The christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body is philosophically vexing. Considering that philosophers have no trouble describing scenarios in which it is problematic whether some person in the near future is me, it is no wonder that the problem of whether I will exist in the far distant future taxes our imaginative and conceptual resources beyond the limit. Nonetheless, many of us like to test the limit. The following story is set in the Middle Ages and freely uses some of the philosophical resources of the time, particularly the work of Aquinas, but most of the arguments and conclusions are not those of any actual medieval philosopher. The scientific knowledge of the protagonists is also premodern (although small bits of matter are called molecules in the narrative). The story can be read as an extended thought experiment describing something that could happen compatible with the following rules: (1) In the story, the bodies of the deceased must come back to life long after death. (2) The story may make no reference to an omnipotent deity or to a supernatural realm or to souls that can exist detached from bodies. (3) The story must alter what we know about the laws of nature as little as possible compatible with the above.

A MEDIEVAL TALE

At the christening of Princess Aurora, a wicked fairy appears and puts a curse on the baby in a fit of pique over not being invited to the festivities.

There are two very different sensibilities out of which moral discourse and even entire moral theories arise. One is the idea that morality attracts. The other is the idea that morality compels. The former focuses on value, the latter on obligation. The former is optimistic enough to think that human beings are drawn to morality by nature and by the good and bad features of the world. The latter is pessimistic enough to think that only law – which is to say, force – can be the source of morality. This is not a negligible difference; it grounds the difference between virtue theories and duty theories. I have occasionally heard philosophers wonder whether there is any significant difference between the two kinds of theory and whether the difference matters. For many of the purposes of morality, it is useful to ignore the differences or to conceal them; the theory of this book is meant to reveal them.

The theory is a strong form of virtue theory with a theological foundation, although I will begin with a general framework that can have a naturalistic form. There are many different ways in which God can be related to morality, but the one that has received the most attention in the history of ethics is Divine Command theory. This is surprising, because quite apart from the famous objections to it, Divine Command theory has rarely aspired to be a complete moral theory.

Theological ethics and theological metaphysics intersect at the idea of perfect goodness. In Chapters 5 and 6, I developed the ethical implications of this idea in a new form of theological virtue theory. In this chapter and the next, I turn to the metaphysics of God and the puzzles generated by the concept of a perfectly good being. The difficulty is that perfect goodness appears to be inconsistent with three other divine attributes: omnipotence, freedom, and moral goodness. The apparent implication of the third problem is that the concept of perfect moral goodness is inconsistent. In addition to these puzzles, there is the problem that perfect goodness and omnipotence seem to be jointly inconsistent with the existence of evil. Divine Motivation theory gives us a way to escape these difficulties. I will argue that the problem of evil can be avoided in its standard forms, but that the problem of suffering is not a problem of evil; it is a puzzle about the motives of God. This problem requires a different approach than the problem of evil.

THE GOOD OF ENDS AND OUTCOMES

The idea that the good is the object of our aims is deeply entrenched in both ethics and moral psychology. One of the main purposes of this book is to shake that view from its pinnacle of received wisdom by revealing a plausible alternative. The received view has the air of the obvious because there are aspects of it that are obvious, although the obvious parts do not have the metaphysical or psychological implications that are usually taken for granted. Here is a short story of the received view and where I think it goes wrong.

When we act, we always aim at bringing about some state of affairs S. We see S as desirable, which is to say, good. As Aquinas put it, we always act under the aspect of good. Sometimes we are mistaken, but sometimes we are not mistaken. The will or choice or desire to bring about S is good just in case S is a good state of affairs to bring about in the situation in question. When desires or choices to bring about good states of affairs become stable dispositions, they are virtues. Good is reflected backward from states of affairs to states of the agent.

I think there are many things wrong with this picture, but I wlll concentrate on two.

VALUE CONCEPTS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF VALUE

Let us begin with good and bad. One of the things I will argue in this book is that the ways of having value are not all forms of good and bad, but because good and bad are as close to basic as we are going to get, I begin with them for simplicity. One of the most obvious but also most troublesome features of good and bad is that they apply to things in a variety of metaphysical categories: objects of many kinds, persons and their states and traits, acts, and the outcomes of acts. We also call states of affairs good or bad apart from their status as act outcomes, and we call certain things designated by abstract names good – life, nature, knowledge, art, philosophy, and many others. Some of the things in this last category belong in one of the other categories, but perhaps not all do.

Do the items in these different categories have anything nontrivial in common? One plausible answer is that they are all related to persons. That answer applies to states of persons such as pleasure or happiness, character traits, motives, intentions, acts and their outcomes, and states of affairs that are valuable to persons in some way, whether or not they are produced by human acts.

MUST CHRISTIANITY BE AN ETHIC OF LAW?

Christian theological ethics has usually been an ethic of law. It is worth considering why this is so. Is there something about Christian doctrine that requires it? Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) implies an affirmative answer in her classic paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (p. 30). There Anscombe argues not only that Christianity has a law ethic, but also that the favorite concept of modern British moral philosophers – obligation – makes no sense except within a law system of ethics. She goes on to argue that an ethics of law makes no sense without a divine lawgiver, so her conclusion is not only that Christian ethics is an ethics of law, but also that any philosopher who wants to retain the concept of obligation as developed within Western philosophy is logically committed to the existence of God (p. 31). Unsurprisingly, most contemporary philosophers have rejected her second claim. Here I want to reject her first.

The connection between Christianity and law-based ethics may be largely owing to historical contingencies that connected the development of Christianity with Roman law, but I wonder how deep the connection is in Christian doctrine. Since the alternative that I am proposing is a Christian virtue theory, it is startling to find Jerome Schneewind blaming Christianity's promotion of morality as law for the earliest and most important “misfortune” that virtue ethics encountered.

The theory of this book defines moral properties by reference to exemplars of goodness. Exemplars differ in significant ways, and that is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that the theory recognizes more than one way for an individual to live a good life and for a society to organize itself in a system of good moral practices. The disadvantage is that exemplars can conflict with each other in emotions and behavior. Some of these conflicts need to be resolved, although not all do. So far, the theory has given no way to resolve conflict between exemplars or even to explain how conflict can occur. The purpose of this last chapter is to answer these questions. I will begin by comparing the Ideal Observer theory with the form of exemplarism I have endorsed, an Ideal Agent theory, and will give reasons for prefering the latter. I will then propose some principles that can be used to resolve conflicts between ideal agents.

This book exhibits a way to structure a virtue ethics with a theological foundation. Since the foundation is an extension of virtue discourse to the moral properties of God, the theory might be called a divine virtue theory. In Part I, I give the framework for a distinctive kind of virtue ethics I call motivation-based. This type of theory makes the moral properties of persons, acts, and the outcomes of acts derivative from a good motive, the most basic component of a virtue, where what I mean by a motive is an emotion that initiates and directs action. Chapter 1 raises the central problems involved in providing an adequate metaphysics of value for virtue theory and proposes the methodology of exemplarism. Chapter 2 gives an account of emotion and its intrinsic value. Chapter 3 defines a good end, a good outcome, the good for a human being, and virtue in terms of a good emotion. Chapter 4 shows how the moral properties of acts can be defined in terms of a good emotion. In Part II, I will propose a Christian form of the theory according to which the motivations of a perfect Deity are the ultimate foundation of all value. I call the enhanced theory Divine Motivation theory.

The ethical significance of motivation has generally been misrepresented by the major ethical theories. Classical utilitarianism and social contract theory have vastly underestimated its importance, while the theoretical friends of motive have tended to make implausible claims that either, like those of Hume, exaggerate the function of motive, or, like Kant's ignore all motives but one. Consider classical utilitarianism. Bentham applies the test of utility directly to motives: “If they [motives] are good or bad, it is only on account of their effects: good, on account of their tendency to produce pleasure, or avert pain: bad, on account of their tendency to produce pain, or avert pleasure.” Robert Adams (1976) says that Bentham is inconsistent in his approach to the evaluation of motives, since Bentham also says that motives are to be evaluated by the utility of the intentions to which they give rise. But, as Adams points out, the consequences of the intention to which a motive leads are not identical to the consequences of the motive itself. Mill, on the other hand, barely treats motive at all, and when he does mention it in a footnote (in Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism), he says that the motive of an act counts not at all toward the morality of the act, although it is important in the evaluation of the person who performs the act:

ACTS AND THE EXEMPLAR

Our consciousness of the world is not merely receptive and representational; it is also laden with feeling that moves us to impact that world. Hence, we act – sometimes with forethought, usually not. Some springs of action may be purely internal, and these are often called drives, but many others arise from emotions or combinations of emotions and beliefs, both of which are derived from, or are part of, our consciousness of the external world. I accept the position that anything motivating must have an affective aspect, but pure affect cannot motivate, because it has no object. When motivated, we may or may not act on the motive. An account of why we sometimes do and sometimes do not leads directly into one of the most difficult issues in the metaphysics of the human person, the problem of free will. I will not attempt an account of human freedom in this book, but will merely mention the step that sometimes comes between the desire to bring about a certain end and the act: choice or decision. I believe that the importance of choice has been exaggerated in moral philosophy. Virtues and vices are not primarily patterns of choice, but rather patterns of feeling and acting, some of which, but not all of which, involve choice. Modern ethics has focused excessively on choice because of the modern shrinking of the range of responsibility.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE IMITATIO DEI

The idea of imitating a god and the divine world was widespread among ancient peoples, who thought that through imitation they could share in the gods' power, thereby compensating for the fragility of human life. The world of the gods was both an ideal and a prototype of human existence. Some even thought that everything in the human world was a replica of something in the divine world. This belief informed the mythology and ritual of ancient peoples and continues to be strongly held in more traditional societies today. We have already noted that imitation is a basic way in which humans and other animals learn, but to imitate a perfect being sounds incredible. Paradoxically, the more worthy of imitation a deity is, the harder it is to see how any finite human can aspire to its likeness. This is one problem faced by the idea of imitating a god. Another is that it was sometimes thought to exhibit hubris to aspire to be like the gods. “Do not try to become Zeus,” warns Pindar, “for mortal things suit mortals best.” Here Pindar expresses an opposing strain in Greek thought that existed alongside the desire to imitate the gods – the idea that imitation is irreverent.

There have been two general approaches to the connection between God and morality in the history of Western philosophy. According to what is usually called voluntarism, God created morality by an act of his free will and imposed it upon us. For us, morality is obedience to a divine sovereign; for God, morality does not clearly apply at all. According to intellectualism, there are eternal moral truths that God did not create and that are valid for God as well as for us. God commands us, but God's commandments come from his intellect's knowledge of these truths. In both approaches, morality is law. In Part II, I will propose a third alternative. God is essential to morality, not because it comes from either his intellect or his will, but because it comes from his motives. God's motive dispositions, like ours, are components of his virtues, and all moral value derives from God's motives. There are many exemplars of goodness in ordinary life, but the ultimate paradigm of goodness and the source of value is God. The moral properties defined in Part I ultimately refer to the motives of God.