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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2013
At a time of acute danger, people commonly petition God for help for themselves or their loved ones. Such prayer seems natural and, indeed, for believers, reasonable and acceptable. But once we closely examine what is actually happening in such situations, we see that frequently such prayer is not morally innocuous. I present a number of examples which illustrate the difficulty, and argue that even assuming the benevolence of the deity does not suffice to make such prayer legitimate.
1 A longer version of this paper appeared, under the title ‘A Problem about the Morality of Some Common Forms of Prayer’, in Ratio vol. 25 (2012), 207–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Stephen Law for the invitation to publish this shortened version, and to the editor of Ratio and John Wiley and Sons for the permission to do so. Versions of the original paper were presented at the Israeli Philosophical Association annual meeting in 2010, and at the Joseph Butler society in Oxford University in 2011; I am grateful to participants on both occasions for their comments. I am very grateful to Gabriel Citron, Zohar Geva, Amihud Gilead, Michael Harris, Arnon Keren, Hugh LaFollette, Iddo Landau, Tal Manor, Ariel Meirav, Adrian Moore, Juha Raikka, Talia Shaham, Daniel Statman, Nehama Verbin, and the editor and an anonymous referee for this journal, for comments on drafts of the paper. I am particularly grateful to Hugh LaFollette for sharing with me a draft of a paper of his on wishing.
