Who is Haunted by the Shadow of God? Dialectical Notes on Michael Rosen's Narrative of (Failed) Secularization

ABSTRACT

In The Shadow of God, Michael Rosen argues that modern moral philosophy in the tradition of German Idealism is profoundly shaped by religious views these thinkers could not overcome. However, a closer look at Rosen’s critique of Kant’s and Kantian conceptions of morality raises the possibility that Rosen’s view may itself be haunted by the shadow of God. In particular, Rosen appears to believe that a moral imperative of respect for human dignity necessarily requires a religious-transcendent grounding, such that there is no purely moral answer to the question of why such respect is owed. In relegating morality to an impersonal realm that alienates us from our personal understandings of the good, Rosen fails to recognize not only that Kantian morality is meant to alienate us from certain ends (e.g., racist or sexist), but that it is also meant to overcome alienation. This is because Kantian morality is not so much impersonal, as it is interpersonal: it recognizes us as belonging to a community of free and equal persons, who are autonomous when we morally reflect on, or even reject, certain ends.

Keywords:

• Kant
• Michael Rosen
• alienation
• ethics
• morality
• secularization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As, for example, Elisabeth Anscombe (1958) and (to some extent) Bernard Williams (1985) thought.

2 This is to continue our long-running debate that began after a talk I gave at Harvard University based on Forst 2017.

3 That is why Rosen (2022, 360n25) is mistaken when he writes that I do not “consider the troubling possibility that the Kantian drive to replace heteronomy with rational justification might bring alienation of a different kind.”