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Religion and Morality: Exploring The Complex Relationship

• Categories: Religious Beliefs Religious Tolerance

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Published: Sep 16, 2023

Words: 580 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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The connection between religion and morality, differing perspectives, impacts on society and culture, 1. religion as the source of morality:, 2. morality independent of religion:, 3. religion and moral dilemmas:, 1. cultural norms and values:, 2. ethical debates:, 3. moral communities:, 4. conflict and tolerance:.

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14 Morality and Religion

Linda Zagzebski is Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, University of Oklahoma and formerly Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. She is author of The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (1991), Virtues of the Mind (1996), and many articles on philosophy of religion, epistemology, and ethics. Her current research is on theory of emotion and emotion-based virtue theory. Department of Philosophy, 455 West Lindsey, Room 605, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019. E-mail: [email protected]

• Published: 02 September 2009
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One of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world is to find a moral discourse that can reach all the inhabitants of the earth, but one that preferably causes no violence to the conceptual frameworks of particular religions. If the concepts that are central to moral practice in the world's great religions cannot be thinned into a common set of concepts, the task is impossible. Or it may be impossible for some other reason, perhaps because it is impossible to get a common content to morality that is sufficient for the requirements for life in a pluralistic world. But it is a goal that should not be given up until its impossibility has been demonstrated. A given religion may find that some of its moral teachings are not feasible for interaction with the practitioners of other religions and it may have to revise or abandon them for interaction to be possible, but that is an issue that needs to be addressed within the framework of that religion.

Does Morality Depend upon Religion?

Virtually all religions include a code of moral conduct. In fact, the only feature of religion that comes close to being universal is a practical one: to offer human beings a way to cope with the human condition, particularly suffering and death. Coping might be aided by the promise that suffering will eventually be overcome, or it might involve seeing suffering as a natural consequence of wrongdoing in a past life, or it might involve changing the way humans perceive suffering. In any case, suffering has to be faced, and it cannot be faced without first understanding it. Most religions give a diagnosis of the human condition and an explanation for the existence of suffering and death, as well as a remedy for the problem. Moral behavior as defined by the particular religion is part of the remedy, but each religion teaches that the ultimate goal of moral living is unattainable without the practice of that religion. So not only is morality an intrinsic feature of almost all religions, but most also teach that morality is incapable of standing alone. Morality needs religion. And one respect in which it is said that morality needs religion is that the goal of the moral life is unreachable without religious practice.

Some religious philosophers maintain that morality needs religion in at least two other respects: (1) to provide moral motivation, and (2) to provide morality with its foundation and justification. These three ways in which morality may depend on religion are logically independent, although we will see that there are conceptual connections among the standard arguments for these positions.

In the premodern age and even today in large portions of the world, the relation between morality and religion has been taken for granted. But for at least two reasons there is strong resistance in the modern West to the idea that morality needs religion. One is the naturalistic temper of the times. Many people lack belief in a deity or a supernatural world of any kind, and yet almost all believe that morality is important. Clearly, then, belief in a religion is not required for belief in either a code of moral behavior or a moral theory. Of course, that fact does not show that morality does not depend on religion any more than the fact that belief in tables does not depend on belief in quarks shows that tables do not depend on quarks. But, of course, if it is a fact that there is no God or supernatural world, then it cannot be a fact that morality depends on religion for the same reason that if it turns out quarks do not exist, tables cannot depend on quarks. Many Western philosophers either believe there is no supernatural world or are agnostic about its existence. This has led them to devote considerable attention to rethinking the relation between religion and morality in order to defend the autonomy of morality, and the history of Western ethics since the Enlightenment can be read as a series of attempts to ground morality in something other than God. 1

The second reason for resistance to the idea that morality needs religion is political. We live in a world of many religions, so if morality depends on religion, on which religion does it depend? Religious exclusivism is the position that only one religion is completely true, and typically, religious exclusivists find no difficulty in maintaining that morality depends on God as they understand him. (Perhaps it is not surprising that religious exclusivists always think that the one true religion is their own.) But the Western world also treats religious freedom as an important civil liberty, an idea that has spread well beyond its boundaries. Persons have the right to practice their own religions without interference from other individuals or the state. If morality is intrinsic to and dependent on particular religions, it follows that individuals have the right to practice their own moralities without interference from the state. But no society can accept that. Morality is a system for getting along with everyone, and that requires a sufficiently common morality to ensure that a society can function. Differences in moral beliefs and behavior can be permitted within limits and within carefully circumscribed categories, for example, some behavior within families and close personal relationships. And it is not necessary that all members of a society agree on the metaphysical basis for morality, nor need all persons in a well-functioning society have the same motives for being moral. But they must agree on a substantial core area of moral behavior, or at the very least, there must be a core morality that is recognized as having authority over all members of the society, including the recalcitrant few who resist it. In a society with no common religious authority, moral authority must come from another source.

In a liberal, pluralistic society religion is a matter of choice; a large area of morality is not. You can opt out of religion, but you cannot opt out of morality. For this reason, even devout religious believers in liberal democracies generally support the search for a way to make morality independent of religion. Or, to make the point more carefully, they want to say that there is an important respect in which morality is autonomous even if there is another respect in which it is not. Distinguishing the different respects in which morality may depend on religion is therefore important for those who believe, as I do, that morality does not depend on religion in every respect.

This problem would be solved if morality has a two-tier grounding—one in God, the other in nature. That is the approach of the historically important theory of Natural Law, whose classic statement in Christian philosophy is found in the work of Thomas Aquinas. This theory teaches that the basic norms of morality sufficient for civil society have a foundation in human nature, and so morality is common to all human beings. The norms of behavior generated by human nature arise from the natural law, which is accessible, in principle, by ordinary human reason. The natural law, however, is not ultimate. Everything outside of God comes from God, including the natural law, which is an expression in the created order of the Eternal Law of God (see Aquinas 1992 , I, ii, q. 91). 2 What is important for the problem of this chapter is the way natural law theory makes morality ultimately dependent on God, while giving it subultimate metaphysical grounding and justification in something all humans have in common. It is not necessary, although it is often advantageous, to refer to God's revealed word in order to know what morality teaches and why. The moral law therefore depends on God only at the deepest level of the metaphysics of morals. The way morality needs God in natural law theory does not threaten the functioning of societies internally nor in their relations with each other.

In natural law theory and in biblical ethics, wrongdoing is a violation of a law. If the ultimate lawgiver is God, and God is a being with whom the agent has a relationship through the practice of religion, wrongdoing is something more than merely doing what is morally wrong. It is a sin, an offense against God. Now, it is important to see that, whereas the concept of moral wrong serves the same function in secularized moral theory as sin does in the moral systems of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the concepts of sin and moral wrong are not the same. The former is a rich concept that makes no sense outside the context of personal and communal relationships, defined in part by narratives, and sometimes involving elaborate theological accounts. In contrast, the latter is a thin concept intended to be the common denominator in a set of concepts used by atheists, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, and others. All can understand the idea of doing what is wrong even though many believe that every act of wrongdoing is more than mere wrongdoing. We should be wary, then, of the idea that when the Christian speaks of “sin” and the nonreligious person speaks of “moral wrong,” they are talking about the same thing. It is not just a matter of the Christian having distinctive beliefs about the implications and consequences of wrongful acts. I am suggesting that the concept of sin and the concept of moral wrong are different concepts, although they are not disjoint, and Christians or Jews are able to understand what is meant by moral wrong because of their ability to understand discourse outside their religious community and the extent to which it overlaps with their own. There are concepts analogous to sin in other religions, such as avidya (ignorance) in the nontheistic Advaita Vedanta. Avidya is a kind of ignorance that involves desiring, feeling, and choosing wrongly as well as thinking wrongly. If I am right in this conjecture, the idea of moral wrong is thinner than the parallel concepts in religious moralities, but it has the advantage of permitting discourse across religious divisions as well as with people who do not find a home in any religion.

The same point applies to concepts for the goal of morality, concepts of salvation, enlightenment, or Aristotle's eudaimonia. These concepts also have something in common even though they are distinct. All apply to the goal of living morally. The idea of an ultimate moral goal, like the idea of moral wrongdoing, is a common denominator among a wide range of religious moralities as well as some, like Aristotle's, that are metaphysically rich but not religious. Sometimes the idea of happiness is taken as the equivalent for the idea of the moral goal. The thinnest concept of happiness is identified by Aristotle at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics ( 2000 ; hereafter NE ); it is simply the concept of what all humans ultimately aim at. This concept can be thickened by a description of the content of the goal, and Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia is gradually thickened in the course of book 1 of the NE , and throughout the rest of the work. Religious discourse almost always begins with a thick concept of the goal of human life, often called salvation. Salvation can be interpreted as a thickening of the goal identified by Aristotle on the first page of the NE , although in a different direction. So, just as sin adds to wrongdoing the idea of offending God, salvation adds to happiness the idea of existing in union with God, or recognizing one's identity with the Brahman, or realizing one's Buddha-nature.

Clearly, the thinning of religious concepts like sin and salvation into nonreligious moral concepts like wrongdoing and happiness is an advantage in a pluralistic society, but one of the consequences of thinning religious moral concepts is that it results in concepts that are so abstract, it is unclear that they are able to motivate an agent in her practical life. The question Why should I be moral? is not obviously a trivial question, whereas Why should I care about offending God? is foolish to anyone who understands the context in which such a question would be asked. It seems to me that the relation between morality and motivation is a serious one in modern secular ethics because the thinning process thins out the aspects of moral concepts most directly relevant to motivation. 2 This problem is perhaps most evident in the case of the concept of happiness. It is very difficult to be motivated by the mere concept of that at which all humans aim, whereas it is much easier to be motivated by the thicker concepts of salvation, enlightenment, or Aristotelian eudaimonia. The thinner the concept, the wider its conceptual applicability, but the price is a reduction of motivational strength. 3

This leads to the issue of whether there are crucial religious moral concepts that cannot be thinned. Elizabeth Anscombe ( 1958 ) argued in a famous paper inaugurating the contemporary reemergence of virtue ethics that the concept of a moral law makes no sense without a moral lawgiver, and that the only lawgiver capable of filling the role is God. One way of interpreting Anscombe's point is that the concept of moral law as used in traditional natural law theory and in biblical ethics cannot be thinned; the idea of a lawgiver cannot be removed from the idea of moral law. Perhaps in implicit agreement with this point, some modern moral philosophers have searched for an alternative lawgiver: society or the moral agent herself. These attempts have been unsuccessful, says Anscombe, because neither society nor the agent is the right sort of thing to have the authority to be a lawgiver. To think so is to misunderstand the concept of law. 4 Of course, it is disputable whether Anscombe is right that there is such a conceptual connection between the moral law and a divine lawgiver, but the fact that the point arises at all suggests that it is not obvious that the thick moral concepts that developed within religious practice can be thinned without threat of incoherence. In any case, I believe that the relation between the moral concepts inside and outside religious discourse deserves more attention.

One of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world is to find a moral discourse that can reach all the inhabitants of the earth, but one that preferably does no violence to the conceptual frameworks of particular religions. If the concepts that are central to moral practice in the world's great religions cannot be thinned into a common set of concepts, the task is impossible. Or it may be impossible for some other reason, perhaps because it is impossible to get a common content to morality that is sufficient for the requirements for life in a pluralistic world. But it is a goal that should not be given up until its impossibility has been demonstrated. A given religion may find that some of its moral teachings are not feasible for interaction with the practitioners of other religions and it may have to revise or abandon them for interaction to be possible, but that is an issue that needs to be addressed within the framework of that religion.

The philosopher's task is different. One of the aims of philosophy is to understand the relation between morality and religion from a perspective outside that of any religion. This is not to deny that there can be a distinctively Christian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and so on. But somebody needs to address the issue of whether morality can be independent of religion and, if so, what it would look like, and that is the distinctive task of the philosopher. There are important arguments that morality needs religion to reach its goal, to provide moral motivation, and to provide morality with its foundation and justification. Versions of these arguments are examined in the next three sections. I will briefly address their implications for the task of developing a common morality in the last section.

The Goal of Morality

One important set of arguments that morality needs religion or that moral theory needs theology holds that there is a goal or point to morality, and that point is inexplicable within a naturalistic, autonomous moral theory. In this class of arguments are some of the best-known moral arguments for the existence of God. These arguments require the identification of a particular point to morality, for example, a system of cosmic justice in which the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad are punished, or the idea that there is an end of history, a goal at which all human life aims, that human life is pointless without such a goal, and the goal is unattainable without a supernatural power. Many of these arguments are in the class of transcendental arguments, or arguments that purport to identify the preconditions for the truth of some premise. These arguments begin with a premise giving the content or point of morality, and the argument attempts to show that the truth of such a premise requires the truth of important religious propositions such as the existence of God or an afterlife.

The classic statement of an argument of this type was given by Immanuel Kant. Kant accepted the ancient Greek and medieval Christian teaching that all human beings necessarily seek happiness. Where he differed from his predecessors was on the relation between virtue and happiness. The Greeks and medieval philosophers agreed that there is a strong connection between the virtuous life and the happy life, although the Greeks worried about the place of good fortune in happiness and the Christians maintained that the happiness we seek is not fully attainable in this life. Nonetheless, with some variations, they believed that the ultimate goal or end of the moral life is a unitary good in which happiness and virtue are integrated and virtually inseparable. Kant denied that. Virtue and happiness are neither conceptually nor probabilistically connected, according to Kant. They are two different ends. But because both virtue and happiness are goods, Kant argues, the highest good, or summum bonum , would be a world in which human beings combine moral virtue with happiness; in fact, it would be a world in which their happiness is proportional to their virtue.

With the idea of the highest good in place, Kant offers the following simple argument for theism. Morality obligates each of us to seek the good, and so it obligates us to seek the highest good. But morality cannot obligate us to seek the impossible. Hence, the highest good must be attainable. It is not attainable without a cause adequate to the effect, which is to say, unless there is a God with the power to proportion happiness to virtue. God's existence is therefore a necessary condition for the possibility of the highest good, and so it is a necessary condition for our obligation to be moral ( 1997 , pt. 1, bk. 2, ch. 2, sec. 5).

The intuition behind Kant's argument is profound even though his description of the highest good is idiosyncratic. What may seem particularly bothersome about the argument is that Kant himself creates a problem for value theory and then argues that there must be a God to solve the problem. The ancient and medieval philosophers, among others, did not see the tension in the concept of the highest good in such stark terms to begin with, so the need to bring God to the rescue was not as glaring. Nonetheless, some of them did think that the highest good must be reachable and that it is not reachable without the existence of an afterlife. A comparison of Kant's notion of the highest good with that of Aquinas is illuminating. Aquinas accepted the Aristotelian position that all humans desire happiness by nature, that happiness is our natural end. But if we investigate what would truly fulfill the human longing for happiness, we see that it is something unattainable without God and the possibility of the enjoyment of seeing God. Aquinas's view of the ultimate human end is an extension and deepening of Aristotle's view in book 10 of the NE that happiness is contemplation of the highest things ( 2000 , bk. 10, ch. 7). As Aquinas describes it, to seek happiness is to seek the satiation of the will; to be happy is to have nothing left to will ( 1992 , I, ii. q. 5, art. 8). The will is satiated in the possession of reality, which, for human beings, is accomplished through an act of the intellect, an intellectual vision. The human desire for happiness is not satisfied with anything less than a total vision of reality. This vision is contained in the Beatific Vision, a vision of God in whom all things are seen. 5

Aquinas does not construct his explanation of human happiness in the form of an argument for theism, since it appears in a part of the Summa Theologiae that presupposes his famous arguments for God's existence at the beginning of the work. But a transcendental argument for the existence of God is implicit in Aquinas's account of the nature of happiness. The natural end for humans requires union with an eternal being who satisfies our natural craving for happiness. Without such a being the end of human living is unattainable. Either there is a God or human beings aim at the impossible by nature. So, whereas Kant argues that morality puts an impossible demand on us if there is no God, the Thomistic argument understands nature as structured in such a way that it aims at the impossible if there is no God. The former argues that in the absence of God there is something wrong with morality, whereas the latter argues that in the absence of God there is something wrong with nature.

Aquinas, like the Greeks, assumed that nature is orderly and teleological in structure. There would be no point to the existence of natural desires unless they are capable of fulfillment ( 1992 , I, q. 75, art. 6, corpus), and therefore the conditions for their fulfillment reveal important metaphysical truths. In contrast, modern thinkers are generally wary of drawing any conclusions from human needs and desires. If we come to believe that our natural human desires cannot be satisfied in this life, the typical response is to conclude that we should change the desires. This modern option displays a remarkable degree of confidence in the power of therapy. Perhaps a less naïve alternative is to conclude that life really is absurd. This is the position of an important strand of atheistic existentialist literature which accepts the Thomistic idea that human desires and aims are irremediably thwarted without God, but rejects the premise that human desires cannot be irremediably thwarted. Camus' essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” ( 1955 ) is a poignant portrayal of this view of human destiny. It contains the following epigram: “Oh my soul do not aspire to immortal heights but exhaust the field of the possible.” Camus' kind of atheism makes an interesting contrast with the atheism of the Enlightenment, which simply rejects the soundness of arguments for theism while attempting to keep most of traditional ethics. The denial of God's existence is an intrinsic feature of Camus' view of the human condition. The absurdity of life is his price for accepting the major premise of the moral argument for the existence of God. 6

The transcendental arguments addressed in this section focus on the conditions for the meaningfulness of human life. In the next section we look at another kind of transcendental argument that argues that God's existence is a condition for escaping motivation skepticism.

Motivation Skepticism

Transcendental arguments are most commonly used against skepticism about an external world. They attempt to show that the beliefs the skeptic doubts are preconditions for a skeptical hypothesis to make sense. These arguments also are inspired by Kant, who argued against Descartes that our consciousness of our own existence in time presupposes something permanent in perception on which our own existence depends. My consciousness of my own existence is simultaneously a consciousness of the existence of things outside of me. Kant says that the skeptical hypothesis that nothing exists except my own mind therefore turns against itself ( 1999 , “Refutation of Idealism,” 1781/B276).

Kant's argument against skepticism addresses the conditions for theoretical judgment, whereas his moral argument addresses the conditions for engaging in the moral life. What the arguments have in common is the attempt to identify the necessary condition for something to make sense, either a theoretical judgment or an act of will. Skepticism attacks thought; atheism attacks the obligation to act morally. But skepticism is not simply a problem for theoretical judgment. It is also a practical problem because confidence in the truth of beliefs is a condition for having the motive to act. In this section I propose a transcendental argument that combines features of both of Kant's arguments. It is a moral argument for theism that arises from motivation skepticism, or skepticism about the meaningfulness of engaging in the moral life.

Radical skepticism in epistemology is the threat of massive and undiscoverable failure in our cognitive life, particularly in the formation of beliefs. Skepticism is a threat because we have epistemic ends, one of which is to get the truth, and the function of skeptical hypotheses such as Descartes' Evil Genius is to lead us to see that there is no guarantee that we get the truth even when our epistemic behavior is impeccable. There are analogues of skepticism in ethics because we have moral as well as epistemic ends, and it is possible that we are radical failures in our moral lives and have no way to discover our failure. Of course, if moral beliefs have truth values, one way we can fail morally is to have false moral beliefs. But we can fail not only at the level of belief, but at the level of motivation. 7 There are at least two ways in which the moral analogue of epistemological skepticism arises at the level of motivation. One is skepticism about the motivational state itself; the other is skepticism about the point of the ensuing action.

First, skepticism can arise about motives, whether motives are understood as emotions or as desires. In my theory of emotion, a motive is an emotion that initiates and directs action toward an end. Emotions are not beliefs and they do not include beliefs, but they have a cognitive component because in an emotional state the intentional object of the emotion is construed a particular way (e.g., as fearful, lovable, contemptible, pitiful, etc.). In an emotion of fear, something is construed as fearful; in an emotion of love something is construed as lovable, and so on. In each case, the cognitive construal is internally connected to a feeling that accompanies it. Skepticism about emotion threatens as long as there is a sense in which the intentional object of an emotion can be construed correctly or incorrectly, appropriately or inappropriately. This follows from the above point that there is a threat of radical skepticism in some area of human life whenever there is a possibility of failure in that area of life that is in principle undiscoverable.

But it does not matter for the argument of this chapter that emotions can succeed or fail. What matters is that motives can succeed or fail, and that is widely accepted, for most philosophers think of motives as desires rather than as emotions. If motives are desires, we get an immediate analogy with epistemological skepticism. There is a gap between the desired and the desirable, just as there is a gap between justified or rational belief and the truth. Skepticism in its extreme form is the fear that the gap is never or almost never closed. So just as almost all of our beliefs may be false, so too, almost all of what we desire may be undesirable. And if that is the case, it is possible that we would be incapable of discovering it, perhaps because the human race is infected with a systematic moral blindness. Less extreme forms of skepticism about emotion or desire, like less extreme forms of skepticism about beliefs, are more persuasive but still threatening. If many of our beliefs and motives are unsuccessful, then even if there are also many that are successful, as long as we cannot tell the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful, the entire set of beliefs and the entire set of motives are in peril.

A second kind of motivation skepticism is skepticism about the point of our acts. The point of most acts is an end in the sense of a state of affairs that the act aims to bring about, but even acts without an end in this sense have a point in that they have a meaning within the context in which they occur. An act can miss its point, whether or not its point is an intended consequence. For example, an act expressing an emotion or the agent's principles may fail to express the emotion or principles in the way intended. The most straightforward way an act can fail in its point, however, is by failing to produce the state of affairs at which it aims. If an act has an end, success in that act includes success in bringing about the intended end. The world must cooperate not only with our beliefs but also with our intended ends if our acts are to be successful. Because it is possible that success in reaching our ends is systematically thwarted, a form of skepticism threatens the point of our acts. Our acts could fail, not because of evil demons or brains in vats, but because the world simply does not cooperate with our intentions. For example, if I am motivated by compassion, I desire that others be comforted in their suffering and I am motivated to bring about states of affairs in which I bring comfort to the suffering. I am then led to form intentions to act in specific ways that I judge will have that effect. But the guarantee that my acts will have such an effect is even less than the guarantee that my rational or justified beliefs are true on the epistemological skeptical hypotheses. After all, if an evil genius can systematically thwart my attempts at getting the truth, it would take a lesser genius to systematically thwart my attempts at alleviating the suffering of others. So it could happen that every time I attempt to act in a compassionate way, I increase the suffering of others rather than alleviate it. And, of course, this problem could occur not only for the motivation of compassion, but for the motivations of justice, fairness, gratitude, courage, kindness, generosity, and many others. It is possible that every time I try to act fairly, my act produces an unfair state of affairs; every time I try to show gratitude, my act conveys the opposite message; every time I try to be generous, my giving goes to the wrong persons or to nobody at all, and so on. And it is possible that I can never discover my failure.

Motivation skepticism is a worry that our desires, emotions, and purposes fail in a way that cannot be discovered. The fear that failure may be undiscoverable entails that motivation skepticism includes the worry that we have false beliefs, but the object of the skepticism in motivation skepticism is not the falsehood of beliefs. The fear that the world may systematically fail to cooperate with my choices is not a fear that certain beliefs are false. The fear that I may desire the undesirable is not a fear that my belief that what I desire is desirable is false. The fear that my emotion is inappropriate to the circumstances is not a fear that my belief that it is appropriate is false. Of course, in each case, I may also have the corresponding belief and fear that it is false, and when I fear that my failure in each case is undiscoverable, I fear a failure to know. But skepticism threatens the motive to act not only on the level of failure in belief, but also on the level of failure in desire and purpose. Belief skepticism and motivation skepticism combine to threaten the moral life—in fact, practical life in general, with possible paralysis.

Assuming that paralysis cannot be rational, there must be a rational way to avoid it or to get beyond it. The argument below is a form of the latter. It is an antiskeptical argument that argues that morality obligates only if there is a God. The argument has features of Kant's transcendental argument against belief skepticism as well as his moral transcendental argument for the existence of God.

An Antiskeptical Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God

(1) We have no option but to engage in the moral life. Morality obligates us, no matter what we think or believe and no matter what we feel or choose. Morality obligates us unconditionally.

(2) Morality requires us to be motivated to act in moral ways and to act on those motives in the appropriate circumstances. Many moral acts also aim at producing particular outcomes.

(3) No one can be required to engage in an activity if he reasonably judges that he is taking a risk that it is pointless or self-defeating and is unable to judge the degree of the risk. 8

(4) The moral life requires some degree of confidence that the effort to be moral is not pointless or self-defeating.

(5) Trust in the general truth of our moral beliefs (or at least, our ability to find out whether they are true), the accuracy of our motivational states (our emotions fit the circumstances, what we desire is desirable, etc.), and our probable success in reaching moral outcomes is a condition for confidence that the effort to be moral is not pointless or self-defeating.

(6) On the radical skeptical hypotheses we cannot have any confidence in the truth of our moral beliefs, the trustworthiness of our motivational states, or our probable success in reaching moral outcomes. On the radical skeptical hypotheses the effort to be moral, for all we know, may be pointless or self-defeating.

(7) Hence, morality does not obligate us unless we have reason to believe that the skeptical hypotheses are false. Moral obligation requires that there be a guarantor of our trust in our moral beliefs, motives, and success in action. As Kant puts it, we must suppose the existence of a cause adequate to the effect: a Providential God.

Notice that according to this argument, our motive for being moral is not threatened as long as we believe there is a God, but morality does not actually obligate us unless the belief is true. If that is the case, then this argument may be able to avoid a well-known objection to Kant's transcendental argument against belief skepticism. The problem sometimes raised against the latter argument is that it shows us how we have to think, not how things have to be. Even if we have to make judgments about an outer world in order to make judgments about the existence of our own minds, it does not follow that the judgments in either category must be true. As long as there is no requirement that the way we think lines up with the way things are, we have not escaped skepticism. I will not discuss the merits of this objection, although I think it is a powerful one. What I want to point out is that the objection cannot so easily be raised against the argument above because there is a requirement that our moral motives line up with moral reality. In fact, morality just is the demand that that be so. Morality requires the falsehood of both belief skepticism, and motivation skepticism and moral motivation requires a guarantor of that falsehood. A deity may not be the only metaphysically adequate guarantor, but in the absence of competitors, he is the most obvious choice to fit the role.

The above argument assumes a form of moral realism, the theory that there are moral facts independent of human perceptions and attitudes, since it presupposes that moral obligation has a source outside of the human mind. Moral skepticism, like skepticism about perception and belief, is most threatening within a realist metaphysics, and so idealism (antirealism) is a possible solution. I think it is no accident that the popularity of antirealism in ethics coincides with the decline in belief in a theistic foundation for morality. The metaphysical foundation of ethics has been problematic in modern ethics, whereas theism offers a number of plausible accounts of that foundation. A couple of these accounts are outlined in the next section.

The Metaphysical Ground of Morality

Western religions maintain that morality arises from God. Natural law theory makes morality rest on God's nature. Divine Command theory makes morality rest on God's will. The theory I call Divine Motivation theory makes morality rest on the motives that are the primary constituents of God's virtues. In each case, the theory may not be committed to the idea that morality needs religion, as it is possible that even though morality in fact derives from God, morality would exist even if there were no God. But clearly, if morality derives from God, it depends on God in actuality whether or not morality would have existed in some other possible godless world. This is the view I investigate briefly in this section.

Other than natural law theory, the principal theory of a theistic foundation for morality is divine command theory. Divine command theory has a long and important history in religious ethics, although it is often misunderstood. In my opinion, the major objections to it can be answered and I will not discuss them in any detail. My own objections are ones that apply to law-based theories in general. The alternative I prefer is a theory I call divine motivation theory. This theory is Christian, but its structure permits variations both for other religions and for secular ethics.

According to divine command (DC) theory, the divine will is the source of morality. Many contemporary forms of DC theory limit the theory to an account of right and wrong acts, not an account of moral value in general. 9 A common form of DC theory, then, is the following: an act is morally required (an obligation) just in case God commands us to do it; an act is morally wrong just in case God forbids us to do it; an act is permissible just in case God neither commands nor forbids it. Because a divine command is the expression of God's will with respect to human and other creaturely acts, the divine will is the fundamental source of the moral properties of acts.

The nature of the relation between God's commands and moral requirements is an important issue for DC theorists. To say that “x is morally required” means “x is commanded by God” is too strong because it has the consequence that to say “x is morally required because God commands it” is just to say “x is commanded by God because x is commanded by God,” which clearly tells us nothing. On the other hand, to say that God's commands and moral requirements are merely extensionally equivalent is too weak. That is compatible with the lack of any metaphysical connection whatever between the existence of moral properties and God's will, and it makes DC theory uninteresting. DC theory, then, aims at something in between identity of meaning and mere extensional equivalence. It should turn out that God's will makes what's right to be right. Acts are right/wrong because of the will of God. A plausible version of the intended relation has been proposed by Robert Adams (1993), who argues that the relation between God's commands and the rightness/wrongness of acts is akin to the relation between water and H 2 O in the theory of direct reference defended by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and others in the 1970s. 10 “Water” and “H 2 O” do not mean the same thing. To think so is to misunderstand the importance of the discovery that water is H 2 O. This was certainly not the discovery of the meaning of a word, nor a change in meaning of a word. Nonetheless, it is not a contingent fact that water is composed of H 2 O. The discovery that water is H 2 O is the discovery that being H 2 O is essential to water. We think now that nothing ever was or will be water that is not H 2 O, even though nobody was in a position to understand that before the seventeenth century. Similarly, the moral properties of acts could be essentially connected to God's commands even though many people are not in a position to realize the connection and perhaps nobody was at some periods of history.

The theory I call divine motivation theory makes the ground of what is morally good and morally right God's motives rather than God's will. Because I think of a motive as an emotion that is operating to initiate action, the divine motives can be considered divine emotions. However, in philosophies influenced by Aristotelian psychology, such as that of Aquinas, emotions are thought to be essentially connected to the body and therefore do not apply to God. I see no reason to deny that emotions are components of the divine nature, but the theory does not require that. It requires only that there are states in God that are analogous to emotions in the same way that there are states in God analogous to what we call beliefs in human beings. Virtually all theists attribute to God states such as love and compassion. Whether or not these states are properly classified as emotions, they are motivating. God acts out of love, joy, compassion, and perhaps also anger and disgust. These are the states that I propose constitute the metaphysical basis for moral value. They are components of God's virtues. The shift I advocate from God's will to God's virtues results in a shift from a theological deontological theory to a theological virtue theory.

The overall structure of the theory is exemplarist. Moral properties are defined via reference to an exemplar of goodness. God is the ultimate exemplar, but there are many finitely good human exemplars. In this respect, the theory is similar to that of Aristotle, ( 2000 , bk. 2, ch. 6, 1107a), who defines virtue as what would be determined by the person with phronesis (practical wisdom), and morally virtuous acts as acts that the phronimos would do in the circumstances in question. For Aristotle, then, the exemplar is the person with practical wisdom. In religious traditions, the exemplar is the Christian saint, the Buddhist arahant, the Jewish tzaddik, and so on. 11

To get a more careful rendering of the way reference to an exemplar defines moral concepts, let us return to Putnam and Kripke's theory of natural kind terms (Putnam 1975 , Kripke 1980 ). They defined a natural kind such as water or gold or human as whatever is the same kind of thing or stuff as some indexically identified instance. For example, they proposed that gold is, roughly, whatever is the same element as that ; water is whatever is the same liquid as that ; a human is whatever is a member of the same species as that ; and so on. In each case, the demonstrative term “that” refers to an entity to which the person doing the defining refers directly, typically by pointing. One of the main reasons for proposing defini-tions like this was that Kripke and Putnam believed that often we do not know the nature of the thing we are defining, and yet we know how to construct a definition that links up with its nature and continues to do so after its nature is discovered.

A person possesses moral properties in a greater or a lesser degree, but it is unlikely that something is more or less gold or more or less water. The exemplars of gold and water, reference to which is used in defining gold and water, are not paradigms in the sense of especially good instances of the kind defined. Virtually any instance of water or gold will do for defining a natural kind term. This is a respect in which moral concepts are disanalogous, for I propose that the latter are defined by reference to exemplary instances of goodness. Like the Aristotelian person of practical wisdom, some moral exemplars must be identifiable in advance of defining the concept they exemplify.

Divine motivation theory is an exemplarist virtue theory. It is exemplarist because the moral properties of persons, acts, and outcomes are defined via an indexical reference to an exemplar of a good person. It is a virtue theory because the moral properties of persons (virtues) are more basic than the moral properties of acts and outcomes. But I will say little in this chapter on the details of the theory. My purpose in this section is merely to show that God can have a foundational role in ethics as an exemplar rather than as a lawgiver. This approach has advantages for Christian ethics as well as for the task of constructing a common morality.

Here is a brief outline of divine motivation (DM) theory. The paradigmatically good person is God. Value in all forms derives from God, in particular, from God's motives. God's motives are perfectly good, and human motives are good insofar as they are like the divine motives as those motives would be expressed in finite and embodied beings. Motive-dispositions are constituents of virtues. A virtue is an enduring trait consisting of a good motive-disposition and reliable success in bringing about the aim, if any, of the good motive. God's virtues are paradigmatically good personal traits. Human virtues are those traits that imitate God's virtues as they would be expressed by human beings in human circumstances. The goodness of a state of affairs is derivative from the goodness of the divine motive. Outcomes get their moral value by their relation to good and bad motivations. For example, a state of affairs is a merciful one or a compassionate one or a just one because the divine motives that are constituents of mercy, compassion, and justice, respectively, aim at bringing them about. Acts get their moral value from the acts that would, would not, or might be done by God in the relevant circumstances.

The relation of being like an indexically identified instance of water is obviously much clearer than the relation of being like a trait of God or being like an act God would do in relevantly similar circumstances. To say that a human is or is acting like God is much different from saying that a portion of liquid is like another portion of liquid. We may have to investigate the chemical constitution of the liquids in order to determine whether one is like the other, but even before we do that we have some idea of what it means to be alike in nature. It is much harder to understand what it means for a human to be like God even though the idea of likeness to God can be found in many traditions including some that are not religious in the usual sense (e.g., Stoicism, Platonism). 12 In Christian theology, the problem is solved in part through the doctrine of the Incarnation. The God-man is both the perfect exemplar from whom all value derives and is a human person who can be imitated. The life of Christ is a narrative that illuminates a point of view from which we can see a number of exemplary acts, and especially exemplary motives and the virtues of which they are constituents. DM theory gives a theoretical foundation to Christian narrative ethics.

An important objection to DC theory goes back to Plato's Euthyphro , where Socrates asks, “Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?” (10a). As applied to DC theory, this question produces a famous dilemma: if God wills the good (right) because it is good (right), then goodness (rightness) is independent of God's will and the latter does not explain the former. On the other hand, if something is good (right) because God wills it, then it looks as if the divine will is arbitrary. God is not constrained by any moral reason from willing anything whatever, and it is hard to see how any nonmoral reason could be the right sort of reason to determine God's choice of what to make good or right. The apparent consequence is that good/bad (right/wrong) are determined by an arbitrary divine will; God could have commanded cruelty or hatred, and if he had done so, cruel and hateful acts would have been right, even duties. This is an unacceptable consequence. It is contrary to our sense of the essentiality of the moral properties of acts of certain kinds, and the goodness of a God who could make cruelty good is not at all what we normally mean by good. It is therefore hard to see how it can be true that God himself is good in any important, substantive sense of good on this approach.

To solve this problem, Robert Adams ( 1979 ) modifies DC theory to say that the property of rightness is the property of being commanded by a loving God. This permits Adams to allow that God could command cruelty for its own sake, but if God did so he would not love us, and if that were the case, Adams argues, morality would break down. Morality is dependent on divine commands, but they are dependent on the commands of a deity with a certain nature. If God's nature were not loving, morality would fall apart.

Although Adams's proposal may succeed in answering the objection it is designed to address, it has the disadvantage of being ad hoc. There is no intrinsic connection between a command and the property of being loving, so to tie morality to the commands of a loving God is to tie it to two distinct properties of God. In DM theory there is no need to solve the problem of whether God could make it right that we brutalize the innocent by making any such modification to the theory, since being loving is one of God's essential motives. The right thing for humans to do is to act on motives that imitate the divine motives. Brutalizing the innocent is not an act that expresses a motive that imitates the divine motives. Hence, it is impossible for brutalizing the innocent to be right as long as (1) it is impossible for such an act to be an expression of a motive that is like the motives of God, and (2) it is impossible for God to have different motives. (2) follows from the plausible assumption that God's motives are part of his nature. 13

The arbitariness problem also does not arise in DM theory. That is because a will needs a reason, but a motive is a reason. The will, according to Aquinas, always chooses “under the aspect of good,” which means that reasons are not inherent in the will itself ( 1992 , ST I, ii, q. 1, art. 5, corpus). In contrast, motives provide not only the impetus to action, but the reason for the action. If we know that God acts from a motive of love, there is no need to look for a further reason for the act. On the other hand, a divine command requires a reason, and if the reason is or includes fundamental divine motivational states such as love, it follows that even DC theory needs to refer to God's motives to avoid the consequence that moral properties are arbitrary and God himself is not good. This move makes divine motives more basic than the divine will even in DC theory.

DM theory also has the theoretical advantage of providing a unitary theory of all evaluative properties, divine as well as human. DC theory is most naturally interpreted as an ethics of law, a divine deontological theory, wherein the content of the law is promulgated by divine commands. God's own goodness and the rightness of God's own acts, however, are not connected to divine commands because God does not give commands to himself. In contrast, DM theory makes the features of the divine nature in virtue of which God is morally good the foundation for the moral goodness of those same features in creatures. Both divine and human goodness are explained in terms of good motives, and the goodness of human motives is derived from the goodness of the divine motives.

An advantage of DM theory for the Christian philosopher is that it shows the importance of Christology for ethics, whereas DC theory ignores the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, focusing on the will of the Creator-God as the source of moral value. For those who prefer virtue ethics to deontological ethics, the theory also has the advantage of being a form of virtue theory. The basic moral concept is not law, but the good.

There are innumerable ways that a moral theory can be structured with a theological foundation. The dominance of DC theory and natural law theory in Western religious ethics is probably due to a combination of the importance of law in Western thought and a particular way of reading the Bible that became standard. Virtue ethics can have a theological foundation also, whether or not it has the form I have proposed here. There are also forms of virtue theory that lack an explicit theological foundation but are compatible with a religious explanation for the existence of value. Whether ethical theory on its metaphysical side needs religious theory is an issue that cannot be disentangled from the general question of what is required for an acceptable metaphysics. When naturalistic ethical theories are preferred to religious ethical theories, it is not because they are thought to be superior as ethical theories, but because it is thought that naturalism is superior to religion. That, of course, is not a dispute that will be resolved within ethics.

Religion and the Task of Developing a Common Morality

Moral pluralism is a challenge to every kind of moral theory, whether or not it is religiously based. Apart from the issue of the justification of one moral system over others, there is the problem of developing a common morality. As I pointed out in the first section, it is not important for this purpose that everyone agree on the foundation of ethics or the substantive goal at which the moral life aims; nor is it important that everyone have the same motive to be moral. It is not even important that everyone think of wrongdoing the same way—as a sin, avidya, a violation of someone's rights, or something else—as long as they agree on what is wrong, and they only have to agree on that within a certain core area of human behavior.

What are the prospects for a common morality? One based on natural law? Divine commands? Universal reason? It is widely believed that there is virtually no hope for a common morality based on divine commands, and I think that must be true. Natural law and Kantian universal reason may both provide some help, but so far with only limited results. 14 It seems to me that one of the lessons of cross-cultural experience is that even though most people find the metaphysics and theology of another culture hard to swallow, they can usually relate to the narratives that have an important place in other cultures, even those that are radically different from their own. That includes other cultures' paradigms of good persons, those they seek to imitate. Of course, most of us would have no trouble distinguishing a Christian saint from a Stoic sage or a Buddhist arahant. My point is not that the exemplars are identical, but that for the most part, we have no trouble understanding why most of them are worthy of being imitated. Even the alleged exceptions, such as terrorist leaders, prove the rule because they get a very different reaction from those outside their own extremist groups than do the more standard moral exemplars in the major religions. 15 I believe it is likely that a wide range of virtues is represented by all or almost all of the moral paradigms in the major cultures, both religious and nonreligious, in different parts of the world, even though there are some differences in the particular acts that are thought to express the virtues. A common morality would in principle be that morality that derives from the overlapping character traits of moral exemplars in a wide range of cultures. Particular moralities distinctive of individual cultures would include the nonoverlapping traits of their exemplars. Religiously based moralities have an important function to serve in the development of a common morality because they have richly described moral exemplars. In contrast, secular ethics in the Western world differs from religious ethics, not so much in having different exemplars, but in not having exemplars at all. This is particularly true of consequentialist and deontological ethics, both of which aim for universality by constructing entire moral systems out of the thinnest of moral concepts.

My view is that if the aim is universal agreement, that is the wrong way to go about it. Full universal agreement is no doubt impossible in any case, but a workable common morality is more likely to arise from dialogue between richly developed religious moralities than between those who develop the most abstract systems and everyone else. If that is right, religious ethics has an important function in society quite apart from its importance in religious communities themselves.

A very interesting and convincing alternative account of Enlightenment ethics has been given by J. B. Schneewind ( 1998 ), who argues that when conceptions of morality as obedience gave way to conceptions of morality as self-governance during the Enlightenment, the change was made primarily by religious philosophers who took for granted that God is essential to morality. One could make the same point about the rise of modern science, which was not precipitated by atheist scientists, but by religious believers who thought that God had created a natural order accessible to investigation by the scientific method. That suggests that both the autonomy of moral reasoning and the autonomy of scientific reasoning are compatible with a deeper theistic metaphysics (see Schneewind 1998 , esp. ch. 1, sec. 3).

In fact, the debate over the issue of whether the Why be moral? question is trivial may show that the concept of the moral is thinner for some people than for others. For many people, the concepts of being moral, doing the right thing, avoiding the wrong thing have an affective content lacking in the thinnest versions of these concepts. I propose a theory on the thinning of moral concepts of their motivational content in “Emotion and Moral Judgment” ( 2003 ).

It has been argued since Hume that no concept is intrinsically motivating. I argue that that is false in “Emotion and Moral Judgment.”

The concepts of guilt and punishment are related to the concept of law. If the former cannot be thinned, it is unlikely that the latter can either.

For an interesting and accessible twentieth-century defense of the Thomistic idea that happiness is found in contemplation, see Pieper ( 1998 ).

It is interesting that Camus retains many features of traditional morality, including the traditional sense of justice, in The Plague and The Rebel . He is not a moral nihilist.

Thomas Nagel ( 1979 , 218) says that the analogue of skepticism on the level of motivation is the problem of the meaning of life. This is not the problem I am addressing here, although it is an interesting one.

It is possible that one may reasonably judge that even a high degree of risk is outweighed by the good one hopes to gain (compare, for instance, Pascal's Wager). So when one cannot judge the degree of risk, one may reasonably judge that the good of the activity is worth the unknown risk. But it is unlikely that such a judgment is reasonable in every case in which morality obligates us to act.

Adams explicitly limits his version of divine command theory to a theory of obligation, not a general theory of the good. See Adams ( 1999 ) for his most recent detailed defense of such a theory.

The theory of direct reference originated with Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity ( 1980 ) and Hilary Putnam's paper, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” ( 1975 ).

See Owen Flanagan, “Saints” ( 1991 ), for a nice discussion of the many ways of sainthood and moral exemplariness.

Daniel Russell argues for the idea that virtue as likeness to God can be found in both Plato and the Stoics in “Plato and Seneca on Virtue as Likeness to God” ( 2001 ). Russell says that this aspect of Plato's thought has largely been ignored.

This is assuming, of course, that the motives of which we are speaking are suitably general. Love is essential to God, but love of Adam and Eve is not.

Perhaps the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , passed by the UN General Assembly in 1947, shows that a restricted range of moral rights without any religious basis can be recognized by many different cultures.

I've claimed in Zagzebski ( 2001 ) that all cultures have phonimoi and that they can in principle be recognized by those outside their own cultures.

Works Cited

Adams, Robert M.   1973 . “A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness.” In Religion and Morality, ed. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jr. , 318–47. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Reprinted as chap. 7 of Adams 1987.

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Adams, Robert M.   1979 . “ Divine Command Metaethics Modified Again. ” Journal of Religious Ethics 7: 66–79. Reprinted as chap. 9 of Adams 1987.

Adams, Robert M.   1987 . The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Adams, Robert M.   1999 . Finite and Infinite Goods. New York: Oxford University Press.

Anscombe, G. E. M.   1958 . “Modern Moral Philosophy. ” Philosophy 33: 1–19. Reprinted in R. Crisp and M. Slote , Virtue Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 10.1017/S0031819100037943

Aquinas, Saint Thomas . Summa theologiae.   1992 . Trans. Fathers of the English Domican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers.

Aristotle . 2000 . Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Roger Crisp . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Camus, Albert . 1955 . The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. J. O'Brien . New York: Knopf.

Flanagan, Owen . 1991 . “Saints.” In Varieties of Moral Personality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Kant, Immanuel . 1997 . Critique of Practical Reason. Ed. Mary Gregor. Introduction by Andrews Reath. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, Immanuel . 1999 . Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. Paul Geyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Kripke, Saul . 1980 . Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Nagel, Thomas . 1979 . Mortal Questions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Pieper, Josef . 1998 . Happiness and Contemplation. Trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston . South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press.

Putnam, Hilary . 1975 . “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’ ” In Mind, Language, and Reality. Vol. 2. of Philosophical Papers. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Originally published in Language, Mind, and Knowledge , ed. Keith Gunderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975).

Russell, Daniel . 2001. “Plato and Seneca on Virtue as Likeness to God.” Paper presented at Philosophy Department colloquium, University of Oklahoma, September.

Schneewind, A. B.   1998 . The Invention of Autonomy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Zagzebski, Linda . 2001 . “ Religious Diversity and Social Responsibility. ” Logos (winter): 135–155.

Zagzebski, Linda . 2003 . “ Emotion and Moral Judgment. ” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46: 104–24. 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2003.tb00245.x

For Further Reading

George, R.   1999 . In Defense of Natural Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hauerwas, Stanley , and Alasdair MacIntyre , eds. 1983 . Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Helm, Paul , ed. 1981 . Divine Commands and Morality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Idziak, Janine , ed. 1980 . Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings. Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press.

Lewis, C. S.   1952 . Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan.

MacDonald, Scott , ed. Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

MacIntyre, Alasdair . 1981 . After Virtue. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Mavrodes, George . 1986 . “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In Rationality, Religious Belief and Moral Commitment, ed. R. Audi and W. J. Wainwright . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Mitchell, Basil . 1980 . Morality: Religious and Secular. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Mouw, Richard . 1990 . The God Who Commands. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.

Quinn, Philip . 1978 . Divine Commands and Moral Requirements. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Swinburne, Richard . 1979 . The Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Vacek, E. C. , S.J.   1994 . Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Zagzebski, Linda . 2004 . Divine Motivation Theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

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International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue XII, December 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Religion and Morality: A Review of the Perspectives in Context

 Zipporah N. Sitoki, Dr. John Ekwenye Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, Kenya

Abstract –Religion and morality are not synonymous though, but some scholarly positions argue that sometimes religion affects morality. The problem is that even though the society may seem to be practicing more of religious related pursuits, the level of morality continues to deteriorate, a fact that strengthens the argument of secularism and the opinion that religion and morality have no relationship. This paper therefore reviews relevant literature in relation to the topic in context, morality and religion, in accordance to the various perspectives in place. The paper is guided by the Divine Command Theory developed by a number of philosophers. The literature reveals a number of issues in reflection to religion and morality and the perspectives in place. In a nutshell, morality in the society should prevail regardless of the ideology an individual subscribes to given that the religious and non-religious people hold their views firm.

Keywords: Morality, Religion, Christianity, African Traditional Religion, Secularism

I. INTRODUCTION

Religion and morality are not synonymous though, but some scholarly positions argue that sometimes religion affects morality. As a matter of fact, different religion claim different positions on what could be deemed right or wrong depending on the origin of the religion in question and the culture of a locality. The link between religion and morality has been a debatable issue for a very long time with philosophical viewpoints re-surfacing in modern times. As a matter of fact, various opinions that have been held on the subject of religion and morality has a traditional inclination right from the Greek philosophy, Christianity, Judaism and other religious confessions but majority of people agree that religion and morality are intertwined and therefore inseparable. Despite the fact that Plato’s uncle Critias was among the early people recorded in the history of atheists, he too agreed to the fact that religion was necessary due to its salutary and stabilizing effect on the aspect of morality. For a period of about 25 centuries, his sentiments have been echoed with both believers and unbelievers (Marx, 1843; Hamiliton & Cairns, 1961). However, some atheists have argued that there is no connection between religion and morality where they opine that religion makes people mean and selfish (Hitchens, 2007).

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Religion and Morality

1 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London

Harvey Whitehouse

2 Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, School of Anthropology, University of Oxford

Thanks to Sir Robert Hinde, Dr. Oliver Curry, and three anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks to Professor Maureen Callanan for valuable advice and assistance. The work of both authors on this article was supported by a Large Grant from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (REF RES-060-25-0085) entitled “Ritual, Community, and Conflict” and a STREP grant from the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme (project no. 043225) entitled “Explaining Religion.”

The relationship between religion and morality has long been hotly debated. Does religion make us more moral? Is it necessary for morality? Do moral inclinations emerge independently of religious intuitions? These debates, which nowadays rumble on in scientific journals as well as in public life, have frequently been marred by a series of conceptual confusions and limitations. Many scientific investigations have failed to decompose “religion” and “morality” into theoretically grounded elements; have adopted parochial conceptions of key concepts—in particular, sanitized conceptions of “prosocial” behavior; and have neglected to consider the complex interplay between cognition and culture. We argue that to make progress, the categories “religion” and “morality” must be fractionated into a set of biologically and psychologically cogent traits, revealing the cognitive foundations that shape and constrain relevant cultural variants. We adopt this fractionating strategy, setting out an encompassing evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. Our goals are twofold: to produce a detailed picture of the current state of the field, and to provide a road map for future research on the relationship between religion and morality.

It is simply impossible for people to be moral without religion or God. —Laura Schlessinger (quoted in Zuckerman, 2008 )

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. —Richard Dawkins (2006 , p. 348)

The question of whether or not morality requires religion is both topical and ancient. In the Euthyphro , Socrates famously asked whether goodness is loved by the gods because it is good, or whether goodness is good because it is loved by the gods. Although he favored the former proposal, many others have argued that morality is dictated by—and indeed unthinkable without—God: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” ( Dostoevsky, 1880/1990 ). 1 Echoing this refrain, conservatives like to claim that “declining moral standards” are at least partly attributable to the rise of secularism and the decline of organized religion (see Zuckerman, 2008 ).

The notion that religion is a precondition for morality is widespread and deeply ingrained. More than half of Americans share Laura Schlessinger’s belief that morality is impossible without belief in God ( Pew Research Center, 2007 ), and in many countries this attitude is far more prevalent (see Figure 1 ). In a series of compelling recent studies, Gervais and colleagues ( Gervais, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2011 ; see also Gervais, 2011 , 2013a , 2014a ; Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012b , 2013 ) have demonstrated strong implicit associations of atheists with immorality. Although these associations are stronger in people who themselves believe in God, even atheist participants intuitively view acts such as serial murder, incest, and necrobestiality as more representative of atheists than of other religious, ethnic, or cultural groups ( Gervais, 2014a ). 2 Unsurprisingly, atheists explicitly disavow this connection, with some even suggesting that atheists are “the moral backbone of the nation . . . tak[ing] their civic duties seriously precisely because they don’t trust God to save humanity from its follies” ( Dennett, 2003 ). Other nontheists have taken a softer line, arguing that moral inclinations are deeply embedded in our evolved psychology, flourishing quite naturally in the absence of religious indoctrination ( Pyysiäinen & Hauser, 2010 ).

Views of religion and morality ( Pew Research Center, 2007 ; reprinted with permission). See the online article for the color version of this figure.

Although there is no shortage of lively polemic, scientific investigations of the connection between religion and morality have so far produced mixed results. The interpretive difficulties are exacerbated by imprecise conceptions both of “religion” and “morality.” It is not clear that these terms are used in the same ways by those between, or even within, seemingly opposing camps. To make progress on this issue, we require a more precise specification of which human virtues are under consideration and which features of religion might be thought to influence their expression. Our aim in what follows will be to sort out some of the conceptual confusions and to provide a clear evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence.

We begin by highlighting a set of conceptual limitations hampering contemporary academic discourse on this topic. In our view, many current investigations suffer from (a) a failure to fractionate “religion” and “morality” into theoretically grounded units; (b) ethnocentric conceptions of religion and morality; in particular, (c) sanitized conceptions of prosocial behavior, and (d) a tendency to conceptualize morality or religion as clusters of either cognitively or culturally evolved features rather than both. To circumvent these problems, we advocate a cross-culturally encompassing approach that fractionates both religion and morality while carefully distinguishing cognition from culture. A thoroughgoing exploration of the religion–morality relationship must seek to establish the evolved cognitive systems that underpin the astonishing diversity of cultural concepts, norms, and behaviors that are labeled (perhaps arbitrarily) “religion” and “morality.” Accordingly, drawing on moral foundations theory (MFT; e.g., Graham et al., 2013 ), we outline sets of cognitive systems commonly associated with these concepts and consider whether their evolutionary histories might be somehow entwined. We go on to consider the quite separate question of whether the evolution of religions as cultural systems has selectively favored moral values of various kinds. In the process, we provide a comprehensive review of research on the religion–morality relationship.

Conceptual Lacunae and Confusions in the Religion and Morality Debate

Despite the confident claims of many contemporary commentators, we believe the relationship between religion and morality is poorly understood. In our view, this is because debates about religion and morality are marred by a set of interrelated conceptual lacunae and confusions. Our aim in this section is to enumerate these shortcomings and to highlight some of their serious consequences.

Astrologizing

History can be written at any magnification. One can write the history of the universe on a single page, or the life cycle of a mayfly in 40 volumes. —Norman Davies (1997 , p. 1)

Just as history can be written at any magnification, the relationship between religion and morality can be explored at any granularity. At the extremes, one can treat “religion” and “morality” as monolithic entities and attempt to characterize their relationship, or one can study the influence of a particular theological doctrine (e.g., predestination) on some highly specific moral outcome (e.g., tithing). The challenge is to adopt a pragmatic and theoretically defensible scale of analysis. One problem with the coarse-grained (monolithic) approach is that religion, like the constellation Orion in the night sky, may not reflect a real natural structure but may instead comprise a more or less arbitrary gathering of disparate features. Researchers in the discipline of cognitive neuropsychiatry view psychiatric syndromes as culturally and historically contingent constellations of symptoms, and argue that the unit of investigation should be the symptom (e.g., delusions) rather than the syndrome (e.g., schizophrenia; Coltheart, Langdon, & McKay, 2011 ). Likewise, progress in understanding the relationship between religion and morality may require fractionating these hazy concepts into more basic units.

Many authors have attempted to identify the fundamental elements of religion. Saroglou (2011) , for instance, has put forward a detailed psychological model of the “Big Four religious dimensions,” providing an illuminating taxonomy of core components of religiosity that integrates numerous previous formulations in the psychology and sociology of religion. In brief, for Saroglou, to be religious entails

• 1 Believing: Holding a set of beliefs about transcendent entities (e.g., personal gods, impersonal life forces, karmic principles).
• 2 Bonding: Having self-transcendent, emotional experiences, typically through ritual (whether private or public, frequent or rare), that connect one to others and to a deeper reality.
• 3 Behaving: Subscribing to certain moral norms, and exerting self-control to behave in accordance with these norms.
• 4 Belonging: Identifying and affiliating with a certain community or tradition.

Note that any one of these dimensions could pick out phenomena that would not ordinarily be classed as “religious.” For instance, “Father Christmas” is a person who manifestly transcends ordinary physical laws, yet few would describe belief in this supernatural being as “religious” (J. L. Barrett, 2008 ). Much the same could be said about ritual , which is often understood to be a religious trait but is also prominent in nonreligious (e.g., military) settings (and, as Bloom, 2012 , notes, even ardent atheists seek out transcendent experiences, whether through drugs or meditative practices). Moreover, Saroglou himself points out that religious affiliation is just one of many ways people can satisfy a need to “belong.”

These considerations point to the arbitrariness of the “religion” designator. Tendencies to postulate bodiless agents such as ghosts and gods and to participate in rituals may seem to warrant some overarching label, but in reality their cognitive causes may be quite unrelated. For example, afterlife beliefs and rituals may be explicitly connected by more or less shared systems of meaning, expressed in discourse at social events like funerals and wakes; and they may form part of larger cultural systems that are transmitted across populations and handed down over generations. But the psychological mechanisms that generate and underpin afterlife beliefs may operate quite independently from those inducing us to perform rituals ( Boyer, 2001 ; Whitehouse, 2004 ). We should not, therefore, expect the different component features of “religion” each to bear the same connection to morality.

Moreover, according to a prevailing conception in moral psychology, morality—perhaps like religion—comprises a suite of largely independent mechanisms that, although often connected by narratives, doctrines, songs, and other culturally distributed networks of ideas, are the outcomes of quite distinct psychological processes and functions. Thus, both religion and morality can be endlessly assembled and reassembled in culturally and historically contingent ways. Like the constellations of the astrologer’s imagination, these assemblages of psychological and behavioral traits and tendencies may be artificial, contingent, and arbitrary, rather than grounded in any stable underlying regularities ( Boyer, 2001 ; Norenzayan, 2014 ).

One notable feature of Saroglou’s model of religious dimensions is that it categorizes morality as a key dimension of religion: “Religion not only is particularly concerned with morality as an external correlate but also includes morality as one of its basic dimensions” ( Saroglou, 2011 , p. 1326). This stipulation implies that any inquiry into the effects of “religion” as a whole on “morality” as a whole may be a circular, and therefore futile, enterprise.

Descriptive Ethnocentrism

If moral psychology is to contribute to the psychology of religion, it will have to describe a moral domain as expansive as that of the Gods. — Graham and Haidt (2010 , p. 143)

When a newspaper headline reads “bishop attacks declining moral standards,” we expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, and so on, and not about the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to poorer nations, or our reckless indifference to the natural environment of our planet. — Singer (2002 , p. 7)

In a recent interview, the Hon. Rev. Fr. Simon Lokodo, Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity, indicated that he viewed the heterosexual rape of young girls as preferable to consensual homosexuality:

Lokodo: I say, let them do it but the right way.

Interviewer: Oh let them do it the right way? Let them rape children the right way? What are you talking about?

Lokodo: No I am saying, at least it is [the] natural way of desiring sex. ( O’Brien, 2013 )

From a contemporary Western liberal perspective, there is a chilling irony to the fact that Lokodo’s ministerial portfolio involves upholding moral values and principles (see http://www.dei.go.ug ). What could be more immoral than the rape of a child, a manifestly harmful act? Is it conceivable that Lokodo’s opposition to homosexuality is morally motivated?

One obstacle to a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between religion and morality is the tendency of researchers to privilege their own cultural perspective on what counts as a “moral concern.” Opposing such ethnocentrism is not the same as advocating cultural or moral relativism: We need take no stand here on whether absolute moral standards exist, or whether it is appropriate for citizens of one society to judge the moral standards of another. Our concern is with descriptive rather than prescriptive ethnocentrism. There are those who consider appropriate sexual behavior to be of paramount moral importance, and those, like Peter Singer, who think there are more pressing moral concerns. Whatever our ethical evaluations, however, a cross-cultural enquiry into the relationship between religion and morality must expand the moral domain beyond the typical concerns of individuals in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies ( Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ), and must consider the effect of religion on any domain that is accorded at least local moral significance. For our purposes, therefore, a moral behavior is not necessarily a behavior that we advocate, but a behavior that is undertaken on putative moral grounds.

We also view descriptive religious ethnocentrism as problematic. In our view, the great variety of culturally distributed concepts and customs that garner the label “religion” are canalized and constrained by a finite, yet disparate, set of biologically endowed cognitive predispositions ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013b ; Xygalatas & McKay, 2013 ). As these predispositions constrain, rather than determine, the types of religious systems that different cultures construct, there is enormous cultural variability in their expression, with some traditions emphasizing conformity of belief (orthodoxy) over conformity of practice (orthopraxy) and vice versa ( Laurin & Plaks, 2014 ; Purzycki & Sosis, 2013 ). 3 In short, the religious constellation may look quite different from one cultural perspective than it does from another. This may help to explain why “religion” has proven so notoriously difficult to define in a way that merits scholarly consensus ( Asad, 1983 ; Saler, 2000 ). To avoid this problem, we should resist the assumption that the core features of “religion” in our own culture (the brightest stars in the constellation from one’s own cultural—or academic—standpoint) are the most important or valid.

Sanitized Conceptions of Morality and Prosociality

Ingroup generosity and outgroup derogation actually represent two sides of the same coin. — Shariff, Piazza, and Kramer (2014 , p. 439)

A frequent consequence of Western liberal ethnocentrism is a sanitized, “family friendly” conception of morality. If Simon Lokodo’s ministerial portfolio seems ironic, this may be because of a Western liberal tendency to equate morality with “warm, fuzzy” virtues like kindness, gentleness, and nurturance, in short, with “niceness.” Thus, many scholars who write about the relationship between religion and morality frame the key question as “Are religious people nice people?” ( Morgan, 1983 ) or “Does religion make you nice?” ( Bloom, 2008 ; see also Malhotra, 2010 ). In many situations, however, what seems the “right” course of action may not be particularly “nice” (e.g., is it nice to punish criminals?); moreover, in certain cultures (e.g., Nazi Germany), “niceness” may even be cast as a vice rather than a virtue ( Koonz, 2003 ). To identify morality with “niceness” is thus to ignore a plethora of moral concerns, motivations, and behaviors.

To illustrate why such sanitizing is problematic scientifically, we note that the most prominent contemporary hypothesis in the literature on religion and morality is the “religious prosociality” hypothesis. Although many papers on “religious prosociality” appear to equate the notions of morality and “prosociality” (e.g., Norenzayan, 2014 ; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ; Preston, Ritter, & Hernandez, 2010 ), some imply that morality is a subcategory of prosociality (e.g., Galen, 2012 ), whereas others indicate that prosociality is a subcategory of morality (e.g., Preston, Salomon, & Ritter, 2014 ). In all of these cases, however, prosociality is used to denote voluntary behaviors that intentionally benefit others at personal cost (e.g., helping, comforting, sharing, donating, volunteering)—in other words, “nice” behaviors (notwithstanding that the motivation to engage in the behaviors may be purely egoistic; Saroglou, 2013 ). Although this usage reflects both popular parlance and a venerable social scientific tradition ( Batson & Powell, 2003 ), we view it as highly confusing.

The problem is that behavior that benefits certain others (and so is “prosocial” in this standard sense) may be detrimental to the wider social group. And conversely, behavior that benefits the group may be harmful to at least some of its members. For example, torture is a powerful mechanism for enforcing and stabilizing social norms, yet torture is often unambiguously detrimental to the recipient. The irony is that behaviors that are literally “prosocial” insofar as they further the interests of a particular social group (e.g., “prosocial aggression”: Sears, 1961 ; “altruistic punishment”: Fehr & Gächter, 2002 , and Shinada, Yamagishi, & Ohmura, 2004 ; cf. B. Herrmann, Thöni, & Gächter, 2008 ) may be “antisocial” in the standard social psychological usage (e.g., by harming the norm violator).

This is not even to consider behavior that extends across group boundaries. Some personally costly acts are intended to benefit the ingroup by harming other groups ( Choi & Bowles, 2007 , refer to such behavior as “parochial altruism”; see also Bernhard, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2006 ; Bowles, 2009 ; De Dreu et al., 2010 ). If attendance at religious services predicts support for suicide attacks ( Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan, 2009 ), is this evidence for “religious prosociality” or evidence against it? In social psychological terms, it is clearly the latter, but we regard this usage of the term as unhelpfully sanitized. As the saying goes, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” ( Seymour, 1975 ). In an otherwise highly illuminating recent article, social psychologists Jesse Preston and Ryan Ritter referred to cooperation with both ingroup and outgroup members as “prosociality,” while noting that helping outgroup members can give that group a competitive advantage in survival and so indirectly harm the ingroup. Here, behavior that was explicitly acknowledged to harm the ingroup was labeled “prosocial” ( Preston & Ritter, 2013 ). In a different example, Blogowska, Lambert, and Saroglou (2013) found that self-reported religiosity predicted helping of a needy in-group member and also physical aggression toward a member of a moral out-group (a homosexual person). Blogowska et al. described the latter behavior as “clearly and unambiguously” antisocial (p. 525). We argue that this behavior can be reconstrued as (literally) prosocial—after all, if homosexuality is a norm violation from the perspective of a religious group, then behavior that punishes this violation serves to enforce the norm and thus promotes and protects the interests and values of the group.

If the relationship between religion and morality is to be explored within an encompassing evolutionary framework (as we intend), the notion of prosociality should assume a literal rather than sanitized meaning (i.e., “furthering the interests of the relevant social group” rather than “nice”) within an expansive moral domain. As we will describe later, we advocate a strategy of scientific pluralism where morality is concerned. In our view, sanitized prosociality (“caring” or “niceness”) is a core moral domain, but should not be solely identified with “morality.”

Cognitive Versus Cultural Levels of Explanation

Efforts to fully characterize the relationship between religion and morality are limited by a tendency for researchers to conceptualize morality or religion as bundles of either cognitively or culturally evolved traits rather than both. For example, Bloom (2012) has attempted to refute the claim that morality requires religion using evidence of (proto)moral behavior in infant humans and in other primates. This argument operationalizes morality at the level of evolved psychological systems, but operationalizes religion as a set of cultural notions. To the extent that “religion” is assumed to refer to some cluster of features that must be culturally learned, this argument may have something to commend it, but at least some of the psychological states that Bloom considers religious (e.g., “spirituality”) are rooted in very early emerging cognitive capacities (J. L. Barrett, 2012 ). So, in principle, it should be possible to investigate the relationship between at least some aspects (or “building blocks”) of religion and morality in infancy and perhaps also in nonhuman primates.

One way of avoiding this problem is to disambiguate epigenetic, cognitive–developmental, and social–historical processes in the formation of religious and moral traits ( Whitehouse, 2013 ). For example, a capacity to empathize with the pain of others may be genetically canalized in the development of infant neural structures, but environmental cues also shape the organization of neural networks and even the gross morphology of the brain. The interaction of genetic and epigenetic factors in the maturation of empathizing capacities may follow different developmental pathways in different individuals, resulting in quite different outcomes at the level of cognitive and behavioral patterns in adulthood. At a still higher level of complexity, the environment in which brains and cognitive systems develop is itself canalized by social structures comprising culturally distributed rules and algorithms for “proper” or “normal” behavior in given social settings, counterbalanced by population-level decision making on the ground that may deviate from tradition and consequently update its edicts. Processes at all these levels contribute to the nature and targets of empathy in society, influencing people’s willingness to tolerate harming behaviors such as warfare, enslavement, capital punishment, and torture, and calibrating what counts as justice or wanton cruelty. The same principles apply to the development of religious traits. For example, a genetically canalized tendency to process information about mental and mechanical events via quite different neural structures may undergird the cognitive developmental pathways for mind–body dualism ( Bloom, 2004 ), but this tendency is also shaped and constrained by cultural concepts and their histories. When asking, for example, how notions of bodiless agents might impact the development of empathy, we need to specify the level(s) at which the impact is hypothesized to occur and trace its repercussions at all levels on both sides of the religion–morality equation.

Religion and Morality: A New Approach

In order to circumvent these limitations and avoid these problems, we propose a new approach to the religion–morality debate that not only fractionates both religion and morality but is careful to distinguish the different levels at which explanation is required. This will provide the basis for more precise questions about the relationship between the fractionated components of religion and morality, respectively.

A comprehensive explanation in evolutionary terms of any causal relationships between our fractionated components of the categories “religion” and “morality” would need to attend to four main types of questions, commonly known as Tinbergen’s Four Whys: a causal why, concerning the psychological mechanisms that produce a particular causal relationship between religion and morality; a developmental why, concerning the processes by which the relationship emerges in the growth and maturation of individuals; a functional why, concerning the adaptive value of the relationship in comparison with others; and an historical why, concerning the phylogeny of the relationship, its appearance via a succession of preceding forms (cf. Tinbergen, 1963 ). 4 Evolutionary theorists standardly categorize the causal and developmental whys as forms of “proximate” explanation, and the functional and phylogenetic whys as forms of “ultimate” explanation (see Mayr, 1961 ). In this context, “ultimate” does not mean final or superior, but refers to the evolutionary forces that sustain the psychological or physiological mechanisms in question. Thus, if the pigmentation of butterfly wings in industrial areas becomes darker over successive generations ( Haldane, 1927 ), it is because darker variants have a selective advantage in smoke-stained environments, but that does not dispense with the need to explain the physiological mechanisms by which individual butterfly wings acquire their coloration, darkness, and hue.

Tinbergen’s Four Whys have been illustrated concisely using the structural properties of the human hand:

In answering the question “Why does the human thumb move differently from the other fingers?” the answer might be in terms of the differences in skeletal arrangements and muscle attachments (a causal answer); or in terms of the embryology of the hand, and how the finger rudiments grew out (developmental); or in terms of the utility of an opposable thumb for holding things (functional); or in terms of our descent from monkey-like ancestors which had opposable thumbs (evolutionary). These answers are all correct, but together they provide fuller understanding. ( Hinde, 2005 , p. 39)

In considering human traits, however, the situation is often complicated by the extent and variability of cultural overlays. In some cases, these are quite literally overlays—for example, in cold environments, human hands may be overlaid by clothing, such as gloves or mittens.

Our general theoretical approach melds recent theorizing in disciplines such as moral psychology and the cognitive science of religion. According to this approach, religious and moral cultural representations are triggered and constrained by implicit, intuitive cognitive systems in much the same way that the morphologies of human hands and feet shape and constrain the morphologies of gloves and shoes (see Figure 2 ). To become culturally widespread, shoes must fit the basic morphology of human feet, while also satisfying other biologically endowed preferences (e.g., preferences for comfort and/or gait; Morris, White, Morrison, & Fisher, 2013 ). Similarly, successful religious and moral cultural representations—including notions of supernatural agents and realms, ritual practices, and various behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions—must resonate with (“fit”) biologically endowed cognitive structures and preferences (or clash with them in attention-grabbing and memorable ways; see Boyer, 2001 ). But such structures may, in turn, be subject—given sufficient time scales—to genetic modification under the selection pressures imposed by culturally evolved practices and preferences. A cultural preference for small feet in women may make it more likely that females with such feet are chosen as sexual partners or less likely that they become victims of infanticide ( Newson, Richerson, & Boyd, 2007 ). So just as shoes adapt to the needs of biologically endowed feet, so feet may need to adapt to fit cultural prescriptions. And in the same way, certain universal features of our biologically evolved cognitive architecture and our culturally evolved religious and moral representations may result from complex processes of coevolution. At the risk of mixing metaphors, our minds can be thought of as “fertile ground” for certain cultural representations, “seeds” that “take root in individual human beings . . . and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide” ( Dennett, 2006 , p. 2). To analyze these various processes correctly, however, it is vital that we disambiguate at which levels selection acts on which traits.

Cultural representations (e.g., propositions, prescriptions, and practices [ovals; green]) are triggered and constrained (arrows; blue) by foundational cognitive systems (“religious foundations” in blue [on the y axis] boxes and “moral foundations” in pink [on the x axis] boxes). For instance, the proposition that “God will punish homosexuals” may resonate with intuitions of observing, intentional agents, and concerns about harm and purity. The relations depicted here are intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. See the online article for the color version of this figure.

Given this complex interplay between sets of evolved cognitive systems and cultural elements (some of which may be arbitrarily designated “religion” and some arbitrarily designated “morality”), what can it mean to investigate the relationship between religion and morality? In what follows, we begin by fractionating, first, morality and, then, religion into elements that are thought to be recurrent features of human evolved psychology. We then consider whether there is evidence that any of the fractionated elements of religion have a biologically evolved connection to the fractionated elements of morality. We will argue that there is scant evidence for this at present. We then consider the cultural evolution of the religion–morality relationship. Here we argue that cultural evolution has served to connect the fractionated elements of religion and morality in a cascading myriad of ways, and it is at this level primarily that the religion–morality debate might be most fruitfully focused in future.

Fractionating Morality: Moral Foundations

For the purposes of fractionating morality, we import what we regard as the dominant model in contemporary moral psychology: moral foundations theory (MFT; Graham & Haidt, 2010 ; Graham et al., 2013 ; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009 ; Haidt, 2012 ; Haidt & Graham, 2007 , 2009 ; Haidt & Joseph, 2004 , 2007 ). MFT is an avowedly pluralistic theory of morality. Whereas some prominent theorists have favored a “monistic” conception of morality, whereby all moral norms reduce to a single basic moral concern such as “care” or “justice” (e.g., Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012 ; Kohlberg, 1971 ), others (e.g., Berlin, 2013 ; Gilligan, 1982 ) have argued there are two or more fundamental, mutually incompatible, and incommensurable moral values. MFT falls within the latter tradition, proposing that the rich array of culturally constructed moral norms and institutions are triggered and constrained by several universal and innate psychological systems—the eponymous moral foundations.

Moral foundations theorists have highlighted five core foundations, giving rise to the following pan-human principles: (a) care–harm: harming others is wrong, whereas treating others with kindness and compassion is right; (b) fairness–cheating: people should reap what they sow and not take more than they deserve; (c) in group loyalty–betrayal: what is good for the community comes above selfish interests; (d) respect for authority–subversion: we should defer to our elders and betters and respect tradition; and (e) purity–degradation: the body is a temple and can be desecrated by immoral actions and contaminants.

Moral foundations theorists claim that each of these principles is written into our distinctively human nature, arising from the normal operation of evolved cognitive mechanisms. On the other hand, the moral foundations are conceived as constraining, rather than determining, the types of moral systems that humans construct. One of the major contributions of the moral foundations approach has been to highlight the cultural and political variability in the expression of these foundations. Some cultures construct their moral norms and institutions on a comparatively small subset of foundations. 5 For example, whereas the moral orders of most traditional societies are broad, the moral domain in WEIRD cultures ( Henrich et al., 2010 ) is built largely on the first two (“individualizing”) foundations, focusing on the protection of individuals from harm and exploitation ( Graham et al., 2013 ). Meanwhile, a number of studies have found that political liberals value the individualizing principles of care and fairness more than conservatives, whereas conservatives value the “binding” principles of loyalty, authority, and sanctity more than liberals (e.g., Graham et al., 2009 ; Graham, Nosek, & Haidt, 2012 ).

Although MFT is not without its critics, we regard it as the most fully developed, integrative, and comprehensive theory of morality currently available. Much criticism to date has focused on MFT’s pluralism ( Graham et al., 2013 ). Some critics (monists) dispute pluralism per se. For example, Gray et al. (2012) have argued that concern about interpersonal harm is the distilled essence of morality, and thus that care/harm is the one true moral foundation. Many moral judgments, however, are difficult to understand “through the lens of intention and suffering” ( Gray et al., 2012 , p. 103). Consider Simon Lokodo’s judgment that homosexuality is immoral. Many have argued that homosexuality is harmful, for instance, harmful to families or to society more generally (e.g., Bryant, 1977 ). But Gray et al.’s dyadic model of morality explicitly predicts greater concern for immoral acts that cause direct suffering than those that do not. Few could doubt that the rape of a child causes more “direct suffering” than private consensual sex between same-sex partners. Whereas Gray et al.’s monistic perspective has to shoehorn all moral judgments into the same category, MFT’s pluralism enables concern for rape victims and opposition to homosexuality to be viewed as the expression of different moral foundations—the former the expression of the “care” foundation and the latter founded in “binding” concerns for the welfare of the group and perhaps for bodily purity.

To cite another topical example, the social media service Facebook recently attracted criticism for allowing users to post graphic footage of beheadings, while prohibiting photos of videos containing nudity (including images of breastfeeding in which the baby does not totally obscure the nipple or in which the non-nursing breast is in view; see Clark, 2013 ). Given the amnesty for posting images of violent murder, it is difficult to see the proscription on breastfeeding images “through the lens of interpersonal harm” ( Gray et al., 2012 , p. 110). A final example concerns moral judgments of suicide, the self-directed nature of which poses an apparent problem for Gray et al.’s dyadic model. One might argue that people who commit suicide harm others (e.g., loved ones) as well as themselves, and that the harm to others is the source of disapprobation when suicide is concerned. However, a recent study by Rottman, Kelemen, and Young (2014) casts doubt on this explanation. Participants read a series of fictitious (but ostensibly real) obituaries describing suicide or homicide victims, and made a series of ratings (including rating the moral wrongness of each death). Whereas perceived harm was the only variable predicting moral judgments of homicide, feelings of disgust and purity concerns—but not harm ratings—predicted moral condemnations of suicide. Thus, contrary to participants’ explicit beliefs about their own moral judgments, suicide was deemed immoral to the extent that it was considered impure.

Other critics of MFT’s pluralism have not questioned the idea of pluralism per se, but have objected to MFT’s particular brand of pluralism. However, proponents of MFT do not claim that their list of five foundations is exhaustive, but have actively sought out arguments and evidence for others (e.g., research is currently underway to evaluate the additional candidates of liberty–oppression, efficiency–waste, and ownership–theft; Graham et al., 2013 ; Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012 ). Moral foundations theorists have put forward their own celestial analogy to describe the process of identifying foundations:

There are millions of objects orbiting the sun, but astronomers do not call them all planets. There are six (including the Earth) that are so visible that they were recorded in multiple ancient civilizations, and then there are a bunch of objects further out that were discovered with telescopes. Astronomers disagreed for a while as to whether Pluto and some more distant icy bodies should be considered planets. Similarly, we are content to say that there are many aspects of human nature that contribute to and constrain moral judgment, and our task is to identify the most important ones. ( Graham et al., 2013 , pp. 104–105)

Using the fairness foundation for illustration, Graham et al. (2013) provide five criteria that any “aspect of human nature” must satisfy to qualify as a moral foundation. First, the relevant moral concern must feature regularly in third-party normative judgments, wherein people express condemnation for actions that have no direct consequences for them. Fairness certainly satisfies this requirement—as Graham and colleagues note, gossip about group members who violate fairness norms (e.g., who cheat, free ride, or neglect to reciprocate) is ubiquitous in human groups, with some authors even suggesting that gossip between third parties evolved as a mechanism for detecting and dissuading cheating and free riding (e.g., see Ingram, Piazza, & Bering, 2009 ). Second, violations of the moral principle in question must elicit rapid, automatic, affectively valenced evaluations. LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, and Haidt (2011) found that children as young as 3 years old reacted rapidly and negatively to unequal distributions of stickers, particularly personally disadvantageous distributions.

For Graham et al. (2013) , these two criteria establish the “moral” quality of the foundations. Their last three criteria relate to foundationhood per se. First, foundational moral concerns should be culturally widespread. In terms of fairness, a preference for interactions based on proportionality is certainly widespread ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ; Gurven, 2004 ), and people from a diversity of cultures appear more interested in relative than absolute benefits ( Brosnan & de Waal, 2005 ; Henrich et al., 2005 ). According to Graham et al., a society has yet to be identified in which reciprocity is not a prominent moral concern. Second, there should be indicators of innate preparedness for foundational concerns. Evidence that capuchin monkeys will sometimes forgo a food reward delivered by an experimenter who has previously paid another monkey a more attractive reward for equal effort ( Brosnan & de Waal, 2003 ) suggests that fairness concerns are found in at least some nonhuman primates. Moreover, developmental studies show that young infants are sensitive to inequity. For example, Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack (2012) found that 21-month-old children expected an experimenter to reward each of two individuals when both had worked at an assigned task, but not when one of the individuals had done all the work. Baumard, Mascaro, and Chevallier (2012) found that 3- and 4-year-old children were able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions.

Finally, an evolutionary model should clearly specify the adaptive advantage conferred by the candidate foundation upon individuals who bore it in the ancestral past (as Graham et al., 2013 , note, a good evolutionary theory will not invoke biological group selection without adducing a great deal of additional support). Fairness meets this criterion nicely. For example, Baumard, André, and Sperber (2013) have compellingly argued that fairness preferences are adapted to an environment in which individuals competed to be selected and recruited for mutually advantageous cooperative interactions (see also Trivers, 1971 ).

Fractionating Religion: Religious Foundations?

Just as it is possible to decompose the category “morality” into a set of theoretically grounded elements, “religion” can be fractionated into distinct components with stable cognitive underpinnings. Research in the “cognitive science of religion” has not sought to demonstrate the universality of any particular religious representations, such as various notions of ancestors, punitive deities, creator beings, or sacrifices, blessings, and rites of passage. Rather, the aim has been to show that the great variety of culturally distributed dogmas and practices that have been collectively labelled “religion” are shaped and constrained by a finite but disparate set of evolved cognitive predispositions—what we might call “religious foundations.” These foundations comprise a set of evolved domain-specific systems, together with the intuitions and predispositions that those systems instill (see Baumard & Boyer, 2013b ; also see Figure 2 ). Barring pathology—itself a valuable source of insight into natural cognition ( Coltheart, 1984 ; Ellis & Young, 1988 )—such tendencies emerge in all human beings without the need for deliberate instruction or training, even if their expression in development may be “tuned” by cultural environments ( McCauley, 2011 ).

Although Saroglou (2011) provides a valuable synthesis of previous taxonomies of core religious dimensions, in our view, the dimensions he settles on (Believing, Bonding, Behaving, Belonging) do not correspond well to evolved cognitive systems, so are not good candidates for religious foundations. For example, Saroglou’s Believing dimension encompasses belief in “divine beings” and belief in “impersonal forces or principles” (p. 1323). There are at least two important and potentially dissociable supernatural concepts here: the notion of supernatural agency , on the one hand (e.g., gods, spirits, angels, “ancestors”), and the notion that our actions in this life have proportionate ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ), supernaturally mediated consequences, on the other. These consequences may be mediated by supernatural agents, as when gods bestow rewards or dispense punishments in this life or the next; but they may also reflect the impersonal unfolding of a cosmic principle (e.g., Saṃm.sāra ). Moreover, supernatural agents are not necessarily in the business of attending to our behaviors and implementing relevant consequences—as we shall review, gods vary in their concerns with human affairs in general and with moral issues more specifically. In view of these various considerations, one could posit not one but two distinct dimensions of supernatural belief here: (a) supernatural agency, and (b) supernatural justice. Rather than take this route, our preference is to specify a small subset of evolved cognitive systems that, jointly or in isolation, would account for why these dimensions are cross-culturally and historically recurrent.

Here we discuss five strong candidates for religious foundationhood: (a) a system specialized for the detection of agents ; (b) a system devoted to representing, inferring, and predicting the mental states of intentional agents; (c) a system geared toward producing teleofunctional explanations of objects and events; (d) a system specialized for affiliating with groups through the imitation of causally opaque action sequences; and (e) a system specialized for the detection of genetic kinship. Like proponents of MFT, we do not claim that this list is exhaustive, and future research may suggest alternative, or additional, candidates (when relevant, we discuss current alternate views). Our commitment, born of doubt that there is any “distilled essence” of religion ( Gray et al., 2012 ), is primarily to a pluralistic approach. Nevertheless, based on an extensive review of the cognitive science of religion literature, the following represent the most plausible candidates for universal religious foundations, on current evidence.

Hyperactive Agency Detection

According to error management theory ( Haselton, 2003 ; Haselton & Buss, 2000 ; Haselton & Nettle, 2006 ; D. D. P. Johnson, Blumstein, Fowler, & Haselton, 2013 ; McKay & Efferson, 2010 ), in any domain characterized by a recurrent asymmetry in the fitness costs of relevant errors, natural selection should favor the evolution of cognitive systems that minimize the more costly error(s). This logic has been used to undergird an influential claim in the cognitive science of religion. Guthrie (1993) has argued that for humans in the ancestral past, mistaking an agent (e.g., an approaching predator) for an inanimate object (e.g., a tree rustling in the wind) was more costly than the converse error. Humans should therefore be equipped by natural selection with biased agency-detection mechanisms—what J. L. Barrett (2000 , 2004 , 2012 ) has termed “Hyperactive [or hypersensitive] agent-detection devices” (HADDs).

HADDs are often described as perceptual mechanisms, devices biased toward the perception of agents in ambiguous stimulus configurations. A by-product of their functioning would be a tendency toward false positives (e.g., perceiving representations of human or animal figures in arbitrary collections of stars, or “faces in the clouds”; Guthrie, 1993 ). A broader conception of HADDs includes attributions of nonrandom structure ( Bloom, 2007 )—such as naturally occurring patterns and events with no clear physical cause—to the activity of agents. In other words, HADDs are a suite of hypothetical devices specialized for perceiving either agents or their effects. A corollary of these “proper functions” ( Millikan, 2005 ) would be the postulation of unseen, or fleetingly visible, supernatural agents. Such notions, once posited, would be attention grabbing, memorable, and thus highly transmissible because of their resonance with intuitive cognitive structures such as HADDs (J. L. Barrett, 2000 ; J. L. Barrett & Lanman, 2008 ). Indeed, just as the cultural success of high-heeled shoes may owe to the fact that they function as supernormal stimuli (insofar as they exaggerate sex specific aspects of female gait; Morris et al., 2013 ), notions of supernatural agency may represent supernormal stimuli for evolved agency-detection mechanisms.

At present, the evidence for a connection between supernatural concepts and beliefs and agency cognition is mixed. On the one hand, Norenzayan and colleagues ( Norenzayan, Hansen, & Cady, 2008 ; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013 ) have found that tendencies to anthropomorphize (e.g., to rate natural scenes using agentic concepts) predict paranormal beliefs (i.e., Psi, precognition) but not belief in God (at least not for Christian participants, who may view anthropomorphism as akin to idolatry and may therefore suppress it). Similarly, Van Elk (2013) found that whereas paranormal beliefs were strongly related to a tendency to erroneously identify walking human figures in point-light displays (see also Krummenacher, Mohr, Haker, & Brugger, 2010 ), traditional religious beliefs were not. However, in a follow-up priming study, van Elk, Rutjens, van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (in press) found that participants’ religiosity moderated the effect of supernatural priming on agency detection, such that religious participants perceived more agents and responded faster to face stimuli following supernatural primes than nonreligious participants. Meanwhile Riekki, Lindeman, Aleneff, Halme, and Nuortimo (2013) found that religious believers showed more of a bias than nonbelievers to indicate that photographs of inanimate scenes (e.g., furniture, buildings, natural landscapes) contained face-like images. In all of these studies, agency detection was a measured variable. As far as we are aware, to date, no published study has investigated whether manipulating cues of agency (e.g., watching eyes; see The Cross-Cultural Prevalence of Supernatural Punishment Concepts) can increase religious belief. Given the hypothesized causal route (whereby agency detection biases predispose humans to acquire beliefs in religious concepts), this may be a fruitful avenue for future research.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

Notions of supernatural beings as psychological entities with beliefs, preferences, and intentions— intentional agents—are also likely to be compelling for humans in light of their expertise in representing, inferring, and predicting the mental states of others (ToM; Baron-Cohen, 1995 ; Mitchell, 2009 ; Premack & Woodruff, 1978 ). Recent studies demonstrate a robust relationship between such “mentalizing” capacities and religious cognition (see Gervais, 2013b ). For example, functional MRI experiments with religious participants have shown that religious belief ( Kapogiannis et al., 2009 ) and improvised prayer ( Schjoedt, Stødkilde-Jørgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2009 ) engage neural networks subserving ToM capacities. Moreover, supernatural believers rate the random movements of animated geometric objects as more intentional than skeptics do, and evince stronger activation of ToM-related networks while viewing such animations ( Riekki, Lindeman, & Raij, 2014 ). Finally, Norenzayan, Gervais, and Trzesniewski (2012) found that autistic participants expressed less belief in God than did matched neurotypical controls. In follow-up studies using nonclinical samples, these authors found that higher autism scores predicted lower belief in God, a relationship mediated by mentalizing abilities.

ToM is also thought to play an important role in afterlife beliefs. It has been suggested, for example, that people spontaneously infer that dead relatives and friends are still present, even in the absence of cultural inputs to support such ideas. Bering and colleagues conducted experiments with children ( Bering & Bjorklund, 2004 ; Bering, Blasi, & Bjorklund, 2005 ) and adults ( Bering, 2002 ) in which participants were presented with scenarios in which specified agents (puppets in the case of the child studies) experienced various sensations, emotions, and thoughts prior to death (e.g., before being gobbled up by a crocodile-shaped puppet). Participants of all ages tended to make “discontinuity judgments” with respect to sensorimotor and perceptual capacities—for example, inferring that a dead agent would immediately lose the ability to walk, taste, smell, and feel hungry. At the same time, however, participants tended to reason that higher level cognitive functions, such as memories, emotions, and beliefs, would continue to function normally, such responses being coded as “continuity judgments” (E. Cohen & Barrett, 2008 ). Interestingly, this pattern was stronger in younger children, such that continuity judgments across all faculties gradually diminished with age; however, this pattern has not been replicated in some other studies ( Astuti & Harris, 2008 ; Harris & Gimenez, 2005 ).

Bering’s (2002 , 2006) explanation for these psychological findings hinges, in part, on what he calls the “simulation constraint hypothesis” (see Hodge, 2011, for a review ). The idea is that although we can simulate the loss of perceptual capacities like sight and hearing simply by covering the relevant organs (the eyes and the ears), we cannot simulate the absence of thoughts, desires, memories, and so on. The proposal is akin to positing a “hyperactive” ToM, which makes it easier to represent minds as persisting, irrespective of what happens to the body (for related ideas, see Bloom, 2004 , 2007 ). Even people who hold explicitly extinctivist beliefs (e.g., who are adamant, when questioned, that personal consciousness is terminated at death) make a striking number of continuity responses with respect to emotional, desire, and epistemic states ( Bering, 2002 , 2006 ). The root of this, Bering argues, is that humans have dedicated cognitive machinery for reasoning about mental states, which, unlike our capacities for reasoning about the mechanical and biological properties of bodies, cannot conceptualize total system failure.

If Bering (2002 , 2006) is right that humans are incapable of simulating the absence of higher level cognitive functions, and if this putative incapacity is what underlies “continuity judgments,” then one would expect to observe a similar pattern in other scenarios involving a complete lack of sentience or experience. For example, participants should be unable to fully appreciate that people lack conscious experiences when under general anesthesia, or that inanimate objects such as carpets and kitchen utensils lack such experiences. Although we think this is implausible, it is an empirical question whether continuity judgments can be elicited in such scenarios. We note in this connection that recent research on pre life beliefs in Ecuadorian children indicates that, until about 9 to 10 years of age, they ascribe several biological and psychological capacities to their prelife selves; moreover, older children, who ascribe fewer capacities to themselves overall, are still more likely to ascribe certain mental states—in particular, emotional and desire states—to their prelife selves than other mental states (e.g., perceptual, epistemic states; Emmons & Kelemen, 2014 ).

Teleofunctional Explanations

Another foundational cognitive predisposition where religion is concerned may be a tendency to favor teleofunctional reasoning. Research by Kelemen and colleagues (e.g., Kelemen, 1999a , 1999b , 1999c , 2004 ) suggests that children display a broad inclination to view objects and behaviors of all kinds—including features of the natural world—as existing for a purpose. For instance, when confronted with multiple accounts of why rocks are “pointy,” children tend to reject explanations that appeal to the effects of long-term erosion by wind and rain, and instead prefer functional accounts such as “rocks are pointy to stop elephants sitting on them.”

Although it may be tempting to think that this teleological bias is attributable simply to acquisition of a creationist worldview (e.g., regular retellings of the Genesis story), several lines of evidence suggest otherwise. For instance, Evans (2001) has found that, irrespective of their community of origin (whether Christian fundamentalist or nonfundamentalist), young children prefer “creationist” explanations of natural phenomena; only later in development do the children of nonfundamentalists diverge from the position that natural phenomena result from nonhuman design. Research conducted with nonschooled Romani adults, who are unfamiliar with scientific accounts of evolutionary origins, arguably demonstrates the persistence of teleological intuitions into adulthood ( Casler & Kelemen, 2008 ). Moreover, elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that erodes semantic memory (including scientific schemas), are more likely to accept and prefer unwarranted teleological explanations than healthy participants ( Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007 ). Finally, university students ( Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ), and even actively publishing physical scientists ( Kelemen, Rottman, & Seston, 2013 ), demonstrate increased acceptance of teleological explanations of natural phenomena when their information-processing resources are limited. These results suggest that an underlying tendency to construe the world in functional terms is present throughout life ( Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ). If so, this tendency may render notions of intelligent supernatural designers, who have created the world and everything in it for a purpose, especially compelling ( Kelemen, 2004 ).

Ojalehto, Waxman, and Medin (2013) present an intriguing “relational–deictic” interpretation of this putative teleological bias. According to these authors, although many teleological explanations that children favor may seem “unwarranted” ( Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ; Kelemen et al., 2013 ) from a Western, scientific perspective, this is a culturally infused stance. Thus, just as our tendency to speak of the sun as “rising” reflects our particular geocentric perspective on the relation between the earth and the sun, and does not (anymore) represent our abstract beliefs ( Purzycki, 2013 ), an utterance such as “rainclouds are for giving animals water” may reflect an appreciation of the perspectival relations among living things and their environments rather than a deep-seated intuition about context-independent purpose in nature. To the extent that this relational-deictic stance represents a cognitive default, however, it may still serve as a strong foundation for religious cultural notions. In particular, although we agree with Ojalehto et al. (2013 , p. 169) that “teleological statements do not necessarily signify a commitment to an intentional creator,” we think it plausible that tendencies to view the world in functional terms—whether the functions in question are intrinsic to entities or relationships—may make notions of purposeful creator beings especially resonant. Recent evidence that acceptance of teleological explanations is related to belief in God, as well as to belief in Nature as a powerful “being” ( Kelemen et al., 2013 ; see also Willard & Norenzayan, 2013 ), is consistent with this suggestion.

The “Ritual Stance”

Humans often imitate each other without knowing why—that is, with little or no understanding of how the actions contribute to goals. Causal opacity of this kind is a hallmark feature of ritualized behavior. In rituals, the relationship between actions and stated goals (if indeed they are stated at all) cannot, even in principle , be specified in physical–causal terms (P. A. Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013 ; Whitehouse, 2011 ). Social anthropologists have often observed that ritual participants are powerless to explain why they carry out their distinctive procedures and ceremonies, appealing only to tradition or the ancestors. But of considerable interest, too, is the fact that nobody has any difficulty understanding the anthropologist’s question, when she asks what the rituals mean. People know that ritualized actions can be invested with functions and symbolic properties even though they may struggle on occasion to identify what those may be, often pointing the hapless researcher in the direction of somebody older or wiser ( Humphrey & Laidlaw, 1994 ; Staal, 1989 ).

Imitation of causally opaque behavior is a distinctively human trait. None of the other great apes shows a marked interest in devising highly stylized procedures and bodily adornments and using these to demarcate and affiliate with cultural groups. Although chimpanzees and other primates do engage in social learning, they attend preferentially to technically useful skills that transparently contribute to proximal end goals ( Call, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005 ). Because rituals lack overt usefulness, most animals would not see any value in copying them. Yet by meticulously conforming to arbitrary social conventions, human groups bind themselves together into cooperative units facilitating cooperation on a scale that is very rare in nature.

From an evolutionary perspective, deriving the benefits of group living requires a means of identifying ingroup members (the ones you should cooperate with) and out-groups (people you should avoid or compete with). One solution is to have a distinctive set of group conventions or rituals (of course, there are other means too, e.g., humans use language to communicate about group identity). When a set of rituals is performed frequently enough, it becomes easy to identify unauthorized innovations, and so the group’s beliefs and practices can be standardized across substantial populations ( Whitehouse, 2004 ).

One of the many clues that ritualistic behavior is written into our species’ evolved biological makeup is the fact that it emerges early in development ( Nielsen, 2006 ). Even infants show considerable interest in causally opaque behavior and will try to copy it ( Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002 ). Indeed, the willingness to copy arbitrary conventions is essential for acquiring language requiring us to accept that arbitrary utterances refer to stable features of the world around us, not because there is a causal relationship between the sound and the thing it refers to, but simply because that is the accepted convention. The human tendency to copy causally opaque behavior is sometimes called “overimitation” ( Whiten, McGuigan, Marshall-Pescini, & Hopper, 2009 ). Psychologists have known for some time that if you show children an unnecessarily complicated way of retrieving an object from a box, they will copy not only the causally necessary behavior but also the useless frills ( Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007 ). One possibility is that overimitation evolved to help children acquire complex technical skills in the absence of a fuller understanding of their underlying causal structure ( Schulz, Hooppell, & Jenkins, 2008 ). Another possibility is that overimitation is designed to help children learn arbitrary group conventions or “rituals.” Such behavior may be motivated by a desire to belong, rather than to learn anything technically useful (P. A. Herrmann et al., 2013 ; Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011 ). This view is supported by recent research showing that priming ostracism threat increases the propensity to imitate causally opaque action sequences ( Watson-Jones, Legare, Whitehouse, & Clegg, 2014 ).

Kinship Detection

Inclusive fitness theory predicts that organisms will behave in ways that preferentially benefit kin, with more benefits conferred as the degree of genetic relatedness between the actor and the recipient increases ( Hamilton, 1964 ). Mechanisms for recognizing and calibrating kinship are critical for such behaviors to evolve and can be classified as one of two broad types: those that exploit direct, phenotypic cues (e.g., visual similarity to self), and those that exploit indirect, contextual cues (e.g., coresidence early in life; DeBruine et al., 2011 ; Penn & Frommen, 2010 ). According to Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides (2007) , cues indicative of kinship are taken as input by two separate motivational systems. The first regulates altruistic behaviors toward kin ( Krupp, Debruine, & Barclay, 2008 ), whereas the second regulates sexual attraction and aversion, thereby avoiding the deleterious consequences associated with close inbreeding ( Bittles & Neel, 1994 ).

As Pinker (2012) points out, kin recognition in humans depends on cues (in particular, linguistic cues) that others can manipulate:

Thus people are also altruistic toward their adoptive relatives, and toward a variety of fictive kin such as brothers in arms, fraternities and sororities, occupational and religious brotherhoods, crime families, fatherlands, and mother countries. These faux families may be created by metaphors, simulacra of family experiences, myths of common descent or common flesh, and other illusions of kinship.

Cultural manipulations of kinship detection machinery may be rife in ritualistic behavior. As Saroglou (2011) notes, religious rituals serve to bond ritual participants together. Such rituals may accomplish this, in part, by incorporating a range of kinship cues. First, many religious rituals involve artificial phenotypic cues of kinship—similar costumes, headdress, face paint, and so forth. Second, social synchrony is a key feature of many religious rituals, and has long been hypothesized to promote group cohesion (e.g., Durkheim, 1915/1965 ; Turner, 1969/1995 ). Recent experimental studies confirm that synchronic movement increases cooperation among participants. For example, Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) found that participants who engaged in synchronic behaviors (e.g., walking in step, synchronous singing and moving) contributed more to the public good in subsequent group economic measures than control participants. Fischer, Callander, Reddish, and Bulbulia (2013) investigated nine naturally occurring rituals and found that those which incorporated synchronous body movements increased perceptions of oneness with their group (see also Hove & Risen, 2009 ; Reddish, Fischer, & Bulbulia, 2013 ; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011 ; Valdesolo, Ouyang, & DeSteno, 2010 ). Interpersonal multisensory-stimulation experiments have demonstrated that synchronous stimulation causes participants to perceive others as both more physically and psychologically similar to themselves ( Paladino, Mazzurega, Pavani, & Schubert, 2010 ; Tajadura-Jiménez, Grehl, & Tsakiris, 2012 ; Tsakiris, 2008 ).

Third, the arousal that many rituals generate may function as a contextual cue to kinship. In particular, coparticipants in intense, dysphorically arousing rituals may gain a quantity of “shared experience” normally possible to accumulate only through a large number—perhaps a lifetime—of shared interactions. As a result, such experiences may activate context-based kinship detection mechanisms, contributing to group cohesion ( Whitehouse & Lanman, in press ). Xygalatas et al. (2013) studied two Hindu rituals in Mauritius—a low-ordeal ritual involving singing and collective prayer, and a high-ordeal ritual involving body piercing, carrying and dragging heavy structures, and climbing a mountain to reach a temple. Following the ritual, participants were paid around two days’ salary for participating in the study and had the opportunity to anonymously donate any part of this money to the temple. High-ordeal participants donated significantly more than low-ordeal participants, and higher levels of self-reported pain were associated with greater donations.

The Religion–Morality Relationship in Biological Evolution

A key feature of our approach is to consider whether the fractionated components of morality and religion have overlapping evolutionary histories. As noted earlier, just as there are genetically endowed physical structures (e.g., limbs and other bodily appendages) and cultural artifacts (e.g., gloves and hats) that are shaped by (and in turn potentially shape) these structures, so there are genetically endowed cognitive structures (innately specified cognitive mechanisms and intuitions) and cultural concepts (e.g., supernatural concepts, stories, and dogmas) that are shaped by (and potentially shape) these structures. Some of these structures and concepts are (perhaps arbitrarily) designated “religion,” and some as “morality.” Our strategy is, first, to identify some of the key elements of our genetically inherited psychology, and to consider whether there is evidence that any of the elements typically designated as “religion” have a biologically evolved connection to any of the elements typically designated as “morality.” We now have before us two sets of domain-specific evolved psychological systems—a set of putative moral foundations and a set of candidate religious foundations. Our fractionating strategy produces a preliminary matrix of at least 25 basic questions at the level of biological evolution (e.g., “Is there a biologically evolved connection between HADDs and the care/harm foundation?”; “Is there a biologically evolved connection between kin detection mechanisms and the authority/subversion foundation?”).

In our view, the most plausible cases of biologically evolved connections between the religious and moral foundations involve agency-detection mechanisms and ToM. As we have seen, Guthrie’s (1993) proposal is that biased agency-perception mechanisms (assuming they exist) are an adaptation for avoiding predators. If the functioning of such mechanisms led to conclusions about the presence of invisible, supernatural agents, this was (at least initially) merely a by-product—a biological spandrel ( Gould & Lewontin, 1979 ). Likewise, if the limitations of our evolved capacities to simulate mental states, or the absence of such states , triggered intuitions about the continued (invisible) presence of dead individuals, this would have been incidental. However, D. D. P. Johnson, Bering, and colleagues (e.g., Bering & Johnson, 2005 ; D. D. P. Johnson, 2009 ; D. D. P. Johnson & Bering, 2006 ; D. D. P. Johnson & Krüger, 2004 ) have suggested that such incidental deliverances may have been exapted for an important function at a later evolutionary stage (an exaptation is a feature whose benefits to the organism that possesses it are unrelated to the reasons for its origination—originally, the feature may have served a different purpose [or no purpose], but later it became coopted for a new purpose; Barve & Wagner, 2013 ; Gould & Vrba, 1982 ).

The supposition of moral-foundations theorists is that the various foundations evolved to solve a range of adaptive problems (e.g., as noted earlier, the fairness/cheating foundation is thought to have evolved to procure the benefits of two-way partnerships; Baumard et al., 2013 ; Graham et al., 2013 ). The evolution of these various mechanisms would have occasioned a novel set of selection pressures—in particular, the costs associated with being caught violating foundational moral principles. According to D. D. P. Johnson, Bering, and colleagues, the evolution of linguistic and mentalizing capacities would have ramped up these costs, as moral transgressions could be reported to absent third parties, exacerbating reputational damage for the transgressor. The conjunction of these various mechanisms, therefore, may have increased the premium on mechanisms that inhibit moral transgressions. Intuitions about punitive supernatural observers—a short excursion through Design Space ( Dennett, 1995 ) for mechanisms that are already generating ideas about invisible supernatural agents as a matter of course—would fit the bill here: “What better way [to avoid the fitness costs associated with the real-world detection of moral transgressions] than to equip the human mind with a sense that their every move—even thought—is being observed, judged, and potentially punished?” (D. D. P. Johnson, 2009 , p. 178).

The notion that humans have a genetically endowed propensity to postulate moralizing, punitive supernatural observers is both compelling and controversial. If intuitions about punitive supernatural observers are a biological mechanism for inhibiting moral transgressions, we should expect activation of these intuitions to have the relevant inhibitory effect. In the next section, we review the evidence for this hypothesis.

Supernatural Agent Intuitions and Morality

Surveys indicate that people who score higher on indices of religiosity (e.g., frequency of prayer and religious service attendance) reliably report more helping behaviors, such as charitable donations ( Brooks, 2006 ; Putnam & Campbell, 2010 ). As Norenzayan and Shariff (2008) have persuasively argued, however, this “charity gap” could occur because of an important confound: It may be that religious individuals are simply more motivated to maintain a moral reputation than nonreligious individuals (see also Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993 ; Sablosky, 2014 ). This would render religious individuals more susceptible to social desirability concerns, to which self-report measures of socially desirable behaviors are notoriously vulnerable ( Paulhus, 1991 ). Indeed, studies have found a consistent empirical link between religion and socially desirable responding ( Eriksson & Funcke, 2014 ; Sedikides & Gebauer, 2010 ), which raises the prospect that results linking religion with moral behavior largely reflect concerns to present a positive image to the researcher ( Galen, 2012 ; Saroglou, 2012 , 2013 ). Some studies have found that a link between self-reported religiosity and self-reported altruism remains even when social desirability concerns are measured and controlled for (e.g., Saroglou, Pichon, Trompette, Verschueren, & Dernelle, 2005 ). However, to the extent that the relationship between religiosity and self-enhancement stems from self-stereotyping rather than from concerns with projecting a positive image ( Eriksson & Funcke, 2014 ), attempts to control for socially desirable responding may not eliminate all relevant sources of response bias in self-report measures. Accordingly, experiments with behavioral measures should be consulted wherever possible ( Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ).

A growing body of studies have utilized experimental and naturalistic priming paradigms in a bid to uncover causal—rather than merely correlational—relationships between concepts of supernatural agency and morally relevant behaviors (see Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007 ). 6 To date, such studies have found evidence that, compared with control participants, those primed with supernatural concepts are more cooperative in experimental economic measures, such as dictator games ( Ahmed & Salas, 2011 ; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007 ; cf. Benjamin, Choi, & Fisher, 2010 ), public goods games ( Ahmed & Hammarstedt, 2011 ; Benjamin et al., 2010 ), common-pool resource games ( Xygalatas, 2013 ), and prisoner’s dilemma games ( Ahmed & Salas, 2011 ). 7 Moreover, primed participants evince greater intention to help others ( Malhotra, 2010 ; Pichon, Boccato, & Saroglou, 2007 ; Pichon & Saroglou, 2009 ), less willingness to cheat ( Aveyard, 2014 ; Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005 ; Carpenter & Marshall, 2009 ; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008 ; Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007 ), and greater self-control ( Friese & Wänke, 2014 ; Laurin, Kay, & Fitzsimons, 2012 ; Rounding, Lee, Jacobson, & Li, 2012 ; Toburen & Meier, 2010 ; cf. Harrison & McKay, 2013 ). 8

One limitation of some of these behavioral studies, from a pluralistic moral perspective, is that competing moral motivations are sometimes conflated. For example, given the effect of religious priming on dictator game allocations, one might conclude that such priming activates the care foundation, promoting moral concerns for the well-being of others. An alternative possibility, however, is that the increased giving in the dictator game reflects the activation of the fairness foundation. For instance, the most frequent behavior for religiously primed participants in Shariff and Norenzayan’s (2007) studies was to transfer exactly half of the available money (in accordance with a salient norm of fairness), whereas for control participants, the most frequent behavior was to transfer nothing. (This might be seen as compelling evidence that fairness concerns were paramount here. However, although the modal response was to transfer half of the money, some participants in the religious prime condition transferred more than half—strictly speaking, an unfair allocation.) A similar issue arises when considering the study of Pichon et al. (2007) . These authors found that participants primed with positive religion words (e.g., “heaven”) collected more pamphlets advertising a charity organization than participants primed with neutral religion words (e.g., “parish”), positive words unrelated to religion (e.g., “liberty”), or neutral words unrelated to religion (e.g., “shirt”). One might conclude that religious priming (or, at least, positive religious priming) had activated compassion for the disadvantaged. But charitable behaviors or concerns could also be driven by an aversion to inequity ( Fehr & Schmidt, 1999 ).

Notwithstanding these interpretive complexities, the results of religious priming studies, taken together, would seem to indicate that religious priming promotes adherence to moral norms. Nevertheless, the picture may be more complicated than this, as other studies have shown that religious priming also elicits a range of aggressive and prejudicial behaviors. For example, Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, and Busath (2007) found that participants who read a description of violent retaliation commanded by God were subsequently more aggressive than participants who read the same description, but with the passage about God’s sanction omitted. Saroglou, Corneille, and Van Cappellen (2009) found that religiously primed participants encouraged by the experimenter to exact revenge on an individual who had allegedly criticized them were more vengeful than those given neutral primes. Van Pachterbeke, Freyer, and Saroglou (2011) found that religiously primed participants displayed support for impersonal societal norms even when upholding such norms would harm individuals (the effects reported by Saroglou et al. and Van Pachterbeke et al. were limited to participants scoring high on measures of submissiveness and authoritarianism, respectively). M. K. Johnson, Rowatt, and LaBouff (2010) found that subliminal priming of Christian concepts in ethnically diverse participant samples increased covert racial prejudice and negative affect toward African Americans (see also LaBouff, Rowatt, Johnson, & Finkle, 2012 ; Van Tongeren, Raad, McIntosh, & Pae, 2013 ). And Ginges et al. (2009) found that Jewish settlers were more likely to endorse as “extremely heroic” a suicide attack carried out against Muslims by an Israeli Jew when primed with synagogue attendance than when unprimed.

The fact that religious priming has been shown to elicit both “prosocial” and “nonprosocial” effects ( Galen, 2012 ) is often viewed as something of a contradiction or inconsistency (e.g., Preston & Ritter, 2013 ; Saroglou, 2006 ). One might suppose that the effects of such priming on aggression and prejudice count against the hypothesis that intuitions about supernatural observers inhibit moral norm violations. But without knowing what participants perceive as the relevant norm, this is difficult to establish. It may be that the putative “nonprosocial” effects involve adherence to, rather than violation of, a perceived norm. For example, in the Bushman et al. (2007) study, God’s apparent sanctioning of violent retaliation may reasonably be perceived as establishing a religious norm that participants then adhere to by behaving aggressively ( Preston & Ritter, 2013 ; see Blogowska & Saroglou, 2013 ).

There are other reasons to doubt that religious priming studies demonstrate that activating intuitions about punitive supernatural agents curbs moral infractions. For example, although Shariff & Norenzayan (2007) suggested that their primes had “aroused an imagined presence of supernatural watchers” (p. 807), Randolph-Seng and Nielsen (2008) argued that the use of primes that are semantically associated with moral behavior (e.g., “God”) may lead to moral behavior simply by virtue of that association. This “behavioral priming” interpretation of Shariff and Norenzayan’s results is consistent with their discovery, in their second study, that the effect on dictator game behavior of “secular” primes (civic, jury, court, police, and contract) was comparable with that of religious primes. Randolph-Seng and Nielsen ask why secular primes such as “civic” and “contract” should increase giving behavior if such behavior results from the activation of “supernatural watcher” concepts. The effect of the secular primes, they suggest, is more consistent with the behavioral priming explanation.

Similar considerations apply to a study by Mazar et al. (2008) , who found that participants who wrote down the titles of 10 books they had read in high school cheated on a subsequent task if given the opportunity to do so, whereas participants who instead wrote down the Ten Commandments did not. In a second study, these authors found that a secular reminder of morality (a statement about the university’s honor code) had the same effect on cheating as the Ten Commandments prime. More recently, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich (2013) found that even primes of science (e.g., words such as “hypothesis,” “laboratory,” and “scientists”) promoted adherence to moral norms and morally normative behaviors (these researchers examined morality primarily in the harm–care and fairness domains).

McKay and Dennett (2009) , however, have argued that the primes used in such cases do not enable clear adjudication between the surveillance and “behavioral priming” accounts. For example, both the “religious” and “secular” conditions in Shariff and Norenzayan’s (2007) second study included words associated not just with moral behavior but also with intelligent agents (“God” and “prophet” in the religious condition; “jury” and “police” in the secular condition). Gervais and Norenzayan (2012a) have recently shown that participants exposed to Shariff and Norenzayan’s religious primes showed a subsequent increase both in public self-awareness and socially desirable responding—two variables that are sensitive to the perception of being observed. This result seems an impressive substantiation of Shariff and Norenzayan’s supernatural watcher hypothesis. It remains to be demonstrated, however, that the perception that one is observed is what mediates the effect of the primes on behavior. It is possible that religious priming might activate both surveillance concerns and moral concepts, but that only the latter influence game behavior. 9

Earlier we mentioned methods that potentially conflate distinct moral motivations (e.g., the care and fairness foundations). The contrast between care and fairness is perhaps starkest when considering retributive punishment (“an eye for an eye”) and forgiveness (“turn the other cheek”). Jesus preached the latter (e.g., Matthew 5:39; Luke 6:29), and in so doing arguably prioritized kindness and compassion over fairness and justice (the command to “turn the other cheek” is effectively an endorsement of “second-order” free riding; Panchanathan & Boyd, 2004 ). 10 The dichotomy between forgiveness and punishment provides a potential empirical lever for teasing apart the effects of supernatural primes on kindness and fairness. What effect would such primes have on the altruistic punishment of unfair behavior ( Fehr & Gächter, 2002 )? If supernatural primes activate concerns for fairness, then primed participants should be more likely to punish violations of fairness norms. If, on the other hand, such primes stimulate kindness, then participants may be less likely to engage in such punishment.

A study by McKay, Efferson, Whitehouse, and Fehr (2011) bears on this question. Participants were primed subliminally with the concepts of religion and/or punishment , and the extent to which they subsequently punished unfair offers in a punishment game was measured. We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviors for a subset of our participants—those who had previously donated to a religious organization. This finding seems consistent with the notion that supernatural agency concepts promote fairness and its enforcement, although, as this study did not disambiguate agency and moral dimensions along the lines suggested earlier, it may be that the effect here was a result of behavioral priming of moral behavior (in this case, punishment of unfair behavior) rather than activation of supernatural agent concepts. Another problem is that different idiosyncratic conceptions of God (e.g., compassionate vs. punitive) may, when primed, result in very different behaviors. Earlier studies, for example, have found that whereas people who report having a close personal relationship with a loving god are less likely to support the death penalty ( Unnever, Cullen, & Bartkowski, 2006 ), those who conceive of God as a powerful dispenser of justice are more likely to support the death penalty ( Unnever, Cullen, & Applegate, 2005 ; see also Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011 ). When possible, therefore, priming studies should attempt to measure idiosyncratic conceptions of God (e.g., Laurin, Shariff, Henrich, & Kay, 2012 ).

Overall, we think that religious priming studies provide at least tentative evidence that activating intuitions about supernatural agents curbs moral norm violations. However, it is important to note that almost all of these studies were conducted in WEIRD societies ( Henrich et al., 2010 ), typically using undergraduate student populations. 11 The extent to which these effects generalize to other cultures is therefore unclear. But what of the intuitions themselves?

The Cross-Cultural Prevalence of Supernatural Punishment Concepts

If intuitions about such supernatural punishers are properly foundational , they should be culturally and historically widespread. However, Baumard and Boyer (2013a) note that the gods of numerous classical traditions (e.g., Greek, Roman, Chinese, Hindu) “were generally construed as unencumbered with moral conscience and uninterested in human morality” (p. 272; see also Baumard & Boyer, in press ; Schlieter, 2014 ). Further illustration of the cultural and historical variability in this respect comes from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (SCCS), 12 which sorts the variable “high gods” into four categories: (a) “absent or not reported,” (b) “present but not active in human affairs,” (c) “present and active in human affairs but not supportive of human morality,” and (d) “present, active, and specifically supportive of human morality” ( Divale, 2000 ; see D. D. P. Johnson, 2005 ; Roes & Raymond, 2003 ). It seems clear that not all supernatural agents are explicitly represented as taking an interest in human morality: Insofar as the gods monitor human behavior, in many traditions this is primarily to oversee adherence to nonmoral strictures and the appropriate performance of costly rituals and sacrifices ( Purzycki, 2011 ; Purzycki & Sosis, 2011 ).

Although these considerations may seem to refute any suggestion that moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are historically and cross-culturally universal, recent work suggests that even when gods are not explicitly represented as caring about human morality, there is nevertheless a moral undercurrent beneath the surface of such explicit, reflective representations ( Purzycki, 2013 ). For example, ethnic Tyvans (from the central Asian Republic of Tuva) rate spirit masters’ knowledge and concern about moral information (e.g., theft) higher than nonmoral information ( Purzycki, 2013 ), despite explicitly denying that spirit masters care about interpersonal moral behavior ( Purzycki, 2010 ).

In any case, as Graham et al. (2013) argue, foundationhood does not require that the foundation in question be shown to underlie relevant cultural representations in all human cultures. Cultural influences may restrict the expression of innate cognitive tendencies, just as they can restrict the expression of innate physical propensities (e.g., foot binding in Imperial China restricted the growth of the feet; Ko, 2002 ). However, Graham and colleagues also note that not all cultures are equally informative when it comes to establishing foundationhood. In particular, the most informative societies are those most closely resembling relevant ancestral lifestyles ( Tooby & Cosmides, 1990 , 1992 ; see Marlowe, 2005 ). And it is in these small-scale hunter–gatherer societies that explicit doctrines about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are conspicuously absent ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ; Boehm, 2008 ; Boyer, 2001 ). For example, the Hadza of northern Tanzania and the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are contemporary hunter–gatherer societies with gods who take little interest in human wrongdoing ( Norenzayan, 2013 ).

In our judgment, therefore, it is unlikely that our evolved cognitive systems produce stable intuitions about omnipresent supernatural punishers. What we think more plausible is that we have a genetically endowed sensitivity to situational cues that our behavior is being observed. Experiments demonstrate that people—even young children—are “strategically prosocial,” behaving more generously and cooperatively when they know others can observe their behavior (e.g., Gächter & Fehr, 1999 ; Leimgruber, Shaw, Santos, & Olson, 2012 ; Wedekind & Milinski, 2000 ). A burgeoning literature indicates that even very subtle cues of surveillance influence adherence to prevailing moral norms. For example, Haley and Fessler (2005) found that the presence of stylized eye-like images on the computer background had a substantial influence on the number of participants who, under conditions of strict anonymity, allocated money to another individual in a computerized dictator game (nearly 80% of participants in the “eyespots” conditions transferred money, compared with just over 50% in conditions without eyespots). Rigdon, Ishii, Watabe, and Kitayama (2009) replicated this experimental result using three dots in a schematic face configuration, compared with a condition in which this configuration was reversed vertically (see also Baillon, Selim, & van Dolder, 2013 ; Burnham & Hare, 2007 ; Oda, Niwa, Honma, & Hiraishi, 2011 ; cf. Fehr & Schneider, 2010 ). In contrast to these studies, Raihani and Bshary (2012) found that dictators donated less money in the presence of eye images. However, these authors only analyzed mean donations, and not the probability of donating something (however small). Nettle et al. (2013) argue that the reliable effect of surveillance cues in the dictator game is to increase the probability that dictators will donate something, rather than to increase mean donations. A reanalysis by these authors of Raihani and Bshary’s (2012) data confirmed the former effect.

Bateson, Nettle, and colleagues have found similar effects using an image of a pair of eyes on a notice in naturalistic settings. Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts (2006) found that, compared with images of flowers, eye images substantially increased the level of contributions to an honesty box in a psychology department tea room; and Ernest-Jones, Nettle, and Bateson (2011) found that similar images halved the odds of littering in a university cafeteria. Bourrat, Baumard, and McKay (2011) found that such images led to greater condemnation of moral infractions. Relatedly, Cavrak and Kleider-Offutt (2014) recently found that participants exposed to religious images associated with a prominent supernatural agent (e.g., a crucifix, a crown of thorns, a Jesus Fish or Ichthys) rated morally ambiguous actions as less morally appropriate than did participants exposed to control images. Finally, there is evidence that experimental cues of anonymity rather than of surveillance (e.g., dimmed lighting, the wearing of sunglasses) led to more moral infractions ( Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010 ). Tane and Takezawa (2011) found that Haley and Fessler’s (2005) stylized eye-like images had no effect on dictator game allocations when the stimuli were presented in a dark room.

The upshot of all this work is that evolved agency-detection mechanisms may serve to deliver intuitions about observing agents and to regulate our behavior in the presence of those agents. We doubt, however, that such mechanisms deliver intuitions about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents—instead, we think that the relevant intuitions are more basic (just concerning the presence of agency per se). Triggered in the absence of any visible intentional agent, however, such intuitions may be reflectively elaborated into conclusions about supernatural watchers ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013b ). And drawing on intuitions about fairness and the psychological characteristics of intentional agents (ToM), such supernatural watcher concepts may morph into more complex, compelling, and culturally transmissible notions of moralizing gods—notions which, when made salient or activated (as in priming studies), serve to promote adherence to the perceived norms of those gods.

Here we see the essential arbitrariness of the “religion” and “morality” categories, for there may be considerable overlap between “religious” and “moral” features at the levels of both cognitive predispositions and cultural representations. After all, it is clear that cultural representations of morally concerned, punitive supernatural agents—“moralizing gods” ( Roes & Raymond, 2003 )—are both religious and moral. Moreover, the notion that cultural notions of such gods are undergirded by cognitive intuitions about agency, ToM, and fairness (or “proportionality”; Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ) is not just plausible but also compelling.

What this highlights is that we can often make no principled distinction between religion and morality at the level of culture or cognition. Our aim here has been to pinpoint some of the major features in the religious and moral constellations. When we play the astrologer’s game, in considering the biological and cultural interplay between certain—essentially arbitrary—sets of these features, we do so in order to engage and accommodate our academic colleagues. Ultimately, however, we see evolved cognitive systems for care, fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity as “religious foundations” no less than as “moral foundations.” A thoroughgoing science of “religion” and “morality” may ultimately dispense with these terms, exhaustively mapping the relations between evolved cognitive systems and cultural representations without recourse to vague overarching labels.

The Religion–Morality Relationship in Cultural Evolution

Recall the analogy drawn earlier between the properties of (a) hands and gloves, and (b) evolved cognitive systems and explicit cultural representations. Whereas hands are biologically evolved features of human anatomy, gloves are culturally evolved artifacts that must follow the contours of the hand at least to some extent in order to be wearable. In this section, we ask whether, in a similar fashion, culturally evolved belief systems must follow the contours of our evolved cognitive systems. Moreover, from the perspective of our concern with the religion–morality relationship, do cultural systems create durable connections between the moral and religious foundations depicted in Figure 2 ? Do religious cultural representations influence the prevalence of moral cultural representations and/or do they constrain the activation of moral intuitions? In posing these particular questions, we do not mean to suggest that the direction of causality must always run from religion to morality. It could be that “moral” cultural representations amplify or constrain the activation of “religious” intuitions. For example, a sign in a public restroom designed to encourage hand washing by reminding people of a behavioral norm (“Is the person next to you washing with soap?”) may trigger intuitions about observing agents ( Judah et al., 2009 ).

In considering these questions, one might seek to supplement the examples in Figure 2 with further examples plucked from the ethnographic record. Although time-consuming, such an exercise would undoubtedly be instructive in many ways. It would indicate, for example, whether—and how—cultural systems from diverse regions of the world are capable of connecting moral and religious foundations in a variety of ways. It would not, however, address the deeper question of why they do so. To examine the “how” question, we provide a case study based on long-term immersion in a particular cultural system. To examine the “why” question, we consider two competing perspectives: a cultural adaptationist account and a cultural epidemiological one.

The Pomio Kivung: A Case Study in Culturally Evolved Connections Between Religious and Moral Foundations

To illustrate some of the ways in which cultural systems may serve to connect the fractionated elements of religion and morality (the “how” question), we consider a cargo cult in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung ( Whitehouse, 1995 ). In Tok Pisin (the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea), the word Kivung means “a meeting” or “to meet,” but for several ethnic groups in New Britain, it also designates a popular religious movement. Established in the early 1960s and spreading to encompass scores of villages in some of the more remote regions of the island, the movement has a centralized leadership, based at a large coastal settlement, from which regular patrols to outlying villages are sent, bringing news, collecting taxes, and policing the orthodoxy. Each Kivung village has a team of designated orators, trained at the movement’s headquarters, charged with the responsibility of preaching a standard body of doctrines and overseeing a wide range of authorized rituals. The mainstream Kivung exhibits all the fractionated elements of our intuitive religious repertoire: hyperactive agency detection, ToM, teleofunctional reasoning, the ritual stance, and group psychology. And it connects each of these elements to our five moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity).

At the heart of Kivung teachings is the idea that the ancestors of followers will someday soon return from the dead, bringing with them all the wonders of Western technology. Until that day, however, the ancestors exist only as bodiless agents, discernible by the sounds they make and the traces they leave behind. The ancestors are believed to mill around with the living as they go about their daily activities, invisibly observing people’s comings and goings, and taking a particular interest in the moral implications of their behavior. Failures to observe the laws of the Kivung are said to delay the miracle of returning ancestors. Only when a certain moral threshold has been achieved will the living and the dead be reunited. This dogma connects with all our moral foundations because the Kivung laws, adapted from the Ten Commandments as taught by Catholic missionaries in the region, forbid such a broad range of transgressions as violence and slander (harming), cheating and stealing (fairness), criticizing the Kivung (loyalty), disobedience (respect), and cooking during menses (purity).

Kivung ideas about ancestors not only link up our moral foundations but also weave intricate connections through discourse and ritual between each of our religious foundations. For example, among the many rituals observed by Kivung followers is the daily laying out of food offerings to the ancestors. Great attention is paid to the noises of ancestors entering the temple (e.g., the creaking of the door), tampering with the food (e.g., the clattering of dishes), and the visible signs of eating (e.g., morsels of food apparently removed by invisible hands). These ideas obviously prime agency detection—moreover, there is a specialist (whose official role translates roughly as “witness”) charged with responsibility for observing vigils in the temples and listening for signs of invisible ancestral presence. Insofar as ancestors are said to be able to see into people’s hearts and minds, Kivung dogma presents formidable ToM challenges and a suite of rituals dedicated to assuaging feelings of guilt and shame, as well as the pursuit of forgiveness and absolution. A common way of paying for one’s sins to is place money into a special receptacle or (because not all Kivung followers have access to money) to place one’s hand over the receptacle to display the intention to give. This simple ritual requires intense concentration, as it is said that if the ancestors detect insincerity (telepathically), they will withhold their forgiveness. Teleofunctional reasoning meanwhile is a pervasive feature of Kivung origin myths and various rituals associated with the sacred gardens (one of which memorializes a Melanesian Eden). And lastly, the Kivung activates group psychology by creating familial ties based on shared ritual experiences and coalitional bonds via us–them thinking in relation to external detractors and critics.

Although the Kivung connects up all our moral and religious foundations through a highly elaborated system of doctrines and practices, many of which borrow liberally from missionary teachings, we cannot assume that the same would be true of all cultural systems typically classified as “religious.” This is a matter for anthropologists to establish on a case-by-case basis. In the end, however, it constitutes a question about how , rather than why , cultural systems create connections between moral and religious foundations. To address the why, we need to consider issues of function and ultimate causation.

Adaptationist and By-Product Accounts

Two contrasting positions on the why of the morality–religion relationship in cultural evolution have achieved some prominence in recent years. One takes the form of adaptationist arguments concerning the emergence and spread of routinized rituals and moralizing gods. The other argues that all cultural traditions, however they trace (or fail to trace) the connections between moral and religious foundations, are by-products of cognitive predispositions and biases, rather than cultural adaptations that enhance the fitness of individuals or groups. We briefly review these alternative positions and consider what evidence would be required to adjudicate satisfactorily between the two.

Scholars in the cognitive science of religion tend to agree that many globally and historically recurrent features of religious thinking and behavior are by-products of cognitive machinery that evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with religion (e.g., Atran, 2002 ; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004 ; J. L. Barrett, 2004 ; Bloom, 2009 ; Boyer, 2001 ). For example, HADDs are thought to have evolved to help support the detection of predators and prey. If they also undergirded intuitions about the presence of bodiless agents, then this was originally a side effect (by-product) of their main function (J. L. Barrett, 2000 , 2004 , 2012 ). To express this in terms of our body–clothing analogy, if HADDs were equivalent to the evolved anatomy of the hand, then the accumulated cultural knowledge of expert trackers and hunters would be equivalent to the protective functions of gloves, essential for survival in very cold climates. But gloves can also have decorative frills, like bobbles and tassels, which have no particular survival value. Cultural representations concerning bodiless agents would be decorative frills of this kind. As such, these kinds of functionally superfluous additions need not follow the contour of the hand at all—and might derive their popular appeal precisely from the fact that they do not. Thus, one of the dominant explanations for the cultural recurrence of supernatural agent concepts is that they violate intuitive expectations in ways that are especially attention grabbing and memorable—like glittering jewels adorning the gauntlet of an emperor ( Boyer, 2001 ; Pyysiäinen, 2001 ). Conceivably, the cultural success of certain Christian ideals (e.g., “turning the other cheek”) may owe, in part, to the fact that they violate intuitions about proportionality (“an eye for an eye”).

What distinguishes the adaptationist perspective on religion, however, is the view that at least some of these religious by-products became useful for the survival of individuals and groups in the course of cultural evolution. Most commonly, this argument has been applied to the growth of large-scale societies. Humans evolved to live in face-to-face bands of hunter–gatherers rather than in vast empires or nations. Small group psychology, it has been argued, would have been insufficient to handle many of the challenges of large group living. Religion provided cultural adaptations to support the transition from foraging to farming, from local community to state formation. One line of adaptationist thinking has focused on the role of ritual frequency in this transition ( Whitehouse, 2012 ). As collective rituals came to be performed more regularly, beliefs and practices that defined the group could be standardized across larger populations, a tendency that was reinforced by the invention of literacy ( Mullins, Whitehouse, & Atkinson, 2013 ). As common identity markers came to unite ever larger coalitions, local communities bound together by small group psychology tended to be engulfed and absorbed or wiped out altogether ( Turchin, Whitehouse, Francois, Slingerland, & Collard, 2012 ). Another line of adaptationist thinking has focused on the role of rituals as costly signals and “credibility enhancing displays.” Still another has focused on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of social complexity. We consider each of these approaches in turn.

Routinization

One of the major challenges in understanding how and why religion changes as societies become larger and more complex relates to the changing structure and function of ritual. As conditions permitted an escalation of the scale and complexity of human societies, cultural evolutionary processes may have further tuned the elements of ritual, promoting social cohesion. With the evolution of social complexity, religious rituals become more routinized, dysphoric rituals become less widespread, doctrine and narrative becomes more standardized, beliefs become more universalistic, religion becomes more hierarchical, offices more professionalized, sacred texts help to codify and legitimate emergent orthodoxies, and religious guilds increasingly monopolize resources ( Whitehouse, 2000 , 2004 ). Some of these patterns have recently been documented quantitatively using large samples of religious traditions from the ethnographic record. For instance, Atkinson and Whitehouse (2011) have shown that as societies become larger and more hierarchical, rituals are more frequently performed ( Atkinson & Whitehouse, 2011 ), and low-frequency dysphoric rituals typical of small, cohesive social groups, such as warring tribes ( Whitehouse, 1996 ), come to be confined to specialized niches (e.g., hazing and initiation in military organizations). Small, tightly bonded groups with dysphoric rituals may be generally deleterious to cooperation in larger societies (creating opposing coalitions), and thus “selected out” of the cultural repertoire, at least for the population at large, and relegated to confined organizations (e.g., militaries). Instead, the much more frequent rituals typical of regional and world religions sustain forms of group identification better suited to the kinds of collective action problems presented by interactions among strangers or socially more distant individuals ( Whitehouse, 2004 ). As rituals become more routinized, however, they also become less stimulating emotionally, and perhaps even more tedious ( Whitehouse, 2000 ). New rituals then evolved in some traditions to convey propositional information about supernatural beliefs through a combination of repetition and costly displays (such as animal sacrifices or monetary donations) that culturally transmit commitment to certain beliefs ( Atran & Henrich, 2010 ; Henrich, 2009 ). As some societies became ever larger and more complex, even the processes described here may not have been sufficient to sustain cooperation and a host of new cultural adaptations—most notably, forms of external information storage and secular institutions of governance—became increasingly important ( Mullins et al., 2013 ; Norenzayan, 2013 ).

Costly signaling and “credibility-enhancing displays.”

“Costly signaling” theorists have argued that rituals serve as a hard-to-fake index of commitment to the group ( Irons, 2001 ). Although originally used by biologists to denote the display of costly signals of fine health, such as the peacock’s tail or the leaping of springbok ( Grafen, 1990 ; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997 ), applications of signaling theory to ritual behavior in humans adopt a broader conception of “costliness”—in terms of time, labor, money, goods, and health ( Bulbulia, 2008 ; for a critique, see Murray & Moore, 2009 ). To avoid confusion with the narrower meaning of costly signaling in biology, some social scientists prefer to talk of “commitment signaling” or “honest signaling” ( Bliege Bird & Smith, 2005 ; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003 ). With the emergence of agriculture and larger, more complex social formations, strangers (or relative strangers) needed to be able to assess their respective reputational statuses when biographical information was not readily available. It has been argued that rituals provided a signal of good character (trustworthiness and willingness to cooperate) in the absence of specific information about other people’s personal histories ( Bulbulia et al., 2013 ).

The signaling theory of religion and ritual has been recently extended by the theory of credibility enhancing displays (CREDS; Henrich, 2009 ). By engaging in costly behaviors, rather than merely advocating such behavior in others (i.e., by “walking the walk” as well as “talking the talk”), role models secure the trust and devotion of followers. This is thought to facilitate the spread of moral norms across large populations and safeguard their transmission across the generations. CREDS theory seeks to explain not only the wide distribution of moral norms in the so-called ethical religions but also the prevalence of moral exemplars in such traditions (e.g., gurus, prophets, priests, and messiahs) and the willingness of rulers to be bound by the divine edicts.

The cultural evolution of “moralizing gods.”

One of the most vigorous debates in the recent literature on religion and morality has concerned the cultural prevalence of moralizing gods—powerful supernatural agents who monitor behavior and punish moral infractions. Ara Norenzayan and colleagues (e.g., Norenzayan, 2013 , 2014 ; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ; Norenzayan, Shariff, & Gervais, 2009 ; Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2009 ) have argued that the cultural innovation of notions of such gods over the last 12 millennia has been an important factor in the human transition from small-scale, kin-based groups to large-scale societies.

In small-scale and traditional societies in which everybody knows everyone else and most social behavior is easily observed and reported, transgressions are easily detected. Modern technologies of surveillance, such as police cameras, identity cards, and computer records, allow increasingly extensive monitoring of thieves, cheats, defectors, and free riders by designated authorities. But for several thousand years, during which the so-called “ethical religions” evolved, much of the world’s population has lived in relatively complex societies in which interactions with strangers were common and parasitic free riders could evade punishment by wearing the cloak of anonymity. According to Norenzayan and colleagues, the postulation of moralizing gods provided an “eye in the sky” ( Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012a ), curtailing the deleterious effects of free riders and cheats, and allowing groups with such gods to survive and prosper, in turn enhancing the spread of the relevant god notions. Norenzayan et al.’s theory is thus (cultural) adaptationist in nature, as it claims that the cultural success of moralizing god concepts is partly a result of the adaptive effects of such concepts on human groups.

In contrast, Baumard and Boyer (2013a) argue incisively that the cultural prevalence of moralizing god representations does not result from the fact that such representations promote socially cohesive behaviors among human groups. Instead, these representations are successful because they have features (e.g., resonance with stable intuitions about proportionality and with elaborated intuitions about invisible agency) that render them especially attention-grabbing, memorable, and transmissible. In short, moralizing gods are cultural variants with effects that enhance their own success (and so are adaptive in that sense; Dennett, 1995 ), but these effects do not include changes in the biological or cultural fitness of their human vectors.

How are we to evaluate these opposing views? One feature of Norenzayan et al.’s position is that it seems to entail that supernatural agent representations should promote moral behaviors in the relevant cultures. As we have seen, a wealth of evidence from priming studies indicates that the activation of supernatural concepts can promote adherence to moral norms. On the other hand, other priming studies have revealed “nonprosocial” effects of religious primes ( Galen, 2012 ). Do the latter studies undermine the hypothesis of Norenzayan and colleagues?

In our view, the tension between the “prosocial” and “nonprosocial” effects of religious primes may be a consequence of a sanitized conception of “prosociality.” The contention of Norenzayan and colleagues is that the cultural success of “moralizing gods” owes to the fact that members of groups with beliefs in such gods engage in behaviors that allow those groups to become larger and larger—that favor their “stability, survival, and expansion, at the expense of less successful rivals” ( Norenzayan, 2013 , p. 30). Such behaviors are literally “prosocial,” but we should not expect them to be “prosocial” in the sanitized social psychological sense. On the contrary, they may be aggressive, murderous, and even genocidal. Activating the notion of moralizing supernatural agents should encourage behaviors that advance the interests of the ingroup, whether these behaviors are “nice” or “nasty.” When priming with god concepts promotes altruism, we should expect this altruism to be parochial (confined to the ingroup) rather than indiscriminate ( Hartung, 1995 ), and we should not be surprised if behaviors are undertaken to damage relevant out-groups ( Blogowska et al., 2013 ; De Dreu et al., 2010 ). In short, attempts to substantiate Norenzayan’s theory with evidence of “religious prosociality” (the sanitized kind) may be misguided.

The pattern of “prosocial” and “nonprosocial” findings that has emerged from priming studies, to date, is quite consistent with Norenzayan’s theory. It is less clear that these findings are consistent with Baumard and Boyer (2013a) . The latter authors claim that the success of moralizing god concepts is entirely a result of the resonance of these concepts with the output of intuitive systems, so their theory does not require that these concepts have any effects whatsoever on behavior. Any such effects are incidental and superfluous from their perspective.

In making their case, Baumard and Boyer argue that the gods of many prominent historical large-scale societies were “strikingly nonmoral”:

To simplify somewhat, the Romans, with their nonmoralizing gods, built one of history’s most successful predatory empires. They then converted to Christianity, a moralizing religion, and were promptly crushed by barbarians with tribal, nonmoralizing gods. ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a , p. 276)

Baumard and Boyer thus argue that moralizing religions were not the “magic bullet” enabling the formation of large-scale societies. A potential limitation of their formulation, however, is that they appear to identify gods as “nonmoralizing” if those gods are not explicitly represented as caring about human morality. As they acknowledge, however, the gods of antiquity were represented as monitoring the appropriate performance of rituals. To the extent that rituals represent or promote moral behaviors (see earlier), therefore, gods that care about rituals care about morality, directly or indirectly. We note in this connection that common components of ritual performance may facilitate parochially altruistic behaviors, including aggression (e.g., Wiltermuth, 2012 , has recently shown that participants who acted in synchrony with a confederate were more likely to comply with the confederate’s request to administer a blast of noise to other participants than were control participants). In sum, in our view, a full evaluation of cultural evolutionary hypotheses about the connection between religion and morality requires reorientation on at least two fronts: what is important is that notions of the relevant gods promote socially cohesive behaviors, not that the behaviors are “nice,” and not that the gods are explicitly represented as valuing social cohesion.

The relationship between religion and morality is a deep and emotive topic. The confident pronouncements of public commentators belie the bewildering theoretical and methodological complexity of the issues. In the scholarly sphere, progress is frequently impeded by a series of prevailing conceptual limitations and lacunae. Many contemporary investigations employ parochial conceptions of “religion” and “morality,” fail to decompose these categories into theoretically grounded elements, and/or neglect to consider the complex interplay between cognition and culture. The tendency to adopt a sanitized conception of prosocial behavior has hampered efforts to test theories of the extraordinary cultural dominance of “moralizing god” concepts—as we have seen, behaviors that allow religious groups to survive and expand may be anything but “nice.”

We have set out an encompassing evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. Our view is that cultural representations—concepts, dogmas, artefacts, and practices both prescribed and proscribed—are triggered, shaped, and constrained by a variety of foundational cognitive systems. We have sought to identify the most currently plausible conjectures about biologically evolved connections between these systems, and have reviewed and evaluated the most prominent published debates in the cultural evolutionary domain. Ultimately, we see and foresee no pithily characterizable relationship between religion and morality. First, to the extent that the terms “religion” and “morality” are largely arbitrary and do not refer to coherent natural structures (as we have suggested), efforts to establish connections between religion and morality, conceived as monolithic entities, are destined to be facile or circular (or both). Second, under the pluralistic approach we advocate, which fractionates both religion and morality and distinguishes cognition from culture, the relationship between religion and morality expands into a matrix of separate relationships between fractionated elements. Thus some aspects of “religion” may promote some aspects of “morality,” just as others serve to suppress or obstruct the same, or different, aspects. In short, in discussing whether religion is a force for good, we must be very clear what we mean by “religion” and what we mean by “good.”

Although we eschew a simplistic story, we live in a very exciting time for psychological research on this topic. A key avenue for future work is to establish which biologically endowed cognitive structures and preferences are truly foundational where “religion” and “morality” are concerned. The aim should be to settle upon a parsimonious set of culturally and historically widespread cognitive predispositions that exhibit developmental and comparative evidence of innate preparedness, and that jointly account for the great bulk of culturally distributed items falling under the umbrella of religion and morality. In the meantime, taking into consideration data from non-WEIRD populations ( Henrich et al., 2010 ), empirical work seeking to clarify relationships between religious and moral concepts and behaviors should capitalize on this fractionating approach by expanding the domain of relevant variables (for recent studies that have delineated a range of moral outcomes in accordance with MFT, see Cavrak & Kleider-Offutt, 2014 ; Gervais, 2014a ). In particular, researchers should seek to characterize the range of “prosocial” outcomes (including outgroup aggression and hostility) more comprehensively, and when possible, should distinguish between parochial and more generalized variants of altruistic behaviors (e.g., Reddish, Bulbulia, & Fischer, 2013 ; Smith, Aquino, Koleva, & Graham, 2014 ). Research on “religion” and “morality” proceeds apace, but to capitalize on the gains that have been made, we must adopt higher standards of conceptual precision—a hallmark of maturation in any field of science.

1 Here we conflate two different senses in which morality may require God. On the one hand, morality may require God in the sense that the very notion of morality is incoherent without God (i.e., without God, there is no basis for ethics). This is what Socrates had in mind (and disputed). On the other hand, morality may require God in the sense that (belief in) God is needed to enforce moral behavior. This is what Dostoevsky meant. Partly for rhetorical effect, here we have presented the Socrates view and the Dostoevsky view as opposing, but strictly speaking, they could both be valid—for example, it could be that the notion of morality is coherent without God (Socrates), but that the threat of God’s punishment is required for anybody to actually act morally (Dostoevsky).

2 At the same time, atheists and believers alike view good deeds as less moral if they are performed for religious reasons ( Gervais, 2014b ).

3 A. B. Cohen and colleagues (e.g., A. B. Cohen, 2003 ; A. B. Cohen & Rankin, 2004 ; A. B. Cohen & Rozin, 2001 ) have investigated how different religious traditions vary with respect to the moral status accorded to thoughts. Some religions (e.g., Protestantism) view thoughts as morally equivalent to actions, whereas others (e.g., Judaism) do not.

4 Although Tinbergen apparently did not mention Aristotle in his work ( Hladký & Havlíček, 2013 ), a number of authors have commented on the parallels between Tinbergen’s Four Whys and Aristotle’s teaching of Four Causes (e.g., L. Barrett, Blumstein, Clutton-Brock, & Kappeler, 2013 ). The point that scientific research on religion should consider all four whys has been eloquently made by Hinde (2005) and informs his writings on religion more generally (e.g., Hinde, 1999 ).

5 An advantage of our hand–glove analogy over the foundation–building analogy is that the morphologies of hands suggest gloves more than the morphologies of foundations suggest resulting architectural forms.

6 All undergraduate psychology students learn that correlation does not imply causation. This lesson is particularly important when considering evidence germane to the religion–morality debate. To illustrate, Brañas-Garza, Espín, and Neuman (2014) used economic games such as the dictator game (see Footnote 7 ) to explore the relationship between individual religious variables and morally relevant social behaviors (e.g., altruism, fairness) in a large Spanish sample. Although they found a positive relationship between intensity of religiosity and altruism in the dictator game, they acknowledged that the causality of this relationship could have run from altruism to religiosity, or that unobserved third variables may have influenced both altruism and religiosity.

7 The dictator game is an anonymous, two-player “game” in which the first player must decide how much of a monetary endowment to distribute to the second player. The second player has a completely passive role (which is why the dictator game is not, strictly speaking, a game) and must accept whatever the first player transfers. In a public goods game, players privately choose how much of an endowment to donate to a public pot. Total donations are subsequently multiplied by some factor (greater than 1 but less than the number of players) and this “public good” payoff is then distributed evenly among all players (a common-pool resource game is similar, but players choose how much to withdraw from a collective pot; if total withdrawals exceed the amount in the pot, no player receives anything). A prisoner’s dilemma game is essentially a simplified public goods game played with two players.

8 Although some authors have suggested that moral conduct of any kind may be impossible without self-control (e.g., according to Baumeister and Exline [1999 , p. 1175], “it is fair to consider self-control the master virtue”), the relationship between self-control and morality is complex. For example, punishment of unfairness has been associated both with self-control (e.g., Knoch, Pascual-Leone, Meyer, Treyer, & Fehr, 2006 ; Lakshminarayanan & Santos, 2009 ) and with its opposite—impulsivity (e.g., Crockett, Clark, Lieberman, Tabibnia, & Robbins, 2010 ; Pillutla & Murningham, 1996 ; see Espín, Brañas-Garza, Herrmann, & Gamella, 2012 ). At present, there is no official moral foundation of self-control.

9 Ritter and Preston (2013) conducted a sophisticated recent investigation of lay understandings of religious prime words, finding evidence for the cognitive representation of three relatively distinct classes of religious concept: agent concepts (e.g., god, angel), spiritual–abstract concepts (e.g., faith, belief), and institutional–concrete concepts (e.g., shrine, scripture).

And I: “Master, I would be most eager To see him pushed deep down into this soup Before we leave the lake” Soon I watched him get so torn to pieces By the muddy crew, I still give praise And thanks to God for it. ( Inferno , VIII: 52–54; 58–60; Alighieri, 1472/2002 )

11 Two exceptions are Hadnes and Schumacher (2012) and Aveyard (2014) . Hadnes and Schumacher found that priming West African villagers with traditional beliefs substantially increased trustworthy behavior in an economic trust game. Aveyard tested a sample of Middle Eastern Muslim undergraduates and found that whereas a laboratory priming manipulation had no effect on their cheating rates, participants exposed to a naturalistic religious prime—the Islamic call to prayer—cheated substantially less.

12 The SCCS is a database of 186 well-documented human societies, spanning contemporary hunter–gatherers, early historic states, and contemporary industrial societies. The sample was devised by Murdock and White (1969) and selected such that the included cultures capture the world’s regions and diversity, yet have relatively weak phylogenetic and cultural diffusion relationships to one another (thus avoiding “Galton’s problem,” whereby cross-cultural comparisons can generate spurious correlations if common attributes have been transmitted between societies or are descended from a common ancestor; D. D. P. Johnson, 2005 ). The database contains quantitative variables describing numerous characteristics of the societies in the sample. The “high gods” variable is defined by Murdock (1967 , p. 52) as “a spiritual being who is believed to have created all reality and/or to be its ultimate governor, even though his sole act was to create other spirits who, in turn, created or control the natural world.”

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Religion and Morality

From the beginning of Western thought, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. This is true whether we go back within Greek philosophy or within Christianity and Judaism. The present article will not try to step beyond these confines. The article proceeds chronologically, giving greatest length to the contemporary period. It attempts to explain the main options as they have occurred historically. The purpose of proceeding historically is to substantiate the claim that morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently, and that our moral vocabulary is still deeply infused with this history. Since there are historically so many different ways to see the relation, a purely schematic or typological account is not likely to succeed as well. The ethical theories of the individual philosophers mentioned will not be described in depth, since this encyclopedia already contains entries about them; instead, the focus will be on what these philosophers say about the relation between morality and religion.

1. Ancient Greek Philosophy

• 2. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament

3. The Middle Ages

4. modern philosophy, 5. the twentieth century, bibliography.

With the Greeks as a starting point, the initial focus is on ‘Homer’, a body of texts transmitted first orally and then written down in the seventh century BCE. In what follows, the term ‘morality’ will be used more frequently than ‘ethics’. Philosophers have drawn various contrasts between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ at various times (Kant for example, and Hegel, and more recently R. M. Hare and Bernard Williams). But etymologically, the term ‘moral’ comes from the Latin mos , which means custom or habit, and it is a translation of the Greek ethos , which means roughly the same thing, and is the origin of the term ‘ethics’. In contemporary non-technical use, the two terms are more or less interchangeable, though ‘ethics’ has slightly more flavor of theory, and has been associated with the prescribed practice of various professions (e.g., medical ethics, etc.). In any case, no distinction will be made here. Morality is regarded here as a set of customs and habits that shape how we think about how we should live. The term ‘religion’ is much disputed. Again, we can learn from the etymology. The origin of the word is probably the Latin religare , to bind back. Not all uses of the term require reference to a divinity or divinities. But the term is used here so that there is such a reference, and a religion is a system of belief and practice that accepts a 'binding' relation to such a being or beings. This does not, however, give us a single essence of religion, since the conceptions of divinity discussed here are so various, and human relations with divinity are conceived so variously that no such essence is apparent even within Western thought. The ancient Greeks, for example, had many intermediate categories between full gods or goddesses and human beings. There were spirits (in Greek daimones ) and spiritual beings like Socrates's mysterious voice ( daimonion ) ( Apology , 31d1-4, 40a2-c3). There were heroes who were offspring of one divine parent. There were humans who were deified, like the kings of Sparta. This is just within the culture of ancient Greece. If we included Eastern religions in the scope of the discussion, the hope for finding a single essence of religion would recede further.

So what does the relation between morality and religion look like in Homer? The first thing to say is that the gods and goddesses of the Homeric poems behave remarkably like the noble humans described in the same poems, even though the humans are mortal and the gods and goddesses immortal. Both groups are motivated by the desire for honor and glory, and are accordingly jealous when they receive less than they think they should while others receive more, working ceaselessly against each other to rectify this. The two groups are not however symmetrical, because the noble humans have the same kind of client relation to the divinities as subordinate humans do to them. There is a complex pattern that we might call ‘an honor-loop’. The divinities have their functions (in Greek, the word is the same as ‘honors’), such as Poseidon's oversight of the sea, and humans seek their favor with ‘honor’, which we might here translate as ‘worship’. This includes, for example, sanctuaries devoted to them, dedications, hymns, dances, libations, rituals, prayers, festivals and sacrifices. In all of these the gods take pleasure, and in return they give ‘honor’ to mortals in the form of help or assistance, especially in the areas of their own expertise. There is a clear analogy with purely human client-relations, which are validated in the Homeric narrative, since the poems were originally sung at the courts of the princes who claimed descent from the heroes whose exploits make up the story. The gods and goddesses are not, however, completely at liberty. They too are accountable to fate or justice, as in the scene in the Iliad 22, where Zeus wants to save Hector, but he cannot because ‘his doom has long been sealed’ ( Iliad 22:179).

The Presocratic philosophers come out of Homer, and it is sometimes said that they do so by rejecting religion in favor of science. There is a grain of truth in this, for when Thales (who flourished around 580) is reported as saying ‘Water is the origin (or principle) of all things’ this is different from saying, for example, that Tethys is mother of all the rivers, because it deletes the character of narrative or story (Aristotle's Metaphysics , 983b20-8). When Anaximenes (around 545 BCE) talks of air as the primary element, explaining all change by its compression and dilation (Diels & Kranz, 13, A 5), or Heraclitus (around 500 BCE) explains change as a pattern in the turnings of fire igniting in measures and going out in measures, they are not giving stories with plot-lines involving quasi-human intentions and frustrations (DK 13, A 5). But it is wrong to say that they have left religion behind. Heraclitus puts this enigmatically by saying that the one and only wisdom does and does not consent to be called Zeus (DK 22, B 14). He is affirming the divinity of this wisdom, but denying the anthropomorphic character of much Greek religion. ‘To god all things are beautiful and good and just but humans suppose some things to be just and others unjust’ (DK 22, B 102). He ties this divine wisdom to the law of a city, ‘for all human laws are nourished by the one divine law’ (DK 22, B 114), though he does not have confidence that ‘the many’ are capable of making law. The sophists, to whom Socrates responded, rejected this tie between human law and divine law, and this was in part because of their expertise in rhetoric, by which they taught their students how to manipulate the deliberations of popular assemblies. The most famous case is Protagoras (c.490-21), who stated in the first sentence of his book Truth that ‘A human being is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not’ (Plato's Theaetetus , 152a). Protagoras is not correctly seen here as skeptical about morality or religion. It is true that he claimed he was not in a position to know either the manner in which the gods are or are not (another translation is ‘that they are or are not’) or what they are like in appearance (DK 80, B 4). But as Plato (c.430-c.347) presents him, he told the story that all humans have been given by the gods the gifts of respect and justice, so as to make possible the founding of cities; this is why each human is the measure. Even Thrasymachus, in the first book of Plato's Republic , thinks of justice as the same thing amongst gods and humans ( Republic , 388c). His view of what this justice is, namely the interest of the stronger, is disputed by Plato. But the claim that justice operates at both the divine and human levels is common ground.

Socrates (c.470-399) in one of the early dialogues debates the nature of the holy with Euthyphro, who is a religious professional. Euthyphro is taking his own father to court for murder, and though ordinary Greek morality would condemn such an action as impiety, Euthyphro defends it on the basis that the gods behave in the same sort of way, according to the traditional stories. Socrates makes it clear that he does not believe these stories, because they attribute immorality to the gods. This does not mean, however, that he does not believe in the gods. He was observant in his religious practices, and he objects to the charge of not believing in the city's gods that was one of the bases of the prosecution at his own trial. He points to the spirit who gives him commands about what not to do ( Apology , 31d), and we learn later that he found it significant that this voice never told him to stop conducting his trial in the way he in fact did (Ibid., 40a-c). Socrates interpreted this as an invitation from the gods to die, thus refuting the charge that, by conducting his trial in the way he did, he was guilty of theft — i.e., depriving the gods of his life that properly belonged to them. His life in particular was a service to god, he thought, because he was carrying out Apollo's charge given by the oracle at Delphi, implicit in the startling pronouncement that he was the wisest man in Greece (Ibid., 21a-d).

Socrates's problem with the traditional stories about the gods gives rise to what is sometimes called ‘the Euthyphro dilemma’. If we try to define the holy as what is loved by the gods (and goddesses), we will be faced with the question ‘Is the holy holy because it is loved by the gods, or do they love it because it is holy?’ ( Euthyphro , 10a). Socrates makes it clear that his view is the second (though his argument for this conclusion is obscure). (See Hare, Plato's Euthyphro , Bryn Mawr Commentaries, Bryn Mawr: PA 1985.) But his view is not an objection to tying morality and religion together. He hints at the end of the dialogue ( Euthyphro , 13de) that the right way to link them is to see that when we do good we are serving the gods as well. Plato probably does not intend for us to construe the dialogues as a single philosophical system, and we must not erase the differences between them. But it is significant that in the Theaetetus (176b), Socrates says again that our goal is to be as like god as possible, and since god is in no way and in no manner unjust (in the sense of ‘unrighteous’), but as just as it is possible to be, nothing is more like god than the one among us who becomes correspondingly as just as possible. In several dialogues this thought is connected with a belief in the immortality of the soul; we become like god by paying attention to the immortal and best part of ourselves (e.g., Symposium , 210A-212B). The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also tied to the doctrine of the Forms, whereby things with characteristics that we experience in this life (e.g., beauty) are copies or imitations of the Forms (e.g., The Beautiful-Itself) that we see without the distraction of the body when our souls are separated at death. The Form of the Good, according to the Republic , is above all the other Forms and gives them their intelligibility (as, by analogy, the sun gives visibility), and is (in a pregnant phrase) ‘on the other side of being’ ( Republic , 509b). Finally, in the Laws (716b), perhaps Plato's last work, the character called ‘the Athenian’ says that the god can serve for us in the highest degree as a measure of all things, and much more than any human can, whatever some people say; so people who are going to be friends with such a god must, as far as their powers allow, be like the god themselves.

This train of thought sees the god or gods as like a magnet, drawing us to be like them by the power of their goodness or excellence. In Plato's Ion (533d), the divine is compared to a magnet to which is attached a chain of rings, through which the attraction is passed. This conception is also pervasive in Aristotle (384-22), Plato's student for twenty years. In the Nicomachean Ethics , for example, the words ‘god’ and ‘divine’ occur roughly twice as often as the words ‘happiness’ and ‘happy’. This is significant, given that Aristotle's ethical theory is (like Plato's) ‘eudaimonist’ (meaning that our morality aims at our happiness). Mention of the divine is not merely conventional, for Aristotle, but does important philosophical work. In the Eudemian Ethics (1249b5-22) he tells us that the goal of our lives is service and contemplation of the god. He thinks that we become like what we contemplate, and so we become most like the god by contemplating the god. Incidentally, this is why the god does not contemplate us; for this would mean becoming less than the god, which is impossible. As in Plato, the well-being of the city takes precedence over the individual, and this, too, is justified theologically. It is more divine to achieve an end for a city than for an individual. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle draws a distinction between what we honor and what we merely commend ( NE , 1101b10-35). There are six states for a human life, on a normative scale from best to worst: divine (which exceeds merely human on the one extreme), virtuous (without wrongful desire), strong-willed (able to overcome wrongful desire), weak-willed (unable to do so), vicious and bestial (which exceeds the merely human on the other extreme, and which Aristotle says is mostly found among barbarians) ( NE , 1145a15-22). The highest form of happiness, which he calls blessedness, is something we honor as we honor gods, whereas virtue we merely commend. It would be as wrong to commend blessedness as it would be to commend gods ( NE , 1096a10-1097a15). Sometimes Aristotle uses the phrase ‘God or understanding’ (in Greek, nous ) (e.g., Politics , 1287a27-32). The activity of the god, he says in the Metaphysics , is nous thinking itself (1074b34). The best human activity is the most god-like, namely thinking about the god and about things that do not change. Aristotle's virtue ethics, then, needs to be understood against the background of these theological premises. He is thinking of the divine, to use Plato's metaphor, as magnetic, drawing us, by its attractive power, to live the best kind of life possible for us. This gives him a defense against the charge sometimes made against virtue theories that they simply embed the prevailing social consensus into an account of human nature. Aristotle defines virtue as lying in a mean between excess and defect, and the mean is determined by the person of practical wisdom (actually the male, since Aristotle is sexist on this point). He then gives a conventional account of the virtues such a person displays (such as courage, literally manliness, which requires the right amount of fear, between cowardice and rashness). But the virtuous person in each case acts ‘for the sake of the noble (or beautiful)’, and Aristotle continually associates the noble with the divine (e.g., NE , 1115b12).

There are tensions in Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness. It is not clear what his final view is of the relation between the activity of contemplation and the other activities of a virtuous life. But the connection of the highest human state with the divine is pervasive in the text. One result of this connection is the eudaimonism mentioned earlier. God does not care about what is not god, for this would be a diminution. In the same way, the highest and most god-like human does not care about other human beings except to the degree they contribute to his own best state. This degree is not negligible, since humans are social animals, and their well-being depends on the well-being of the families and cities of which they are members. Aristotle is not preaching self-sufficiency in any sense that implies we could be happy on our own, isolated from other human beings. But our concern for the well-being of other people is always, for him, contingent on our special relation to them. Within the highest kind of friendship ‘a friend is another self’, he says, and within such friendship we care about friends for their own sake, but if the friend becomes divine and we do not, then the friendship is over ( NE , 1159a7). Aristotle does not say that we have obligations to other human beings just because they are human beings. Finally, he ties our happiness to our end (in Greek, telos ); for humans, as for all living things, the best state is activity in accordance with the natural function that is unique to each species. For humans the best state is happiness, and the best activity within this state is contemplation ( NE , 1178b17-23).

The Epicureans and Stoics who followed Aristotle differed with each other and with him in many ways, but they agreed in tying morality and religion together. For the Epicureans (as for Aristotle in the Metaphysics ), the gods do not care about us, though they are entertained by looking at our tragicomic lives (rather as we look at soap operas on television). We can be released from a good deal of anxiety, the Epicureans thought, by realizing that the gods are not going to punish us. Our goal should be to be as like the gods as we can, enjoying ourselves without interruption, but for us this means limiting our desires to what we can obtain without frustration. The Stoics likewise tied the best kind of human life, for them the life of the sage, to being like god. The sage follows nature in all his desires and actions, and is thus the closest to the divine. One of the virtues he will have is ‘apathy’ (in Greek apatheia ), which does not mean listlessness, but detachment from wanting anything other than what nature, or the god, is already providing.

2. The Hebrew Bible And The New Testament

The second line of thought traced in this entry starts with the Hebrew Bible and continues with the Greek scriptures called by Christians ‘The New Testament’. Morality and religion are connected in the Hebrew Bible primarily by the category of God's command. Such commands come already in the first chapter of Genesis , and they come in two types. First, God creates by command, for example ‘Let there be light’ ( Gen . 1:3). Then, after the creation of animals, God gives a second kind of command, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, and repeats the command to the humans he creates in the divine image ( Gen . 1:22). In the second chapter there is a third kind of command. God tells Adam that he is free to eat from any tree in the garden, but he must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Eve and Adam disobey, and eat of that fruit, they are expelled from the garden. There is a family of concepts here that is different from what we meet in Greek philosophy. God is setting up a kind of covenant by which humans will be blessed if they obey the commands God gives them. Human disobedience is not explained in the text, except that the serpent says to Eve that they will not die if they eat the fruit, but will be like God, knowing good and evil, and Eve sees the fruit as good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom. After they eat, Adam and Eve know that they are naked, and are ashamed, and hide from God. There is a turning away from God and from obedience to God that characterizes this as a ‘fall into sin’. As the story goes on, and Cain kills Abel, evil spreads to all the people of the earth, and Genesis describes the basic state as a corruption of the heart (6:9). This idea of a basic orientation away from or towards God and God's commands becomes in the Patristic period of early Christianity the idea of a will. There is no such idea in Plato or Aristotle, and no Greek word that the English word ‘will’ properly translates.

In the Pentateuch, the story continues with Abraham, and God's command to leave his ancestral land and go to the land God promised to give him and his offspring ( Gen . 17:7-8). Then there is the command to Abraham to kill his son, a deed prevented at the last minute by the provision of a ram instead ( Gen . 22:11-14). Abraham's great grandchildren end up in Egypt, because of famine, and the people of Israel suffer for generations under Pharaoh's yoke. Under Moses the people are finally liberated, and during their wanderings in the desert, Moses receives from God the Ten Commandments, in two tables or tablets ( Exod . 20:1-17, 31:18). The first table concerns our obligations to God directly, to worship God alone and keep God's name holy, and keep Sabbath. The second table concerns our obligations to other human beings, and all of the commands are negative (do not kill, commit adultery, steal, lie, or covet) except for the first, which tells us to honor our fathers and mothers. God's commands, taken together, give us the law. One more term belongs here, namely ‘kingdom’. The Greeks had the notion of a kingdom, under a human king (though the Athenians were in the classical period suspicious of such an arrangement). But they did not have the idea of a kingdom of God. This idea is explicable in terms of law, and is introduced as such in Exodus in connection with the covenant on Mt. Sinai. The kingdom is the realm in which the laws obtain.

This raises a question about the extent of this realm. The Ten Commandments are given in the context of a covenant with the people of Israel, though there are references to God's intention to bless the whole world through this covenant. The surrounding laws in the Pentateuch include prescriptions and proscriptions about ritual purity and sacrifice and the use of the land that seem to apply to this particular people in this particular place. But the covenant that God makes with Noah after the flood is applicable to the whole human race, and universal scope is explicit in the Wisdom books, which make a continual connection between how we should live and how we were created as human beings. For example, in Proverbs 8 Wisdom raises her voice to all humankind, and says that she detests wickedness, which she goes on to describe in considerable detail. She says that she was the artisan at God's side when God created the world and its inhabitants.

In the writings which Christians call ‘The New Testament’ the theme of God's commands is recapitulated. Jesus sums up the commandments under two, the command to love God with all one's heart and soul and mind (see Deuteronomy 6:5), and the command to love the neighbor as the self (see Leviticus 19:18). The first of these probably sums up the first ‘table’ of the Ten Commandments to Moses, and the second sums up the second. The New Testament is unlike the Hebrew Bible, however, in presenting a narrative about a man who is the perfect exemplification of obedience and who has a life without sin. New Testament scholars disagree about the extent to which Jesus actually claimed to be God, but the traditional interpretation is that he did make this claim; so that we can see in his life the clearest possible revelation in human terms of what God is like and at the same time a revelation of what our lives ought to be like. In the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ ( Matthew 5-7) Jesus issues a number of radical injunctions. He takes the commandments inside the heart; for example, we are required not merely not to murder, but not to be angry, not merely not to commit adultery, but not to lust. We are told, if someone strikes us on the right cheek, to turn to him also the left. Jesus tells us to love our enemies and those who hate and persecute us, and in this way he makes it clear that the love commandment is not based on reciprocity ( Matt 5:43-48; Luke 6:27-36). Finally, when he is asked ‘Who is my neighbor?’, he tells the story ( Luke 10) of a Samaritan (traditional enemies of the Jews) who met a wounded Jew he did not know by the side of the road, was moved with compassion, and went out of his way to meet his needs; the Samaritan was ‘neighbor’ to the wounded traveler.

The theme of self-sacrifice is clearest in the part of the narrative that deals with Jesus’ death. This event is understood in many different ways in the New Testament, but one central theme is that Jesus died on our behalf, an innocent man on behalf of the guilty. Jesus describes the paradigm of loving our neighbors as the willingness to die for them. This theme is connected with our relationship to God, which we violate by disobedience, but which is restored by God's forgiveness through redemption. In Paul's letters especially we are given a three-fold temporal location for the relation of morality to God's work on our behalf. We are forgiven for our past failures on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice ( Rom . 3:21-26). We are reconciled now with God through God's adoption of us in Christ ( Rom . 8:14-19). And we are given the hope of future progress in holiness by the work of the Holy Spirit ( Rom . 5:3-5). All of this theology requires more detailed analysis, but this is not the place for it.

There is a contrast between the two traditions described so far, namely the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. The idea of God that is central in the above account of the Greeks is the idea of God attracting us, like a kind of magnet, so that we desire to become more like God. In the above account of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the central notion was that of God commanding us. It is tempting to simplify this contrast by saying that the Greeks favor the good , in their account of the relation of morality and religion, and the Judeo-Christian account favors the right or obligation. The notion of obligation seems to make most sense against the background of command. But the picture is over-simple because the Greeks had room in their account for the constraint of desire; thus the temperate or brave person in Aristotle's picture has desires for food or sex or safety that have to be disciplined by the love of the noble. On the other side, the Judeo-Christian account adds God's love to the notion of God's command, so that the covenant in which the commands are embedded is a covenant by which God blesses us, and we are given a route towards our highest good which is union with God.

The rest of the history described in this entry is a cross-fertilization of these two traditions or lines of thought. In the patristic period, or the period of the early Fathers, it was predominantly Plato and the Stoics amongst the Greek philosophers whose influence was felt. The Eastern and Western parts of the Christian church split during the period, and the Eastern church remained more comfortable than the Western with language about humans being deified (in Greek theiosis ). In the West, Augustine (354-430) emphasized the gap between the world we are in as resident aliens and our citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem, and even in our next life the distance between ourselves and God. He describes in the Confessions the route by which his heart or will, together with his understanding, moved from paganism through Neo-Platonism to Christianity. The Neo-Platonists (such as Plotinus, 205-270) taught a world-system of emanation, whereby the One (like Plato's Form of the Good) flowed into Intellect (the realm of the Forms) and from there into the World-Soul and individual souls, and finally into bodies, from where it returned to itself. Augustine accepted that the Platonists said, like the beginning of the prologue of John , that the Word (in Greek, logos ) is with God and is God, since the Intellect is the mediating principle between the One and the Many ( John 1:1-5). Augustine held that Plato had asserted that the supreme good, possession of which alone gives us blessedness, is God, ‘and therefore (Plato) thought that to be a philosopher is to be a lover of God’ ( City of God , VIII.8). But the Platonists did not say, like the end of John's prologue, that the Word is made flesh in Jesus Christ, and so they did not have access to the way to salvation revealed in Christ or God's grace to us through Christ's death. Nonetheless, it is surprising how far Augustine can go in rapprochement. The Forms, he says, are in the mind of God and God uses them in the creation of the world. Human beings were created for union with God, but they have the freedom to turn towards themselves instead of God. If they turn to God, they can receive divine illumination, through a personal intuition of the eternal standards (the Forms). If they turn towards themselves, they will lose the sense of the order of creation, which the order of their own loves should reflect. Augustine gives primacy to the virtue of loving what ought to be loved, especially God. In his homily on I John 4:8, he says, ‘Love and do what you will.’ But this is not a denial of the moral law. He held that humans who truly love God will also act in accord with the other precepts of divine and moral law; though love not merely fulfils the cardinal virtues (e.g., temperance, courage, justice) but transforms them by supernatural grace.

The influence of Augustine in the subsequent history of ethics resulted from the fact that it was his synthesis of Christianity (the official religion of the Roman empire after 325) and Greek philosophy that survived the destruction of the Western Roman Empire. Especially noteworthy is Boethius (c.480-524), from whom we get the definition of the concept of ‘person’ that has been fundamental to ethical theory. To understand this, we need to go back into the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. The church had to explain how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit could be distinct and yet not three different gods. They used, in Latin, the term persona , which means ‘role’ but which was also used by the grammarians to distinguish what we call ‘first person, second person and third person’ pronouns and verb-forms. The same human being can be first person ‘I’, second person ‘you’, and third person ‘he’ or ‘she’, depending on the relations in which he or she stands. The doctrine of the Trinity comes to be understood in terms of three persons, one God, with the persons standing in different relations to each other. But then this term ‘person’ is also used to understand the relation of the second person's divinity to his humanity. The church came to talk about one person with two natures, the person standing under the natures. This had the merit of not making the humanity or the divinity less significant to who Jesus was. The Greek philosophers did not have any term that we can translate ‘person’ in the modern sense, as some one (as opposed to some thing ) that stands under all his or her attributes. Boethius, however, defines ‘person’ as ‘individual substance of rational nature,’ a key step in the introduction of our present concept.

In the West knowledge of most of Aristotle's texts was lost, but not in the East. They were translated into Syriac, and Arabic, and eventually (in Muslim Spain) into Latin, and re-entered Christian Europe in the twelfth century accompanied by translations of the great Arabic commentaries. This new rebirth (a ‘renaissance’) of learning gave rise to a crisis, because it threatened to undermine the harmony established from the time of Augustine between the authority of reason, as represented by Greek philosophy, and the authority of faith, as represented by the doctrines of the Christian church. There were especially three ‘errors of Aristotle’ that seemed threatening: his teaching that the world was eternal, his apparent denial of personal immortality, and his denial of God's active agency in the world. (See, for example, Bonaventure, In Hexaemeron , VI.5 and In II Sent ., lib.II, d.1, pars1, a.1, q.2.) These three issues (‘the world, the soul, God’) become in one form or another the focus of philosophical thought for the next six centuries.

Thomas Aquinas (c.1224-74) undertook the project of synthesis between Aristotle and Christianity, though his version of Christianity was already deeply influenced by Augustine, and so by Neo-Platonism. Aquinas, like Aristotle, emphasized the ends (vegetative, animal and typically human) given to humans in the natural order. He described both the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. There is no tension, in Aquinas, between virtue and the following of rules or principles. The rules governing how we ought to live are known, some of them by revelation, some of them by ordinary natural experience and rational reflection. But Aquinas thought these rules consistent in the determination of our good, since God only requires us to do what is consistent with our own good. Aquinas's theory is eudaimonist in the sense previously defined; ‘And so the will naturally tends towards its own last end, for every man naturally wills beatitude. And from this natural willing are caused all other willings, since whatever a man wills, he wills on account of the end’ ( Summa Theologiae I, q.20. a.2). God's will is not exercised by arbitrary fiat; but what is good for some human being can be understood as fitting for this kind of agent, in relation to the purpose this agent intends to accomplish, in the real environment of the action, including other persons individually and collectively. The principles of natural moral law are the universal judgments made by right reasoning about the kinds of actions that are morally appropriate and inappropriate for human agents. Aquinas holds that reason, in knowing these principles, is participating in the eternal law ( Summa Theologiae I, q.91. a.2). Aquinas was not initially successful in persuading the church to embrace Aristotle. In 1277 the Bishop of Paris condemned 219 propositions (not all Thomist), including the thesis that a person virtuous in Aristotle's terms ‘is sufficiently disposed for eternal happiness’. But in the long run, the synthesis which Aquinas achieved became authoritative in Roman Catholic education.

Aquinas was a Dominican friar. There was a contemporary tradition of thought from the other major order of friars, the Franciscan, starting with Bonaventure (c.1217-74), who held that while we can learn from both Plato and Aristotle, and both are also in error, the greater error is Aristotle's. One other figure from this tradition should be mentioned, John Duns Scotus (literally John from Duns, the Scot, c.1266-1308). There are three notable differences between him and Aquinas. First, Scotus is not a eudaimonist. He takes a double account of motivation from Anselm (1033-1109), who made the distinction between two affections of the will, the affection for advantage (an inclination towards one's own happiness and perfection) and the affection for justice (an inclination towards what is good in itself independent of advantage) (Anselm, De Concordia 3.11, 281:7-10; De Casu Diaboli 12, 255:8-11). Scotus says that we are born with a ranking of advantage over justice, which needs to be reversed by God's assistance before we can be pleasing to God. We should be willing, he says, to sacrifice our own happiness for God if that were to be necessary, which it is not (by God's grace). Second, he does not think that the moral law is self-evident or necessary. He takes the first table to be necessary, since it derives (except for the ‘every seventh day’ provision of the command about the Sabbath) from the necessary principle that God is to be loved. But the second table is contingent, though fitting our nature, and God could prescribe different commands even for human beings ( Ord . I, dist.44). One of his examples is the proscription on theft, which applies only to beings with property, and so not necessarily to human beings (since they are not necessarily propertied). God also gives dispensations from the commands, according to Scotus, for example the command to Abraham to kill Isaac ( Ord . III, suppl. dist.37). Third, Scotus denied the application of teleology to non-intentional nature, and thus departed from the Aristotelian and Thomist view. This does not mean that we have no natural end or telos , but that this end is related to the intention of God in the same way a human artisan intends his or her products to have a certain purpose (see Hare 2006, Ch. 2).

Europe experienced a second Renaissance when scholars fled Constantinople after its capture by the Muslims in 1453, and brought with them Greek manuscripts that were previously inaccessible. In Florence Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) identified Plato as the primary ancient teacher of wisdom, and (like Bonaventure) cited Augustine as his guide in elevating Plato in this way. His choice of Plato was determined by the harmony he believed to exist between Plato's thought and the Christian faith, and he set about making Latin translations of all the Platonic texts so that this wisdom could be available for his contemporaries who did not know Greek. He was also the first Latin translator of Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist.

There is a fundamental similarity in the way the relation between morality and religion is conceived between Scotus and the two Reformers Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-64), though neither of them make the distinctions about natural law that Scotus (the ‘subtle doctor’) does. Luther says ‘What God wills is not right because he ought or was bound so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because he so wills’ ( Bondage of the Will , Works , 195-6). Calvin says ‘God's will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous’ ( Institutes , 3.23.2). The historical connection between Scotus and the Reformers can be traced (though it won't be done here). The Counter-Reformation in Roman Catholic Europe was strongly influenced by Aquinas. Francisco de Suarez (1548-1617) claimed that the precepts of natural law can be distinguished into those (like ‘Do good and avoid evil’) which are known immediately and intuitively by all normal human beings, those (like ‘Do no injury to anyone’) which require experience and thought to know them, but which are then self-evident, and those (like ‘Lying is always immoral’) which are not self-evident but can be derived from the more basic precepts. However, Suarez accepted Scotus's double account of motivation.

The next two centuries in Europe can be described in terms of two lines of development, rationalism and empiricism, both of which led, in different ways, to the possibility of a greater detachment of ethics from theology. The history of rationalism from René Descartes (1596-1650) to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is a history of re-establishing human knowledge on the foundation of rational principles that could not be doubted, after modern science started to shake the traditional foundations supported by the authority of Aristotle and the church. Descartes was not primarily an ethicist, but he located the source of moral law (surprisingly for a rationalist) in God's will. The most important rationalist in ethics was Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77). He was a Jew, but was condemned by his contemporaries as unorthodox. Like Descartes, he attempted to duplicate the methods of geometry in philosophy. Substance, according to Spinoza, exists in itself and is conceived through itself ( Ethics , I, def. 3); it is consequently one, infinite, and identical with God (Ibid., I, prop. 15). There is no such thing as natural law, since all events in nature (‘God or Nature’) are equally natural. Everything in the universe is necessary, and there is no free will, except in as far as Spinoza is in favor of calling someone free who is led by reason (Ibid., I, prop. 32). Each human mind is a limited aspect of the divine intellect. On this view (which is Stoic) the human task is to move towards the greatest possible rational control of human life. Leibniz was, like Descartes, not primarily an ethicist. He said, however, that ‘the highest perfection of any thinking being lies in careful and constant pursuit of true happiness’ ( New Essays on Human Understanding , XXI, 51). The rationalists were not denying the centrality of God in human moral life, but their emphasis was on the access we have through the light of reason rather than through sacred text or ecclesiastical authority.

After Leibniz there was in Germany a long-running battle between the rationalists and the pietists, who tried to remain true to the goals of the Lutheran Reformation. Good examples of the two schools are Christian Wolff (1679-1754) and Christian August Crusius (1715-75), and after discussing the empiricists, we shall try to understand Kant will as mediating between the two. Wolff was a very successful popularizer of the thought of Leibniz, but fuller in his ethical system. He took from Leibniz the determinist principle that we will always select what pleases us most, and the principle that pleasure is the apprehension of perfection, so that the amount of pleasure we feel is proportional to the amount of perfection we intuit ( New Essays on Human Understanding , XXI, 41). He thought we are obligated to do what will make us and our condition, or that of others, more perfect, and this is the law of nature that would be binding on us even if ( per impossible ) God did not exist. He saw no problem about the connection between virtue and happiness, since both of them result directly from our perfection, and no problem about the connection between virtue and duty, since a duty is simply an act in accordance with law, which prescribes the pursuit of perfection. His views were offensive to the pietists, because he claimed that Confucius already knew (by reason) all that mattered about morality, even though he did not know anything about Christ. Crusius accepted Scotus's double theory of motivation, and held that there are actions that we ought to do regardless of any ends we have, even the end of our own perfection and happiness. It is plausible to see here the origin of Kant's categorical imperative. But he also added a third motivation, what he called ‘the drive of conscience’ which is ‘the natural drive to recognize a divine moral law’ (“A Guide to Rational Living,” Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant , §132, 574). His idea was that we have within us this separate capacity to recognize divine command and to be drawn towards it out of a sense of dependence on the God who prescribes the command to us, and will punish us if we disobey (though our motive should not be to avoid punishment) (Ibid., §135).

The history of empiricism in Britain from Hobbes to Hume is also the history of the attempt to re-establish human knowledge, but not from above (from indubitable principles of reason) but from below (from experience and especially the experience of the senses). Thomas Hobbes (1588-1649) said that all reality is bodily (including God), and all events are motions in space. Willing, then, is a motion, and is merely the last act of desire or aversion in any process of deliberation. His view is that it is natural, and so reasonable, for each of us to aim solely at our own preservation or pleasure. In the state of nature, humans are selfish, and their lives are ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, a war of all against all ( Leviathan , Ch. 13). The first precept of the law of nature is then for each of us, pursuing our own interest, ‘to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of attaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of war’ (Ibid., Ch. 14). The second precept is that each of us should be willing to lay down our natural rights to everything to the extent that others are also willing, and Hobbes concludes with the need to subordinate ourselves to a sovereign who alone will be able to secure peace. The second and longest portion of Leviathan is devoted to religion, where Hobbes argues for the authority of Scripture, which he thinks is needed for the authority of law. He argues for the authority in the interpretation of Scripture to be given to that same sovereign, and not to competing ecclesiastical authorities (whose competition had been seen to exacerbate the miseries of war both in Britain and on the continent) (Ibid., Ch. 33).

John Locke (1632-1704) followed Hobbes in deriving morality from our need to live together in peace given our natural discord, but he denied that we are mechanically moved by our desires. He agreed with Hobbes in saying that moral laws are God's imposition, but disagreed by making God's power and benevolence both necessary conditions for God's authority in this respect ( Treatises , IV.XIII.3). He also held that our reason can work out counsels or advice about moral matters; but only God's imposition makes law (and hence obligation), and we only know about God's imposition from revelation ( The Reasonableness of Christianity , 62-5). He therefore devoted considerable attention to justifying our belief in the reliability of revelation.

The deists (e.g., William Wollaston, 1659-1724) believed that humans can reason from their experience of nature to the existence and some of the attributes of God, that special revelation is accordingly unnecessary, that God does not intervene in human affairs (after creation) and that the good life for humans finds adequate guidance in philosophical ethics. Frances Hutcheson (1694-1546) was not a deist, but does give an example of the sort of guidance involved. He distinguished between objects that are naturally good, which excite personal or selfish pleasure, and those that are morally good, which are advantageous to all persons affected. He took himself to be giving a reading of moral goodness as agape , the Greek word for the love of our neighbor that Jesus prescribes. This love is benevolence, Hutcheson said, and it is formulated in the principle ‘That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers’ ( Inquiry II, III, VIII). Because the definitions of natural and moral good produce a possible gap between the two, we need some way to believe that morality and happiness are coincident. Hutcheson thought that God has given us a moral sense for this purpose ( Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions , II). This moral sense responds to examples of benevolence with approbation and a unique kind of pleasure, and benevolence is the only thing it responds to, as it were the only signal it picks up. It is, like Scotus's affection for justice, not confined to our perception of advantage. The result of our having moral sense is that when intending the good of others, we ‘undesignedly’ end up promoting our own greatest good as well because we end up gratifying ourselves along with others. God shows benevolence by first making us benevolent and then giving us this moral sense that gets joy from the approbation of benevolence. To contemporary British opponents of moral sense theory, this seemed too rosy or benign a picture; our joy in approving benevolence is not enough to make morality and happiness coincident. We need also obligation and divine sanction.

David Hume (1711-76) is the first figure in this narrative who can properly be attached to the Enlightenment, though this term means very different things in Scotland, in France and in Germany. Hume held that reason cannot command or move the human will. Since morals clearly do have an influence on actions and affections, ‘it follows that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence’ ( Treatise , III.1). For Hume an action, or sentiment, or character, is virtuous or vicious ‘because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind’ (Ibid., III.2). The denial of motive power to reason is part of his general skepticism. He accepted from Locke the principle that our knowledge is restricted to sense impressions from experience and logically necessary relations of ideas in advance of experience (in Latin, a priori ). From this principle he derived more radical conclusions than Locke had done. For example, we cannot know about causation or the soul. The only thing we can know about morals is that we get pleasure from the thought of some things and pain from the thought of others. Since the idea of morality implies something universal, there must be some sentiment of sympathy or (he later says) humanity, which is common to all human beings, and which ‘recommends the same object of general approbation’ ( Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , IX.I.221). Hume thought we could get conventional moral conclusions from these moral sentiments, which nature has fortunately given us. He was also skeptical about any attempt to derive conclusions containing ‘ought’ from premises containing only ‘is’, though scholars debate about the scope of the premises he is talking about here. Probably he included premises about God's will or nature or action. This does not mean he was arguing against the existence of God. He thought (like Calvin) that we cannot rely on rational proofs of God's existence, even though humans have what Calvin calls a sense of the divine. But he never identified himself as an atheist, though he had plenty of opportunity in the atheist circles he frequented in Paris, and his Dialogues on Natural Religion end with the sentiment that ‘to be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian’ ( Dialogues , part XII, penultimate paragraph). Some scholars take it that this remark (like similar statements in Hobbes) is purely ironic, but this goes beyond the evidence.

The Enlightenment in France had a more anti-clerical flavor (in part because of the history of Jansenism, unique to France), and for the first time in this narrative we meet genuine atheists, such as Baron d’Holbach (1723-89) who held not only that morality did not need religion, but that religion, and especially Christianity, was its major impediment. François-Marie Voltaire (1694-1778) was, especially towards the end of his life, opposed to Christianity, but not to religion in general ( Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great , letter 156). He accepted from the English deists the idea that what is true in Christian teachings is the core of human values that are universally true in all religions, and (like the German rationalists) he admired Confucius. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) said, famously, that mankind is born free, but everywhere he is in chains ( The Social Contract , Ch. 1). This supposes a disjunction between nature and contemporary society, and Rousseau held that the life of primitive human beings was happy inasmuch as they knew how to live in accordance with their own innate needs; now we need some kind of social contract to protect us from the corrupting effects of society upon the proper love of self. Nature is understood as the whole realm of being created by God, who guarantees its goodness, unity, and order. Rousseau held that we do not need any intermediary between us and God, and we can attain salvation by returning to nature in this high sense and by developing all our faculties harmoniously. Our ultimate happiness is to feel ourselves at one with the system that God created.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is the most important figure of the Enlightenment in Germany, but his project is different in many ways from those of his French contemporaries. He was brought up in a pietist Lutheran family, and his system retains many features from, for example, Crusius. But he was also indebted through Wolff to Leibniz. Moreover, he was ‘awoken from his dogmatic slumbers’ by reading Hume, though Kant is referring here to Hume’s attack on causation, not his ethical theory ( Prolegomena , 4:260). Kant's mature project was to limit human knowledge ‘in order to make room for faith’ ( Critique of Pure Reason , B xxx). He accepted from Hume that our knowledge is confined within the limits of possible sense experience, but he did not accept skeptical conclusions about causation or the soul. Reason is not confined, in his view, to the same limits as knowledge, and we are rationally required to hold beliefs about things as they are in themselves, not merely things as they appear to us. In particular, we are required to believe in God, the soul and immortality. These are three ‘postulates of practical reason’, required to make rational sense of the fact of moral obligation, the fact that we are under the moral law (the categorical imperative) that requires us to will the maxim of an action (the prescription of the action together with the reason for it) as a universal law (removing any self-preference) and to treat humanity in any person as always at the same time an end and never merely as a means ( Critique of Practical Reason , 4.421,429). Kant thought that humans have to be able to believe that morality in this demanding form is consistent in the long run with happiness, if they are going to be able to persevere in the moral life without rational instability. He did not accept the three traditional theoretical arguments for the existence of God (though he was sympathetic to a modest version of the teleological argument). But the practical argument was decisive for him, though he held that it was possible to be morally good without being a theist, even though such a position was rationally unstable.

In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason he undertook the project of using moral language in order to translate the four main themes of Biblical revelation (accessible only to particular people at particular times) into the revelation to Reason (accessible to all people at all times). This does not mean that he intended to reduce Biblical faith to morality, though some scholars have taken him this way. The translated versions of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Second Coming are as follows (see Hare 1996): Humans have an initial predisposition to the good, which is essential to them, but is overlaid with a propensity to evil, which is not essential to them. Since they are born under ‘the Evil Maxim’ that subordinates duty to happiness, they are unable by their own devices to reverse this ranking, and require ‘an effect of grace’ ( Religion , 6.53). Providence ushers in progress (though not continuous) towards an ‘ethical commonwealth’ in which we all make the moral law our own law, by appropriating it as authoritative for our own lives (this is what Kant means by ‘autonomy’) ( Religion , 6.98-99; Groundwork , 4.433-34).

A whole succession of Kant's followers tried to ‘go beyond’ Kant by showing that there was finally no need to make the separation between our knowledge and the thing-in-itself beyond our knowledge. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) accomplished this end by proposing that we should make the truth of ideas relative to their original historical context against the background of a history that is progressing towards a final stage of ‘absolute knowledge’, in which Spirit (in German Geist , which means also ‘mind’) understands that reality is its own creation and there is no ‘beyond’ for it to know. Hegel is giving a philosophical account of the Biblical notion of all things returning to God, ‘so that God may be all in all’ ( I Cor . 15:28). In this world-history, Hegel located the Reformation as ‘the all-enlightening sun’ of the bright day that is our modern time ( The Philosophy of History , 412). He thought that the various stages of knowledge are also stages of freedom, each stage producing first its own internal contradiction, and then a radical transition into a new stage. The stage of absolute freedom will be one in which all members freely by reason endorse the organic community and concrete institutions in which they actually live ( Phenomenology , BB, VI, B, III).

One of Hegel's opponents was Arthur Schopenhauer (1799-1860), the philosopher of pessimism. Schopenhauer thought that Hegel had strayed from the Kantian truth that there is a thing-in-itself beyond appearance, and that the Will is such a thing. He differed from Kant, however, in seeing the Will as the source of all our endless suffering, a blind striving power without ultimate purpose or design ( The World as Will and Representation , §56, p.310 and §57, p.311). It is, moreover, one universal Will that underlies the wills of all separate individuals. The intellect and its ideas are simply the Will's servant. On this view, there is no happiness for us, and our only consolation is a (quasi-Buddhist) release from the Will to the limited extent we can attain it.

Hegel's followers split into what are sometimes called ‘Right Hegelians’ and ‘Left Hegelians’ (or ‘Young Hegelians’). Right Hegelians promoted the generally positive view of the Prussian state that Hegel expressed in the Philosophy of Right . Left Hegelians rejected it, and with it the Protestant Christianity which they saw as its vehicle. In this way Hegel's peculiar way of promoting Christianity ended up causing its vehement rejection by thinkers who shared many of his social ideals. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) wrote The Life of Jesus Critically Examined , launching the historical-critical method of Biblical scholarship with the suggestion that much of the Biblical account is myth or ‘unconscious invention’ that needs to be separated out from the historical account. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-72) wrote The Essence of Christianity in which he pictured all religion as the means by which ‘man projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself’ ( The Essence of Christianity , 30). Feuerbach thought religion resulted from humanity’s alienation from itself, and philosophy needed to destroy the religious illusion so that we could learn to love humankind and not divert this love onto an imaginary object. Karl Marx (1818-83) followed Feuerbach in this diagnosis of religion, but he was interested primarily in social and political relations rather than psychology. He became suspicious of theory (for example Hegel’s), on the grounds that theory is itself a symptom of the power structures in the societies that produce it. ‘Theory,’ Marx writes, ‘is realized in a people only in so far as it is a realization of the people's needs’ (“Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Early Writings , 252). And ‘ideologies’ and ‘religion,’ he believes, arise from ‘conditions that require [these] illusions’ (Ibid., 244). Marx returned to Hegel’s thoughts about work revealing to the worker his value through what the worker produces, but Marx argued that under capitalism the worker was alienated from this product because other people owned both the product and the means of producing it. Marx urged that the only way to prevent this was to destroy the institution of private property (“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” Early Writings , 348). Thus he believed, like Hegel, in progress through history towards freedom, but he thought it would take Communist revolution to bring this about.

A very different response to Hegel (and Kant) is found in the work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), a religious thinker who started, like Hegel and Kant, from Lutheranism. Kierkegaard mocked Hegel constantly for presuming to understand the whole system in which human history is embedded, while still being located in a particular small part of it. On the other hand, he used Hegelian categories of thought himself, especially in his idea of the aesthetic life, the ethical life and the religious life as stages through which human beings develop by means of first internal contradiction and then radical transition. Kierkegaard's relation with Kant was problematic as well. In Either/Or he caricatured Kant’s ethical thought (as well as Hegel’s) in the person of Judge William, who is stuck within the ethical life and has not been able to reach the life of faith. On the other hand, his own description of the religious life is full of echoes of Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason . Kierkegaard wrote most of his work pseudonymously, taking on the names of characters who lived the lives he describes. In the aesthetic life the goal is to keep at bay the boredom that is constantly threatening, and this requires enough distance from one's projects that one is not stuck with them but can flit from engagement to engagement without pain ( Either/Or , II.77). This life deconstructs, because it requires (in order to sustain interest) the very commitment that it also rejects. The transition is accomplished by making a choice for one's life as a whole from a position that is not attached to any particular project, a radical choice that requires admitting the aesthetic life has been a failure. In this choice one discovers freedom, and thus the ethical life (Ibid., II.188). But this life too deconstructs, because it sets up the goal of living by a demand, the moral law, that is higher than we can live by our own human devices. Kierkegaard thought we have to realize that God's assistance is necessary even for the kind of repentance that is the transition into the religious life. He also suggested that within the religious life, there is a ‘repetition’ of the aesthetic life and the ethical life, though in a transformed version.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), was the son of a Lutheran pastor in Prussia. He was trained as a classical philologist, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy , was an account of the origin and death of ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, especially his view of the will (which Nietzsche called ‘the Will to Power’), and was first attracted and then repelled by Wagner, who was also one of Schopenhauer's disciples. The breaking point seems to have been Wagner's opera Parsifal . Nietzsche by this time was opposed to orthodox Christianity and promoting Ancient Greece instead, and he thought that Wagner was betraying his integrity by using an ‘anti-Greek’ Christian story for the opera. Nietzsche saw clearly the intimate link between Christianity and the ethical theories of his predecessors in Europe, especially Kant. In On the Genealogy of Morals , he says, ‘The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God, there is now also a considerable decline in mankind's feeling of guilt’ ( On the Genealogy of Morals , 90-1). This is the ‘death of God’ which Nietzsche announced, and which he predicted would also be the end of Kantian ethics ( The Gay Science , §108, 125, 343). It is harder to know what Nietzsche was for, than what he was against. This is partly an inheritance from Schopenhauer, who thought any system of constructive ethical thought a delusion. But Nietzsche clearly admired the Ancient Greeks, and thought we would be better off with a ‘master’ morality like theirs, rather than a ‘slave’ morality like Christianity. ‘Mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures’ ( Genealogy , 59-60). By this last clause, he meant mastery over other people, and the model of this mastery is the ‘overman’ who is free of the resentment by the weak of the strong that Nietzsche thought lay at the basis of Christian ethics.

Hume had a number of successors in Britain who accepted the view (which Hume took from Hutcheson) that our fundamental obligation is to work for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Four should be mentioned. William Paley (1743-1805) thought he could demonstrate that morality derived from the will of God and required promoting the happiness of all, that happiness was the sum of pleasures, and that we need to believe that God is the final granter of happiness if we are to sustain motivation to do what we know we ought to do ( The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy , II.4). Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) rejected this theological context. His grounds were radically empiricist, that the only ‘real’ entities are publicly observable, and so do not include God (or, for that matter, right or time or relations or qualities). He thought he could provide a scientific calculus of pleasures, where the unit that stays constant is the minimum state of sensibility that can be distinguished from indifference. He thought we could then separate different ‘dimensions’ in which these units vary, such as intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity (how soon the pleasures will come), fecundity (how many other pleasures this pleasure will produce) and purity. Discarding the theological context made moral motivation problematic, for why should we expect (without God) more units of pleasure for ourselves by contributing to the greater pleasure of others? Bentham's solution was to hope that law and social custom could provide individuals with adequate motives through the threat of social sanctions, and that what he called ‘deontology’ (which is personal or private morality) could mobilize hidden or long-range interests that were already present but obscure.

John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was raised on strict utilitarian principles by his father, a follower of Bentham. Unlike Bentham, however, Mill accepted that there are qualitative differences in pleasures simply as pleasures, and he thought that the higher pleasures were those of the intellect, the feelings and imagination, and the moral sentiments. He observed that those who have experienced both these and the lower pleasures, tend to prefer the former. At the age of twenty, he had a collapse, and a prolonged period of ‘melancholy’. He realized that his education had neglected the culture or cultivation of feeling , of which hope is a primary instance ( Autobiography , 1.84). In his Three Essays on Religion (published posthumously in 1874) he returned to the idea of hope, saying that ‘the indulgence of hope with regard to the government of the universe and the destiny of man after death, while we recognize as a clear truth that we have no ground for more than a hope, is legitimate and philosophically defensible’; without such hope, we are kept down by ‘the disastrous feeling of “not worth while”’ ( Three Essays , 249-50). Mill did not believe, however, that God was omnipotent, given all the evil in the world, and he insisted, like Kant, that we have to be God's co-workers, not merely passive recipients of God's assistance.

Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) in Methods of Ethics distinguished three methods: Intuitionism (which is, roughly, the common sense morality that some things, like deliberate ingratitude to a benefactor, are self-evidently wrong in themselves independently of their consequences), Egoistic Hedonism (the view that self-evidently an individual ought to aim at a maximum balance of happiness for herself, where this is understood as the greatest balance of pleasure over pain), and Utilitarianism or Universalistic Hedonism, (the view that self-evidently she ought to aim at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the cost to herself). Of these three, he rejected the first, on the grounds that no concrete ethical principles are self-evident, and that when they conflict (as they do) we have to take consequences into account in order to decide how to act. But Sidgwick found the relation between the other two methods much more problematic. Each principle separately seemed to him self-evident, but when taken together they seemed to be mutually inconsistent. He considered two solutions, psychological and metaphysical. The psychological solution was to bring in the pleasures and pains of sympathy, so that if we do good to all we end up (because of these pleasures) making ourselves happiest. Sidgwick rejected this on the basis that sympathy is inevitably limited in its range, and we feel it most towards those closest to us, so that even if we include sympathetic pleasures and pains under egoism, it will tend to increase the divergence between egoistic and utilitarian conduct, rather than bring them closer together. The metaphysical solution was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all living things, and who will reward and punish in accordance with this desire. Sidgwick recognized this as a return to the utilitarianism of Paley (Compare Methods of Ethics , II.1,2 and IV.4,5). He thought this solution was both necessary and sufficient to remove the contradiction in ethics. But this was only a reason to accept it, if in general it is reasonable to accept certain principles (such as the Uniformity of Nature) which are not self-evident and which cannot be proved, but which bring order and coherence into a central part of our thought. Sidgwick did not commit himself to an answer to this, one way or the other.

In the twentieth century professional philosophy divided up into two streams, sometimes called ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’, and there were periods during which the two schools lost contact with each other. Towards the end of the century, however, there were more philosophers who could speak the languages of both traditions. The beginning of the analytic school is sometimes located with the rejection of a neo-Hegelian idealism by G. E. Moore (1873-1958). One way to characterize the two schools is that the Continental school continued to read and be influenced by Hegel, and the Analytic school (with some exceptions) did not. Another way to make the distinction is geographical; the analytic school is located primarily in Britain, Scandinavia and N. America, and the continental school in the rest of Europe, in Latin America and in certain schools in N. America. Some figures from the Continental school are described first, after which we turn to the analytic school (which is this writer's own). Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was initially trained as a theologian, and wrote his dissertation on what he took to be a work of Duns Scotus. He took an appointment under Edmund Husserl (1855-1938) at Freiburg, and was appointed to succeed him in his chair. Husserl's program of ‘phenomenology’ was to recover a sense of certainty about the world by studying in exhaustive detail the cognitive structure of appearance. Heidegger departed from Husserl in approaching Being through a focus on ‘Human Being’ (in German Dasein ) as concerned above all for its fate in an alien world, or as ‘anxiety’ ( Angst ) towards death (see Being and Time I.6). In this sense he is the first existentialist, though he did not use the term. Heidegger emphasized that we are ‘thrown’ into a world that is not ‘home’, and we have a radical choice about what possibilities for ourselves we will make actual. Heidegger drew here from Kierkegaard, and he is also similar in describing the danger of falling back into mere conventionality, what Heidegger calls ‘the They’ ( das Man ). On the other hand he is unlike Kierkegaard in thinking of traditional Christianity as just one more convention that authentic existence requires us to get beyond. In Heidegger, as in Nietzsche, it is hard to find a positive or constructive ethics. Heidegger's position is somewhat compromised, moreover, by his initial embrace of the Nazi party. In his later work he moved increasingly towards a kind of quasi-religious mysticism. His Romantic hatred of the modern world and his distrust of system-building led to the espousal of either silence or poetry as the best way to be open to the ‘something’ (sometimes he says ‘the earth’) which reveals itself only as ‘self-secluding’ or hiding itself away from our various conceptualizations. He held the hope that through poetry, and in particular the poetry of Hölderlin, we might be able to still sense something of the god who appears ‘as the one who remains unknown,’ who is quite different from the object of theology or piety, but who can bring us back to the Being we have long lost sight of ( Poetry, Language, Thought , 222).

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) did use the label ‘existentialist’, and said that ‘Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheist position’ ( Existentialism and Human Emotions , 51). He denied (like Scotus) that the moral law could be deduced from human nature, but this was because (unlike Scotus) he thought that we give ourselves our own essences by the choices we make. His slogan was, ‘Existence precedes essence’ (Ibid., 13). ‘Essence’ is here the defining property of a thing, and Sartre gave the example of a paper cutter, which is given its definition by the artisan who makes it. Sartre said that when people believed God made human beings, they could believe humans had a God-given essence; but now that we do not believe this, we have realized that humans give themselves their own essences (‘First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.’ Ibid., 15). On this view there are no outside commands to appeal to for legitimation, and we are condemned to our own freedom. Sartre thought of human beings as trying to be God (on a Hegelian account of what God is), even though there is no God. This is an inevitably fruitless undertaking, which he called ‘anguish’. Moreover, we inevitably desire to choose not just for ourselves, but for the world. We want, like God, to create humankind in our own image, ‘If I want to marry, to have children, even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man’ (Ibid., 18). To recognize that this project does not make sense is required by honesty, and to hide this from ourselves is ‘bad faith’. One form of bad faith is to pretend that there is a God who is giving us our tasks. Another is to pretend that there is a ‘human nature’ that is doing the same thing. To live authentically is to realize both that we create these tasks for ourselves, and that they are futile.

The twentieth century also saw, within Roman Catholicism, forms of Christian Existentialism and new adaptations of the system of Thomas Aquinas. Gabriel Marcel (1889-73), like Heidegger, was concerned with the nature of Being as it appears to human being, but he tried to show that there are experiences of love, joy, hope and faith which, as understood from within , give us reason to believe in an inexhaustible Presence, which is God. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) developed a form of Thomism that retained the natural law, but regarded ethical judgment as not purely cognitive but guided by pre-conceptual affective inclinations. He took a more Hegelian view of history than traditional Thomism, allowing for development in the human knowledge of natural law, and he defended democracy as the appropriate way for human persons to attain freedom and dignity. The notion of the value of the person and the capacities given to persons by their creator was at the center of the ‘personalism’ of Pope John Paul II's The Acting Person (1979), influenced by Max Scheler (1874-1928). Natural law theory has been taken up and modified more recently by two philosophers who write in a style closer to the analytic tradition, John Finnis (1940-) and, in a different and incompatible way, Alastair MacIntyre (1929-). Finnis holds that our knowledge of the fundamental moral truths is self-evident, and so is not deduced from human nature. His Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) was a landmark in integrating the modern vocabulary and grammar of rights into the tradition of Natural Law. MacIntyre, who has been on a long journey back from Marxism to Thomism, holds that we can know what kind of life we ought to live on the basis of knowing our natural end, which he now identifies in theological terms. He is still influenced by a Hegelian historicism, and holds that the only way to settle rival knowledge claims is to see how successfully each can account for the shape taken by its rivals.

Michel Foucault (1926-84) followed Nietzsche in aspiring to uncover the ‘genealogy’ of various contemporary forms of thought and practice (he was concerned, for example, with sexuality and mental illness), and how relations of power and domination have produced ‘discourses of truth’ (“Truth and Power,” Power , 131). In his later work he described four different aspects of the ‘practice of the self’ in which we have been engaged. We select the desires, acts, and thoughts that we attend to morally. We recognize ourselves as morally bound by some particular ground, e.g., divine commands, or rationality, or human nature. We transform ourselves into ethical subjects by some set of techniques, e.g., meditation or mortification or consciousness-raising. Finally, we propose a ‘ telos ’ or goal, the way of life or mode of being that the subject is aiming at, e.g., self-mastery, tranquility or purification. Foucault criticized Christian conventions that tend to take morality as a juristic and often universal code of laws, and to ignore the creative practice of self-making. Even if Christian and post-Christian moralists turn their attention to self-expression, he thought they tend to focus on the confession of truth about oneself, a mode of expression which is historically linked to the church and the modern psycho-sciences. Foucault preferred stressing our freedom to form ourselves as ethical subjects, and develop ‘a new form of right’ and a ‘non-disciplinary form of power’ (“Disciplinary Power and Subjection,” Power , 242). He did not, however, tell us much more about what these new forms would be like.

Jurgen Habermas (1929-) proposed a ‘communicative ethics’ that develops the Kantian element in Marxism ( The Theory of Communicative Action , Vols. I and II). By analyzing the structure of communication (using speech-act theory developed in analytic philosophy) he lays out a procedure that will rationally justify norms, though he does not claim to know what norms a society will adopt by using this procedure. The two ideas behind this procedure are that norms are valid if they receive the consent of all the affected parties in unconstrained practical communication, and if the consequences of the general observance of the norms (in terms of how each person's interests are affected) are acceptable to all. Habermas thinks he fulfills in this way Hegel's aim of reconciling the individual and society, because the communication process extends individuals beyond their private perspectives in the process of reaching agreement. Religious convictions need to be left behind, on this scheme, because they are not universalizable in the way the procedure requires.

We are sometimes said to live now in a ‘post-modern’ age. This term is problematic in various ways. As used within architectural theory in the 1960's and 1970's it had a relatively clear sense. There was a recognizable style that either borrowed bits and pieces from styles of the past, or mocked the very idea (in modernist architecture) of essential functionality. In philosophy, the term is less clearly definable. It combines a distaste for ‘meta-narratives’ and a rejection of any form of foundationalism. The effect on philosophical thinking about the relation between morality and religion is two-fold. On the one hand, the modernist rejection of religion on the basis of a foundationalist empiricism is itself rejected. This makes the current climate more hospitable to religious language than it was for most of the twentieth century. But on the other hand, the distaste for over-arching theory means that religious meta-narratives are suspect to the same degree as any other, and the hospitality is more likely to be towards bits and pieces of traditional theology than to any theological system as a whole.

We conclude this section with some movements that are not philosophical in a professional sense, but are important in understanding the relation between morality and religion. Liberation theology, of which a leading spokesman from Latin America is Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928-), has attempted to reconcile the Christian gospel with a commitment (influenced by Marxist categories) to revolution to relieve the condition of the oppressed. The civil rights movement (drawing heavily on Exodus ), feminist ethics, animal liberation, environmental ethics, and the gay rights and children's rights movements have shown special sensitivity to the moral status of some particular oppressed class. The leadership of some of these movements has been religiously committed, while the leadership of others has not. At the same time, the notion of human rights, or justified claims by every human being, has grown in global reach, partly through the various instrumentalities of the United Nations. There has, however, been less consensus on the question of how to justify human rights. There are theological justifications, deriving from the image of God in every human being, or the command to love the neighbor, or the covenant between God and humanity. Whether there is a non-theological justification is not yet clear. Finally, there has also been a burst of activity in professional ethics, such as medical ethics, engineering ethics, and business ethics. This has not been associated with any one school of philosophy rather than another. The connection of religion with these developments has been variable. In some cases (e.g., medical ethics) the initial impetus for the new sub-discipline was strongly influenced by theology, and in other cases not.

We return, finally, to analytic philosophy, whose origins were associated above with G. E. Moore. His Principia Ethica (1903) can be regarded as the first major ethical document of the school. He was strongly influenced by Sidgwick at Cambridge, but rejected Sidgwick's views about intuitionism. He thought that intrinsic goodness was a real property of things, even though (like the number two) it did not exist in time and was not the object of sense experience. He explicitly aligned himself here with Plato and against the class of empiricist philosophers, ‘to which most Englishmen have belonged’ ( Principia Ethica , 162). His predecessors, Moore thought, had almost all committed the error, which he called ‘the naturalistic fallacy’, of trying to define this value property by identifying it with a non-evaluative property. For example, they proposed that goodness is pleasure, or what produces pleasure. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good. For example, it makes sense to ask whether pleasure or the production of pleasure is good. This is true also if we propose a supernatural property to identity with goodness, for example the property of being commanded by God. It still makes sense to ask whether what God commands is good. This question cannot be the same as the question ‘Is what God commands what God commands?’ which is not still an open question. Moore thought that if these questions are different, then the two properties, goodness and being commanded by God, cannot be the same, and to say (by way of a definition) that they are the same is to commit the fallacy. Intrinsic goodness, Moore said, is a simple non-natural property (i.e. neither natural nor supernatural) and indefinable. He thought we had a special form of cognition that he called ‘intuition’, which gives us access to such properties. By this he meant that the access was not based on inference or argument, but was self-evident (though we could still get it wrong, just as we can with sense-perception). He thought the way to determine what things had positive value intrinsically was to consider what things were such that, if they existed by themselves in isolation, we would yet judge their existence to be good.

At Cambridge Moore was a colleague of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Russell was not primarily a moral philosopher, but he expressed radically different views at different times about ethics. In 1910 he agreed with Moore that goodness (like roundness) is a quality that belongs to objects independently of our opinions, and that when two people differ about whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right. By 1922 he was holding an error theory (like that of John Mackie, 1917-81) that although we mean by ‘good’ an objective property in this way, there is in fact no such thing, and hence all our value judgments are strictly speaking false (“The Elements of Ethics,” Philosophical Essays ). Then by 1935 he had dropped also the claim about meaning, holding that value judgments are expressions of desire or wish, and not assertions at all. Wittgenstein's views on ethics are enigmatic and subject to wildly different interpretations. In the Tractatus (which is about logic) he says at the end, ‘It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)’ ( Tractatus , 6.421). Perhaps he means that the world we occupy is good or bad (and happy or unhappy) as a whole, and not piece-by-piece. Wittgenstein (like Nietzsche) was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's notion of will, and by his disdain for ethical theories that purport to be able to tell one what to do and what not to do. The Tractatus was taken up by the Logical Positivists, though Wittgenstein himself was never a Logical Positivist. The Logical Positivists held a ‘verificationist’ theory of meaning, that assertions can be meaningful only if they can in principle be verified by sense experience or if they are tautologies (for example, ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’). This seems to leave ethical statements (and statements about God) meaningless, and indeed that was the deliberately provocative position taken by A. J. Ayer (1910-89). Ayer accepted Moore's arguments about the naturalistic fallacy, and since Moore's talk of ‘non-natural properties’ seemed to Ayer just nonsense, he was led to emphasize and analyze further the non-cognitive ingredient in evaluation which Moore had identified. Suppose one says to a cannibal, ‘You acted wrongly in eating your prisoner.’ Ayer thought one is not stating anything more than if one had simply said, ‘You ate your prisoner’. Rather, one is evincing moral disapproval of it. It is as if one had said, ‘You ate your prisoner’ in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks ( Language, Truth and Logic , 107-8).

The emotivist theory of ethics had its most articulate treatment in Ethics and Language by Charles Stevenson (1908-79). Stevenson was a positivist, but also the heir of John Dewey (1859-1952) and the American pragmatist tradition. Dewey had rejected the idea of fixed ends for human beings, and stressed that moral deliberation occurs in the context of competition within a person between different ends, none of which can be assumed permanent. He criticized theories that tried to derive moral principles from self-certifying reason, or intuition, or cosmic forms, or divine commands, both because he thought there are no self-certifying faculties or self-evident norms, and because the alleged derivation disguises the actual function of the principles as devices for social action. Stevenson applied this emphasis to the competition between people with different ends, and stressed the role of moral language as a social instrument for persuasion ( Ethics and Language , Ch. 5). On his account, normative judgments express attitudes and invite others to share these attitudes, but they are not strictly speaking true or false.

Wittgenstein did not publish any book after the Tractatus , but he wrote and taught; and after his death Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953. The later thought of Wittgenstein bears a similar relation to Logical Positivism as the relation Heidegger bears to Husserl. In both cases the quest for a kind of scientific certainty was replaced by the recognition that science is itself just one language, and not in many cases prior by right. The later Wittgenstein employed the notion of ‘forms of life’ in which different ‘language games’ are at home ( Philosophical Investigations , §7), and probably included religion as a form of life (though scholars disagree about this). In Oxford there was a parallel though distinct development centering round the work of John Austin (1911-60). Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that traditional philosophical discussions had ignored this primary material. In How to do Things with Words (published posthumously) Austin labeled ‘the descriptive fallacy’ the mistake of thinking that all language is used to perform the act of describing or reporting, and he attributed the discovery of this fallacy to Kant ( How to do Things with Words , 3).

R. M. Hare (1919-2002) took up the diagnosis of this fallacy, and proposed a ‘universal prescriptivism’ which attributed three characteristics to the language of morality. First, it is prescriptive, which is to say that moral judgments express the will in a way analogous to commands. This preserves the emotivist insight that moral judgment is different from assertion, but does not deny the role of rationality in such judgment. Second, moral judgment is universalizable. This is similar to the formula of Kant's categorical imperative that requires that we be able to will the maxims of our actions as universal laws. Third, moral judgment is overriding. This means that moral prescriptions legitimately take precedence over any other normative prescriptions. In Moral Thinking (1981) Hare claimed to demonstrate that utilitarianism followed from these three features of morality, though he excluded ideals (in the sense of preferences for how the world should be independently of the agent's experience) from the scope of this argument. God enters in two ways into this picture. First, Hare proposed a figure he calls ‘the archangel’ who is the model for fully critical (as opposed to intuitive) moral thinking, having full access to all the relevant information and complete impartiality between the affected parties. Hare acknowledged that since archangels (e.g., Lucifer) are not reliably impartial in this way, it is really God who is the model. Second, we have to be able to believe (as Kant argued) that the universe sustains morality in the sense that it is worthwhile trying to be morally good. Hare thought that this requires something like a belief in Providence (“The Simple Believer,” Essays on Religion and Education , 22-3).

The most important opponent of utilitarianism in the twentieth century was John Rawls (1921-2005). In his Theory of Justice (1971) he gave, like Hare, a basically Kantian account of ethics. But he insisted that utilitarianism does not capture the Kantian insight that each person is an end in himself or herself, because it ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ ( Theory of Justice , 22). He constructed the thought experiment of the ‘Original Position’ in which individuals imagine themselves not knowing what role in society they are going to play or what endowments of talent or material wealth they possess, and agree together on what principles of justice they will accept. Rawls thought it important that substantive conceptions of the good life were left behind in moving to the Original Position, because he was attempting to provide an account of justice that people with competing visions of the good could agree to in a pluralist society. Like Habermas he included religions under this prohibition. In Political Liberalism (1993) he conceded that the procedure of the Original Position is itself ideologically constrained, and he moved to the idea of an overlapping consensus: Kantians can accept the idea of justice as fairness (which the procedure describes) because it realizes autonomy, utilitarians because it promotes overall utility, Christians because it is part of divine law, etc. But even here Rawls wanted to insist that adherents of the competing visions of the good leave their particular conceptions behind in public discourse and justify the policies they endorse on grounds that are publicly accessible. He described this as the citizen's duty of civility ( Political Liberalism , iv).

In closing the section of this article on the continental school, we talked briefly about postmodernism. Within analytic philosophy the term is less prevalent. But both schools live in the same increasingly global cultural context. In this context we can reflect on the two main disqualifiers of the project of relating religion intimately to morality that seemed to emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first disqualifier is the prestige of natural science, and the attempt to make it foundational for all human knowledge. The various empiricist, verificationist, and reductionist forms of foundationalism have not yet succeeded, and even within modern philosophy there has been a continuous resistance to them. This is not to say that they will not succeed in the future (for example we may discover a foundation for ethics in the theory of evolution), but the confidence in their future success has waned. Moreover, the secularization hypothesis that religion would wither away with increasing education seems to have been false. Certainly parts of Western Europe are less attached to traditional institutional forms of religion. But taking the world as a whole, religion seems to be increasing in influence rather than declining as the world's educational standards improve. The second main disqualifier is the liberal idea (present in the narrative of this article from the time of the religious wars in Europe) that we need a moral discourse based on reason and not religion in order to avoid the hatred and bloodshed that religion seems to bring with it. Here the response to Rawls has been telling. It seems false that we can respect persons and at the same time tell them to leave their fundamental commitments behind in public discourse, and it seems false also that some purely rational component can be separated off from these competing substantive conceptions of the good (c.f. Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Rorty”). It is true that religious commitment can produce the deliberate targeting of civilians in a skyscraper. But the history of the twentieth century, the bloodiest century of our history, is that non-religious totalitarian regimes have at least as much blood on their hands. Perhaps the truth is, as Kant saw, that people under the Evil Maxim will use any available ideology for their purposes. Progress towards civility is more likely if Muslims, Christians, Jews, (and Buddhists and Hindus) are encouraged to enter ‘the public square’ with their commitments explicit, and see how much common ethical ground there in fact is. This writer has done some of this discussion, and found the common ground surprisingly extensive, though sometimes common language disguises significant differences. Progress seems more likely in this way than by trying to construct a neutral philosophical ground that very few people actually accept.

We end with a recent development in analytic ethical theory, a revival of divine command theory parallel to the revival of natural law theory already described. A pioneer in this revival was Philip Quinn's Divine Command and Moral Requirements (1978). He defended the theory against the usual objections (one, deriving from Plato's Euthyphro , that it makes morality arbitrary, and the second, deriving from a misunderstanding of Kant, that it is inconsistent with human autonomy), and proposed that we understand the relation between God and moral rightness causally, rather than analyzing the terms of moral obligation as meaning ‘commanded by God’. Though we could stipulate such a definition, it would make it obscure how theists and non-theists could have genuine moral discussion, as they certainly seem to do. Richard Mouw's The God Who Commands (1990) locates divine command theory within the Calvinist tradition, and also stresses the background of divine command against the narrative of God's work in saving human beings. Robert M. Adams, in a series of articles and then in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999), first separates off the good (which he analyzes Platonically in terms of imitating the ultimate good, which is God) and the right. He then defends a divine command theory of the right by arguing that obligation is always obligation to someone, and God is the most appropriate person, given human limitations. John Hare, in God and Morality , defends a somewhat similar theory, as well as giving a fuller history than the present article allows of the different conceptions of the relation between morality and religion. Thomas L. Carson's Value and the Good Life (2000) argues that normative theory needs to be based on an account of rationality, and then proposes that a divine-preference account of rationality is superior to all the available alternatives. An objection to divine command theory is mounted by Mark Murphy's An Essay on Divine Authority (2002) on the grounds that divine command only has authority over those persons who have submitted themselves to divine authority, but moral obligation has authority more broadly. Finally, Linda Zagzebski's Divine Motivation Theory (2004) proposes, as an alternative to divine command theory, that we can understand all moral normativity in terms of the notion of a good emotion, and that God's emotions are the best exemplar. To conclude, this revival of interest in divine command theory, when combined with the revival of natural law theory already discussed, shows evidence that the attempt to connect morality closely to religion is undergoing a robust recovery within professional philosophy.

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