Religion and Morality

Morality has a long association with religion, and on most ethics panel there's a minister.  So, it’s natural to ask whether morality essentially depends on religion.
Some philosophers (e.g., Anscombe) have argued as follows:

1. Contemporary morality uses the notion of moral obligation.
2. The notion of moral obligation presupposes that of moral law.
3. But a legalistic system of morality presupposes a law-giver.
4. However, laws and norms of human society and individual conscience won't do because they are often wrong, absurd and idiosyncratic, as history amply shows.
5. Hence, the only plausible law-giver left is God.
6. So, contemporary morality entails a divine law theory of obligation in which moral laws are divine commands.

If the previous argument is correct, atheism precludes the possibility of morality; in other words, a secular morality is impossible, a conclusion sometimes drawn by theists
1. The basic meta-ethical issue of Divine Command Theory deals with

•  the relation between God's commands and morality.
•  the role of God in moral knowledge
•  the role of God in moral motivation.

i. The relation between God's commands and morality:

•  Right actions are right just because God approves of them and wrong actions are wrong just because God disapproves of them (theological voluntarism). Then, God is a legislator of morality; he decides what's right or wrong in the same way in which the state decides what's legal and what's illegal.
  Problems:
1. divine commands run the risk of being arbitrary.
   NOTE: one cannot say that murder is forbidden by God because it’s wrong, if being wrong amounts to being forbidden by God.  That is, on what basis does God decide what's wrong?  Obviously, not on a moral basis.
2. When religious people say that God is moral, they want to convey more than a simple truism.  But this is possible only if God follows the moral law, which, therefore, cannot depend on his will or promulgation.
3. If God commanded to kill the innocent, would murder still be wrong?  On mount Moriah, was Abraham a murderous (i.e., a morally wrong) religious fanatic?  Many would answer “yes” to both questions. The reason is that many think that the moral qualities of an action are supervenient on its non-moral ones, that is, they depend on objective features of the action itself, not on whether god happens to like it or not. In fact, one might hold that moral truths, like the laws of arithmetic, are necessary, and therefore not subject to divine power.
4. Theological voluntarism looks suspiciously like subjectivism on a grand scale.
5. Divine commands may be morally binding only if they are recognized as such. But the existence of more than half a billion atheists indicates that god has failed to publicize properly. Since such failure on god’s side is impossible, morality must be independent of divine commands.

• God approves of right actions because they are right and disapproves of wrong actions because they are wrong (theological objectivism).
  Then, God is a mere transmitter of values (and not a very good one at that), much in the same way in which a math teacher is a transmitter of math which, however, do not depend on her.
  Problem: Is theological objectivism sufficient to base a religious morality?  If God is a mere transmitter, what's essentially religious about morality?

Note that this does not exclude the fact that we may have special duties toward god because he’s our maker, he’s perfect, he owns our abode, and so on, and that consequently He may have moral grounds for asking us to behave thus and so because of our relation to him. Of course, this also entails that God had moral duties toward us.

ii. The role of God in moral knowledge
One might hold that morality is religious in the weak sense that God is the only transmitter of morality.  On this view the dependence of morality on religion is epistemological.  True, there are atheists who seem to know that murder is wrong, but they don't fully know it; they are like non-physicists talking about atoms: they may get it right, but they are unable to justify or warrant their beliefs.
Problem: This view is hard to support.  That certain actions are known to be morally wrong seems the starting point of morality. Presumably, one’s ground for one’s belief that murder is wrong is not worse than the one a religious person could offer or for the claim that god exists.

iii. The role of God in moral motivation.
One might argue that the presence of a God who will punish and reward us in the afterlife on the basis of our deeds is a necessary component of moral motivation. The issue is complicated because the question “why be moral?” is difficult to answer. 

The question is, of course, a challenge to justify one’s adherence to morality. One must show that well informed rational beings would choose to behave morally.  One can think of two types of justification:

1. internal (validation). This is within ethics itself: we have a good moral reason to be moral, and that's all that is required

2. external (vindication). Here one is asking:  why should the moral way of life have priority over other conflicting ways of life (religious, self interested etc.)?  An external justification addresses a global issue:  why should I be moral at all?  Brief reflection shows that this can be an impossible question to answer if it requires to show that morality should have priority even from the standpoint of another, and opposed, way of life.  For example, if self-interest and morality do come into conflict, it would be unreasonable to demand that the defender of morality show that from the standpoint of self-interest we should be moral.  Or, if religion and morality conflict (think of Abraham on mount Moriah), it would be absurd to require a religious justification for why one ought to choose morality rather than religion. Of course, one might believe, like Clarke, that morality and religion never conflict, and that when they seem to disagree one only has to look more carefully to find agreement, but that may be wishful thinking. 

Since typically morality is thought to conflict with self-interest, here’s an argument stating the problem:

I. One has a reason to behave morally only if doing so is in one’s self-interest

II. At times behaving morally conflicts with self-interest

III. Hence, at times one has no reason to behave morally

Criticism of (I):

· It embodies a request for vindication. But some philosophers, e.g., Kant, have rejected this as misguided, claiming that the answer to “Why should I be moral?” is “Because it is moral.” Asking for another justification betrays a misunderstanding of the very nature of morality. Morality is not prudence.

· It’s not clear why only self-interest would provide a reason for action. Why should other-regardedness be irrational? What are the criteria of rationality here?

· Maybe the evolutionary foundation for prosocial behavior and (probably) for morality provides a warranty for morality

Criticism of (II):

· Morality is its own reward. For example, self-sacrifice ennobles one (Aristotle), or immorality deforms one’s character (Plato), etc. Doing wrong may provide some advantage but thwarts our nature preventing us from achieving true happiness (vs. mere contentment).

· Behaving morally is always advantageous. Here things are easier for theists. For example, Paley thought that since God exists, wants us to be moral, and will punish and reward accordingly in the next (eternal!) life without fail, real self-interest and morality never diverge.  Or, one might argue, as Hume did, that behaving immorally while pretending to be moral (the obvious case in which immorality seems advantageous) is psychologically too demanding and ultimately leads to unhappiness. Or that giving in to temptation even once makes it easier to give in again, which increases the chance of getting caught and punished.

However:

1. At a minimum one might argue that acting out of fear has little or no moral worth.  As Kant puts it, threats extort but fail to impose moral obligation.
2. Knowledge that divine justice will be brought about makes some forms of self-sacrifice, e.g., laying down one’s life believing that there’s no afterlife, or going though hardship believing that no recompense will follow, impossible
3. As a matter of fact, many atheists behave morally without any fear of punishment in the afterlife.

2. Problems with sacred texts and their teachings

• Which texts or oral traditions constitute God's message to us? The Hebrew   Bible? The Christian Bible? If so, which version?  The Koran?  The Book of   Mormon?  Some other text in some other culture?
• How does one decipher God's will from the Scriptures?  This presents two types of problem:
• The Bible is a very old text, the compositional details of which are very often obscure and whose interpretation is often controversial. Compare this with the US constitution, written in relatively clear English about 200 years ago by people who have left letters and documents on the details of its composition and the politics of its adoption. And yet its interpretation is far from obvious, as the nasty political battles for each new supreme court justice and the split decisions of the court indicate. That scriptural interpretation could reasonably be any easier defies belief; in fact, one should expect it to be much harder.
• Scriptural divine behavior, what God does, commands, and allows, is at times immoral and occasionally grossly so, involving, for example, wholesale slaughter of children and pregnant women (Hosea 13:16), slavery (Lev, 25:44-46) the beating of slaves to death as long as they survive for two days (Ex. 20:20-21), stoning (Lev 24:16; Numbers 15 32-36), and genocide (Josh. 1-12), not to mention the various prophecies in Revelation. Hence, one is left with either a grossly immoral god, or with the need to explain away the relevant texts. Since we are dealing with morality, the former is not really an option. But then we are left with the task of interpreting religion in the light of morality.  That is, we use morality to determine the boundaries of what "proper" religion should say, an enterprise that seems reasonable only if  we ourselves are already prepared to assess moral standards, at least partially independently of religion. 
• Since sacred texts are very often opaque, it's very tempting, and historically very frequent, to read them so as to have God say whatever we want God to say, which is not only blasphemous but all too often also has given, and perhaps still gives, religious sanction to sexism, racism, intolerance, and other immoral dispositions adopted, perhaps in good faith, by those who have religious authority at the time.
• Since Scriptures are obviously errant in factual matters and some of its teachings are grossly immoral, it’s reasonable to conclude that they were not divinely inspired but rather written by men who today would be considered racist, sexist, and genocidal ignoramuses. So, what reason do we have to accept what they say as binding just because they say it?

3.  So, bracketing religious considerations far from threatening ethics is often a precondition for doing ethics reasonably.