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God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality

Online ISBN:
9780191732010
Print ISBN:
9780199693665
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality

Mark C. Murphy
Mark C. Murphy
Georgetown University, USA
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Published online:
19 January 2012
Published in print:
1 November 2011
Online ISBN:
9780191732010
Print ISBN:
9780199693665
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

There has been a revival in theistic ethics within mainstream contemporary moral philosophy. The characteristic methodology of this revival is to proceed by asking whether there are features of moral norms that can be adequately explained only if we hold that such norms have some sort of theistic foundation. But this methodology, fruitful as it has been, is one-sided. This book proceeds not from the side of the moral norms, so to speak, but from the God side of things: what sort of explanatory relationship should we expect between God and moral norms given the existence of the God of orthodox theism? This question asks whether orthodox theism's conception of God as an absolutely perfect being militates in favor of a particular view of the explanation of morality by appeal to theistic facts. This book puts this methodology to work and shows that, surprisingly, the two dominant theistic accounts of morality — natural law theory and theological voluntarism (divine command theory) — fail to offer the sort of explanation of morality that we would expect given the existence of the God of orthodox theism. Drawing on the discussion of a structurally similar problem — that of the relationship between God and the laws of nature — a third, more adequate account of the relationship between God and morality is articulated, one in which facts about God and facts about nature cooperate in the explanation of moral law.

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