3 Max Maxwell — "The Moral Bankruptcy of Faith"

The essay's argument (as the text is taught — read your assigned copy closely): faith — accepting moral or factual claims on religious authority rather than evidence and reason — is presented as morally bankrupt: a person who does right because a text or a god commands it is not doing moral reasoning at all, merely obeying; morality grounded in command can justify anything commanded (including atrocity); and faith's demand for unquestioning belief disables the moral faculties it pretends to crown. The essay's target is faith as a moral method, not believers as persons. The debate it joins (map it for exams): Plato's Euthyphro dilemma (is the good good because the gods command it, or do they command it because it is good? — the oldest shot at divine-command ethics); reason vs revelation in ethics (Kant: moral law within; the natural-law tradition — Jurisprudence Unit 3.1); and secularism's question: must the state's law rest onpublic reason rather than any faith? — Rawls's political liberalism (Jurisprudence Unit 5.1's Rawls). Law connection: the secular justification of state coercion (Nepal's secular Constitution — the word chosen deliberately in 2015); religious law vs state law in history (the dharmashastra-to- codes arc of your Nepali History course); freedom of religion as belief, bounded by public-reason law. Critical-thinking task (Unit 1–3 applied): reconstruct the essay in…