Theistic moral grounding can yield more robust moral agency than secular skepticism.

Evidence

Yet, the implications of adopting a divine-command theory extend even beyond the political, for in the very act of making it a starting point for reflection on the world there lies the profound assumption that this world is saturated with goodness and that everything in it is made in accordance with an ethical plan. By contrast, an epistemology that leads to skepticism is bound to land the skeptic in what Bardsley has called (as we saw earlier) a “hopeless conundrum,” without this guaranteeing a more robust moral agency than the theist would possess. If anything, a whole line of philosophical-historical analysis shows the opposite, a line that ranges from Foucault’s discursive formations to the problem of moral neutrality and Arendt’s banality of evil and moral agency’s resignation to bureaucratic and other forms of domination. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 516

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common secularist assumption that removing religious foundations strengthens moral critique; echoes the reader’s notes on Arendt’s banality of evil.
• DEEPTHINKING: Challenges the assumption that epistemological skepticism produces superior moral agency, marshaling Foucault, Arendt, and moral neutrality against it. The claim that theism’s assumption of a goodness-saturated world underwrites critique more effectively than skepticism deserves sustained reflection.