Morality, Autonomy, and God by Keith Ward

Author:Keith Ward
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2013-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

A CONCEPT OF GOD

G.E. Moore held that beauty and love are intrinsic values, and (though Moore did not hold this) as such they must exist in any God who incorporates the highest possible values. If these were just hypothetical values (stating that if beauty was ever contemplated and loved, then that would be good), nothing much might follow. But suppose there is a supreme actual beauty that is known and loved for itself, then it would follow that there is a mind (or mind-like reality) that knows and loves it. And, if love (personal affection) is an intrinsic good, this mind would desire to express love in personal relationship, and so to share its love of beauty and perhaps the creation of new forms of beauty and forms of appreciation by and with other personal beings. That is one reason one might have for thinking that some form of creation is necessary for a loving God.

I am supposing, as Moore does, that beauty and love are intrinsic goods. I am going beyond him in suggesting that, if they find supreme realization in an eternal and necessary mind, this will resolve some of Moore’s problems about the status of moral truths and ‘non-existent’ properties, and it will make an enormous difference both to what humans see to be good, and to the authority that they take moral truths to have for them.

Moore denies this when he says that ‘no truth about what is real can have any logical bearing upon the answer to the question [“what is good?”]’ (1951, p. 118). But he also says that ‘love of God’ is good if there is a God, but it is ‘misdirected affection’ if there is not (ibid., p. 194), and that ‘we should hesitate to encourage the love of God, in the absence of any proof that he exists’ (ibid., p. 196). That entails that the truth about the existence of God has a logical bearing upon whether ‘love of God’ is good. And the difficulty about this is that it is not easy to know the truth about God, so it may be that the answers to some moral questions depend upon facts that are not conclusively verifiable.

The situation seems to be that we can – in general and in the abstract – see that beauty and love would be very great goods. If we now suppose that there exists a supremely beautiful and loving (and eternal and necessary) mind, we will naturally and justifiably love it for its own sake, not for the sake of any rewards or punishments it may intend for us in some afterlife. Its reality, if rightly perceived, will evoke in us both desire and freely given obedience, and impel us to make its purposes our own and to share insofar as we can in its perfections. Moral truths will exist objectively in this supreme mind, and they will have authority because I will see them to be good and worthy of loving and obedient response. Morality will have an objectivity and authority that is firmly rooted in reality.

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