"Ethics and Religion"

 In "Ethics and Religion; Ethical Relativism” the author objects to the widely held belief that morality depends on religion and notes that such a belief “often proves to be a major obstacle to benefitting fully from serious ethical reflection.”  I take it that the gist of his argument is: we should NOT not value the study of ethics on the grounds that religion can already tell us what is good, because religion (in this particular example, the kind of religion that claims “it is good because God says it is”) provides us with an entirely arbitrary moral code which is “problematic” and “disconcerting.”

            In the following paragraphs I will attempt to discredit the aforementioned argument in various ways. First, I will point out how the belief that things are good because God wills them may not necessarily leave the believer with an entirely arbitrary or disconcerting sense of morality. And second, even if such a belief were to result in an arbitrary, disconcerting, or challenging (for reasons the author provides which I will touch on) moral code, this does not discredit the truth of the moral code.

            The author provides an example, stating that God’s ability to will what is good suggests he could change his mind every other day on whether murder is evil which would disconcertingly make good and evil arbitrary. The author fails to acknowledge that those who believe things are good because God wills them, typically also believe in an omniscient and benevolent God. To such a religious person, it is implausible to suggest that an all knowing God would “change his mind” because that suggests he could at one point have been wrong. Deeply embedded in many monotheistic religions is the idea that God has a complete and thorough understanding of all that occurs and therefore whatever he wills would not feel arbitrary or random at all. Furthermore, the image of a God who arbitrarily wills things to be right or wrong seems incongruent with a God who is all loving and considerate of his people. And even if it were congruent, the arbitrariness would not be disconcerting for someone who believes in God’s benevolence.

            Later, the author argues against “making morality depend on religion” because of logistical problems such as the existence of conflicting religions, the inability to decipher which one to believe, etcetera. Although I agree that relying on religion for morality is problematic in that it places a large and potentially impossible burden on people to figure out which religion, if any, is correct, I do not think this actually discredits any of the religions. It may be true that it is simply too hard to use religion as a means to figuring out what is good for an array of reasons- there are conflicting views, some religions rely on faith, some people are put off by religious institutions. However, I think it is interesting to point out that these problems merely make the use of, say Christianity, inconvenient, inaccessible, non-universal, but are not evidence for how Christian morality is actually untrue. This point does not disprove the authors overall claim that religion should not replace the study of ethics when trying to answer how to live our lives, but I still think he would do well in pointing it out in order to not appear as if he is attempting to disprove the possibility of a true morality that results from religion.