Showing papers on "Supreme Being published in 1983"
TL;DR: The authors argue that the existence of a supremely moral God can have no legitimate bearing on the content of our morality, or on the reasons we have for acting or thinking as we do, or the moral arguments we give and accept.
Abstract: Most analytic philosphers hold-until recently, I numbered myself among them-that God can have no relevance to morality. This conviction is expressed rather vaguely, but it usually translates into the claim that the existence of God (even a supremely moral God) can have no legitimate bearing on the content of our morality-what we actually do or approve of as moral agents-or on the reasons we have for acting or thinking as we do-the moral arguments we give and accept. It is, I think, the latter point that will turn out to be especially crucial here: God cannot legitimately function, it is said, in any of our moral arguments, because morality, if we understand it aright, is entirely self-supporting. Of course, no one is so naive as to deny that God or the concept of God has in fact often been invoked in order to support certain moral commands or to provide a possible reason for adhering to them. But, as sophisticated philosophers, we know in advance that such appeal has no bearing one way or the other on the cogency such arguments have in their own right. Appeal to God is perhaps functioning in an emotive way, or as shorthand for referring to moral arguments so compelling or obvious that we must think of them as the only values a supreme being could embrace. But this does not alter the point: the morality we have must stand on its own. If we were believers and discovered God did not exist, or atheists who discovered that he did, our moral life, provided we understood what it was to be moral to begin with, would not change one jot. I will argue here against this view. It is rarely satisfactorily challengedlargely, I think, because in discussing it philosophers have focused on rather extreme examples, and these examples in turn obscure the nature of moral commitment and the nature of our relationship to God. Once a certain amount of drama is set aside, and a certain amount of genuine complexity is allowed to enter in, we shall find the standard view of most analytic philosophers on this problem to be seriously incomplete.
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