The Relation between Non-Religious Ethics and Christian Ethics

The Relation between Non-Religious Ethics and Christian Ethics essay assignment

The Relation between Non-Religious Ethics and Christian Ethics essay assignment

In this module, we’ve briefly looked at the claim that morality finds its source and authority in God’s commands. For believers in a creator God, this view can provide an answer to the question of why moral commands have authority over what we do. Here we will briefly look at whether the various approaches to ethics that were surveyed in this course have any direct bearing on Christian faith in a divine creator.

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The final message of this section of the course is that there is no simple answer to the question of what is the relation between non-religious and religious ethics. By now, the interactions and influences between the two are multiple and varied. The best analogies would be cross-breeding or assimilation. Even what we take to be characteristically religious views have non-religious antecedents; and conversely, non-religious ethics did not develop in a religious vacuum.

Slide 3

Title: Virtue Ethics and Natural Law

Slide Content: Image of the word “ETHICS” in 3-D block letters

Text:

· Christian ethics has incorporated Aristotelian and Stoic virtue ethics

· Christian ethics has incorporated Greek and Roman conceptions of natural law

Narrator: Aristotelian and Stoic virtue ethics, not to mention Platonic ideals about the good, have been incorporated into Christian ethics. Indeed, ideas concerning what virtues are and how they are conducive to the good and to right action have been synthesized with Christian ideals most extensively by Aquinas in the 13th century. Contemporary discussions of the virtues in a Christian outlook have been conducted by Catholic philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre. Thus, non-Christian virtue ethics is not only compatible with Christian ethics, it has, in part, endured by being folded into Christian thinking about the moral life.

Something similar can be said about the conception of a natural law. Its source is pre-Christian, yet it too has been synthesized with Christianity. The idea that a just law must be in conformity with natural law, well- known to the American civil rights movement through the impact of Martin Luther King, Jr., had already been asserted by Augustine in the 5th century CE. Augustine has exercised a tremendous influence, not only on Catholic thought, but also on Protestant thought. Yet Augustine did not invent the ideas of just law and natural law. They were part of the legacy of Greek thought and Ancient Rome. While the notion of a natural law is pre-Christian, it does presume that the universe is ordered by some cosmic purpose. Thus the notion of a natural law requires more assumptions than contemporary secular conceptions of nature would allow. But it does not strictly require belief in the existence of a creator God.

Slide 4

Title: Rights

Slide Content: Photo of a scale and gavel

Text:

· The interaction between Christian and non-Christian ideas especially complex in the matter of rights

· Passive rights developed from non-religious sources

· Active rights developed under the influence of theological ideas and combined with natural law

Narrator: The relation between the notion of rights and religious ethics is a complex one. In the 20th century, one of the significant figures who contributed to the ideas that found their way in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain. In this respect, the notion of rights must be thought to be at least compatible with religious ethics. As we have seen in a previous module, the earliest conception of rights, developed in the 12th century, is of rights as passive rights or claim rights. It was developed by individuals who were in some way connected with the Church and the notion served to support the charitable functions of the Church. Yet the notion of a claim right is derived from commentaries on Roman law involving agreements among individuals or between individuals and the State. So the source of the notion of a claim right cannot straightforwardly be said to be of religious inspiration. The later notion of liberty rights, or active rights, developed beginning the 13th century, did find its inspiration in a religious doctrine concerning the relation of God to Earth. This is the notion that was later combined with a conception of natural law and used in a formulation of a doctrine of natural rights, as we find it in John Locke, notable for its influence on the US Declaration of Independence. The development of the notion of rights illustrates just how intricate is the relation between nonreligious and religious conceptions of morality.