Theological and Naturalistic Ethics
From lecture notes by: Dr. Garrett
Created January 17, 2003; modified January 22, 2003 Theological and Naturalistic Ethics Defined
The key distinction here is between theological ethics and ethics that is not theological, which we can call "naturalistic" for convenience.
Theological ethics has as an essential component or assumption the premise that what gods or God wishes or commands is what we should be or do. If God commands us to love our neighbors, that is what we should do; but if God commands us to kill one or more individuals, then that is what we should do. Theological ethics subscribes to the divine command theory of morality, which holds that the ultimate basis of moral rightness is what God/the gods wishes us to do.
By contrast, a naturalistic ethics would be an ethical system that has no such essential component. Typically such ethical systems would start out from premises, assumed to need no divine justification, that our actions or policies should be based on some natural or human fact or the results of human reason, properly used.
One naturalistic approach among many, known as ethical hedonism, holds that we should try to promote pleasure or minimize pain or suffering.
Another nontheological approach might state that we should respect and promote human rights, and define human rights in terms of rules that prevent harm to the most vital human needs that people have (such as needs for personal security or subsistence).
Naturalistic ethics presupposes the use of reason to determine our moral duties. Theological ethics may or may not require much use of reasoning. In one form of theological ethics, the person would look for immediate divine inspiration concerning what he or she should do. If God tells her, pay your taxes she will. If He tells her not to, she won't. In all other forms of theological ethics, reason plays a more or less important role.
One form of theological ethics is very close to naturalistic ethics. In this view, the basic assumption is that God wants us to use our reason to figure out how we should live, what He wants us to do is no different from what we would think right to do after careful consideration and reflection about the facts and about past experience. This kind of a theological moralist operates most of the time as if he or she were a naturalistic moralist. Like the naturalistic moralist, this theological moralist learns from past experience, including the moral advice of older and more experienced people. They both ask questions like, should I do X if I would not want everybody else to do X? Should I do X to A if I would not wish A or B or C for that matter to do X to me?
Theological Ethics-Compatibilist and Incompatibilist
We could say that this sort of theological ethics is compatibilist: All I mean by that is that having a religiously based ethics is compatible with 100 percent devotion to using our human capacities to figuring out what we should do, except for answering the question why we should use our human capacities.
Other forms of theological ethics are incompatibilist. They tell us to follow the will of God even where it conflicts with the best conclusions arrived at independently by the use of human reason.
Two types of incompatibilist theological ethics are as follows: A situational kind, in which God reveals what we should do here and now, as illustrated in the Bible where Abraham is told by God to kill his first-born son. There were no rules or generalizations involved here. Abraham was not told that all first-born sons should be killed by their fathers, only that he should kill Isaac.
Another kind of incompatibilist theological ethics is rule-oriented. For instance, God is thought to have given the ancient Israelites a set of rules, and it was then up to the Israelites to determine which situation called for which rules. Suppose some of these rules (perhaps rules prohibiting the mixture of meat and milk products) could not possibly have been discovered by reflecting on the facts about the human condition and would even have contradicted rules that would have been discovered by that method. In such a case we would have a rule-oriented kind of theological incompatibilism.
Reason within Rule-Oriented Theological Ethics
Rule-oriented theological systems usually trace the rules back to an inspired human being who received the rules from the deity. With the invention of writing, the rules are soon written down, if not by the prophet who received the rules himself, then by his followers in the next generation. The followers do not normally trust themselves or each other to remember the rules perfectly and employ writing as a way of preserving and transmitting the rules.
As soon as theological ethics has to relate to transmitted revelations, or what is allegedly a transmitted revelation, the door is open for the use of reason. It becomes possible to ask whether any errors crept in between the original receiver of the revelation and the present hearer or reader of it.
Did the prophet unconsciously alter the revelation before he told it to another person?These are all important questions involving reason. Theological ethics that rely on transmitted revelations (and that includes all theological ethics based upon Scriptures like the Torah, the Koran, and the New Testament) must deal with these questions.Did the person who wrote it down write it down accurately?
Did the scribe who recopied the message copy it correctly?
If the message was translated from one language to another, did the message get unconsciously altered in translation?
Even if there has been no alteration in the language from original understanding to our own understanding, do we understand the words in the same way as the prophet did who first received the message?
Finally, assuming we understand the message as we are supposed to understand it, how do we apply it to the present situation, which is surely not exactly the same as the situation in which the message was received centuries or millennia ago.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Theological and Nontheological Ethics
Naturalistic ethics is both easier and more difficult than theological ethics. A naturalistic ethics does not have to connect the original reception of the divine message long ago and the present situation, a task which is difficult at best. Some may say impossible.
Naturalistic ethics is free to draw moral insight from
(1) many religious traditions,
(2) recent and not-so-recent human experience,
(3) the sciences and social sciences, and
(4) literature that is not religious in any obvious way.The sheer diversity of sources from which one might gain ethical insight might make some people recoil from the task of naturalistic ethics.
In naturalistic ethics, the testimony of a single religious tradition is never sufficient ground for adopting a moral rule, and sometimes we can justify moral guidelines without referring to religious traditions at all. It has been claimed by scholars of religion that all major religions teach the importance of compassion. From the perspective of naturalistic ethics, that's important not because all religions are true, but because the universality of the teaching suggests that compassion is important for us as human beings. A naturalistic ethics might proceed to ground an ethic of compassion in facts about human nature generally.
In this course, our focus will be upon naturalistic or nontheological ethics as distinct from theological ethics. Since this is a public university, not a university that is tied to a particular religious denomination, we are not permitted to assume the universal validity of the texts of any religious tradition, because religions can and do contradict one another at various points. Moreover, since this is a public university, and agnostics and atheists have as much right as believers in deity to participate in the dialogue about right and wrong, we cannot give priority to any theological position just because it is a theological position. A practical matter is that your professor does not profess to be an expert in Bible, Torah, or Koran interpretation.
An advantage of focusing upon naturalistic ethics is that the arguments of naturalistic ethics can be used to appeal to individuals regardless of their religious orientation. You may be opposed to the death penalty on religious grounds, but you can make your case intelligible even to the nonreligious or, what is just as likely, the only slightly religious person, in the non-religious terms referring to rights or needs or the possibility of human mistaken judgment.