Ethics: Dark and White- Page 2

Morality in ancient Greece

Greece is well marked in history due to its city-state structure which is an ancestral form of democracy. That is unlike a kingdom, there were people in the process of determining the administrative system. Of course, it was not very similar to modern society in the sense that, women and slaves were out of the process. But, we can see that there were ethical rules which govern social life in each city-state. And there were also philosophical discussions going on about ethics. So, it is another nice place in history where we could get some more thoughts.

We could see the Gods and Goddesses in the poems of Homer, who are much similar to noble human beings. The only difference was that they called humans as mortals. But remarkably both Gods and humans are led by the desire of honor. There we can see all the human emotions on the face of Gods also. Humans are honoring them for their needs, through means of rituals and offerings. But, here the Gods are not the above all powers, they are also subjected to fate and justice. We could see this in the case of any Greek God.

But, when we are moving towards pre-socratic philosophers, we could see a shift from religious thoughts to more logic-based reasoning, even though those ideas weren’t completely correct. That is the mythical stories about unseen characters had disappeared from the description and they became more concentrated on the physical world. We could see this shift when Thales was saying that “water is the origin of everything”. But, they didn’t leave the religion behind. This is clear from the Heraclitus that “only wisdom does and does not consent to be called Zeus”. This could be seen as an act to affirm the divinity of wisdom. There is also another line of thought similar to this, that is ‘To God, all things are beautiful and good and just but humans suppose some things to be just and others unjust’. And similar effort tries to link the laws of the city to the divine law of God. But later the sophists rejected the link between the human laws and the divine laws. So it is thought that sophists had taught their students to manipulate the laws of the city for their own advantage. The statement of Protagoras could be also explained in this way also. He stated that ‘A human being is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not’. That is a person is getting more important than society and so he is allowed to do his deeds, irrespective of the rest of the world. Contrastingly, one could also explain that this is a shift towards a world view, which is centered on humans, rather than the Gods. Plato later explains this, he tells that humans have been given by the Gods, the gift of shame and justice, which made it possible to make the cities and hence he is the measure of all things.

Justice is thought to be the same thing among the Gods and humans. But, Socrates was not the one who is believing in the city Gods. He was interpreted as a sophiest and that was the reason for the punishment given to him, which he interpreted as the invitation from the Gods to die. But, if we are looking closer, he wasn’t a sophiest as he wasn’t manipulating any rules for his advantage. It was just that he questioned the Gods, Questioned the immortals. What is wrong with that? In many places in the history we could see similar things. Perhaps we could call this as the clash between an individual and society. If a person is completely against the sole idea on which a society is based on one of the most probable event that would occur is this. And most likely the system would win and would build stories on it. His contrasting view with the existing stories of the God later give rise to the ‘Euthyphero dylemma’. Suppose you are defining something as holly, then you would be faced by a question. Is it called holly because the Gods love it or does the God love it because it is holly? Socrates thought that the second one is what is true, that is one would love a thing based on the property of that. But, this wasn’t an objection in connecting religion and morality, and he also added that good deeds are serving the Gods well. So he does says that our goal is to be like the Gods, and since they are nothing less than just, that is exactly what a person need to achieve. Here it is clear that it is again morality and ethics. In the Laws it is clearly stated by Plato that ‘god can serve for us in the highest degree as a measure of all things, and much more than any human can, whatever some people say; so people who are going to be friends with such a god must, as far as their powers allow, be like the gods themselves.’

One thing we have to see here is that, in ancient Greece, God or divine is considered to be like a magnet, rather than like an ultimate power. And it is thought that people are influenced by them to be like that, which is the highest state anyone can achieve. For simplicity, we can compare the concept of God existed there to a superhero, who would appear in any classic melodrama, which is true here. They all were just creations of a writer, and later people had forgotten that fact. So, instead of Heavens here the reward for good deeds according to ethics is the state of God or something close to that. This is much like declaring someone as the war hero, the heaven in this cause does exist in the collective imagination but exist in the imagination alone. The well being of a city here is mentioned as the precedence over individuals. Aristotle says that the highest state of happiness is blessedness, and according to him the highest human activity is the most God-like. Aristotle defines ethical virtue as lying in a mean between excess and defect, which is fair enough. But, how could we define this mean? For him a man of political wisdom is enough to do that. This looks like the classical view of a perfect human, who is a balanced mixture of emotions and abilities. Here we have to see that even if the God-like nature is the highest attainable state, and causes the well-being of both the person and the society, the person is not considering anything other than the state he wants to achieve. For example, according to this logic a friend is considered to be another self of a person, but if he could achieve the highest state and his friend couldn’t do that, the friendship is lost. So no one wants his friend to be God-like even if it is the highest thing anyone could achieve.

Ethics was there in ancient Greece also, but as we had already told it would be different depending on the society in which it is defined. In the cause of Christianity it was the all-powerful God who is commanding for goodness. But for Greeks the highest human state was a dream to achieve. Indeed there are differences, but the result is just an ordered society in both cases.

Medieval Ages and Evolution

The medieval ages are marked with the rejuvenation of the ancient Greek knowledge, which is mainly occurred through the Arab scholars at that time. So it is clearly a ground for the interaction between the two lines of thoughts that we had already discussed. But, in the discussion one might notice that, whatever the story or idea behind the ethics existed in those societies, they evolved in isolation. Indeed, there are interactions with many groups of people, but mostly their contribution is not clear or is annihilated. So, we can call the middle ages as the experiment of history were two of the mainline of thought is interacting and resulting in changes in the concept of morality and ethics. That is the main reason for changes happened in society itself. Such a process would always enable the human race to select better ideas. Simply one would understand the defect of his or her idea, when exposed to a contrasting view, and you cannot improve your idea by talking to someone having similar thoughts.

During the middle ages, the Christian church was split into eastern and western parts. The western church was mainly influenced by the platonic ideas known as the neo-platonism. Saint Augustine claimed that Plato had already said that the supreme good, possession of which alone would give blessedness is God. He is also telling that human beings are made for the union with God, but they could instead turn towards themselves also. If they turn towards themselves, they will lose the sense of the order of creation, which the order of their loves should reflect. In short he gave primacy to love. According to him those who truly love God would act following other percepts of the divine and the moral law. Here the God is picturised like a source of love, which is making the life possible, and the morality is more or less based on the feel of love towrds him, which is a remarkable change. And the result of this love is the transformation of one by the supreme grace. In a closer look we could see the wisdom of both Christianity and Greek philosophy in the idea of Augustus. This feature of these idea enabled his ideas to survive the destruction of western Roman empire.

Concept of person: One of the important things we need to consider while discussing ethics is the concept of a person. Until now, in this discussion, we were mainly talking about the larger body, which is the society and the religion and the myth associated with it. But, we have to appreciate the fact that ethics is needed when the individual is interacting with society. From the beginning itself, we had said that it is the moral philosophy, which categorizes the deeds and aspects of life into two broad categories and would give preference to only one among them. So it is meaningless to continue the discussion without incorporating the idea of the so-called a ‘person’. And the first definition of this idea also comes in the middle ages by Boethius, which in fact wasn’t independent of theology. It raised a question about the Trinity, that is how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit could be distinct and yet not three independent Gods. This was understood in terms of three persons. One god with the persons standing in a different relation to each other. But, then the term, the person stands as the relation between the one’s divinity and his humanity. The church tried to explain one person with two natures. This assured both divine and human qualities for Jesus. The explanation was that the person is standing under nature he posses. So a person is defined as someone who stands under all his/her attributes. But Boethius defined a person as ‘individual substance of rational nature’.

One must see that most of the Greek knowledge was not lost for the western part of the Roman empire, whereas it was translated into other languages in the Eastern part. Later they became accessible to Christian Europe through translations of the Arabic commentaries. In this period Islamism became important and this ideology is again based on the commands of God, which is given in the Qur’an. But after Prophet, Mohammed Islam society split int Sunnies and Shiites. There were two streams two-stream of thoughts within the Sunni Islam, Mu’tazilite and al-Ashari. The most developed statement of Mu’tazilite is given by Abd al-Jabbar from Basra. He defines a wrongful act as one that deserves blame and holds that the right and wrong character of acts is known immediately to human reason, independently of revelation. Similar to ancient Greece, these standards are also applicable to God so that one could understand what God commands us to do and what he will not command us to do. The second line of thought was by al-Ashari, who initially started as a Mu’tazilite and later rejected their views. According to this view God is subjected to none and no standard can bound him. It is quite interesting to see here that if one thinks like this, nothing is actually wrong for God, and it questions the existence of the standard. How God is affected by all these social rules, which are made by humans? So, whatever God defines as good is good irrespective of anything else. al-Maturidi of Samarqand lies in between these two lines of thought. In this view, it is assumed that humans have the tendency to do sinful and negative things so that God has to reveal himself as the commands to correct the humans, which sounds much similar to the disobedient nature of humans presented in the Bible. So, God had given us the choices, it is the humans who have to choose what he wanted.

In medieval Judaism, ethical thoughts evolved as a solution to building pressure between the philosophies and the faith. There Maimonides teaches the concept of right and wrong. Even though he says that as humans we have access to the notion of right and wrong, but ultimately it is what defined by God himself.

We were already talking about the clash between the two mainstream of thoughts in the middle ages and the resultant evolution in the ethics. As the Greek knowledge and philosophy had reentered into Christian Europe, it threatened the harmony between the authority of reason and authority of faith. So a process of synthesis between these two streams was needed. But, this process again is influenced by neo-platonism. Finally it agreed upon the idea that God just wants us to do what is good for us. And it is concluded that the ethical laws are universal judgment that is based on the right reasoning about the kind of actions that are morally wrong and right. Eventually, both the ideologies had found a middle ground.