Moral Philosophy

This book offers an argument for theism. It claims only purposive accounts of the universe can do justice to our pre-philosophical moral commitment to objective moral truth and explain the human acquisition of belief-generating and belief-evaluating capacities which track such truth.This book begins with a defence of moral realism, arguing for its ‘deliberative indispensability’. It claims that the practical deliberation human beings engage in on a daily basis only makes sense if they take themselves to be aiming at a normative truth — that is to say, a truth which goes beyond their own sentiments or the conventions of their culture. Furthermore, when humans engage in practical deliberation, they necessarily take their processes of reasoning to have some ability to track the truth.The central argument of the book builds on this first claim: arguing that we need an explanation as well as a justification of our cognitive capacities with respect to moral truth. It claims that evolutionary biology is not able to generate the kind of explanation which is required — and, in consequence, that all secular philosophical accounts are forced either to abandon moral objectivism or to render the human capacity for moral knowledge inexplicable. This case is made with discussions of a wide range of moral philosophers including Simon Blackburn, Thomas Scanlon, Philippa Foot, and John McDowell. The book concludes by arguing that only purposive accounts of the universe (such as theism and Platonism) can account for human moral knowledge. Among such purposive accounts, it makes the case for theism as the most satisfying, intelligible explanation of our capacity for moral knowledge.

There has been a revival in theistic ethics within mainstream contemporary moral philosophy. The characteristic methodology of this revival is to proceed by asking whether there are features of moral norms that can be adequately explained only if we hold that such norms have some sort of theistic foundation. But this methodology, fruitful as it has been, is one-sided. This book proceeds not from the side of the moral norms, so to speak, but from the God side of things: what sort of explanatory relationship should we expect between God and moral norms given the existence of the God of orthodox theism? This question asks whether orthodox theism's conception of God as an absolutely perfect being militates in favor of a particular view of the explanation of morality by appeal to theistic facts. This book puts this methodology to work and shows that, surprisingly, the two dominant theistic accounts of morality — natural law theory and theological voluntarism (divine command theory) — fail to offer the sort of explanation of morality that we would expect given the existence of the God of orthodox theism. Drawing on the discussion of a structurally similar problem — that of the relationship between God and the laws of nature — a third, more adequate account of the relationship between God and morality is articulated, one in which facts about God and facts about nature cooperate in the explanation of moral law.

To create a possible world is to actualize it strongly or weakly. A world is prime if God can create it and he cannot create a world better than it. This book's conclusions include: (1) If there is at least one prime world, then if God does create some world he will create one of them. (2) If there are no prime worlds, then it does not follow that God does not exist. Instead, what follows is that if God creates a world he will create one that is good enough, despite the fact that he could create a world which is better. (3) These conclusions do not give rise to a good objection to theism, based on the apparent fact that the actual world is improvable, and is not good enough. (4) Even if there is a best world, or several equal‐best worlds, God cannot create any of them. (5) A good partial theodicy for evil can be provided, appealing to goods bound up with human free will, moral responsibility, and the roles of individuals' own personal traits in shaping their own and other people's lives. The partial theodicy is neutral between theological compatibilism and libertarianism. (6) The problem of evil does not provide a very strong objection to the existence of God.

This book is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. It provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. It offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well‐being. It emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. It rejects as simple‐minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well‐being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. It argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives.