Thursday, September 18, 2008
From 9/17: Piety & Virtue & Knowledge, Oh My!
After considering the relationship between morality and religion, we went on to talk about both the nature of virtue and the possibility of human knowledge. Should morality and religion be separated from each other? Is virtue nothing other than a form of knowledge? Does Socrates convince us that knowledge is possible with his theory of recollection? Let us know what you think.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Morality should be separated from religion in the sense that religion does need some kind of ethical code, however morality does not require religion. A person does not have to be affiliated with a religion to be moral, but it is expected that a religious person act morally. However, many times this is not the case. In the last decade, we have heard about the sex scandals in the Catholic Church. Religion has a negative connotation and many do not wish to be affiliated with it. Once you identify with a religion, people assume you stand for the same things. This is a major turn off for many people. Conversely, morality is thought of as a good practice. People look for ethical traits of their elected leaders and expect a certain demeanor of behavior. However, people do not want a leader that is associated with a religion. So, morality should be considered independent from religion. While nearly all religions maintain some form of a moral code, morality does not need religion to exist. A person could be an atheist, and still act morally, so he clearly must get his morals from somewhere other than religion. Therefore, morality can and should be considered separate from religion.
This is one time when I think Socrates's arguments do not transcend the gap to our age. Usually, being drawn from pure reason, we tend to find his arguments very compelling, but here he strays to far into the illogical and divine. By claiming that people possess all knowledge from birth and that we are just "recalling" it when we learn something, he automatically calls divinity into the question. There would have to be some sort of knowledge repository that stored all this knowledge prior to our existence, and then deposited it into us when we were born. This idea to me seems preposterous, and it felt when I read it like it was just a good trick to gain the upper hand in the argument. On the question of morality vs. religion, which ties nicely into this one, I tend to agree with Cheryl here(^) in saying that religion has no true tie to morality. Religion, while often having the effect of instilling good moral fortitude in sound minded followers, does not explicitly have to do so to be a religion. There have been many instances of what accepted religions like to call "cults", but which have the same structure as any other religion, where death or other malicious activity was the fundamental purpose of existence for them. Since such groups have already been condemned as morally reprehensible, we must conclude that morality is a separate topic that may be affected by religion, but that is not explicitly connected to it.
I agree that morality and religion should be separated from one another. More often than not, religion offers a reductionist view of world matters. Yet, most people, regardless of their faith, can come to some semblance of agreement when it comes to what is moral and immoral. In regards to virtue and knowledge, I really like Socrates' argument that virtue is a form of knowledge. We can't really be virtuous if we have no knowledge of what virtue is. In order to be virtuous we must first be able to identify what is good and what is bad. This ties into religion vs. morality because religion often takes the form of radical extremism when it attempts to further its own views or agendas. People need to have the wisdom to know when they're taking something too far.
I think one of the most compelling arguments we talked about in class was the idea that virtue must be related to knowledge, because people think different things are virtuous. For example, we discussed that Adolf Hitler thought that the Holocaust would be virtuous. I have tried to wrap my mind around this concept, because we really have to question if the same virtues are at the core of every persons existence. It would seem that by looking at the example of Hitler, that virtue cannot be the same for every person, and that is why sometimes people do have to look towards religion for their virtue/morality. I do not think that people use religion solely to answer the “fuzzy” questions about morality, rather they do not know where to look for virtue period. In the world we live in, we are tugged in so many different directions, and a lot of people look to religion to find out exactly what is moral and what is not. This leads us to Meno’s Paradox, that the pursuit of knowledge (virtue) is impossible because we do not know what knowledge (virtue) is, and that is why a lot of people have to look to religion to answer these questions. So if knowledge is innate in us, as Socrates says, then why would someone have to look to religion to confirm this? This, coupled with bad knowledge (i.e. Hitler’s “virtue”), really goes to show that maybe virtue/knowledge are not innate in us, and we need rather to hope that our guides (parents, religion, etc.) can guide us into a virtuous life, rather than relying on the “innate” virtue given to us by god.
Religion and morality should be viewed as two different entities. Although it can be argued that religions instill a sense of morality in its followers, that does not mean that the morality being instilled in them is right or wrong. For example there could be a fanatical sect of a religion that believes it is morally right to commit murder. Where as all other religions are strictly against this idea. Even though the followers of this sect wil be learning a moral code, it is a code that other people would say is morally wrong because murder is wrong. This leads us to ask the question can religion teach us what is truly morally right or wrong? Which is what we were discussing in class. And the only way we could possibly know what is morally right and wrong is through recollection or instinct. There is no other way for you to deteremine, for yourself with out outside interference, what is right and what is wrong. Without an inherent idea of morals there would be no way to discern what religion you should follow. You wouldn't be able to determine if their ideas are something you should believe in because you would have no idea if that belief was right or wrong for you. So, then you have to have an inherent instinct of what morality is, and what your own moral code should be.
Post a Comment