RELIGION and MORALITY CLAREMONT STUDIES in the PHILOSOPHY of RELIGION General Editor: D
RELIGION AND MORALITY CLAREMONT STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION General Editor: D. Z. Phillips
Published titles:
PHILOSOPHY AND THE GRAMMAR OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF Edited by Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr
RELIGION AND NORALITY Edited by D. Z. Phillips
CAN RELIGION BE EXPLAINED AWAY? Edited by D. Z. Phillips
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE Edited by Stephen T. Davis (forthcoming) Religion and Morality
Edited by D. Z. Phillips Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion Claremont Graduate School, and Professor of Philosophy, University of Wales, Swansea
~ Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-13560-8 ISBN 978-1-349-13558-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-13558-5
RELIGION AND MORALITY Copyright © 1996 by The Claremont Graduate School Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-62066-3 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address:
St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1996
ISBN 978-0-312-12868-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Religion and morality / edited by D. Z. Phillips. p. cm. - (Claremont studies in the philosophy of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12868-5 (cloth) I. Religion and ethics. 2. Religious ethics. I. Phillips, D. Z. (Dewi Zephaniah) II. Series. BJ47.R43 1996 241--dc20 95-17961 CIP Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors viii Introduction xi
PART I RELIGION AS INFANTILE 1 1 Is Religion an Infantile Morality? Raimond Gaita 3 2 Reply: Morality, Humanity and Historicality: Remorse and Religion Revisited Richard Schacht 39
PART II MORALITY AND DIVINE COMMANDS 57 3 The Concept of a Divine Command Robert Merrihew Adams 59 4 Reply: Moral Duty and God: A View from the Left Clark A. Kucheman 81
PART III THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 105 5 Evil and the God-Who-Does-Nothing-In-Particular Marilyn McCord Adams 107 6 Reply: Redeeming Sorrows Rowan Williams 132
PART IV RELIGION AND MORAL RELATIVISM 149 7 Relativism about Torture: Religious and Secular Responses Philip L. Quinn 151 8 Reply: Ethical Universality and Ethical Relativism Joseph Runzo 171
v vi Contents
PART V BUDDHISM AND ETHICS 189 9 Ethics Post-Zen John V. Canfield 191 10 Reply: Before 'Post-Zen': A Discussion of Buddhist Ethics Frank J. Hoffman 212
PART VI ATHEISM, MORALITY AND RELIGION 233 11 Atheism and Morality R. W. Beardsmore 235 12 Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility James Conant 250
PART VII VOICES IN DISCUSSION 299 13 Voices in Discussion D. Z. Phillips 301 Index of Names 351 Index of Subjects 354 Preface and Acknowledgements
This collection of essays is the second in the series Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, the first being Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief edited by Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr. It is based on the proceedings of the fifteenth annual con• ference on the philosophy of religion at The Claremont Graduate School, California, in February 1994. As in the first volume, I have included 'Voices in Discussion' as an afterword. Some readers may want to read this discussion first before turning to the papers as fuller elucidations of the philo• sophical perspectives expressed in it. Others may not want to do so, hence the general introduction. I am grateful to the contributors to this collection, not only for participating in the conference, but for their generous support of the fund from which the annual conferences are funded. I also gratefully acknowledge contributions to the fund by The Claremont Graduate School, Pomona College, and Claremont McKenna College. I am indebted to Stephen Davis, Jackie Huntzinger and Althea Spencer-Miller for administrative assistance with the conference and to all those graduate students who, in various ways, contrib• uted to the success of the conference. I acknowledge the help provided in the preparation of typescripts by Lance Ashdown and Martha Bailey, my research assistants at Claremont, and Helen Baldwin, Secretary to the Department of Philosophy at Swansea. I am grateful to Timothy Tessin, my colleague at Swansea, for help with the proof-reading. The ready cooperation of people based at Claremont and Swansea is a happy by-product of my involve• ment in both institutions.
D. Z. PHILLIPS Claremont and Swansea
vii Notes on the Contributors
Marilyn McCord Adams is Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University and an Episcopal priest. She is author of a two• volume study, William Ockham, and of numerous articles on medi• eval philosophy and theology, Anselm, Duns Scotus, and the problem of evil.
Robert Merrihew Adams is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Virtue of Faith and Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, and of articles on meta• physics, ethics, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.
R. W. Beardsmore is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Head of Department at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is the au• thor of Moral Reasoning and Art and Morality and author of pa• pers on ethics, aesthetics and Wittgenstein.
John V. Canfield teaches at Erindale College, University of To• ronto. He is the author of Wittgenstein: Language and the World and The Looking-Glass Self.
James Conant is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Univer• sity of Pittsburg. He is the author of articles on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Frege and Wittgenstein.
Raimond Gaita is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Ad• vanced Research, Australia, and Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College, London. He is the author of Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception and editor of Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch.
Frank J. Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Chester University. He is the author of Rationality and Mind in Early Buddhism and co-editor of Pali Buddhism. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (India).
viii Notes on the Contributors ix
John Hyman is Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy at The Queen's College, Oxford. He is the editor of Investigating Psychology and the author of The Imitation of Nature.
Clark A. Kucheman is Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Chris• tian Ethics at Claremont McKenna College. He is editor of The Life of Choice: Some Liberal Religious Perspectives on Morality and the author of numerous essays in journals and anthologies.
David McLellan is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Kent. His numerous books have been translated into many languages. His most recent publications are Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist and Unto Caesar: The Political Reference of Christianity.
D. Z. Phillips is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wales, Swansea and Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at The Claremont Graduate School. He is the author of The Concept of Prayer; Moral Practices (with H. O. Mounce); Death and Immor• tality; Faith and Philosophical Enquiry; Sense and Delusion (with Dham Oilman); Athronyddu Am Grefydd; Religion Without Explanation; Through a Darkening Glass; Dramau Gwenlyn Parry; Belief, Change and Forms of Life; R. S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God; Faith After Foundationalism; From Fantasy to Faith; Interventions in Ethics; Wittgenstein and Religion; Writers of Wales: J. R. Jones. He has edit• ed many books including Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees (with Peter Winch). He is editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations and of the Macmillan series, Swansea Studies in Philosophy and Claremont Studies in the Philos• ophy of Religion.
Philip L. Quinn is John O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and was formerly William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of Divine Commands and Moral Requirements and numer• ous articles on philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, eth• ics and metaphysics. He has served as editor of Faith and Philosophy and president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division (1994-5).
Joseph Runzo is Professor of Philosophy and Griset Professor of Religion at Chapman University. He is the author of World Views x Notes on the Contributors and Perceiving God; Relativism and God; editor of Is God Real? and Ethics, Religion and the Good Society, New Directions in a Pluralistic World, and co-editor of Religious Experience and Religious Belief: Essays in the Epistemology of Religion. He is founder and president of the Philosophy of Religion Society.
Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana• Champaign. He is Executive Director of the North American Nietzsche Society and editor of the University of Illinois Press series International Nietzsche Studies. His books include Alienation; Classical Modern Philosophers; Hegel and After; Nietzsche; and, more recently, The Future of Alienation; Making Sense of Nietzsche.
Rowan Williams is the Anglican Bishop of Monmouth, Wales, Honorary Professor of Theology at the University of Bristol and Fellow of the British Academy. He was formerly Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford. He is the author of The Wound of Knowledge; Resurrection; The Truth of God; Beginning Now: Peacemaking Theology (with Mark Collier); Arius: Heresy and Tradition; Theresa of Avila and editor of The Making of Orthodoxy. Introduction D. Z. PHILLIPS
For some contemporary philosophers, an emphasis on guilt in morality is infantile, the sign of a narrowly conceived ethics. Raimond Gaita argues that this is not so. Guilt is the essential means by which we recognise the harm we do to others. In such a revelation, guilt is related to that first-person affective response we call remorse. Remorse is not the psychological consequence of recognising the harm, but is constitutive of what such recogni• tion amounts to. It is the recognition of a violation of human beings which Gaita thinks can be described best as the violation of the sacred. Once again, however, Gaita wants to emphasise that the affective response does not occur because the other is seen to be sacred. Rather, the sense of the sacred is given in the poss• ibility of such a response; a response which reveals the absolute worth of human beings. Gaita recognises that the notion of the sacred has its roots in certain religious responses, but he hopes to show that it has a meaning independent of these origins. The possibility of show• ing this raises an issue which runs through all the papers: the interrelations between moral and religious concepts. Richard Schacht is suspicious of the transposition of concepts Gaita seems to con• template, and Gaita himself comes to have misgivings concern• ing it. Both symposiasts agree on the confusion involved in looking for metaphysical underpinnings for our affective responses. Schacht argues, however, that talk of absolute values and absolute worth, which Gaita wants to maintain, itself depends on such metaphysical support and cannot be sustained without it. We must realise, Schacht argues, that we are interpreters of our own conditions. The vital issue for him concerns what there is to guide us in these interpretations. In them, we are always creating more than we know, but without such efforts we are condemned to prosaic speech. Schacht believes that after the demise of transcendental metaphysics and the transcendental religion which depends on it, we have the resources to explore the possibility of other forms of discourse which constitute a celebration of life.
xi xii Introduction
In the second symposium, we meet a very different perspec• tive. It should not be confused, however, with the view that the good is good because God commands it. That is not what Robert Adams means by a Divine Command Theory. On the contrary, the theory, on his view, presupposes our conceptions of human good and harm. We can appreciate that torture is wrong inde• pendently of the theory, and the harm involved is not elucidated in terms of it. What the theory explains is the notion of obliga• tion. We must obey because it has been commanded, but the com• mand is not the reason for the goodness involved. Yet, the theory does involve belief in a revelation in which what is communicat• ed to us is not a mere wish, but the direct command of God who is the source of highest value. It follows, therefore, that our moral responses are grounded in an objective state of affairs. God's com• mands may not be accessible to all people at all times, in which case they are under no obligation to obey them. Yet, people still retain a sense of good and evil. Adams argues that in such con• texts we have a relativity of obligation, but no relativity of value. Here, the emphasis is clearly different from that found in the first symposium where moral responses are said to occur, not because human beings have absolute worth. Rather, the notion of absol• ute worth is found in the possibility of such responses. Clark Kucheman, like Adams, seeks an objective grounding for our moral responses, something which no person would be justi• fied in not accepting. He finds this in a version of Kant's categ• orical imperative; a grounding which we must not surrender to an alien will. The grounds of our moral responses can be found in the respect due to others. Unlike the first two symposiasts, Kucheman does not want to say that this respect has its sense in our affective responses, since if those responses are wanting, he wants to argue, the respect is due, nevertheless. How does any reference to God inform our lives in face of the actual evils, some of them horrendous, which human beings have to face? In the third symposium, Marilyn Adams thinks that some kind of theodicy is needed if this question is to be answered sat• isfactorily. Yet, a great deal depends on the kind of theodicy which is advanced. How is sense to be made of one's life in such a way that its fragmented parts can be seen in the context of a mean• ingful whole? Marilyn Adams has little time for attempts made by analytic philosophers of religion to justify and explain evil by appeals to possible worlds or the free-will defence. Such theories Introduction xiii simply do not work. Things are too bad for them, and we are right to reject them. For Marilyn Adams, the only hope of mak• ing sense of things, including the horrendous evils people suffer, is to be found in post-mortem experiences in which encounters with God will transform our understanding of our present con• dition. It is not that the evils suffered cease to be horrendous, but that their meaning changes. This change of meaning is a form of redemption received by all in the end, even the most evil per• son imaginable, since God would not create a creature beyond his own powers of redemption. In a post-mortem context, those powers may include forms of coercion to change people's views. Rowan Williams is unhappy with the language he takes Marilyn Adams to be offering us to cope with the fact of horrendous evils. He does not want even to begin talking of what solutions would be proportionate or disproportionate in relation, say, to years of sexual child abuse. He thinks such language destroys both our sense of such evils and the religious notion of beatitude. The task of correlation he thinks such talk involves invites us to entertain misleading pictures of our experiences as atomic units. These pic• tures cannot do justice to the diverse ways in which people have come to terms with horrendous evils in their lives, ways which are by no means always religious. When the reactions are religious, Rowan Williams argues, the account Marilyn Adams gives of them is too reactive, as something introduced post-mortem when all else has failed. This raises the whole issue of the grammar of divine action. Robert Adams and Marilyn Adams acknowledge that their views involve a degree of anthropomorphism, where• as, for Rowan Williams, divine action is incommensurable with finite agency. To see what it involves we must pay attention to the form concept-formation takes where the notion of grace is concerned. Talk of grace must remain faithful to the facts of hu• man suffering, a faithfulness which, for Rowan Williams, involves giving up talk of balancing horrendous evils against something else. He is suspicious of all theoretical attempts at resolving the problem of evil since, in the end, he believes they involve not only evasions of humanity, but of divinity as well. Undoubtedly, among horrendous evils we find torture. Yet, can we say it is always wrong, everywhere and for everyone? This is the issue Philip Quinn addresses in the context of religion and moral relativism in the fourth symposium. He argues that, if we are religious, we can say that we should not torture others because xiv Introduction they are sacred, a fact derived from their being created by God. For Quinn, this is a metaphysical sacredness, although he admits that it can sometimes stand alone apart from its metaphysical grounding. This recalls issues in the first symposium. The prob• lem, Quinn argues, is that the metaphysical religious grounding does not work for everyone and there is little reason to suppose that it ever will. The only hope in such a situation is to seek to influence the moral teaching of children, or to work towards such moral consensus as can be attained. But Quinn is suspicious of those who argue that there is such a thing as the moral point of view which, if recognised, will show us why we should not tor• ture others. This moral view, it is said, involves respecting others as persons, taking into account the good of others, abiding by the principle of universalisability, and commitment to certain moral principles as normative. But these characteristics belong, Quinn argues, not to the moral point of view, but to a moral point of view, that of Western Enlightenment Liberalism. Quinn is, in fact, an adherent of such liberalism, but he is under no illusion that he and his fellow liberals alone occupy the moral point of view. Worse, even within such a point of view, agreement relating to torture in a particular case is by no means guaranteed. He con• cludes, with some regret, that moral pluralism is here to stay. Clearly, Quinn's difficulties contrast with the Kantianism ad• vanced by Kucheman in the second symposium. One aspect of this Kantianism is taken up by Joseph Runzo in his reply to Quinn. He agrees that there are no overreaching religious or secular ar• guments which can command a universal audience where the prohibition of torture is concerned. Yet, he still wants to main• tain that it is a universal prohibition. How can this be said? Ac• cording to Runzo, it is rooted in a respect for persons, which overlaps many different perspectives. All human beings have the duty to show this respect, whether they recognise it or not. For believers, this respect is grounded in seeing others in the image of God, but this conception is not shared widely enough to work as a final appeal. Runzo wants to argue that no circumstances should constitute exceptions to the rule prohibiting torture, since it violates the respect for others most people acknowledge. Those who do not recognise it are beyond the moral pale. To admit exceptions to the rule would be to embark on a slippery slope which ends in the direst atrocities. . In the subsequent discussion, difficult situations and moral di- Introduction xv lemmas loomed large; situations which Quinn readily acknowl• edged. Apart from cases where the moral descriptions of the sit• uations would be disputed, some admitted that even when it is appropriate to speak of torture they would, in certain circum• stances, commit it. For some, this meant regarding such situations as exceptions to the moral rule, while others would not speak of 'exceptions' but of involvement in tragic, moral dilemmas where we discover what we have to do without necessarily talking of the right thing to do. In some cases, it was argued, torturing a terrorist would not constitute a violation of respect for persons even in relation to the terrorist. The connection with issues in the first three symposia arises from the attempt to give a central role to the notion of respect for persons. For some participants, the notion is a highly theor• etical one of a Kantian or Hegelian kind. For others, talk of rules and principles in this connection is of limited value. They argued that when we say that torture is wrong because we have failed to respect others, this creates the illusion that we have been told why torture is wrong. The 'respect' itself can only be cashed out in moral terms which limit what we should be prepared to do to others. So talk of principles does not underwrite our moral prac• tices, since it is in terms of these practices that the principles have their life. This reminds us of the issues concerning whether our affective responses, in respecting others, are grounded in some• thing independent, whether it be post-mortem experiences, a metaphysical system or a set of principles, or whether the re• spect gets its sense from our affective responses. Once we ask for a further elucidation of what respect for oth• ers involves further issues return which are present in the pre• ceding symposia. If we say that the respect expresses a sense of the sacred in others, this leads to the question of the extent to which a sense of the sacred can have sense independently of its religious roots. This question leads us to the concerns of the fifth symposium, concerns which are intimately connected with the discussions which preceded it. John Canfield is concerned to bring out the practical import of the notion of 'no-self' in the practice he calls post-Zen. He shows that this has to do with the possibility of a certain kind of en• lightenment which shows itself in what is called 'fine behaviour', free of our normal egocentric preoccupations. This is not the na• tion of the self which philosophers usually worry about, or the xvi Introduction kind of self-consciousness they normally discuss. The reason for mentioning the philosophical preoccupations is that they can eas• ily obscure the whole point of the striving for no-self. The meta• physical preoccupations obscure the practical context in which the notion has its life. That is why John Canfield speaks of post-Zen. He is referring to a practice which has deliberately divorced it• self from the metaphysical doctrines of Buddhism, such as the doctrine of rebirth, but which, at the same time, has kept those practices which constitute the path to enlightenment. Some may see this as an attenuated form of Buddhism, but Canfield sees it as the separation of the essential from the inessential, the separa• tion of the spiritual from the metaphysical. It is the character of this separation which concerns Frank Hoffman. Why cut post-Zen off from the main tenets of Bud• dhism? Although Canfield does not say a great deal about why he cannot swallow the metaphysical aspects of Buddhism, it is clear to Hoffman that it is because Canfield thinks they obscure what really matters in Buddhism. But, then, there are philosophers who think that metaphysical theories have done Christianity an equal disservice. They do not, for that reason, speak of the need for a different practice called post-Christianity. The intriguing question is this: has the notion of rebirth a spiritual significance which is itself obscured by metaphysical accounts of it? If this question is answered in the affirmative, giving up the notion of rebirth would be to lose a form of practice in which the enlight• enment made possible by the use of the notion would show it• self. Of course, none of this has any implication for the nature of the enlightenment Canfield discusses in his elucidation of the practice of post-Zen. These issues lead us to the concerns of the final symposium, concerns which are connected with the earliest discussions of the interrelations between moral and religiOUS conceptions. It is no part of R. W. Beardsmore's intention to deny that there are re• ligious conceptions which have no counterparts in morality. But he also wants to reject the claim that moral concepts are necess• arily parasitic on religion. He is well-aware of the condescending misunderstanding to which religion is often subjected and wants no part of it. On the other hand, he thinks that it is equally necess• ary to recognise that atheism can be subjected to a condescend• ing misunderstanding too. He illustrates what he means by considering what is involved in gratitude for life. Even if it could Introduction xvii be shown that gratitude for life originated in religion, why should it follow that it must have those associations for us now? It is tempting to say that the atheist feeds on some vestiges of religious faith, so that they cannot really say what they want to say in expressing gratitude for life. Their speech is an implicit recogni• tion of God. Beardsmore wants to resist the temptation to think in this way. We have to look to the role gratitude for life plays in a person's life to see what it amounts to. Beardsmore provides examples of such gratitude which do not take a religious form. They need not have a religious origin. If we think of certain gen• eral facts of nature, laughing, crying, reacting to miraculous es• capes with gratitude, why shouldn't we say that religious and atheistic conceptions of gratitude are derived from the last of these? Beardsmore argues that such considerations count against the tendency in some philosophers to advance general claims about the relation of morality to religion. In particular, some philos• ophers have argued that we are in a state of moral unintelligibility. This comes about by our attempt to use concepts disconnected from the religious context in which they have their intelligibility. Beardsmore finds such a thesis in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. He believes that she conflates two theses: that certain words may survive the demise of a divine law conception of ethics, and that certain concepts can do so. If Anscombe is saying that we cannot have a divine law conception of ethics without a conception of divine law her thesis is a tautology. It is manifestly false to say that words can't survive the demise of the context in which they had their original sense. Beardsmore's thesis is quite different, namely, that there are moral notions of obligation, moral necess• ity and gratitude for existence which are distinctive concepts, not dependent on religion for the sense they have in people's lives. In his reply, much expanded from his original paper, James Conant concentrates on what is involved in the claim that people can be in the grip of a certain kind of moral unintelligibility. He explores, in illuminating detail, what this claim amounts to in the work of three very different thinkers: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Elizabeth Anscombe. He thinks that this claim needs to be clearly distinguished from any general philosophical thesis. To the extent that Beardsmore attributes such a general thesis to Anscombe, Conant argues, this is to miss the main thrust of her far more specific observations; observations which have to do with the way many philosophers and others attribute sense to notions xviii Introduction of moral necessity and obligation which depended for their sense on a divine law conception of ethics no longer in evidence. Conant admits that Anscombe is not as careful as she might be about the distinction between the survival of concepts and the survival of words. She speaks, sometimes, of the survival of con• cepts outside the framework which once made them possible. But that supposition is meaningless since, in that event, we do not have the concept. Only nominal words survive. It may seem that this thesis is obvious, but uninteresting. It gets its interest from the fact that people may not realise what situation they are in. They employ the words in contexts which seem to resemble those which gave them their sense, but they do not recognise this; thus people are in a state of moral unintelligibility without realising it. This is a common theme in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe, although their diagnoses of the reasons for and the consequences of such situations differ in important respects. Un• like MacIntyre, however, their concerns are quite specific. MacIntyre propounds a thesis about the state of all our moral concepts, which is why Conant parts company with him. Anscombe, Conant argues, is quite specific. She claims that the sense we try to give to a moral use of 'must' is confused in the absence of a divine law conception of ethics. Once that concep• tion is lost, her claim is that we have nothing similar at that level of generality. Our sense of an absolute prohibition is lost. As a result, we are tempted to indulge in the corruption of contem• plating evil so that good may come. Other concepts of obligation, independent of this absolute conception are, of course, unaffec• ted by this specific claim. Even in this specific context, Beardsmore and Gaita recognise that Anscombe is looking for a moral 'stopper'. But they insist that 'It is commanded by God' is only one stopper among many. Wittgenstein, for example, reminds us of another use. If we told someone he ought to act decently and he said that he was not interested in doing so, we'd say, 'But you ought to.' That use is perfectly intelligible without reference to religion. The necessity expressed is not a psychological consequence of recognising the harm, but is constitutive of what the moral response to it amounts to. Conant agrees that a successful elucidation of the concept of moral necessity involved in such contexts would constitute a refutation of Anscombe's claim regarding its dependence on a divine law conception of ethics. Introduction xix
The issues in the final symposium have brought us full circle to the central concerns which we met in the first symposium, concerns which are seldom far away at any point in the collec• tion. They may be summed up in the following fundamental question: are our affective responses, moral or religious, grounded in the recognition of what is decent or sacred, or is the sense of decency or the sacred shown in these responses? However readers answer this question in the end, their reflections on it will, hope• fully, be furthered by the discussions in and after the symposia in this collection.