Religion and Morality__Ashgat

RELIGION AND MORALITY Religion and Morality addresses central issues arising from religion’s relation to morality. Part I offers a sympathetic but critical appraisal of the claim that features of morality provide evidence for the truth of religious belief. Part II examines divine command theories, objections to them, and positive arguments in their support. Part III explores tensions between human morality, as ordinarily under- stood, and religious requirements by discussing such issues as the conflict between Buddhist and Christian pacifism and requirements of justice, whether “virtue” without a love of God is really a vice, whether the God of the Abrahamic religions could require us to do something that seems clearly immoral, and the ambiguous relations between religious mysticism and moral behavior. Covering a broad range of topics, this book draws on both historical and contemporary literature, and explores afresh central issues of morality and religion offering new insights for students, academics and the general reader interested in philosophy and religion. ASHGATE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION SERIES Series Editors Paul Helm, King’s College, University of London, UK Jerome Gellman, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel Linda Zagzebski, University of Oklahoma, USA Due to the work of Plantinga, Alston, Swinburne and others, the philosophy of religion is now becoming recognized once again as a mainstream philosophical discipline in which metaphysical, epistemological and moral concepts and arguments are applied to issues of religious belief. The Ashgate Philosophy of Religion Series fosters this resurgence of interest by presenting a number of high profile titles spanning many critical debates, and presenting new directions and new per- spectives in contemporary research and study. This new series presents books by leading international scholars in the field, providing a platform for their own particular research focus to be presented within a wider contextual framework. Offering accessible, stimulating new contributions to each topic, this series will prove of particular value and interest to academics, graduate, postgraduate and upper-level undergraduate readers world-wide focusing on philosophy, religious studies and theology, sociology or other related fields. Titles in the series include: Mystical Experience of God A Philosophical Inquiry Jerome Gellman Religious Diversity A Philosophical Assessment David Basinger Rationality and Religious Theism Joshua L. Golding God and Realism Peter Byrne God and the Nature of Time Garrett J. DeWeese Religion and Morality WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA © W. J. Wainwright 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wainwright, William J. Religion and morality. - (Ashgate philosophy of religion series) 1. Divine commands (Ethics) 2. God - Proof, Moral 3. Religious ethics I. Title 205 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wainwright, William J. Religion and morality / William J. Wainwright.— 1st ed. p. cm. -- (Ashgate philosophy of religion series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-1631-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7546-1632-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Religion and ethics. I. Title. II. Series. BJ47.W35 2005 205--dc22 2004013979 ISBN 0 7546 1631 2 (Hbk); 0 7546 1632 0 (Pbk) Typeset by Manton Typesetters, Louth, Lincolnshire, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall. For Mimi, Rebecca, Sarah, Chantal, Nicholas, and Alan Contents Preface xi PART I: MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 1 The Nineteenth-Century Background 3 2 Kant, God, and Immortality 6 Kant’s Ethical Position 6 The Postulate of Immortality 12 The Postulate of God’s Existence 18 General Objections to Kant’s Moral Arguments 23 Appendix 26 3 Newman and the Argument from Conscience 28 Preliminary Observations 28 Newman’s Phenomenology of Conscience 30 Taking Conscience at Face Value 34 The Reliability of Conscience 37 Is Conscience a Natural Faculty? 42 Conclusion 45 Appendix 46 4 The Argument from the Objectivity of Value 49 The Objectivity of Value 49 W. R. Sorley and the Inference from Objective Values to a Supreme Mind 54 Robert Adams and the Transcendent Good 57 Conclusion 68 Appendix: Moral Commitment and the Objectivity of Values 68 PART II: DIVINE COMMAND THEORY AND ITS CRITICS 5 The Euthyphro Problem 73 Some Classical Statements of Divine Command Theory 73 Cudworth and Theological Voluntarism 75 Conclusion 80 viii Contents 6 Two Recent Divine Command Theories 84 Robert Adams’s “Modified Divine Command Theory” 84 Philip Quinn’s Causal Divine Command Theory 97 Adams, Quinn, and Traditional Divine Command Theory 102 Appendix: Are there Substantive Necessary Moral Truths? 103 7 Objections to Divine Command Theory 106 Semantic, Epistemic, and Logical Objections to Divine Command Theory 106 Moral Objections 110 Theological Objections 115 The Autonomy Objection 117 A Final Word 122 8 The Case for Divine Command Theory 124 The Arguments from Impeccability, Omnipotence, and Analogy 124 The Argument from God’s Sovereignty and Independence 126 The “Immoralities” of the Patriarchs 130 The Love Commandment and Christian Practice 132 A Cumulative Case for Divine Command Theory? 135 An Appeal to Divine Authority 136 Is Divine Command Theory the Best Account of the Relevant Data? 141 PART III: HUMAN MORALITY AND RELIGIOUS REQUIREMENTS 9 Religious Ethics and Rational Morality 147 Buddhist and Christian Pacifism and the Demands of Rational Morality 148 Are Ordinary Virtues Real Virtues When Divorced from True Religion? 174 Conclusion 179 10 Abraham and the Binding of Isaac 180 Kierkegaard and Abraham 182 Three Recent Interpretations of Kierkegaard’s Abraham 187 Quinn on Abraham’s Dilemma 195 Adams on Abraham’s Dilemma 201 Conclusion 206 11 Mysticism and Morality 209 Moral Ideals and Mysticism 210 Contents ix Does Mysticism either Justify or Undermine Morality? 232 Conclusion 238 Bibliography 241 Index 249 Preface Most twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century work on moral philosophy has had little or nothing to say about religion. When its authors do speak of it, they tend to be dismissive or patronizing, and almost inevitably brief. Similarly, most analytic philosophers of religion have had little of substance to say about morality. Alleged moral truths are of course sometimes appealed to. (Discussions of the problem of evil are the most obvious example.) But the implications of morality as such for religion, and religion’s implications for it, have been largely neglected. This book is about these issues. It is divided into three parts. The four chapters of Part I examine three moral arguments for God’s existence—Immanuel Kant’s contention that a belief in God and immortality is a necessary postulate of moral reason, J. H. Newman’s insistence that human conscience attests to a divine law- giver and judge, and the claim made by W. R. Sorley and others that God (or something like God) is needed to explain the apparent objectivity of moral value. After critically discussing contemporary critiques of the three arguments, I con- clude that, when suitably qualified, versions of each of them are sound. Part II discusses the most hotly contested theistic account of moral obligation— divine command theory. Chapter 5 surveys medieval and early modern divine command theories and their critics. In Chapter 6 I turn to the two most important recent versions of divine command ethics—those of Philip L. Quinn and Robert M. Adams. Chapters 7 and 8 of this section examine the major linguistic, logical, and ethical objections to divine command theory, and the positive case that can be made for it. I argue that the objections to divine command theory can be met, but that the positive case for it isn’t conclusive since other theistic accounts of moral obligation, and in particular Linda Zagzebski’s divine motivation theory, may be equally compelling. It is typically assumed that the moral requirements of religion and secular moral requirements are essentially the same. Part III questions this assumption by exam- ining three areas in which religious requirements come into apparent conflict with the requirements of ordinary human morality. Chapter 9 argues for two claims: first, the absolute pacifism of the Buddha and Jesus can only be viewed as irrational by human moral reason, and, second, a strong case can be made for the contention that what we ordinarily regard as virtues aren’t real virtues when they are divorced from the love of God—a claim equally offensive to ordinary moral reason. Chapter 10 examines the implications of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It argues that attempts to water the story down, or soften its message, are ultimately unsuccessful. God’s goodness and human moral goodness may not be fully compatible. The book’s final chapter explores the ambiguous relations between mysticism and morality. The issue is important because the mystical strand plays a significant role in all of the major religious traditions, and a decisive role in xii Preface some. While I disagree with those who think that mysticism and morality are incompatible, I shall show that the relations between them are much less straight- forward than is often supposed. The general thrust of the book as a whole is that moral philosophy and philosophy of religion have very important bearings on each other. Philosophers of religion and moral philosophers can’t afford to ignore each other as they too often do.

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