## 1. Ancient Greek Philosophy



We can start with the Greeks, and this means starting with Homer, a
body of texts transmitted first orally and then written down in the
seventh century BCE. So what does the relation between morality and
religion look like in Homer? The first thing to say is that the gods
and goddesses of the Homeric poems behave remarkably like the noble
humans described in the same poems, even though the humans are mortal
and the gods and goddesses immortal. Both groups are motivated by the
desire for honor and glory, and are accordingly jealous when they
receive less than they think they should while others receive more,
and work ceaselessly to rectify this. The two groups are not however
symmetrical, because the noble humans have the same kind of client
relation to the divinities as subordinate humans do to them. There is
a complex pattern that we might call 'an honor-loop' (see
Mikalson,
*Honor Thy Gods*). The divinities have their functions (in
Greek, the word is the same as 'honors'), such as Poseidon's
oversight of the sea, and humans seek their favor with 'honor', which
we might here translate as 'worship'. This includes, for example,
sanctuaries devoted to them, dedications, hymns, dances, libations,
rituals, prayers, festivals and sacrifices. In all of these the gods
take pleasure, and in return they give 'honor' to mortals in the form
of help or assistance, especially in the areas of their own
expertise. There is a clear analogy with purely human
client-relations, which are validated in the Homeric narrative, since
the poems were probably originally sung at the courts of the princes
who claimed descent from the heroes whose exploits make up the
story. The gods and goddesses are not, however, completely at
liberty. They too are accountable to fate or justice, as in the scene
in the *Iliad*, where Zeus wants to save Hector, but he cannot
because 'his doom has long been sealed' (*Iliad*, 22:
179).



It is sometimes said that the Presocratic philosophers come
*out* of Homer by rejecting religion in favor of science. There
is a grain of truth in this, for when Thales (who flourished around
580) is reported as saying 'Water is the origin (or principle) of all
things,' this is different from saying, for example, that Tethys is
mother of all the rivers, because it deletes the character of
narrative or story (Aristotle's *Metaphysics*, 983b20-8). When
Anaximenes (around 545) talks of air as the primary element differing
in respect of thinness and thickness, or Heraclitus explains all
change as a pattern in the turnings of fire igniting in measures and
going out in measures, they are not giving stories with plot-lines
involving quasi-human intentions and frustrations (DK 13, A 5, DK 22,
B 30). But it is wrong to say that they have left religion
behind. Heraclitus puts this enigmatically by saying that the one and
only wisdom does and does not consent to be called Zeus (DK 22, B
14). He is affirming the divinity of this wisdom, but denying the
anthropomorphic character of much Greek religion. 'To god all things
are beautiful and good and just but humans suppose some things to be
just and others unjust' (DK 22, B 102). He ties this divine wisdom to
the laws of a city, 'for all human laws are nourished by the one
divine law' (DK 22, B 114), though he does not have confidence that
'the many' are capable of making law. The sophists, to whom Socrates
responded, rejected this tie between human law and divine law and this
was in part because of their expertise in rhetoric, by which they
taught their students how to manipulate the deliberations of popular
assemblies, and so change the laws to their own advantage. The most
famous case is Protagoras (c. 490-21), who stated in the first
sentence of his book *Truth* that 'A human being is the measure
of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is
not' (Plato's *Theaetetus*, 152a). Protagoras is not correctly
seen here as skeptical about morality or religion. It is true that he
claimed he was not in a position to know either the *manner* in
which the gods are or are not (another translation is 'that they are
or are not') or what they are like in appearance (DK 80, B 4). But as
Plato (c. 430-347) presents him, he told the story that all humans
have been given by the gods the gifts of shame and justice, so as to
make possible the founding of cities; this is *why* each human
is the measure. Even Thrasymachus, in the first book of Plato's
*Republic*, thinks of justice as the same thing amongst gods
and humans (*Republic*, 388c). His view of what this justice
is, namely the interest of the stronger, is disputed by Plato. But the
claim that justice operates at both the divine and human levels is
common ground.



Socrates (c. 470-399) in one of the early dialogues debates the
nature of the holy with Euthyphro, who is a religious
professional. Euthyphro is taking his own father to court for murder,
and though ordinary Greek morality would condemn such an action as
impiety, Euthyphro defends it on the basis that the gods behave in the
same sort of way, according to the traditional stories. Socrates makes
it clear that he does not believe these stories, because they
attribute immorality to the gods. This does not mean, however, that he
does not believe in the gods. He was observant in his religious
practices, and he objects to the charge of not believing in the city's
gods that was one of the bases of the prosecution at his own trial. He
points to the spirit who gives him commands about what not to do
(*Apology*, 31d), and we learn later that he found it
significant that this voice never told him to stop conducting his
trial in the way that in fact led to his death (*Ibid*.,
40a-c). Socrates interpreted this as an invitation from the gods to
die, thus refuting the charge that, by conducting his trial in the way
he did, he was guilty of theft - i.e., depriving the gods of his
life that properly belonged to them (*Phaedo*, 62b). His life
in particular was a service to god, he thought, because his testing of
the wisdom of others was carrying out Apollo's charge given by the
oracle at Delphi, implicit in the startling pronouncement that he was
the wisest man in Greece (*Apology*, 21a-d).




Socrates's problem with the traditional stories about the gods gives
rise to what is sometimes called 'the Euthyphro
dilemma'. If we try to define the holy as what is loved by all
the gods (and goddesses), we will be faced with the question 'Is
the holy holy because it is loved by the gods, or do they love it
because it is holy?' (*Euthyphro*, 10a). Socrates makes
it clear that his view is the second (though he does not argue for
this conclusion in addressing this question, and he is probably
relying on the earlier premise, at
*Euthyphro*, 7c10f, that we love things because of the
properties they have). (See Hare, *Plato's Euthyphro*, on this
passage.) But his view is not an objection to tying morality and
religion together. He hints at the end of the dialogue
(*Euthyphro*, 13de) that the right way to link them is to see
that when we do good we are serving the gods well. Plato probably does
not intend for us to construe the dialogues together as a single
philosophical system, and we must not erase the differences between
them. But it is significant that in the *Theaetetus* (176b),
Socrates says again that our goal is to be as like the god as
possible, and since the god is in no way and in no manner unjust, but
as just as it is possible to be, nothing is more like the god than the
one among us who becomes correspondingly as just as possible. In
several dialogues this thought is connected with a belief in the
immortality of the soul; we become like the god by paying attention to
the immortal and best part of ourselves (e.g., *Symposium*,
210A-212B). The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also tied
to the doctrine of the Forms, whereby things with characteristics that
we experience in this life (e.g., beauty) are copies or imitations of
the Forms (e.g., The Beautiful-Itself) that we see without the
distraction of the body when our souls are separated at death. The
Form of the Good, according to the *Republic*, is above all the
other Forms and gives them their intelligibility (as, by analogy, the
sun gives visibility), and is (in a pregnant phrase) 'on the other
side of being' (*Republic*, 509b). Finally, in the
*Laws* (716b), perhaps Plato's last work, the character called
'the Athenian' says that the god can serve for us in the highest
degree as a measure of all things, and much more than any human can,
whatever some people say; so people who are going to be friends with
such a god must, as far as their powers allow, be like the gods
themselves.



This train of thought sees the god or gods as like a magnet, drawing
us to be like them by the power of their goodness or excellence. In
Plato's *Ion* (533d), the divine is compared to a magnet to
which is attached a chain of rings, through which the attraction is
passed. This conception is also pervasive in Aristotle (384-22),
Plato's student for twenty years. In the *Nicomachean Ethics*,
for example, the words 'god' and 'divine'
occur roughly twice as often as the words 'happiness' and
'happy'. This is significant, given that Aristotle's
ethical theory is (like Plato's) 'eudaimonist' (meaning
that our morality aims at our happiness). Mention of the divine is not
merely conventional for Aristotle, but does important philosophical
work. In the *Eudemian Ethics* (1249b5-22) he tells us
that the goal of our lives is service and contemplation of the god. He
thinks that we become like what we contemplate, and so we become most
like the god by contemplating the god. Incidentally, this is why the
god does not contemplate us; for this would mean becoming less than
the god, which is impossible. As in Plato, the well-being of the city
takes precedence over the individual, and this, too, is justified
theologically. It is nobler and more divine to achieve an end for a
city than for an individual (*NE* 1094b9-10). Aristotle
draws a distinction between what we honor and what we merely commend
(*NE*, 1101b10-35). There are six states for a human
life, on a normative scale from best to worst: divine (which exceeds
the merely human on the one extreme), virtuous (without wrongful
desire), strong-willed (able to overcome wrongful desire), weak-willed
(unable to do so), vicious and bestial (which exceeds the merely human
on the other extreme, and which Aristotle says is mostly found among
barbarians) (*NE*, 1145a15-22). The highest form of
happiness, which he calls blessedness, is something we honor as we
honor gods, whereas virtue we merely commend. It would be as wrong to
commend blessedness as it would be to commend gods (*NE*,
1096a10-1097a15). Sometimes Aristotle uses the phrase 'God
or understanding' (in Greek, *nous*) (e.g.,
*Politics*, 1287a27-32). The activity of the god, he says in
the *Metaphysics*, is *nous* thinking itself
(1074b34). The best human activity is the most god-like, namely
thinking about the god and about things that do not
change. Aristotle's virtue ethics, then, needs to be understood
against the background of these theological premises. He is thinking
of the divine, to use Plato's metaphor, as magnetic, drawing us, by
its attractive power, to live the best kind of life possible for
us. This gives him a defense against the charge sometimes made
against virtue theories that they simply embed the prevailing social
consensus into an account of human nature. Aristotle defines ethical
virtue as lying in a mean between excess and defect, and the mean is
determined by the person of practical wisdom (actually the male,
since Aristotle is sexist on this point). He then gives a
conventional account of the virtues such a person displays (such as
courage, literally manliness, which requires the right amount of fear
and confidence, between cowardice and rashness). But the virtuous
person in each case acts 'for the sake of the noble (or beautiful)',
and Aristotle continually associates the noble with the divine (e.g.,
*NE*, 1115b12).




There are tensions in Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness. It
is not clear whether the *Nicomachean Ethics* has a consistent
view of the relation between the activity of contemplation and the
other activities of a virtuous life (see Hare, *God and
Morality*, chapter 1, and Sarah Broadie, *Ethics with
Aristotle*, chapter 7). But the connection of the highest human
state with the divine is pervasive in the text. One result of this
connection is the eudaimonism mentioned earlier. If the god does not
care about what is not divine (for this would be to become
*like* what is not divine), the highest and most god-like human
also does not care about other human beings except to the degree they
contribute to his own best state. This degree is not negligible, since
humans are social animals, and their well-being depends on the
well-being of the families and cities of which they are
members. Aristotle is not preaching self-sufficiency in any sense that
implies we could be happy on our own, isolated from other human
beings. But our concern for the well-being of other people is always,
for him, contingent on our special relation to them. Within the
highest kind of friendship 'a friend is another self', he says, and
within such friendship we care about friends for their own sake, but
if the friend becomes divine and we do not, then the friendship is
over (*NE*, 1159a7). We therefore do not want our friends to
become gods, even though that would be the best thing for
them. Finally, Aristotle ties our happiness to our end (in Greek,
*telos*); for humans, as for all living things, the best state
is its own activity in accordance with the natural function that is
unique to each species. For humans the best state is happiness, and
the best activity within this state is contemplation (*NE*,
1178b17-23).




The Epicureans and Stoics who followed Aristotle differed with each
other and with him in many ways, but they agreed in tying morality and
religion together. For the Epicureans, the gods do not care about us,
though they are entertained by looking at our tragicomic lives (rather
as we look at soap operas on television). We can be released from a
good deal of anxiety, the Epicureans thought, by realizing that the
gods are not going to punish us. Our goal should be to be as like the
gods as we can, enjoying ourselves without interruption, but for us
this means limiting our desires to what we can obtain without
frustration. They did not mean that our happiness is self-interested
in any narrow sense, because they held that we can include others in
our happiness by means of our sympathetic pleasures. The Stoics
likewise tied the best kind of human life, for them the life of the
sage, to being like the divine. The sage follows nature in all his
desires and actions, and is thus the closest to the divine. One of the
virtues he will have is 'apathy' (in
Greek *apatheia*), which does not mean listlessness, but
detachment from wanting anything other than what nature, or the god,
is already providing. Like the Epicureans, the Stoics had an argument
against any narrow self-interest, but this time based on their
conception of right reason which is directed by the law common to all,
'which pervades everything and is the same as Zeus, lord of the
ordering of all that exists' (Diogenes Laertius, *Lives of
the Philosophers*, VII 88. For the views of the Epicureans and
Stoics about morality and religion, see Julia Annas, *The Morality
of Happiness*, chapters 5 and 7.)


## 2. The Hebrew Bible And The New Testament




The second line of thought to be traced in this entry starts with the
Hebrew Bible and continues with the Greek scriptures called by
Christians 'The New Testament'. Morality and religion are
connected in the Hebrew Bible primarily by the category of God's
command. Such commands come already in the first chapter
of *Genesis*. God created by command, for example 'Let
there be light' (*Gen*. 1:3). Then, after the creation of
animals, God gives the command, 'Be fruitful and
multiply', and repeats the command to the humans he creates in
the divine image (*Gen*. 1:22). In the second chapter God tells
Adam that he is free to eat from any tree in the garden, but he must
not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Eve and
Adam disobey and eat of that fruit, they are expelled from the
garden. There is a family of concepts here that is different from what
we met in Greek philosophy. God is setting up a kind of covenant by
which humans will be blessed if they obey the commands God gives
them. Human disobedience is not explained in the text, except that the
serpent says to Eve that they will not die if they eat the fruit, but
will be like God, knowing good and evil, and Eve sees the fruit as
good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining
wisdom. After they eat, Adam and Eve know that they are naked, and are
ashamed, and hide from God. There is a turning away from God and from
obedience to God that characterizes this as a 'fall into
sin'. As the story goes on, and Cain kills Abel, evil spreads to
all the people of the earth, and *Genesis* describes the basic
state as a corruption of the *heart* (6:9). This idea of a
basic orientation away from or towards God and God's commands becomes
in the Patristic period of early Christianity the idea of a
will. There is no such idea in Plato or Aristotle, and no Greek word
that the English word 'will' properly translates.




In the Pentateuch, the story continues with Abraham, and God's command
to leave his ancestral land and go to the land God promised to give
him and his offspring (*Gen*. 17:7-8). Then there is the
command to Abraham to kill his son, a deed prevented at the last
minute by the provision of a ram instead
(*Gen*. 22:11-14). Abraham's great grandchildren end up
in Egypt, because of famine, and the people of Israel suffer for
generations under Pharaoh's yoke. Under Moses the people are finally
liberated, and during their wanderings in the desert, Moses receives
from God the Ten Commandments, in two tables or tablets
(*Exod*. 20:1-17, 31:18). The first table concerns our
obligations to God directly, to worship God alone and keep God's name
holy, and keep the Sabbath. The second table concerns our obligations
to other human beings, and all of the commands are negative (do not
kill, commit adultery, steal, lie, or covet) except for the first,
which tells us to honor our fathers and mothers. God's commands taken
together give us the law (on some lists there are 613
*mitzvot*, Hebrew for 'commands'.) One more term belongs here,
namely 'kingdom'. The Greeks had the notion of a kingdom, under a
human king (though the Athenians were in the classical period
suspicious of such an arrangement). But they did not have the idea of
a kingdom of God, though there is something approaching this in some
of the Stoics. This idea is explicable in terms of law, and is
introduced as such in *Exodus* in connection with the covenant
on Mt. Sinai. The kingdom is the realm in which the laws obtain.




This raises a question about the extent of this realm. The Ten
Commandments are given in the context of a covenant with the people of
Israel, though there are references to God's intention to bless the
whole world through this covenant. The surrounding laws in the
Pentateuch include prescriptions and proscriptions about ritual purity
and sacrifice and the use of the land that seem to apply to this
particular people in this particular place. But the covenant that God
makes with Noah after the flood is applicable to the whole human race,
and universal scope is explicit in the Wisdom books, which make a
continual connection between how we should live and how we were
created as human beings. For example, in *Proverbs* 8 Wisdom
raises her voice to all humankind, and says that she detests
wickedness, which she goes on to describe in considerable detail. She
says that she was the artisan at God's side when God created the world
and its inhabitants. Judaism distinguishes seven 'Noahide'
laws given to Noah before the covenant with Abraham.




In the writings which Christians call 'The New Testament'
the theme of God's commands is recapitulated. Jesus sums up the
commandments under two, the command to love God with all one's heart
and soul and mind (see *Deuteronomy* 6:5), and the command to
love the neighbor as the self (see *Leviticus* 19:18). The
first of these probably sums up the first 'table' of the
Ten Commandments to Moses, and the second sums up the second. The New
Testament is unlike the Hebrew Bible, however, in presenting a
narrative about a man who is the perfect exemplification of obedience
and who has a life without sin. New Testament scholars disagree about
the extent to which Jesus actually claimed to be God, but the
traditional interpretation is that he did make this claim; in any case
the Christian doctrine is that we can see in his life the clearest
possible revelation in human terms both of what God is like and at the
same time of what our lives ought to be like. In the 'Sermon on
the Mount' (*Matthew* 5-7) Jesus issues a number of
radical injunctions. He takes the commandments inside the heart; for
example, we are required not merely not to murder, but not to be
angry, and not merely not to commit adultery, but not to lust
(see *Ezekiel* 11:19, 'I will give them a heart of flesh,
that they may walk in my statutes.') We are told, if someone
strikes us on the right cheek, to turn to him also the left. Jesus
tells us to love our enemies and those who hate and persecute us, and
in this way he makes it clear that the love commandment is not based
on reciprocity (*Matt* 5:43-48; *Luke*
6:27-36). Finally, when he is asked 'Who is my
neighbor?', he tells the story (*Luke* 10) of a Samaritan
(traditional enemies of the Jews) who met a wounded Jew he did not
know by the side of the road, was moved with compassion, and went out
of his way to meet his needs; Jesus commends the Samaritan for being
'neighbor' to the wounded traveler.




The theme of self-sacrifice is clearest in the part of the narrative
that deals with Jesus' death. This event is understood in many
different ways in the New Testament, but one central theme is that
Jesus died on our behalf, an innocent man on behalf of the
guilty. Jesus describes the paradigm of loving our neighbors as the
willingness to die for them. This theme is connected with our
relationship to God, which we violate by disobedience, but which is
restored by God's forgiveness through redemption. In Paul's letters
especially we are given a three-fold temporal location for the
relation of morality to God's work on our behalf. We are forgiven for
our *past* failures on the basis of Jesus' sacrifice
(*Rom*. 3:21-26). We are reconciled *now* with God
through God's adoption of us in Christ
(*Rom*. 8:14-19). And we are given the hope
of *future* progress in holiness by the work of the Holy Spirit
(*Rom*. 5:3-5). All of this theology requires more
detailed analysis, but this is not the place for it.




There is a contrast between the two traditions I have so far
described, namely the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. The idea of God
that is central in Greek philosophy is the idea of God attracting us,
like a kind of magnet, so that we desire to become more like God,
though there is a minority account by Socrates of receiving divine
commands. In the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the notion of God
commanding us is central. It is tempting to simplify this contrast by
saying that the Greeks favor *the good*, in their account of
the relation of morality and religion, and the Judeo-Christian account
favors *the right* or obligation. It is true that the notion of
obligation makes most sense against the background of command. But the
picture is over-simple because the Greeks had room in their account
for the constraint of desire; thus the temperate or brave person in
Aristotle's picture has desires for food or sex or safety that have to
be disciplined by the love of the noble. On the other side, the
Judeo-Christian account adds God's love to the notion of God's
command, so that the covenant in which the commands are embedded is a
covenant by which God blesses us, and we are given a route towards our
highest good which is union with God.


## 3. The Middle Ages




The rest of the history to be described in this entry is a
cross-fertilization of these two traditions or lines of thought. In
the patristic period, or the period of the early Fathers, it was
predominantly Plato and the Stoics amongst the Greek philosophers
whose influence was felt. The Eastern and Western parts of the
Christian church split during the period, and the Eastern church
remained more comfortable than the Western with language about humans
being deified (in Greek *theosis*). In the Western church,
Augustine (354-430) emphasized the gap between the world we are
in as resident aliens and our citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem,
and even in our next life the distance between ourselves and God. He
describes in the
*Confessions* the route by which his heart or will, together
with his understanding, moved from paganism through Neo-Platonism to
Christianity. The Neo-Platonists (such as Plotinus, 205-270) taught a
world-system of emanation, whereby the One (like Plato's Form of the
Good) flowed into Intellect (the realm of the Forms) and from there
into the World-Soul and individual souls, where it encountered the
realm of bodies, from where it returned to itself ('the flight of the
alone to the alone'). Augustine accepted that the Platonists taught,
like the beginning of the prologue of *John*, that the Word (in
Greek, *logos*) is with God and is God, since the Intellect is
the mediating principle between the One and the Many (*John*
1:1-5). Augustine held that Plato had asserted that the supreme good,
possession of which alone gives us blessedness, is God, 'and therefore
(Plato) thought that to be a philosopher is to be a lover of God.'
(*De Civ. Dei* VIII.8). But the Platonists did not teach, like
the *end* of John's prologue, that the Word is made flesh in
Jesus Christ, and so they did not have access to the way to salvation
revealed in Christ or God's grace to us through Christ's
death. Nonetheless, it is surprising how far Augustine can go in
rapprochement. The Forms, he says, are in the mind of God and God uses
them in the creation of the world. Human beings were created for union
with God, but they have the freedom to turn towards themselves instead
of God. If they turn to God, they can receive divine illumination
through a personal intuition of the eternal standards (the Forms). If
they turn towards themselves, they will lose the sense of the order of
creation, which the order of their own loves should reflect. Augustine
gives primacy to the virtue of loving what ought to be loved,
especially God. In his homily on *I John* 4:8, he says, 'Love
and do what you will.' But this is not a denial of the moral law. He
held that humans who truly love God will also act in accord with the
other precepts of divine and moral law; though love not merely
fulfills the cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice, courage and
temperance) but transforms them by supernatural grace.




The influence of Augustine in the subsequent history of ethics
resulted from the fact that it was his synthesis of Christianity (the
official religion of the Roman Empire after 325) and Greek philosophy
that survived the destruction of the Western Roman Empire, especially
in the monasteries where the texts were still read. Boethius
(c. 480-524) gave us the definition of the concept of
'person' that has been fundamental to ethical theory. To
understand this, we need to go back into the history of the
development of the doctrine of the Trinity. The church had to explain
how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit could be distinct and yet
not three different gods. They used, in Latin, the
term *persona*, which means 'role' but which was
also used by the grammarians to distinguish what we call 'first
person, second person and third person' pronouns and
verb-forms. The same human being can be first person 'I',
second person 'you', and third person 'he' or
'she', depending on the relations in which he or she
stands. The doctrine of the Trinity comes to be understood in terms of
three persons, one God, with the persons standing in different
relations to each other. But then this term 'person' is
also used to understand the relation of the second person's divinity
to his humanity. The church came to talk about one person with two
natures, the person standing under the natures. This had the merit of
not making either the humanity or the divinity less essential to who
Jesus was. Plato and Aristotle did not have any term that we can
translate 'person' in the modern sense, as
some*one* (as opposed to some*thing*) that stands under
all his or her attributes. Boethius, however, defines
'person' as 'individual substance of rational
nature,' a key step in the introduction of our present
concept.




In the West knowledge of most of Aristotle's texts was lost, but not
in the East. They were translated into Syriac, and Arabic, and
eventually (in Muslim Spain) into Latin, and re-entered Christian
Europe in the twelfth century accompanied by translations of the great
Arabic commentaries. In the initial prophetic period of Islam (CE
610-32) the Qur'an was given to Mohammad, who explained it and
reinforced it through his own teachings and practices. The notion of
God's (Allah's) commands is again central, and our obedience to these
commands is the basis of our eventual resurrection. Disputes about
political authority in the period after Mohammad's death led to the
split between Sunnis and Shiites. Within Sunni Muslim ethical theory
in the Middle Ages two major alternative ways developed of thinking
about the relation between morality and religion. The first, the
Mu'tazilite, was given its most developed statement by 'Abd
al-Jabbar from Basra (d. 1025). 'Abd al-Jabbar defines a
wrongful act as one that deserves blame, and holds that the right and
wrong character of acts is known immediately to human reason,
independently of revelation. These standards that we learn from reason
apply also to God, so that we can use them to judge what God is and is
not commanding us to do. He also teaches that humans have freedom, in
the sense of a power to perform both an act and its opposite, though
not at the same time. (For Mu'tazilite ethical theory, see Sophia
Vasalou,
*Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Mu'tazilite
Ethics* and George Hourani, *Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of
'Abd al-Jabbar*.) The second alternative was taught by al-Ashari
(d. 935), who started off as a Mu'tazilite, but came to reject their
view. He insists that God is subject to none and to no standard that
can fix bounds for Him. Nothing can be wrong for God, who sets the
standard of right and wrong. This means that 'if God declared lying to
be right, it would be right, and if He commanded it, none could
gainsay Him' (*The Theology of al-Ash'ari*, 169-70). With
respect to our freedom, he holds that God gives us only the power to
do the act (not its opposite) and this power is simultaneous to the
act and does not precede it. A figure contemporary with al-Ashari, but
in some ways intermediate between Mu'tazilites and Asharites, is
al-Maturidi of Samarqand (d. 944). He holds that because humans have
the tendency in their nature towards ugly or harmful actions as well
as beautiful or beneficial ones, God has to reveal to us by command
what to pursue and what to avoid. He also teaches that God gives us
two different kinds of power, both the power simultaneous with the act
(which is simply to do the act) and the power preceding the act (to
choose either the act or its opposite). (For the work of al-Maturidi,
see Ulrich Rudolph, *Al-Maturidi and Sunni Theology in
Samarkand*.)




Medieval reflection within Judaism about morality and religion has, as
its most significant figure, Maimonides (d. 1204) who was born in
Muslim Spain, and was familiar with much of the Muslim discussion of
these questions. *The Guide of the Perplexed* was written for
young men who had read Aristotle and were worried about the tension
between the views of the philosopher and their faith. Maimonides
teaches that we do indeed have some access just as human beings to the
rightness and wrongness of acts; but what renders conforming to these
standards obligatory is that God reveals them in special
revelation. The laws are obligatory whether we understand the reasons
for them or not, but sometimes we do see how it is beneficial to obey,
and Maimonides is remarkably fertile in providing such reasons.




The reentry of Aristotle into Europe caused a rebirth (a
'renaissance'), but it also gave rise to a crisis, because
it threatened to undermine the harmony established from the time of
Augustine between the authority of reason, as represented by Greek
philosophy, and the authority of faith, as represented by the
doctrines of the Christian church. There were especially three
'errors of Aristotle' that seemed threatening: his
teaching that the world was eternal, his apparent denial of personal
immortality, and his denial of God's active agency in the world. (See,
for example, Bonaventure,
*In Hexaemeron*, VI.5 and *In II Sent*., lib. II, d.1,
pars 1, a.1, q.2.) These three issues ('the world, the soul, and God')
become in one form or another the focus of philosophical thought for
the next six centuries.




Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-74) undertook the project of synthesis
between Aristotle and Christianity, though his version of Christianity
was already deeply influenced by Augustine, and so by
Neo-Platonism. Aquinas, like Aristotle, emphasized the ends
(vegetative, animal and typically human) given to humans in the
natural order. He described both the cardinal virtues and the
theological virtues of faith, hope and love, but he did not feel the
tension that current virtue ethicists sometimes feel between virtue
and the following of rules or principles. The rules governing how we
ought to live are known, some of them by revelation, some of them by
ordinary natural experience and rational reflection. But Aquinas
thought these rules consistent in the determination of our good, since
God only requires us to do what is consistent with our own
good. Aquinas's theory is eudaimonist; 'And so the will
naturally tends towards its own last end, for every man naturally
wills beatitude. And from this natural willing are caused all other
willings, since whatever a man wills, he wills on account of the
end.' (*Summa Theologiae* I, q.60. a.2) God's will is not
exercised by arbitrary fiat; but what is good for some human being can
be understood as fitting for this kind of agent, in relation to the
purpose this agent intends to accomplish, in the real environment of
the action, including other persons individually and collectively. The
principles of natural moral law are the universal judgments made by
right reasoning about the kinds of actions that are morally
appropriate and inappropriate for human agents. They are thus, at
least in principle and at a highly general level, deducible from human
nature. Aquinas held that reason, in knowing these principles, is
participating in the eternal law, which is in the mind of God
(*Summa Theologiae* I, q.91. a.2). Aquinas was not initially
successful in persuading the church to embrace Aristotle. In 1277 the
Bishop of Paris condemned 219 propositions (not all Thomist),
including the thesis that a person virtuous in Aristotle's terms
'is sufficiently disposed for eternal happiness.' But in
the Counter-Reformation, the synthesis which Aquinas achieved became
authoritative in Roman Catholic education.




Aquinas was a Dominican friar. The other major order of friars, the
Franciscan, had its own school of philosophy, starting with
Bonaventure (c. 1217-74), who held that while we can learn from
both Plato and Aristotle, and both are also in error, the greater
error is Aristotle's. One other major figure from this tradition is
John Duns Scotus (literally John from Duns, the Scot,
c. 1266-1308), and there are three significant differences
between him and Aquinas on the relation between morality and
religion. First, Scotus is not a eudaimonist. He takes a double
account of motivation from Anselm (1033-1109), who made the
distinction between two affections of the will, the affection for
advantage (an inclination towards one's own happiness and perfection)
and the affection for justice (an inclination towards what is good in
itself independent of advantage) (Anselm, *De Concordia* 3.11,
281:7-10; *De Casu Diaboli* 12, 255:8-11). Original
sin is a ranking of advantage over justice, which needs to be reversed
by God's assistance before we can be pleasing to God. Scotus says that
we should be willing to sacrifice our own happiness for God if God
were to require this. Second, he does not think that the moral law is
self-evident or necessary. He takes the first table to be necessary,
since it derives (except for the 'every seventh day'
provision of the command about the Sabbath) from the necessary
principle that God is to be loved. But the second table is contingent,
though fitting our nature, and God could prescribe different commands
even for human beings (*Ord*. I, dist. 44). One of his examples
is the proscription on theft, which applies only to beings with
property, and so not necessarily to human beings (since they are not
necessarily propertied). God also gives dispensation from the
commands, according to Scotus, for example the command to Abraham to
kill Isaac (*Ord* III, suppl. Dist. 37). Third, Scotus denied
the application of teleology to non-intentional nature, and thus
departed from the Aristotelian and Thomist view. This does not mean
that we have no natural end or
*telos*, but that this end is related to the intention of God
in the same way a human artisan intends his or her products to have a
certain purpose (see Hare 2006, chapter 2).


## 4. Modern Philosophy




Europe experienced a second Renaissance when scholars fled
Constantinople after its capture by the Muslims in 1453, and brought
with them Greek manuscripts that were previously inaccessible. In
Florence Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) identified Plato as the
primary ancient teacher of wisdom, and (like Bonaventure) cited
Augustine as his guide in elevating Plato in this way. His choice of
Plato was determined by the harmony he believed to exist between
Plato's thought and the Christian faith, and he set about making Latin
translations of all the Platonic texts so that this wisdom could be
available for his contemporaries who did not know Greek. He was also
the first Latin translator of Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist.




Many of the central figures in the Reformation were humanists in the
Renaissance sense (where there is no implication of atheism). But
there is also a fundamental similarity in the way the relation between
morality and religion is conceived between Scotus and the two
Reformers Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin
(1509-64), though neither of them make the distinctions about
natural law that Scotus (the 'subtle doctor') does. Luther
says 'What God wills is not right because he ought or was bound
so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because
he so wills.' (*Bondage of the Will*, *Works*,
pp. 195-6). Calvin says 'God's will is so much the highest
rule of righteousness that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he
wills it, must be considered righteous' (*Institutes*
3. 23. 2). The historical connection between Scotus and the Reformers
can be traced through William of Ockham (d. 1349) and Gabriel Biel
(1410-95). The Counter-Reformation in Roman Catholic Europe, on
the other hand, took the work of Aquinas as authoritative for
education. Francisco de Suarez (1548-1617) claimed that the
precepts of natural law can be distinguished into those (like
'Do good and avoid evil') which are known immediately and
intuitively by all normal human beings, those (like 'Do no
injury to anyone') which require experience and thought to know
them, but which are then self-evident, and those (like 'Lying is
always immoral') which are not self-evident but can be derived
from the more basic precepts (*De Legibus*, 2. 7. 5). However,
Suarez accepted Scotus's double account of motivation.




The next two centuries in European philosophy can be described in
terms of two lines of development, rationalism and empiricism, both of
which led, in different ways, to the possibility of a greater
detachment of ethics from theology. The history of rationalism from
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716) is a history of re-establishing human knowledge on
the foundation of rational principles that could not be doubted, after
modern science started to shake the traditional foundations supported
by the authority of Greek philosophy and the church. Descartes was not
primarily an ethicist, but he located the source of moral law
(surprisingly for a rationalist) in God's will. The most important
rationalist in ethics was Benedict de Spinoza (1623-77). He was
a Jew, but was condemned by his contemporary faith community as
unorthodox. Like Descartes, he attempted to duplicate the methods of
geometry in philosophy. Substance, according to Spinoza, exists in
itself and is conceived through itself (*Ethics*, I, def. 3);
it is consequently one, infinite, and identical with God
(*Ethics*, I, prop. 15). There is no such thing as natural law,
since all events in nature ('God or Nature') are equally
natural. Everything in the universe is necessary, and there is no free
will, except in as far as Spinoza is in favor of calling someone free
who is led by reason ( *Ethics*, I, prop. 32). Each human mind
is a limited aspect of the divine intellect. On this view (which has
its antecedent in Stoicism) the human task is to move towards the
greatest possible rational control of human life. Leibniz was, like
Descartes, not primarily an ethicist. He said, however, that
'the highest perfection of any thinking being lies in careful
and constant pursuit of true happiness' (*New Essays on Human
Understanding*, XXI, 51). The rationalists were not denying the
centrality of God in human moral life, but their emphasis was on the
access we have through the light of reason rather than through sacred
text or ecclesiastical authority.




After Leibniz there was in Germany a long-running battle between the
rationalists and the pietists, who tried to remain true to the goals
of the Lutheran Reformation. Examples of the two schools are Christian
Wolff (1679-1754) and Christian August Crusius (1715-75),
and we can understand Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), like his
teacher Martin Knutzen (1713-51), as trying to mediate between
the two. Wolff was a very successful popularizer of the thought of
Leibniz, but fuller in his ethical system. He took from Leibniz the
principle that we will always select what pleases us most, and the
principle that pleasure is the apprehension of perfection, so that the
amount of pleasure we feel is proportional to the amount of perfection
we intuit (*New Essays on Human Understanding*, XXI, 41). He
thought we are obligated to do what will make us and our condition, or
that of others, more perfect, and this is the law of nature that would
be binding on us even if (*per impossible*) God did not
exist. He saw no problem about the connection between virtue and
happiness, since both of them result directly from our perfection, and
no problem about the connection between virtue and duty, since a duty
is simply an act in accordance with law, which prescribes the pursuit
of perfection. His views were offensive to the pietists, because he
claimed that Confucius already knew (by reason) all that mattered
about morality, even though he did not know anything about
Christ. Crusius by contrast accepted Scotus's double theory of
motivation, and held that there are actions that we ought to do
regardless of any ends we have, even the end of our own perfection and
happiness. It is plausible to see here the origin of Kant's
categorical imperative. But he also added a third motivation, what he
called 'the drive of conscience' which is 'the
natural drive to recognize a divine moral law' ("A Guide
to Rational Living,"
*Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant*, SS132, 574). His idea
was that we have within us this separate capacity to recognize divine
command and to be drawn towards it out of a sense of dependence on the
God who prescribes the command to us, and will punish us if we disobey
(though our motive should not be to avoid punishment) (Ibid.,
SS135). 




The history of empiricism in Britain from Hobbes to Hume is also the
history of the attempt to re-establish human knowledge, but not from
above (from indubitable principles of reason) but from below (from
experience and especially the experience of the senses). Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1649) said that all reality is bodily (including God), and
all events are motions in space. Willing, then, is a motion, and is
merely the last act of desire or aversion in any process of
deliberation. His view is that it is natural, and so reasonable, for
each of us to aim solely at our own preservation or pleasure. In the
state of nature, humans are selfish, and their lives are
'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', a war of all
against all (*Leviathan*, Ch. 13). The first precept of the law
of nature is then for each of us, pursuing our own interest, 'to
endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of attaining it; and when he
cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages
of war.' (*Ibid*., Ch. 14). The second precept is that
each of us should be willing to lay down our natural rights to
everything to the extent that others are also willing, and Hobbes
concludes with the need to subordinate ourselves to a sovereign who
alone will be able to secure peace. The second and longest portion
of *Leviathan* is devoted to religion, where Hobbes argues for
the authority of Scripture ('God's word'), which he thinks
is needed for the authority of law. He argues for the authority in
the *interpretation* of Scripture to be given to that same
earthly sovereign, and not to competing ecclesiastical authorities
(whose competition had been seen to exacerbate the miseries of war
both in Britain and on the continent) (*Ibid*., Ch. 33).




John Locke (1632-1704) followed Hobbes in deriving morality from
our need to live together in peace given our natural discord, but he
denied that we are mechanically moved by our desires. He agreed with
Hobbes in saying that moral laws are God's imposition, but disagreed
by making God's power and *benevolence* both necessary
conditions for God's authority in this respect (*Treatises*,
IV. XIII. 3). He also held that our reason can work out counsels or
advice about moral matters; but only God's imposition makes
*law* (and hence obligation), and we only know about God's
imposition from revelation (*The Reasonableness of
Christianity*, 62-5). He therefore devoted considerable attention
to justifying our belief in the reliability of revelation.




The deists (e.g., William Wollaston, 1659-1724) believed that
humans can reason from their experience of nature to the existence and
some of the attributes of God, that special revelation is accordingly
unnecessary, that God does not intervene in human affairs (after
creation) and that the good life for humans finds adequate guidance in
philosophical ethics. Frances Hutcheson (1694-1746) was not a
deist, but does give a reading of the sort of guidance involved
here. He distinguished between objects that are naturally good, which
excite personal or selfish pleasure, and those that are morally good,
which are advantageous to *all* persons affected. He took
himself to be giving a reading of moral goodness as *agape*,
the Greek word for the love of our neighbor that Jesus
prescribes. This love is benevolence, Hutcheson said, and it is
formulated in the principle 'That Action is best, which procures
the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers'
(*Inquiry* II, III, VIII). Because these definitions of natural
and moral good produce a possible gap between the two, we need some
way to believe that morality and happiness are coincident. Hutcheson
thought that God has given us a moral sense for this purpose
(*Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions*, II). This
moral sense responds to examples of benevolence with approbation and a
unique kind of pleasure, and benevolence is the only thing it responds
to, as it were the only signal it picks up. It is, like Scotus's
affection for justice, not confined to our perception of
advantage. The result of our having moral sense is that when intending
the good of others, we 'undesignedly' end up promoting our
own greatest good as well because we end up gratifying ourselves along
with others. God shows benevolence by first making *us*
benevolent and then giving us this moral sense that gets joy from the
approbation of our benevolence. To contemporary British opponents of
moral sense theory, this seemed too rosy or benign a picture; our joy
in approving benevolence is not enough to make morality and happiness
coincident. We need also obligation and divine sanction.




Joseph Butler (1692-1752, Bishop of Bristol and then of Durham)
held that God's goodness consists in benevolence, in wanting us to be
happy, and that we should want the same for each other. He made the
important point that something can be good for an agent because it is
what he wants without this meaning that the *content* of what
he wants has anything to do with himself (*Fifteen Sermons*,
126-27).




David Hume (1711-76) is the first figure in this narrative who
can properly be attached to the Enlightenment, though this term means
very different things in Scotland, in France and in Germany. Hume held
that reason cannot command or move the human will. Since morals
clearly do have an influence on actions and affections, 'it
follows that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because
reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such
influence' (*Treatise* III.1). For Hume an action, or
sentiment, or character, is virtuous or vicious 'because its
view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind'
(*Ibid*., III.2). The denial of motive power to reason is part
of his general skepticism. He accepted from Locke the principle that
our knowledge is restricted to sense impressions from experience and
logically necessary relations of ideas in advance of experience (in
Latin, *a priori*). From this principle he derived more radical
conclusions than Locke had done. For example, we cannot know about
causation or the soul. The only thing we can know about morals is that
we get pleasure from the thought of some things and pain from the
thought of others. Since the idea of morality implies something
universal, there must be some sentiment of sympathy or (he later says)
humanity, which is common to all human beings, and which
'recommends the same object to general approbation'
(*Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals*,
IX. I. 221). Hume thought we could get conventional moral conclusions
from these moral sentiments, which nature has fortunately given us. He
was also skeptical about any attempt to derive conclusions containing
'ought' from premises containing only 'is',
though scholars debate about the scope of the premises he is talking
about here. Probably he included premises about God's will or nature
or action. This does not mean he was arguing against the existence of
God. He thought (like Calvin) that we cannot rely on rational proofs
of God's existence, even though humans have what Calvin called a sense
of the divine and Human called 'true religion'. But Hume
never identified himself as an atheist, though he had opportunity in
the atheist circles he frequented in Paris, and his *Dialogues on
Natural Religion* end with the sentiment that 'to be a
philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most
essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian'
(*Dialogues*, part XII, penultimate paragraph). Some scholars
take this remark (like similar statements in Hobbes) as purely ironic,
but this goes beyond the evidence.




The Enlightenment in France had a more anti-clerical flavor (in part
because of the history of Jansenism, unique to France), and for the
first time in this narrative we meet genuine atheists, such as Baron
d'Holbach (1723-89) who held not only that morality did not need
religion, but that religion, and especially Christianity, was its
major impediment. Francois-Marie Voltaire (1694-1778) was,
especially towards the end of his life, opposed to Christianity, but
not to religion in general (*Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the
Great*, letter 156). He accepted from the English deists the idea
that what is true in Christian teachings is the core of human values
that are universally true in all religions, and (like the German
rationalists) he admired Confucius. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)
said, famously, that mankind is born free, but everywhere he is in
chains (*The Social Contract*, Ch. 1). This supposes a
disjunction between nature and contemporary society, and Rousseau held
that the life of primitive human beings was happy inasmuch as they
knew how to live in accordance with their own innate needs; now we
need some kind of social contract to protect us from the corrupting
effects of society upon the proper love of self. Nature is understood
as the whole realm of being created by God, who guarantees its
goodness, unity, and order. Rousseau held that we do not need any
intermediary between us and God, and we can attain salvation by
returning to nature in this high sense and by developing all our
faculties harmoniously. Our ultimate happiness is to feel ourselves at
one with the system that God created.




Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is the most important figure of the
Enlightenment in Germany, but his project is different in many ways
from those of his French contemporaries. He was brought up in a
pietist Lutheran family, and his system retains many features from,
for example, Crusius. But he was also indebted through Wolff to
Leibniz. Moreover, he was 'awoken from his dogmatic
slumbers' by reading Hume, though Kant is referring here to
Hume's attack on causation, not his ethical theory
(*Prolegomena*, 4:260). Kant's mature project was to limit
human knowledge 'in order to make room for faith'
(*KrV*, B xxx). He accepted from Hume that our knowledge is
confined within the limits of possible sense experience, but he did
not accept skeptical conclusions about causation or the soul. Reason
is not confined, in his view, to the same limits as knowledge, and we
are rationally required to hold beliefs about things as they are in
themselves, not merely things as they appear to us. In particular, we
are required to believe in God, freedom and immortality. These are
three 'postulates of practical reason', required to make
rational sense of the fact of moral obligation, the fact that we are
under the moral law (the 'categorical imperative') that
requires us to will the maxim of an action (the prescription of the
action together with the reason for it) as a universal law (removing
any self-preference) and to treat humanity in any person as always at
the same time an end and never merely as a means (*Groundwork*,
4.421, 429). Kant thought that humans have to be able to believe that
morality in this demanding form is consistent in the long run with
happiness (both their own and that of the people they affect by their
actions), if they are going to be able to persevere in the moral life
without rational instability. He did not accept the three
traditional *theoretical* arguments for the existence of God
(though he was sympathetic to a modest version of the teleological
argument). But the *practical* argument was decisive for him,
though he held that it was possible to be morally good without being a
theist, despite such a position being rationally unstable.




In *Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason* he undertook
the project of using moral language in order to translate the four
main themes of Biblical revelation (accessible only to particular
people at particular times) into the revelation to Reason (accessible
to all people at all times). This does not mean that he intended to
reduce Biblical faith to morality, though some scholars have taken him
this way. The translated versions of Creation, Fall, Redemption and
Second Coming are as follows (see Hare 1996): Humans have an initial
predisposition to the good, which is essential to them, but is
overlaid with a propensity to evil, which is not essential to
them. Since they are born under 'the Evil Maxim' that
subordinates duty to happiness, they are unable by their own devices
to reverse this ranking, and require 'an effect of grace'
(*Religion*, 6.53). Providence ushers in progress (though not
continuous) towards an 'ethical commonwealth' in which we
together make the moral law our own law, by appropriating it as
authoritative for our own lives (this is what Kant means by
'autonomy') (*Religion*, 6.98-99;
*Groundwork*, 4.433-34). 




A whole succession of Kant's followers tried to 'go
beyond' Kant by showing that there was finally no need to make
the separation between our knowledge and the thing-in-itself beyond
our knowledge. One key step in departing from the surviving influence
in Kant of Lutheran pietism was taken by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814), who identified (as Kant did not) the will of the
individual with the infinite Ego which is ordering the universe
morally. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) accomplished
a somewhat similar end by proposing that we should make the truth of
ideas relative to their original historical context against the
background of a history that is progressing towards a final stage of
'absolute knowledge', in which Spirit (in
German *Geist*, which means also 'mind')
understands that reality is its own creation and there is no
'beyond' for it to know. Hegel is giving a philosophical
account of the Biblical notion of all things returning to God,
'so that God may be all in all.' (*I Cor*. 15:28)
In this world-history, Hegel located the Reformation as 'the
all-enlightening sun' of the bright day that is our modern time
(*The Philosophy of History*, 412). He thought that Geist moves
immanently through human history, and that the various stages of
knowledge are also stages of freedom, each stage producing first its
own internal contradiction, and then a radical transition into a new
stage. The stage of absolute freedom will be one in which all members
freely by reason endorse the organic community and the concrete
institutions in which they actually live (*Phenomenology*, BB,
VI, B, III).




One of Hegel's opponents was Arthur Schopenhauer (1799-1860),
the philosopher of pessimism. Schopenhauer thought that Hegel had
strayed from the Kantian truth that there is a thing-in-itself beyond
appearance, and that the Will is such a thing. He differed from Kant,
however, in seeing the Will as the source of all our endless
suffering, a blind striving power without ultimate purpose or design
(*The World as Will and Representation*, SS56 p. 310 and
SS57 p. 311). It is, moreover, one universal Will that underlies
the wills of all separate individuals. The intellect and its ideas are
simply the Will's servant. On this view, there is no happiness for us,
and our only consolation is a (quasi-Buddhist) release from the Will
to the limited extent we can attain it, especially through aesthetic
enjoyment.




Hegel's followers split into what are sometimes called 'Right
Hegelians' and 'Left Hegelians' (or 'Young
Hegelians'). Right Hegelians promoted the generally positive
view of the Prussian state that Hegel expressed in the *Philosophy
of Right*. Left Hegelians rejected it, and with it the Protestant
Christianity which they saw as its vehicle. In this way Hegel's
peculiar way of promoting Christianity ended up causing its vehement
rejection by thinkers who shared many of his social ideals. David
Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) wrote *The Life of Jesus
Critically Examined*, launching the historical-critical method of
Biblical scholarship with the suggestion that much of the Biblical
account is myth or 'unconscious invention' that needs to
be separated out from the historical account. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
(1804-72) wrote *The Essence of Christianity* in which he
pictured all religion as the means by which 'man projects his
being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this
projected image of himself' (*The Essence of
Christianity*, 30). Feuerbach thought religion resulted from
humanity's alienation from itself, and philosophy needed to destroy
the religious illusion so that we could learn to love humankind and
not divert this love onto an imaginary object. Karl Marx
(1818-83) followed Feuerbach in this diagnosis of religion, but
he was interested primarily in social and political relations rather
than psychology. He became suspicious of theory (for example Hegel's),
on the grounds that theory is itself a symptom of the power structures
in the societies that produce it. "Theory," Marx writes,
"is realized in a people only in so far as it is a realization
of the people's needs" ("Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right," *Early Writings*, 252). And
'ideologies' and 'religion,' he believes,
arise from "conditions that require [these] illusions"
(Ibid., 244). Marx returned to Hegel's thoughts about work revealing
to the worker his value through what the worker produces, but Marx
argues that under capitalism the worker was alienated from this
product because other people owned both the product and the means of
producing it. Marx urged that the only way to prevent this was to
destroy the institution of private property ("Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts," *Early Writings*, 348). Thus he
believed, like Hegel, in progress through history towards freedom, but
he thought it would take Communist revolution to bring this about.




A very different response to Hegel (and Kant) is found in the work of
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), a religious thinker who
started, like Hegel and Kant, from Lutheranism. Kierkegaard mocked
Hegel constantly for presuming to understand the whole system in which
human history is embedded, while still being located in a particular
small part of it. On the other hand, he used Hegelian categories of
thought himself, especially in his idea of the aesthetic life, the
ethical life and the religious life as stages through which human
beings develop by means of first internal contradiction and then
radical transition. Kierkegaard's relation with Kant was problematic
as well. In *Either/Or* he caricatured Kant's ethical thought
(as well as Hegel's) in the person of Judge William, who is stuck
within the ethical life and has not been able to reach the life of
faith. On the other hand, his own description of the religious life is
full of echoes of Kant's *Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason*. Kierkegaard wrote most of his work pseudonymously, taking
on the names of characters who lived the lives he describes. In the
aesthetic life the goal is to keep at bay the boredom that is
constantly threatening, and this requires enough distance from one's
projects that one is not stuck with them but can flit from engagement
to engagement without pain (*Either/Or*, II. 77). This life
deconstructs, because it requires (in order to sustain interest) the
very commitment that it also rejects. The transition is accomplished
by making a choice for one's life as a whole from a position that is
not attached to any particular project, a radical choice that requires
admitting the aesthetic life has been a failure. In this choice one
discovers freedom, and thus the ethical life (*Either/Or*,
II. 188). But this life too deconstructs, because it sets up the goal
of living by a demand, the moral law, that is higher than we can live
by our own human devices. Kierkegaard thought we have to realize that
God is (contrary to Fichte) 'another' (*Sickness unto
Death* xi 128), with whom we have to relate, and whose assistance
is necessary even for the kind of repentance that is the transition
into the religious life. He also suggested that within the religious
life, there is a 'repetition' of the aesthetic life and
the ethical life, though in a transformed version.




Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was the son of a Lutheran pastor
in Prussia. He was trained as a classical philologist, and his first
book, *The Birth of Tragedy*, was an account of the origin and
death of ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche was deeply influenced by
Schopenhauer, especially his view of the will (which Nietzsche called
'the Will to Power'), and was first attracted and then
repelled by Wagner, who was also one of Schopenhauer's disciples. The
breaking point seems to have been
Wagner's *Parsifal*. Nietzsche by this time was opposed to
orthodox Christianity and was promoting Ancient Greece instead, and he
thought that Wagner was betraying his integrity by using an
'anti-Greek' Christian story for the opera. Nietzsche saw
clearly the intimate link between Christianity and the ethical
theories of his predecessors in Europe, especially Kant. In *On the
Genealogy of Morals*, he says, 'The advent of the Christian
God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by
the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Presuming we have
gradually entered upon the *reverse* course, there is no small
probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the
Christian God, there is now also a considerable decline in mankind's
feeling of guilt' (*On the Genealogy of Morals*,
90-1). This is the 'death of God' which Nietzsche
announced, and which he predicted would also be the end of Kantian
ethics (*The Gay Science*, SS108, 125, 343). It is harder
to know what Nietzsche was for, than what he was against. This is
partly an inheritance from Schopenhauer, who thought any system of
constructive ethical thought a delusion. But Nietzsche clearly admired
the Ancient Greeks, and thought we would be better off with a
'master' morality like theirs, rather than a
'slave' morality like Christianity. 'Mastery over
himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over
nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures'
(*Genealogy*, 59-60). By this last clause, he meant mastery
over other people, and the model of this mastery is the
'overman' who is free of the resentment by the weak of the
strong that Nietzsche thought lay at the basis of Christian
ethics.




To return to Britain, Hume had a number of successors who accepted the
view (which Hume took from Hutcheson) that our fundamental obligation
is to work for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Four are
especially significant. William Paley (1743-1805) thought he
could demonstrate that morality derived from the will of God and
required promoting the happiness of all, that happiness was the sum of
pleasures, and that we need to believe that God is the final granter
of happiness if we are to sustain motivation to do what we know we
ought to do (*The Principles of Moral and Political
Philosophy*, II. 4). Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) rejected
this theological context. His grounds were radically empiricist, that
the only 'real' entities are publicly observable, and so
do not include God (or, for that matter, right or time or relations or
qualities). He thought he could provide a scientific calculus of
pleasures, where the unit that stays constant is the minimum state of
sensibility that can be distinguished from indifference. He thought we
could then separate different 'dimensions' in which these
units vary, such as intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity (how
soon the pleasures will come), fecundity (how many other pleasures
this pleasure will produce) and purity. Discarding the theological
context made moral motivation problematic, for why should we expect
(without God) more units of pleasure for ourselves by contributing to
the greater pleasure of others? Bentham's solution was to hope that
law and social custom could provide individuals with adequate motives
through the threat of social sanctions, and that what he called
'deontology' (which is personal or private morality) could
mobilize hidden or long-range interests that were already present but
obscure.




John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was raised on strict utilitarian
principles by his father, a follower of Bentham. Unlike Bentham,
however, Mill accepted that there are qualitative differences in
pleasures simply as pleasures, and he thought that the higher
pleasures were those of the intellect, the feelings and imagination,
and the moral sentiments. He observed that those who have experienced
both these and the lower pleasures, tend to prefer the former. At the
age of twenty he had a collapse and a prolonged period of
'melancholy'. He realized that his education had neglected
the culture or cultivation of
*feelings*, of which hope is a primary instance
(*Autobiography*, 1. 84). In his *Three Essays on
Religion* (published posthumously in 1874) he returned to the idea
of hope, saying that 'the indulgence of hope with regard to the
government of the universe and the destiny of man after death, while
we recognize as a clear truth that we have no ground for more than a
hope, is legitimate and philosophically defensible'; without
such hope, we are kept down by 'the disastrous feeling of
"not worth while"' (*Three Essays*
249-50). Mill did not believe, however, that God was omnipotent,
given all the evil in the world, and he insisted, like Kant, that we
have to be God's co-workers, not merely passive recipients of God's
assistance.




Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) in *Methods of Ethics*
distinguished three methods: Intuitionism (which is, roughly, the
common sense morality that some things, like deliberate ingratitude to
a benefactor, are self-evidently wrong in themselves independently of
their consequences), Egoistic Hedonism (the view that self-evidently
an individual ought to aim at a maximum balance of happiness for
herself, where this is understood as the greatest balance of pleasure
over pain), and Utilitarianism or Universalistic Hedonism, (the view
that self-evidently she ought to aim at the maximum balance of
happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the
cost to herself). Of these three, he rejected the first, on the
grounds that no concrete ethical principles are self-evident, and that
when they conflict (as they do) we have to take consequences into
account in order to decide how to act. But Sidgwick found the relation
between the other two methods much more problematic. Each principle
separately seemed to him self-evident, but when taken together they
seems to be mutually inconsistent. He considered two solutions,
psychological and metaphysical. The psychological solution was to
bring in the pleasures and pains of sympathy, so that if we do good to
all we end up (because of these pleasures) making ourselves
happiest. Sidgwick rejected this on the basis that sympathy is
inevitably limited in its range, and we feel it most towards those
closest to us, so that even if we include sympathetic pleasures and
pains under Egoism, it will tend to increase the divergence between
Egoistic and Utilitarian conduct, rather than bring them closer
together. The metaphysical solution was to bring in a god who desires
the greatest total good of all living things, and who will reward and
punish in accordance with this desire. Sidgwick recognized this as a
return to the utilitarianism of Paley (Compare *Methods of
Ethics*, II. 1, 2 and IV. 4, 5). He thought this solution was both
necessary and sufficient to remove the contradiction in ethics. But
this was only a reason to accept it, if in general it is reasonable to
accept certain principles (such as the Uniformity of Nature) which are
not self-evident and which cannot be proved, but which bring order and
coherence into a central part of our thought. Sidgwick did not commit
himself to an answer to this, one way or the other.


## 5. Contemporary Philosophy




In the twentieth century professional philosophy in the West divided
up into two streams, sometimes called 'Analytic' and
'Continental', and there were periods during which the two
schools lost contact with each other. Towards the end of the century,
however, there were more philosophers who could speak the languages of
both traditions. The beginning of the analytic school is sometimes
located with the rejection of a neo-Hegelian idealism by G.E. Moore
(1873-1958). One way to characterize the two schools is that the
Continental school continued to read and be influenced by Hegel, and
the Analytic school (with some exceptions) did not. Another way to
make the distinction is geographical; the analytic school is located
primarily in Britain, Scandinavia and N. America, and the continental
school in the rest of Europe, in Latin America and in certain schools
in N. America.




We will start with some figures from the Continental school, and then
move to the analytic (which is this writer's own). Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976) was initially trained as a theologian, and wrote his
dissertation on what he took to be a work of Duns Scotus. He took an
appointment under Edmund Husserl (1855-1938) at Freiburg, and
was then appointed to succeed him in his chair. Husserl's program of
'phenomenology' was to recover a sense of certainty about
the world by studying in exhaustive detail the cognitive structure of
appearance. Heidegger departed from Husserl in approaching Being
through a focus on 'Human Being' (in
German *Dasein*) concerned above all for its fate in an alien
world, or as 'anxiety' (*Angst*) towards death
(see *Being and Time* I. 6). In this sense he is the first
existentialist, though he did not use the term. Heidegger emphasized
that we are 'thrown' into a world that is not
'home', and we have a radical choice about what
possibilities for ourselves we will make actual. Heidegger drew here
from Kierkegaard, and he is also similar in describing the danger of
falling back into mere conventionality, what Heidegger calls
'the They' (*das Man*). On the other hand he is
unlike Kierkegaard in thinking of traditional Christianity as just one
more convention making authentic existence more difficult. In
Heidegger, as in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, it is hard to find a
positive or constructive ethics. Heidegger's position is somewhat
compromised, moreover, by his initial embrace of the Nazi party. In
his later work he moved increasingly towards a kind of quasi-religious
mysticism. His Romantic hatred of the modern world and his distrust of
system-building led to the espousal of either silence or poetry as the
best way to be open to the 'something' (sometimes he says
'the earth') which reveals itself only as
'self-secluding' or hiding itself away from our various
conceptualizations. He held the hope that through poetry, and in
particular the poetry of Holderlin, we might be able to still
sense something of the unknown god who appears 'as the one who
remains unknown,' who is quite different from the object of
theology or piety, but who can bring us back to the Being we have long
lost sight of (*Poetry, Language, Thought*, 222).




Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) did use the label
'existentialist', and said that 'Existentialism is
nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a
coherent atheist position' (*Existentialism and Human
Emotions*, 51). He denied (like Scotus) that the moral law could
be deduced from human nature, but this was because (unlike Scotus) he
thought that we give ourselves our own essences by the choices we
make. His slogan was, 'Existence precedes essence' (Ibid.,
13). 'Essence' is here the defining property of a thing,
and Sartre gave the example of a paper cutter, which is given its
definition by the artisan who makes it. Sartre said that when people
believed God made human beings, they could believe humans had a
God-given essence; but now that we do not believe this, we have
realized that humans give themselves their own essences ('First
of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only
afterwards, defines himself.' Ibid., 15). On this view there are
no outside commands to appeal to for legitimation, and we are
condemned to our own freedom. Sartre thought of human beings as trying
to be God (on a Hegelian account of what God is), even though there is
no God. This is an inevitably fruitless undertaking, which he called
'anguish'. Moreover, we inevitably desire to choose not
just for ourselves, but for the world. We want, like God, to create
humankind in our own image, 'If I want to marry, to have
children, even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances
or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not
merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone
else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In
choosing myself, I choose man' (Ibid., 18). To recognize that
this project does not make sense is required by honesty, and to hide
this from ourselves is 'bad faith'. One form of bad faith
is to pretend that there is a God who is giving us our tasks. Another
is to pretend that there is a 'human nature' that is doing
the same thing. To live authentically is to realize both that we
create these tasks for ourselves, and that they are futile.




The twentieth century also saw, within Roman Catholicism, forms of
Christian Existentialism and new adaptations of the system of Thomas
Aquinas. Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), like Heidegger, was
concerned with the nature of Being as it appears to human being, but
he tried to show that there are experiences of love, joy, hope and
faith which, as understood from *within*, give us reason to
believe in an inexhaustible Presence, which is God. Jacques Maritain
(1882-1973) developed a form of Thomism that retained the
natural law, but regarded ethical judgment as not purely cognitive but
guided by pre-conceptual affective inclinations. He gave more place to
history than traditional Thomism did, allowing for development in the
human knowledge of natural law, and he defended democracy as the
appropriate way for human persons to attain freedom and dignity. The
notion of the value of the person and the capacities given to persons
by their creator was at the center of the 'personalism' of
Pope John Paul II's
*The Acting Person* (1979), influenced by Max Scheler
(1874-1928).




Natural law theory has been taken up and modified more recently by
three philosophers who write in a style closer to the analytic
tradition, John Finnis, Alastair MacIntyre and Jean Porter. Finnis
holds that our knowledge of the fundamental moral truths is
self-evident, and so is not deduced from human nature. His *Natural
Law and Natural Rights* (1980) was a landmark in integrating the
modern vocabulary and grammar of rights into the tradition of Natural
Law. MacIntyre, who has been on a long journey back from Marxism to
Thomism, holds that we can know what kind of life we ought to live on
the basis of knowing our natural end, which he now identifies in
theological terms. In *After Virtue* (1981) he is still
influenced by a Hegelian historicism, and holds that the only way to
settle rival knowledge claims is to see how successfully each can
account for the shape taken by its rivals. A different account of
natural law is found in Porter, who in *Nature as Reason*
(2005) retains the view that our final motivation is our own happiness
and perfection, but rejects the view that we can deduce absolute
action-guiding moral principles from human nature. Another
contemporary school is virtue ethics, for example Philippa Foot in
*Natural Goodness* (2001) and Rosalind Hursthouse in *On
Virtue Ethics* (1999). They are not Roman Catholic but they are
strongly influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas. They emphasize the
notion of virtue which belongs to human nature just as bees have
stings. Hursthouse ends her book by saying that we have to hold onto
the *hope* that we can live together, not at each other's
expense, a hope which she says used to be called belief in (God's)
Providence (*On Virtue Ethics*, 265). One final contribution to
be mentioned here is Linda Zagzebski's *Divine Motivation
Theory* (2004) which proposes, as an alternative to divine command
theory, that we can understand all moral normatively in terms of the
notion of a good emotion, and that God's emotions are the best
exemplar. We will return to the rebirth of divine command theory at
the end of this entry.




Michel Foucault (1926-84) followed Nietzsche in aspiring to
uncover the 'genealogy' of various contemporary forms of
thought and practice (he was concerned, for example, with our
treatment of sexuality and mental illness), and how relations of power
and domination have produced 'discourses of truth'
("Truth and Power," *Power*, 131). In his later
work he described four different aspects of the 'practice of the
self': We select the desires, acts, and thoughts that we attend
to morally, we recognize ourselves as morally bound by some particular
ground, e.g., divine commands, or rationality, or human nature, we
transform ourselves into ethical subjects by some set of techniques,
e.g., meditation or mortification or consciousness-raising, and
finally, we propose a '*telos*' or goal, the way of
life or mode of being that the subject is aiming at, e.g.,
self-mastery, tranquility or purification. Foucault criticized
Christian conventions that tend to take morality as a juristic and
often universal code of laws, and to ignore the creative practice of
self-making. Even if Christian and post-Christian moralists turn their
attention to self-expression, he thought they tend to focus on the
confession of truth about oneself, a mode of expression which is
historically linked to the church and the modern
psycho-sciences. Foucault preferred stressing our freedom to form
ourselves as ethical subjects, and develop 'a new form of
right' and a 'non-disciplinary form of power'
("Disciplinary Power and Subjection,"
*Power*, 242). He did not, however, tell us much more about
what these new forms would be like.




Jurgen Habermas (1929-) proposed a 'communicative
ethics' that develops the Kantian element in Marxism (*The
Theory of Communicative Action*, Vols. I and II). By analyzing the
structure of communication (using speech-act theory developed in
analytic philosophy) he lays out a procedure that will rationally
justify norms, though he does not claim to know what norms a society
will adopt by using this procedure. The two ideas behind this
procedure are that norms are valid if they receive the consent of all
the affected parties in unconstrained practical communication, and if
the consequences of the general observance of the norms (in terms of
how each person's interests are affected) are acceptable to
all. Habermas thinks he fulfills in this way Hegel's aim of
reconciling the individual and society, because the communication
process extends individuals beyond their private perspectives in the
process of reaching agreement. Religious convictions need to be left
behind when entering the public square, on this scheme, because they
are not communicable in the way the procedure requires. In recent work
he has modified this position, by recognizing that certain religious
forms require their adherents to speak in an explicitly religious way
when advancing their prescriptions for public life, and it is
discriminatory to try to prevent their doing so.




Within contemporary Jewish ethics mention should be made of Martin
Buber (1878-1965) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95). Buber's
form of existentialism emphasized the I-You relationship, which exists
not only between human beings but (out of that) between human beings
and God. When we reject I-You relationship, we return to I-It
relations, governed by our impositions of our own conceptualizations
on objects. Buber said these two relations are
exhaustive. 'There is no I as such but only the I of the basic
word I-You and the I of the basic word I-It.' (*I and
Thou*, 54). Levinas studied under Husserl, and knew Heidegger,
whose work he first embraced and then rejected. His focus, like
Buber's, was on the 'ethics of the Other', and he held
that the face of the Other makes a demand on us even before we
recognize our freedom to accept it or reject it. To meet the Other is
to have the idea of Infinity (*Ethics and Infinity*,
90-1).




We are sometimes said to live now in a 'post-modern'
age. This term is problematic in various ways. As used within
architectural theory in the 1960's and 1970's it had a relatively
clear sense. There was a recognizable style that either borrowed bits
and pieces from styles of the past, or mocked the very idea (in
modernist architecture) of essential functionality. In philosophy, the
term is less clearly definable. It combines a distaste for
'meta-narratives' and a rejection of any form of
foundationalism. The effect on philosophical thinking about the
relation between morality and religion is two-fold. On the one hand,
the modernist rejection of religion on the basis of a foundationalist
empiricism is itself rejected. This makes the current climate more
hospitable to religious language than it was for most of the twentieth
century. But on the other hand, the distaste for over-arching theory
means that religious meta-narratives are suspect to the same degree as
any other, and the hospitality is more likely to be towards bits and
pieces of traditional theology than to any theological system as a
whole. Habermas uses the term 'post-secular age' to
describe our current condition, in which the secularization hypothesis
(that religion was destined to wither away under the impact of science
and education) has apparently failed.




Mention should be made of some movements that are not philosophical in
a professional sense, but are important in understanding the relation
between morality and religion. Liberation theology, of which a leading
spokesman from Latin America is Gustavo Gutierrez (1928-), has
attempted to reconcile the Christian gospel with a commitment
(influenced by Marxist categories) to revolution to relieve the
condition of the oppressed. The civil rights movement (drawing heavily
on *Exodus*), feminist ethics, animal liberation, environmental
ethics, and the gay rights and children's rights movements have shown
special sensitivity to the moral status of some particular oppressed
class. The leadership of some of these movements has been religiously
committed, while the leadership of others has not. At the same time,
the notion of human rights, or justified claims by *every*
human being, has grown in global reach, partly through the various
instrumentalities of the United Nations. There has, however, been less
consensus on the question of how to *justify* human
rights. There are theological justifications, deriving from the image
of God in every human being, or the command to love the neighbor, or
the covenant between God and humanity (see Wolterstorff,
*Justice*: *Rights and Wrongs*, chapter 16). Whether
there is a non-theological justification is not yet clear. Finally,
there has also been a burst of activity in professional ethics, such
as medical ethics, engineering ethics, and business ethics. This has
not been associated with any one school of philosophy rather than
another. The connection of religion with these developments has been
variable. In some cases (e.g., medical ethics) the initial impetus for
the new sub-discipline was strongly influenced by theology, and in
other cases not.




The origin of analytic philosophy can be associated with
G.E. Moore. His *Principia Ethica* (1903) can be regarded as
the first major ethical document of the school. He was strongly
influenced by Sidgwick at Cambridge, but rejected Sidgwick's negative
views about intuitionism. He thought that intrinsic goodness was a
real property of things, even though (like the number two) it does not
exist in time and is not the object of sense experience. He explicitly
aligned himself here with Plato and against the class of empiricist
philosophers, 'to which most Englishmen have belonged'
(*Principia Ethica*, 162). His predecessors, Moore thought, had
almost all committed the error, which he called 'the
naturalistic fallacy,' of trying to define this value property
by identifying it with a non-evaluative property. For example, they
proposed that goodness is pleasure, or what produces pleasure. But
whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical
to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that
property is in fact good. For example, it makes sense to ask whether
pleasure or the production of pleasure is good. This is true also if
we propose a supernatural property to identify with goodness, for
example the property of being commanded by God. It still makes sense
to ask whether what God commands is good. This question cannot be the
same as the question 'Is what God commands what God
commands?' which is not still an open question. Moore thought
that if these questions are different, then the two properties,
goodness and being commanded by God, cannot be the same, and to say
(by way of a definition) that they are the same is to commit the
fallacy. Intrinsic goodness, Moore said, is a simple non-natural
property (i.e., neither natural nor supernatural) and indefinable. He
thought we had a special form of cognition that he called
'intuition,' which gives us access to such properties. By
this he meant that the access was not based on inference or argument,
but was self-evident (though we could still get it wrong, just as we
can with sense-perception). He thought the way to determine what
things had positive value intrinsically was to consider what things
were such that, if they existed *by themselves* in isolation,
we would yet judge their existence to be good.




At Cambridge Moore was a colleague of Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Russell
was not primarily a moral philosopher, but he expressed radically
different views at different times about ethics. In 1910 he agreed
with Moore that goodness (like roundness) is a quality that belongs to
objects independently of our opinions, and that when two people differ
about whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right. By 1922
he was holding an error theory (like that of John Mackie,
1917-81) that although we mean by 'good' an
objective property in this way, there is in fact no such thing, and
hence all our value judgments are strictly speaking false ("The
Element of Ethics," *Philosophical Essays*). Then by 1935
he had dropped also the claim about meaning, holding that value
judgments are expressions of desire or wish, and not assertions at
all. Wittgenstein's views on ethics are enigmatic and subject to
wildly different interpretations. In the *Tractatus* (which is
about logic) he says at the end, 'It is clear that ethics cannot
be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics
are one and the same.)' (*Tractatus*, 6.421). Perhaps he
means that the world we occupy is good or bad (and happy or unhappy)
as a whole, and not piece-by-piece. Wittgenstein (like Nietzsche) was
strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's notion of will, and by his
disdain for ethical theories that purport to be able to tell one what
to do and what not to do. The *Tractatus* was taken up by the
Logical Positivists, though Wittgenstein himself was never a Logical
Positivist. The Logical Positivists held a
'verificationist' theory of meaning, that assertions can
be meaningful only if they can in principle be verified by sense
experience or if they are tautologies (for example, 'All
bachelors are unmarried men.') This seems to leave ethical
statements (and statements about God) meaningless, and indeed that was
the deliberately provocative position taken by A.J. Ayer
(1910-89). Ayer accepted Moore's arguments about the
naturalistic fallacy, and since Moore's talk of 'non-natural
properties' seemed to Ayer just nonsense, he was led to
emphasize and analyze further the non-cognitive ingredient in
evaluation which Moore had identified. Suppose I say to a cannibal,
'You acted wrongly in eating your prisoner.' Ayer thought
I am not *stating* anything more than if I had simply said,
'You ate your prisoner.' I am, rather, evincing my moral
disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, 'You ate your
prisoner' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the
addition of some special exclamation marks (*Language, Truth and
Logic*, 107-8).




The emotivist theory of ethics had its most articulate treatment in
*Ethics and Language* by Charles Stevenson (1908-79). Stevenson
was a positivist, but also the heir of John Dewey (1859-1952) and the
American pragmatist tradition. Dewey had rejected the idea of fixed
ends for human beings, and stressed that moral deliberation occurs in
the context of competition within a person between different ends,
none of which can be assumed permanent. He criticized theories that
tried to derive moral principles from self-certifying reason, or
intuition, or cosmic forms, or divine commands, both because he
thought there are no self-certifying faculties or self-evident norms,
and because the alleged derivation disguises the actual function of
the principles as devices for social action. Stevenson applied this
emphasis to the competition between *people* with different
ends, and stressed the role of moral language as a social instrument
for persuasion (*Ethics and Language*, Ch. 5). On his account,
normative judgments express attitudes and invite others to share these
attitudes, but they are not strictly speaking true or false.




Wittgenstein did not publish any book after the *Tractatus*,
but he wrote and taught; and after his death *Philosophical
Investigations* was published in 1953. The later thought of
Wittgenstein bears a similar relation to the *Tractatus* as
Heidegger bears to Husserl. In both cases the quest for a kind of
scientific certainty was replaced by the recognition that science is
itself just one language, and not in many cases prior by right. The
later Wittgenstein employed the notion of different 'forms of
life' in which different 'language games' including
those of religion are at home (*Philosophical Investigation*,
SS7, 19, 373). In Oxford there was a parallel though distinct
development centering round the work of John Austin
(1911-60). Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was
infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom
that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that
traditional philosophical discussion had ignored this primary
material. In *How to do Things with Words* (published
posthumously) Austin labeled 'the descriptive fallacy' the
mistake of thinking that all language is used to perform the act of
describing or reporting, and he attributed the discovery of this
fallacy to Kant (*How to do Things with Words*, 3).




R.M. Hare (1919-2002) took up the diagnosis of this fallacy, and
proposed a 'universal prescriptivism' which attributed
three characteristics to the language of morality. First, it is
prescriptive, which is to say that moral judgments express the will in
a way analogous to commands. This preserves the emotivist insight that
moral judgment is different from assertion, but does not deny the role
of rationality in such judgment. Second, moral judgment is
universalizable. This is similar to the formula of Kant's categorical
imperative that requires that we be able to will the maxims of our
actions as universal laws. Third, moral judgment is overriding. This
means that moral prescriptions legitimately take precedence over any
other normative prescriptions. In *Moral Thinking* (1981) Hare
claimed to demonstrate that utilitarianism followed from these three
features of morality, though he excluded ideals (in the sense of
preferences for how the world should be independently of the agent's
concurrent desires or experience) from the scope of this argument. God
enters in two ways into this picture. First, Hare proposed a figure he
calls 'the archangel' who is the model for fully critical
(as opposed to intuitive) moral thinking, having full access to all
the relevant information and complete impartiality between the
affected parties. Hare acknowledge that since archangels (e.g.,
Lucifer) are not reliably impartial in this way, it is really God who
is the model. Second, we have to be able to believe (as Kant argued)
that the universe sustains morality in the sense that it is worthwhile
trying to be morally good. Hare thought that this requires something
like a belief (he called it a 'blik') in the operation of
Providence ("The Simple Believer," *Essays on Religion
and Education*, appendix, 37-9).




The most important opponent of utilitarianism in the twentieth century
was John Rawls (1921-2005). In his *Theory of Justice*
(1971) he gave, like Hare, an account of ethics heavily indebted to
Kant. But he insisted that utilitarianism does not capture the Kantian
insight that each person is an end in himself or herself, because it
'does not take seriously the distinction between persons'
(*Theory of Justice*, 22). He constructed the thought
experiment of the 'Original Position' in which individuals
imagine themselves not knowing what role in society they are going to
play or what endowments of talent or material wealth they possess, and
agree together on what principles of justice they will accept. Rawls
thought it important that substantive conceptions of the good life
were left behind in moving to the Original Position, because he was
attempting to provide an account of justice that people with competing
visions of the good could agree to in a pluralist society. Like early
Habermas he included religions under this
prohibition. In *Political Liberalism* (1993) he conceded that
the procedure of the Original Position is itself ideologically
constrained, and he moved to the idea of an overlapping consensus:
Kantians can accept the idea of justice as fairness (which the
procedure describes) because it realizes autonomy, utilitarians
because it promotes overall utility, Christians because it is part of
divine law, etc. But even here Rawls wanted to insist that adherents
of the competing visions of the good leave their particular
conceptions behind in *public* discourse and justify the
policies they endorse on grounds that are publicly accessible. He
described this as the citizen's duty of civility (*Political
Liberalism*, iv).




The section of this entry on the continental school discussed briefly
the topic of postmodernism. Within analytic philosophy the term is
less prevalent. But both schools live in the same increasingly global
cultural context. In this context we can reflect on the two main
disqualifiers of the project of relating morality intimately to
religion that seemed to emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The first disqualifier was the prestige of natural science,
and the attempt to make it foundational for all human knowledge. The
various empiricist, verificationist, and reductionist forms of
foundationalism have not yet succeeded, and even within modern
philosophy there has been a continuous resistance to them. This is not
to say they will not succeed in the future (for example we may
discover a foundation for ethics in the theory of evolution), but the
confidence in their future success has waned. Moreover, the
secularization hypothesis seems to have been false, as mentioned
earlier. Certainly parts of Western Europe are less attached to
traditional institutional forms of religion. But taking the world as a
whole, religion seems to be increasing in influence rather than
declining as the world's educational standards improve. The second
main disqualifier was the liberal idea (present in the narrative of
this entry from the time of the religious wars in Europe) that we need
a moral discourse based on reason and not religion in order to avoid
the hatred and bloodshed that religion seems to bring with it. Here
the response to Rawls has been telling. It seems false that we can
respect persons and at the same time tell them to leave their
fundamental commitments behind in public discourse, and it seems false
also that some purely rational but still action-guiding component can
be separated off from these competing substantive conceptions of the
good (see Wolterstorff, "An Engagement with Rorty".) It is
true that religious commitment can produce the deliberate targeting of
civilians in a skyscraper. But the history of the twentieth century
suggests that non-religious totalitarian regimes have at least as much
blood on their hands. Perhaps the truth is, as Kant saw, that people
under the Evil Maxim will use any available ideology for their
purposes. Progress towards civility is more likely if Muslims,
Christians, Jews, (and Buddhists and Hindus) are encouraged to enter
'the public square' *with* their commitments
explicit, and see how much common ethical ground there in fact
is. This writer has done some of this discussion, and found the common
ground surprisingly extensive, though sometime common language
disguises significant differences. Progress seems more likely in this
way than by trying to construct a neutral philosophical ground that
very few people actually accept.




One recent development in analytic ethical theory has been a revival
of divine command theory parallel to the revival of natural law theory
that I have already described. A pioneer in this revival was Philip
Quinn's *Divine Command and Moral Requirements* (1978). He
defended the theory against the usual objections (one, deriving from
Plato's *Euthyprho*, that it makes morality arbitrary, and the
second, deriving from a misunderstanding of Kant, that it is
inconsistent with human autonomy), and proposed that we understand the
relation between God and moral rightness causally, rather than
analyzing the terms of moral obligation as *meaning*
'commanded by God'. Though we could stipulate such a
definition, it would make it obscure how theists and non-theists could
have genuine moral discussion, as they certainly seem to do. Robert
M. Adams, in a series of articles and then in *Finite and Infinite
Goods* (1999), first separates off the good (which he analyzes
Platonically in terms of imitating the ultimate good, which is God)
and the right. He then defends a divine command theory of the right by
arguing that obligation is always obligation *to* someone, and
God is the most appropriate person, given human limitations. John
Hare, In
*God and Morality* (2007) and *Divine Command* (2015),
defends a version of the theory that derives from God's sovereignty
and defends the theory against the objection that obedience to divine
command itself requires justification. He also compares Christian,
Jewish and Muslim accounts of divine command. Thomas L. Carson's
*Value and the Good Life* (2000) argues that normative theory
needs to be based on an account of rationality, and then proposes that
a divine-preference account of rationality is superior to all the
available alternatives. An objection to divine command theory is
mounted by Mark Murphy's *An Essay on Divine Authority* (2002)
and *God and Moral Law* (2012) on the grounds that divine
command only has authority over those persons that have submitted
themselves to divine authority, but moral obligation has authority
more broadly. William Wainwright's *Religion and Morality*
defends the claim that divine command theory provides a more
convincing account of moral obligation than any virtue-based theory,
including Zagzebski's divine motivation theory, discussed
earlier. Finally, C. Stephen Evans, in *Kierkegaard's Ethics of
Love*: *Divine Commands and Moral Obligations* (2004) and
*God and Moral Obligation*(2013) articulates both in
Kierkegaard and in its own right a divine command theory that is
argued to be superior to all the main alternative non-theist accounts
of the nature and basis of moral obligation.




To conclude this entry, the revival of interest in divine command
theory, when combined with the revival of natural law theory I already
discussed, shows evidence that the attempt to connect morality closely
to religion is undergoing a robust recovery within professional
philosophy.