What connexion is there between factual statements concerning God or man and moral judgments? That is the question which occasions this paper. Not long ago moral philosophers were wont to say that there is a logical gap between the two sorts of utterance to which I have just referred: that nothing follows in terms of moral value from a statement of fact, no ‘ought’ from any ‘is’. They recognised only one restriction on what may be said in terms of ‘ought’ by what has been said in terms of ‘is’, namely that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. It is manifest nonsense to say that anyone ought to do what he cannot do. But, this apart, they thought it possible without contradiction or anomaly to hold any conceivable factual belief and at the same time subscribe to any conceivable moral judgment. They would have held that it makes perfectly good sense to say, for example, ‘This is God’s will but it ought not to be done’ or ‘Men are not pigs but a good man will live like a pig’. Bizarre such judgments may be, they would have said, but nonsensical they are not. They conceived it to be their main business, as moral philosophers, to erect warning notices along the edge of the is-ought gap so that contemporary moralists would not fall headlong into it as so many of their predecessors, in less enlightened ages, had done.

In the first part of his paper, Dr Hudson argues that the distinction between between facts and values is eroded because there are some factual statements (those of ‘institutional fact’) from which moral judgments do follow; and secondly he argues that there is a non-contingent connexion between beliefs about man and what it is intelligible to approve of or disapprove of morally. Both these conclusions are argued for tentatively and with reservation. In this comment I want to discuss three of the many issues Dr Hudson raises, and then to touch on a more general point which is at the source of my dissatisfaction with the drift of Dr Hudson's paper.

Miss G. E. M. Anscombe has said that, in order for progress to be made in ethics, we must have some determinate idea of ‘human flourishing.’ I want to cite in what follows the work of a number of writers in the psychiatric field who seem to me to throw light on just what it is for a human individual to flourish, for a human community to flourish, and for a human individual to flourish in relation to or in spite of his community.

The key points in Meynell's argument seem to me to be as follows: (1) It is logically absurd to say of an action or of a state of affairs that it is good unless at least some or other of the qualities w, x, y, z, etc. (e.g. being socially approved or being productive of happiness) are present. Similarly it is logically absurd to talk of human flourishing unless some or other specifiable features are present in a person's life. (2) The Heimler questionnaire shows us the sorts of ways in which the notion of human flourishing might be ‘unpacked’, viz, in terms of satisfaction through friendship, etc. I am in full agreement with him over (1) and I shall simply add some further comments on the notion of ‘evaluating’; but as far as (2) is concerned I shall voice some doubts and reservations.

I have been asked to consider two questions: How Christian ‘oughts’ are related to Christian ‘is-es’, and, What does Christianity take flourishing to be? The background to these questions is that Christian ethics have traditionally been taken, both by supporters and opponents, as au ethic of creature-hood, sometimes quite crudely conceived. It is a sketch, but by no means a caricature, of a great deal of standard Christian thinking, to depict it as answering the two questions as follows: (1) God is your Creator: therefore you ought to obey him. (2) The end of man (his true flourishing) is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.

Lady Oppenheimer has shown the need to preserve the richness of religious language and the language of vision if we are to talk about the reality of Christian ethics rather than some skeletal caricature of it. The problem is how to preserve such richness in the face of the astringent effect of the fact/value dichotomy in logic and the principle of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Therefore, rather than attempt to develop or comment directly upon Lady Oppenheimer's sensitive and perceptive exposition of the richness of some Christian ethico-theological concepts I am inclined to relate it to some of the earlier papers and to make some suggestions about the kind of prolegomenon I would like to write for it.

In few cases among modern religious ethicists are the contemporary issues concerning the problem of norms and of criteria more intriguingly brought to the fore than in the ethics of Martin Buber.

The canonical texts of Early Buddhism describe and explain a way to achieve a goal. What the goal is is not immediately clear; many different descriptions are given of it, and these descriptions can be variously interpreted. It is to some extent easier to find out what is the way to achieve the goal; the texts contain frequently repeated lists of stages on this Way. The best way of starting a consideration of the nature of the goal and its moral status is to examine the most important of these lists.

In 1944–45 a survey was carried out on the topic of religion in a London borough, and in 1960 the survey was repeated in the same borough. In both 1945 and 1960 over forty per cent of those attending Anglican services said that they did not believe in a life after death. When due allowance has been made for the relative unreliability of public opinion sampling, it is nevertheless obvious that incredulity on this issue is widespread and probably increasing, even within the Church. There are at least two main reasons for this—that personal immortality is commonly held to be incompatible with the scientific view of man, and the apparent irrelevance of the belief for life in the here and now. The question in people's minds today is no longer what the Bible says about immortality, nor what the churches teach on the subject [if indeed they teach anything at all]. These questions can be answered by reading the Bible and by consulting manuals of doctrine. The problem is this: How is it possible in any meaningful sense to believe in a life after death in the 'sixties of the twentieth century?

My object in this paper is to consider what relevance, if any, current analyses of probability have to problems of religious belief. There is no doubt that words such as ‘probable’ are used in this context; what is doubtful is that this use can be analysed as other major uses of such words can. I shall conclude that this use cannot be so analysed and hence, given the preponderance of the other uses that can, that it is misleading.

On Patterson Brown's analysis of the logic of Judeo-Christian morality, God's will is the criterion of what is right. The believer simply commits himself to or chooses God's will to the exclusion of all other criteria. Brown does not say that to obey God is a moral duty which always overrides other moral considerations. Nor does he say that God ‘transcends’ human morality either in the sense that he is the perfect exemplar of human standards or that the standard he exhibits and requires meets but also exceeds human standards. Nor does he say that God's will is to be obeyed over against morality per se. Rather, his view is that for the believer God's will is the standard of all moral judgments. For the believer, if and only if God commands something is it right. God ‘transcends’ human morality in the sense that his will need not accord with human standards.

Flew's challenge to the religious believer asks him to specify what would count as a disproof for, e.g. ‘There is a God’. A statement of such a specifiable condition I called an ‘empirical denial’. In my earlier paper I was concerned to show that a statement is a statement whether or not it has such an empirical denial. I was not particularly concerned to show that there are some statements which do not have an empirical denial; my concern was to show that it is not essential that they do. It was in connection with this point that the statement ‘John loves Mary’ was discussed. But this very same example may indeed serve as an example of a statement for which, in certain complex situations, there is no empirical denial. That is, in some circumstances, no matter what empirical conditions are specified, when the statement ‘John loves Mary’ is made (if they are not merely necessary conditions), they could obtain and still John might love Mary, as the developing situation would make clear. If the condition specified is that John is cruel to Mary and shows no concern for her, details could always emerge in such a situation to explain why, even though he loved her, he was cruel and showed no concern. And so on.

In an incisive critique of Professor Hick's Evil and the God of Love, Professor Puccetti claims to ‘carry the campaign as well as the battle’—i.e. to show that, with respect to evil, theists

‘are either “explaining it away” or saying it cannot be explained at all. And in both cases they are in effect admitting they have no rational defence to offer. Which means that despite appearances they really are abandoning the battlefield.’