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Religion and Ethics
Assignment
Required Resources
Read/review the following resources for this activity:
Textbook: Chapters 3, 4
Lesson
Minimum of 2 scholarly sources (in addition to the textbook)
Instructions
Review the following ethical dilemmas:
John Doe has decided to clone himself. He is sterile. He cannot find anyone to marry him. He wishes to have children. He knows that he will not be able to love a child that is adopted or not connected directly to him biologically. He will be making use of a new procedure that involves taking his skin cells to produce a twin. The twin starts out as an embryo and grows into a child. The child in this case will have the same genetic information as John Doe. John Doe and his child will be twins.
Jane Doe is eighteen. For as long as she can remember she has been sexually attracted to other females. Her parents belong to a religion that has a religious text stating that God forbids one to be a lesbian. This religion goes on further to say that lesbians will be punished in the afterlife. Jane Doe is debating whether she should tell her parents about her sexual attraction. She has not yet decided if she should come out to her parents and live as a lesbian now that she is a legal adult.
Joe and Mary are a couple. Before becoming sterile, they had a child. This child died of a rare disease. Joe and Mary miss their child terribly. They have heard that there is a new IVF procedure that can ensure that they can have another child. However, their religion forbids using IVF.
Use the resources assigned for this week and additional research,
Select two of the situations above and then address 2 of the following:
What is the relation between ethics and religion? Formulate and investigate the relation.
For each case, determine the ethical path of conduct. Then, determine what paths of conduct would be unethical
For each case, what would an emotivism say to appraise what you determine is the ethical form of conduct?
For each case, would a natural law ethicist agree with what you say is the ethical form of conduct? Why or why not?
Articulate, explain, and evaluate in each case an approach that makes use of divine command ethics.
Requirements
Length: 2-3 pages (not including title page or references page)
1-inch margins
Double spaced
12-point Times New Roman font
Title page
References page (minimum of 2 scholarly sources)
Grading
This activity will be graded based on the rubric provided.
Outcomes
CO 2: Examine the relation between ethics and religion via a valuation of divine command and natural law ethics as ways of determining the morality of actions
CO 3: Argue the importance of subjectivity in ethics and interpret the significance of emotivism as an explanation of moral propositions.
Due Date
By 11:59 p.m. MT on Sunday
Rubric
ETHC445 Week 2 Assignment Rubric – 100 pts
ETHC445 Week 2 Assignment Rubric – 100 pts
Criteria Ratings Pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeSituation/Question Selection
20 pts
Selects two of the situations and thoroughly answers two of the questions.
17 pts
Selects two of the situations and answers two of the questions.
15 pts
Selects either two of the situations and answers only one of the questions or selects only one situation but answers both questions.
12 pts
Selects only one scenario and one question.
0 pts
The student does not identify any policy areas.
20 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeAssignment Content
40 pts
Addresses all aspects of the questions, applying professional knowledge, and research regarding weekly concepts.
34 pts
Addresses most aspects of the questions, applying professional knowledge, , and research regarding weekly concepts.
30 pts
Addresses some aspects of the questions, applying professional knowledge, and research regarding weekly concepts.
24 pts
Minimally addresses the questions, applying professional knowledge, and research regarding weekly concepts.
0 pts
No effort
40 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeProfessional Communication
20 pts
Presents information using clear and concise language in an organized manner (minimal errors in English grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation).
17 pts
Presents information in an organized manner (some errors in English grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation).
15 pts
Presents information using understandable language but is somewhat disorganized (some errors in English grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation).
12 pts
Presents information that is not clear, logical, professional or organized to the point that the reader has difficulty understanding the message (numerous errors in English grammar, spelling, syntax, and/or punctuation).
0 pts
No effort
20 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeSource Integration
10 pts
Paper includes reference to 2 scholarly sources and properly integrates the sources.
7 pts
Paper includes reference to 2 scholarly sources but does not properly integrate the sources.
0 pts
Paper does not make reference to a scholarly source.
10 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeAPA Format
10 pts
Paper meets all source requirements, and is properly formatted in APA style throughout (i.e. title page, spacing, font, in-text citations and references.)
8.5 pts
Paper meets all source requirements, and is mostly properly formatted in APA style (i.e. title page, spacing, font, in-text citations and references.)
7.5 pts
Paper meets all source requirements, and is somewhat properly formatted in APA style (i.e. title page, spacing, font, in-text citations and references.)
6 pts
Paper fails to meet source requirements and/or is improperly formatted in APA style throughout
0 pts
No effort
10 pts
Total Points: 100
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CHAPTER 3 
Subjectivism in Ethics
Take any [vicious] action. . . . Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. . . . You can never find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of [disapproval], which arises in you, toward this action. Here is a matter of fact; but ’tis the object of feeling, not reason.
DAVID HUME, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE (1739–1740)
3.1. The Basic Idea of Ethical Subjectivism
In 2001 there was a mayoral election in New York, and when it came time for the city’s Gay Pride Day parade, every single Democratic and Republican candidate showed up to march. Matt Foreman, the director of a gay rights organization, described all the candidates as “good on our issues.” He said, “In other parts of the country, the positions taken here would be extremely unpopular, if not deadly, at the polls.” The national Republican Party apparently agrees; for decades, it has opposed the gay rights movement.
What do people around the country actually think? Since the year of that parade, 2001, the Gallup Poll has been asking Americans their personal opinions about gay and lesbian relations. In 2001, only 40% of Americans considered gay relations to be “morally acceptable,” while 53% viewed them as “morally wrong.” Twenty years later, these numbers were dramatically different; in 2021, 69% saw gay relations as “morally acceptable,” whereas only 30% deemed them “morally wrong.”
People on both sides have strong feelings. As a member of Congress, Mike Pence spoke out against gay marriage on the floor of the House of Representatives. Calling traditional marriage “the backbone of our society,” he warned America that “societal collapse” always follows “the deterioration of marriage and family.”
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Pence is an evangelical Christian. The Catholic view may be more nuanced, but it agrees that gay sex is wrong. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, gay people “do not choose their homosexual condition” and “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” Nonetheless, the Catholic Church does not allow openly gay men to serve as priests. This, the Church believes, is not unjust because “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and “under no circumstances can they be approved.” So, gay people must conceal and resist their desires if they want to be virtuous.
What attitude should we take? We might think that gay relations are immoral, or we might find them acceptable. But there is a third alternative. We might believe:
People have different opinions, but where morality is concerned, there are no “facts,” and no one is “right.” People just feel differently about things, and that’s all there is to it.
This is the basic idea behind Ethical Subjectivism. Ethical Subjectivism is the theory that our moral opinions are based on our feelings and nothing more. As David Hume (1711–1776) put it, morality is a matter of “sentiment” rather than “reason.” According to this theory, there is no such thing as right or wrong. It is a fact that some people are gay and that some people are straight, but it is not a fact that being gay is morally better or morally worse than being straight.
Of course, Ethical Subjectivism is not merely an idea about same-sex relations. It applies to all moral matters. To take a different example, it is a fact that over half a million abortions are performed in the United States each year. However, according to Ethical Subjectivism, it is not a fact that this is morally acceptable or morally wrong. When pro-life activists call abortion “murder,” they are merely expressing their outrage. And when pro-choice activists say that a woman should have the right to choose, they are merely letting us know how they feel.
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3.2. The Linguistic Turn
What’s startling about Ethical Subjectivism is its view of moral value. If ethics has no objective basis, then morality is all just opinion, and our sense that some things are “really” right or “really” wrong is just an illusion. However, most of the philosophers who developed this theory did not focus on its implications for value. Toward the end of the 19th century, professional philosophy took a “linguistic turn,” as philosophers began to work almost exclusively on questions of language and meaning. This trend lasted until around 1970. During that time-period, Ethical Subjectivism was developed by philosophers who asked such questions as: What exactly do people mean when they use words like “good” and “bad”? What is the purpose of moral language? What are moral debates about, if they’re not about whose opinion is (really) correct? With questions like those in mind, philosophers proposed various versions of the theory.
Simple Subjectivism. The simplest version is this: When a person says that something is morally good or bad, this means that he or she approves of that thing, or disapproves of it, and nothing more. In other words:
And similarly:
Let’s call this version of the theory Simple Subjectivism. It expresses the basic idea of Ethical Subjectivism in a plain, uncomplicated form.
However, Simple Subjectivism is open to a serious objection: that it cannot account for moral disagreement. Consider our previous example. Gay rights advocate Matt Foreman believes that being gay is morally acceptable. Mike Pence believes that it is not. So, Foreman and Pence disagree. But consider what Simple Subjectivism implies about this situation. When Foreman says that being gay is morally acceptable, the theory holds that he is merely saying something about his attitudes—he is saying, “I, Matt Foreman, do not disapprove of being gay.” Would Pence disagree with that? No, he would agree that Foreman does not disapprove of being gay. At the same time, when Pence says that being gay is immoral, he is only saying, “I, Mike Pence, disapprove of being gay.” And how could anyone doubt that? Thus, according to Simple Subjectivism, there is no disagreement between them; each should acknowledge the truth of what the other is saying. Surely, though, this is incorrect, because Pence and Foreman do disagree.
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There is a kind of eternal frustration implied by Simple Subjectivism: Pence and Foreman have deeply opposing points of view, yet they cannot state their beliefs in a way that manifests their disagreement. Foreman may try to deny what Pence says, but, according to Simple Subjectivism, he succeeds only in talking about himself.
The argument may be summarized like this: When one person says, “X is morally acceptable,” and someone else says, “X is morally unacceptable,” they are disagreeing. Yet Simple Subjectivism implies otherwise. Therefore, Simple Subjectivism cannot be correct.
Emotivism. The next version of Ethical Subjectivism came to be known as Emotivism. Emotivism was popular during the mid-20th century, largely due to the American philosopher Charles L. Stevenson (1908–1979).
Language, Stevenson observed, is used in many ways. Sometimes we use it to make statements—that is, to state facts. Thus we may say,
“Gas prices are rising.”
“Quarterback Peyton Manning underwent multiple neck surgeries, was sidelined for a year, and then broke the record for most touchdown passes in a season.”
“Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.”
In each case, we are saying something that is either true or false, and the purpose of our utterance is, typically, to convey information to our audience.
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Yet we also use language for other purposes. Suppose I say, “Close the door!” This utterance is neither true nor false. It is not a statement, intended to convey information; it is a command. Its purpose is to get someone to do something.
Or consider utterances such as these, which are neither statements nor commands:
“Aaargh!”
“Way to go, Peyton!”
“Alas, poor Yorick!”
We understand these sentences easily enough. But none of them can be true or false. (It makes no sense to say, “It is true that ‘way to go, Peyton’” or “It is false that ‘aaargh.’”) These sentences are not used to state facts or to influence behavior. Their purpose is to express the speaker’s attitudes—attitudes about gas prices, or Peyton Manning, or Yorick.
Now consider moral language. According to Simple Subjectivism, moral language is about stating facts—facts about the speaker’s attitudes. According to that theory, when Pence says, “Being gay is immoral,” his utterance means “I (Pence) disapprove of being gay”—a statement of fact about Pence’s attitudes. Emotivism, however, believes that moral language is not used to state facts or convey information. It is used, first, as a means of influencing people’s behavior. If someone says, “You shouldn’t do that,” he is trying to persuade you not to do it; his utterance is more like a command than a statement of fact. “You shouldn’t do that” is a gentler way of saying, “Don’t do that!” Second, moral language is used to express attitudes. Calling Peyton Manning “a morally good man” is like saying, “Way to go, Peyton!” And so, when Pence says, “Being gay is immoral,” emotivists interpret his utterance as meaning something like “Homosexuality—gross!” or “Don’t be gay!”
Earlier we saw that Simple Subjectivism cannot account for moral disagreement. Can Emotivism?
According to Emotivism, disagreement comes in different forms. Compare these two ways in which people can clash:
I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy, and you believe that Oswald was part of a conspiracy. This is a factual disagreement—I believe something to be true which you believe to be false.
I am rooting for the Atlanta Braves baseball team to win, and you are rooting for them to lose. Our beliefs are not in conflict, but our desires are—I want something to happen which you want not to happen.
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In the first case, we believe different things, both of which cannot be true. Stevenson calls this disagreement in belief. In the second case, we want different outcomes, both of which cannot occur. Stevenson calls this disagreement in attitude. Our attitudes may be different even when our beliefs aren’t. For example, you and I may have all the same beliefs regarding the Atlanta Braves: We both believe that Braves players are overpaid; we both believe that I am rooting for the Braves just because I am from the South; and we both believe that Atlanta is not a great baseball town. Yet despite all this common ground—despite all this agreement in belief—we may still disagree in attitude: I may still root for the Braves, and you may still root against them.
According to Stevenson, moral disagreement is disagreement in attitude. Matt Foreman and Mike Pence may (or may not) have clashing beliefs about the facts regarding same-sex attraction. Yet it is clear that they disagree in attitude. For example, Foreman wants same-sex marriage to remain legal in the United States, whereas Pence does not. For Emotivism, then, moral conflict is real.
Is Emotivism correct? It has the virtue of identifying some of the main functions of moral language. Certainly, moral language is used to persuade as well as to express our attitudes. However, in denying that moral language is fact-stating, Emotivism seems to be denying an obvious truth. For example, when I say, “Long-term solitary confinement is a cruel punishment,” it is true that I disapprove of such punishment, and it may also be true that I am trying to persuade others to oppose it. However, I am also trying to say something true; I am making a statement that I believe to be correct. Like most people, I do not see my own moral convictions as “mere opinions” that are no more justified than the beliefs of bigots, bullies, and bumbling fools. The fact that I see things in this way, whether rightly or wrongly, is relevant to interpreting what I mean when I use words like “ought,” “good,” and “wrong.”
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The Error Theory. The last version of Ethical Subjectivism acknowledges that people are at least trying to say true things when they talk about ethics. This is the Error Theory of John L. Mackie (1917–1981). Mackie was a subjectivist; he believed that there are no “facts” in ethics, and that no one is ever “right” or “wrong.” However, he also saw that people believe they are right, and so we should interpret them as trying to state objective truths. Thus, instead of saying that Pence and Foreman are merely reporting their own attitudes (Simple Subjectivism) or expressing those attitudes, perhaps for persuasive purposes (Emotivism), the Error Theory holds that Pence and Foreman are in error: they are each making a positive claim about value—claiming that the moral truth is on their side—even though no such truth exists. Moral discussions, Mackie thought, are teeming with error.
3.3. The Rejection of Value
Moral theories are primarily about value, not language. Hence, our discussion of Ethical Subjectivism might seem to have gone off track. At the heart of Ethical Subjectivism is a theory of value called Nihilism. Nihilists believe that values are not real. People might have various moral beliefs, but, really, nothing is good or bad, or right or wrong. Earlier we applied Nihilism to the issues of abortion and same-sex relations. According to a nihilist, neither side is right in those debates, because there is no “right.”
So long as we consider only difficult or controversial moral issues, Nihilism might seem plausible. After all, we may ourselves be unsure what to think about such issues; perhaps we’re unsure because there’s no right answer? Yet Nihilism and Ethical Subjectivism seem much less plausible when applied to simpler matters. To take a new example: It is a fact that the Nazis killed millions of people based on their racial backgrounds, but, according to Nihilism, it is not a fact that the Nazis acted badly. Instead, the nihilist would say that different people have different opinions, and no one is right. You may believe one thing, but Adolph Hitler believed something else, and Hitler’s opinion was just as good as yours.
Viewed in this light, Nihilism seems absurd. Indeed, it is hard to believe that anyone has ever believed Nihilism, or at least believed it consistently. After all, every human being has moral beliefs in addition to having “subjective feelings.” Even racists believe that it would be wrong to kill them or to exterminate their race; yet those judgments also conflict with Subjectivism.
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Nihilism might be compared to another theory, which has nothing to do with ethics. According to this theory, the universe is only five minutes old. This theory denies the existence of the past—or, at least, of a past that stretches back more than five minutes. Although the theory is ridiculous, it is hard to refute. If you try to refute it by describing events that you recall happening yesterday, the reply will be that your “memories” of those events were put in your brain five minutes ago, when the universe came into being. Or, if you point to a book with a copyright date of 1740, the reply will be that this book came into existence—along with its misleading copyright page—five minutes ago. Despite these clever replies, none of us are tempted to believe such a theory.
Much the same can be said about Nihilism and Ethical Subjectivism. Those theories deny the existence of right and wrong. So, for example, they deny that it is wrong to intentionally cause severe pain to a human baby for no reason. A nihilist would simply say that the baby-torturer has his beliefs on the matter, and you and I have ours. Such a position may be hard to refute, but perhaps a refutation isn’t necessary.
3.4. Ethics and Science
If Ethical Subjectivism is so implausible, then why are so many people attracted to it? Perhaps some people haven’t considered its implications very carefully. Yet there are deeper reasons for its appeal. Many thoughtful people believe that they must be skeptical about values, if they are to maintain a proper respect for science.
According to one line of thought, a belief in “objective values” in the 21st century is like a belief in ghosts or witches or mystics. If there are such things, then why hasn’t science discovered them? Even back in the 18th century, David Hume argued that if we examine wicked actions—“willful murder, for instance”—we will find no “real existence” corresponding to the wickedness. The universe contains no such thing as wickedness; our belief in it comes merely from our subjective responses. As Mackie put it, values are not “part of the fabric of the world.”
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What should we make of this? Admittedly, value is not a tangible thing like a planet or a spoon. Scientists will never “discover” wickedness, as they might discover a new type of electron. However, this does not mean that ethics has no objective basis. A common mistake is to assume that there are just two possibilities:
1. There are moral values, in the same way that there are planets and spoons.
2. Our values are nothing more than the expression of our subjective feelings.
This overlooks a third possibility. People have not only feelings but reason, and that makes a big difference. It may be that
3. Moral truths are matters of reason; a moral judgment is true if it is backed by better reasons than the alternatives.
On this view, moral truths are objective in the sense that they are true independently of what we might believe or want. If there are good reasons against inflicting severe pain on babies, and no good reasons on the other side, then it is objectively true—and not “mere opinion”—that causing such pain is wrong.
Another line of thought takes science as our model of objectivity. And when we compare ethics to science, ethics seems lacking. For example, there are proofs in science, but there are no proofs in ethics. We can prove that the earth is round, that dinosaurs lived before humans, and that bodies are made up of atoms. But we can’t prove whether abortion is acceptable or unacceptable.
The idea that moral judgments can’t be proved seems appealing. However, as we noted earlier, the subjectivist’s case seems strongest when we consider difficult issues like abortion. When we think about such matters, it is easy to believe that “proof” is impossible. Yet there are also complicated matters in science that scientists argue about. If we focused entirely on those issues, then we might conclude that there are no proofs in physics or chemistry or biology.
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Suppose we consider a simpler moral matter. A student says that a test was unfair. This is a moral judgment; fairness is a moral idea. Can this judgment be proved? The student might point out that the test covered a lot of trivial material while ignoring what the teacher had stressed. Moreover, some of the material on the test didn’t come up in the course at all, and the test was so long that nobody could finish it.
Suppose all this is true. Further suppose that the teacher has no defense to offer. In fact, the teacher seems generally confused. Hasn’t the student proved that the test was unfair? It is easy to think of other examples that make the same point:
Jones is a bad man: Jones is a habitual liar; he enjoys ridiculing children; he cheats at cards; he once killed a man in a dispute over 27 cents; and so on.
Dr. Smith is irresponsible: She bases her diagnoses on superficial considerations; she doesn’t listen to other doctors’ advice; she drinks cheap beer before performing delicate surgery; and so on.
Joe the used-car dealer is immoral: He conceals defects in his cars; he tries to pressure people into paying too much; he runs misleading ads on the Web; and so on.
The process of giving reasons can be taken further. If we criticize Jones for being a habitual liar, we can go on to explain why lying is bad. Lying is bad, first, because it harms people. If I give you false information, and you rely on it, things may go wrong for you in all sorts of ways. Second, lying is a violation of trust. Trusting another person means leaving yourself vulnerable and unprotected. When I trust you, I simply believe what you say, without taking precautions; and when you lie, you take advantage of my trust. Finally, the rule requiring truthfulness is necessary for society to exist. If we could not trust what other people said, then communication would be impossible. If communication were impossible, then society would fall apart.
So we can support our judgments with good reasons, and we can explain why those reasons matter. If we can do all this and, for an encore, show that no comparable case can be made on the other side, what more in the way of “proof” could anyone want? Perhaps people want ethical theories to be proved experimentally, the way scientific theories are. However, proving a hypothesis about ethics involves giving reasons, analyzing arguments, setting out and justifying principles, and so on. The fact that ethical reasoning differs from scientific reasoning does not mean that ethics is deficient.
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Despite all this, anyone who has ever argued about something like abortion knows how frustrating it can be to try to “prove” one’s opinion. Yet we must not run together two things that are really very different:
1. Proving an opinion to be correct
2. Persuading someone to accept your proof
Constructing sound proofs is part of philosophy. However, philosophers leave persuasion to the pundits, politicians, and product advertisers. From a philosophical perspective, an argument may be good even if it fails as persuasion. After all, an argument may fail to persuade merely because those who hear it are stubborn or biased or not really listening.
3.5. Same-Sex Relations
Let’s return to the dispute about the gay community. If we consider the relevant reasons, what do we find? The most pertinent fact is that gay people are pursuing the life that can make them happy. Sex, after all, is a particularly strong urge, and few people can be happy without satisfying their sexual needs. But we should not focus solely on sex. Being gay is not merely about sex; it’s also about love. Gay people develop crushes and fall in love in the same way that straight people do. And, like straight people, gay people often want to live with, and be with, the person they love. To say that people shouldn’t act on their desires is thus to wish unhappiness on them. Nor can we pretend that people might avoid loneliness and frustration by choosing to become straight. People discover who they are, once they reach a certain age; nobody decides which sex to be attracted to.
Arguments against the Gay Community. Why do people oppose gay rights? Some think that gay people are “dangerous perverts.” The charge, often merely insinuated, is that gay men are especially likely to molest children. In the mid-to-late 20th century, there were several campaigns in America to get gay schoolteachers fired, and those campaigns always played on the fears of parents. Before serving in Congress, Michele Bachmann exploited this fear when she said that gay marriage “is a very serious matter, because it is our children who are the prize for [the gay] community—they are specifically targeting our children.” Such a fear, however, has never been reality-based. It is a mere stereotype, like the idea that Muslims are terrorists or that Black people are lazy. Gay people are not more likely to molest children than straight people.
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A different argument faults homosexuality for being “unnatural.” What should we make of this charge? To assess it, we must understand it. In particular, we need to understand what “unnatural” means. There seem to be three possibilities.
First, “unnatural” might merely be a statistical idea. A human quality is unnatural, in this sense, if few people possess it. Being gay would be unnatural—because most people aren’t gay—but so would being left-handed, being tall, and even being especially nice or smart or courageous. Clearly, the statistical notion gives us no reason to condemn homosexuality. Many rare qualities are good.
Second, “unnatural” might be connected to a thing’s purpose. Parts of the human body seem to serve specific purposes, and it seems wrong when they don’t or won’t. Fingers that cannot bend in order to grasp objects are arthritic; kidneys that cannot remove toxins are diseased. And so, the argument goes, the genitals serve the purpose of procreation; sex is for making babies. Thus, gay sex is unnatural because it involves using the genitals in ways that cannot produce children.
This idea seems to express what many people mean when they say that homosexuality is unnatural. Yet to condemn gay sex on these grounds would also condemn many widely accepted practices that heterosexuals engage in: masturbation, oral sex, sex using birth control, online sex, virtual sex, sex had by pregnant women, and sex involving someone who is sterile, including men who have had vasectomies and women who have gone through menopause. None of these sexual activities can result in pregnancy; thus, all might be condemned as “unnatural.” However, we needn’t do that, because this whole way of reasoning is faulty. It rests on the assumption that it is wrong to use one’s body parts for anything other than their natural purposes. And why should we believe that? The natural purpose of the eyes is to see; is it, therefore, wrong to use one’s eyes to flirt or to express surprise? The fingers are meant to grasp and poke; is it, therefore, wrong to snap one’s fingers in order to get someone’s attention? Why can’t we invent new purposes for things? The idea that things should be used only in “natural” ways cannot be maintained, and so the second version of the argument fails.
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Third, because the word “unnatural” has a sinister sound, it might be understood simply as a term of evaluation. Perhaps it means something like “contrary to how things ought to be.” But then to say that homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural is to say that homosexuality is wrong because it is contrary to how things ought to be—which is a lot like saying that it’s wrong because it’s wrong. That sort of empty remark provides no reason to condemn anything.
Hence, no meaning for “unnatural” yields a sound argument. Gay behavior isn’t unnatural in any troubling sense.
Finally, let’s consider the argument that homosexuality is wrong because the Bible condemns it. For example, Leviticus 18:22 says, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.” And suppose we agree that the Bible really does condemn homosexuality. What may we infer from this? Are we supposed to believe what the Bible says, simply because it says it?
This question will offend some people. To question the Bible, they believe, is to challenge the word of God. And this, they think, is an act of arrogance coming from creatures who should be thanking the Almighty for what they have. Questioning the Bible can also make people feel uncomfortable, because it may seem to challenge their whole way of life. However, thoughts like these cannot hold us back. Philosophy is about questioning ways of life. When the argument is given that homosexuality must be wrong because the Bible says so, the argument must be assessed on its merits, just like any other argument.
The problem with the argument is that, if we look at other things the Bible says, then it does not appear to be a reliable guide to morality. The Book of Leviticus does condemn homosexuality, but it also forbids eating sheep’s fat (7:23), letting a woman into the church’s sanctuary who has recently given birth (12:2–5), and seeing your uncle naked. Seeing your uncle naked, like homosexuality, is considered an abomination (18:14, 26). Even worse, Leviticus condemns to death those who curse their parents (20:9) and those who commit adultery (20:10). It says that a priest’s daughter, if she “plays the whore,” shall be burned alive (21:9), and it says that we may purchase slaves from nearby nations (25:44). In Exodus, it even says that it’s okay to beat your slaves, so long as you don’t kill them (21:20–21).
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The point of all this is not to ridicule the Bible; the Bible, in fact, contains much that is true and wise. But we can conclude from examples like these that the Bible is not always right. And because it’s not always right, we can’t conclude that homosexuality is wrong just because the Bible condemns it.
Marriage and Adoption. In American politics, conservatives have often claimed that gay rights are “contrary to family values.” When Mike Pence called traditional marriage “the glue of the American family,” he was suggesting that the American family would fall apart if gay couples were allowed to marry. But why should it? Gays have never tried to change traditional families. Instead, they have tried to form their own families. They have sought the right to marry and the right to adopt children.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Hence, gay marriage is now legal in all fifty states. Adoption rights, however, are not yet guaranteed. Some states have “religious freedom laws” that allow private adoption agencies to turn away same-sex couples, if the people in those agencies believe that their religion forbids them from helping gay people become parents.
Personal beliefs aside, why shouldn’t gay couples be allowed to raise children? For decades, the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study has followed a group of children who were born between 1986 and 1992 and raised by two mothers. At age 17, those children seemed to be doing significantly better than their peers who grew up in traditional homes. Sometimes, the teens were made fun of at school, and that was hard on them. But, in general, they were doing better than other teenagers, both socially and academically, and had fewer behavioral problems. Bear in mind, too, that the children in this study were 17 between 2003 and 2009. Since then, non-traditional families have become more common, and so today’s teenager might get teased less at school for having two moms. Or for having two dads. At any rate, the American Academy of Pediatrics supports full adoption rights for same-sex couples.
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Laws Abroad and Social Realities at Home. American law no longer discriminates blatantly against gays. However, many other countries’ laws do. In 69 countries, gay sex is illegal. In five of those countries (and possibly in six others), homosexuality is punishable by death.
One intolerant place is Russia. Its “gay propaganda laws” forbid Russians from even speaking about homosexuality in public. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, often criticizes the West for its “decadence,” and his main example of decadance is always the toleration of gays. Police in the Russian republic of Chechnya combated such decadence in 2017 by rounding up and torturing at least 100 gay men, ultimately murdering at least three. The torture was used as a way of forcing the victim to lure other gay men into meeting him somewhere, thus giving the police a new victim to brutalize.
In America, the drawbacks to being gay are social rather than legal but can be serious. How serious may depend on where you live, and on who you interact with. But, in general, if you are gay, then you can expect that about one-third of your neighbors believe that something is wrong with you. And that can be stressful. Someone who is LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender) runs a higher risk of being targeted in a hate crime than does a member of any other minority—including Jews and African-Americans. This was the case even before the massacre in Orlando in 2016, in which a single gunman murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub. In the aftermath of that slaughter, as emergency personnel tended to the horrific scene, they could hear the haunting, discordant sounds of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the deceased, as their friends and loved ones called to see if they were okay.
Many gay people in the United States choose to live in the closet—some due to fear, some due to shame. But trying to hide who you are is terribly stressful. A common tragedy is when a young person who has been taught to despise gays begins to realize that he or she is gay. Young LGBTs are almost six times more likely than their peers to have recently attempted suicide—or, at least, that was true as of 2015. The good news is that society is becoming more tolerant, and so gay life is becoming more tolerable. The suicide rate for gay teens quickly fell by an average of 14% in particular individual states, once those states began recognizing the right of same-sex couples to say “I do.”
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Notes on Sources
Matt Foreman was quoted in The New York Times on June 25, 2001.
The Gallup Poll information is from www.gallup.com.
Mike Pence on marriage: see the United States of America Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Congress, Second Session, Vol. 152, Part 11, p. 14,796 (pertaining to July 18, 2006).
The Catholic view of homosexuality is from Catechism of the Catholic Church (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 566.
Over half a million abortions performed per year: for example, more than 620,000 abortions were performed in the U.S. in 2018, according to cdc.gov.
Charles L. Stevenson on disagreement in belief and in attitude: Ethics and Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 2–4.
“[T]he fabric of the world”: J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (England: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 15.
Michele Bachmann was speaking on the radio program Prophetic Views behind the News (hosted by Jan Markell), KKMS 980-AM, March 20, 2004.
Gay people are not more likely to molest children: Olga Khazan, “Milo Yiannopoulos and the Myth of the Gay Pedophile,” The Atlantic, February 21, 2017.
For state-by-state information on same-sex adoption laws, see “LGBT Adoption Laws” at lifelongadoptions.com.
Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos, “U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents,” Pediatrics 126, no. 1 (July 2010), pp. 1–9.
See the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Policy Statement, “Promoting the Well-Being of Children Whose Parents Are Gay or Lesbian,” Pediatrics, vol. 131, no. 4 (April 1, 2013), pp. 827–830.
Gay sex is illegal in 69 countries and is punishable by death in 5 to 11 countries: see ILGA World: Lucas Ramon Mendos, Kellyn Botha, Rafael Carrano Lelis, Enrique Lopez de la Pena, Ilia Savelev and Daron Tan, State-Sponsored Homophobia 2020: Global Legislation Overview Update (Geneva; ILGA, December 2020), p. 25.
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On Russia and Chechnya, see Sewell Chan, “Russia’s ‘Gay Propaganda’ Laws Are Illegal, European Court Rules,” The New York Times, June 20, 2017, and Andrew E. Kramer, “‘They Starve You. They Shock You’: Inside the Anti-Gay Pogrom in Chechnya,” The New York Times, April 21, 2017.
On LGBT suicide attempts in 2015, see cdc.org, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health”/“LGBT Youth,” accessed August 27, 2017. On hate crimes, see the FBI’s 2015 Hate Crime Statistics (under “Victims”) at ucr.fbi.gov (accessed August 27, 2017). Also see Haeyoun Park and Iaryna Mykhyalyshyn, “L.G.B.T. People Are More Likely to Be Targets of Hate Crimes Than Any Other Minority Group,” The New York Times, June 16, 2016.
On suicide attempts by gay teens after 2015, see Julia Raifman et al., “Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Association Between State Same-Sex Marriage Policies and Adolescent Suicide Attempts,” JAMA Pediatrics, vol. 171, no. 4 (April 2017), pp. 350–356.
Christopher Bucktin, “Orlando Shooting Investigators Haunted by Sound of Mobile Phones as Families Try to Ring Victims,” Mirror, June 12, 2016.
CHAPTER 4
Does Morality Depend on Religion?
The Good consists in always doing what God wills at any particular moment.
EMIL BRUNNER, THE DIVINE IMPERATIVE (1947)
I respect deities. I do not rely upon them.
MUSASHI MIYAMOTO, AT ICHIJOJI TEMPLE (ca. 1608)
4.1. The Presumed Connection between Morality and Religion
In 1995, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Judge Roy Moore of Gadsden, Alabama, for displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. Such a display, the ACLU said, violates the separation of church and state, which is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The voters, however, supported Moore. In 2000, Moore was elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, running on a promise to “restore the moral foundation of law.” The “Ten Commandments judge” thus became the most powerful jurist in the state of Alabama.
Moore was not through making his point, however. In the wee hours of July 31, 2001, he had a granite monument dedicated to the Ten Commandments installed in the Alabama state judicial building. This monument weighed over 5,000 pounds, and nobody entering the building could miss it. So, Moore was sued again, and again the people stood behind him: 77% of Americans supported his right to display the monument. Yet the law disagreed. When Moore ignored a court order to remove the monument, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary fired him, saying that he had placed himself above the law. Moore, however, believed that he was recognizing God’s rightful place above the law.
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In 2012, Moore was again elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry, Moore told Alabama judges that they had a “ministerial duty” to ignore the ruling. Thus, in 2016, he was again removed from office, in what he called “a politically motivated effort by radical homosexual and transgender groups.” In 2017, Moore almost became a U.S. senator, winning the Republican primary in a deeply conservative state. But then he lost to the Democratic candidate after several women accused him of having molested them when they were teenagers.
Few Americans describe themselves as “atheists,” but this may be due to the social stigma attached to non-believers; some people might not want to admit it. In 2017, a study that measured religious belief without asking people directly about God, found that 26% of Americans are atheists. Even so, the United States is a religious country. The stigma that exists is directed at atheists, not at believers. When asked directly, most Americans say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and three-quarters say they’re Christians.
Members of the Christian clergy are sometimes treated as moral experts in America: Hospitals ask them to sit on ethics committees; reporters may interview them on the moral dimensions of a story; and churchgoers look to them for guidance. The clergy even help decide whether movies will be rated “G,” “PG,” “PG-13,” “R,” or “NC-17.” Priests and ministers are assumed to be wise counselors who often give sound moral advice.
Why are the clergy viewed in this way? The reason is not that they have proven themselves to be better or wiser than other people—as a group, they seem to be neither better nor worse than the rest of us. There is a deeper reason for this. In popular thinking, morality and religion are inseparable; people believe that morality can be understood only in the context of religion. Thus, the clergy are assumed to be authorities on morality.
It is easy to see why people think this. When viewed from a nonreligious perspective, the universe seems to be a cold, meaningless place, devoid of value and purpose. In Bertrand Russell’s essay “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903), he expresses what he calls the “scientific” view of the world:
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That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
From a religious perspective, however, things look very different. Judaism and Christianity teach that the world was created by a loving, all-powerful God to provide a home for us. We, in turn, were created in his image, to be his children. Thus, the world is not devoid of meaning and purpose. It is, instead, the arena in which God’s plans are realized. What could be more natural, then, than to think of “morality” as part of religion, while the atheist’s world has no place for values?
4.2. The Divine Command Theory
Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe that God has told us to obey certain rules of conduct. God does not force these rules on us. He created us as free agents; so, we may choose what to do. But if we live as we should, then we must follow God’s laws. This idea has been expanded into a theory known as the Divine Command Theory. The basic idea is that God decrees what is right and wrong. Actions that God commands us to do are morally required; actions that God forbids us to do are morally wrong; and all other actions are morally neutral.
This theory has a number of advantages. For one, it immediately solves the old problem of the objectivity of ethics. Ethics is not merely a matter of personal feeling or social custom. Whether something is right or wrong is perfectly objective: It is right if God commands it and wrong if God forbids it. The Divine Command Theory also explains why any of us should bother with morality. Why shouldn’t we just look out for ourselves? If immorality is the violation of God’s commandments, then there is an easy answer: On the day of final reckoning, you will be held accountable.
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There are, however, serious problems with the theory. Of course, atheists would not accept it, because they do not believe that God exists. But there are difficulties even for believers. The main problem was identified by Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived 400 years before Jesus of Nazareth. Plato’s books were written as conversations, or dialogues, in which Plato’s teacher Socrates is always the main speaker and always wins the argument. In one of them, the Euthyphro, there is a discussion of whether “right” can be defined as “what the gods command.” Socrates is skeptical and asks: Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is right? This is one of the most famous questions in the history of philosophy. The British philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010) suggests that “one good test of a person’s aptitude for philosophy is to discover whether he can grasp [the] force and point” of this question.
Socrates’s question is about whether God makes the moral truths true or whether he merely recognizes their truth. There’s a big difference between these options. I know that the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates is the tallest building in the world; I recognize that fact. However, I did not make it true. Rather, it was made true by the designers and builders in the city of Dubai. Is God’s relation to ethics like my relation to the Burj Khalifa building or like the relation of the builders? This question poses a dilemma, and each way out leads to trouble.
First, we might say that right conduct is right because God commands it. For example, according to Exodus 20:16, God commands us to be truthful. Thus, we should be truthful simply because God requires it. God’s command makes truthfulness right, just as the builders of a skyscraper make the building tall. This is the Divine Command Theory. It is almost the theory of Shakespeare’s character Hamlet. Hamlet said that nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. According to the Divine Command Theory, nothing is good or bad, except when God’s thinking makes it so.
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This idea encounters several difficulties.
1. This conception of morality is mysterious. What does it mean to say that God “makes” truthfulness right? It is easy enough to understand how physical objects are made, at least in principle. We have all made something, if only a sand castle or a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. But making truthfulness right is not like that; it could not be done by rearranging things in the physical environment. How, then, could it be done? No one knows.
To see the problem, consider some wretched case of child abuse. On the Divine Command Theory, God could make that instance of child abuse right—not by turning a slap into a friendly pinch of the cheek, but by commanding that the slap is right. This proposal defies human understanding. How could merely saying, or commanding, that the slap is right make it right? If true, this conception of morality would be a mystery.
2. This conception of morality makes God’s commands arbitrary. Suppose a parent forbids a teenager from doing something, and when the teenager asks why, the parent responds, “Because I said so!” Here the parent seems to be imposing his will arbitrarily. Yet the Divine Command Theory sees God as being like such a parent. Rather than offering a reason for his commands, God merely says, “Because I said so.”
God’s commands also seem arbitrary because he always could have commanded the opposite. For example, suppose God commands us to be truthful. On the Divine Command Theory, he just as easily could have commanded us to be liars, and then lying, and not truthfulness, would be right. After all, before God issues his commands, no reasons for or against lying exist—because God is the one who creates the reasons. So, from a moral point of view, God’s commands are arbitrary. He could command anything whatsoever. This result may seem not only unacceptable but impious from a religious point of view.
3. This conception of morality provides the wrong reasons for moral principles. There are many things wrong with child abuse: It is malicious; it inflicts pain unnecessarily; it makes the child fearful and anxious; and so on. However, the Divine Command Theory does not care about any of that; it sees the maliciousness, the pain, and the psychological trauma as being morally irrelevant. All it cares about, in the end, is whether child abuse runs counter to God’s commands.
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There are two ways of confirming that something is wrong here. First, notice something that the theory implies: If God didn’t exist, then child abuse wouldn’t be wrong. After all, if God didn’t exist, then God wouldn’t have been around to make child abuse wrong. However, child abuse would still be malicious, so it would still be wrong. Thus, the Divine Command Theory is false. Second, bear in mind that even a religious person might be unsure as to what God has commanded. After all, religious texts disagree with each other, and sometimes there seem to be inconsistencies and unclarities even within a single text. So, a person might be in doubt as to what God’s will really is. However, a person need not be in doubt as to whether child abuse is wrong. What God has commanded is one thing; whether hitting children is wrong is another.
There is a way to avoid these troublesome consequences. We can take the second of Socrates’s options. We need not say that right conduct is right because God commands it. Instead, we can say that God commands us to do certain things because they are right. God, who is infinitely wise, recognizes that truthfulness is better than deceitfulness, just as he recognizes in Genesis that the light he sees is good. For this reason, God commands us to be truthful.
If we take this option, then we avoid the consequences that spoiled the first alternative. We needn’t worry about how God makes it wrong to lie, because he doesn’t. God’s commands are not arbitrary; they are the result of his wisdom in knowing what is best. Nor are we saddled with the wrong explanations for our moral principles; instead, we are free to appeal to whatever justifications of them seem appropriate.
Unfortunately, this second option has a different drawback. In taking it, we abandon the theological conception of right and wrong. When we say that God commands us to be truthful because truthfulness is right, we acknowledge a standard that is independent of God’s will. The rightness exists prior to God’s command and is the reason for it. Thus, if we want to know why we should be truthful, the reply “because God commands it” does not really tell us. We may still ask, “Why does God command it?” and the answer to that question will provide the ultimate reason.
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Many religious people believe that they must accept a theological conception of right and wrong because it would be sacrilegious not to. They feel, somehow, that if they believe in God, then right and wrong must be understood in terms of God’s wishes. Our arguments, however, suggest that the Divine Command Theory is not only untenable but impious. And, in fact, some of the greatest theologians have rejected the theory for just these reasons.
4.3. The Theory of Natural Law
In the history of Christian thought, the dominant theory of ethics is not the Divine Command Theory. That honor instead goes to the Theory of Natural Law. This theory has three main parts.
1. The Theory of Natural Law rests on a particular view of the world. On this view, the world has a rational order, with values and purposes built into its very nature. This idea comes from the Greeks, whose worldview dominated Western thinking for over 1,700 years. The Greeks believed that everything in nature has a purpose.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) built this idea into his system of thought. To understand anything, he said, four questions must be asked: What is it? What is it made of? How did it come to be? And what is it for? The answers might be: This is a knife; it is made of metal; it was made by a craftsman; and it is used for cutting. Aristotle assumed that the last question—What is it for?—could be asked of anything whatever. “Nature,” he said, “belongs to the class of causes which act for the sake of something.”
Obviously, knives have a purpose, because craftsmen build them with a purpose in mind. But what about natural objects that we do not make? Aristotle believed that they have purposes, too. One of his examples was that we have teeth so that we can chew. Biological examples are especially persuasive; each part of our bodies does seem, intuitively, to have a special purpose—our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing, our skin exists to protect us, and so on. But Aristotle’s claim was not limited to living things. According to him, everything has a purpose. To take a different sort of example, he thought that rain falls so that plants can grow. He considered alternatives. For example, he asked whether the rain might fall “of necessity,” which helps the plants only “by coincidence.” However, he considered that unlikely.
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The universe, Aristotle thought, is an orderly, rational system in which each thing has a proper place and serves its own special purpose. There is a neat hierarchy: The rain exists for the sake of the plants, the plants exist for the sake of the animals, and the animals exist—of course—for the sake of people. Aristotle says, “If then we are right in believing that nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.” This worldview is stunningly anthropocentric, or human-centered. But Aristotle was hardly alone in having such thoughts; almost every important thinker in human history has advanced such a thesis. Humans are remarkably vain.
The Christian thinkers who came later found this worldview appealing. Only one thing was missing: God. Thus, the Christian thinkers said that the rain falls to help the plants because that is what God intended, and the animals are for human use because that is what God made them for. Values and purposes were thus seen as part of God’s plan.
2. A corollary to this way of thinking is that the “laws of nature” describe not only how things are but also how things ought to be. The world is in harmony when things serve their natural purposes. When they do not, or cannot, things have gone wrong. Eyes that cannot see are defective, and drought is a natural evil; the badness of both is explained by reference to natural law. But there are also implications for human conduct. Moral rules are now viewed as deriving from the laws of nature. Some ways of behaving are said to be “natural” for human beings while others are regarded as “unnatural”; and “unnatural” acts are seen as morally wrong.
Consider, for example, the duty of beneficence. We are morally required to care about our neighbors. Why? According to the Theory of Natural Law, beneficence is natural for us, given the kind of creatures we are. We are by nature social and need the company of other people. Someone who does not care at all about others—who really does not care, through and through—is seen as deranged. Modern psychiatry says that such people suffer from antisocial personality disorder, and such people are called psychopaths or sociopaths. A callous personality is defective, just as eyes are defective if they cannot see. And, it may be added, this is true because we were created by God, with a specific “human” nature, as part of his overall plan.
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The endorsement of beneficence is relatively uncontroversial. Natural-law theory has also been used, however, to support more questionable ideas. Religious thinkers often condemn “deviant” sexual practices, and they usually justify this by appealing to ideas from the Theory of Natural Law. If everything has a purpose, what is the purpose of sex? The obvious answer is procreation. Sexual activity that is not connected with making babies can, therefore, be seen as “unnatural,” and practices like masturbation and gay sex may be condemned for this reason. This view of sex dates back at least to Saint Augustine (A.D. 354–430) and is explicit in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The moral theology of the Catholic Church is based on natural-law theory.
3. The third part concerns moral knowledge. How can we tell right from wrong? On the Divine Command Theory, we must consult God’s commandments. On the Theory of Natural Law, however, the “natural laws” of morality are just laws of reason; so, what’s right is what’s supported by the strongest arguments. On this view, we can figure out what’s right because God has given us the ability to reason. Moreover, God has given this ability to everyone, putting the believer and nonbeliever in the same position.
Objections to Natural-Law Theory. Outside the Catholic Church, the Theory of Natural Law has few advocates today. It is generally rejected for three reasons.
First, the idea that “what’s natural is good” seems open to obvious counterexamples. Sometimes what’s natural is bad. People naturally care much more about themselves than about strangers, but this is regrettable. Disease occurs naturally, but disease is bad. Hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions occur naturally, but these are bad things. Children are naturally self-centered, but their parents aren’t pleased by this.
Second, the Theory of Natural Law moves too easily from “is” to “ought.” In the 18th century, David Hume pointed out that what is the case and what ought to be the case are logically different notions, and no conclusion about one follows from the other. We can say that people are naturally disposed to be beneficent, but it does not follow that they ought to be beneficent. Similarly, it may be true that sex produces babies, but it does not follow that sex ought or ought not to be engaged in only for that purpose. Facts are one thing; values are another.
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Third, the Theory of Natural Law is now widely rejected because its view of the world conflicts with modern science. The world as described by Galileo, Newton, and Darwin has no need for “facts” about right and wrong. Their explanations of nature make no reference to values or purposes. What happens just happens, due to the laws of cause and effect. If the rain benefits the plants, this is because the plants have evolved by the laws of natural selection in a rainy climate.
Thus, modern science gives us a picture of the world as a realm of facts, where the only “natural laws” are the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, working blindly and without purpose. Whatever values may be, they are not part of the natural order. As for the idea that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man,” well, that is only vanity. To the extent that one accepts the worldview of modern science, one will reject the worldview of natural-law theory. That theory was a product, not of modern thought, but of the Middle Ages.
4.4. Religion and Particular Moral Issues
So far, our discussion might seem too abstract. Many religious people don’t care whether God determines right and wrong, or whether purposes are part of nature. For them, the connection between morality and religion centers on particular moral issues. What matters are the moral teachings of one’s religion. The Scriptures and the church leaders are regarded as authorities; if one is truly faithful, one will accept what they say. Many Christians, for example, believe that they must oppose abortion because the church condemns it and because (they assume) the Scriptures do too.
Are there distinctively religious positions on major moral issues that believers must accept? The rhetoric of the pulpit suggests so. But there is good reason to think otherwise.
For one thing, it is often difficult to find specific moral guidance in the Scriptures. We face different problems than people faced 2,000 years ago; thus, the Scriptures may be silent on matters that seem pressing to us. The Bible does contain a number of general precepts—for example, to love one’s neighbor and to treat others as one wishes to be treated. And those are fine principles, which pertain to our lives. However, it is not clear what they imply about the rights of workers, or the extinction of species, or the funding of medical research, and so on.
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Another problem is that the Scriptures and church tradition are often ambiguous. Authorities disagree, leaving the believer in the awkward position of having to choose which part of the tradition to accept. For instance, the New Testament condemns being rich, and there is a long tradition of charity and self-denial that affirms this teaching. But there is also an obscure Old Testament figure named Jabez who asked God to “enlarge my territories” (1 Chronicles 4:10), and God did. One book urging Christians to adopt Jabez as their model became a best seller.
Thus, when people say that their moral views come from their religion, they are often mistaken. Really, they are making up their own minds about the issues and then interpreting the Scriptures, or church tradition, in a way that supports the conclusions they’ve already reached. Of course, this does not happen in every case, but it seems fair to say that it happens a lot. The question of wealth is one example; abortion is another.
Religious conservatives sometimes say that all human life is sacred. The fetus, they think, is not merely a potential person but is an actual person, possessing a full-fledged right to life from the moment of conception. On their view, abortion is always murder. Is their view the Christian view? Must Christians condemn abortion? To answer those questions, we might look either to the Scriptures or to church tradition.
The Scriptures. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures never denounce abortion by name. Certain passages, however, are often cited in support of the conservative position. One of them is from the first chapter of Jeremiah, where Jeremiah quotes God as saying, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.” These words are often presented as God’s condemnation of abortion: it is wrong to kill the unborn because the unborn are consecrated to God.
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In context, however, these words obviously mean something different. Suppose we read the whole passage in which they occur:
Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”
Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”
This passage has nothing to do with abortion. Instead, Jeremiah is asserting his authority as a prophet. He is saying, in effect, “God told me to speak for him. I tried to say no, but he insisted.” However, Jeremiah puts this point poetically; he says that God selected him to be a prophet even before he was born.
The pattern here is familiar: Someone who is advocating a moral position quotes a few words from the Bible, out of context, and then declares that the passage supports their position; yet those words mean something else entirely when taken in context. When this happens, is it accurate to say that the person is “following the moral teachings of the Bible”? Or is it accurate to say that he has searched the Bible to find support for something he already believes, and has interpreted the Bible with this in mind? The latter, when true, suggests an especially arrogant attitude—that God himself must share one’s opinions!
Some other biblical passages support a liberal view of abortion. A woman who has recently had sex might be pregnant. Yet three times the Bible recommends executing women who have had sex outside of marriage, without ever saying that the execution should wait until we know that the woman isn’t pregnant (Genesis 38:24; Leviticus 21:9; Deuteronomy 22:20–21). These passages suggest that the death of the fetus doesn’t matter—presumably because the fetus has no right to life.
Church Tradition. Today, the Catholic Church strongly opposes abortion. In many Protestant churches, too, abortion is routinely denounced. Many people of faith, therefore, believe that they must condemn abortion “for religious reasons,” no matter how Scripture is interpreted. What lies behind the Church’s anti-abortion stance?
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To some extent, the Vatican has always opposed abortion for the same reason that it condemns condoms, birth control pills, and other forms of contraception: All of these activities interfere with natural processes. According to natural-law theory, sex is supposed to lead to the birth of a healthy baby. Condoms and birth control pills prevent this from happening by preventing pregnancy; abortion prevents it by killing the fetus. Thus, by the lights of traditional Catholic thinking, abortion is wrong because it disrupts a natural process. This type of argument, however, can hardly show that Christians “must” oppose abortion. It depends on natural-law theory, which, as we have seen, conflicts with modern science. Yet Christians today need not reject modern science—even the Catholic Church dropped its opposition to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution back in 1950. Presumably, then, Christians are not required to oppose abortion based on natural-law considerations.
At any rate, to say that abortion interferes with a natural process is to say nothing about the moral status of the fetus. Recent popes have not merely believed that abortion is immoral, like using a condom; they have viewed it as murder. How did this position become dominant within the Catholic Church? Have Church leaders always regarded the fetus as enjoying a special moral status?
For most of the Church’s history—until around 1200 A.D.—little is known of relevance. Back then, there were no universities, and the Church was not especially intellectual. People believed all kinds of things, for all kinds of reasons. But then, in the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas constructed a philosophical system that became the bedrock of later Catholic thought. The key question, he believed, is whether the fetus has a soul: If it does, then abortion is murder; if it does not, then abortion isn’t murder. Does the fetus have a soul? Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s idea that the soul is the “substantial form” of man. Let’s not worry about exactly what that means; what’s important is that human beings are supposed to acquire a “substantial form” when their bodies take on human shape. So the key question is: When do human beings begin to look human?
When a baby is born, anyone can see that it has a human shape. In Aquinas’s day, however, nobody knew when fetuses begin to look like that—after all, fetal development occurs out of sight, in the mother’s womb. Aristotle said, for no good reason, that males acquire a soul 40 days after conception and females do after 90 days. Presumably, many Christians accepted this view. (Aquinas so respected Aristotle that he always referred to him as simply “the Philosopher.”) At any rate, for the next several centuries, most prominent Catholic thinkers strongly opposed abortion throughout pregnancy, probably because the fetus might, for all they knew, acquire human shape very early on—and so, killing it might always be murder.
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Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church has never officially maintained that the fetus acquires a soul at the moment of conception. Around 1600, however, some theologians began to say that the soul enters the body a few days after conception, and so abortion is murder early on. This monumental change in Catholic thinking apparently occurred without much debate. Maybe the issue seemed unimportant because the Church already opposed early-term abortions. Anyway, we know little about what happened.
Today we know a lot about fetal development. We know, through microscopes and ultrasounds, that fetuses do not look human until several weeks into the pregnancy. Thus, a follower of Aquinas should now say that fetuses have no soul during the first month or two of pregnancy. However, there has been no movement inside the Catholic Church to adopt that position. For reasons that remain murky, the Church adopted a conservative view of the fetus in the 1600s, and it has maintained that view ever since.
The purpose of reviewing this history is not to suggest that the contemporary church’s position is wrong. For all I have said, it may be right. The point, rather, is this: every generation interprets its traditions to support its favored moral views. To illustrate this, we could have also discussed the church’s shifting views on slavery, or capital punishment, or the status of women. In each case, the moral stance taken by the Church doesn’t seem derived from the Bible so much as imposed on it, in different ways at different times. If we look at the whole history of Christianity, then we find little reason to oppose abortion.
This chapter has argued for several conclusions: that right and wrong are not to be understood in terms of God’s will; that morality is a matter of reason and conscience, not religious faith; and that, in any case, religious considerations do not provide definitive solutions to many of the moral problems we face. Together, these conclusions point to a larger thesis: that morality and religion are, in a word, different.
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Of course, religious beliefs can bear on moral issues. Consider, for example, the doctrine of eternal life. If some people go to heaven when they die—and so, death is a good thing for them—then this might affect the morality of killing these people. Or suppose we believe, upon studying ancient prophecies, that supernatural forces will soon bring the world to a fiery end. If so, then this might reduce our fear of climate change. The relationship between morality and religion is complicated, but it is a relationship between two different subjects.
This conclusion may seem antireligious. However, it has not been reached by questioning the validity of religion. The arguments we have considered do not assume that Christianity or any other theological system is false; they merely show that, even if such a system is true, morality remains a separate matter.
Notes on Sources
77% of Americans support Judge Roy Moore: Gallup Poll, September 2003. For Moore’s remark about the alleged homosexual and transgender conspiracy, see Campbell Robertson, “Roy Moore, Alabama Chief Justice, Suspended over Gay Marriage Order,” The New York Times, September 30, 2016.
26% of Americans might be atheists: Will M. Gervais and Maxine B. Najle, “How Many Atheists Are There?” (last edited on March 31, 2017) at psyarxiv.com.
53% of Americans say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and 74% identify as Christian: Gallup Poll, December 2016.
On the clergy’s role in assigning movie ratings, see the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006). Although this documentary is more than 15 years old, it is still the best source of information about how films are rated, due to the Motion Picture Association of America’s continuing secrecy regarding the process.
Bertrand Russell is quoted from “A Free Man’s Worship,” which first appeared in the Independent Review in 1903.
Antony Flew’s remark about philosophical talent is on p. 109 of his book God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966).
Hamlet’s exact words were: “Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison” (act 2, scene 2, lines 254–256 of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [USA: Octopus Books, 1985, p. 844]).
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Aristotle is quoted from The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 249 (“Nature belongs to the class of causes”: Physics 2.8, 198b10–11), and from The Politics, translated by T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 40 (“If then we are right in believing”: I.8, 1256b20).
Saint Thomas Aquinas is quoted from his Summa Theologica, III Quodlibet, 27, translated by Thomas Gilby in St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960; originally written around 1270).
The passage supposedly about abortion is Jeremiah 1:4–8. I quoted the King James translation of The Holy Bible.
On the history of Catholic thought, see John Connery, SJ, Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1977) (the Church has never said that the fetus acquires a soul at conception: p. 308). I am grateful to Steve Sverdlik for tutoring me in this area.
The Catholic Church officially softened its stance on evolution with Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis (1950).