There is a long-standing tradition in Western thought that sees religion as a bolster for morality. In its vaguest version, the idea is that religious belief provides a kind of social cement, fostering an 'ethos' in which traditional moral values are respected. Religious observances are thus often prized by the ethical conservative, who fears secularization as subversive of the moral and social fabric. Religion, at the very least, serves to keep people in line: as Descartes put it, 'since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after life'. Aside from this instrumental view of the role of religion in bolstering morality, there has also been a deeper and equally long-standing belief among many philosophers of a religious persuasion that theistic principles have a foundational or validating role with respect to morality. Thus Richard Cumberland argued that the divine nature is the source not just of all physical laws but also of all moral principles, and that 'the acknowledging of their creator endows these principles with perfect authority'.
Most professional philosophers today, by contrast, would probably say that questions of religion have as little to do with the subject of moral philosophy as they have to do with, say, logic or epistemology or philosophy of science. The comparison is an interesting one, since if we go back three hundred years or so we find the concept of the deity figuring centrally in all these latter areas. Many, perhaps most, seventeenth-century philosophers assigned God a central place in discussions of the status of the eternal verities of logic, in accounts of the foundations of knowledge, in analyses of motion and causality. So it would be astonishing if they had not made the deity central to their moral philosophy as well. But with the gradual secularization of our culture since the seventeenth century has gone a secularization of philosophy itself; discussions of God and religion have progressively ceased to play an important role in any of the main branches of the subject. Even in ethics, where references to religion do occur, they increasingly tend to have the status of asides, as opposed to performing any substantive role in the argument. Thus, when John Stuart Mill observes that in the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth is to be found the 'complete spirit' of the ethics of utility, this is clearly not much more than a piece of incidental propaganda for utilitarianism; the main philosophical arguments for the doctrine of utility are wholly self-standing, and independent of any religious premises. Among moral philosophers since Mill, the picture is even clearer; most philosophical ethics, whether of the meta-ethical or the normative variety, is carried on without any reference whatever to religious doctrine or practice.
Among non-philosophers the picture is less clear. Informal soundings from first-year undergraduates suggest that religion does make a considerable difference to intuitive pre-philosophical attitudes to the demands of morality. Very crudely, it appears that committed religious believers regard the difference between a virtuous and a bad life as of deep significance: the question of how life should be lived seems to connect up, in important ways, with their beliefs about the nature of the cosmos and the meaning of life. Non-believers, by contrast, appear to be more likely to espouse some variety of (often unreflective) relativism or subjectivism. That is, they will tend to be strongly aware of important variations in moral codes from society to society, and be generally inclined to consider that the question of how one should live is largely a matter of 'personal choice'; on the whole, moreover, they will be sceptical or even uncomprehending when confronted with the notion that morality is of 'ultimate significance' (over and above the fact that some people mess up their lives, while others get through reasonably happily).
All this suggests that in the popular consciousness at least, something still survives of the old notion that religion can serve as some kind of underpinning for morality. More precisely, religious faith is felt by its adherents to confer some kind of 'ultimate value' on the life of virtue, while, conversely, the absence of religious faith often seems linked to a more sceptical or even nihilistic view of the difference between virtue and vice.
(John Cottingham, "Religion, Virtue and Ethical Culture," Philosophy 69 [April 1994]: 163-80, at 163-5 [footnotes omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 