Abstract
Keith Ward,
Morality, Autonomy, and God
, Oneworld: London, 2013; 222 pp.: 9781780743172, £14.99 (pbk)
Keith Ward covers a great deal of ground with brevity and clarity. He mostly treats philosophical topics in the analytical tradition, but also ventures into doctrinal matters.
The book’s main argument is for a morality that is objective because it is transcendent. Ward opposes the idea that morality simply consists in those things on which we agree. There are several versions of this idea, some of which are subjectively personal and some of which may have a political corollary. Philosopher Richard Rorty, for example, asserted the latter – that consensus, not truth, is what matters – and as a result made democracy a morality.
Ward is especially compact and wise when he exposes the contradictions among so-called amoralists like Nietzsche and Marx. Marx reduced everything to material existence and rejected Hegel’s appeal to ‘Spirit’. He famously also rejected religion for distracting us from physical, especially economic, struggle. Yet Marx’s own commitment to material existence has the strong odour of ideology and even, some say, of religion.
Ward promotes the morality of an Idealistic philosophy that takes the Ideal to be both personal and loving. As personal, it is a ‘theism’ that surpasses Plato’s Idea; as loving, it is decidedly Christian. Human moral response to transcendent metaphysical reality primarily takes the form of a particular orientation or perception. All things depend on each other; this compels the ego to disappear. However, the alternative to ego is not just a collective society that exhausts all that is. All things, in fact, subsist for their unity in their source, as Thomas Aquinas described God, creation’s first cause. The divine is also everything’s final cause, the meaning of all desire and value, and thus evokes human morality as self-realization in God. Morality, for Ward, has little to do with isolated decisions of the will or obedience to commands. It is about conformity to the divine.
For all of Ward’s brilliance and admirably clear prose, something about the total project itself strikes me as backward, even self-censoring at points. As a theologian, I detected the occasional nod and wink throughout to his Christian readers who suspect where he will end up. Indeed the final chapter, ‘Some Christian Doctrines’, shifts gears from the reserved philosophical language of theism into a full-bodied discussion of theological matters like sin and atonement. The reader has been drawn along from the possibility of moral autonomy to the possibility of the divine to the possibility of a theistic morality. One wonders whether the concluding theological idiom is something like the arrival of the beatific vision for the reader who now meets the hitherto nameless God – the true ‘theism’ is now revealed to be the faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.
Much as I wish it, this cannot have been Ward’s intent. Instead, we appear to have an apologetic for something called ‘theistic morality’ or ‘religious morality’. Which is a shame since no one has ever worshiped the god of theism. The crucial element in Ward’s project is that this god of theism is not only personal but also loving. To make this point Ward must speak like a theologian rather than a philosopher, which may suggest something about the limits of philosophy itself.