[lit-ideas] Re: T'AINT FUNNY, MCGEE

  • From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:06:11 -0800

Julie writes:


In the absence of religion, where is an
generally decided on moral value to come from?  The inherent human  instinct?
Consider this. People have done the vilest things in the name of religion. This 
is simply a fact. Where, then, does the notion that such things were vile come
from? 'Well, they misinterpreted what God (or the gods) wanted humans to do.'
Yet why the urge to say this? Why not simply say, 'They have a religion, and
the tenets of that religion tell them to do what they do'? 'But what they do is plainly wrong, so there's either a moral defect of some sort in their religion, 
or they've misinterpreted the gods' instructions.' At some point, the brute
notions of right and wrong will either be grounded in religion or they won't.
If they're grounded in religion, they will either--as in an imagined case in
which humans are painfully sacrificed--be morally assessable, or they won't. If they are, the assessment will either begin from another religious point of view 
(Unitarians would probably consider the painful sacrifice of human beings
wrong) or from elsewhere. And so on until we reach bedrock. However, if the
'bedrock' is (some) religion, it will still always be possible to evaluate the
tenets and precepts of that religion from 'outside.'
If the answer to a moral complaint about the teachings of a certain religion is 
that those who interpret its teachings in a certain way have got it wrong (so
that it's just a mistake to see that religion as e.g. requiring painful human
sacrifice), such an answer would seem to require another moral point of view
upon which the complaint and this answer both depend.

We might do a slow reading of the Euthyphro.

Robert Paul
The Reed Institute



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