God's Own Ethics

Mark C. Murphy's God's Own Ethics is an exercise in what has come to be called Anselmian perfect-being theology, the attempt to determine the nature of God understood as an absolutely perfect being. The book is bold, original, and carefully argued, and it takes on several tasks. The first is an examination of what norms would govern the actions of an absolutely perfect being, an agent generally referred to in the work as “the Anselmian being.” (Using this description allows the question as to whether the God of the Abrahamic faiths is identical to the Anselmian being to be a meaningful question, and it has other uses as well, as will be seen.) The arguments given here are purely philosophical in nature.After having established (to his satisfaction) the nature of “God's own ethics,” Murphy then tackles the second task of the book, which is to look at the implications of his answer for the problem of evil that theism is generally believed to face. It is obvious that any argument from evil for the nonexistence of God or “the Anselmian being” must rely on premises about what kind of a world one would expect a perfect being to create, and thus must assume some views about how God or the Anselmian being would act. Murphy argues persuasively that on his account of “God's ethics” (discussed in more detail below) there is no cogent argument from evil for the nonexistence of the Anselmian being.The third main goal of this relatively brief but still ambitious book is to look at some of the implications of this view of the Anselmian being for the God of the Abrahamic faiths in general and Christianity in particular. The Anselmian being, on Murphy's view, has “justifying reasons” to care about human welfare (and perhaps the welfare of other sentient creatures), but not “requiring reasons,” although the Anselmian being does have decisive reasons not to “intend evil,” which Murphy defines as intending the absence of due perfection or well-being in creatures (86). (Murphy defends this claim that God does not intend evil by a strong defense of the distinction between what is foreseen and what is intended. Thus, the fact that God foresees that some of his actions in creating the world will result in suffering or the loss of goods does not mean that God intends the suffering or loss of goods.)It is thus an open question how committed the Anselmian being will be to “the ends of familiar welfare-oriented moral goodness” (28), even if the moral norms connected to those ends are obligatory for humans. God's ethical norms are not identical to those of humans. Perhaps one might say in plain language this means that it is an open question how much the Anselmian being will care about the happiness of humans and other sentient creatures, and on Murphy's view, the Anselmian being may well have other ends that take priority over this good. Even if Murphy is correct to say that this is the right view of the norms of the Anselmian being, questions naturally arise as to whether such a being would be worthy of worship, and also about whether humans should commit to allegiance to such a being.This has implications for actual religious communities such as Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. If the God of those faiths is identical to the Anselmian being, but the Anselmian being is not worthy of worship or deserving of human allegiance, then those faiths, which certainly require worship of God and allegiance to God, would be undermined. Murphy argues that the Anselmian being is supremely worthy of worship, and so the issue of worship raises no problems. The question of allegiance is harder, however, and one can imagine someone who refuses allegiance to the Anselmian being if that being has little or no concern for human welfare. Such a person might think, “Why should I commit to or ally myself with a being who does not care (or care very much) about me and my welfare?” (my wording, not Murphy's).Murphy looks at these questions particularly with reference to Christianity, the faith he knows the best. On his view, even though the Anselmian being is not required to commit to human welfare, such a being might contingently care to some degree about such ends, since the Anselmian being has justifying reasons to advance the welfare of creatures though not requiring reasons. If the god of Christianity is a god who is in fact committed to human welfare, even if this commitment is a contingent one, then it looks like a new version of the problem of evil might arise, at least for the god of Christianity. Murphy tries to argue in the last section of the book that the Christian god has enough commitment to human welfare to justify allegiance and subordination of human willing to God's will, even though God's commitment to those ends is not of the right sort to generate an argument from evil for the nonexistence of such a god.Put very briefly, Murphy's view here could be put like the following. Although God is not committed to treat each and every instance of human well-being as a reason to act, God makes the following offer to all of his human creatures: If humans will to act in accordance with the norms of practical reasonableness that apply to them as humans (in effect, to act morally), and commit to subordinate their will to God's will when they act, then God assures them that “your own good will be better achieved if you subordinate your will to my own” (166). In effect, while God does not promise that those who accept the offer will be immune from distress and suffering, God does commit to ensuring that those who accept his offer will have lives that are “on the whole” good and meaningful ones. Murphy argues that it would be reasonable for a human to accept the offer, offering God not only worship but allegiance.Murphy's arguments are constructed with great care, and he tries very hard not to base his conclusions on controversial, highly disputed claims (although this is not always possible). For example, in arguing that the Anselmian being does not necessarily will the promotion of human welfare, he looks at the issue from a variety of normative ethical perspectives, attempting to show that the claim that God must will such ends cannot be justified by Humean, Kantian, or Aristotelean theories. The complexity of the arguments means that they cannot possibly be adequately explained in a brief review. However, readers who want to disagree with the conclusions should try to discern where the arguments go wrong, since the premises generally seem highly plausible and the argument forms seem valid. (Although Murphy does not usually seek to formalize the arguments—a mercy to a reader such as myself in a book that already demands a lot of effort and careful attention.)A number of different objections might be raised against Murphy's work as an answer to the problem of evil. One is to claim that his account is an ad hoc attempt to elude the problem by manufacturing a view of “God's ethics” that will not allow the problem to arise. Murphy discusses this kind of objection as the claim that he is making a “rear-guard” action. His response is twofold, I think. First, he reminds the reader that his arguments for the norms of divine action are purely philosophical and involve no ad hoc adjustments for the sake of solving the problem of evil. The arguments stand on their own feet. Second, Murphy shows that his concept of the Anselmian being is actually consistent with traditional theological views, even if it is a view of God that diverges from the one assumed in many contemporary discussions of the problem of evil. Theologians such as Aquinas and Scotus are agreed that God did not have to create any creatures at all, and that, even having created them, “God is not necessitated by the prospect of any creaturely good to promote that creaturely good” (187). On such views any good God may do for human creatures is an act of grace on his part, a free choice. Murphy agrees that the Abrahamic faiths see God as a god of love, but on his view, God's love is freely extended to us. Since the problem of evil is a problem of internal consistency in theistic beliefs, it seems entirely appropriate to assume traditional views of what God is or is not obligated to do in dealing with the question.A nonreligious person might well concede that Murphy shows that there is no logical or evidential problem in believing in both the existence of God, understood as the Anselmian being, and also the reality of pain and suffering. Such a person might well take the following point of view: “I admit that evil does not provide evidence against God's existence, given your view of God. Perhaps (for all I know) there is such a god. However, even if such a god does exist, I would not want to worship or love a god who seems not to care very much about all the suffering in the world.” Such a person would be taking the view of Ivan Karamazov, who does not so much deny God's reality as refuse to love or serve a god who permits the horrors Ivan describes in The Brothers Karamazov. An argument of this type against religious belief would at least be significantly different from standard arguments from evil. The conversation will be a different one.I suspect the strongest response a believer might make to such an objection would require drawing on the resources of a special revelation, which provides evidence that God is indeed love, even if God's love does not show itself exactly as many think that it should. Christians, for example, would certainly point to the sacrificial death of Jesus as evidence that God loves human beings, both caring about our suffering and showing a willingness to help us by suffering with us and for us. But these theological moves would still need to be undergirded by the kinds of philosophical arguments provided by Murphy, which support the claim that we have no reason to think that a perfect being would not create the kind of universe we find ourselves in.As already noted, Murphy himself responds to the kind of objection described above by arguing that the “offer” God makes to humans shows that God is worth giving our allegiance to. This move may provoke another version of the so-called problem of divine hiddenness, which on my view is just a special type of argument from evil. The critic might say that if God's goodness is to be grounded in such an offer, then the offer should be one that is clearly knowable by all humans. It is difficult to know what to say about such an objection, but perhaps a theist might simply rely on Murphy's defense against other forms of the problem of evil and say that this is yet another good that God is not obligated to provide for human creatures. Or, perhaps one might believe that ultimately God does make the offer clear to everyone open to accepting it, either during this life or after death.Murphy compares his solution to the problem of evil with another view that is supported by many religious believers, the view called skeptical theism (badly named, in my view, since the view is not a form of skepticism and might well be held by someone who is not a theist). Murphy attributes to the skeptical theist the view that “God acts to prevent setbacks to creaturely well-being unless there are sufficient considerations to the contrary” (110). However, I think many of the people who hold to skeptical theism, such as myself, do not accept such a view. Murphy admits that there is a parallel between the skeptical theist view and his own view. Both “argue that we have good grounds to think that the way we have good reason to respond to evils may well not be the way that God has good reason to respond to evils” (110). If I am right in thinking that not all skeptical theists accept the claim that God would prevent creaturely suffering unless there are adequate reasons not to do so, then at least some skeptical theists may well see Murphy not as offering an alternative to skeptical theism but as offering arguments that support a form of skeptical theism. For Murphy essentially argues that although God has justifying reasons to promote human welfare (and perhaps the welfare of other creatures) he is not required to do so. This is a negative claim, a claim that means we do not know very much about the ends God would choose to act on. It seems to me that the heart of skeptical theism is a similar negative claim: we humans are not in a position to know very much, certainly not much a priori, about God's goals or how God will achieve them. We may think that if we were creating a universe we could do better than God did with the actual universe, if God is indeed responsible for it. But what do we really know about universe making? For example, would it really be a better universe if the universe were governed by “particular providences” rather than natural laws, as Hume has Philo suggest in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion? The skeptical theist view seems strengthened if Murphy is correct to argue, as most traditional theologians have held, that we have philosophical reasons to believe that God is not obligated to ensure the happiness of creatures he has made

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · General interest · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil

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