Response to John Rist’s “Must Morality be Grounded on God?” (original) (raw)

In Defense of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism

2009

Many believe that objective morality requires a theistic foundation. I maintain that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts. On my view, objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind. After explaining my view, I defend it against a variety of objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland.

A BRIEF ABDUCTIVE ARGUMENT FOR THEISTIC ETHICS

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XXI, 2019, 1, pp. 61-74 , 2019

I shall develop an abductive argument for the claim that the best explanation for moral facts such as One ought not to rape and kill innocent children for sexual pleasure is that moral norms and values are grounded in God's will. I will first explain (1) the Moral Question, i. e., the question of why one should be moral at all. I will provide a brief outline of the possible answers to this question and show why most answers fail; here, I will have a closer look at moral naturalism. I will then, secondly (2), contend that the only answer to the Moral Question is theistic: Only God can provide or rather: can be the foundation of morality. Furthermore, I shall argue that only on the basis of a personal God that has a will who sets ends the very idea of moral normativity makes sense. I will conclude with some brief remarks on moral epistemology.

Hypothesized Arguments for Morality

https://econteenblog.wordpress.com/, 2021

This paper hypothesizes and argues that the meaning of morality is what maximizes happiness. Happiness in this paper will be defined as an overall sense of positive feelings and wellbeing. Also, this paper hypothesizes and argues that even though it is hypothesized that it is possible to be selfless, that the best moral act isn’t a selfless one.

A Secular Morality and a Transcendent Set of Ethics: How We Can Be "Good Without God."

One of the most pressing questions in western philosophy is "can we be good without God?" This question expresses an anthropocentric concern for establishing a morality and transcendent set of ethics outside of a divine fiat. This paper explores those concerns with a rebuttal of the Thomist concept of Moral Law as found in his Summa Theologica and argues that humans function morally with no need for divine revelation. A brief framework for preventing relativism in ethics and empirically establishing morality via the work of Michael Shermer and Sam Harris constitutes the rest of this paper.

Ethics from the inside out: moral philosophy since the "death of God"

"The scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century had major repercussions on Western moral philosophy. In the Christian tradition, God had been assigned two special roles: first as the creator of the world, including humanity; and second as its moral legislator, overseeing the actions of each person and distributing rewards or punishments according to whether they conformed to a divinely-sanctioned universal moral law. If this view were correct, people would have a clear, pragmatic reason to try to live well: they would gain the favour of God and be rewarded in the afterlife. However, since the case for the creator God’s existence had been undermined, the existence of a divine and all-knowing legislator could no longer be assumed. This led some philosophers to conclude that the language of morality was ultimately meaningless. Moral philosophers who were sceptical about God's existence faced several difficult questions. Why, if at all, should we be interested in doing ‘the right thing’? How can any version of morality have sufficient authority for anyone to have reasons, and especially decisive reasons, to behave according to it? Are there any distinctively moral reasons at all? If the decision to act morally is really pragmatic—that is, we refrain from lying, cheating and stealing because we will otherwise be punished—is the content of morality, or the specific rules that we ought to follow, ultimately arbitrary? This presentation will describe some of the ways in which moral philosophers have responded to the (possible) absence of a divine legislator. Among the theories discussed will be utilitarianism, which is the doctrine of promoting human happiness, developed as a scientifically-grounded alternative to dogmatic rule-following; natural law theory, which says that morality is derivable from facts about human nature; and constructivism, which says that moral authority is created by means of rational procedures. As we will see, the central challenge for each set of theorists is to locate the source of moral authority not in some external entity, but within the very people who are supposed to be answerable to it."

Moral Motivation and Christian Theism

John Hare’s central objections to secular theories of motivation arise via his ‘hateful nephew’ example, which, I argue, obscures important issues of scope: Who must be motivated (some/all)? How frequently must they be motivated (most/all of the time)? What is the extent of their motivation (act/tend to act)? Hare must adopt the stronger readings of these questions if his case against secular accounts of motivation is to succeed. But holding any account of motivation to such standards is misguided. Furthermore, Hare’s own theistic account of motivation cannot meet the standards he applies to his primary secular interlocutor. This study opens into wider terrain as I (i) identify which of myriad moral gaps an account of motivation is alleged to bridge; (ii) explain how the dialectic between Hare and Shelly Kagan depends upon unarticulated assumptions about judgment externalism and judgment internalism; and (iii) criticize appeals to motivational versions of ‘ought implies can’ principles

The Inevitable Contingency of Ethics on Theistic Foundations

Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization

In this article, the author examines the dependence of ethics on theistic foundations. The Western conception is that ethics is a result of a natural evolutionary process. The Modern West has never accepted or believed in any ethical system governed by religion, and modernity has tried to establish that the universal moral principles are independent of any metaphysical context. The modernity project and rising secularization have taken charge of the field, and religious significance has gone absent from the mainstream, on account of which many challenges have occurred in moral and ethical matters. We will also examine whether Modern Western Civilization has established an ethical code independent of religion and whether we should follow the Western Model, if any. Moreover, this article examines how ethics is a cause and consequence of the development of personality, and no ethical system is ever there without any religious foundations. Human beings are built on the essence of servit...

“What is the nature of morality? A response to Casebeer, Railton, and Ruse.”

It should be obvious that, within the confines of a short response, we cannot possibly answer the question that constitutes the title of our reply. Nonetheless, each of our commentators touched upon issues that bear directly on this question, so we've chosen it as a framework within which to reflect upon their many stimulating comments.

Objective Ethics Without Religion

Theists frequently aver that one of their main criticisms of atheism is that it is incompatible with ethical objectivism. This paper develops a defense of the claim that the moral code termed Ethical Rationalism (ER) is a justifiable objective moral code which does not depend on the existence of any supernatural being. ER is described as a seven principle moral code comprising two general prescriptions: do not harm others and help them whenever feasible. It is argued that ER (and, hence, objective morality) is justified on the basis of the fact that all moral agents would have a greater chance of achieving more of their plans of life leading to a long and fulfilling life if they lived in a society that followed ER than if they lived in a society that followed any other moral code.