Does Morality Depend upon Religion?
Virtually all religions include a code of moral conduct. In fact, the only feature of
religion that comes close to being universal is a practical one: to offer human beings a
way to cope with the human condition, particularly suffering and death. Coping might be
aided by the promise that suffering will eventually be overcome, or it might involve
seeing suffering as a natural consequence of wrongdoing in a past life, or it might involve
changing the way humans perceive suffering. In any case, suffering has to be faced, and it
cannot be faced without first understanding it. Most religions give a diagnosis of the
human condition and an explanation for the existence of suffering and death, as well as a
remedy for the problem. Moral behavior as defined by the particular religion is part of the
remedy, but each religion teaches that the ultimate goal of moral living is unattainable
without the practice of that religion. So not only is morality an intrinsic feature of almost
all religions, but most also teach that morality is incapable of standing alone. Morality
needs religion. And one respect in which it is said that morality needs religion is that the
goal of the moral life is unreachable without religious practice.
Some religious philosophers maintain that morality needs religion in at least two other
respects: (1) to provide moral motivation, and (2) to provide morality
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with its foundation and justification. These three ways in which morality may depend on
religion are logically independent, although we will see that there are conceptual
connections among the standard arguments for these positions.
In the premodern age and even today in large portions of the world, the relation between
morality and religion has been taken for granted. But for at least two reasons there is
strong resistance in the modern West to the idea that morality needs religion. One is the
naturalistic temper of the times. Many people lack belief in a deity or a supernatural
world of any kind, and yet almost all believe that morality is important. Clearly, then,
belief in a religion is not required for belief in either a code of moral behavior or a moral
theory. Of course, that fact does not show that morality does not depend on religion any
more than the fact that belief in tables does not depend on belief in quarks shows that
tables do not depend on quarks. But, of course, if it is a fact that there is no God or
supernatural world, then it cannot be a fact that morality depends on religion for the same
reason that if it turns out quarks do not exist, tables cannot depend on quarks. Many
Western philosophers either believe there is no supernatural world or are agnostic about
its existence. This has led them to devote considerable attention to rethinking the relation
between religion and morality in order to defend the autonomy of morality, and the
history of Western ethics since the Enlightenment can be read as a series of attempts to
ground morality in something other than God.^1
The second reason for resistance to the idea that morality needs religion is political. We
live in a world of many religions, so if morality depends on religion, on which religion
does it depend? Religious exclusivism is the position that only one religion is completely
true, and typically, religious exclusivists find no difficulty in maintaining that morality