Henry Sidgwick — in Methods of Ethics distinguished three methods: Intuitionism which is, roughly, the common sense morality that some things, like deliberate ingratitude to a benefactor, are self-evidently wrong in themselves independently of their consequences , Egoistic Hedonism the view that self-evidently an individual ought to aim at a maximum balance of happiness for herself, where this is understood as the greatest balance of pleasure over pain , and Utilitarianism or Universalistic Hedonism, the view that self-evidently she ought to aim at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the cost to herself.
Of these three, he rejected the first, on the grounds that no concrete ethical principles are self-evident, and that when they conflict as they do we have to take consequences into account in order to decide how to act.
But Sidgwick found the relation between the other two methods much more problematic. Each principle separately seemed to him self-evident, but when taken together they seems to be mutually inconsistent. He considered two solutions, psychological and metaphysical. The psychological solution was to bring in the pleasures and pains of sympathy, so that if we do good to all we end up because of these pleasures making ourselves happiest.
Sidgwick rejected this on the basis that sympathy is inevitably limited in its range, and we feel it most towards those closest to us, so that even if we include sympathetic pleasures and pains under Egoism, it will tend to increase the divergence between Egoistic and Utilitarian conduct, rather than bring them closer together.
The metaphysical solution was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all living things, and who will reward and punish in accordance with this desire. He thought this solution was both necessary and sufficient to remove the contradiction in ethics. But this was only a reason to accept it, if in general it is reasonable to accept certain principles such as the Uniformity of Nature which are not self-evident and which cannot be proved, but which bring order and coherence into a central part of our thought.
Sidgwick did not commit himself to an answer to this, one way or the other. Towards the end of the century, however, there were more philosophers who could speak the languages of both traditions. The beginning of the analytic school is sometimes located with the rejection of a neo-Hegelian idealism by G. Moore One way to characterize the two schools is that the Continental school continued to read and be influenced by Hegel, and the Analytic school with some exceptions did not.
Another way to make the distinction is geographical; the analytic school is located primarily in Britain, Scandinavia and N. America, and the continental school in the rest of Europe, in Latin America and in certain schools in N. We will start with some figures from the Continental school, and then move to the analytic which is this writer's own.
Martin Heidegger — was initially trained as a theologian, and wrote his dissertation on what he took to be a work of Duns Scotus. He took an appointment under Edmund Husserl — at Freiburg, and was then appointed to succeed him in his chair.
In this sense he is the first existentialist, though he did not use the term. On the other hand he is unlike Kierkegaard in thinking of traditional Christianity as just one more convention making authentic existence more difficult. In Heidegger, as in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, it is hard to find a positive or constructive ethics.
Heidegger's position is somewhat compromised, moreover, by his initial embrace of the Nazi party. In his later work he moved increasingly towards a kind of quasi-religious mysticism. He denied like Scotus that the moral law could be deduced from human nature, but this was because unlike Scotus he thought that we give ourselves our own essences by the choices we make.
On this view there are no outside commands to appeal to for legitimation, and we are condemned to our own freedom. Sartre thought of human beings as trying to be God on a Hegelian account of what God is , even though there is no God. Moreover, we inevitably desire to choose not just for ourselves, but for the world.
Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. One form of bad faith is to pretend that there is a God who is giving us our tasks. To live authentically is to realize both that we create these tasks for ourselves, and that they are futile. The twentieth century also saw, within Roman Catholicism, forms of Christian Existentialism and new adaptations of the system of Thomas Aquinas.
Gabriel Marcel — , like Heidegger, was concerned with the nature of Being as it appears to human being, but he tried to show that there are experiences of love, joy, hope and faith which, as understood from within , give us reason to believe in an inexhaustible Presence, which is God.
Jacques Maritain — developed a form of Thomism that retained the natural law, but regarded ethical judgment as not purely cognitive but guided by pre-conceptual affective inclinations. He gave more place to history than traditional Thomism did, allowing for development in the human knowledge of natural law, and he defended democracy as the appropriate way for human persons to attain freedom and dignity.
Natural law theory has been taken up and modified more recently by three philosophers who write in a style closer to the analytic tradition, John Finnis, Alastair MacIntyre and Jean Porter. Finnis holds that our knowledge of the fundamental moral truths is self-evident, and so is not deduced from human nature. His Natural Law and Natural Rights was a landmark in integrating the modern vocabulary and grammar of rights into the tradition of Natural Law.
MacIntyre, who has been on a long journey back from Marxism to Thomism, holds that we can know what kind of life we ought to live on the basis of knowing our natural end, which he now identifies in theological terms.
In After Virtue he is still influenced by a Hegelian historicism, and holds that the only way to settle rival knowledge claims is to see how successfully each can account for the shape taken by its rivals. A different account of natural law is found in Porter, who in Nature as Reason retains the view that our final motivation is our own happiness and perfection, but rejects the view that we can deduce absolute action-guiding moral principles from human nature.
They are not Roman Catholic but they are strongly influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas. They emphasize the notion of virtue which belongs to human nature just as bees have stings.
Hursthouse ends her book by saying that we have to hold onto the hope that we can live together, not at each other's expense, a hope which she says used to be called belief in God's Providence On Virtue Ethics , One final contribution to be mentioned here is Linda Zagzebski's Divine Motivation Theory which proposes, as an alternative to divine command theory, that we can understand all moral normatively in terms of the notion of a good emotion, and that God's emotions are the best exemplar.
We will return to the rebirth of divine command theory at the end of this entry. Foucault criticized Christian conventions that tend to take morality as a juristic and often universal code of laws, and to ignore the creative practice of self-making. Even if Christian and post-Christian moralists turn their attention to self-expression, he thought they tend to focus on the confession of truth about oneself, a mode of expression which is historically linked to the church and the modern psycho-sciences.
He did not, however, tell us much more about what these new forms would be like. I and II. By analyzing the structure of communication using speech-act theory developed in analytic philosophy he lays out a procedure that will rationally justify norms, though he does not claim to know what norms a society will adopt by using this procedure. The two ideas behind this procedure are that norms are valid if they receive the consent of all the affected parties in unconstrained practical communication, and if the consequences of the general observance of the norms in terms of how each person's interests are affected are acceptable to all.
Habermas thinks he fulfills in this way Hegel's aim of reconciling the individual and society, because the communication process extends individuals beyond their private perspectives in the process of reaching agreement.
Religious convictions need to be left behind when entering the public square, on this scheme, because they are not communicable in the way the procedure requires. In recent work he has modified this position, by recognizing that certain religious forms require their adherents to speak in an explicitly religious way when advancing their prescriptions for public life, and it is discriminatory to try to prevent their doing so.
Within contemporary Jewish ethics mention should be made of Martin Buber — and Emmanuel Levinas — Buber's form of existentialism emphasized the I-You relationship, which exists not only between human beings but out of that between human beings and God.
When we reject I-You relationship, we return to I-It relations, governed by our impositions of our own conceptualizations on objects.
Buber said these two relations are exhaustive. Levinas studied under Husserl, and knew Heidegger, whose work he first embraced and then rejected. To meet the Other is to have the idea of Infinity Ethics and Infinity , 90—1. This term is problematic in various ways. As used within architectural theory in the 's and 's it had a relatively clear sense.
There was a recognizable style that either borrowed bits and pieces from styles of the past, or mocked the very idea in modernist architecture of essential functionality. In philosophy, the term is less clearly definable. The effect on philosophical thinking about the relation between morality and religion is two-fold. On the one hand, the modernist rejection of religion on the basis of a foundationalist empiricism is itself rejected.
This makes the current climate more hospitable to religious language than it was for most of the twentieth century. But on the other hand, the distaste for over-arching theory means that religious meta-narratives are suspect to the same degree as any other, and the hospitality is more likely to be towards bits and pieces of traditional theology than to any theological system as a whole. Mention should be made of some movements that are not philosophical in a professional sense, but are important in understanding the relation between morality and religion.
The civil rights movement drawing heavily on Exodus , feminist ethics, animal liberation, environmental ethics, and the gay rights and children's rights movements have shown special sensitivity to the moral status of some particular oppressed class. The leadership of some of these movements has been religiously committed, while the leadership of others has not. At the same time, the notion of human rights, or justified claims by every human being, has grown in global reach, partly through the various instrumentalities of the United Nations.
There has, however, been less consensus on the question of how to justify human rights. There are theological justifications, deriving from the image of God in every human being, or the command to love the neighbor, or the covenant between God and humanity see Wolterstorff, Justice : Rights and Wrongs , chapter Whether there is a non-theological justification is not yet clear.
Finally, there has also been a burst of activity in professional ethics, such as medical ethics, engineering ethics, and business ethics. This has not been associated with any one school of philosophy rather than another.
The connection of religion with these developments has been variable. In some cases e. The origin of analytic philosophy can be associated with G. His Principia Ethica can be regarded as the first major ethical document of the school. He was strongly influenced by Sidgwick at Cambridge, but rejected Sidgwick's negative views about intuitionism. He thought that intrinsic goodness was a real property of things, even though like the number two it does not exist in time and is not the object of sense experience.
For example, they proposed that goodness is pleasure, or what produces pleasure. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good. For example, it makes sense to ask whether pleasure or the production of pleasure is good.
This is true also if we propose a supernatural property to identify with goodness, for example the property of being commanded by God. It still makes sense to ask whether what God commands is good. Moore thought that if these questions are different, then the two properties, goodness and being commanded by God, cannot be the same, and to say by way of a definition that they are the same is to commit the fallacy. Intrinsic goodness, Moore said, is a simple non-natural property i.
By this he meant that the access was not based on inference or argument, but was self-evident though we could still get it wrong, just as we can with sense-perception. He thought the way to determine what things had positive value intrinsically was to consider what things were such that, if they existed by themselves in isolation, we would yet judge their existence to be good. Russell was not primarily a moral philosopher, but he expressed radically different views at different times about ethics.
In he agreed with Moore that goodness like roundness is a quality that belongs to objects independently of our opinions, and that when two people differ about whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right. Then by he had dropped also the claim about meaning, holding that value judgments are expressions of desire or wish, and not assertions at all. Wittgenstein's views on ethics are enigmatic and subject to wildly different interpretations.
Ethics is transcendental. Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. Perhaps he means that the world we occupy is good or bad and happy or unhappy as a whole, and not piece-by-piece. Wittgenstein like Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's notion of will, and by his disdain for ethical theories that purport to be able to tell one what to do and what not to do.
Ayer — The emotivist theory of ethics had its most articulate treatment in Ethics and Language by Charles Stevenson — Stevenson was a positivist, but also the heir of John Dewey — and the American pragmatist tradition. Dewey had rejected the idea of fixed ends for human beings, and stressed that moral deliberation occurs in the context of competition within a person between different ends, none of which can be assumed permanent. He criticized theories that tried to derive moral principles from self-certifying reason, or intuition, or cosmic forms, or divine commands, both because he thought there are no self-certifying faculties or self-evident norms, and because the alleged derivation disguises the actual function of the principles as devices for social action.
Stevenson applied this emphasis to the competition between people with different ends, and stressed the role of moral language as a social instrument for persuasion Ethics and Language , Ch. On his account, normative judgments express attitudes and invite others to share these attitudes, but they are not strictly speaking true or false. Wittgenstein did not publish any book after the Tractatus , but he wrote and taught; and after his death Philosophical Investigations was published in The later thought of Wittgenstein bears a similar relation to the Tractatus as Heidegger bears to Husserl.
In both cases the quest for a kind of scientific certainty was replaced by the recognition that science is itself just one language, and not in many cases prior by right.
In Oxford there was a parallel though distinct development centering round the work of John Austin — Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that traditional philosophical discussion had ignored this primary material.
First, it is prescriptive, which is to say that moral judgments express the will in a way analogous to commands. This preserves the emotivist insight that moral judgment is different from assertion, but does not deny the role of rationality in such judgment.
Second, moral judgment is universalizable. This is similar to the formula of Kant's categorical imperative that requires that we be able to will the maxims of our actions as universal laws. Third, moral judgment is overriding. This means that moral prescriptions legitimately take precedence over any other normative prescriptions.
In Moral Thinking Hare claimed to demonstrate that utilitarianism followed from these three features of morality, though he excluded ideals in the sense of preferences for how the world should be independently of the agent's concurrent desires or experience from the scope of this argument. God enters in two ways into this picture. Hare acknowledge that since archangels e. Second, we have to be able to believe as Kant argued that the universe sustains morality in the sense that it is worthwhile trying to be morally good.
The most important opponent of utilitarianism in the twentieth century was John Rawls — In his Theory of Justice he gave, like Hare, an account of ethics heavily indebted to Kant.
Rawls thought it important that substantive conceptions of the good life were left behind in moving to the Original Position, because he was attempting to provide an account of justice that people with competing visions of the good could agree to in a pluralist society.
Like early Habermas he included religions under this prohibition. In Political Liberalism he conceded that the procedure of the Original Position is itself ideologically constrained, and he moved to the idea of an overlapping consensus: Kantians can accept the idea of justice as fairness which the procedure describes because it realizes autonomy, utilitarians because it promotes overall utility, Christians because it is part of divine law, etc.
But even here Rawls wanted to insist that adherents of the competing visions of the good leave their particular conceptions behind in public discourse and justify the policies they endorse on grounds that are publicly accessible. He described this as the citizen's duty of civility Political Liberalism , iv. The section of this entry on the continental school discussed briefly the topic of postmodernism.
Within analytic philosophy the term is less prevalent. But both schools live in the same increasingly global cultural context. In this context we can reflect on the two main disqualifiers of the project of relating morality intimately to religion that seemed to emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first disqualifier was the prestige of natural science, and the attempt to make it foundational for all human knowledge.
The various empiricist, verificationist, and reductionist forms of foundationalism have not yet succeeded, and even within modern philosophy there has been a continuous resistance to them. This is not to say they will not succeed in the future for example we may discover a foundation for ethics in the theory of evolution , but the confidence in their future success has waned.
Moreover, the secularization hypothesis seems to have been false, as mentioned earlier. Certainly parts of Western Europe are less attached to traditional institutional forms of religion.
But taking the world as a whole, religion seems to be increasing in influence rather than declining as the world's educational standards improve.
The second main disqualifier was the liberal idea present in the narrative of this entry from the time of the religious wars in Europe that we need a moral discourse based on reason and not religion in order to avoid the hatred and bloodshed that religion seems to bring with it. Here the response to Rawls has been telling. It is true that religious commitment can produce the deliberate targeting of civilians in a skyscraper. But the history of the twentieth century suggests that non-religious totalitarian regimes have at least as much blood on their hands.
Perhaps the truth is, as Kant saw, that people under the Evil Maxim will use any available ideology for their purposes. This writer has done some of this discussion, and found the common ground surprisingly extensive, though sometime common language disguises significant differences. Progress seems more likely in this way than by trying to construct a neutral philosophical ground that very few people actually accept. One recent development in analytic ethical theory has been a revival of divine command theory parallel to the revival of natural law theory that I have already described.
Though we could stipulate such a definition, it would make it obscure how theists and non-theists could have genuine moral discussion, as they certainly seem to do. Robert M. Adams, in a series of articles and then in Finite and Infinite Goods , first separates off the good which he analyzes Platonically in terms of imitating the ultimate good, which is God and the right. He then defends a divine command theory of the right by arguing that obligation is always obligation to someone, and God is the most appropriate person, given human limitations.
John Hare, In God and Morality and Divine Command , defends a version of the theory that derives from God's sovereignty and defends the theory against the objection that obedience to divine command itself requires justification. He also compares Christian, Jewish and Muslim accounts of divine command. Thomas L.
Carson's Value and the Good Life argues that normative theory needs to be based on an account of rationality, and then proposes that a divine-preference account of rationality is superior to all the available alternatives.
An objection to divine command theory is mounted by Mark Murphy's An Essay on Divine Authority and God and Moral Law on the grounds that divine command only has authority over those persons that have submitted themselves to divine authority, but moral obligation has authority more broadly. William Wainwright's Religion and Morality defends the claim that divine command theory provides a more convincing account of moral obligation than any virtue-based theory, including Zagzebski's divine motivation theory, discussed earlier.
Finally, C. Stephen Evans, in Kierkegaard's Ethics of Love : Divine Commands and Moral Obligations and God and Moral Obligation articulates both in Kierkegaard and in its own right a divine command theory that is argued to be superior to all the main alternative non-theist accounts of the nature and basis of moral obligation.
To conclude this entry, the revival of interest in divine command theory, when combined with the revival of natural law theory I already discussed, shows evidence that the attempt to connect morality closely to religion is undergoing a robust recovery within professional philosophy.
Ancient Greek Philosophy 2. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament 3. The Middle Ages 4. Modern Philosophy 5. Ancient Greek Philosophy We can start with the Greeks, and this means starting with Homer, a body of texts transmitted first orally and then written down in the seventh century BCE.
The Middle Ages The rest of the history to be described in this entry is a cross-fertilization of these two traditions or lines of thought. Modern Philosophy Europe experienced a second Renaissance when scholars fled Constantinople after its capture by the Muslims in , and brought with them Greek manuscripts that were previously inaccessible.
Bibliography Adams, R. Anselm, S. Aquinas, T. New York: Christian Classics, Al-Ash'ari, The Theology of al-Ash'ari , trans. Richard J. McCarthy, Beyrouth: Imprimerie Catholique, Austin, J. Ayer, A. Bourke, V.
Buber, Martin, I and Thou , trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Scribner's, McNeill ed. Carson, T. Coplestone, F. Schneewind ed. Evans, C. Feuerbach, L. Finnis, J. Habermas, J. Hare, J. Basically, people take or leave religious morality according to some internal moral compass they already have. They might even choose which church to go to, according to how well the teachings of that church match up with what they feel is right or wrong. In the modern Western world, some people feel free to choose the religion that feels right to them.
Why might someone convert to Christianity from Buddhism, or become a Muslim? Read more: Millennials abandon hope for religion but revere human rights.
We see that people can choose religious beliefs, churches and even whole religions based on the morality that they already have. And this is the morality that atheists have too. Social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues surveyed religious believers about their moral beliefs and the moral beliefs of God.
When respondents were asked again what God thought, people reported that God agreed with their new opinion! Yet most surveyed still clung to the illusion that they got their moral compass from what they think God believes is right and wrong.
Read more: Being a progressive Christian shouldn't be an oxymoron. In any case, religiosity is only loosely related to theology. That is, the beliefs and behaviors of religious people are not always in accordance with official religious doctrines. Instead, popular religiosity tends to be much more practical and intuitive.
Buddhism, for example, may officially be a religion without gods, but most Buddhists still treat Buddha as a deity. Similarly, the Catholic Church vehemently opposes birth control, but the vast majority of Catholics practice it anyway. In fact, theological incorrectness is the norm rather than the exception among believers. This discrepancy among beliefs, attitudes and behaviors is a much broader phenomenon.
After all, communism is an egalitarian ideology, but communists do not behave any less selfishly. When researchers ask people to report on their own behaviors and attitudes, religious individuals claim to be more altruistic, compassionate, honest, civic and charitable than nonreligious ones. Even among twins , more religious siblings describe themselves are being more generous. Researchers have now looked at multiple aspects of moral conduct, from charitable giving and cheating in exams to helping strangers in need and cooperating with anonymous others.
They found that religiosity played no role in helping behavior, even when participants were on their way to deliver a talk on the parable of the good Samaritan. This finding has now been confirmed in numerous laboratory and field studies. Overall, the results are clear: No matter how we define morality, religious people do not behave more morally than atheists, although they often say and likely believe that they do.
Studies conducted among American Christians, for example, have found that participants donated more money to charity and even watched less porn on Sundays. However, they compensated on both accounts during the rest of the week. As a result, there were no differences between religious and nonreligious participants on average.
Likewise, a study conducted in Morocco found that whenever the Islamic call to prayer was publicly audible, locals contributed more money to charity. However, these effects were short-lived: Donations increased only within a few minutes of each call, and then dropped again.
Numerous other studies have yielded similar results.
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