One major approach to religious fictionalism is to highlight the moral benefits of religious practices, i.e., to argue that even non-doxastic acceptance of the content of religious claims may help practitioners with their moral growth, moral sensibility, moral motivation, and so on (cf. Eshleman 2005; Le Poidevin 2019, 2023; Jay 2014, Leng 2023). In this paper, I argue that this approach fails. Since our worldviews, value systems, and belief systems form an integrated whole in religious practice, it is difficult to isolate moral values (within which moral growth, moral sensibility, and moral motivation are all deeply involved) from this whole. Accordingly, moral benefits seem to be intimately connected with moral and religious belief and cannot be gained separately in religious practices. Instead, I suggest a ritualistic approach. I argue that religious rituals can be beneficial for attaining the meaningfulness of life. As Nozick (1981) argues, meaning consists in transcending limits: being part of God’s plan could be a way of pursuing the meaning of life. While the meaning of life may collapse with the rejection of religious belief, meaningfulness may nevertheless survive through non-doxastic acceptance alone. In this paper, I propose such a novel approach to religious fictionalism.
Religious fictionalism is roughly the view that our engagement with religious discourse, ritual and practise involves pretense. According to the fictionalist, religious talk does not involve assertion and religious thought does not involve belief. When we say things like ‘God is good’, we are merely expressing something like a make-belief that God is good (and perhaps inviting others to do the same). In this paper, I defend a version of hermeneutic religious fictionalism, suggesting that religious fictionalism is not just a practise we should adopt, it is a practise that many (if not most) religious practitioners currently adopt. If I am correct, religious practitioners are not in error; but many philosophers and athiests are.
Jason Thibodeau has recently developed a revised version of the Horrendous Deeds Objection against Modified Divine Command Theory (MDCT). On his formulation, if God has “moral grounding power”—the capacity for a being’s commands to constitute moral obligations—then any omnipotent being would possess the same power. This purportedly allows for a possible world in which a non‑omnibenevolent deity renders horrendous acts morally obligatory. I argue that this objection fails once the nature of moral grounding power is correctly understood. On standard versions of MDCT, moral obligation is identical to being commanded by God. When grounding is construed as identity rather than causal production, Thibodeau’s key premise collapses: identity is not transferable, and it is therefore logically impossible for the property of being morally required to be identical to the commands of any distinct agent, regardless of omnipotence. I further respond to two recent attempts to rehabilitate the objection, concerning alleged cases of type‑identical commands constituting the same normative phenomenon and the purported arbitrariness of restricting moral grounding power to God alone. I conclude that the revised Horrendous Deeds Objection does not undermine MDCT.
Metaphysical freedom, experienced as a state of lucidity, can allow for balanced change in our understanding of ecology as it creates opportunities for individuals to develop a dynamic moral mindset in line with our ever-changing relationship with nature and empower them to enact intentional change. Entering a state of lucidity, a state where we recognise our responsibility in creating our own meaning, will give us a position from which to birth creative solutions in the face of loss. Processing eco-grief and moral injury, in our current state of global climate-crisis, provides opportunities to reflect on our appeals to futility or authority, and other approaches to nature that are frequented as means to exonerate us from our responsibility to nature. I argue that environmental disseminators and organisations have the more difficult job of empowering individuals to reflect on their moral injury, than corporations and institutions who wish to offer exoneration to the individual from their moral injury for continued capital gain. How we act in response to our moral injury and eco-grief comes to shape our world.
Why are we moral equals, given how different we are? In Section I, I review what it means to reject fundamental moral equality and endorse moral hierarchy. I argue that the hierarchical challenge is more pressing than egalitarians concede, and that merited hierarchy is more attractive than egalitarians admit. In Section II, I consider the solution of proposing a 'range property' or threshold degree of some morally relevant capacity (generally moral agency, personal autonomy, or something similar). I argue that existing accounts cannot motivate the relevance of the threshold, and are thus driven to accept scalar moral status in proportion to one's possession of the relevant capacity. In Section III, I consider the ‘decisionistic’ defence of basic equality, which argues that moral equality is a fundamental commitment, motivated by the evils of denying it. This approach has two flaws. First, it offers a contingent, non-ideal objection to moral hierarchy, which concedes crucial ground that egalitarians generally want to defend. Second, that it is fatally vague: it fails to sufficiently specify what we thereby commit to. In Section IV I propose an alternative approach, locating the basis of equality in the badness of social alienation. I consider a series of objections.
