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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
I criticize Richard Swinburne's account of the need for and means of atonement in his Responsibility and Atonement. I offer objections to his understanding and use of the notion of ‘the gift of life’ in his account of the need for atonement; and closely related to that, I show that his conclusions about duties to God as a benefactor do not follow from his reasons. Furthermore, when examined closely, these conclusions seem false. In relation to his account of the means of atonement, I argue that the mechanism he provides to explain how Christ's actions benefit sinners does not work.
1 Swinburne, Richard, Responsibility and Atonement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a very different but still critical evaluation of Swinburne's theory, see Stump's, Eleonore ‘Richard Swinburne: Responsibility and Atonement’, Faith and Philosophy, XI (1994), 321–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar And for an excellent critical evaluation of the means of atonement in Swinburne's theory, see McNaughton's, David ‘Reparation and Atonement’, Religious Studies, XXVIII (1992), 129–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Swinburne defends a panoramic value theory that places objective moral goodness and badness of actions at the centre of our web of ethical beliefs. Moral rightness and wrongness, the obligatory and morally forbidden, are understood in relation to them.
He does not to try to ground his moral theory in a defence of the metaphysics of his ethics. Instead, he relies tactically on an account of the core system of beliefs humans share about what actions are of overriding importance due to certain ‘universal properties’ they have, following Hare, R. M.. (See his The Language of Morals (London: Oxford University Press, 1952.))Google Scholar Actions important to humans in this way are so in virtue of exemplifying one or another of a set of ‘standard moral properties’, that are either positive or negative. ‘Causing pleasure’ and ‘causing pain’ are, respectively, examples of these properties. So in as much as he takes common usage to be a metaphysical clue, he suggests a value-based metaethics. Swinburne thinks normative ethical disputes are typically due to one, or another, or a combination of the following: a difference of opinion about the relative values of those standard properties, disagreement about the non-ethical facts of the circumstances in which an act is situated, or disagreement about whether some property is in fact a moral property.
3 It is a dramatic instance because of who the benefactor is (because of some universal property the benefactor has, e.g. being our creator) and the kind of benefit provided. Though Swinburne suggests (p. 123) that our living a good life ‘pleases’ God, he nowhere says explicitly that our living a bad life ‘displeases’ him and that such a consequence constitutes the wronging of God that requires reparation. I will have more to say later in sections 1.3 and 1.4 regarding what kind of grounds Swinburne cannot rely on to support the claim that sinners owe atonement to God.
4 Swinburne discusses principles of punishment at length. Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 93–109.
5 Swinburne is uneasy about what restrictions for forgiving are included in or implied by the notion of forgiveness; but he offers loose guidelines for understanding the term. He quotes Taylor, Gabriele (see her Pride, Shame, and Guilt (Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 105)Google Scholar, and distinguishes forgiveness from condonation by requiring that the victim, in forgiving, not hold his own values in contempt by allowing the wrongdoer to fail to acknowledge and appreciate the harm done. The closest thing Swinburne offers to an expression of the nature of forgiveness comes in this sentence: ‘Your acceptances [constituted by counting the offence out of history] of my reparation, penance and, above all, apology, is forgiving’, Swinburne, op. cit., p. 85 (my brackets).
6 Swinburne thinks of repentance, apology and penance as the wrongdoer's efforts directed at ‘distancing’ herself from the intentional or cognizant attitude of harming another, while reparation is directed at the consequential aspect of harm. The function of penance is to constitute the apology as sincere by making it costly. Swinburne, op. cit., p. 84.
7 Contrary to what Swinburne calls ‘hard line’ interpretations of scripture on the topic of whether salvation is by faith and works or by faith alone, he thinks works, in the following limited sense, are necessary for salvation: humans must take what God provides and make atonement with it themselves. Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 2–3.
8 Although Swinburne says that he rejects the tradition of penal substitution accounts of atonement because they make atonement ‘too mechanical for a means of reconciliation which ought to be intimate and personal’ (Swinburne, op. cit., p. 152), he does not explicitly disavow the notion of God's ability to transfer guilt from sinners to Christ – or, failing that, to somehow punish the innocent in place of the guilty to some morally valuable end.
9 Swinburne presents the components of his theological assumption after setting out his moral theory. Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 121–3.
10 For example, he calls the gift of life the ‘precondition of all other good things’. Swinburne, op. cit. p. 123.
11 As will be indicated on the first quotation of section 1.3 below, Swinburne considers continued existence to be the central benefit God provides that grounds our duty to him to live a good life. I will therefore consider this last interpretation of (1a) as Swinburne's preferred understanding of the gift of life.
12 I am not suggesting that it is impossible to have an obligation to give a gift. Parents ought to give gifts to their children on occasion to teach them generosity after all. It is not clear however that one who recognizes that a particular item is morally owed to someone can provide it as a gift.
13 Swinburne, op. cit., p. 157.
14 Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 123, 124.
15 If Swinburne meant seriously to allow that we may have no duty to God in so far as he has benefited us, as he suggests with this phrase from the quotation above: ‘even if there is no duty to do so’ (to obey and please one's parents), his premise for concluding that atonement is owed to God would be missing. There would be no need for his theory.
16 As Swinburne himself suggests above, the duty to obey one's parents need not be supposed to hold merely in virtue of their being parents. It is plausible that more ultimate facts about parents than that ground children's duties, if any, to them. Hence, Swinburne endorses the clarification of duties by means of, what L. Susan Stebbing called, directional analysis. See Stebbing, L. Susan, ‘The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1932), pp. 65–94.Google Scholar
Directional analysis, characteristic of so much of philosophical enterprise, is the effort to uncover the ground of the truth of propositions the terms of which do not refer as immediately as possible to the items or relations that make them true, if true. ‘Atlanta will host the Olympics’ is in one sense perfectly adequate, but if the general terms ‘Atlanta’ and ‘the Olympics’ do not refer directly to entities, there is room for a deeper understanding, discoverable by analysis, or what makes that statement true.
17 I will assume along with Swinburne's value-based ethics that the grounding of a duty can be identified or approximated through such analytic methods as abstraction, precision, thought-experiments and the like.
18 It is an unnecessary complication what role mistakenly rendered benefits play in proscribing the grounds for duties to benefactors, e.g. benefits rendered due to falsely believing that they are morally owed. Whatever benefits God provides he will provide without any of the varieties of confusion that might possibly attend their bestowal. I do however mention how confusion on the part of recipients might affect their duties of gratitude in section 1.3.2.
19 Even if it were a contracted benefit, if humans did not remember making such a contract, through no fault of their own, and had no compelling reason to think that they had made such a contract, they would be free of it at least until they became convinced of it.
20 Acting from some motive other than concern for the person to be benefited severs the ground of gratitude by constituting the action as an impersonal action. Though one might be glad that some action has occurred, one is not grateful to a person in the sense Swinburne's theory requires (since God is supposedly personally offended by the ingratitude) unless that person intended the benefit for the sake of his or her well-being.
21 Even if we grant the plausibility of the ‘Dionysian principle’, i.e. that goodness is essentially diffusive of itself, and conclude that God, being perfectly good, must then create others with whom to share his goodness, I do not think it will follow that his creatures owe him a debt of gratitude. He still would not have acted out of a duty to them (they do not exist), nor received informed consent from them. If creating them without their informed consent would still indebt them, creating them would be to act presumptuously (something I will argue in the next section) and would seemingly cancel that particular sort of diffusion of goodness.
22 The reason I need to argue this line is that Swinburne leaves open the possibility that there are two general methods by which humans can offend God and thereby usher in the need for atonement. As we have seen, his explicit and primary method was to characterize the relevant offence thusly: failing in a duty to God himself as our benefactor. And that offence is accomplished by not living a good life. But a secondary method, suggested in the first block quotation in 1.4, hints that merely disobeying God, regarding either what is already a duty or what God might command that would otherwise not be a duty, is another way in which humans might offend him (other than by failing to live a good life) and usher in the need for atonement.
23 Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 127, 128.
24 I am using W. D. Ross's sense of prima facie duty, which is not the sense of being merely an apparent duty, nor is it a kind of duty (‘prima facie’ is not an adjective). A prima facie duty, as I understand Ross, is an act that would be one's actual duty if no alternatives to it other than inaction were possible. Also, Ross could find no principled way of deciding between conflicting prima facie duties. See Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), pp. 19–21.Google Scholar
25 It may be difficult to defend as a practical guide for lawmakers or judges, the injunction that the state not interfere with the freedom of individuals unless the exercise of that freedom brings harm to others. Nevertheless, the spirit of the injunction is clear: freedom of thought and action is good in itself. Mill might have considered its value merely as ‘one of the principal ingredients of human happiness’; but that would be sufficient to support a prima facie duty not to restrict it. See John Stuart Mill: On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Grey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 63.Google Scholar
26 By ‘justified by requirements for some end’ I mean merely that there might be situations that provide a sufficient reason for God to command someone's actions, for example, if the person is too deficient in constitution or perception to be motivated by a morally sufficient reason for some act, but might be motivated by the command. Also, I mean to exclude from the notion of a command, that I am here criticizing, that mere imperative character of any moral advice that is internal to its nature.
27 For a defence of this view, see Prichard, H. A., ‘Duty and Ignorance of Fact’, Moral Obligation: and Duty and Interest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 16–39.Google Scholar The ‘condition of control’, like the ought implies can principle, says that the range of duties is limited to those actions one can perform, Prichard's action theory, relevant to discovering the sense of ‘can’ in the principle, concludes that all one is capable of doing directly is setting oneself to, or willing to, or trying to produce some change or other. As W. D. Ross points out, one's duty is a duty to produce such and such a change – to secure the receipt of a borrowed book, not merely to try to return the book (say, by dropping it in the post). See, Ross, op. cit. note 21, pp. 44–7. The condition of control does not, however, restrict duty to simply setting oneself to some purpose, but to some vague commitment to producing some change – ‘vague’ because the requirement to try and try again (in certain circumstances), has, depending on the importance of the action, some limit at which one can properly give up.
28 Stocker, Michael, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Moral Theories’, Doing and Being: Selected Readings in Moral Philosophy ed. Haber, Joram Graf (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 180–90.Google Scholar
29 Stocker, op. cit., pp. 184–5.
30 Consider further a positive and negative example of Swinburne's fundamental moral properties: ‘causing pleasure’ and ‘causing pain’. Their suggested values might be reversed when Hitler is the object of the action, i.e. causing pleasure in Hitler might be bad and causing pain in him might be good.
This examples suggests another kind of attitude, in addition to ‘respect for persons’, that guides our evaluation of actions: ‘Respect for persons in light of their self-developed merit or (for want of a better term) demerit’. That is, our evaluation of any of Swinburne's standard moral properties is dependent on our valuation of persons and on the moral status of the terms (persons) those properties might find as their support. (I mention the qualification ‘self-developed’ since causing pain and causing pleasure to persons hypnotized into their respective characters would seemingly fail to elicit this retributivist intuition.)
31 This is a problem made exceptionally clear in Philip Quinn's recent work. See, Quinn, Philip L., ‘Anselmian Satisfaction and Kantian Justification’, Faith and Philosophy, III (1986), 440–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 154–7 (passim).
33 See note 8.
34 I am grateful to Professors Scott MacDonald and Ronald Glass for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.
