[lit-ideas] Re: Inner Moral :Law
- From: John Wager <johnwager@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:13:41 -0500
Eric Yost wrote:
Veronica wrote about Japanese TV: I found this quite interesting, in
that the lessons of morality are not based on a religion, and
certainly not the Judeo Christian version.
Eric: That's central to the _Euthyphro_ stuff. Socrates shows that
belief in the gods (or God) need not be central to knowledge of
morality or quality.
It shows that Ivan Karamazov may have been mistaken. God may (in some
fictive modality) be dead, yet everything is NOT permissible.
The existence or nonexistence of God need NOT be foundational to a
rational morality. That seemed like a good point to debate.
The whole issue gets a bit more complicated, though. St. Augustine, a
respected figure in both Catholic and Protestant circles, claimed that
all humans could know what was moral without any religious faith at
all. He thought that one could not DO what was right without such
faith, though. This complicates matters because many religious
believers claim that beliefs about abortion, which non-believers might
see as a religious belief, are in fact non-religious beliefs that "all
humans" should recognize as wrong, following Augustine. If the
religious right DID think that somehow faith were necessary for
understanding the difference between right and wrong, it would be more
difficult to hold non-believers responsible for their actions under laws
that religious believers would want to be based on what the believers
see as the morality that "all humans" should recognize, but that
non-believers might say were particular religious beliefs.
In Catholic circles, this distinction usually takes the form of some
kind of discussion of "natural law," while in Protestant circles this
distinction turns out to be based on something like conscience or
intuition of the good. But both camps would agree with the basic idea
that everybody should know what's right and what's wrong without
bringing religion into the picutre.
As a concequence, establishing the independence of the "knowledge of
moralty" from religious belief would not do much to settle the current
conflicts between the religious right and the rest of the world.
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