John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part I, Introduction

David Baggett

In the introduction of this book, Hare points out that there will be three chapters, corresponding to the three lectures he gave at Calvin College in 1999. Taken together, the chapters are after an account of God’s authority in human morality.

In this book Hare will defend what he calls “prescriptive realism,” which is the view that when a person judges that something is good, he is endorsing (from inside) an attraction (from outside) which he feels towards it. But even if there is some call from outside, why bring God into it? Is the appeal to God redundant, or worse (corrupting our notions of morality by tying it to self-interest in a problematic way)? Finally, does this talk of God threaten our autonomy—turning us into children trying to please our father? Hare will undertake addressing these questions.

In the first chapter Hare gives a selective history of a sustained debate within Anglo-American philosophy over the last century between moral realists and moral expressivists. Moral realism is the view that moral properties such as moral goodness are real. Moral expressivism is the view that moral judgments are orectic. This is a Greek term that covers the whole family of emotion, desire, and will. Expressivism locates the role of moral judgment as expressing some act or disposition that belongs within this family.

Hare thinks that theists in particular have good reason to consider these questions that pertain to how objectivity and subjectivity are related in value judgment. For they want to say that value is created by God and is there whether we realize it or not. In that sense value is objective, and we feel pulled towards some form of realism. But we also want to say that when we value something, our hearts’ fundamental commitments are involved. In that sense our valuation is subjective, and we feel pulled towards some kind of expressivism. We have to find a way of saying both of these things together, and Hare is going to try to suggest a way. [Hare’s project bears a resemblance to Dooyeweerd’s view that for every modality there is a law side and a subject side—but he was approaching things from the vantage point of German idealism. Hare’s will be a different philosophical tradition.]

The second chapter harkens back to the Middle Ages and in particular to the divine command theory of John Duns Scotus. Hare’s interested in the connections Scotus forged between God’s commands, human nature, and human will. Hare will try to show that a Reformed version of a DCT of moral obligation can be defended via Scotus against natural law theory as well as contemporary challenges. He thinks it will become apparent how such a theory fits the account he gives in the first chapter. One theme will be that after the Fall our natural inclinations are disordered, and we can’t use them as an authoritative source of guidance for how we must and must not live.

In the third chapter, Hare moves to what he sees as a key juncture between the medieval discussion and our own times, namely, the moral theory of Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century. Kant has given us a central text that’s been taken in modern moral philosophy to refute divine command theory. It’s a text about human autonomy. Hare will attempt to show that Kant is not in fact arguing against the kind of divine command theory Hare wants to support. Hare will discuss what Kant means by saying that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, and he will defend a notion of human autonomy as appropriation.

Throughout the book Hare will be trying to do philosophy through its history. He thinks just doing the history ends up being unfaithful to what makes the history important in the first place. And just doing the philosophy ends up making half-baked references to the history in which the topic is in fact embedded. Somehow we have to do both at the same time, and Hare will attempt to do that here, despite the limitations of a short book—by plucking what he considers are three moments from a larger history and three thoughts abstracted from a larger framework.

 Part 2