Edwards and the Ethical Question

Whereas traditionally the nature of God and his actions have been counted as decisive for man's morality, it has been argued by some contemporary moral philosophers that man's moral autonomy is such that reference to deity in any decisive way is either irrelevant or at best an optional addendum to the moral life. Thus P. H. Nowell-Smith asserts that even if God commands a certain course of action, “it still makes sense ... to ask whether or not I ought to do it.” But even the sense of obligation is weakened from its Kantian austerity by this author who insists that “morality is a set of habits of choice determined by the question ‘what life is most satisfactory to me as a whole?’” Outside this teleological reference he professes ignorance as to what the term “ought” means. A similar view is explicitly stated by Kai Nielsen, “The moral agent must independently decide that whatever God wills or commands is good.” Our own moral awareness and sensitivity are used “to decide that God is good and that God ought to be obeyed. We have not derived our moral convictions just from discerning what are the commands of God.” A slightly different position is taken by W. G. MacLagan. It is argued at length that the sense of the moral ought, moral law or moral values is arrived at independently of the theistic hypothesis, although he is willing to employ the notion of moral law as an index to the meaning of the term God. God is not completely shut out of moral calculations, but any independent recourse to deity infringes upon the prior and sui generis character of duty which man directly feels

Epistemology · Ignorance · Meaning (existential) · Moral obligation · Morality · Obligation · Political science · Ethics in medical practice · Law · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil · War, Ethics, and Justification

• Jonathan Edwards and “The Way of Ideas”

  Open Access•Claude A Smith•Harvard Theological Review•1966

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