304 RELIGION, MORALITY, FAITH, AND REASONtime, and it appears that this notion of what individuality amounts to is
preparatory to an account on which all individuality is lost.
Here, too, then, final enlightenment has no moral content – indeed,
perhaps, no content period. Thus, however nice individual or typical
Theravada Buddhists, or Advaita Vedantins, may be, and whatever the
morally relevant effects of their respective traditions in the cultures
that they influence, it seems true that ultimate religious value has, for
these traditions, no place for any sort of intrinsic moral value.
Jainism is more complex in this regard. In Jain enlightenment,
personal identity is retained, and there is no reason to deny that what
sort of person, morally speaking, one has been may enter into one’s
status in final enlightenment – may, so to say, flavor the enlightenment
experience in one way or another. Thus while following a strict code is
required here, as in Theravada and Advaita, in order to achieve
enlightenment, in Jainism alone of these alternatives is it possible to
contend that one’s moral character now somehow carries over into one’s
condition in enlightenment, for only in Jainism is there anything in the
condition of enlightenment to which moral properties might belong or
which might possess moral character.
Monotheistic traditions
If God is conceived as a moral agent, as is frequent but not universal
among monotheists, then God’s existence is the highest moral value and
the core of morality relative to created persons is their being made in the
image of God and their achieving their positive potential by imitation of
God. A highly plausible view of morality takes moral principles^1 to be, if
true, then necessarily true. Monotheists who suppose God exists to be a
logically necessary truth can take the necessary truth of true moral
principles to be grounded in divine cognitive states; monotheists who
view God exists as contingently true can ground necessarily true moral
principles in abstract objects that possess logically necessary existence.^2
On both views, if a moral principle is true, it is true whether God creates
or not. A moral principle, being conditional – of the form possessed by If
X is a person then X ought to be respected, for example – will be true
under all possible conditions, including those in which God does not
create. On both views, there will be persons^3 to whom moral principles
apply only if God creates them.
It is sometimes argued that God cannot be said to be morally good in the
same sense in which human beings – say, St Paul – are said to be good. Two
arguments often given for this view are: