Murphy on the Immoralities of the Patriarchs

I recently bought Mark Murphy’s God and Moral Law.  I have high hopes that this book will help me sort through a number of problems in metaethics and their relationship to God, and I will eventually make some posts based on what I learn from it.  

But at this point, I just want to make a note of an interesting passage from the book that coheres well with the take I gave on God’s command to exterminate the Caananites.  The sort of problems that arise in this difficult case also arise in God’s command to Abraham to kill Isaac.  Murphy calls these difficult cases the (apparent) “Immoralities of the Patriarchs,” or IP cases.  The task of the biblically faithful apologists is to properly motivative and explain how such difficult cases can nevertheless fit into an ethically consistent and plausible framework.

Here’s the interesting tidbit from Murphy:
“For the act that Abraham performed [in attempting to sacrifice Isaac] differed from an act of murder in the same way that a public executioner’s act differs from an act of murder.  In both cases, the person performing the act is authorized by an entity that is (by hypothesis) morally permitted to perform that act.”  

This is a vivid illustration of what I called Delegation.  Murphy goes further and says that such acts of execution can be justly done by God given that we are all in a state of original sin, and in this he follows Aquinas.  This differs slightly from my account on which God has rights over our lives due to his status as creator.  But I’m fine supplementing my account with this added guilt element.