Self-commands and incoherence

Note that Quinn grounds his appeal to incoherence in the ‘oddness’ and ‘unintelligibility’ of self-commanding. He also offers examples that (presumably) show that commanding oneself is incoherent. But giving an example and just stating that in such an example no self-commanding has taken place is hardly an argument. The same goes for the appeal to its oddness and unintelligibility. Many philosophical theories strike one as odd but that is not a reliable indicator that the theory is incoherent. Moreover, unintelligibility may well say something about us and not the theory, namely, that we are not in a position to understand it, just as theists say that we are not in a position to understand God's nature, or as physicists say that we are not in a position to understand the fundamental structure of the universe. I submit, then, that Quinn's arguments are, at best, inconclusive. Despite this, the consensus among theists who endorse DCT seems to be that Quinn is correct. Against this consensus, I will defend the claim that self-commanding is not incoherent.

What do we mean here by ‘incoherent’? At first it is hard to say. We can say that a proposition is incoherent just in case it is a self-contradiction, or it entails a self-contradiction. This is not completely right. The proposition ‘some triangles have four sides’ is incoherent, but it is not a self-contradiction, nor does it entail one. The sentence ‘some triangles have four sides’ is incoherent because it is conceptually impossible. Let us say that a proposition is conceptually impossible just in case substitution of synonymous or analytically equivalent terms results in a contradiction. In the sentence ‘some triangles have four sides’ the word/concept ‘triangle’ is synonymous with ‘closed three-sided two-dimensional shape’. If we substitute the latter with the former, we get a contradiction. So, let us say that a proposition is incoherent iff it is self-contradictory, it entails a self-contradiction, or it is conceptually impossible.

We still have one problem. What is it for the concept commands to oneself to be incoherent? Self-commands are a species of the genus ‘commands’. In turn, commands are speech acts and, certainly, speech acts are not mere propositions. So, what do we mean when we say that a speech act is incoherent? Green defines speech acts as ‘those acts that can (though need not) be performed by saying that one is doing so’ (Reference Green and Zalta2021, 4). For example, I can command Ana to study by saying ‘Ana, go study!’ but I can also command her without uttering any words, say, by pointing to her philosophy books while looking at her. In both cases, we may safely assume I have commanded Ana to study, the difference being that in the former case I said that I commanded her while in the latter I commanded her without saying anything.

To perform these speech acts, however, there are certain conditions that need to be the case for one to felicitously perform such an act. For instance, to absolve a person from their sins I need to be a Catholic priest. J. L. Austin (Reference Austin1962) called these conditions felicity conditions (also conditions of success or satisfaction) the violation of which prevents the speech act from being performed. These conditions can be described in declarative sentences that express a proposition. We can then say that a speech act is incoherent iff at least one of its felicity conditions is incoherent in the sense explained above. My claim is that no felicity condition of self-commanding is incoherent. Formally, we can state the argument thus:

1. 8. A speech act, SA, is incoherent iff some SA's conditions of (performative) success are incoherent. [definition]

2. 9. Commanding oneself (CO) is a speech act. [premise]

Therefore,

1. 10. CO is incoherent iff some CO's conditions of (performative) success are incoherent. [from 8, 9]

2. 11. No condition of (performative) success of CO is incoherent. [premise]

Therefore,

1. 12. CO is not incoherent. [from 10, 11]

In what follows I explain premise 11 using Searle's speech act theory and defend it.Footnote ⁶

Searle (Reference Searle1979, 13) classifies commands as directives which is a specific kind of speech act. When we say, then, that self-commands are incoherent, we are saying that a speech act of a certain kind is incoherent. Furthermore, following Searle (Reference Searle1969, 33–34), we can say that a speech act is the sum of its constitutive rules/conditions which are the following:

• Essential Conditions. A speech act is done for some end or purpose. For example, directives attempt to bring about a desired behaviour of the person directed. Searle (Reference Searle1979, 2–3) also calls these conditions the illocutionary point. If S does not fulfil this condition, the speech act is not performed.

• Propositional Content Conditions. Some speech acts require the utterance of a sentence with a certain form. For example, promises are necessarily about future acts. So, when S promises that p, p needs to be about the future.

• Sincerity Conditions. For speech acts that have propositional content, generally, S must have an attitude towards the proposition contained in the speech act. For example, if S promises that p, then S intends that p. If one doesn't intend what was promised, one has promised insincerely and, therefore, infelicitously.

• Preparatory Conditions. These are non-linguistic features such that, when they hold, they make bringing about a speech act possible. For example, I cannot christen a boat without the relevant authority to do so; I cannot absolve from sins if I am not a priest, etc.

Each kind of speech act is constituted, then, by its constitutive rules/conditions described above (see Searle Reference Searle1969, 62–71).

Since commands are speech acts, we can say that commands are the sum of its constitutive rules/conditions. Let ‘S’ and ‘H’ refer to a speaker and a hearer, respectively. The constitutive rules of commands are the following.

Note that the constitutive rules are propositions or, at least, expressible as propositions. Thus, let us say that (the concept of) a particular speech act, SA, is incoherent just in case some of its constitutive rules or conditions are self-contradictory, entail a self-contradiction, or are conceptually impossible in the sense defined above.Footnote ⁸ Also note that self-commanding is a speech act identical to its constitutive rules which are the ones above when we replace each ‘H’ with ‘S’. Thus, Quinn's objection amounts to this claim: some of the constitutive rules of self-commands are incoherent in the sense explained above. I will argue that this claim is false.

The sincerity condition of self-commanding – that S wants S to do A – is perfectly coherent. Many, if not all, people want themselves to act in certain ways. In fact, one might just say that sentences of the form ‘I want to do A’ express the proposition that the utterer wants the utterer to do A. The sentence ‘I want to eat’ entails ‘someone wants to eat’, and that someone is me. So, if I say ‘I want to eat’ that just means that I want that someone, namely myself, eats. Thus, the sincerity condition is not incoherent.

I can't see that the content condition leads to a contradiction. The restriction that the content condition introduces to commands is that the commanded action must be a future action. That is, the propositional content expressed by the command must be of the form S will do A. This seems to be true even if, ex hypothesi, I self-command. Certainly, I cannot command myself to do something that I already did or that I am doing in the present. But the fact that someone else or myself commands me to do A does not lead to any incoherent result. Therefore, the content condition does not show that self-commands are incoherent.

The two prospects for deriving an incoherent result from self-commanding are the preparatory condition and the essential condition. I think we can dismiss the essential condition thusly. Replacing ‘H’ for ‘S’ in the essential condition we get ‘Counts as an attempt to get S to do A in virtue of the authority S has over S’. Let us ignore for the moment the part of having authority over oneself – since that is what the preparatory condition says – and let us focus on attempting to get S to do A, namely, attempts to get oneself to do something. Is this incoherent? No. I recall myself going to an amusement park and wanting to ride a gigantic rollercoaster. But I was so afraid that I was not able to ride it. In this case, it is extremely plausible to say that I was attempting to get myself to ride the rollercoaster. This is ubiquitous in the lives of many! People try to get themselves out of bed, break their lifting record, write more, not fall into temptation, etc. All these cases are instances of trying to get oneself to do something. Therefore, attempting to get oneself to do something is far from being incoherent.

Self-commands and authority

I have shown that the content, preparatory, and essential conditions of self-commanding are not incoherent. What about the preparatory condition? If any condition looks suspiciously incoherent, it is this one. I argue that not even the preparatory condition of self-commanding is incoherent. Let us turn to this issue next.

The preparatory condition of self-commanding is ‘S is able to do A. S believes S is able to do A. S is in a position of authority over S’. There are three parts of which the first two are obviously not incoherent. The fact that I am able to do A does not entail a contradiction or a conceptual impossibility, nor does the fact that I believe myself able to do A. It is well-established that I can have a doxastic attitude about myself, for instance, I believe that I exist. Nevertheless, the third part of the preparatory condition is not innocent. For it is not obvious at all that we can have authority over ourselves. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case since authority seems to require a distinction between the authoritative figure and the subordinate figure. Put differently, authority seems to require that x be authoritative over a subordinate y; but since one and the same individual cannot be authoritative and subordinate at the same time, in the same respect, then x and y must be distinct.

To show that authority is or is not incoherent, we first need an account of that authority is. After we have understood what authority is, we can assess if, under that understanding, having authority over oneself is incoherent. In what follows I consider three accounts of authority and argue that self-commanding is coherent given their truth.

Authority as constitutive actualization

According to Murphy's (Reference Murphy2002, 8–19) account, ‘[H] has authority over [S] iff [S's] commands actualize a reason for [H] to φ; the [propositional] content of the command and what the command actualizes a reason to do must be identical; the commands must be themselves parts of the reason for action actualized’ (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, 15). Put more simply, one has authority when one's dictates and commands actualize reasons for action. This does not mean that my command is both necessary and sufficient to actualize reasons for action. For Murphy, reasons must be complete, that is, ‘a fact must include within it all that makes an action choiceworthy in some way if that fact is to count as a reason to perform that action’ (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, 9). A reason, R, may be, then, written out as a long conjunction r ₁ & r ₂ & . . . & r _n the conjuncts of which are those things that make an action choiceworthy, one of them being that S commands H to do the action for which R is a reason.

Let us consider the reflexive case where S =  H. By replacement in Murphy's schema above we get:

• S has authority over S iff (i) S's commands actualize a reason for S to φ; (ii) the [propositional] content of the command and what the command actualizes a reason to do must be identical; (iii) the commands must be themselves parts of the reason for action actualized.

The only part that references the commands of the agent is condition (i). Is (i) incoherent? I do not think so. First, it is intuitively plausible that commanding myself to behave in a certain way actualizes a reason for me to behave in that way. It is less intuitive that this is so from one agent to another. This is because we have intuitions that moral agents are autonomous. Second, the first-person perspective seems to give us ‘special access’ to ourselves so that it gives us primacy over what we do. Third, we do things with our bodies. And our bodies are our own. These three points make plausible the claim that if authority is constitutive actualization, then self-commanding is one, if not the one, practice that has support from this theory.

Here's an illustration that puts these points in context.Footnote ⁹ Suppose Jones suffers from a disease that exercise will help eliminate. Jones goes to his doctor and the doctor confirms that some exercise will help him. Jones has the following reasons to exercise: exercise being good for Jones's health, the doctor prescribing an exercise routine, the doctor's being an expert on health and medicine, Jones's desiring to be healthy, and Jones's dictating himself to do things to promote his health. Note that if Jones commands himself to do things that promote his health, it is plausible to assume that, under Murphy's account, Jones has an obligation to do such things. But if Jones did not command himself to do so, it is also plausible to say that he was doing something desirable, rational, etc. In the former case, if I fail to do the things to promote my health Jones has failed to give what he owed himself; in the latter case, if Jones does not do these things, he does not fail to give what he owes himself. In other words, Murphy's account gives us the tools to accommodate self-commanding as a way in which we actualize reasons that generate obligations. There is nothing in this account that excludes this possibility. Hence, under Murphy's account, self-commanding is not incoherent.

The service account of authority

Raz (Reference Raz1985, Reference Raz1990, Reference Raz2005) account of authority attempts to capture what happens in cases where one has authority over the will of another. Although Raz is not explicit about what he takes authority to be, we can infer his view when he presents the problem of justifying authority over others. For instance, presenting the problem of justification Raz writes that ‘[t]he moral question is how can it ever be that one has a duty to subject one's will and judgment to those of another?’ (Reference Raz2005, 1012, my italics). For Raz, then, authority is subjecting one's own will and judgement to the will and judgement of another person. He then tries to capture when it is justified to submit one's own will to another's will with the following criteria: practical authority [submitting one's own will to the will of another] is normally justified if (a) the subject is likely to conform better with reasons which already, independently, apply to her if she intends to accept the authority's directives and treat them as valid; and (b) the relevant situation is one where it is better that the agent conforms with the reasons that externally apply to her, rather than decide for herself what to do without the aid of an authority (Raz Reference Raz2005, 1014). One example given to purport this point is the following.

Star and Delmas note that:

In what follows I show that Raz's account of the justification of practical authority together with his account of the nature of authority presupposes that we have authority over ourselves.Footnote ¹⁰

Raz's first condition is stated in a way that does not allow a reflexive reading of the conditions for authority. However, one might think about it like this. Suppose there is no distinct authority – i.e., an agent different from me that issues certain commands – such that I would be likely to conform better with reasons which already apply to me if I intended to accept the authority's directives and treat them as valid. In such a case, I will better conform to reasons that apply to me if I accept my own directives and treat them as valid or the situation would be equally good, that is, it would be indifferent whether I take the directives of a distinct authority or of myself. The same reasoning applies to the second condition. Suppose that it is false that the relevant situation is one where it is better that I conform with the reasons that externally apply to me, rather than decide for myself what to do without the aid of a [distinct] authority. This would imply that it is either better or equally good for me to decide for myself what to do without the aid of a distinct authority.

What this shows is that Raz's analysis presupposes authority over oneself. If (a) is not satisfied, then it may be because it would be better or equally good to follow my own directives. If (b) is not satisfied, it would be better or equally good to decide for myself what to do. But this amounts to giving oneself directives to act, that is, self-commanding. In fact, one puzzling aspect of authority is that sometimes it is justified (or even required) to give away the authority we have over ourselves (at least partially) to others, for instance, the state, the teacher, etc. So, far from suggesting that authority over oneself is contradictory, it suggests that the puzzling aspect of authority rests precisely upon the fact that sometimes we give away the authority we have over our own wills to the will of another! In other words, the fact that we are sometimes justified to submit our will to the will of other shows that, when it is not justified, it would be better or equally good to determine our own wills and follow our own judgements, which means following one's own directives and submitting to our own judgements and reasons.

The second-personal account of authority

According to Darwall (Reference Darwall2013), for S to have (practical) authority over H is for S to have a standing in a relation with H. This ‘standing’ involves S's valid claims or demands towards H, H's having a (second-personal) reason to comply with S's valid demands, and H's being accountable for not complying with S's demands. In the words of Darwall: ‘[S] has practical authority with respect [H] if, and only if, [H] has a second personal reason to comply with the [S's] valid claims and demands and is responsible to [S] for so doing’ (Darwall Reference Darwall2013, 141).

Darwall's example makes this clearer. Suppose H is stepping on S's feet causing S pain. According to Darwall's account, H has a second-personal reason to comply with S's demand that H stop stepping on him. But this implies, according to Darwall, that A has the authority to demand of H that H stops stepping on him, giving H a reason to refrain from his wrongdoing and becoming responsible for so doing. The authority one has comes by virtue of the relation we have with others as rational, free, moral agents who are part – and representatives – of a moral community. And this relation involves addressing the other as such, that is, second-personally. Therefore, according to Darwall's account, authority is an irreducibly second-personal concept, that is, it necessarily involves addressing another in a relation between persons that take each other to be rational, free agents.

Whether the second-personal account of authority can be not irreflexive depends upon whether a person can address herself second-personally. I think we can establish that an agent can – and in fact does – address herself second-personally. Two pieces of evidence lead to this conclusion. First, since we are dealing with Darwall's account of authority, we would expect that Darwall's theory is not only consistent but suggests that people address themselves second-personally given that people actually address themselves second-personally.

In his book The Second-Personal Standpoint, Darwall takes competence to be one of the features that make us bound to a moral obligation. There is a conceptual connection between being bound by the demands of another and being capable of demanding ourselves to act according to the other's demands. Here's Darwall:

Furthermore, in explaining what is this competence that is conceptually required by having an obligation to another, that is, being addressed second-personally by the valid demands of another, Darwall says:

If, as Darwall says, ‘any second-personal claim presupposes a common competence, authority, and, therefore, responsibility as free and rational’ (Darwall Reference Darwall2006, 21, my italics), then the second-personal account of authority is not only consistent but presupposes that we have authority over ourselves (as does Raz's account)! Darwall, then, seems not just to allow but commit himself to the view that we have authority over ourselves. As the main advocate of the view, this gives us strong reasons to believe that, given the second-personal account of authority, we have authority over ourselves.

The second piece of evidence that we find for the claim that people can – and often do – address themselves second-personally is the nature of reactive attitudes. A reactive attitude, r, is an attitude S adopts towards H such that S's adopting r entails S's holding H responsible for doing such-and-such. Paradigmatic examples of reactive attitudes are blame, indignation, and resentment. According to Darwall, personal reactive attitudes are essentially second-personal, that is, they involve making a claim or demand the recognition of which gives one a (second-personal) reason to comply with such demands. In the words of Darwall: ‘[R]eactive attitudes are second-personal in our sense, and that ethical notions that are distinctively relevant to these attitudes – the culpable, moral responsibility, and, I argue, moral obligation – all have an irreducibly second-personal aspect that ties them conceptually to second-personal reasons’ (Darwall Reference Darwall2006, 17). Now, it is known that we can adopt reactive attitudes towards ourselves for doing such-and-such. Take the reactive attitude of blame for example. Parents who give unjust punishments to their children, police officers who act recklessly, people who cause terrible accidents while drunk driving are cases where those people can and do blame themselves for doing such things. Thus, it is very plausible that moral agents can and often do adopt some reactive attitudes towards themselves.

But if it is true that people can and do adopt some of these reactive attitudes towards themselves, it seems that this entails that we can and often do have authority over ourselves. For adopting a certain reactive attitude entails having a second-personal reason to comply with the demands made by the person who adopts such an attitude. In fact, Darwall explicitly says that ‘Reactive attitudes invariably concern what someone can be held to, so they invariably presuppose the authority to hold someone responsible and make demands of him’ (Darwall Reference Darwall2006, 17, my italics). It follows directly that – under Darwall's account – when we adopt such an attitude towards ourselves, we presuppose the authority to hold ourselves responsible and make demands of ourselves. Hence, given the second-personal account of authority, having authority over oneself is not incoherent.

Inconsistency with theological voluntarism

One immediate problem that the possibility of self-commanding raises for theological voluntarism (specifically, a DCT) is that it seems inconsistent with one central tenet of this view.Footnote ¹² For one main motivation to endorse voluntarism is to be able to say that God is authoritative over human beings. In fact, this might follow from a strong view of divine sovereignty that is also a reason to endorse theological voluntarism. Nevertheless, the introduction of self-authority seems to undermine the claim that it is God who has authority over humans. Since humans can and (we may suppose) do (at least sometimes) have authority over themselves, then God's being the sole authority of humans is false which entails that theological voluntarism is false.

I think there are many ways in which the DCT-ist can defuse this worry. First, note that having self-authority – as having authority over another person – requires that certain conditions are obtained. For example, a child can have authority over himself. However, the fact he can does not mean he does. By virtue of being the child of his parents – and the parents being their benefactor, guardian, etc. – it is the parents who have authority over the child. Thus, in this case, even if the child can have authority over himself, by being in a certain (normative) relation to his progenitors, it is his parents who in fact have authority over him. And so, even if humans can have self-authority, that does not entail that they do. It is God who has authority over them in virtue of his relation to his creators, not only as a parent, but as creator, benefactor, etc. This account, then, is consistent with the possibility of self-authority.

One might object that it is not sufficient that theological voluntarism is consistent with the possibility of humans having authority over themselves. It must also allow for humans actually having self-authority. I do not think this is a requirement, but I can imagine a way to satisfy this demand. It is known that parents have authority over their offspring. Does this entail that God is not authoritative over the children? No. It could be the case that there is a hierarchy of authoritative figures of which God is the ultimate one. State officials have the authority to take into custody children who are mistreated by their parents. In cases like these one may say that the state officials' authority overrides the parents' authority. So, it doesn't seem to be a requirement of theological voluntarism that God is the sole authority but the ultimate authority. Allowing for hierarchies of authoritative figures, we can allow that God is the ultimate authoritative figure while also allowing that individuals (as also social entities like the state) (actually) have authority. This is consistent with God's being the ultimate authority over everything created.

Divine timelessness

The argument presented here relies heavily on Searle's account of speech acts, specifically on his account of the constitutive rules that define what a command is. According to this account, a command requires that the commanded action A is a future act of H. Thus, the very idea of commanding presupposes that it is logically possible and coherent to talk about the addressee's future. However, many prominent theologians and philosophers hold that God is a timeless being, that is, they claim that God exists in the ‘eternal present’, which is an infinitely extended, pastless, and futureless duration.Footnote ¹³ If these thinkers are right, then tensed temporal categories and distinctions do not apply to God. Hence, it would follow it is incoherent that God can command himself precisely because it is logically impossible that God commands himself to do a future action since God's mode of existence is timeless. Therefore, even if the notion of, say, humans commanding themselves is coherent, the notion of God commanding himself is not.

Let us, first, mention two indirect ways of getting out of this problem. One way to address this concern is to say that, though the argument presented here uses Searle's framework of speech acts, it is not an essential part of the argument. One could adopt another theory of speech acts that does not presuppose that we can apply tensed temporal properties to God. Another way out is to reject divine timelessness altogether or adopt a weaker version of divine timelessness (see Padgett Reference Padgett1989, Reference Padgett1992, Reference Padgett, Tapp and Runggaldier2011 for example). If either of these two ways seems attractive for some, then the problem dissolves quickly.

However, it would be desirable if what I have argued for here is consistent with such a prominent view as divine timelessness, and I think we can make it consistent with it. An advocate of divine timelessness could say that God's commands are issued simultaneously, that is, everything that God commands himself is commanded at the ‘eternal present’ just as God knows (according to divine timelessness) everything at one instance. Schematically, then, advocates of divine timelessness can amend the propositional content condition of self-commanding thusly:

Furthermore, this change can be justified along the following lines. When ordinary humans command themselves (and other people), they do it in accordance with what stage of their life they are in, since humans live their lives in a fragmented way, that is, not fulfilled all at once. God, on the other hand, has the most perfect mode of existence. As such, God's life is complete and fulfilled; it is impossible that God's life is fragmented in any way. For this reason, some think that God must be timeless. But for the same reason one could argue that, since commanding oneself is part of one's life, God's commanding activity is complete and fulfilled. It might be that God commands himself to do only one thing, namely, that there is just one command issued from God to Godself. Hence, from the fact that God's life is necessarily complete and fulfilled, it follows that his commanding activity could not be affected by the passage of time just as any other part of God's life cannot be circumscribed by the fleeting passage of time.

The irreflexive character of commands

Another objection is to just deny that we can take the reflexive case of the speech act ‘commanding’. In other words, one might object that it is an implicit assumption on the Searlean illocutionary conditions of commanding that S ≠ H. And this finds justification in that it explains the sense of oddness and unintelligibility of the notion of commanding oneself. Therefore, one can understand Quinn's challenge in the following lines. We have (prima facie) reason to dismiss or at least be sceptical of concepts and notions that are difficult to understand. Self-commanding is a notion of noticeable difficulty. Therefore, we have a reason to be at least sceptical of this notion, and the reason is that one Searlean condition of commands is that the speaker (commander) must be distinct from the hearer (commanded).

This objection seems to beg the question against the possibility of self-commanding. For if one presupposes that S ≠ H, one automatically rules out self-commanding. A more charitable interpretation of this objection, however, might be that we can come up with independent reasons to affirm that the speech act of commanding is irreflexive. One reason to conclude that self-commanding is incoherent might be that taking the reflexive case of any (or most) speech act(s) results in making that speech act self-defeating in some way. But this cannot be the reason to conclude that self-commanding is incoherent. It is extremely plausible that the reflexive case of a coherent speech act is still a coherent speech act with the obvious exception of speech acts stipulated not to be reflexive. Take questioning as an example. We question ourselves all the time! I take it that, colloquially, ‘to question oneself’ sometimes means to doubt oneself and not to ask a question. Whether it is one or the other, both are speech acts, and we address ourselves acting in such ways, namely, questioning (in the asking sense) and doubting ourselves.

More to the point, promising is a speech act that is closer to commanding (it has normative moral force, it's directed, it binds the promisor, etc.) and that, plausibly, can be done reflexively. Though I do not have the space to argue in detail for the coherence of self-promising here, two points are worth noting. Although it is philosophically puzzling to make sense of self-promising, it is known that people often make promises to themselves. One piece of evidence is that, when a self-promise is broken, we hold ourselves accountable for not fulfilling our promise just as we would hold accountable another for not fulfilling it. Second, there has been a recent development of philosophical accounts that not only argue that self-promising is coherent, but show how morally significant they are, which support the claim that commanding can also be done reflexively.Footnote ¹⁴ I take it that this is far from being a knockdown argument, but I believe it supports the claim that it is false that the reflexive case of speech acts (even those which are in way similar to commands) are not incoherent.

Are self-commands really commands?

One might be sceptical that self-commands are really commands. For it appears that there are actions such that I have the authority over myself to do (and all the other conditions for self-commanding hold) that no-one (me or anyone else) could command me to do. For instance, it is plausible to think that I have some kind of authority over myself even to do something wrong or foolish. It may be ‘up to me’ whether I indulge in some behaviour that could become a bad habit. It is less clear that I or anyone has the authority to command indulgence in such behaviour. This suggests that even if I have authority over myself to do something, this is different from commanding myself (or another commanding me) to do that action. Self-commanding would, then, be more akin to deciding or persevering in a behaviour. If this is a reasonable thing to say, we might ask, do we want to collapse the distinction between a decision or resolution and a self-command? Or do we want to retain the distinction in some way that is compatible with divine self-commands and therefore with DCT-allowed divine obligations?

One way one could sidestep this objection is found in Adams (Reference Adams1999, ch. 10).Footnote ¹⁵ He notes that DCT-ists don't claim that any command has the normative force to generate obligations. There are non-deontic considerations that need to be the case for a command to be valid. For example, the content of the command matters; the character of the commander matters; the relationship between the commander and the commanded matters. If any of these go afoul, we do not have a valid command. One can go down Adams's route and say that whether one has authority over oneself and, therefore, whether the commands one issues to oneself are valid depends also on these kinds of factors. For instance, one could say that one has authority over oneself only if one's relation with oneself is a good or virtuous one, since only then one will be adequately responsive to reasons for action. So, in the case of it being up to me whether I smoke fifty cigarettes a day, under this account, it would be true that I can choose to do so, but false that I have authority over myself to command me that I do so precisely because my relationship with myself is anything but virtuous. This way we distinguish acts of deciding from acts of commanding by saying that the former requires conditions that the latter does not (e.g. a virtuous relation with myself).

Interestingly, this works perfectly in the case of God. God has a perfect relationship with himself. In fact, one of the many reasons that Christians give in favour of a trinitarian God is that a perfect being must be self-sufficient but also needs to be loving, and loving is a relational notion. Therefore, God, though one substance, is three persons in perfect loving harmony with each other. This allows us to say that God has – or better, can never fail to have – perfect authority over himself and all of creation partially in virtue of the perfect relation he has to himself.