A Theistic Alternative
A Theistic Alternative
The worry, then, is that our efforts at moral reflection are compromised by features of our constitution that are in place for purposes other than the acquisition of truth. As philosopher Sharon Street puts it, “If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence…then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former.”27
In order to inspire confidence in those initial evaluative judgments of which Street speaks, the moral realist owes us some account of their origin that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. What we need is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. And so our question is, What reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth aimed? What we seek is what Norman Daniels calls “a little story that gets told about why we should pay homage ultimately to those [considered] judgments and indirectly to the principles that systematize them.”28
The theist may here oblige us in a way that the naturalist may not. Robert Adams, for example, has suggested that things bear the moral properties that they do, good or bad, insofar as they resemble or fail to resemble God. He goes on to offer the makings of a theistic “genealogy of morals.”
If we suppose that God directly or indirectly causes human beings to regard as excellent approximately those things that are Godlike in the relevant way, it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justified about excellence, and hence it is in general no accident that such beliefs are correct when they are.29
The theist is thus in a position to offer Daniels's “little story” to explain the general reliability of those evaluative judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.30 The moral law is “written upon the heart” (Rom 2:15), the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome.