Ethical frameworks and atheism
Ξ December 13th, 2007 | → Comments Off | ∇ Theology |
This was spawned in a thread about EU policies regarding stem-cells. I’m rather proud as I think it’s one of my more coherent efforts. I write in italics, a regular member of the board, unruled, is bold
I don’t see how people can say that religion and ethics can be seperated. My religion forms my ethics. After all, what is religion if not a guide for how to live your life?
well, I have a very easy answer to that.
I do not believe in any god or religion…. but (obviously) I still believe in ethics, and the immorality of some actions. I think these two are very much seperate.
if I would have had to take your statement literally, it would mean that non-religious people would have no ethics… no sense of humanity, which is rediculous if you think of it.. if you catch my drift :hmm:
No, if you have no religion then it very much has an impact on your ethics – you simply aren’t bound by the constraints that bound people of various religions. If you don’t believe in a higher authority, then much more is permissible because you aren’t playing within anyone’s rules. That isn’t to say that atheists and agnostics can’t be perfectly civil people, but their ethical framework is simply not bound in the same manner as the religious.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always felt that athiests and agnostics operate in sort of a self-delusional, jury-rigged ethical framework. It comes down to a basic definition of right and wrong, good and evil. How do you define those? To the Christian, they’re defined by God, because God defines reality. This makes sense within the Christian framework – God is the prime mover, that which created the universe but not of it. The irreligious, on the other hand, have a harder time. What is “good”? Let’s take for instance, the simple concept of murder. No caveats, just the common, general concept of murder. Why shouldn’t you do it? Because it’s “wrong” or “bad”? What makes it so? Because you’re causing someone to suffer? Why is that wrong of bad? Because it would create anarchy and chaos if everyone were free to murder people. Why is anarchy and chaos bad? Because I don’t like it. Why is that wrong or bad? (You see, this is where the arbitrary, jury-rigged part comes in) Because my pleasure is as good a motivating factor as anything. Well, what about people you enjoy murder, what makes them wrong and you right? Because it would cause chaos. Why is that bad again? Well, because most of the people in the world don’t like it. Well, most of the people in the world believe in God, why shouldn’t we base our ethical code off that? . . .
And the conversation goes like that, around and around. Many atheists and agnostics argue that their ethics can define good and evil very similarly to their religious counterparts without the need to base it on a higher power, but invariably, if you really dig to the basis of the ethical code, it can’t be justified as anything other than arbitrary (that’s where the self-delusional charge comes in). But even so, regardless of their logical viability, your religious beliefs very much influence your ethical code. It’s just more straight-forward with the religious – they have guiding principles that form them. So when you say that a Christian should separate their ethics from their religion, I really don’t see how you expect that to happen.
oh sure, Im not saying religion doesn’t have an impact on ethics… but, they are definitely not as one.
as for not playing by anyones rules if one doesn’t believe, that is far from true. We have many social, and legal laws that we must obey in our societies. When you violate such a law, you are, eg. thrown in prison.
I don’t believe that the average person that is christened, (or whatever) obey the laws much more then an average person that isn’t. I think you will only see that kind of obedience from the extremely religious people.
moreoever, I do not think that many people take the 10 commandments, for example as strict laws.. but more as guidelines..
I think the concept of ethics is a stumbling block here. Ethics is the rational, logical framework one uses to make moral choices. As I illustrated previously, when one makes a moral choice, ethics answers the question “Why is this the ‘right’ choice? What makes the alternative the ‘wrong’ choice?”
Now, you make a valid point in that many people don’t put a great deal of thought into their ethics. Most people are just trying to get by from day to day. You say that many people adhere to social and legal laws because to do otherwise is to incur a penality that many do no want to endure, eg. thrown in prison. But that doesn’t necessarily make it right.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran priest in Germany in the 1930′s. He was an intellectual in addition to being a member of the clergy, and was well regarded internationally. By the mid-30′s, he and a number of his associates saw the writing on the wall with the rise of the Nazi party. Many of his German associates had fled abroad, and he had many open invitations to come to America to avoid the dark times Germany was entering into. But he stayed, to fight against the evil he saw infecting his country. He went so far as to become a double-agent in WWII, feeding false information to the Germans. He was eventually discovered and in 1943, sent to prison. Two years later, as the remanants of the German war machine was crumbling around him, Hitler, in one of his final acts, order Bonhoeffer tried and executed.
Bonheoffer was a man of great moral courage, and I think most people would agree that what he did was a “good” thing. Now, many would make a different choice than Bonheoffer, but does that mean that his risking his well-being (a risk that turned into a sacrifice) can’t be considered “good” by those people? Are they hypocrites? If not, does that mean that ethics can transcend the need to preserve one’s own happiness – indeed even their own existence?
So then, what are “ethics”? You’ve articulated a position that I believe to be less defensible than you think it is. When I say atheists aren’t bound by the same rules that are associated with, say, Christianity, we can use your example to illustrate that, taken to it’s logical conclusion, you aren’t.
Now, you say that “We have many social, and legal laws that we must obey in our societies. When you violate such a law, eg. you are thrown in prison.” The implication here is that so long as you do not violate the law, social or legal, what you are doing is perfectly fine, but if you violate either of them, it then violates your ethical code. This is the thinking that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned the West against after fleeing from what he termed the “lawlessness” of Soviet Russia:
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.
. . .
And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency —- all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man —- the master of the world —- does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)
Furthermore, such thinking does not dictate how one who is not constrained by social or legal “laws” should act. Was Stalin wrong, being that he dictated what the “laws” were? Was it possible for him to be wrong?
To a Christian, the answer is obvious and easy – of course he could be and indeed was wrong, he violated the moral code set down by the ultimate authority, that is, God. To an atheist, Stalin’s actions are harder to condemn from a rational framework – what authority is there to appeal to? No, to an atheist, they must come up with a way to condemn Stalin without resorting to appeals to a moral code granted by a higher authority – they must create one. And at that point, isn’t that the same as what Stalin did? Again, you can refer to my “dialogue” (if calling it such isn’t too presumptious) in my previous post.
Ethics is the application of reason to morals in order to create a logical framework. It’s one thing to say, “Thou shall not kill.” It’s another to apply that to a situation where the moral clarity of the dictate becomes slightly less so (ie, “It it moral for me to kill someone trying to kill me?”). That is why we have ethics – to bring reason to morality. And that is why you cannot seperate religion from ethics – one’s religious beliefs necessarily create the bedrock from which one’s ethics are formed. Just because not everyone can act 100% rationally all the time doesn’t mean that ethics founded on an ideal are irrelevant – it simply means that we’re all human.
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