God’s Command and Moral Goodness. Theological Metaethics in the Age of Pluralism

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Hendrik Klinge
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513191602

Contemporary religious (and ideological) pluralism presents Systematic Theology with decisive challenges. This also applies in particular to theological ethics, especially when it comes to laying the foundation for it. Going back to early analytical philosophy, modern metaethics has dealt extensively with the question of how central expressions of moral language are to be understood and what metaphysical implications are associated with them. Although these approaches are, in my opinion, highly relevant for the foundation of theological ethics, Protestant ethicists have hardly taken them up. This is particularly regrettable insofar as attempts have been made in recent decades, especially by Anglo-american scholars, to combine metaethics with philosophy of religion. The best-known model of this kind of “practical philosophy of religion”, i.e., a metaethics decidedly oriented towards religion, are the so-called Divine Command Metaethics. Robert Adams, who is considered one of the leading contemporary philosophers of religion and metaethics in the English-speaking world, can be seen as the main representative of this type of theory, but has so far hardly been noticed by German theology. In my habilitation thesis I first check the significance of analytical metaethics for protestant theology; I then deal in detail with Robert Adams’ approach and related attempts at a “practical philosophy of religion”. In doing so, I try to build a bridge between continental and analytical philosophy of religion, and also discuss historical texts, from Duns Scotus to Luther to Karl Barth. At the end of my book, I present the draft of a theological metaethics, which equally emphasizes the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches of Adams et al. by critically reflecting them. The main theme remains the topic of pluralism, whereby I concentrate on the question of the extent to which people of different religions and worldviews can at all come to an understanding about fundamental ethical questions, and where the limits of mutual understanding are. In the last chapter, I eventually try to underline the plausibility of my metaethical approach by relating it to two particularly relevant fields of applied ethics, namely the ethics of migration and the ethics of digital media

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants