Transformed By Faith

Faith and Philosophy 36 (1):4-32 (2019)
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Abstract

Appealing to self-interest is a common way of justifying the rationality of religious faith. For instance, Pascal’s wager relies upon the expected value of choosing the life of faith being infinite. Similarly, many contemporary arguments for the rationality of faith turn on whether it is better for an agent to have faith rather than lack it. In this paper, I argue, contra Pascal, that considerations of self-interest do not make choosing faith rational because they fail to take into account the way the self is transformed by faith.

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Rebecca Chan
San Jose State University

Citations of this work

Salvaging Pascal’s Wager.Elizabeth Jackson & Andrew Rogers - 2019 - Philosophia Christi 21 (1):59-84.
Pascalian Expectations and Explorations.Alan Hajek & Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Roger Ariew & Yuval Avnur (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Pascal. Wiley-Blackwell.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Naming and Necessity: Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium.Saul A. Kripke - 1980 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
The sources of normativity.Christine Marion Korsgaard - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Onora O'Neill.
Naming and necessity.Saul Kripke - 2010 - In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language. New York: Routledge. pp. 431-433.
The Constitution of Selves.Marya Schechtman (ed.) - 1996 - Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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