John Houston is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. We invited him to answer the question “What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Epistemic Norms and the Adoption of Morally Horrific Religious Beliefs

There are a number of variables we might take into consideration when it comes to the adoption of beliefs about God: philosophical arguments, sacred texts, the faith community, personal experience, our moral sensibilities, and so forth. In what follows I examine the norms that ought to govern the adoption of morally horrific beliefs about God, focusing specifically on the claim that God commands the killing of the infidel. This claim appears within the history of all three major monotheisms—–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—–though it remains most prevalent in Islam. To what should one look to determine whether to believe or disbelieve in divinely sanctioned or commanded murder? Prophets? Sacred texts? Personal revelations & visions? What about one’s existing moral intuitions? Further, suppose there is a conflict between the purportedly authoritative sources to which one might appeal, which should be given normative and epistemic preference?

Deep cognitive dissonance is common among believers who find the propositional content of their traditions at odds with their moral convictions. When it comes to sacred texts, many believers gloss over or look away from the more morally grotesque things that are attributed to God. But evasion won’t do. The question persists, and it demands an answer, especially since many believers (not all of them fundamentalists) feel compelled to defend every jot and tittle of their sacred texts, or every utterance of their prophets, no matter how unpalatable they might seem, even including God’s sanctioning or ordering the execution of the nonbeliever.

One way to determine the adoption of proposed beliefs is to examine their coherence with the body of one’s existing beliefs. As a rule of thumb, the coherence test is wise to apply, but by itself, it is not enough. For, although consistency is a hallmark of rationality, it cannot by itself guarantee epistemic rectitude: one can hold all sorts of beliefs that are consistent with one another yet which are, taken by themselves, wildly implausible.¹ We must go further than consistency and weigh the newly proposed beliefs not merely against our existing beliefs, but against those beliefs of ours that are most fundamental or most deeply held in our overall belief system. When a newly proposed belief presents a problem of severe moral-cognitive dissonance, it must be weighed against the beliefs that are most central to the core of one’s moral convictions.

At the core of any healthy set of beliefs lies the conviction that we ought not murder our fellow human beings for reasons of theological disagreement, and the proposition that God commands us to slay the infidel runs directly counter to this most fundamental of beliefs. There is a strain of thought within theism that holds that when faced with such commands we must not too quickly domesticate the transcendent², or that we must at times to be willing to engage in the “teleological suspension of the ethical”. I reject those arguments, and maintain that instead we ought, in such cases, to adopt the teleological suspension of the allegedly transcendent, because the psychological and spiritual price paid for adopting a belief in divinely sanctioned or commanded killing of our fellow human beings for reasons of their religious epistemic states is too grave. Kant captures this intuition well when faced with the Abraham dilemma and the proposition that God commands him to kill his son. For Kant, it seems that such commands carry with them the inherent transparency of their not being from God, and therefore they must be regarded as illusory. Thus, in The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant says of the man who hears a voice commanding him to violate the moral law, that he must doubt that advice: “for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion.”³

Kant’s claim notwithstanding, some theists argue that, as the author of life, God holds an absolute right to take the life of any of his creatures at any time, and can do so without violating any moral law. For God, as the argument goes, transcends the moral law, and is permitted to do whatever he wills in virtue of being the sovereign divine creator. This argument is misguided, as it relies on the flawed assumption that the power to create something entails the right to do whatever one wishes with that thing. The choice to bring forth certain creatures in the world carries with it the adoption of certain obligations to those creatures. This is most evidently true of creatures that are sentient and conscious. Once Pinocchio becomes a real boy Geppetto can no longer toss him in the trash without violating a moral norm.

In short, God can and does owe things to the men and women he creates. Arguments from divine sovereignty, no matter how strongly rooted in power fetishism, lack the power to justify the wanton destruction of sentient and conscious beings. The crass father who declares to his child that because he brought him into this world he has the right to take him out of it, is wrong. Having the creative power to bring something into being does not entail an absolute right to kill that thing.

The belief that God sanctions killing is horrible enough, but the belief that God commands this of us is even more horrible yet. For the consequences of killing are not limited to the victim, but extend to the murderer as well. The victim loses his life. The murderer loses his soul. For the victim, the tragedy is the loss of her life, for the murderer it is what she becomes. This in itself is a sufficient reason for rejecting out of hand the belief in divinely sanctioned or commanded killing, especially such killing for reasons of disparate creeds. No scripture, no vision, no theophany, no apparition should supersede this most fundamental moral intuition. In short, when the starry sky above proposes that you violate the moral law within, you listen not to the sky, but to the moral law.

Devin Singh is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. We invited him to answer the question “What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

One can imagine a number of theoretical and ethical virtues important to the philosophy of religion. Certainly, virtues such as explanatory power, predictive accuracy, and empirical adequacy are among those that one should seek to cultivate. I contend, however, that other virtues are more central and primary. In this essay, I highlight a cluster of virtues offered by the ethics of care as an important normative framework for thinking about the philosophy of religion.

The ethics of care is an ethical system that puts our relational existence at the starting point of inquiry and that assesses morality in terms of one’s fulfillment of various relational obligations. The ethics of care focuses on the needs and concerns of those with whom one is relationally connected, emphasizing the particularity of the needs of others in their specific social and historical contexts. To the Cartesian cogito, for instance, it asserts that awareness of one’s thinking always manifests in relation to an Other. To the Husserlian epoché it responds that phenomenological reduction always occurs in the context of relatedness. Beyond such structural clarification, it asserts that within the context of such relations emerge concrete and specific needs and obligations, as well as awareness of vulnerability, all of which should shape how philosophical and ethical reasoning might proceed.

Virginia Held (2006), whose work has most programmatically outlined an ethics of care, offers the care of a child as a paradigmatic instance to think through such concerns. Acting morally and ethically in such a scenario stems from vulnerability, affective bonds, relations of mutual dependence, and other senses of obligation that may precede and exceed universalized and abstract maxims of moral virtue. Despite utilizing the child as an exemplary case, an ethics of care is not to be relegated simply to the familial, personal, or private sphere, but has bearing on broader publics including the national and international level. It also bears on matters of justice and, while care and justice cannot be collapsed together, they refine and shape one another in significant ways. Care and concern for specificity of actors and contexts will emphasize restorative and redistributive forms of justice more than retributive. Beyond models of simple fairness or balance, it will emphasize corrective and ameliorative measures that may look imbalanced when contextual differences are ignored.

Leonardo Boff (2008) extends the networks of care to all of creation, asserting that human relatedness occurs within a broader context of reciprocal care with the earth. Such a view raises to prominence the ways that material existence, embodiment, and history remain relational factors that inform thinking. For Boff, “care is a way of being; that is, it is the key way through which the human being structures itself and through which it interacts with others in the world. In other words: it is a way of being-in-the-world in which the relations that are established with all things are founded” (59). Care thus grounds and orients relational existence, from which then proceed ways of thinking and knowing.

An ethics of care as a philosophical system therefore emphasizes relational existence and eschews atomism and individualism. Not only does moral formation not happen in isolation, but the ethical as such is relational. Such ethical relationality puts this view into tension with virtue ethics, which at times imply internalized and individually construed paths of moral formation. The ethical individual—and, originally, the virtuous man (sic)—was the paradigm of ethical excellence. Such a horizon of the good is opposed to moral postures of relatedness that attend to ethical social networks.

In attending to the specificity and particularity of ethical others, the ethics of care also pushes back against the universalism of typical deontological approaches. Maxims such as the categorical imperative commend a universalizable course of action that intentionally denudes the ethical actor of history, society, and culture—not to mention biographical particularities including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Rather, an ethics of care emphasizes that moral action necessarily varies across time and space, that context and the specific needs of the other dictate what the ethical looks like in each situation.

A dominant approach to the philosophy of religion attempts an objective, dispassionate, and removed analysis, with the claim that such a position is the least biased and most accurate. One starts with the reduction, bracketing out the self, its relations, affect, and emotional connections. Only after this can one apply a particular normative ethical framework and value set. The assumption is that a more accurate description of reality can be reached though withdrawal from one’s connections to others and their concrete, lived situation.

The ethics of care belies this approach by questioning the supposed neutrality of its starting point. It challenges the assumption that the disconnected, asocial, isolated individual is an adequate baseline for philosophical and ethical reasoning. Such a posture of existence is actually far from the human norm. Rather, life takes place under circumstances of embeddedness in social and relational networks, mutual dependencies, and the obligations and reciprocities that emerge from and in turn resubstantiate these ties. Furthermore, religiously inflected ethics of care derive injunctions from religious traditions to care for the vulnerable in ways that resonate powerfully with the normative vision of this ethical system. Such approaches might integrate quite well with philosophy of religion approaches that themselves are grounded in or derive guiding principles from certain religious traditions.

The virtues that emerge from this approach, therefore, include a recognition of and commitment to one’s concrete relational ties and the obligations of reciprocal care that arise. This approach suggests that some of the best forms of thinking in the philosophy of religion will emerge from living and reasoning through such concrete instances of encounter and bond, as opposed to from efforts at distance, withdrawal, and objective views from nowhere. Such norms and values are thus existential and ethical as much as epistemological and noetic. They issue the challenge and promise that excellence in thinking and analysis will emerge in full acceptance and embrace of the realities of lived existence, an existence that is always already relationally determined and conditioned by vulnerability, affective bond, interdependence, and the needs of care that inevitably arise.

Works cited:

Boff, Leonardo. 2008. Essential Care: An Ethics of Human Nature. Translated by Alexander
Guilherme. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

Held, Virginia. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Derek Michaud is Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Maine. We invited him to answer the question “What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.

Excellence in the philosophy of religion, whether in scholarship, public presentation, or classroom instruction, is sensitive to the history and significance of religious ideas and practices for living human beings. The philosophy of religion is best when it seeks at once to contribute to philosophy as a sub-division thereof and generally to religious studies as one approach among many thereto. Philosophers of religion should remain therefore humble students of both religion and philosophy.

Perhaps we should start with the obvious. When we speak of the “philosophy of religion” we assume, methodologically at least, that religion is not philosophy and philosophy is not religion. In modern Western philosophy, this is basically uncontroversial in theory. A fair approximation of the modern Western ideal of the philosophy of religion might be that it applies the tools of philosophy to the study of religion. As such, its virtues are those of philosophy applied to this particular object of study. These virtues include, above all, the honest search for truth. From this cardinal concern and to this end comes the coherence and explanatory power so often sought by philosophers in practice. As such, excellence in the philosophy of religion seems to amount to no more than what counts as excellence in philosophy in general. But there is a lot to unpack in this all-too-brief definition.

For one, such a conception of the philosophy of religion has always been more aspirational than real; a goal seldom if ever achieved. Not even Ralph Cudworth’s massive True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), the first attempt to lay out a “philosophy of religion” in English (xvii), could resist the urge to stack the deck in favor of a form of the author’s favored religion. Much of the contemporary philosophy of religion follows Cudworth’s lead, usually unknowingly, but without his sensitivity to texts and history. The result is, too often, apologetics by another name. Some working in this vein defend a religious tradition while others work to discredit religion either in whole or part. The best philosophy proceeds in a humbler spirit and does its best to follow the arguments wherever they lead (Euthyphro 14c).

The ideal of rational philosophical investigation is nowhere more prone to self-sabotage than in the philosophy of religion. There are, I think, at least two reasons for this.

First, philosophers, like other human beings, have personal commitments when it comes to religion. This is unavoidable and in most respects welcome. After all, one does not investigate that which one is indifferent toward. However, this does raise the temptation to simply apologize for one’s own presuppositions.

Second, philosophy and religion are closely related by their very natures. This is an unpopular position among contemporary philosophers but consider the following. Religions make metaphysical, epistemic, and axiological claims. For example, claims to prophetic revelation pose serious questions of an epistemological nature as well. If the epistemologist finds it a challenge to account for how we come to know everyday objects the challenge is taken up several notches when considering how one can know the invisible and ultimately unknowable! Consider also the mutual influence of religious ideas and practices in the history of philosophy. For Plato philosophy is a purifying process (Phaedo 64a) leading to becoming like God (Republic 500c-d). Aristotle too understands his philosophy in nominally religious terms, referring to his metaphysics as “theology” (Metaphysics 6.1026a). Throughout most of the history of Western philosophy, in fact, philosophy retained an intentional closeness to religion, oftentimes drawing inspiration from faith and influencing those faiths in turn. This tendency is only magnified when we look beyond the limits of Greek inspiration. For the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara, the Madhyamaka of Nagarjuna, or the Lǐxué of Zhu Xi to name but a few, true religion is philosophical.

There is no space in this blog post to argue for it adequately but I think that philosophy and religion are complementary and mutually supportive and often corrective. Philosophy without religion is heartless. Religion without philosophy is mindless.

The philosopher of religion must also be a student of religion. This sounds like it should go without saying but there is no shortage of otherwise rigorous work in the philosophy of religion that makes little or no effort to familiarize itself with the complexity of lived religion in practice or even the linguistic and historical nuances of religious ideas. Many working in the analytic philosophy of the Christian religion, for example, have adopted the practice of exploring the plausibility of literal readings of creedal orthodoxy at the expense of attention to the beliefs and practices of actual living Christians. If the philosophy of religion is to serve more than an insular curiosity it must engage with religion as it is lived and practiced and not merely as it is codified by theologians. This means that philosophers must resist the urge to think of religion as a clear and distinct object of study.

Indeed, religion is a frustratingly complex thing to investigate. Even among religious studies scholars, there is no single agreed upon definition of religion much less uniformity with respect to methodology. The reasons for this are legion. Religion itself, whatever it is, involves or is involved with every aspect of human existence. It is as multifaceted as we ourselves are and lessons can, therefore, be learned by employing every conceivable methodological approach. So, before the philosopher applies their methods to some aspect of religion(s) they must become as well acquainted with their object as possible. This calls for a high level of multidisciplinary competence and cooperation, but above all deep humility.

Developing research levels of competence in all the scientific, behavioral, and humanistic approaches to religion is impossible for a single philosopher. General literacy, however, is difficult but possible and even essential. If they would seek excellence the philosopher of religion must cultivate the humility to remain a student of religion. This means being intentionally open to new insights and new approaches while avoiding the conceit that one has it all figured out. Institutionally this will often mean inhabiting the philosophical and the religious studies spaces simultaneously. At a minimum, it means carrying on an ongoing conversation between fellow philosophers and scholars of religion.