Part 3 A Fivefold Moral Argument
Part 3
A Fivefold
Moral Argument
Part 1 explored the history of the moral argument, especially in Western philosophy. On the shoulders of the luminaries discussed, and on the basis of the reasons to take moral realism seriously, which we discussed in part 2, we now, in brief compass, offer our own version of the moral argument. At numerous junctures it will resonate with aspects of that history we chronicled earlier. We will identify some of those points of overlap and will leave readers to take note of the rest.
Our case will be fivefold, covering five moral phenomena: essential human dignity and value; objective moral duties; moral knowledge; performative matters of morality encompassing forgiveness, change, and ultimate transformation; and an argument from rationality pertaining to the relationship between morality and something like flourishing. Our focus will mainly be on how each of these moral elements, whose reality we argued for in part 2, evidentially points to God. We will defer discussion of theism’s main nonnatural rival—nontheistic moral Platonism—until part 4. The final chapter of this section of the book will put forth our fivefold argument in the form of a cumulative moral case for theism. At a few points we will suggest that it is arguable that the evidence points to something more fine-grained than generic theism. The conclusion will discuss an array of ways in which the argument can be couched, a relatively ancillary matter by comparison with the substantive content of the argument.
We take theism to involve God as classically construed in Anselmian fashion. For our purposes we don’t make much of the distinction between classical theism narrowly understood and what some more recently have dubbed theistic personalism. Although our theological preferences are not wholly classical, this is not a debate that we are currently undertaking. Generally, we think of God as Anselmian primarily in the sense of instantiating the various great-making properties exemplified to the maximally compossible degree. Such “omni” qualities include omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and the like. As Anselm was also a Christian, his construal of God was occasionally more fine-grained than that and more distinctively biblical. Our view is that the a priori conception of God as the greatest possible being is altogether consistent with the a posteriori biblical conception of God as found in Christian Scripture. Again, usually our argument will pertain to God understood in broader generic terms, Anselmian in the wider sense; whenever we might wish to argue for something more fine-grained, something distinctively Christian and Anselmian in the narrower sense, we will make that clear.