One objection is that divine command ethics is either useless or unacceptably divisive in a religiously pluralistic society. Jeremy BENTHAM (1748- 1832) presses the point about uselessness. He says:

“We may be perfectly sure, indeed, that whatever is right is conformable to the will of God: but so far is that from answering the purpose of showing us what is right, that it is necessary to know first whether a thing is right, in order to know from thence whether it be conformable to the will of God.”  Bentham

If Bentham’s view is correct, divine command ethics is of no practical use because we can never learn what is right by first learning that something is conformable to God’s will and then inferring that it is right.

But, of course, most divine command theorists will disagree with Bentham and argue that we can sometimes learn that something is conformable to God’s will from sources such as revelation and then use this information to determine that it is right. If the appeal to revelation is allowed against Bentham, however, the fact that religiously pluralistic societies contain rival views about what, if anything, has been revealed and competing claims about what, if anything, has been divinely commanded must be taken into account. When it is, it seems that allowing the appeal will be divisive because it introduces religious controversy into ethics and eliminates the prospect of coming by rational means to agreement on moral principles. It is worth noting that, if this is a successful objection to divine command ethics, parallel objections will succeed against other forms of theological ethics. For in a religiously pluralistic society, there are also disagreements about what virtues and vices there are and what natural laws, if any, hold.