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
end p.347
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