The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God's necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss's reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands.

中文翻译：

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如果上帝命令了一些可怕的事情怎么办？基于语用学的神圣命令元伦理学辩护

对可怕命令的反对声称神圣命令元伦理学注定要失败，因为它致力于极端违反直觉的假设，即如果上帝命令这些行为，对无辜者的酷刑、强奸和谋杀在道德上是强制性的。莫里斯顿、维伦伯格和辛诺特-阿姆斯特朗认为，用反可能性的形式提出这一反对意见特别有力，因为不能简单地通过坚持上帝必要的完美道德良善来回避它。我表明，即使是反对可怕命令的这种反可能性版本，也可以为神圣命令元伦理学辩护，因为我们可以将关于有争议的反可能性的真值直觉解释为对话暗示的结果。此外，还原反对可怕命令的反对的可能版本的反驳。