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2022
A review of William Lane Craig, Erik J. Wielenberg, and Adam Lloyd Johnson's "A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?" Religious Studies. (2022) 58:3 659–663. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412520000475
Faith and Philosophy
God and Morality2020 •
God and Morality, by Anne Jeffrey. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 84. $18 (paperback).
This paper has three parts; in the first, I look at the role that God plays as an explainer of morality. In the second part, I ask what difference Christianity makes to us, as practical and moral agents. In the third part I ask about God’s communication of normative matters to us.
"The scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century had major repercussions on Western moral philosophy. In the Christian tradition, God had been assigned two special roles: first as the creator of the world, including humanity; and second as its moral legislator, overseeing the actions of each person and distributing rewards or punishments according to whether they conformed to a divinely-sanctioned universal moral law. If this view were correct, people would have a clear, pragmatic reason to try to live well: they would gain the favour of God and be rewarded in the afterlife. However, since the case for the creator God’s existence had been undermined, the existence of a divine and all-knowing legislator could no longer be assumed. This led some philosophers to conclude that the language of morality was ultimately meaningless. Moral philosophers who were sceptical about God's existence faced several difficult questions. Why, if at all, should we be interested in doing ‘the right thing’? How can any version of morality have sufficient authority for anyone to have reasons, and especially decisive reasons, to behave according to it? Are there any distinctively moral reasons at all? If the decision to act morally is really pragmatic—that is, we refrain from lying, cheating and stealing because we will otherwise be punished—is the content of morality, or the specific rules that we ought to follow, ultimately arbitrary? This presentation will describe some of the ways in which moral philosophers have responded to the (possible) absence of a divine legislator. Among the theories discussed will be utilitarianism, which is the doctrine of promoting human happiness, developed as a scientifically-grounded alternative to dogmatic rule-following; natural law theory, which says that morality is derivable from facts about human nature; and constructivism, which says that moral authority is created by means of rational procedures. As we will see, the central challenge for each set of theorists is to locate the source of moral authority not in some external entity, but within the very people who are supposed to be answerable to it."
2015 •
1. Types of Realism; 2. Branches of Ethics; 3. Moral Concepts; 4. Axiology; 5. Religion and Morality; 6. Other Related Issues Which Are (Arguably) Not Part of Ethics Proper; Appendix A. Bibliography
2012 •
2022 •
In 2022 the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave.
This article provides an overview of the history of what is termed the secular moral project by providing a synopsis of the history of the moral argument for God’s existence and the various historical processes that have contributed to the secularization of ethics. I argue that three key thinkers propel the secular moral project forward from the middle of the 19th century into the 20th century: John Stuart Mill, whose ethical thinking in Utilitarianism serves as the background to all late 19th century secular ethical thinking, Henry Sidgwick, who, in the Methods, indisputably establishes the secular autonomy of ethics as a distinctive discipline (metaethics), and finally, G.E. Moore, whose work, the Principia Ethica, stands at the forefront of virtually all secular metaethical debates concerning naturalism and non-naturalism in the first half of the 20th century. Although secular metaethics continues to be the dominant ethical view of the academy, it is shown that theistic metaethic...
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