Religion and Morality

Abstract

The Call for Papers² maintains that ‘[m]ost contemporary and early modern scholars have not seen a close affinity between religion and true morality (ethics). The prevailing doxa is that the two are worlds apart.’ If there is anyone who was not (and today would not be) surprised about a disconnect between religion and ethics, it would be Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, the two are deeply connected: there can be no morality without both particular, individual experience in the world and the universally transcendental conditions of possibility shared by all human beings for which the term religion is appropriate. Yet, Kant by no means ‘reduces’ religion to morality.