The Moral Gap  by John E. Hare (pages 91-2)

According to Kant, Spinoza will constantly experience the lack of fit between what virtuous people deserve in the way of happiness and what they in fact get, namely ‘all the evils of want, disease, and untimely death, just like the beasts of the earth’. One commentator, Alan Wood, says, ‘It is discovered at once that . . . the world seems not to reflect in any way the good man’s striving to bring about goodness in it.’

This looks like empirical evidence that the highest good in the less ambitious sense is not actual. It is also evidence that the highest good in the more ambitious sense is highly improbable. Kant’s solution to the antinomy (between what people deserve and what they receive) is to to bring in the possibility that the relation between virtue and happiness is ‘mediated by an intelligible Author of nature’. There cognition of this possibility allows him to deny the claim that we know that the highest good is impossible. The antithesis goes beyond the limits of human knowledge.

Sophocles was notorious in Athens for his piety; he was entrusted with the sacred snake of Asclepius during the great plague. Our failures to understand what is happening to us do not license the conclusion that the impact of chance is uncontrollable. Kant’s argument is for a Sophoclean humility in what we claim to know. He rejects the inference from our limitations to the denial of a moral order. He is limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith. But given the moral need to believe in the highest good, the structure of his conclusion is like the conclusion of the ontological argument, that if God’s existence is possible then it is necessary.49 In the present case, the necessity is moral. If it is possible that we are in the hands of Providence, the argument is that we are morally required to believe that we are.

Kant claims that postulating the existence of a good, just God is the only way to solve the antinomy. A defence of this would require looking at other possible solutions, to see if they can be rejected. I have not done this, and will not do it.What I do think I have done is, first, to defend the claim that there is an antinomy here that requires solution. If I am right, and if Kant’s proposal does solve it, then(if we do not want to postulate the existence of God) we will have to show either that his postulate is unacceptable on grounds independent of the antinomy, or that there is a solution of the antinomy that does not require the postulate. Second, I think I have given an argument for the conclusion that perseverance in the moral life requires what I have called, in Kant’s phrase, ‘moral faith’. This moral faith can be defined as the trust that things are so ordered that my future wellbeing is consistent with my trying to live a life that is morally good.

To put this the other way round, it is the trust that I do not have to do what is immoral in order to enjoy future well-being. Moral faith then requires to this extent a belief in a moral order. It does not require, at least not without additional argument, belief in a moral orderer. But believing in a moral orderer is one way to accomplish belief in a moral order. A moral argument for the existence of God would have to examine whether there are other ways to accomplish the same result.