Shawlands Academy
RMPS Higher
Morality in the Modern World - Area One
Morality in the Modern world
AREA ONE: The Relationship between Religion and Moral Values
The plan : in this section you will study
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Euthyphro 9a-10b “Are actions ‘good’ simply because the
gods command them or do the gods command certain actions because they are ‘good’?”
Possible Relationships between Religion and Moral Values
Autonomy
Moral values are independent of religious belief.
1) Human reason guides moral decision making.
2) Heteronomy Moral values are grounded in religious belief.
3) Religious belief, authority and tradition are important guides in moral decision making.
Guiding Principles
• The interpretation of sacred writings guided by faith, tradition and/or reason
•The Golden Rule (in both religious and non-religious contexts)
• Human Excellence or Virtue (Virtue Ethics)
• Consequences (Utilitarian Ethics)
• Duty and Reason (Kantian Ethics)
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Shawlands Academy
RMPS Higher
Morality in the Modern World - Area One
Introduction :What is Morality ?
Task One
Answer the following questions (truthfully) and give reasons for your answer
1. You withdraw money from your bank account for the deposit on a flight ticket to see a sick relative abroad. The bank teller gives you £500 instead of £50. It will show only as £50 withdrawal on your account. You do not realise the mistake until you get home. What do you do and why?
______
2. The student you sit next to in Maths is terribly upset. In a moment of desperation they confide in you that they were involved in a vicious drunken gang attack upon a stranger last night. They are terribly upset but swear you to secrecy. What would you do?
______
3. You have left your bag in the last classroom and the teacher is on a break (a rare occasion) so she gives you the classroom keys. You catch sight of the prelim paper from a subject you are really struggling with. No one is a round and it is clear you could have a quick browse of the exam paper without being caught? What would you do and why?
______
In Area One we must look at 4 guiding principles which help us make moral decisions.
Think about the examples of ethical decisions above and try to define the following guiding principles (Clue – read the plan again)
1. Religion (Heteronomy)
______
2. Human Excellence or virtue (Autonomy)
______
3.Consequences (Autonomy)
______
4.Duty and Reason (Autonomy)
______
Definitions
Heteronomy
______
Autonomy
______
One way to understand the difference between heteronomy and autonomy is to consider Plato’s discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma.
Firstly consider some difficult questions about who is moral and where does morality come from
Answer the following questions. Give one reason for your answer.
1. Should religious people have higher moral standards than non - religious people?
______
2. Where do the standards for religious people come from?
______
3. What problem does the fact that there is more than one religion pose for morality?
______
4. Are religious people more consistent in their morality than people who do not believe in God?
______
Every single one of us has to make moral decisions - it is a part of daily life.
However, it is probably true to say that one of the features of being a religious person is that you have a consistently observed set of moral standards. You stick to these through thick and thin and they guide you through life’s moral puzzles. Being ‘religious’ implies that you are also moral, but does being moral also imply that you have to be religious? Can you have morality without religion, or religion without morality?
The answers to the questions above will depend on whom you ask. A follower of a religion might well say that you need the structure and meaning of a religion behind any moral decision, while someone who is not religious would most definitely say that you could live a moral life without any reference to religion at all. Must the answer to this be ‘either/or’, or isn’t it as clear-cut as that?
Key Question: Does morality need religion in the same way that religion needs morality?
Euthyphro Dilemma - Plato
The dilemma arising out of these questions can be found in a piece of Greek philosophical writing known as Euthrypho’s dilemma
The dilemma is found in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, in his Last Days of Socrates. Socrates is in trouble. He’s been stirring up the young people of Athens with troubling questions. Outside the court where he’s about to be tried, he has a conversation with a young man called Euthyphro. Socrates asks Euthyphro what he thinks holiness is and this leads to a conversation which went something like this.
It is important to note here that the word holy is also to be taken to mean right – what is good
Euthyphro: What is holy is that which the gods like and what is not holy is that which they do not like.
Socrates: But the gods disagree about so many things. They don’t all like the same things. So what is holy or not can’t be the same for all of them.
Euthyphro: Perhaps, but surely they would all agree that killing a man is wrong.
Socrates: Have you evidence for this?
Euthyphro: What’s holy is what all the gods approve of and what’s unholy is what they all disapprove of.
Socrates: Ah, but is what’s holy approved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it’s approved?
Socrates has cleverly turned the argument on its head – turning it into a chicken-and-egg problem. Do the gods call something right because it is in itself right, or is it right only because they say it is?
We will examine this dilemma in 2 stages
1. Is something good because God Commands it?
This position assumes that a moral action is one that is willed by God. He is the source of morality and humans act morally when they fulfil God’s will obediently. A moral law is made right when it is a divine command. The God who commands this moral law is omnipotent creator of moral standards and without him there would be no right or wrong. This places God clearly above morality and it is under his control.
Problems with “Is something good because God commands it – Divine Command Theory “
a) If God commands something us this sufficient ground to say that this is moral? It has the effect of making moral law arbitrary since it depends upon God’s whims so if he commanded that all blue eyed people be killed would that make it morally right to do so?
b) Can humans always correctly interpret what they believe God is commanding them? If we say no to the above example because we know that God in his wisdom would not command such a thing then we would be saying that killing all blue eyed people is wrong in itself and God would not command this. This means that God is not all – powerful but subject to the laws of reason which humans also share. Gods’ power is therefore limited by reason which means that God too must be limited.
c) What happens if we do not have a command that directly applies to the situation? Religious leaders suggest that would extrapolate from the information that we have already.
How would we work out what Christians should do on the issue of euthanasia, an issue that does not appear in the Bible?
d) Does this mean that anything and everything that God commands is a moral law?
Exodus
e) What about all the people who do not believe in God? They still make judgements concerning right and wrong which they believe to be reliable. A non – believer must be able to be moral without consciously deriving their morality from God.
f) If moral behaviour is motivated by fear of God’s punishment then is this not rather questionable. Surely people should obey god out of love not fear.
Donkey
2. God commands that which is already good.
This second position also assumes a link between God and morality but suggests that moral values are not established by God’s will. He operates according to moral laws already in place in the universe. The moral laws already exist and God approves of them.
Problems with”God commands that which is already good”.
a) God is limited by laws of morality. He is reactive ( ) rather than proactive ( ). God responds to the laws rather than sets them.
b) We must wait for God to reveal what is moral by commanding it. He is the channel through which moral values are passed down to human beings.
Euthyphro dilemma expanded
This philosophical problem gets right to the heart of the question, ‘Are things right or wrong in themselves or are they only right or wrong in relation to the wishes of the gods (or God)?’
Do the gods[1] call something right because it is in itself right, or is it right only because they say it is? The implications of this for how you live your life are very serious because it means that your moral decisions can either be absolute or relative to the decrees of a god (or the gods) – for example:
Suppose you are standing guard over a suspected child-murderer while waiting for the police to arrive. You have a gun. You are a devoutly religious person. Suddenly you hear a voice from the heavens. ‘This man is worthless – shoot him.’ Everything you have ever been taught and believed says that killing is wrong, but you are absolutely convinced that the voice is the voice of your God. What do you do?
Now suppose, just as you’re struggling with your decision, the world leader of your faith arrives on the scene to tell you that he has had a message from God which says that this man must die and you have been chosen to carry out the sentence right now. What do you do?
Now change the whole scenario from standing with your gun over a child-killer to standing next to someone at the bus stop with a gun in your pocket.
The issue is clear, and is a version of Euthyphro dilemma. Once a God (or gods) decrees that something is right, does it become right – or are some things wrong no matter what God or the gods think of it?
Are there any things which are absolutely wrong no matter what, or is everything subject to the whims of whatever god you happen to follow? History is full of people who have done something that would be considered bad, but who did it because they genuinely believed that it was sanctioned by their religious belief and therefore by their own God or gods – their god thought it was right therefore it was right.
Absolute, relative, arbitrary
Euthyphro’s dilemma takes us further still. If something is wrong, no matter what, then we refer to this as an absolute. Many people think that killing is absolutely wrong – including many religious people. Some religious groups, like Christian Quakers, believe that this should lead to a life where killing is renounced and so they will be conscientious objectors in a war and live a life of non-violence or pacifism. Similarly, the Hindu concept of ahimsa relates to living a life which causes the minimum of suffering to other living things. This has one of its ultimate expressions in the life of Jain monks who live a life which has the avoidance of harm to all things at its core.
However, many religious people do take part in wars and they do support things like capital punishment
Some wars have had religion as there cause? Name 3
Quite simply, for many religious people, morality is not absolute, it’s relative. This means that while there are general principles which in almost all cases should be adhered to, there are inevitably exceptions to this rule where the circumstances demand it. For example, although just about all religions believe that killing is wrong in principle – they would accept killing where it is done out of necessity in order to avoid a greater harm. So, for example, if you had the means to kill a man who himself was about to kill twenty people, then not only is it something you can do even if you normally think killing is wrong – in such a case it is something you probably should do. But does that make it right?
There are some religious people who might agree that it does, some who would not agree, and some who would simply say that the action itself is never right, though it might be necessary. In short, for a religious person it might sometimes be right to do something which is wrong without that turning the wrong thing into the right thing!
So most religious people would probably accept that moral principles can be absolute, but that moral actions can be relative to the situation in which we have to move from principle to practice. However, the answers even from within a religion are not always straightforward.
That said, most religious people would not accept the notion of an arbitrary approach to moral decision-making – and almost certainly not that their God could act in an arbitrary way about morality. That’s why the person standing at the bus stop in the example above should be very dubious about the voice of God telling him to shoot the person next to him in the queue. Religious people would be right to expect some kind of consistency in the direct and indirect teachings of their faith about right and wrong. A religious person would probably therefore be right to doubt what they thought they were hearing from their God because it would be so out of step with everything else they had learned about their God’s views on killing. They would also have to presume that their God always acted for the good.
These are the kind of points Socrates was really trying to make. For him, the gods sometimes acted in arbitrary ways. Perhaps they would think something was right today but wrong tomorrow – and the Greek gods weren’t just as godly as you might expect. They often used humans for their enjoyment – setting them tasks or putting obstacles in their way for their own pleasure – in many ways they acted like humans with all the problems and dramas of any modern TV soap. So perhaps they weren’t the most reliable judges of what was and wasn’t right.