David B. Hart on Joel Marks’ Radical Atheism

David B. Hart on Joel Marks’ Radical Atheism October 20, 2010

From First Things, Hart ruminates — as he always does — on the connection of atheism and morals in the recent turn to radical atheism by Joel Marks and his moral theory of “desirism.” [The first sentence in the first paragraph is worth writing out.]

The real question of the moral life, at least as far as philosophical “warrant” is at issue, is not whether one personally needs God in order to be good, but whether one needs God in order for the good to be good. This is something that Marks fails to address when he talks of God simply as a “commander,” rather than as the summum bonum that makes a moral metaphysics possible….

That is inevitable, in any event. But surely the belief that moral principles are only a combination of evolutionary epiphenomena and sentimental predilections must weaken the will to seek the good, and a whole culture that truly came to believe that all moral choices are merely personal preferences might find that the inventiveness and spontaneity of the liberated will are capable of just about anything, and responsible to nothing. After all, it is not as if the lessons of modern history have given us no cause for apprehension on that score.


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