Why doctrine matters - to being a good person

Why Kant was wrong to drive a wedge between religious doctrine and ethics/practice/being a good person. Love - willing the good of the other as other - as participation in God's way of being. Rights, freedom, dignity and inherent worth of every person rest on the Christian doctrine of God as love - they did not exist in the classical world of antiquity nor in the atheist anti-Christian societies of the 20th century. (On the revolutionary nature of Christianity in this respect and its profound historical implications, see David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions.)

Fr. Barron talks about how our very notions of what being good entails for individuals and society are related to religious teachings that we hold or have absorbed culturally even if we are unaware of their religious foundations.  An interesting indicator of how our beliefs affect our behavior is found in the research on charitable giving.  A key behavioral difference between the earliest Christians and the pagans around them was the extent and selflessness of the Christians' caring for each other and their neighbors, even nursing them during plagues as well as feeding the hungry and other works of mercy (Stark, Rise of Christianity; Triumph of Christianity).  This difference persists today, where all the research (Brooks) shows that by every measure religious believers are more charitable, in terms of giving their time, treasure, and talent not only to religiously sponsored but also secular charities.  (As Lupton shows - see my review below - not all this effort is wisely deployed, but that is another matter.)

Of particular relevance to the question of whether what you believe matters, is the finding that even among church attendees, those who believe that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are a good person are in practice less generous with their time, treasure, and talent than those who believe doctrine matters (Brooks).

Amartya Sen on Adam Smith

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/04/smith-market-essay-sentiments

In this article from the New Statesman (UK), Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, offers a clear, accessible explanation of why the 18th century moral philosopher Adam Smith's first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is "one of the truly outstanding books in the intellectual history of the world." Critically acclaimed upon publication in 1759, his work in ethics--emphasizing the Enlightenment themes of impartiality and universality--were overshadowed by Immanuel Kant's much more influential contributions along similar lines. And his discussion of political economy in relation to ethics was overshadowed by his later Wealth of Nations (1776)--which as a result has been misread ever since as a celebration of the unfettered free market.

In his understanding of the "demands of rationality, the need for recognizing the plurality of human motivations, the connections between ethics and economics, and the co-dependent rather than free-standing role of institutions in general and free markets in particular, in the functioning of the economy," argues Sen, Smith is of continued global relevance today.

"The global reach of Smith's moral and political reasoning is quite a distinctive feature of his thought, but it is strongly supplemented by his belief that all human beings are born with similar potential and, most importantly for policymaking, that the inequalities in the world reflect socially generated, rather than natural, disparities."

In short, Sen concludes, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a global manifesto of profound significance to the interdependent world in which we live."

His work is also important for the question that divides modern psychologists and moral philosophers on the relation of emotions to moral judgments. See, for example, Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis and his studies in social intuitionism. For a different view, see Paul Bloom, "Why Do Morals Change?" in Nature 464, 490 (25 March 2010) at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7288/full/464490a.html