1.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
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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).
2.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).
3.It has been argued since Hume that no concept is intrinsically motivating. I argue that
that is false in “Emotion and Moral Judgment.”
4.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.
5.For an interesting and accessible twentieth-century defense of the Thomistic idea that
happiness is found in contemplation, see Pieper (1998).
6.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.
7.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.
8.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.
9.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.
10.The theory of direct reference originated with Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity
(1980) and Hilary Putnam's paper, “The Meaning of `Meaning' ” (1975).
11.See Owen Flanagan, “Saints” (1991), for a nice discussion of the many ways of
sainthood and moral exemplariness.
12.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.