Engagement with Historical Figures

Adams makes extensive use of historical sources, above all Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, he combines detailed textual scholarship with systematic reconstruction, emphasizing how Leibniz’s views on determinism, divine goodness, and idealism fit together.

More broadly, Adams engages figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant, treating them as interlocutors rather than mere historical curiosities. He often extracts conceptual distinctions or arguments from historical texts, then re‑casts them in contemporary analytic idiom.

9.3 Balancing Historical and Systematic Aims

Commentators frequently observe that Adams uses historical work not only for exegesis but also for model‑building:

This dual focus allows his work to contribute simultaneously to history of philosophy and systematic philosophy, particularly in areas where theology and metaphysics intersect.

10. Impact, Criticisms, and Ongoing Debates

Adams’s work has had significant influence across multiple subfields, and it continues to be the subject of critical discussion.

10.1 Influence

In metaethics, his modified divine command theory is a standard reference point. It has shaped debates about theological voluntarism, moral motivation, and the relation between the good and the right. In philosophy of religion, his treatment of the “best‑world” assumption and his account of faith have entered the common repertoire of positions considered in textbooks and specialized literature. His actualist account of possible worlds and his views on haecceities are extensively discussed in metaphysical literature.

10.2 Criticisms

Critiques come from several directions:

• Secular ethicists question whether grounding moral obligation in divine commands can respect the autonomy of ethics or adequately explain the moral status of non‑believers. Some argue that a resemblance‑to‑God account depends on controversial theological assumptions.
• Alternative theists (including some natural law theorists and non‑voluntarists) contend that Adams retains too strong a link between God’s will and obligation, or that his axiology risks collapsing distinct goods into a single theological standard.
• Metaphysicians critical of haecceitism challenge his commitment to thisness‑properties as ontologically costly or unnecessary.
• In truth theory, deflationists and minimalists dispute whether Adams’s correspondence‑leaning account is required for explaining the role of truth in language and thought.

10.3 Ongoing Debates

Current discussions often center on:

• Whether Adams’s framework can be “internalized” by non‑theists (e.g., by replacing God with an ideal moral standard) while preserving its structure.
• How his account of faith as trust compares with more strictly evidentialist or pragmatic theories.
• The viability of actualist metaphysics and haecceities in light of alternative modal theories.

His work thus continues to function as both a positive resource and a critical target across ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion.

11. Legacy and Historical Significance

Adams is widely regarded as a central figure in the late twentieth‑century renaissance of analytic philosophy of religion and ethics. His legacy can be described along several dimensions.

11.1 Reintegrating Theism into Analytic Philosophy

At a time when many analytic philosophers treated religious commitment as philosophically peripheral, Adams helped normalize explicitly theistic positions in mainstream debates. His work is frequently cited as evidence that religiously informed philosophy can meet prevailing standards of rigor and argumentative care.

11.2 Bridging Subfields

Adams’s systematic integration of ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical theology has influenced how later philosophers approach cross‑disciplinary questions. His combination of a theistic axiology, a refined divine command metaethics, and actualist metaphysics has served as a model for other integrative projects.

11.3 Pedagogical and Generational Influence

During his years at UCLA and Yale, Adams supervised and influenced numerous students who went on to become prominent philosophers. Through teaching and collaborative work, he contributed to shaping a generation that treats questions about God, value, and modality as mutually informative rather than compartmentalized.

11.4 Place in the History of Philosophy

Historically, Adams is often grouped with contemporaries such as Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and Nicholas Wolterstorff as part of the movement that re‑established analytic philosophical theology. His historically informed study of Leibniz has also affected scholarship on early modern philosophy.

While assessments of his specific positions vary, commentators generally agree that Adams’s work has permanently altered the landscape in which debates about divine command theory, theistic ethics, and actualist metaphysics are conducted, ensuring him a lasting place in the history of contemporary analytic philosophy.