Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements

6. Kierkegaard and Ethical Theory

Introduction Anyone who happens to read both Kierkegaard’s writings and the works of moral philosophers from the last hundred years or so is bound to be struck by the great difference in character of these two bodies of literature. One might well read Works of Love or Practice in Christianity or Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits as a source of personal moral strengthening, as part of daily spiritual exercises. Indeed, Kierkegaard intended these works for just such use. The reader who chose David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement or Michael Slote’s Morals from Motives for the same purpose would be sorely disappointed—or, if he somehow persisted in the endeavor, might actually suffer damage to his moral constitution. Yet Kierkegaard is often treated as in some sense a philosopher, and one whose thought is highly relevant to ethics; were it not relevant to ethics, it would lack the upbuilding potential that he carefully puts into it. So the thought occurs —and this is the one I want to explore in this chapter—that while Kierke­ gaard is doing moral philosophy in some sense, he is doing something interestingly different from what professional philosophers of ethics do, philosophers whom Kierkegaard might well have lumped with “the professors” (for the vast majority of them are such). Sometime in the middle or later period of modern philosophy, philosophers of ethics began to speak of “moral theory,” though the thing itself was being done before it was named. Today, the word ‘theory’ dots the pages of moral philosophers, and they quite happily think of their main business as constructing theories. In this chapter I am going to try out the idea that the word ‘theory’ provides a nice key to the difference—or at any rate an important part of the difference—between what Kierkegaard is doing in his 6. Kierkegaard and Ethical Theory RobertC.Roberts Kierkegaard and Ethical Theory · 73 writings and what the professors are doing. My thesis is that Kierkegaard does not have a theory in the sense that ethics professors are supposed to, and that what he is doing in his writings is better thought of as a conceptual exploration, within a given moral tradition (Christianity), that expresses, seeks, and seeks to engender wisdom. Theory and wisdom, then, will both be conceptual activities, and they will have some overlapping properties. Otherwise, how could they both be philosophical and about ethics? But they will also be deeply different, and that difference will account for our sense of difference as we read the two kinds of writing. In the next section I will try to get clear on what an ethical theory is, and will look particularly at a couple of proposals of a “virtue theory” of ethics, because Kierkegaard does quite often write about virtues—love, faith, hope, patience, gratitude, humility, courage, and the like—and because on my understanding of how he is seeking wisdom, and seeking to promote it, he does so largely by exploring such virtue-concepts.1 Then, since a peculiarity of the ethical thought that we find in Works of Love2 is the emphasis that Kierkegaard places on the fact that Christian love is commanded, I will consider the possibility that he has, in some sense, a divine command theory. To get a clear contemporary example of a divine command theory before us, I will look at the one that Robert Adams proposes in Finite and Infinite Goods. We will see that Adams’s procedure deviates pretty significantly from paradigm cases of moral theorizing, but is still recognizable (and intended) as such. Finally, I will turn to Works of Love to compare what Kierkegaard does there with what Adams does, and will argue that Kierkegaard’s discussions of divine commands in that work are better regarded as embodying wisdom than as proposing a divine command theory. I will try to characterize what I take to be the connection, in Kierkegaard’s agenda, between his comments about the divine command and the concept of love. Ethical Theories Early modern philosophy is preoccupied with finding common ground beneath disagreements, ground so solid and so obviously so to everybody that it can sustain a superstructure of knowledge about which everyone who stands on it can agree. The superstructure is somehow attached to the ground by equally incontrovertible fasteners (say, of logic or mathematics). Some say that behind this preoccupation with securing agreement was horror at the wars of the Reformation , which were made possible by the breakup...