Religion and Morality

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  • Created by: Samio
  • Created on: 12-01-16 14:50
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  • Religion and Morality
    • Natural Law
      • Developed by Thomas Aquinas
      • Claims that God set out a series of fixed moral principles
      • 5 Primary Precepts: Be educated, worship god, live in an ordered society, use sex for reproduction only, preserve life.
      • Any action that goes against the precepts is immoral
    • Conscience
      • Our internal voice of moral judgement
      • Bonhoeffer said that conscience was a 'god-given voice'
      • Freud believed it was a result of our socialisation, not a higher power
      • John Henry Newman: 'If we feel responsibility....there is One to whom we are responsible'
    • Kantian Ethics
      • Reason and good will: Duty for duty's sake
      • 3 Categorical principles: Universalisability, ends/means, universal kingdom of ends
      • Man is morally autonomous but God is the ultimate judge
      • We all share the ability to reason
    • Situation Ethics
      • Teleological approach, no fixed rules
      • Based on the principle of agape
      • Proposed by Joseph Fletcher
      • Actions hare instrumental worth, so duty to God is not required
    • Scriptural Ethics
      • Morality is taken directly from religious scriptures
      • No room for individualism/moral autonomy
      • Criticised because scriptures are often ambiguous/contradictory
    • Divine Command Theory
      • Takes God to be the source of all ethics
      • Strong theonomic deontological perspective
      • Popularised in the Middle Ages by thinkers such as Aquinas
      • William of Ockham argued that anything can be moral if God commands it
      • Makes morality arbitrary - Euthyphro dilemma

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