God in Moral Experience - Values and

Duties Personified Paul K. Moser

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God in Moral Experience

The Apostle Paul defined the moral values of love, joy, peace, patience, and
kindness as “the fruit of God’s Spirit.” Paul Moser here argues that such
values are character traits of an intentional God. When directly experi-
enced, they can serve as evidence for the reality and goodness of such a
God. Moser shows how moral conscience plays a key role in presenting
intentional divine action in human moral experience. He explores this
insight in chapters focusing on various facets of moral experience –
regarding human persons, God, and theological inquiry, among other
topics. He enables a responsible assessment of divine reality and goodness,
without reliance on controversial arguments of natural theology. Clarifying
how attention to moral experience can contribute to a limited theodicy for
God and evil, Moser’s study also acknowledges that the reality of severe
evil does not settle the issue of God’s existence and goodness.

 .  is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.

He is the author of numerous books, most recently Paul’s Gospel of Divine
Self-Sacrifice: Righteous Reconciliation in Reciprocity, Divine Guidance:
Moral Attraction in Action, and The Divine Goodness of Jesus: Impact
and Response (all Cambridge University Press).
     .     
Loyola University
Chicago

God in Moral Experience

Values and Duties Personified
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Contents

Preface page ix
Introduction: Moral Experience Personified 
Moral Impact and Response 
God in Moral Values 
Chapter Overviews 
 Moral Experience and Persons 
Deciders with Dissonance 
Values as Powers 
Character and Will 
Conscience and Valuing 
Meaning in Values 
 Moral Experience and God 
Values and God 
God and Good Experienced 
Reciprocity in Response 
Assurance Grounded 
Two Contrasts 
 Moral Experience and Moral Rapport 
God in Human Images 
God in God’s Image 
Motivating Divine–Human Rapport 
Obstacles to Moral Rapport 

v


 Moral Experience and Moral Inspiration 

Spirit in Creation 
Spirit in Re-creation 
Inspiration in Jesus and Paul 
Gambit for Divine Inspiration 
Reality Check in Moral Inspiration 
 Moral Experience without Philosophical Overlays 
Divine Power and Evidence 
Platonic Philosophical Overlay 
Thomist Philosophical Overlay 
Kantian Philosophical Overlay 
Divine Evidence Personalized 
 Moral Experience and Co-valuing in Conflict 
Genesis Revisited 
Conflict in Moral Life and Wisdom 
Trust in Divine Accompaniment 
Conflict in Conscience 
Accompaniment for Agapē 
Love’s Judgment 
Triumph over Moral Defeat and Death 
 Moral Experience Justified by God 
In the Beginning 
From Creation to Promise 
God’s Test and Job’s Lesson 
Paul and Jesus on Theodicy 
God’s Theodicy Justified 
Perfecting Moral Experience 
 Moral Experience and Theological Inquiry 
Competitors for Divine Revelation 
Jesus on Theological Inquiry 

vi
 

Paul on Theological Inquiry 

Moral Experience as Gift and Duty 
Concluding Ongoing Task 

Select Bibliography 

Index 

vii
Preface

Shakespeare introduced talk of “for goodness’ sake” with a telling

sentiment in Henry VIII: “For goodness’ sake, consider what you
do, how you may hurt yourself, ay, utterly.” What we “do” often
bears on the goodness that comes or does not come to us. Our
“doing” in this regard includes the questions we pursue, as they can
inform and reveal the focus of our lives in relation to what is good.
This book pursues a demanding question that can be for good-
ness’ sake: Can we humans have lives with lasting meaning and
value, and, if so, does God have any role here? This question is
demanding because, going beyond short-term meaning, it asks
about seemingly elusive meaning for human life that lasts – a tall
order for most inquirers. If God does have a role here, which God,
and how? Good answers do not come easy, but they still may come
if we approach our questions responsibly. This book contends that
they do come, if with important moral challenges for humans.
Our culture at large may or may not value the questions to be
pursued here, but, upon reflection, many members of our culture
do value them. We shall see why our questions merit our careful
reflection, even if some inquirers lack optimism about lasting
meaning for our lives. We shall assess the importance of our
questions in relation to God’s role, if any, in lasting meaning and
value for human life. If God exists, God may seek to have all of us
“educated” in a divine school of lasting moral makeover for us, for
our own good, and thus “for goodness’ sake.” Whether we excel in
this moral education remains to be seen, but we shall ask about its
importance and its prospects for us as morally responsible persons.

ix


Our inquiry bears on what we are entitled to hope for regarding

human life, particularly a morally good human life. This matter
differs from what we happen to hope for because it calls for grounded
hope – that is, hope with adequate reason or support. This is hope
that goes beyond wishful thinking to responsible hope, based on our
relevant evidence. We will clarify what the relevant evidence looks
like, thereby saving us from looking in the wrong places for lasting
meaning and value. For goodness’ sake, we cannot afford to look for
the living among the dead, or for God in what has no divine good-
ness. It is an occupational hazard among philosophical inquirers to
look for God in the wrong places. We shall resist that hazard.
Some inquirers agree with Albert Camus that we humans share
the absurd, hopeless predicament of Sisyphus in Homer’s myth.
The myth has Sisyphus doomed to rolling a rock up a hill, only to
have the rock roll down, leading to a repetition of futile rock-
rolling, with no end or gain in sight. His life thus has no robust
meaning or value, let alone lasting meaning or value. Even so,
Camus praises Sisyphus as an “absurd hero” for his persistence in
avoiding collapse from bitter despair. He remarks that “one must
imagine Sisyphus happy.” Many people concur, holding that we are
Sisyphus, like it or not. We, however, shall entertain doubts about
that spin on a tragic myth. Even if we face tragedy in life, and that
seems unavoidable for us, we still must ask if our lives match the
hopeless absurdity faced by Sisyphus.
Perhaps there is a caring purpose-bearer and purpose-giver
behind the veil of human tragedy. This would be a benevolent
intentional agent who, however elusive, is capable of guiding the
world for goodness’ sake, including for lasting good in cooperative
human lives. That option seems imaginable, but is it just imaginary?
We should ask whether anything indicates it to be a reality beyond a
fantasy. The key, we shall see, is in our experience of some moral
values and duties, including love, joy, peace, and patience, that
arguably seek, as divine character traits, to guide us in distinctive
moral ways for the sake of character formation.

x
 

We shall examine the intended moral impact of the traits in

question and our chosen response, considering that our attitude
toward them may amount to our attitude toward God, even if we do
not acknowledge God. The relevant evidence could be right before
our eyes – or at least the eyes of our conscience – while we still
overlook it. This book aims to challenge such overlooking by
bringing a neglected kind of self-awareness and self-adaptation
involving moral conscience to bear on moral values and duties that
intentionally challenge us for goodness’ sake.
Neglect of the moral values and duties to be identified, we shall
see, entails neglect not only of God but also of crucial evidence of
God’s reality and goodness in divine character traits disclosed in
moral experience. God, we might say, hides and seeks, and even
self-reveals, in these values and duties as they are intended to have a
moral impact on us and to represent qualities of divine personality.
More to the point, God self-reveals divine valuing and caring
toward us with these values and duties when experienced, aiming
to persuade us and to influence our wills without coercion to
comply with them.
The divine aim is to have us comply voluntarily, in order for us to
become worthy beneficiaries and representatives of God’s moral
character, thus building a community of God’s people. In this
perspective, we are not in the hopeless predicament of Sisyphus;
nor need we consider him to be happy. We are, however, in a
context of ongoing moral challenge seeking our moral rapport with
God for the sake of our character formation, even if we try to
suppress this fact. In that rapport, God’s moral character is revealed
to humans in direct ways that intentionally challenge and encour-
age us toward good lives in our sharing of divine character traits.
This book’s examination of value, duty, and meaning in human
lives takes the following broad steps. The Introduction draws from
Leo Tolstoy to give a concrete example of moral challenge and self-
adaptation in finding meaning for human life. It suggests that we
often share Tolstoy’s kind of challenge in our moral experience to

xi


become morally better persons. Chapter  contends that persons as

voluntary deciders typically have purposes (or intentions) for their
decisions and broader actions, even if those purposes are subcon-
scious and face dissonance in personal and social life. It identifies
how some moral values revealed in moral conscience can offer
worthy meaning for our lives, owing to their role in our becoming
morally better as persons and in our personal relationships.
Chapter  asks whether some moral values and duties that influence
persons reveal to them, perhaps only with glimmers in conscience,
personal character traits of a benevolent purpose-bearing God
seeking to lead them to moral improvement and character forma-
tion. Even so, some people could fail to recognize such potentially
veiled divine activity, owing to various reasons.
Chapter  considers that moral experience from a caring God
would seek moral rapport with humans for the sake of an inter-
active cooperative relationship in righteousness. Such rapport
would call for their loyal cooperation with God’s moral will as
expressed in their moral experience, including conscience.
Chapter  examines a kind of moral inspiration of humans by
God for the sake of reaching their deepest motives for decision
and action. Such inspiration takes moral decision-making beyond a
self-help program to an interpersonal contribution from God to be
received with loyal cooperation by humans. Chapter  contends
that moral experience and corresponding evidence from God do
not depend on philosophical overlays of an abstract or speculative
sort. It uses familiar Platonic, Thomist, and Kantian philosophical
overlays to illustrate this lesson and to highlight the importance of
direct moral experience of God’s righteous character and will.
Chapter  explores whether becoming a co-valuer for divine
goodness in conflict could bring lasting meaning not only to an
individual life but also to the shared life of a society, including a
society that flourishes with national, ethnic, racial, gender, and
religious diversity. Such a society could benefit with goodness and
meaning by its chosen reciprocity in reflecting (to some degree)

xii
 

a morally perfect God worthy of human worship and trust.

Chapter  asks whether a perfectly good God could justify or
vindicate God’s ways of allowing and using severe suffering and
evil in human moral experience and in the world. It looks for such a
justification in divine promise and proximity that seek righteous-
ness as rectitude fulfilled for humans in God’s preferred time.
Chapter  explores the relevance of moral experience to theological
inquiry. It considers a potential divine concern for righteous inten-
tions in inquirers about God.
Overall, the book explains the needed role of God in human
moral experience and character for the sake of building a righteous,
morally good commonwealth in moral rapport with God. It argues
that this role enjoys distinctive but widely neglected support from
evidence of intentional activity in human moral experience and
character. We shall see that this evidence merits our careful atten-
tion if we aim to understand a vital divine purpose behind moral
values and duties and that purpose’s corresponding ethics for the
common good. A potential result is a new appreciation of the
profound significance of moral values and duties for the meaning
of human life, individually and collectively, and in relation to God
and intentional divine activity in human experience and moral
character.
This book has benefited from comments and suggestions from
many people. For constructive remarks on earlier parts, I thank
Simon Babbs, David Bukenhofer, Tom Carson, Harry Gensler,
Todd Long, Chad Meister, Aeva Munro, Ben Nasmith, Clinton
Neptune, Bernard Walker, and Tom Wren. I also thank students
in my classes at Loyola University Chicago, and various anonymous
referees. For excellent help at Cambridge University Press, as usual,
I thank Beatrice Rehl, publisher.
Parts of the book make use of revised materials from some of
my recent essays: “Divine Self-Disclosure in Filial Values: The
Problem of Guided Goodness,” Modern Theology  ();
“Faith, Power, and Philosophy: Divine–Human Interaction

xiii


Reclaimed,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 

(); “Divine Moral Inspiration: Unity in Biblical Theology,”
Biblical Theology Bulletin  (); “Moral Rapport in
Communion of the Spirit,” Pneuma  (); “Biblical Theodicy
of Righteous Fulfillment: Divine Promise and Proximity,” Irish
Theological Quarterly  (); and “God with Us in Moral
Conflict,” The Expository Times  ().

xiv
Introduction
Moral Experience Personified

We sometimes neglect questions about what is good for us, such as

the question of whether our conscience at times shows moral
goodness in intentional attitudes or actions toward us as persons.
We thus can fail to notice some intentional goodness in our lives
and how it functions toward us. We shall examine how our neg-
lecting some moral questions restricts our understanding and
appreciation of intentional goodness in our lives. We shall see,
however, that a suitably responsive attitude to moral values and
duties can shed new light on vital questions about the nature of
moral goodness and life’s meaning. Such an attitude, involving self-
adaptive attention to experienced goodness, can also figure in a
person’s commitment to a role for a good God in human moral
experience and life. We may think of moral experience generally as
awareness of, or attention-attraction by, factors bearing directly on
righteousness or unrighteousness.

Moral Impact and Response

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich (), Leo Tolstoy imagines a troubled

but inquisitive Russian judge, Ivan Ilyich, who reflects Tolstoy’s life
in various ways. Downtrodden with physical injury, Ivan confronts
the “inner voice” of his conscience in moral dissonance and struggle
and, according to my reading, in moral responsiveness in self-
adaptation to experienced moral goodness.




Initial Awareness and Challenge

Ivan’s struggle and experiment begin with his awareness of inad-

equate moral goodness in his life (his main “suffering”) and a
corresponding challenge in a question from his conscience.
“What is it you want?” was the first clear conception capable of
expression in words, that he heard. “What do you want? What do
you want?” he repeated to himself. “What do I want? To live and
not to suffer,” he answered. And again he listened with such
concentrated attention that even his pain did not distract him.
“To live? How?” asked his inner voice. “Why, to live as I used
to – well and pleasantly.” “As you lived before, well and pleasantly?”
the voice repeated.

This self-reflection leads to Ivan’s asking, for the sake of a good

explanation, about the actual moral character of his life. He had
assumed on the basis of his moral self-experience that his own role
was morally good on balance. His self-reflection adds, however, to
the moral challenge he faces by revealing moral dissonance and
even conflict from within. His indicators in experience of his
moral goodness now face discord from his experience of his moral
failure. Such morally relevant dissonance leaves him troubled and
perplexed.

Initial Response Adapted

Tolstoy portrays Ivan as revising his initial understanding of his

prior moral experience and life.
As soon as the period began which had produced the present Ivan
Ilych, all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and


Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans.
Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Harper & Row, ), p. 
(hereafter DII).


    

turned into something trivial and often nasty. And the further he
departed from childhood and the nearer he came to the present the
more worthless and doubtful were the joys . . . Then all became
confused and there was still less of what was good; later on again
there was still less that was good, and the further he went the less
there was.

Ivan is adapting himself and his self-understanding to the actual

moral experience of his life, including its dissonance, thus leaving
behind some earlier self-deception about his moral character. Such
self-adapting to moral reality, although painful at times, provides an
opportunity for moral candor and for further moral challenge on
that basis. Ivan is learning about himself through trial and error in
his responsive self-reflection on his moral experience and character,
including their dissonance. His process of self-adaptation to moral
goodness rests on the moral values he experiences and accepts as
motivating qualities, albeit with some change in those values
over time.

Fear of Moral Inadequacy and Despair

Ivan expresses concern about his moral inadequacy in his life, and
he fears what may be the painful truth about himself.

“Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred

to him. “But how could that be, when I did everything properly?” he
replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole
solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite
impossible. “There is no explanation! Agony, death . . . What for?”

The painful truth of Ivan’s moral inadequacy prompts his fear of

despair (as well as of a lack of satisfactory explanation) regarding


DII, p. .

DII, p. .




his moral character and life. His potential moral failure in life seems
too much for him to acknowledge and handle.
Tolstoy puts perceived moral failure at the center of Ivan’s moral
struggle. He remarks:
It occurred to [Ivan] that what had appeared perfectly impossible
before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done,
might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely percep-
tible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the
most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which
he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and
all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrange-
ment of his life and of his family, and all his social and official
interests, might all have been false.

Tolstoy identifies in Ivan’s experience, perhaps in his conscience,

morally relevant “impulses” felt but suppressed by him, thus indi-
cating morally relevant dissonance in his life. He also gives a central
role to Ivan’s self-adapting to the new evidence from his moral
experience and character, which indicates that “he had not spent his
life as he should have done.”
Ivan’s self-adaptive change frees him from a harmful attempt to
protect or to justify his previous moral self-image that suppressed
the actual moral truth about his character and life. It also enables
him to proceed, through self-adaptive attention, with moral inquiry
akin to experiment to discover and to clarify what, if anything, lies
behind the veil of his moral values directed toward a good life. Such
values leave him troubled about the overall moral value and mean-
ing of his life.
Ivan’s search for moral self-justification includes his lashing out
at God: “He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible
loneliness, the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence


DII, p. .


    

of God. ‘Why have You done all this? Why have You brought me
here? Why, why do You torment me so terribly?’” Ivan finds no
relief in his attempt at moral self-justification for his life, even if the
attempt seeks relief in his blaming the “cruelty of God.” He is thus
stuck in moral suffering over his life.

Beyond Moral Self-Justification

Tolstoy remarks that “Ivan was hindered from getting [relief from
his moral suffering] by his conviction that his life had been a good
one.” He also comments: “That very [self-]justification of his life
held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him
most torment of all.” The latter moral torment, according to
Tolstoy, exceeds Ivan’s considerable physical suffering, and it
invites despair over his life. He simply is not in a position to justify
his own life, given his moral shortcomings.
Upon relinquishing his dubious attempt at moral self-
justification, Ivan has a powerful experience: He “caught sight of
the light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not
been what it should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked
himself, ‘What is the right thing?’ and grew still, listening.”
The “light” experienced by Ivan is more than heat and smoke, as
it comes with a challenging moral purpose. It “revealed” something
to him about how his life could be “rectified,” or made right, from
a moral point of view. This revelation changes everything for
Ivan. It opens the door to new hope for him regarding his
overall life.
Tolstoy has Ivan’s moral self-adaptation to goodness continue,
with his listening for further evidence in moral experience that


DII, p. .

DII, p. .

DII, p. .




requires further adaptive attention, without his life being self-rectified

or self-justified. We need to ask, then, exactly how it is to be rectified
or justified. The moral experiment is thus ongoing throughout Ivan’s
later life, until its end, owing to the ongoing emergence of new
evidence and discovery in his moral experience, including conscience.
We need to consider, then, such vital evidence and its bearing on the
meaning of human life.
Tolstoy builds into Ivan’s life an important personal source of
moral experience and evidence: a peasant healthcare assistant,
Gerasim, who impresses Ivan with his attractive moral character
under stressful work. Ivan remarks to Gerasim: “How easily and
well you do it all!” Tolstoy adds: “Gerasim did it all easily, willingly,
simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan Ilych. Health,
strength, and vitality in other people were offensive to him, but
Gerasim’s strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed him.”
His “good nature, strength, and vitality” were morally grounded in
goodness, in a way that was attractive to Ivan, even if they created
some dissonance for him. They thus figured in Ivan’s not losing
hope for his life and in his ultimately catching “sight of the light.”
We need to consider, then, the role of moral goodness in other
people for a person’s appreciation of the overall value and meaning
of human life.
Tolstoy has Ivan undergo a moral experience of God akin to
Tolstoy’s own life-changing experience, noted in his Confession of
:

“Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.” And
more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the
light did not again abandon me. And I was saved from suicide.
When and how this change occurred, I could not say.
As imperceptibly and gradually the force of life in me had been
destroyed and I had reached the impossibility of living, a cessation


DII, p. .


    

of life and the necessity of suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually

did that force of life return to me.

So, Tolstoy’s own moral self-adaptation to moral goodness was

ongoing and gradual, and it went against his initial effort toward
his moral self-justification. Even so, it had a definite goal: to explain
his actual moral experience, including its challenges, conflicts, and
frustrations, with candor and illumination, for the sake of recogniz-
ing, appreciating, and self-conforming to the needed moral good-
ness in his life.
Tolstoy links the needed moral goodness in the meaning of life
with the intentional will of God, as does Ivan (if with more subtlety
in the latter case):

I returned to the conviction that the single most important purpose

in my life was to be better, to live according to this will [of God for
goodness]. I returned to the conviction that I could find the expres-
sion of this will in something long hidden from me, something that
all of humanity had worked out for its own guidance; in short,
I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection.

Tolstoy thus was moved toward co-valuing with God and even
agreeably cooperating with God’s will or purpose, as experienced
by him, for him to “be better.” Such cooperating can exceed co-
valuing in that it adds inward commitment to outward action.
It can include self-conformity in motive, action, and character to
God’s perfectly good will or purpose.
We shall explore how the kind of moral values recognized by
Tolstoy and Ivan can motivate people settling on their attitudes,
actions, and character. A critical issue will be whether such motiv-
ating by moral values is sometimes directed, perhaps intentionally


Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and What I Believe, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford
University Press, ), pp. –.

Tolstoy, A Confession, p. .




by God, toward a goal rather than being “blind.” If it is, this calls for
some careful explanation, perhaps in terms of an intentional,
directing divine source beyond humans. Tolstoy, as noted, thought
of the relevant goal in terms of the divine purpose to “be better.”
We need to ask what exactly prompted Tolstoy’s controversial
move to invoke God in relation to his moral experience, particularly
in connection with his idea of “moral perfection.” We also need to
ask whether that bold move was or can be well grounded, and, if it
can, how so. This book explores such matters without being limited
to Tolstoy’s or Ivan’s instructive moral experiences. It also allows
for variable grounded responses to moral experience among
humans. In doing so, it assesses the significance of this variability
for the alleged reality of moral values and God. We shall see how
moral experience and self-adaptation to goodness contribute to our
discovery and understanding of moral values and perhaps even of
intentional divine activity in our moral experience. The role of
variable moral understanding among inquirers will contribute to
our appreciation of motivating and voluntary factors in meaning
for a person’s life.

God in Moral Values

The book examines a controversial twofold question: Can we

humans have lives with lasting meaning and value, and, if so, does
God have any role here? The answer is grounded in moral experi-
ence of intentionally being led toward moral goodness through
values and duties in conscience. A key feature of being led in this
way is self-conformity to moral goodness, and the latter requires
being duly inquisitive, responsive, intentional, and loyal toward
such goodness in moral experience. The details required for such
self-conformity will add clarity in due course, relative to moral
motives, actions, and character. We shall see that God would aim
for moral rapport or communion with humans, including a


    

relationship of volitional harmony in vital moral matters, for the

sake of building human moral character and relationships.
We do not beg the question of whether God exists. Nothing
would be gained by such cheating in our controversy. Instead, in
all cases, evidence has free rein to indicate the nature of a person’s
moral or religious experience and the corresponding evidence it
supplies. Given the variability in relevant evidence, we thus show
mutual tolerance in characterizing our moral and religious experi-
ences or their absence. This approach should save us from counter-
productive dogmatism. It also seems to fit with the character of a
good God who would be morally above coercing, manipulating, or
intimidating inquirers. This strategy seems fair and fruitful for all
concerned, and it seems to accommodate genuine responsibility
for humans.
The very word “God” invites controversy and caution, given its
breathtaking diversity of uses. This book adopts a simplifying
assumption: The word “God” is an exalted title requiring of any
titleholder worthiness of worship and trust, and thus perfect moral
goodness. It does not follow that God exists or even that using the
title “God” commits us to the existence of God. The title “king of
the USA,” for instance, is intelligible even though there is no such
king. (There might have been such a king, of course.) Likewise, the
title “God” can be intelligible in the absence of God’s existence. The
meaningfulness of the title, then, does not settle the issue of an
actual titleholder. So, the term “God,” as we shall use it, is not a
proper name that logically requires a bearer or referent. The title
“God” might fail to refer to any real object. Agnostics and atheists,
then, can discuss matters of God without assuming that God exists
or that the title “God” is meaningless. A nondogmatic approach to
God should accommodate this lesson.


An illuminating discussion of the relevant notion of worship is H. H. Rowley, Worship
in Ancient Israel (London: SPCK, ), pp. –.




Some people find hope for lasting purpose in human life via
evidence in their experience of moral values as powerful qualities
intentionally attracting and guiding them toward a distinctive
Godward goal. Such values, they report, are “for goodness’ sake,”
as they intentionally lead them, with due timing and fittingness,
toward love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and faithfulness. These
values are taken to be filial by them in being an interpersonal
expression of and a means to God’s inviting, forming, and guiding
a universal family of people reflective of divine goodness. Famously,
the Apostle Paul takes them to be the “fruit” of God’s Spirit, being
borne by God in divine character and action. He thus regards them
as intentionally self-manifested character traits of God in human
experience. We examine this prospect by attending to its suggested
self-awareness of divine values that aim to challenge, support,
and guide humans toward voluntary character formation for good-
ness’ sake.
Moral self-adaptation and experiment, including trial and error,
toward the reality and nature of experienced values and duties offer
a responsible way to assess, and perhaps to discover, the reality and
the goodness of a God worthy of worship. They do so from the
perspective of human moral experience and response. The general
idea is this:

We self-adapt and morally experiment toward divine goodness and

thereby God when we give our adaptive attention to any evident
indication of such intentional goodness and thereby God in our
moral experience of values, including our adaptive willingness to
value God if divine goodness is suitably present in our moral
experience.

This is an initial statement to be clarified in subsequent discussion.

It does not specify a needed degree either of our willingness to value
God or of the presence of divine goodness in our experience.
In addition, it does not specify how divine goodness would or could
be indicated or confirmed (or even disconfirmed) in human moral


    

experience. So, elaboration is needed. This statement nonetheless

can add some clarity to the familiar injunction “Seek and you will
find [God]” from the Sermon on the Mount.
Constraints for needed confirmation (or disconfirmation) will be
set by the kind of perfect moral goodness required by divine
worthiness of worship. Part of the needed confirmation could be
that people who persist in moral self-adaptation and experiment
toward divine goodness tend to receive the moral power needed to
cooperate with, and thereby to exemplify, the relevant filial values.
They could receive such power even if they do not acknowledge that
it comes from God. We shall consider, however, proposed grounds
to entertain the reality of such power divine, coming intentionally
from God, as well as alleged grounds not to do so. Whatever the
outcome, we should allow for a need of repeated moral self-
adaptation and experiment over time, beyond a single case, given
that moral education and character formation for humans typically
need some time.
Experience and corresponding evidence, including in the moral
domain, can vary over time and among people. Our approach to
moral self-adaptation and experiment toward God accommodates
this truth, which is confirmed by due attention to moral phenom-
enology. We thus should not expect a quick fix regarding alleged
evidence for God in moral experience. In particular, we should not
expect a single moral argument for God’s reality or goodness to
capture the moral experience of all people. Instead, we should
attend to the actual moral experience of an inquirer to see how it
compares to the moral experiences of other inquirers.
We may use inference to a best available explanation (that is,
abduction) on the basis of moral experience, but we should expect
variable results relative to variability in human moral experience,
including in conscience. Many inquirers have neglected this
important consideration that has a bearing on the elusiveness and
the variability of divine evidence among humans. That evidence
may include divine hiding from a human on occasion.




Our neglect of the filial values to be clarified, we shall see, would

entail our neglect of suitable moral inquiry regarding God. It also
could entail our neglect of God and crucial evidence of God’s reality
and good character traits. Moral self-adaptation and experiment
toward God can prompt us to consider that God may hide and self-
reveal in filial values for purposes of benefiting humans and thus for
goodness’ sake. An awareness of such intentional hiding and self-
revealing could lead to our improved recognition of divine moral
expectations of us and of corresponding divine evidence.
A divine expectation, if God exists, would be that we humans at
some time give due self-adaptive attention, and thus needed reflect-
ive time, to the values and duties in question. Such attention would
give God an opportunity to have a salient personal influence or
impression on us through those values, for the sake of our goodness
in character formation and relationships. God thus would seek to
have us become co-valuers with God, thereby sharing in God’s
moral values and life as we give due attention and time to divine
filial values and duties.
Only by giving our self-adaptive attention would we decide
responsibly whether to value the filial values and duties in question
and, going further, to cooperate with them. In this widely neglected
perspective on filial values and duties, we might find an alternative
to the hopeless predicament of Sisyphus. If we do, we need not
follow Camus in considering him, implausibly, to be happy.
We then could recommend a life of purposive filial values and
duties in lasting meaning and happiness. This, however, is just a
possible option now, in need of supporting evidence. The book
presents needed evidence from moral experience.
A key issue is whether we can sustain, with evidence, moral
optimism about lasting goodness and meaning for human life.
The answer is “yes” in an important sense of “sustain,” but “no”
in another sense. God as well as the devil are in the detail here, as
usual, but we will gain understanding by separating them sharply,
in terms of moral goodness and badness in thought and practice.


    

God and evidence for God may be elusive, however, for the sake of
avoiding divine promiscuity in giving evidence to humans. Such
elusiveness could be fitting for divine work among us for goodness’
sake. It could challenge our uncritical expectations of divine evi-
dence as well as our moral complacency, particularly if we feel a lost
opportunity in divine absence, in contrast with what we initially
expect of divine presence in our lives.
God, if real, would not become an easy commodity for us, given
what would be the significant contrast between divine perfect
goodness and our imperfect goodness. We thus will consider the
value of our needing to self-conform, if with difficulty, to divine
goodness and corresponding expectations for us, for our lasting
good in character formation and relationships. That option enables
us to assess God responsibly in terms of divine goodness in worthi-
ness of worship. It includes attention to the importance of the
psalmist’s injunction to “taste and see” regarding alleged evidence
of God. The analogy is with evaluating firsthand the gustatory
goodness of a food on offer by tasting it, rather than by merely
thinking about it.
Moral self-adaptation and experiment toward divine goodness
would allow an intervening God to attract our attention and
thereby us with divine values and duties in our experience. As a
result, we could face a divine challenge to have us commit needed
time and self-adaptive attention to those values and duties in order
to give responsible attention to relevant evidence of God. Such a
response would include our willingness to “taste,” as “trying out”
for goodness’ sake, any divine values and duties emerging in our
experience for their actual goodness, particularly in our
character formation.
Our attentiveness to moral values and duties in relation to
corresponding goodness would matter in apprehending relevant
evidence of God in moral experience. It would not be the end of
the story, however, for our moral self-adaptation and moral
experiment toward God. Such self-adaptive attention and




experiment would respond candidly to confirming evidence in a

way that ultimately values any divine values or duties on offer, in
giving them a normative and practical priority. Being perfectly
good, God would aim for us to have not only good experiences,
but also good motives, attitudes, actions, and characters formed by
our experiences of divine values and duties. Ideally, then, our
valuing divine values and duties would lead to our agreeably
cooperating in self-conformity to them. They thus would be “felt”
values for us, owing to our sympathetic response to them.
Our moral experiment toward divine values and duties and
toward God asks how we measure up to the standard of the relevant
values and duties, and whether we need a remedy, perhaps even a
divine remedy, for our often falling short. We thus would start out
as inquirers about God and our moral experience but end up, if
divine reality emerges, with God inquiring of us regarding our
moral status. This would be fitting for our inferior moral status
relative to a God of perfect moral goodness.
We shall see that divine inquiry of us would be for goodness’
sake, including our goodness’ sake in character formation and
relationships. Being under such inquiry would have definite indica-
tors of its reality and goodness, as it would be akin to a divine moral
experiment regarding us, seeking to reveal our chosen moral stand-
ing in relation to divine values and duties and thus to God too. (The
book of Job offers a good example, to which Chapter  returns.)
We shall examine the possible indicators in question and their
potential influence on our moral life and character formation.

Chapter Overviews

Chapter , “Moral Experience and Persons,” explains how persons

as voluntary deciders differ from nonpersons in virtue of persons
having purposes or goals. Their having purposes includes their
intending to do things, which has people willingly resolving to


  

bring about something, typically in a context of moral dissonance

and other people. Their being purposive thus sets them apart from
purely physical objects devoid of a psychological makeup. It also
makes them candidates for being morally responsible for their
voluntary purposes, given the moral goodness they experience
and the reality of other persons they affect. In addition, it makes
individual persons irreducible to social groups.
Moral assessment asks whether our purposes are morally worthy
or fit overall for us to have, including in relation to other persons.
Their moral worthiness or fitness requires their being integral to a
righteous personal character and its conduct, where righteousness
excludes evil in relation to oneself and other persons. Chapter 
explains how a challenge from righteousness is typical for reflective
persons and is worthy of being welcomed. It acknowledges that
people with purposes typically rely on values and respond to duties.
It denies, however, that values and duties depend for their reality or
importance on human beliefs, preferences, or feelings. In that
regard, values and duties have a kind of objectivity relative to such
human psychological realities. Values for humans are potentially
motivating good qualities for them, and duties are requirements for
satisfying or realizing some values in human lives. Values and
duties can emerge in conscience without coercion of our wills.
The chapter asks how these considerations bear on meaning for
human life. It raises the question of how such meaning can be
represented in human conscience, including in relation to divine
activity in human conscience.
Chapter , “Moral Experience and God,” asks whether some
moral values and duties indicate God at work in human moral
experience. The main issue is whether some values and duties
represent God’s aiming to guide people toward righteousness and
away from unrighteousness via divine personal character traits
revealed in human moral experience. Many people oppose thinking
of any values and duties as representing or including a morally
perfect agent aiming to do something. This chapter takes exception




to such opposition. It contends that attention to the moral experi-

ence of some people yields evidence for a morally good agent
aiming to nudge, prod, prompt, or attract them toward righteous-
ness in character formation and relationships. It asks whether the
agent in question is human, as Freud and some others have sug-
gested, and it considers evidence that it is not. The latter evidence,
according to the chapter, includes firsthand experience of God at
work in human conscience for goodness’ sake in character forma-
tion and relationships.
Conscience is not the voice of God. Instead, according to the
chapter, God challenges and guides some humans at times through
conscience. Any such process of successful guidance is not mech-
anical, however, because its development depends on human
cooperation, even if God intervenes first. Humans can suppress
divine intervention in conscience, and therefore their responsible
agency is not at risk. The chapter examines what kind of evidence
would be needed for the reality of divine intervention in human
conscience and how such evidence would seek human cooperation
with God. It explains how typical distortions of conscience would
need to be corrected by God in a manner that accommodates
persons as voluntary deciders.
Chapter , “Moral Experience and Moral Rapport,” argues that
God would want humans to reciprocate toward God regarding the
divine goodness as righteousness shown to them. If that righteous-
ness is self-sacrificing for good and thus self-giving toward humans,
God would want humans to participate cooperatively in that good-
ness by committing themselves to God in trust, obedience, and
loyalty. Such committing entails human self-sacrifice to God for
the purpose of sharing in and reflecting God’s morally perfect
character of righteousness. This theme is suggested by various
biblical writers, and it merits attention in contemporary interpret-
ations of divine expectations for humans.
In yielding to God in cooperative trust, a person allows God’s
unique moral power to come to fruition or maturation in a human


  

life. It thereby enables salient evidence for divine reality and good-
ness to emerge. Such cooperation as loyal moral rapport with God
is a central feature of the meaning of human life by divine stand-
ards, but it does not come easy for humans. Even so, it underwrites
a moral adventure for cooperative humans, as it includes their self-
conforming, voluntarily and responsively, to lasting meaning from
God. The chapter thus explains how evidence from God is intended
to be redemptive through being reconciliatory, and not just infor-
mational, for humans. Its profound challenge to human tendencies
to selfishness, according to the chapter, can lead to its rejection or
dismissal by humans and thus to divine frustration and strategic
withdrawal in divine hiding.
Chapter , “Moral Experience and Moral Inspiration,” notes that
the experience of moral inspiration of humans by God has received
minimal attention. That neglect is striking, because such divine
inspiration of humans is arguably a silver lining throughout the
Bible. It is a source of robust unity for biblical theology, from the
beginning of the Jewish Bible to the end of the Christian New
Testament. This chapter contends that the moral inspiration of
humans by God aims for their cooperative reconciliation toward
righteous relationships in a divine commonwealth. This theme is a
substantial unifier for biblical theology, despite its widespread neg-
lect by scholars and students of the Bible.
The chapter shows how its approach to cooperative moral inspir-
ation confirms an interpersonal understanding of the fruit of God’s
Spirit as divine filial values in human experience. It thus adds
cogency to a main theme of Chapter . It also proposes a needed
veracity check on its proposed unified biblical theology of moral
inspiration. One important lesson is that moral inspiration, from a
prominent biblical point of view, is cooperative in response to
divine influence. It is not a mechanical process of coercion. Moral
inspiration from God thus fits with the kind of uncoercive moral
rapport with God discussed in Chapter . It also takes moral
assessment to a level deeper than familiar human decisions and




conduct because it involves a person’s deepest motives. God would

seek to work at that level in order to guide character formation,
uncoercively, toward righteousness in relationships. In doing so,
God would aim to have humans share in God’s perfect moral
character for the sake of what is good for all involved.
Chapter , “Moral Experience without Philosophical Overlays,”
observes that many philosophers and theologians try to increase the
credibility of faith in God by means of persuasive philosophical
arguments and explanations. Given the perspective of the Apostle
Paul on evidence for God, one might proceed in either of two ways
for using arguments and explanations. Philosophers and theolo-
gians who hold that Paul has a contribution to make in this area can
benefit by considering the relative efficacy of these two ways. The
main area of contrast lies in the epistemic basis of philosophical
arguments and explanations. They have, at least from Paul’s
perspective, a basis either in the power of direct divine self-
manifestation or in philosophical claims. The latter basis will
neglect or obscure the humanly experienced power distinctive of a
perfectly righteous God and thus miss out on the foundational
evidence characteristic of that God.
The chapter clarifies what the relevant divine power includes, in
terms of intentional divine self-manifestation as God’s self-witness
to divine reality and goodness. This witness occurs in receptive
human moral experience, including conscience, and in the resulting
character formation. The chapter explains how such power, being
intentionally interactive toward divine righteousness, serves as a
significant alternative to such prominent philosophical overlays on
faith in God as Platonism, Thomism, and Kantianism. The latter
overlays, according to the chapter, improperly depersonalize key
evidence in moral experience for God’s reality and goodness.
Chapter , “Moral Experience and Co-valuing in Conflict,” iden-
tifies how a social, society-building aim would lie behind divine
evidence aimed at renewing people in righteousness. The intended
renewal would be social as well as individual, and this would bear


  

on the evidence of God appropriated by humans. It would give a

central role to righteous love for persons in the appropriation of
divine evidence, thus making human motives matter in the discern-
ment and reception of that evidence. God would aim to have divine
evidence benefit human moral character among as many people as
are willing to cooperate with divine righteous love. This aim would
seek a divine commonwealth motivated by righteous love for all
people, and the commonwealth thus would transcend familiar
racial, ethnic, national, and even religious boundaries. The divine
love presented to humans, then, would underwrite a robust ethics
for human relationships across typical boundaries.
The desired commonwealth of righteous love would seek to
include even enemies of the commonwealth, thus fulfilling the
divine love commands and the command to love one’s enemy
found in Jesus. So, human motives matter in relating to God and
corresponding evidence, as they demand character change relative
to typical human tendencies to selfishness and exclusiveness toward
outsiders and enemies. The chapter explores how such change can
arise in and guide a human life, with vital individual and social
benefits. It identifies how it bears on what some biblical writers
consider to be the good news of human restoration from God. That
good news would aim to be universal, even if some humans are set
on ignoring or blocking it.
Chapter , “Moral Experience Justified by God,” considers
whether God’s relation to the world, including the abundance of
suffering and evil in moral experience and the larger world, can be
justified by God from a moral point of view. The chapter contends
that two factors can play a central role in a divine self-justification: a
divine promise of fulfilling righteousness for humans at God’s
preferred time, including due reparations; and divine presence
available to them now under fitting conditions. The promise would
have a basis in morally relevant experience of divine presence, as in
the cases of Abraham and Job, but its fulfillment would await a
future time.




The chapter explains how the relevant promise can be grounded

in moral experience, given special attention to moral conscience.
It also clarifies why such grounding does not demand a full
explanatory theodicy, thus agreeing with the book of Job and the
teaching of Jesus and Paul. God could give self-justification, then,
without supplying a full explanation to humans of the divine
purposes for allowing suffering and evil. A key issue is whether
God would be morally blameworthy for postponing the elimination
of suffering and evil among humans. A negative answer would be
challenged by the human inability to identify all of God’s relevant
purposes. Given that inability, we would not be in a position to fault
God’s moral character for delaying the full establishment of
righteousness among humans.
Chapter , “Moral Experience and Theological Inquiry,” exam-
ines the relevance of moral experience to theological inquiry.
It considers the role of a divine concern for experienced righteous-
ness in inquirers about God, as suggested by Jeremiah, Jesus, and
Paul. This concern relates to whether theological inquiry, by a
divine standard, takes us beyond mere assessment of theological
information to the moral status of inquirers before God. We shall
see that it does and explore some implications.
The chapter considers whether evidence of God in human moral
experience comes with the divine intention to have recipients
voluntarily be conformed, with divine power, to divine righteous-
ness. If it does, we should expect the moral attitude of an inquirer to
be relevant to the evidence, if any, of God received. In that case,
God would not self-present evidence of God in moral experience
just to present evidence or information. The chapter identifies
divine evidence in human moral experience as not only a gift of
grace but also a duty to cooperate toward divine righteousness.
A key role for humans in theological inquiry is to let God be God
in leading them to loyal cooperation with divine righteousness.
Overall, this book renews attention to the vital role of intentional
values and duties in the meaning of human life and in relating to


  

the God who supplies such meaning. It contends that this renewed
attention relies on distinctive but widely neglected evidence of
intentional divine activity in human moral experience, including
conscience. This evidence tends to be elusive, but it becomes salient
as it comes to fruition in human cooperation as self-conformity to
it. Such cooperation is an integral part of desired moral rapport
with divine righteousness manifested in human moral experience.
We miss out on crucial relevant evidence if we neglect the role of
moral experience in much religious commitment, particularly if we
hold the excessively intellectual view that “religious belief is the
brainchild of intuitive thinking.”
God initiates the moral rapport in question, and humans are
responsible for responding with self-conformity, if with divine aid,
to the intentional righteousness presented. In such rapport, a
human moral character can find a new moral focus that can bring
meaning to human life: the kind of meaning Tolstoy described as
“to be better” as a person, in doing the will of God. We shall
examine how such meaning can enliven people as voluntary
deciders with moral significance, individually and collectively, in a
society that is not altogether of their own making.


Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), p. .


 Moral Experience and Persons

What are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you
care for them?
Psalm :

For our current purposes, we shall think of persons as voluntary

deciders who make decisions with varying degrees of deliberation
and rationality relative to their intentions or goals. They settle on
chosen options and then proceed to try to bring about those
options, with more or less success. Such decision-making has a
creative aspect, at least in the chosen timing of exercise of a will,
even if the decision is familiar or ill-advised. For instance, readers of
this chapter are persons who have decided voluntarily to read it,
and they could have decided otherwise. We have no reason to
suppose that the laws of nature or of science or any other laws
require their reading it, now or ever.
We would need a nonscientific kind of explanation of voluntary
deciders and their decisions, if an explanation is available.
We would need an explanation that is irreducibly purposive or
intentional. We shall find support for an explanation that acknow-
ledges the typical context of persons involving their experience of
good, evil, and other persons, often in cases of dissonance and
direct conflict. This chapter asks whether humans have the power
to resolve the moral dissonance and conflict they face. It also
considers how values bear on their purposes and on the kind of
meaning available for human life.


   

Deciders with Dissonance

Given a familiar understanding of persons, they must have some

purposes or intentions in their lives, regardless of the extent of their
rationality. Perhaps they lack purposes for their lives overall or in
general, but if they have no purpose, intention, or goal in their lives,
they will fall short of personhood as typically understood. A purpose
or an intention goes beyond a mere desire because it requires one’s
being settled on an end. In the absence of a purpose, a physical body
could be present, but that body would not be a person. We shall see
that this approach to persons leads naturally to questions about moral
responsibility, thus going beyond mere scientific objects. It opens up a
domain of assessment of persons irreducible to scientific assessment.
It is difficult to separate persons from purposes and our notion of
persons from an idea of purposes. Even our denial of purposes or
goals for persons would come with our having a purpose for the
denial, thus bringing in a purpose for us as persons. Our intention to
opt out of purposes for persons would be an intentional decision on
our part, for some purpose or other, to opt out of being involved with
purposes. A kind of practical incoherence regarding intention would
thus arise, given the joining of a denial of intention with the presence
of an intention in making the denial. This is a lesson about the denial
of intention, if not about intentions themselves, but it suggests that
persons have no easy escape from intentions as purposes.
Our purposes organize and guide our lives, for better or worse,
thus functioning as guideposts for the direction of our lives, at least
at times. They distinguish us from the scientific objects of physics,
chemistry, and geology, among other natural sciences. Atoms,
molecules, and glaciers do not have purposes, although we humans
typically do, even if they are not always good. We usually have
various purposes or goals in our lives, however variable and frus-
trating, and we typically pursue them intentionally, if only at times.
It is an open question whether there is an overarching purpose for
this reality concerning persons.


   

Our intentional decisions contribute to who we are as persons

and to how we direct our lives relative to our selected purposes.
If I decide to be a professor of Ancient Greek philosophy, for
instance, I will focus my professional life on classical Greek and
some literature from Ancient Greece, for my purposes of research,
writing, and teaching. My decision would be voluntary under
ordinary conditions; nothing would coerce me to make it, and
I could choose otherwise (as I actually did, as it happens).
My accepted values underlie my decisions, and I am committed
to relying on those values. In general, the values I accept are
revealed in what I assume to be the worth of my actions. For
instance, I assume that my writing this book is worthwhile, and
I accept the value of worthwhile books. Our decisions are thus
value-laden in a way that makes some sense of our lives. Even so,
my assumed value and worth for my actions can go wrong in being
misleading about what is genuinely good or worthwhile. So, we
need to separate the genuinely good from the merely apparently
good in values.
The topic of the nature of persons is complicated not only by our
personal experience of good and evil in conflict but also by our
typical interpersonal experience of other voluntary deciders. Many
people have a personal experience of instances of moral good and
evil in relation to deliverances from their conscience, and this
experience sometimes includes dissonance as discord and even
direct conflict. For instance, as in the Introduction’s case described
by Tolstoy, people examine their conscience and find instances of
good and of evil, such as kindness and selfishness, presented to
them, and those instances often resist a mutual reconciliation.
Inward discord can result in conscience, and it can linger in human
lives, with resulting complexities in moral decision-making.
Some people are challenged in their conscience regarding, for
instance, their selfish use of their available time solely for their own
gain. They are disturbed, if only momentarily, by such selfishness
reflected in conscience in a way that reveals a purpose they have: to


   

use their available time merely for their own benefit, disregarding
other people. This disturbance in conscience need not be something
they choose or desire. Indeed, they may desire not to have it, given
that it creates some psychological and moral dissonance or turbu-
lence in their lives. They also have experienced some unselfishness
in their lives, perhaps approvingly via conscience, and they feel a
conflict between it and their tendency to selfishness. Such conflict is
common in human life, and it bears on our being voluntary
deciders under a kind of morally relevant duress. Ignoring this
duress, as much academic discussion of persons does, would distort
our actual situation as intentional deciders.
People have three options toward the reality of dissonance in
their conscience. First, they can try to ignore it, proceeding as if it
did not occur. Second, they can oppose it, opting to go beyond
trying to ignore it to renounce or denounce its reality. Third, they
can try to resolve the discord, by acknowledging it and seeking a
resolution of it in attitude and action. Whichever option they adopt,
their voluntary decision regarding it, however reflective or delibera-
tive, shows that they are personal, intentional agents, and not mere
machines. The reality of the dissonance does not force their hand
on their response to it. They are left with a voluntary decision, at
least in typical cases where human agency functions.
As voluntary deciders, we operate in a world under moral duress,
and we share in that duress, while opposing it at times. Keith Ward
thus remarks:

The natural world is a darker place than humanist and liberal

morality pretends. It is this fact that makes morality not a matter
of the humane and dispassionate calculation of maximization of
compatible interests, but a matter of a relentless and passionate
battle of the moral will against the insistent pressures of lust, hatred,
aggression and arrogance that dominate human lives.


Keith Ward, Morality, Autonomy, and God (London: Oneworld, ), p. .


   

This fact is reflected in an insight of the Apostle Paul: “I do not do

the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do . . . I see in
my members a law at war with the law of my mind, making me
captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Rom :,
). If his talk of “sin” somehow offends, we can substitute talk of
“unrighteousness” without loss.
The challenge to us as voluntary deciders includes the reality of
competing influences on us, going beyond our own “dispassionate
calculation.” Those influences can leave us “not doing the good we
want,” even if we know what is good. So, when we decide on our use
of time, as we frequently do, we can be influenced by sources of
selfishness, such as our own habits of selfishness or the selfishness
of other people. We will do well, however, not to confuse those
influences with our own decisions.
We can decide to conform to influences of selfishness, thus
favoring a selfish use of our time. Alternatively, we can try to resist
the influence toward selfishness and decide for an unselfish use of
our time. A third option would be to try to ignore the challenge
between selfishness and unselfishness in our use of time. Even if
persons tend toward selfishness or unselfishness in their use of time,
they could try to avoid considering a conflict between the two.
A motive could be their aim not to try to resolve that conflict, given
the difficulty involved. We are, in any case, often influenced in our
decisions by selfish tendencies, regardless of our attitude toward
that influence or any conflict resulting from it.
The dissonance we experience comes not only from inside us
but also from outside. Voluntary deciders typically coexist with,
and sometimes confront, other such deciders, including the vol-
itional tendencies and actions of those other deciders. One result
is conflict between deciders. They thus have a decision to make:
whether to ignore, to oppose, or to cooperate with the other


Biblical translations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.


   

deciders. We humans make this kind of decision on many occa-

sions, often without much reflection or deliberation. This problem
of conflicting deciders from outside raises the issue of whether
there is a right way to approach the kind of interpersonal conflict
in question.
Suppose that I am at conflict with my neighbor over a proposed
tax increase for our local schools. My conscience convicts me to
value and to support paying higher taxes to benefit the local school-
children. My neighbor, however, insists that he should not be given
a higher tax rate because he has no schoolchildren of his own.
My decision on how to vote on the tax proposal faces conflict from
the decision of my neighbor. What am I to do with this conflict?
Does it challenge the goodness of my own planned decision to vote
for the proposal? One important issue is whether the conflict
between me and my neighbor, beyond our own initial aims, could
be intended to work for something morally good. We would need to
explore evidence for the potential instrumental value of such
conflict.
We face a vital issue for us as voluntary deciders: Do we have the
needed power to correct bad influence and to resolve dissonance
and conflict in moral experience for the sake of what is good?
In particular, if we form a purpose or an intention to withstand
dissonance and bring about something morally good, do we have
the power to actualize that purpose? We shall ask whether such
power is available to us. If it is not, we face a moral analogue of the
futility of Sisyphus. We then shall be unable to bring about desired
moral goodness in our lives. Our question about power does not
assume that we must be able to be self-rightening or self-justifying
in the way Tolstoy initially held. It allows that we could find the
needed power in a source other than ourselves, such as in the place
ultimately suggested by Tolstoy: in God’s power found in a divine
purpose to have a person “be better.” The latter power, we shall see,
would involve special values that can motivate people with uncoer-
cive power to “be better.”


   

Values as Powers

We shall consider the view that values are potentially motivating

goods, such as being righteous or being caring, that merit approval
from people in a position to give approval or disapproval. According
to this view, values are not reducible to human beliefs, preferences, or
feelings about value. Giving attention to one ordinary linguistic use,
the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers the following as a defin-
ition of “value”: “quality viewed in terms of importance, usefulness,
desirability, etc. The relative worth, usefulness, or importance of a
thing or (occasionally) a person.” Ordinary use captured by a dic-
tionary typically does not settle a philosophical or theological issue,
but it can illustrate a noteworthy semantic meaning.
The use of the term “value” among philosophers and theologians
varies widely, with emphases ranging from concepts to beliefs to pref-
erences to feelings. We need not digress to the metaphysics of values,
but it is important for this book’s position to allow for manifested values
that have an independence of humans in a challenge offered by
those values to human attitudes. In addition, it is important to allow
for manifested values to go beyond abstract, static “Forms” or “Ideas”
and causally influence humans in their moral experience. A manifested
value, we shall see, is not reducible to a static concept of a value or to a
mere belief, preference, or feeling about what is valuable.
As a characterization of values, we may offer the following:

Values are qualities with causal powers either to improve something

or make it worthwhile or to attract someone to do so by the values’
empowering quality toward improvement.

This characterization does not make the reality of values dependent

on human approval, favor, endorsement, belief, preference, feeling,
or supporting reason. It thus avoids a common confusion of the


Here I dissent from Robert M. Adams’s suggestion that it is “probably impossible . . . to
get value judgments out of the foundations of objectivity.” See Robert M. Adams, Finite


   

reality of a value with a human attitude or response toward it.

Thomas Hobbes, for instance, fell prey to that confusion in
remarking: “[Let people] rate themselves at the highest value they
can; yet their true value is no more than it is esteemed by others.”
Contrary to Hobbes, values (at least of the kind relevant to this
book’s position) can exist without having any human response, and
they can be discovered, without being created, by humans. They
also can survive in the presence of false value judgments and
misleading value beliefs, preferences, and feelings among humans.
Values have a relativity not to a human response but to what
their power can improve. For instance, the value inherent in salt
water for improving the life of a whale does not apply in the same
way to the life of a human. In addition, the value had by a college
education for various humans does not extend to dogs and cats, or
even to all humans. We thus may say that the scope of values can
vary in potential beneficiaries, but this is not relativism about values
resulting from variable beliefs, preferences, or feelings about values.
Values differ from truth and factuality in having variability of
scope. Truth and factuality do not vary depending on the scope of
their beneficiaries. Even so, the reality of values, truths, and facts is
not at the mercy of how people respond with their beliefs, prefer-
ences, or feelings toward values, truths, or facts. In this regard, a
kind of objectivity stems from the belief-, preference-, and feeling-
independence of values, as in the case of truth and facts.
Being loving (or unselfishly caring), being honest, and being
humble are examples of familiar values for humans, at least as

and Infinite Goods (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. . I also dissent, as
we shall see, from his resulting epistemology of value based on what William P. Alston
called “doxastic practices” and from his Platonic talk of God as “the Good.” I doubt
that there is any such singular thing as “the Good,” even if many things are objectively
good. I also doubt that established “doxastic practices” always agree with our best
evidence, as illustrated in relation to some evidence from the sciences.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
[]), I.X..


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