For centuries philosophers have tried to answer the question of the
nature of morality. Conclusive answers are hard to get by. Still many theist claim a divine origin of moral.
The problem with a god given moral
Moral under the guidance of a god is a logically problematic idea. There’s the problem of dicriminating between evil and good divine intentions. When people are
subjected to a god given moral, they’re not able to validate this
god-moral because people can only benchmark it with there own moral,
which is god given. So the answer would be begging the question. In other words, we have no independent means to answer the
question whether the god provided moral is a good moral or an evil one. Think of the implications of this. This could mean
that when we’re dealing with an evil god who just presents his moral as
a good moral, we won’t know the difference. You might object that it’s
plain to see that god’s moral as presented in the bible is a good
moral, but that only is a valid argument when it’s an entirely human
judgement. In that case we ‘ve reached the conclusion that man can
reach moral conclusions on his own which in turn declines the need for
an absolute god-given moral altogether.
Still, people do assert strong moral convictions. Some facts on morality.
- Morality in general shows both geographic and cultural depedencies.
-
Morality is dynamic in nature. History clearly shows that over time
moral convictions can change significantly even within the same culture
and geographic location.
- Some moral concepts seem to be shared by nearly all humans over all time.
-
Some animals seem to live by some moral rules. Moreover, behaviour of
some animals seems to parallel some basic moral concepts of man. For
instance, primates will punish certain deeds of a group member by
exclusion of the member from the group.
A conclusion from these facts is that moral isn’t absolute and
static in essence at all, it’s (partly at least) dynamic and relative. Furthermore a
biological and/or environmental factor seems present. Moral convictions seem to stem from
a mix of personal, cultural and intrinsic (biological) goals. So,
morality is based on goals we aim at of which some are shared by many
(some may be ‘hard-wired’ in our phenotype), others are
very personal indeed. Then the question is not if moral is relative, but just how relative. In other words, is there a common human basis of moral predicates, constant over all time and all cultures?
