Religious Belief, Motivation and Moral Commitment

There are two different approaches followed by moral philosophers regarding the motivational role of moral belief. Having restricted the motivating reasons to belief, the internalists consider the relationship between belief and ethical commitment necessary and believe that moral judgmentis inherentlymotivating. While theexternalists by regarding the belief and desire as reasons for action,they believe that the relationship between belief and actin is not necessary. Therefore, the weakness of will is possible, that is, the agent can acts against his best judgment. Now we put religious belief instead of moral judgment and ask about the motivational role of religious beliefs, that is, what is the relationship between religious beliefs and moral commitment? Are religious beliefs sufficient for moral action? Are they inherently motivating? Considering the impact of religious beliefs on committing ethical acts as necessary or contingent may have various and valuable consequences for the believers in different religions. The purpose of this article is to investigate such psychological relationship between religion and moralityand to seek the motivating influence of religious beliefs. The article tries to analyze the relation between the religious belief and ethical commitment and responds to this question that whether religious beliefs are the necessary and sufficientcondition for committing moral action, or they are just necessary conditions or neither necessary nor sufficient.If they are essential, what other elements can be complementary to religious beliefs? In other words, what other elements can substitute religious belief? To answer these questions, the present study will firstly investigate the stimulating influence of ethical beliefs and then will analyze the two approaches of internalism and externalism in ethics and finally will conclude that the approach of externalism is much closer to the reality. The article then will explain the four different kinds of relations between religion and morality including semantic, ontological, epistemological and psychological relations. Here, after describing different kinds of relations between religious belief and ethical commitment, it is concluded that the question of stimulating influence of religious belief is included in psychological relation between religion and morality. Finally, after confirming the motivating power of religious beliefs for action, it is concluded that there is no necessary relation between them and that faith can substitute belief. Thus, as ethical beliefs cannot be sufficient conditions for act, religious beliefs even if it is assumed asa necessary element, cannot be sufficient for committing ethical practices. The article, in its last part, after analyzing the meaning of faith and inspecting different moods of relations between faith and act, concludes that real faith can have a necessary relation with ethical commitment. Accordingly, the weakness of faith by influencing on the person's volition, will lead to the person's quitting of the ethical act, as moral philosophers believe that the weakness of willcan get the person to quit acting. The exposition of this issue has been mostly based on the Muslim and western philosophers such as Audi and 'Allāmah ṬabāṭabāῙ.