Ethical Rationalism and Secularisation in the British Enlightenment by Dafydd Mills Daniel

Author:Dafydd Mills Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030522032
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

However, just as divine command and heavenly reward help to emphasise the ‘infinite Importance’ of moral truths, they remain, for a fully-developed moral agent, part of the experience of moral judgement, and of the essential difference of right and wrong, even as he looks at them from the perspective of, and with the intention of, rectitude.

In CER, an agent performs merely a ‘virtuous act’ qua AATC when his primary reason for acting was only eternal reward promised in conscience, for ‘’tis mean and mercenary to pursue those Advantages alone’.264 Likewise, it is only AATC if an individual obeys his conscience simply because he experiences the command of a superior will in conscience. However: ‘Where the Fitness of Things is dark and dubious, and the Divine Command clear and certain; can it be any Question, whether the former is not to be measured by the latter?’265 Although divine command and heavenly reward are ‘requisite’ ‘material’ in the world as a ‘state of trial’ for moral reasoning and moral development, a fully-developed moral character will no longer be simply AATC when he acts with recognition of divine command and eternal happiness, but performing AAOC qua ‘virtuous agent’.

The agent with underdeveloped moral character may pursue virtue simply for reward; he may also, like Epictetus’ fly on the chariot wheel axle, admire the dust he kicks up, thinking that it is his reaction to vice and virtue that constitutes the essential difference between right and wrong. However, the fully-developed moral agent appreciates that it is because he has been ‘constituted’ a rational agent by God that he perceives virtue with reason, and experiences what, by the ‘nature of things’, belongs to virtue and vice:[The ‘perception of good and ill desert’] Considered merely, as principle of the natures which God has given us, or a determination interwoven with our frame, it implies a declaration from the author of our minds, informing us how he will deal with us, and upon what the exercise of his goodness to us is suspended…But, considered as a necessary perception of reason, it proves with the evidence of demonstration what the supreme reason will do; what laws and rules it observes in carrying on the happiness of the universe; and that its end is, not simply happiness, but happiness enjoyed with virtue.266

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.