Abstract

After an opening chapter, in which he defends an objectivist theory of moral discourse against various forms of emotivism and pragmatism by locating the ordinary import of moral ascriptions in their reference to persons rather than situations, Owen proceeds to generalize this requirement so that moral imperatives are regarded as making sense only if they issue from a personal source. "Making sense" admittedly does not mean that there is any logical contradiction involved in denying that a relation of persons is presupposed by moral conduct and implied by moral discourse; negatively put, stoicism is the only consistent alternative to theism: but stoicism neglects evidence for the existence of God that it need not. Thus, while there is a "gap" between the premisses and the conclusion of the moral argument which can only be bridged by a "leap," this "leap" of faith is far from being blind. While most of this book amounts simply to an incisive and extremely well-ordered restatement of the Kantian moral argument for the existence of God, the author's use of the notion of person and pari passu community as integral features of the argument revise it sufficiently to give it a prima facie better based cognitive appeal than Kant's.—E. A. R.