R
Russell_SA
Guest
Is divine command theory a moral system?
Situation: Two people are disagreeing with the morality of a situation. How do they determine who has the better moral path when one assesses their morals through social interactions and understandings of reality to make predictions on what their actions will accomplish in the future while the other relies on their religious texts that claims these actions are the correct path because their deity addressed this issue.
Assertions about the religion: It claims that all people have a broken moral compass and require a deity to direct them to the correct moral pathway.
The first person wonders how the religious person decided to conclude that their deity was the moral one over anyone or anything else. Person B used their own moral compass to assess that their deity was the correct path and their devil was not the correct path. So in that process, she is applying her own moral compass to make a decision on where to go to for moral issues. However, since she is choosing to throw out her moral decision making ability and go by this deity’s wishes, she is no longer acting as a moral agent. This is not to say she is acting immorally, just that she is no longer applying her ability to think about the moral issues and assess her choices as moral or not. She is now acting as the dog sitting on the couch because her master told her to sit on the couch, but she does not know why she should be sitting on the couch. She’s only acting as a robot and not using her moral thinking process to assess her actions to see if they are actually good or bad. If her deity tells her to do something that she believes is immoral, she will still have to suspend her moral thought process and just take that path. Also, she may evaluate the situation and still follow what her deity told her to do, this becomes just a waste of time exercise since she is just going to do what her deity tells her to do even if she believes that the action is a horribly immoral action to take.
We have to understand why a path is right or wrong before taking that pathway, otherwise we are suspending our abilities to think about moral issues and are no longer acting as a moral agent, but only acting as a trained pet.
We can be wrong on our moral conclusions but if we do not know that we are wrong in this process, how can we know otherwise? This is why we do not hold people morally culpable for results of choices they made where they were, in good faith, acting in the best way that they knew how. But her deity would, if only for not following it’s commandments. To operate that way removes her humanity, her ability to apply her moral understanding to the situation; she is just a trained pet with no understanding of what actually is moral or not.
Since we do not have a complete consensus on moral issues, this is what you would expect from an evolutionary guided natural world instead of a supernaturally guided world; where there is a sense of general fairness and it will manifest differently from culture to culture. What’s the point of having the capacity to evaluate moral issues if all you have to do is follow the dear leader’s rules? You are not a moral agent if your deity tells you to do something and you suspend your moral assessment of that action to understand if it is actually good or bad. You should always be evaluating what you are being told to do instead of just following orders without question. Divine command theory is inherently immoral because of this result.
Situation: Two people are disagreeing with the morality of a situation. How do they determine who has the better moral path when one assesses their morals through social interactions and understandings of reality to make predictions on what their actions will accomplish in the future while the other relies on their religious texts that claims these actions are the correct path because their deity addressed this issue.
Assertions about the religion: It claims that all people have a broken moral compass and require a deity to direct them to the correct moral pathway.
The first person wonders how the religious person decided to conclude that their deity was the moral one over anyone or anything else. Person B used their own moral compass to assess that their deity was the correct path and their devil was not the correct path. So in that process, she is applying her own moral compass to make a decision on where to go to for moral issues. However, since she is choosing to throw out her moral decision making ability and go by this deity’s wishes, she is no longer acting as a moral agent. This is not to say she is acting immorally, just that she is no longer applying her ability to think about the moral issues and assess her choices as moral or not. She is now acting as the dog sitting on the couch because her master told her to sit on the couch, but she does not know why she should be sitting on the couch. She’s only acting as a robot and not using her moral thinking process to assess her actions to see if they are actually good or bad. If her deity tells her to do something that she believes is immoral, she will still have to suspend her moral thought process and just take that path. Also, she may evaluate the situation and still follow what her deity told her to do, this becomes just a waste of time exercise since she is just going to do what her deity tells her to do even if she believes that the action is a horribly immoral action to take.
We have to understand why a path is right or wrong before taking that pathway, otherwise we are suspending our abilities to think about moral issues and are no longer acting as a moral agent, but only acting as a trained pet.
We can be wrong on our moral conclusions but if we do not know that we are wrong in this process, how can we know otherwise? This is why we do not hold people morally culpable for results of choices they made where they were, in good faith, acting in the best way that they knew how. But her deity would, if only for not following it’s commandments. To operate that way removes her humanity, her ability to apply her moral understanding to the situation; she is just a trained pet with no understanding of what actually is moral or not.
Since we do not have a complete consensus on moral issues, this is what you would expect from an evolutionary guided natural world instead of a supernaturally guided world; where there is a sense of general fairness and it will manifest differently from culture to culture. What’s the point of having the capacity to evaluate moral issues if all you have to do is follow the dear leader’s rules? You are not a moral agent if your deity tells you to do something and you suspend your moral assessment of that action to understand if it is actually good or bad. You should always be evaluating what you are being told to do instead of just following orders without question. Divine command theory is inherently immoral because of this result.
