Swinburne's respect account

According to Richard Swinburne,

This brief argument for religious engagement conflates two distinct considerations: that God deserves worship as a species of gratitude for the good He has done for us, and that God deserves worship as a way of showing respect for the excellence He bears. Let's bracket the first consideration, since both considerations might function as sufficient motivations for the behaviours we describe as ‘worship’, and they are both (very plausibly) compatible. We don't need to have exactly one account of what worship is, nor of why it is obligatory. Manslaughter, for example, is both illegal killing, and negligent killing; and it is impermissible (as a species of negligence) both because it takes away a life and because it causes suffering. But we do need at least one account, which successfully shows that worshipping God would be obligatory.Footnote ⁴ Let's call the view that we owe God worship because we owe excellent people respect, and He is maximally excellent, the ‘respect account’; I will articulate it more precisely in due course.

There are everyday cases Swinburne can appeal to which motivate his first claim: in a culture like ours, it would be wrong to ignore an acquaintance one passes by; this wrongness stems from what they demand from us as persons. When hiking through the wilderness, it would (I believe) be wrong for us to ignore a lone stranger one passes by for the same reasons; whereas in some bustling cities the culture determines that we can discharge our obligation to acknowledge other persons merely by striving not to touch their skin when jammed against them on the Tube. This example of contextual variation, and how pluriform our obligations can be in light of a general obligation to respect people, will become important below. Just because there is no ‘perfect obligation’ to greet strangers in London does not mean there is no ‘imperfect obligation’ to acknowledge (to demonstrate respect for) things, owing to their possession of the perfection of personhood, in general. That imperfect obligation imposes on me the perfect obligation to greet strangers if I move from London to, for example, a village in the Brecon Beacons.

Swinburne is also claiming here that my obligations to show respect to others (and, presumably, to cultivate that respect if I do not have it yet) can alter, given differences in their character. We can begin motivating this by considering the difference in respect we owe to humans as opposed to animals. I have an excuse for lateness to a social meeting if I stop to greet a colleague in the quad, but not if I stop to play with a squirrel.

Theism and the ‘uniqueness thesis’

Bayne and Nagasawa give two objections to the above account which intend to show that it conflicts with a constraint on accounts of worship's nature and norms which they call the ‘uniqueness thesis’. Their first argument rests, I suggest, on interpreting the uniqueness thesis as a claim about the nature of worship rather than a postulate of theism. They point out that

And then consider the following case:

Interestingly, where Swinburne presents his argument for worship being obligatory, and hence motivating religious engagement, he writes ‘The first religious reason for following a religious way is to render proper worship and obedience to whatever God or gods there are’ (Swinburne (Reference Swinburne2005), 168, my emphasis). The implication is that Swinburne would indeed regard both God and God* as worthy of worship. Perhaps Swinburne's instincts are not representative of the typical theist's. Or, perhaps there are ways of making Bayne and Nagasawa's uniqueness thesis come out true in ways which do not put ‘possible world polytheism’ at odds with it.

Suppose that, as a matter of contingent fact, only God is maximally excellent. Then, indeed, God is the only appropriate object of worship, as a matter of contingent fact; the uniqueness thesis comes out true alongside the respect account. But, of course, the claim that God is as a matter of fact the only maximally excellent being is part of monotheism, not part of an analysis of worship.

We could attempt to uphold their objection by strengthening the uniqueness thesis: perhaps we should interpret it to mean that ‘necessarily, God is the only appropriate object of worship’. This strengthened claim about who is the proper object of worship can still be made true by the addition of classical theism to an account of worship which does not include uniqueness, rather than requiring an analysis of worship which assumes only one proper object of worship whether or not theism is true. How? Because, on classical theism, God is necessarily, not contingently, the only maximally excellent being.

So the possibility of ‘possible-worlds theism’ does not show that the respect account is false, but only that, given the respect account, if theism were false, either no or multiple beings would be worthy of worship. If theism is true, and the respect account is true, uniqueness is true. But we should not think the respect account false on the assumption that uniqueness must be true independently of theism.

Is worship sui generis?

Bayne and Nagasawa appeal to the uniqueness thesis in another way. When considering holiness, an example of a divine perfection which might merit worship on the respect account, they worry that

This criticism seems to misrepresent how Swinburne, at least, is thinking of the connection between worship and the kinds of excellence which merit it. It presupposes that worship is a sui generis, ‘all-or-nothing’ obligation merited by a determinable property borne by the object of worship. On this assumption, that is, whatever degree of holiness (or wisdom, or love) one possesses, one merits a similar response from others; that response is worship. But on the respect account, the property grounding worship is determinate – not just excellence of whatever degree, but maximal excellence – and that worship is the extraordinary way we show the extraordinary respect merited by that particular determinate property. Since creatures do not (and never will) have this determinate property, they are not worthy of worship just because God is.

Let's consider a parody of this argument. I am obliged to give of my disposable income to those who are lacking their basic needs. I can do this in (at least!) two ways: I can give a pony (£25) or a monkey (£500). To tighten the parody's resemblance to its target, let's verb these nouns: I can satisfy the obligations of charity by (inter alia) monkeying or ponying someone. If I meet someone (Bob) who is £500 short of their basic needs, I will be obliged to monkey him. But if I meet someone (Annie) who is £25 short, I will be obliged to pony her.

Bayne and Nagasawa's argument against the respect account is akin here to arguing that Bob's poverty cannot oblige me to monkey Bob, because if it did, then I would be obliged to monkey Annie, which I am clearly not. But, the parody continues, if a lack of basic needs were what merits charity, and monkeying is a form of charity, then I would be obliged to monkey her, since Annie lacks her basic needs. So monkeying (giving someone £500) cannot be a form of charity. Here's the legend: ‘charity’ is respect, ‘poverty’ is excellence, ‘monkeying’ is worship, and ‘needing £500 to start flourishing’ is maximal excellence.

My parody does not need an equivalent of the uniqueness thesis to run: if it were a valid reductio against monkeying being a form of charity, it could run on our intuition that we are not obliged to give Annie £500. Likewise, the uniqueness thesis is more than is needed in their argument against the respect account: intuitively, we are not obliged to worship saints, so if the respect account implies we are, it must be false.

Now, we can see how this argument against helping Bob is invalid: on the correct analysis of how the perfect obligation of monkeying relates to the imperfect obligation of charity, there is no implication that we must give Annie what our intuitions say we need not give her. And so we can see how, on a more faithful articulation of Swinburne's respect account, Bayne and Nagasawa's reductio is also invalid. Our obligation to worship God arising from a more general obligation to respect excellence does not entail that we have an obligation to worship less excellent beings, but only that we have an obligation to respect them.

Does adding the uniqueness thesis make the reductio valid? No – because, when theism is true, the respect account does not imply that anyone but God is worthy of worship. If worship is the kind of respect owed to the maximally excellent, and only God is maximally excellent, then however holy, or wise, or just creatures are, short of perfection, they will not be worthy of worship.

The argument does operate, however, if worship does not enter into a continuum with respect in the way the respect account claims.

The denial of this continuum is implied by another criterion for successful analyses of worship which Bayne and Nagasawa endorse and appeal to. In criticizing a gratitude-based account, they write that it ‘runs the risk of “domesticating” worship – that is, of presenting it as continuous with attitudes it is appropriate to take to mundane entities’ (306). They endorse Mark Wynn's reading of the religious phenomena surrounding worship, according to which worship ‘has no real parallel in our relations with created things’ (Wynn (Reference Wynn1999), 144–145, endorsed by Bayne & Nagasawa (Reference Bayne and Nagasawa2006), 306).

What motivates postulating this ‘gulf’ between worship, on the one hand, and creatures, on the other? It cannot be the uniqueness thesis alone. In connection with their endorsement of Wynn's ‘no parallel’ claim, Bayne and Nagasawa cite worship's ‘moral, aesthetic and noumenal components’ (Bayne & Nagasawa (Reference Bayne and Nagasawa2006), 306).

That the ‘moral’ components would be missing on the respect account seems to depend on whether or not we are morally obliged (or otherwise motivated) to respect people. If we are, then worship does not need to be sui generis to be morally salient. As long as respect is obligatory (or morally motivating), worship will get its moral components from being a case of respect. Bayne and Nagasawa (Reference Bayne and Nagasawa2006, 307) deny that respecting people is obligatory, and Danaher's argument against the respect account requires the same denial, as I hope to show below. Let's defer the question of whether respect is obligatory for now.

Why might the ‘continuity’ respect account exclude the aesthetic and noumenal components? Why would the sui generis alternative guarantee their inclusion?

Let's consider the first question. An answer hinges on the phenomenology of respect. Wynn suggests that paying people their respects might seem ‘a wearisome business’ (Wynn (Reference Wynn1999), 145). Our activities of inter-human praise and acknowledgement are ubiquitous and hence quotidian, whereas practices of worship seem designed precisely to cultivate extraordinary affective responses. There are, indeed, contexts in which we might find the activities involved in respecting people wearisome, and we take for granted much of the social discourse in which we pay each other respect, and feel little if anything while doing it. But the same is true for worshipping God, where committed religious practitioners are concerned. Sometimes religious agents engage in worshipping activities and are committed heart and soul to the enterprise, and reap the phenomenological ‘rewards’, but sometimes we just ‘phone it in’, distracted and ill-prepared. On the other hand, there are ‘good cases’ in the phenomenology of respect: I suggest that those of us who have been in love, or followed a leader, or emulated a role model, will be able to report creaturely analogues of the aesthetic or noumenal. The connection between worship and respect cannot legitimately be broken by appealing to only the ideal cases on the one hand and only the bad cases on the other. The quotidian nature of inter-creature respect, in comparison to the extraordinary affective phenomenology we take to be paradigmatic of worship, can be accounted for partly by the ubiquity of our interactions with creatures. It can partly be accounted for by the difference in degree between the moral significance of showing respect for a good creature and a maximally excellent being, since a rightly ordered agent will presumably appreciate that moral difference phenomenologically.

Now for the second question. Why would the ‘no parallel’ claim explain the aesthetic and noumenal components?

This question is really rhetorical. The ‘no parallel’ claim does not secure the aesthetic and noumenal components of worship. This is because any account must draw parallels with inter-creature phenomenology in order to make clear how it secures these components, just as with the moral component. Wynn's own account is an example of this inevitability. Wynn attempts to respect the ‘gulf’ he sets up in developing an alternative to Swinburne's gratitude account: he proposes that worship is a species of nature contemplation rather than gratitude. For Wynn, worshipping God is appropriate because God pre-eminently instantiates all the perfections found in creation: ‘in worship the believer relates herself to the marvel of existence, by placing herself in wonder and adoration before the one in whom all existence is contained’ (Wynn (Reference Wynn1999), 151).Footnote ⁵ But this account, too, relies on a continuum between our aesthetic and noumenal reactions to creatures’ perfections and delicate givenness, and our reactions to God in worship. In order to unpack his account of worship, Wynn describes conservationists’ reactions to flora as illustrative analogues of the worshipper's attitude to God (ibid., 152).

The difference between God pre-eminently possessing all the perfections, and creatures dependently possessing limited perfections, is no less a difference in high degree and hence kind than the difference between God's maximal excellence and creatures’ limited excellence. The ‘no parallel’ claim seems to be a constraint on accounts of worship which misinterprets the data, insofar it threatens to rule out any intelligible account of worship.

Phenomenologically, there is indeed a great difference between inter-creature respect, and creature–God worship. But this can be accounted for without insisting that worship is sui generis. If Swinburne's position is our paradigm of an account which posits ‘continuity’ between worship and inter-creature attitudes, it's worth noting that he still writes of a qualitative distinction between them – worship is ‘a peculiar respect’ – arising out of God's greatness being ‘incomparable’ with any creature's excellence (Swinburne (Reference Swinburne1993), 298). ‘Incomparable’ has to be read emphatically, not literally, here: clearly we can compare God's excellence to creatures in all sorts of ways, and Swinburne does so.Footnote ⁶ But God's excellence is very, importantly, different from creatures’ virtues. The limit case is different from the ordinary case; and the limit case of respect will be as different from the ordinary case as maximal excellence is from the kind of virtue and probity we find in those creatures we look up to and admire.

Benjamin Crowe's criticisms of Bayne and Nagasawa can be understood as attempts to articulate this tension between similarity and difference, while conceding in principle Wynn's ‘no parallel’ claim. Crowe appeals to Patristic authors to stress the extent to which God's goodness exceeds ours, and hence the difference between the respect we owe Him and the respect we owe each other. But, conceding the ‘no parallel’ claim, he interprets Aquinas as claiming that, even if God's goodness is continuous with creatures’, it only merits our love, whereas His ‘excellence’, which ‘is such that it cannot be shared with anything else’ (Crowe (Reference Crowe2007), 472–473) is what merits our worship. This interpretation invites the reply that we have lost our grip on what it is about God which grounds obligations to worship Him (Bayne & Nagasawa (Reference Bayne and Nagasawa2007), 478).Footnote ⁷ We know that what we call ‘excellence’ in creatures motivates respect. But if whatever we call ‘excellence’ in God is something else, we don't know that that feature motivates any response at all.

The solution is to interpret that classical theology in a way which affirms that analogies are not to be treated as equivocations. We should deny the ‘no parallel’ claim; or, rather, we should notice that the right version of it will be made true by the difference between God and creatures, without the worship-theorist needing to do ‘extra work’. There's a continuity between other activities and attitudes arising from respect, and the activity of worship and the ‘peculiar respect’ it manifests and teaches. And there is also a gap between how worship ‘feels’ when we get it right, and how rightly ordered respect for creatures ‘feels’. But this arises from the gap between God and creatures, not from the nature of worship, or respect, itself. And since the gap admits of continuity, Bayne and Nagasawa's second argument against the respect account will not succeed.

The respect account, defined

While I have unpacked Swinburne's germinal respect account to show how it can resist criticisms, I have not yet lain it out explicitly. For clarity's sake, the respect account I advocate operates this way.

Both actions and attitudes might be obligatory. Some actions might be obligatory insofar as they are ordinary manifestationsFootnote ⁸ of obligatory attitudes. When we encounter persons (or perhaps anything relevantly person-like, such as animals), we are obliged to hold an attitude or attitudes we will describe as ‘respect’. If we think only actions, but not attitudes, can be obligatory, because we cannot choose what attitudes we have, this might translate into an indirect obligation to cultivate a disposition to hold such (an) attitude(s).Footnote ⁹

For the purposes of exposition so far, I have appealed solely to respect; and I have suggested that this term is expansive enough to provide for an account of a phenomenon as diverse as worship. But for some of us the term may still pick out something too narrow or ‘thin’. If we find the term has too narrow a meaning as we understand it in ordinary language, we can consider the term as used in this ‘respect account’ as carrying a special stipulative sense such that it covers a family of related reactive attitudes to perfections, such as admiration or awe, which plays the relevant role in our account. A natural concern is that using the term with this special sense means that the respect account is really a disjunction of alternative accounts no one of which is a plausible account of worship, and why worshipping God is obligatory, on its own. But insofar as these reactive attitudes are in fact related, this concern should be allayed.

Ordinarily, agents who hold such an attitude will show that attitude in a range of activities the details of which are subject to culture and circumstances: let's call such actions and activities ‘showing respect’. We can thereby naturally speak of an obligation to show respect to people. We can speak even more simply of an obligation to respect people, and mean by this expression that we are obliged to carry out actions which show respect, as well as meaning that we are obliged to bear or cultivate respect. So when I use ‘respecting people’, I will mean all these.

The strength of our obligation to respect someone, and the degree or kind of respect we owe them, can vary with their characteristics. So, there will be many different types of activities and actions of showing respect corresponding to how these different degrees and kinds of respect will be manifested by ordinary agents.Footnote ¹⁰ So, insofar as we can naturally speak of an obligation to show respect, we can naturally speak of our obligation to praise changing in its particular demands, in response to the object which demands our respect. Consider the differences between politeness, friendliness, praise, and veneration.Footnote ¹¹ In the limit case, where the object is maximally excellent, the degree or kind of respect we owe will manifest itself in a correspondingly distinctive form of praise. And this we call ‘worship’.

If we are concerned that scaling degrees of respect owed will too easily mean that obviously unreasonable acts will be demanded of us, we can think of our imperfect obligation to respect people as a pro tanto obligation among other pro tanto obligations. For example, we might be generally obliged to punish wrongdoing in proportion to how wrong some crime was, but never obliged to carry out acts of punishment which would violate a criminal's human rights, because punishing wrongdoing stands as one pro tanto obligation among others such as respecting human dignity. Likewise, the fact that our obligations of respect scale (not necessarily monotonically) with the perfection of their objects does not mean that these obligations will necessarily dominate other obligations to deliver counter-intuitive results.

As mentioned above, the actions which satisfy our respect obligation will be manifold, and might frequently depend on local customs. The degreed picture only complicates this, but we can give some illustrative examples of actions which show different degrees of respect. We might be polite, for example, to a stranger we sat next to on public transport, about whose virtues we know nothing – other than that they are a person and so deserving of our politeness. But suppose that we recognize them from the newspaper as the fellow who saved the child drowning in the river, or the lady who put in extra shifts to treat casualty patients after a building fire: then we might congratulate and wish them well in whatever way our culture deems appropriate.

If we can imagine how such behaviour would ‘scale up’ to become an appropriate response to a perfect being, the respect account might not only explain and vindicate religious worship, but also allow us to comparatively evaluate different activities purporting to be obligatory because instances of worship. For example, James Rachels has argued that theism is false because it entails that we owe God worship, but worship entails unconditional obedience, which we cannot owe to anyone since the autonomous nature of moral obligation means obedience can only ever be owed conditionally on its helping us satisfy some other obligation we take on for ourselves (Rachels (Reference Rachels1971), 333–335). To simplify Rachels's account, this offer of obedience is the fundamental action which lies behind the various ritual activities we think of as instances of worship. But if the respect account is true, and we would never offer unconditional obedience out of respect no matter how much respect were owed nor how perfect the object, then the offer of obedience may not be what is happening in these rituals if they are instances of worship; or, if they must be understood as offers of obedience, then they will not be good acts of worship on the respect account. On the other hand, when we consider those religious, ritual activities which, before analysis, we took intuitively to be acts of worship, we can see how they might be actions which manifest an extreme form of respect. Litanies of praise, and acts of sacrifice or gift-giving, are readily interpreted as extreme cases of our congratulation of, and friendliness to, the local hero met on the train. Given the complexity of the ways in which we show our attitude of respect, the respect account provides a framework for interpreting and evaluating the acts of worship we have inherited, while also understanding why ‘genuine’ acts of worship would be obligatory.

An issue in interpreting the phenomenology of worship which is natural to return to at this point is that it often seems grounded in aspects of a relationship which concern two people's history of interaction. One example would be Swinburne's suggestion that worship is connected to the gratitude apt to a giver of past favours. Another would be the idea that we owe the attitude of devotion or loyalty to those to whom we have made a past commitment, and that worship is at least connected to these attitudes. Two options are available here. One is to treat these other aspects as grounding alternative, mutually compatible accounts of worship, any of which might be sufficient to morally motivate someone's worshipping another in limit cases. The difficulty this option faces is in explaining how these are all accounts of the same thing: we will be left wanting an explanation as to why the relevant collection of religious practices seems aptly described by one word, rather than constituting a motley disjunction. The second option is to suppose that respect owed might be diverse in kind as well as degree, and differ not only due to degree and kind of excellence of the respected party, but also due to differences in the nature of the relationship between the parties. So the difference in attitude I owe my father, as opposed to an equally wise and caring teacher, could be construed as a difference in degree or quality of respect; but this difference is due to aspects of our relationship which are independent of his excellence relative to me or that other teacher. This option supposes a fundamental connection between these various attitudes of positive regard, but this supposition does not strike me as counter-intuitive. In other words, the respect account can be stretched to operate as a ‘master account’ of worship, if having one is a theoretical desideratum. Again, theism can supply the lemmata which explain why God is uniquely worthy of those action-types whose tokens manifest maximal gratitude or maximal devotion, which we pick out by ‘worship’. For now, however, let's bracket these complications to focus on allaying criticisms of the ‘simple’ respect account.

The respect account and Gwiazda's threshold account

To discern remaining reasons for rejecting this account, we need to consider Gwiazda's proposed neighbour to the respect account above, and how that respect account escapes Danaher's criticism of Gwiazda's account.

Gwiazda's defence of the respect account appeals to this ‘limit case’ picture described above, but without making the explicit commitments concerning general obligations to respect people which I have drawn from Swinburne. This is a consequence of how Bayne and Nagasawa have shaped the debate: Gwiazda accepts their use of the uniqueness thesis and the ‘no parallel’ claim, and so is mainly concerned to secure the conclusion that ‘maximal-excellence accounts [of the grounds of worship] can ground an obligation to worship God without lesser degrees of excellence grounding lesser obligations to worship lesser entities’ (Gwiazda (Reference Gwiazda2011), 522). My respect account, in contrast, allows lesser degrees of excellence to ground lesser obligations to show respect to lesser entities, but calls the actions satisfying those lesser obligations ‘showing respect’ rather than ‘worship’.

Gwiazda's solution is to suppose that the obligation to worship is a ‘threshold obligation’. In some circumstances, he argues, we are obliged to carry out an action, but only because some relevant degreed properties have passed a threshold degree. Before, when they lie below that threshold, we do not have the obligation. His example is a parent's obligation to feed her child: she can permissibly deny him food if he's misbehaving, until his hunger passes a certain threshold, at which point she is obliged to feed him (ibid.). In the worship case, the perfections of a person can reach to any but the maximal degree, and we are not obliged to worship them; but at the maximal degree, they pass the threshold and we are obliged to worship that person. Because there is no obligation at all, of any kind, below the threshold, there is no risk of the obligation to worship God, because He is perfect, entailing an obligation to worship creatures because they are good, so generating a reductio or violation of uniqueness of the kind discussed above.

Gwiazda's solution avoids generating the result that creatures would be worthy of worship, but does this by obscuring the analogue between creaturely and divine respect which made the respect account morally intelligible in the first place. We are left with a sui generis obligation to worship a maximally excellent being. Danaher picks up on this omission by pointing out that threshold obligations are a species of perfect obligation – and actions are only perfectly obligatory if they are ways of satisfying an imperfect obligation. The reason the parent becomes obliged to feed her child when the child is too hungry is because she already had a standing obligation to care for the child. When the child is not too hungry, the perfectly obligatory act which satisfies her duty of care is to discipline the child; but the specific act which will satisfy her imperfect obligation of care changes to feeding when he is too hungry (Danaher (Reference Danaher2012), 474).

In the worship case, however, Gwiazda has not provided for an imperfect obligation which becomes ‘crystallized into a concrete course of action’ (ibid.), a perfectly obligatory act, in the context where we encounter God. For Gwiazda's account to work, Danaher argues, there needs to be an imperfect obligation to worship already in place; then it ‘crystallizes’ into the perfectly obligatory act of ‘worship God’ in response to God's threshold-crossing maximal excellence. Danaher points out that we would need to supply another account of worship to show that such an imperfect obligation exists: ‘thresholds could only be appealed to if there was pre-existing agreement [between worship advocate and critic] to the effect that worship was imperfectly obligatory or supererogatory’ (ibid.).

To clarify what Danaher is getting at, let's return to the case of Bob and Annie. I have an imperfect obligation to give charitably, to provide for the basic needs of those who cannot supply themselves. Suppose I have plenty of money myself: if I come across Bob, my imperfect obligation imposes on me a perfect obligation to give him £500; when I encounter Annie, to give her £25. These are both different action-types – we called them ‘monkeying’ and ‘ponying’ respectively. The point Danaher is making is that monkeying is a threshold obligation, certainly – it binds me only if someone needs £500, but not when they need less – but if there were no general obligation to give to the needy, then neither would monkeying be obligatory, even when I come across Bob. And on Danaher's account, there seems to be no such general obligation.

The respect account I have developed satisfies Danaher's demands, however; there is an imperfect obligation which can generate the perfect obligation to worship God, but that general obligation does not generate the absurd consequence that we should worship any creatures. It supposes, instead, only that there is an imperfect obligation to show respect. And this imperfect obligation, when we encounter God, generates a perfect obligation to worship Him.

Respect is obligatory enough

The way to resist the respect account is to deny that showing respect is obligatory. Then worship cannot be obligatory. First, the critic might argue that showing respect is only indirectly obligatory – it is morally motivated only because showing respect typically satisfies some other, more fundamental obligation. But that more fundamental obligation does not generate respect obligations in the specific case of our relationship to God. Or, second, they might suggest that showing respect is merely supererogatory, so that worship, by extension, is merely supererogatory.

There are elements of both strategies in Bayne's, Nagasawa's, and Danaher's criticisms. The former write that ‘Most of us recognize various other persons as our moral superiors, yet few of us suppose that we have obligations to worship such persons. Perhaps we ought to recognize their moral superiority and aspire to emulate their behaviour, but these attitudes seem to fall short of worship’ (Bayne & Nagasawa (Reference Bayne and Nagasawa2006), 307).

Treating this quotation as an example of the first objection to the respect account, we can understand them as claiming that recognizing and emulating moral superiority are indirectly obligatory, as ways of helping us to satisfy the general, imperfect obligation to cultivate virtue. But, so the response continues, the act of worship does not help us to satisfy that imperfect obligation; so worship is not obligatory.

The defender of traditional norms of worship should reply that we can give an account of worship as the extreme case of any or all of these other indirect obligations. Unless there is a reason, specific to God's case, to think that recognizing His excellence, and seeking to emulate Him, would fail to satisfy our obligation to grow morally, worship will thereby be obligatory, since on the respect account, worship is (at least) the form or manifestation of moral recognition appropriate to the perfect being. It will be indirectly obligatory – but indirect obligations are obligations nevertheless.

There are other ways to interpret this passage. Suppose that Bayne and Nagasawa accept that recognizing and emulating moral superiority are obligatory. If they are directly obligatory because they are instances of respect, then worship will be obligatory as an instance of the high respect we owe to the perfect being. If they are indirectly obligatory as manifestations of respect, then worship will again be obligatory as a manifestation of our respect for the perfect being. If they are directly obligatory in and of themselves, we can notice that they come in degrees and kinds, just as respect does, and so we can generate from them structural analogues to the respect account, giving a nearby alternative account of worship which makes it obligatory because recognition and emulation of the morally superior are obligatory.

I suggest that, given the continuum between ordinary respect and respect for God set out in the respect account, the burden of proof is on the critic as to why the propriety of our ‘reactive attitudes’ concerning praise and blame should be confined to the creaturely case and not extended to the divine case.

Now let's consider the second line of attack: that showing respect is merely supererogatory. The propriety of praising the excellent stops short of the obligatory.Footnote ¹² In that case, worship will not be obligatory just by being a species of showing respect. Bayne and Nagasawa's distinction between the thesis that worshipping God is reasonable, and the thesis that worshipping God is obligatory, raises this concern. They concede the former thesis, but add that:

But if motivations of this kind are ever to rationally dominate other alternative actions, admiration of excellence – respect – must at least be supererogatory. If an action-type is supererogatory, however, certain extreme situations can arise in which actions among a narrower sub-type would be perfectly obligatory. Consider again our case with Bob and Annie. Perhaps giving to charity in general is not obligatory, but supererogatory; but this supererogatory motive could still provide for perfect obligations. It seems implausible to suppose that someone with plenty of money, meeting Bob or Annie face-to-face, knowing about their circumstances, would not be obliged to give them what they need to start flourishing.

As Danaher admits:

The respect account can appeal to this admission to generate a strong case that worship is obligatory even if respect is generally speaking only supererogatory. If we can find just one case where some instance of showing respect is obligatory because the object is more excellent, relative to a case where they are merely supererogatory, then worship will be obligatory – even if that obligation can be dominated in turn by other obligations bearing on the putative worshipper.Footnote ¹³ Such cases abound in our social practices, at least if we take them at face value. The fastest three runners deserve their medals, and it would be shameful not to reward them;Footnote ¹⁴ the runner who comes in last is worthy of ‘mere’ respect for being a competitor. Praising students who pass exams seems morally worthwhile; but we would be remiss to do nothing special to honour the top students.

If we criticize such examples by insisting that everyone ‘deserves’ respect in the strong sense the victors deserve respect, then we appear to have accepted that respect is obligatory. Then worship will be obligatory. Alternatively, the critic can insist that these practices all serve ulterior motives. But by that point, I suggest, the burden of proof has shifted from the defender to the critic. The respect account appeals to our ordinary moral intuitions and simply extends them to the divine case.Footnote ¹⁵