TY - JOUR
T1 - The problem of arbitrary requirements
T2 - an abrahamic perspective
AU - Aronowitz, Sara
AU - Coetsee, Marilie
AU - Saemi, Amir
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the participants in and organizers of the Randomness & Providence project, three anonymous reviewers, and especially Scott Davison, Sajjad Rizvi, Aaron Segal, Josef Stern and Karen R. Zwier for helpful comments. We also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation’s “Models of Providence” Grant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - Some religious requirements seem genuinely arbitrary in the sense that there seem to be no sufficient explanation of why those requirements with those contents should pertain. This paper aims to understand exactly what it might mean for a religious requirement to be genuinely arbitrary and to discern whether and how a religious practitioner could ever be rational in obeying such a requirement (even with full knowledge of its arbitrariness). We lay out four accounts of what such arbitrariness could consist in, and show how each account provides a different sort of baseline for understanding how obedience to arbitrary requirements could, in principle, be rational.
AB - Some religious requirements seem genuinely arbitrary in the sense that there seem to be no sufficient explanation of why those requirements with those contents should pertain. This paper aims to understand exactly what it might mean for a religious requirement to be genuinely arbitrary and to discern whether and how a religious practitioner could ever be rational in obeying such a requirement (even with full knowledge of its arbitrariness). We lay out four accounts of what such arbitrariness could consist in, and show how each account provides a different sort of baseline for understanding how obedience to arbitrary requirements could, in principle, be rational.
KW - Arbitrary requirements
KW - Rationality of religious requirements
KW - Religious obligations
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U2 - 10.1007/s11153-020-09775-7
DO - 10.1007/s11153-020-09775-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85090771945
SN - 0020-7047
VL - 89
SP - 221
EP - 242
JO - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
JF - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
IS - 3
ER -