 So, so far this semester we've looked at a pretty wide variety of moral theories. Now, at this point we're going to ask the question of, you know, does morality depend upon religion? Now this notion of dependence kind of fluctuates in this chapter. There's different notions of dependence floating around. One way of thinking about whether morality depends upon religion is whether the truth of some ethical theory depends upon the truth of some religion. That's one way to try to understand dependence. Another way is, does our knowledge of morality depend upon our knowledge of a particular religion? That's another way to think about dependence. Another way to think about it is, does the existence of morality depend upon the existence of a religion? Now Rachel's, you know, looks at this question and he provides several different approaches but sometimes it's not always clear which kind of dependence he's talking about. So, we'll think about that as we wrap this up at the end. But the question we're dealing with here is trying to figure out what, if any kind of dependence, morality has upon a religion. So one of the classic arguments in dealing with this kind of dependence is something called the Euthyphro Dilemma. And it's called Euthyphro named after the person with whom Socrates is having a conversation about this. So the Euthyphro Dilemma starts off really simple. He's asking the question, is what is moral, moral because the gods command it or we can just simply say the divine. If you don't want to talk about the existence of God you can simply say it this way. Say, is what is moral, moral because the divine commands it or does the divine command it because it's moral? So if it's the first one, right, so the two possibilities, either it's moral because the divine commands it or the divine commands it because it's moral. So let's try the first one. It's moral because the divine commands it. Okay. So what is this supposed to mean? Well, there's a couple of different ways of trying to understand this. One way that Rachel's looks at is that we have existence, we have the world, we have what's real, we have all these physical properties and then the gods come along, the divine comes along and then kind of adds morality on top of that. So what the divine commands makes this morality. Another way of understanding this is that you have what is natural, you have what is existence, there is just no morality at all and the gods simply just command something or the divine simply commands something. Okay. So this whole idea is that there is some kind of disconnect between what is real, what's true and then what the divine says. Well, now if it's this option it looks like a bad situation here if this is the case that if the divine makes true independently of what's real makes true what is moral. Because it looks like there's just absolutely no reason for deciding one thing or another. Sure, the divine with a lot of faith traditions that the divine commands say something like murder, that murder is immoral. But if there's no reason for that then we say well the divine could have commanded just anything. Could have commanded murder or killing, random killing to be moral. The divine could have commanded a variety of things regarding life. The divine could have commanded that it's absolutely wrong in all situations to take life, any life whatsoever. The divine could have commanded that to take every life. Now you might be thinking well that's just kind of nonsensical because there's good reasons to take life or not take life and this is exactly the point. If there's nothing that existed or is responsible for divine command then it could have just been completely arbitrary. But your gut instinct is that well there's really good reasons for what is moral. There's really good reasons for why this or that is more than moral. We've seen lots of varieties of how to explain that with these different ethical theories. So this is exactly the point. We don't think morality is arbitrary. We think that there is good reason. But if there's already good reason and depending on what the divine commands then it can't be that option. There has to be reason for why the divine commands with the divine commands. Okay, good. But then this is the second option. That the divine commands it because it is good. But if the divine commands it because it is good it looks like it's good regardless of what the divine commands. So randomly killing strangers. There's really good reason not to do them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that some divinity wouldn't command it. You know if divinities are anything like people there are many times when people have commanded killing others for no good reason. But that doesn't mean it's moral. It looks like the standard of what is moral is independent of what the divine command is. So either way you go here I mean either you say that what is moral is moral because the divine commands that then you get this weird notion that morality is arbitrary and we don't want to accept that. The other way that we can go is to say that the divine commands because it is moral. It's like okay, we like to go that way but then it looks like what is moral is independent of divine command. So one approach in saying that and taking this second option with the youth of pro dilemma is what's called natural law theory. Now the reason why Rachel's talks about this is because it's been very popular with some traditions to appeal to natural law theory when trying to explain why what divinity commands is moral. And natural law theory has basically three claims. The first is that there is a natural order to the world or even just order. There is just an order to the world. And another way of saying this is that there are patterns to what's real. Trees sprout from acorns. Trees don't sprout from puppies and vice versa. Puppies don't sprout from acorns. The sky is gaseous the ground is solid and rock. Talk about mathematics, right? There's a pattern in mathematics for what is real. 1 plus 1 always equals 2. 2 plus 2 always equals 4. The rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division are constant. They don't change when you're dealing with well at least when you're dealing with counting integers. You don't have difference rules. But if there is going to be a difference then there's going to be some way to account for it. If there's going to be a difference in this situation then there's going to be that same difference The laws, what we discovered that the physical sciences discovers a causal order to the universe. The physical sciences are going to tell us things for instance like puppies don't sprout from acorns and acorns don't sprout from puppies. The physical laws are also going to tell us about these causal relationships between material objects. So they're going to describe the physical sciences are going to describe how I behave or at the beginning of account other things that I can do within physical limits. So that's the first claim of natural law theory is that there is a pattern and order of rationality to the universe to all of reality. The second part of natural law theory is that there are laws that describe how things are and there are laws that describe how things should be. So the causal laws of nature are going to describe how these trees are actually going to exist. Trees are these trees well the old trees sprout from acorns the cedar trees sprout from whatever the seed is for cedar trees and this is the causal order of reality. Not just trees but also human beings what we can do what we can't do. The second kind of laws are not how things are how things should be. So we have lots of ideas about how things should be. We talk about this all the time. Human bodies should be healthy. We should strive for health. Human minds should be emotionally and cognitively well balanced. We should be able to have a grasp upon our emotional states and we should strive for believing true things. These are two different kinds of laws. Laws for how things should be and laws for how things actually are. It's not like these things are completely separated. How things should be is in part going to depend upon how things are. So one part of what we are human beings is we in fact have minds. We do have emotions. So the laws that describe how we actually behave are going to have certain descriptions about what we're going to do given certain emotional states. If you're extremely, extremely angry the laws will describe that behavior. Usually it's yelling, sometimes violence, certain facial expressions. These laws will where we're dealing with anger are probably going to explain how we react to people with whom we are angry. That's going to be the descriptive part. The laws that describe what should happen are going to in part depend upon that in the sense that given certain descriptions in how we are we should act in a particular way. But that's not necessarily it's not going to be the same thing as actually what is. So for instance how we actually act when we're angry, it's like we're yelling at somebody and maybe we'll actually hit them or something like that. But the laws describing how we should behave you shouldn't hit people necessarily when you're angry. There are going to be certain limits on when you can use violence. Now you imagine that the descriptive laws are different. Imagine, for instance when you hit somebody it causes damage. It causes bruising, maybe you cause some bleeding or if you hit them hard or something like that. If the descriptive laws were different if no amount of hitting somebody actually caused damage then the laws describing how you should behave would probably be different. If there was no damage that was caused by hitting somebody then it would probably be ok to actually hit somebody when you're angry. So for instance this happens already now when I'm angry at somebody you know my anger doesn't necessarily cause damage. I could just be angry and keep that anger to myself but it wouldn't necessarily hurt another person. So if it doesn't cause that damage at least on the surface there's nothing really wrong with whether or not I should be angry. There are the laws that describe what actually happens what can happen as far as physical descriptions are concerned and there are laws about what should happen. The laws about what should happen aren't completely independent of what actually happens but they're not co-extensive they're not the same thing. There's going to be different sets of laws or as I like to tell people the difference between is and should is called the real world. The third part of natural law theory is that the first part was that there's an order, a pattern, a rationality to existence. The second part is that there are laws that describe how things actually are and laws that describe how they should be. The third part of natural law theory is that all this is all this is discoverable or at least known or understood by reason. So the idea is there is this pattern, there is this rationality to the universe this pattern, this rationality is going to give us two different sets of laws since there is this rationality to the universe we are going to understand it because we are rational creatures we are the kinds of things that use reason we are the kinds of things that can discover patterns and this works really well in every regard because we are really good at discovering the causal laws of nature at least to an extent we understand a lot as far as that is concerned we are really good with for instance mathematics which is another kind of pattern to reality we are really good with logic to an extent we are really good with logic we can discover a lot of patterns and reasoning with logic what we have been doing through this course we have been discovering different ideas of what is moral looking at reality and engaging reality with our minds and trying to figure out what is moral based upon that so these three claims are the real basis for natural law theory the Rachel's provides three objections to natural law theory the first objection is what is natural is not always what is good so you get this kind of popular refrain from people who are endorsing how shall we say certain plants that when either consumed or the smoke of which is inhaled induces certain euphoric states so the claim is well you know this is natural so it's good you also get a lot of claims about this say for instance with food products you say well this food is natural it's naturally made so it's good well as Rachel's points out there are lots of things that are natural like this that are not good arsenic occurs naturally in nature you can literally if you know where to look for it you can literally go into a field and find arsenic poisons are natural the venom of a snake is natural but that doesn't mean it's good that doesn't mean it's good so the Rachel's argument here his objection is that what is natural is not always what is good that's a good argument that's a true claim though what is natural in this sense is not always what is good however that's not the sense of natural that the natural law theorist is dealing with you know it looks like what Rachel's is doing here is he's kind of combining the two different kinds of laws into one he seems to be saying that the causal laws of nature are just the same thing as the laws of what you should do and that's not what the natural law theorist is claiming would agree with Rachel's here that just because it's natural in the sense that it occurs in nature does not mean it's good the natural law theorist would agree with that but the natural law theorist says I'm not talking about just that sense of natural I've got more than one sense of I've got when I'm talking about natural I'm talking about what exists what exists what's part of the nature the essence or definition or meaning of a thing not necessarily what happens in a forest right so this is Rachel's first objection that what is natural in the sense that it occurs independent of human intervention is not always what is good and this is true what is natural in the sense that it occurs independent of human intervention is not always what is good but the natural law theorist doesn't claim this the second objection that Rachel's gives is this kind of famous one that what is the case doesn't imply what ought to be the case so the idea is well there's lots of things that actually are so when we're looking at it to the world we're looking at reality there's lots of things that actually are I mean there is there is the fact that people are dying of disease there is the fact that people are killing each other there is the fact that oh I don't know that people lie to each other all the time but from that fact of is it doesn't mean that you ought to kill that you ought to lie that you ought to steal and this is right there's all kinds of things that actually happen that doesn't mean they ought to happen however the natural law theorist is not claiming this the natural law theorist it actually makes a real distinction between this when with the two different kinds of laws the laws of what actually is the causal laws of what actually happens and the laws of what should be right now you know you might say hold on a second does that mean that they're independent no like I said they're not completely independent some of what should be is going to depend upon what actually is okay well it doesn't mean they're co-extensive right and all that is really meant here when talking about laws that should be with laws that are this kind of laws of existence is that if you know if reality were different the laws of what should be would also be different and that's just I mean that's just going to go here with all the theories that we talked about so far right if there were no rationality we wouldn't have social contract theory or consrespect for persons or even Rachel's bare minimum conception of morality right involving rationality you know if rationality were completely different if we were built differently such that you know right now the way that we're built we have to start with experiences and try to derive conclusions from that right so if I'm going to learn about these trees I got to start by observing the trees and derive the laws of nature about the trees now if our brains were different if our rationality was different such that I didn't have to go through the experiences of looking at that tree instead and say my mind could make direct contact with the tree and be able to infer or be able to just know directly everything there is to know about that tree then I wouldn't have to bother with the scientific method right if there was that change in what was real there would be that change as far as what rationality is but that doesn't mean that what is rational is just co-extensive with what is okay there's still some dependence there there's going to be something more happening than simple inference but but it's not as if the natural law theorist is saying that what is just is what ought to be natural law theorist is not saying that so again it kind of it looks like Rachel's complaint that is does not imply ought that's a good complaint that's true is does not imply ought claims exactly opposite that that there is a difference between what is and what ought to be Rachel's third objection is kind of related to the first two so the third objection deals with the physical sciences now with the physical sciences we can spend all day out here observing nature and we do this a lot and we do it very well so we do study the trees and we look at how the trees are related to the earth and the water and the sky we look at the causal relationships between these things and never not once do we find laws of what ought to be we only ever find of laws of what is so Rachel's is saying look the physical sciences deal with what's natural all the time but we never find these laws of what ought to be we only ever find the laws of what are or what is and you know if that you know that's that complaint again is it's kind of misguided again it's confusing the two kinds of laws there's a lot that science that the physical sciences don't uncover and it's not supposed to for instance you can study nature all you want and you're not going to find any physical evidence for mathematics that's not how math works we don't understand mathematics in virtue of observation and through experiment we understand mathematics through conceptual understanding all the same thing is the same is true for a lot of things there are plenty of properties out there that are not physical properties science and this is what the physical sciences do very good and I'm a fan of science physical sciences can tell you about the physical properties of all these things and about you and about the world and atoms and galaxies from the very tiny to the very big you can describe all those physical properties but natural law theorists say yeah there's physical properties and there are moral properties as well there are laws about what is and there are laws about what should be lots of things do this right lots of other disciplines talk about other properties besides physical properties and you might just start discounting all these different kinds of physical properties but the property of being a good inference is one of those that's not a physical property for instance the whole scientific method does not have physical properties the scientific method is a great method for discovering physical properties and the relationships of the things having those physical properties between them but it itself has no physical properties what an experiment is does not rely upon any given physical thing or any kind of physical thing rather what an experiment is involves all of these physical things and itself doesn't have any physical properties so even truth truth is not a physical property you can't weigh it you can't burn it you can't transfer it from one object to another you can't build it truth itself is not a physical property so you know Rachel's complaint here that the sciences deal with what's natural and they can't find any of these natural laws again it is confusing the two kinds of laws the natural law theorist is very willing to say yes there are causal laws of nature between material objects that's one set of laws and that the physical sciences discovers very well but physical sciences don't discover the laws of what should be because it's not designed for that and for one really simple example of what this is all kinds of physical laws there's going to be all kinds of physical properties about what happens to the body in different situations you give the body different kinds of food you give different kinds of outcomes you have the body do different kinds of activities you give different kinds of outcomes and the physical sciences can give us that complete description but in that description amongst the physical properties you will not find the physical property healthy healthy is what we come along and in a sense add to it and if you don't believe me there have been really constant descriptions of what of what the physical body does but there's been changing definitions of what is healthy so we already engage in this kind of activity of what we should be healthy versus how we actually are and I'm not going to go into my physical descriptions so these three objections that Rachel provides really just confuse the two kinds of laws that the natural theorist is dealing with now this still leaves open the question of what this all has to do with religion now I don't want to give the impression that there's just absolutely nothing wrong or problematic with natural law theory no there's lots of problems even just using the case of what's healthy you're going to get a wide variety of answers of what's healthy when we're talking about physical health we're talking about motion health mental health even in terms of we've been talking a lot about nature obviously lots of people are not happy but trying to figure out what happiness is and answering that question has been at best troublesome because we've had a lot of problems with that really in a lot of ways natural law theory is a very common project when you look at the three claims behind natural law theory that there is an order to the universe that there's a difference between what is and what ought to be and that we can discover through human reason that's real common to all the theories at least to some of them we're dealing with Kant's categorical comparative definitely dealing with rationality definitely dealing with the difference between what is and what ought to be and definitely dealing with the idea that reason can discover this utilitarianism does the same thing utilitarianism is very concerned with what's real out there it demands of us that we look at what's real and especially at the consequences of our actions and we find happiness in all that and we should go after happiness so there's lots of rules about what is and one rule about what we should do namely go after the thing that produces the most happiness and the utilitarianism is really confident that we can do this through human reason I guess what I'm pointing at here is that there is variety of natural law theories in really important ways and there are some really specific ones I mean one there's a version that just really kind of sticks to natural law theory but the three claims behind is one that's just really specifically called natural law theory but the idea behind natural law theory is actually really common across the theories now of course there's going to be problems with natural law theory we've seen that just through the course of the semester we can work out these three claims now what it's really getting to the main point here is what does this have to do with religion and there's even a way you can kind of parse this out you can say what does morality have to do with any given religion and what does morality have to do with with any given if a deity exists the other things are kind of two different questions the fact that there are religions doesn't necessitate that anyone's got it right and if there is no deity it really looks like religions are in trouble but they still make a lot of a lot of claims and the idea is what are we supposed to do with that if there is no divinity so to try to think about this a little bit when we're dealing with something like natural law theory and actually any of these different philosophical theories about what is moral and you see the motivations behind these different theories pop up across time, culture, religion and place the question is what is this relationship between morality and religion and the thing that Rachel's focus is on is a really great question is this various theories the idea is that we can discover what's true about morality independent of what a religion states so that's one way to look at it another way to look at it is to say religions make various claims about what's moral but we have to use reason to understand why they're moral another way to look at it and these are two really important claims to consider as far as I know faiths and different religions they do teach different kinds of moral codes that's right also as far as I know none of them stop there there's always an explanation for why these are the right moral commands of course you can have preachers and maybe even some religious institutions that will say that the reason why these are true is because they're commanded by the divine or by that church but that's pretty few and far between even Rachel's likes to use the catholic church as an example but the catholic church spends a lot of time trying to explain why these moral commands are the right ones and it doesn't always depend upon simply because it pops up in a sacred text as Rachel's points out natural law theory is a favorite of the catholic church in trying to explain these things but natural law theory as we saw with that discussion doesn't rely upon any specific sacred text so yeah these various faiths as far as I know all of them as far as I can tell always offer some kind of explanation some kind of justification for why these theories are the right ones besides simply saying the divine commands it so the different faiths embrace this idea that what is moral is understood and justified by human reason so but this is the crux of the complaint that Rachel's has this is the big question if what is moral does depend or you know is justified but it can't be understood by reason, by human reason why do we need the divine