For philosophers who seek to give an account of the nature of moral properties, an important first step is to identify the platitudes of moral discourse. These platitudes establish the roles that moral properties are thought to play, such that any property that might plausibly be identified with moral wrongness (for example) must be well-suited to fill that role: it should be objective, normative, categorical, authoritative, knowable, and unified. Within the framework of metaphysical naturalism, it is very difficult to find any suitable candidates to play this role. Traditional theism, on the other hand, brings with it conceptual resources that are more than adequate to ground a robust moral realism. Divine commands and divine attitudes are both good candidates to play the role established by moral discourse for moral properties.;Contrary to much received philosophical wisdom, metaethical accounts that imply the dependence of moral facts upon theological facts do not face any insuperable difficulties. Worries that theistic metaethical accounts imply a variety of untoward consequences---e.g. that there are nearby possible worlds in which nothing is morally wrong, that many substantive moral claims are arbitrarily true if true at all, and that ascriptions of moral qualities to God are redundant or incoherent---can be shown to be unfounded.;Thus theistic philosophers have good reason to seek to develop distinctively theistic metaethical accounts. Past accounts of this kind have focused primarily on divine commands. More promising, however, is a divine attitude-based account, according to which moral properties are identical to agent-directed divine attitudes (e.g. an action's moral wrongness consists in its being such that God would be displeased with a person who performs it). This account is able to accommodate many of the subtleties of moral assessment better than a wide range of other moral realisms, both theistic and non-theistic. In particular, the attitude-based account preserves a strong and theoretically desirable link between blameworthiness and wrongdoing. It is superior to divine command theory for a number of reasons, including its ability to preserve the modal status of moral truths and its consonance with an independently plausible and attractive conception of the religious life.
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