No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
For some moral philosophers the question ‘Why be moral?’ is fundamentally inappropriate, since it seems to ask for non–moral reasons or motivations for moral action and thus to threaten the integrity and autonomy of morality. Yet the question ‘Why be moral?’ need not be oriented towards discovering non–moral reasons for moral action, but rather towards elucidating what general description of the human condition is most compatible with the fundamental character of morality. Rather than leaving the moral sense as an isolated category of human response, it is relevant to ask what other features of reality it may be associated with and in what general context it can most coherently be situated. The purpose of this paper is to examine the sense of moral obligation as an objective or categorical claim on individual action and to present the thesis that this moral sense is most intelligible within a theological context.
page 533 note 1 Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 49.
page 534 note 1 Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981), pp. 217–18, 183–5.Google Scholar
page 535 note 1 Cf. Foot, P., ‘Moral Beliefs’, in Theories of Ethics, ed. by Foot, P. (Oxford University Press, 1967),Google Scholar and Taylor, B., ‘Neutrality in Political Science’, in The Philosophy of Social Explanation, ed. by Ryan, A. (Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar
page 535 note 2 Hare denies the claim that his moral theory is ‘not objectivist in any sense’ (Mitchell, , Morality: Religious and Secular, p. 32)Google Scholar since for him a moral prescription takes subjective preferences as its raw material but becomes ‘without respect of persons’ through the logic of universalization and thus in this sense objective – it is a subjective maxim become a universal law. (Moral Thinking, p. 208).Google Scholar Yet this form of objectivity, he argues, does not make his theory a naturalism or descriptivism, since it is still possible for the ‘universal amoralist’ to make singular rather than universal prescriptions without defying logic or the facts (Ibid. pp. 186–7).
page 535 note 3 Mitchell, , Morality: Religious and Secular, p. 143.Google Scholar
page 536 note 1 Mackie, , Ethics, p. 55.Google Scholar
page 536 note 2 Winch, P., ‘Moral Integrity’, in Ethics and Action (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 190.Google Scholar
page 536 note 3 Such an understanding of rational judgement in relation to religious or metaphysical beliefs is argued for by Mitchell, B. in his The justification of Religious Belief (London, Macmillan, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by Pannenberg, W. in his Wissenschaftstheorie and Theologie (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1977).Google Scholar
page 537 note 1 Kritik der Urteilskraft (Stuttgart, Reclam, 1971), p. 461.Google Scholar
page 538 note 1 Ibid, p. 462.
page 538 note 2 Ibid, p. 463.
page 538 note 3 Ibid, p. 452.
page 538 note 4 The Theological Frontier of Ethics (London, 1961) p. 56.Google Scholar
page 539 note 1 Ibid, p. 60.
page 539 note 2 Ibid, p. 62.
page 539 note 3 Ibid, pp. 75, 88.
page 539 note 4 Ibid, pp. 63, 93.
page 539 note 5 Ibid, p. 188.
page 540 note 1 Religion and Morality, ed. by Outka, G. and Reeder, J. P. (Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1973), p. 414.Google Scholar
page 540 note 2 Ibid pp. 429, 424.
page 541 note 1 Ramsay, I. (ed.), Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (S.C.M. 1966), p. 140.Google Scholar
page 541 note 2 Ibid p. 148
page 545 note 1 A Short History of Ethics (London, Macmillan, 1966), p. 114.Google Scholar
page 545 note 2 Ethics, p. 194.Google Scholar
page 548 note 1 The Object of Morality (London, 1971), pp. 140–1.Google Scholar
page 548 note 2 Ibid p. 142.