1.0.5 Existence of Goodness: Ethics Overview

Version 1.5 January 2023                                             (Previous Version)

Here we face a few questions: Why be good?  What is goodness made up of?

Here we are talking about how to behave like moral human beings.  Morality is about being right or wrong.  Ethics is the study of the moral value of human conduct and the rules or guidelines that should govern it.  In REALigion, our core values are the key guidelines that govern our behaviour.

If there were a God who cares what we do, what would that tell us about being good? 

• Some say we should be good because God will punish us or it makes bad karma if we don’t.  But that is not being good: it's being practical.  Behaving out of fear is not genuine goodness.
• Some say being good is acting according to God’s wishes, because God is good and doesn’t lead us astray.  But it’s circular to say God is good when doing good is doing what God says.
• If we know God is good it's because we already understand goodness, before we know god.

·       Many of the rules that supposedly come from God, in the Bible or the Qu’ran, are in fact bad.

How can we address ethical issues if a caring God doesn’t exist?  How can we tell if God is good? 

There is no agreed way to define in a simple sentence what is good, virtuous or our duty. 

• Some think we can learn what is good by looking at what happens in nature.  But what does happen can't tell us what we should do.  We can't learn core values from science or history.
• We have evolved to have emotional responses.  Most of us are born with an innate ability to feel empathy, at least to some extent, and to assess what behaviour is fair – children have it.
• But we vary in the strength of such feelings: most of us also need legal and cultural constraints.
• Many of us are capable of acting in our enlightened self-interest.  We help others because we expect others will help us in return.  So far as society is concerned, that may be enough.
• A small minority, either innately or as a result trauma, don't feel compassion or can't follow their enlightened self-interest.  We have to control such people via legal and cultural means.

We choose as a core value love: part of being good is doing what we can to reduce others’ suffering, promote happiness or fulfillment, and help others to satisfy their preferences.

We also choose to accept that there are no reasonable grounds to believe that one person is innately worth more than another: one of our core values is equality.

Again we face the problem of causality or chaos: we can't confidently assert we have free will.  If we can't choose freely, can we be held responsible for our actions?  But we observe that people change their behaviour with legal and cultural rewards and punishments.

We assign responsibility to a person committing an action, including ourselves,

when there is a potential for social or personal intervention to be effective.

Justice requires that if no intervention would be effective, we must show mercy.

We say “goodness comes from within�.  This still leaves many practical problems in deciding what we should do.  Science, history and religion can provide useful guidelines on what is effective.  Government must be based on our core values, best shown to date in liberal democracies.

We work through the next level of detail on each of the above issues (more).  After considering this evidence, we’ve looked for a way to state our conclusions briefly, and we come to the following summary.

Is this the best way to state our conclusions in this area?  Click on feedback, or add a comment below, if you can improve the substance or the phrasing.

  more                                                              Statement 5

The choices we make reflect that we value love (or compassion), responsibility and equality.