The Philosophical Interest of the Hebrew-Christian Moral Tradition

THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST OF THE HEBREW-CHRISTIAN MORAL TRADITION I. INTRODUCTION I BORROW this essay's title from the book I intend to discuss, Alan Donagan's The Theory of Morality, where it serves as the heading of an important section.1 It is striking to find a philosopher of Donagan's stature devoting an entire book to the reconstruction and defense of the moral content of a religious tradition. A survey of ethical theory would show that the question of why one might want to subject such a tradition to detailed ethical scrutiny has rarely been posed in this century, let alone answered in terms that would be convincing to a secular audience. Theologians, when addressing the faithful, usually either assume the answer will be obvious or give an answer only the faithful could take seriously as a source of motivation. The same theologians, when addressing a general audience on a specific moral problem, typically search £or common assumptions in a way that blurs whatever distinctive contribution their religious tradition might make. Secular students of religious ethics tend either to attempt value-free description or to argue on philosophical grounds that the relationship between religion and morality is basically invariant and can he discovered a priori. They thus either studiously avoid giving readers reasons for being interested in their subject or make historical investigation of actual religious traditions seem relatively insignificant.2 1 Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix edition, 1979), p. !'l6. In the remainder of this article page references to Donagan's book will be given in parentheses in the text. 2 These tendencies in religious ethics are discussed in my book, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), chap. IO. 165 166 JEFFREY STOUT Theologians and those secular academicians who specialize in the field called religious ethics have, of course, studied the ethical aspects of the religious traditions; they have, however, said rather little to show why such study might be justified on grounds that are neither theological nor antiquarian. Philosophers , on the other hand, have, throughout most of this century, felt free to dismiss religious ethics as plainly fallacious and therefore not worthy of extensive historical study from a philosophical point of view. It was possible for many years to defend this dismissal merely by citing famous arguments from Plato, Hume, Kant, and G. E. Moore. These arguments demonstrated, so most philosophers thought, that religion must depend logically upon morality, as opposed to the other way around, and that attempts to derive moral judgments and concepts from theological judgments and concepts could not possibly succeed. Not everyone accepted all the arguments: occasional doubts were raised especially about the ones drawn from Hume and Moore, which seemed to threaten not only religious ethics but much else besides. Yet almost everyone accepted at least one of the arguments, and accorded religious ethical traditions a kind of neglect one could hardly term benign . Meanwhile, logical positivism and related doctrines gave independent reasons for deeming religious propositions meaningless or, at 'best, false. On many counts, then, religious ethics seemed an unlikely contender for philosophical attention. Virtually all those who did attend to it did so with polemical intent reminiscent of the Enlightenment's struggle with superstition . Most theologians either ignored the polemics entirely or were too busy retreating to put up a fight. Recently, however, much has changed in philosophy. The same developments in philosophy of language and epistemology that have undermined positivistic critiques of religion, and have thus helped revive philosophical theology as an acceptable vocation for professional philosophers, have also undermined confidence in the standard dismissals of religious ethics.q The 8 For an account of these developments and their impact upon philosophy of religion and ethics, see ibid., parts II and III. THE HEBREW-CHRISTIAN MORAL TRADITION 167 result has by no means been mass conversion of the moral philosophers. Nonetheless, the ethical interest of what Donagan calls the Hebrew..:Christian moral tradition does seem to have re-emerged as a philosophically respectable topic over the past two decades or so. One set of reasons for ascribing philosophical...