Deception and Temptation

The possibility, which Descartes arrives at towards the end of the first Meditation, of an "evil genius" deceiving an incorporeal entity that it has a body, makes little Theological sense.  In contrast, the prototype of Deception in the scriptures of his religious orientation is Temptation, i. e. the presentation of Evil as if it were Good.  On that basis, the concept of God as a non-deceiver is as a presenter of the Good, not, as Descartes portrays it, of theTrue.  But, the underlying problem, that he does not even begin to address, is the application of his method of Doubt to Moral judgments, en route to the establishment of at least one attribution of Goodness of which he can be certain.  In other words, in sharp contrast to The Republic and the Nichomachean Ethics, the Meditations not only enthrones Epistemology, but marginalizes Ethics, the legacy of which in subsequent Modern Philosophy is perhaps best exemplified by the currently pervasive reduction of Moral Reasoning to a branch of Modal Logic, under the rubric 'Deontic Logic'.