Religion and Ethics. Notes for a Profile of Javier Muguerza

The present article reviews the less frequented writings of Javier Muguerza, who dealt, among other topics, with the Philosophy of Religion, establishing a deep and respectful dialogue from a lay point of view with christian theology. With an open and tolerant attitude he analyzed two essential dilemmas of religious question: Socrates' question to Euthyphron, concerning the existence of God as the foundation of moral judgments; and Epicurus' dilemma, which deals with the problem of evil. In his approach to the ethical positions of christians, he raised three reservations about the "Declaration for a global ethic": (1) the danger of reducing the ethics of religions to the ethics of churches, (2) the risk of erasing all distinction between ethics and religion, and (3) the tendency to subordinate ethics to religion and the inconsistency to which it leads. The result of such dialogues with philosophical theology is the impossibility of appealing to religious justifications of ethics, which inevitably leads to the impossibility of appealing to religious justifications of the content of legal orders, thus concluding that there is no natural law of religious imprint.