God and Objective Moral Values

Abstract

For some moral philosophers the question ‘Why be moral?’ is fundamentally inappropriate, since it seems to ask for non–moral reasons or motivations for moral action and thus to threaten the integrity and autonomy of morality. Yet the question ‘Why be moral?’ need not be oriented towards discovering non–moral reasons for moral action, but rather towards elucidating what general description of the human condition is most compatible with the fundamental character of morality. Rather than leaving the moral sense as an isolated category of human response, it is relevant to ask what other features of reality it may be associated with and in what general context it can most coherently be situated. The purpose of this paper is to examine the sense of moral obligation as an objective or categorical claim on individual action and to present the thesis that this moral sense is most intelligible within a theological context.