In general, morals and ethics are related terms. Morals are valid encoded or natural and universal-enough ideas of right and wrong. Ethics are systems by which people navigate doing right over wrong, so that one’s conduct is good enough to satisfy the light, sweet burden of humanity.
In Kali Yuga-era religious traditions, there are a few different objectives that morals are designed to achieve.
- Harm reduction
- Some of the rules you’ll find in religious laws are extremely straight forward. They exist to reduce the harm that people cause through unjustified self interest and other antisocial motives.
- These rules usually concentrate on minimizing interpersonal harm— the ways that people sometimes hurt, violate, and exploit one another. However, various religious codes also seek to reduce the harm that people cause to themselves, animals, their environment, etc.
- Generally, religious laws that focus on harm reduction have a great deal of overlap with secular ethics. Most people— of any faith or lack thereof— tend to agree that rules that minimize interpersonal harm tend to be sensible, and are necessary for a peaceful society.
- Social Cohesion and Continuity
- Religions are in the business of building communities. Sometimes religious rules restrict behaviors, but don’t actively prevent harm in an obvious way. These rules have a community-based purpose. Restricting and encouraging specific behaviors can help define a community, and strengthen members’ identification with the group. This becomes an extreme problem in cases of dangerous cults.
- For example, if I belong to a religion that instructs me to eat a certain way or dress a certain way, it’s not necessarily mitigating any harm I might do in the world. But it’s informing my identity. It’s making me feel closer to other people who eat and dress and worship the way I do. We’ve become a community of “us” in a sea of “them”. This too becomes an extreme problem in cases of dangerous cults.
- Rules that achieve social cohesion vary widely between different faiths. As such, they’re extremely subjective, and usually have very little to do with secular codes of ethics.
- Maintaining Power Structures and Institutions
- Often, religious rules are put in place to perpetuate the power structures and institutions inside the faith. These often take the form of specific protocols and taboos intended to prevent reform, power struggles, and other shifts in the community.
- Wherever hierarchies form, the people at the top tend to get very invested in maintaining the current power distribution. That’s human nature. (Whenever religious laws dovetail perfectly with keeping the people in power more happy than uncorrupted, I do think it’s worth asking how divine they actually.)
- Rules that maintain specific hierarchies within religions aren’t necessarily supported by secular ethics (although they often are, if those hierarchies are doing good in the world). However, similar rules concerning governmental hierarchy are almost always encoded into secular law.
So when we’re talking about morals inside a theistic worldview, they might fall into one or more of those three categories.
Religions tend to have a lot of variation when it comes to moral laws that don’t focus on harm reduction.
Name an activity that’s not hurting anyone. You can probably find a handful of religions that embrace it, and others that consider it a terrible sin.
In this sense, some religious “morals” don’t have an objective reality. They’re sometimes highly subjective and variable, depending on which religion or sect or denomination we’re discussing.
However, the ethical notion of reducing the harm that humans do to other humans is close to universal. You find people in nearly every religion talking about reducing harm, needless suffering, and damage. You find atheists (and agnostics) saying the exact same things.
A rare sort of religious person might think that driving a car is evil.
A rare sort of religious person might think that any song with a repetitive, driving beat is the devil’s music.
A rare sort of religious person might believe that it’s morally repugnant for a woman to wear pants.
An ethical atheist probably doesn’t hold those beliefs. But an ethical atheist is almost certainly going to think that murder and terrorism are wrong, as would anyone, because murder and terrorism cause concrete and unjustifiable harm.
──── by Lync Dalton ────
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(This article by Lync Dalton first appeared on Quora in 2017)
