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Religion and Ethics—II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

A. Phillips Griffiths
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Extract

Professor Sutherland has argued that ‘God wills the good’ should be regarded as an analytic truth, with the consequence that any account of what is God's will in which it does not appear to be good is either a mistake about God's will or a mistake about what is good.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 31 , March 1992 , pp. 135 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1992

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References

1 It is interesting enough for me to diverge here to remark that Abraham's son Isaac later did exactly the same thing to Abimelech. It was God who told Abimelech about Abraham's Sarah, but he found out about Isaac when he looked out of his window and saw the old man frisking with Rebekah. What Abimelech now said was ‘What is this you have done to us?’ (Genesis xxvi 10). But he didn't send him away. He protected Isaac who got very rich, though Isaac also, to stretch the coincidence beyond belief, had trouble with the Philistines over his wells.

2 Newman, John Henry, The Dream of Gerontius, quoted in Strange: 1990.Google Scholar I am grateful to Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, CR for drawing my attention to this article.

3 It is a corollary of this doctrine for Kant that all non-moral motivation is essentially selfish; for the agent aims only at the satisfaction of (which Kant mistakenly thinks is the same as the satisfaction to be gained from) his inclination towards the particular object. Kierkegaard seems also to share this error. He says ‘Then why did Abraham do this? For God's sake, and so, what is absolutely identical, for his own sake. For God's sake, because God demands a proof of his faith; for his own sake, because he wanted to furnish this proof’ (1939: 84). See Griffiths 1991.