Contemporary Moral Apologists

A. C. Ewing worked on moral goodness; Austin Farrer focused on the value and dignity of persons; George Mavrodes underscored the odd nature of binding moral duties in a naturalistic world. Robert Adams did work in theistic ethics that produced innovative variants of the moral argument; his wife, Marilyn Adams, demonstrated how God’s incommensurable goodness can address versions of the problem of evil. Linda Zagzebski identified three ways we need moral confidence. C. Stephen Evans defended divine command theory and a natural signs approach to apologetics. John Hare did landmark work on moral arguments. William Lane Craig used the moral argument to powerful effect in books and debates. C. Stephen Layman used the overriding reason thesis and conditional thesis in his variant of the argument. Scott Smith, Mark Linville, Angus Menuge, and Angus Ritchie have offered brilliant epistemic moral arguments. Paul Copan has used history to augment the moral argument.

An Agnostic Moralist

Henry Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason is a problem confronting the ethical enterprise. It’s the tension between one’s own happiness and the happiness of others; or between rational self-love and rational benevolence. Sidgwick thought each impulse was equally legitimate, yet on occasion they encounter an intractable tension. The full rationality of morality requires the resolution of this dualism, but Sidgwick didn’t see such a rapprochement as forthcoming. The only potential solution he could see is a theistic one, according to which a providential God ensures their harmony, but Sidgwick himself refused to follow this path. Nevertheless, his writings include the seeds for such a moral argument, predicated on the full rationality of morality.

The Sage of Königsberg

Better than anyone, Kant recognized the power and authority of the moral law. On that foundation he constructed two variants of the moral argument. His argument from grace pertains to whether or not the moral life is possible. Morality requires us to achieve a stand too demanding to meet on our own. Divine assistance is needed to close the resulting gap. So rationality dictates that we postulate God’s existence. Kant’s argument from providence pertains to the aforementioned rational need for happiness and virtue to cohere. Full rational commitment to morality requires that morality is a rationally stable enterprise, which entails the ultimate correspondence between virtue and (both individual and corporate) fulfillment. Without God’s existence there’s no particularly good reason to think such correspondence obtains. So rationality dictates the postulation of God’s existence.

Introduction

The richness of the history of the moral argument is a well-kept secret. Numerous luminaries from its history devoted their best intellectual energies to its exploration. Several of them gave Gifford lectures on the topic. From before Kant until the present day, the story of the moral argument has been unfolding. Its adherents have had much to say about morality, its disparate features, and their evidential potential. This book will chronicle this long and fertile history. We trust the story will serve as inspiration for a new generation to recapture some of the vision and passion shared by these luminaries in the field who had learned to live long and well with these arguments, making them part of the air they breathed, and in so doing breathing new life back into them.

A Reverend Don

H. P. Owen was a wonderfully systematic thinker, and his work is a joy to read. He was also a student of history; his moral argument is couched in what to this day remains one of the better cursory sketches of the history of the moral argument. On the shoulders of Newman, Sorley, Taylor, and others, Owen constructed an intelligent moral argument. Distinguishing between self-evidence and self-explanation, he argued that various moral phenomena, though they fall into the former category, don’t fall into the latter. In discussing the deliverances of morality and delineating their salient features, he patiently demonstrated their theistic implications, without pretending to have offered anything in the vicinity of a logical proof or demonstration. Significantly, he extended his case not just to theism generally but to Christianity particularly.

Dean of St. Paul’s

W. R. Matthews found the moral argument (along with the teleological argument) the most persuasive of all the theistic arguments. He reflects upon the “moral evolution of mankind” and asks what it implies concerning the nature of the universe; he discusses the conscience and asks, “On what grounds can we justify that sense of obligation which is the characteristic property of moral experience?” He ponders the nature of the good and asks, “What is the place of the Good in the general structure of the universe?” He finds that in each case he is led to the theistic hypothesis.

An Eminent and Erudite Platonist

A. E. Taylor argued at length against an artificial dichotomy between fact and value, in an effort to carve out evidential space for morality. Divorcing facts and values is like trying to separate the sounds of a great symphony from its musical quality. More important than what we do is who we are, and what’s needed is an adequate account for the sort of external assistance we desperately require to be radically transformed (even transfigured)—after all, Taylor said, we can’t pull ourselves up by our own hair—so we can enjoy a good never left behind and never superseded. The inherent features of moral guilt point in the direction of a personal and perfectly loving God as our first and final cause. Taylor counseled close and sustained attentiveness to the moral evidence and (as we’ve seen in others) modeled a laudably expansive epistemology.

The Theo-Philosopher of Carlisle

Hastings Rashdall critiqued Henry Sidgwick’s inability to see that rational benevolence has primacy over rational self-love, so while recognizing the dualism of practical reason, Rashdall underscored the strength of at least certain versions of theism to account for the priority of benevolence and altruism. As both a moral apologist and kind of utilitarian, Rashdall also demonstrated that agreement on normative ethical matters is not a prerequisite for proponents of the moral argument. What’s needed more centrally is an essential dependence relation of morality on God, not agreement on the peripheral matter of fine-grained normative analysis. Rashdall argued that a generous empiricism won’t domesticate morality but will instead insist on allowing the deliverances of morality, the binding nature of the moral law, and the transcendent implications and aspirations of the moral good to inform his metaphysics. Like others, he thought the moral argument works best when combined with other pieces of natural theology.

A Knightbridge Professor

William Sorley argued that God provides the best and most rational and unified view of reality, the ground of both the natural and moral orders. What a close look reveals is that Sorley’s approach, rather than dated, remains a lively, instructive, and powerful model to follow. Whether he was integrating or reconciling various pieces of natural theology—the causal and moral, is and ought, reality and value, life and work, finite and infinite goods, the temporal and transcendent, the moral law and evil, philosophy and poetry, or morality and metaphysics—his was an expansive and integrative mind and an open and capacious heart whose prescient insights have proven the test of time. He demonstrated what long and intimate acquaintance with the world of ideas can generate, and his enduring example can serve as an inspiration and corrective to much of what passes for apologetics today.

An Oxford Nolloth Professor

The work Clement Webb did on the moral argument often had for its context wider theological questions that he wished to explore. He primarily looked to Plato for inspiration about the nature of moral goodness, and he looked to Immanuel Kant on the nature of moral duties. Although he initially thought Kant had reduced religion to morality, he eventually softened on that conviction. As empirical experience justifies belief in an external world, he took our moral experience as solid justification for belief in moral realities. Inspired by James Martineau, Webb argued that the phenomenology of moral duties (which Kant explained so well) warranted belief in departing from an overambitious kind of Kantian autonomy that precludes belief in a “Higher than ourselves” (Martineau’s term) that gives us the moral law. Finally, Webb also saw some of the profound political implications of the erosion of moral foundations.