Robert Merrihew Adams

Robert Merrihew Adams (b. 1937) is an American philosopher whose work spans philosophy of religion, ethics, and early modern metaphysics. Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Cornell, he taught at the University of Michigan, UCLA, Yale, Oxford, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, becoming a central figure in the late twentieth-century revival of Christian analytic philosophy alongside Alvin Plantinga and William Alston.

Adams is best known for developing a modified divine command theory of ethics, which identifies moral wrongness with contrariety to the commands of a loving God, defended in articles collected in 'The Virtue of Faith' (1987) and elaborated systematically in 'Finite and Infinite Goods' (1999), where he grounds value in a Platonic conception of God as the supreme Good. He has also produced influential work on Leibniz ('Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist', 1994), the problem of evil, the ontological argument, and middle knowledge, including his critique of Molinist counterfactuals of freedom.

Critics including Louise Antony, Wes Morriston, and Erik Wielenberg have challenged the divine command framework as failing to escape Euthyphro-style objections and as unable to ground moral obligation without circularity. Adams's theistic Platonism has likewise been contested by secular moral realists. He is married to theologian Marilyn McCord Adams, with whom he co-edited the present volume on evil.