Ethics is said to be one of the most accessible phylosophies. How should we live? What should be our aim? Is it happiness or knowledge or something else? If one chooses to be happy, does that mean happiness of a person alone or that of a society in which he lives? If one chooses knowledge, up to what extent one can go and what about the knowledge that would become harmful to the rest of the world? Killing a human being is considered to be bad, but why it is not wrong in a war? What is wrong with cloning a human? These are the kind of questions in which we use something called ethics to take a decision. But, did you thought about ethics itself? What is ethics? What is the basis for it? How it had been evolved. This is a lighter discussion to make some view on this matter.
Historical Background
First let us think about its evolution from the past. The major part of the history is not known to us, and this is an attempt to make a logical conclusion from the known facts. One could say that the set of rules so-called ethical or social rules have emerged when humans started to live in groups. That is when one is living in society there would be interactions, there should be regulations to make the social life easy. One person’s interest should not hurt another one, for the social system to be in a stable state. And there should be a meaningful division of resources for benefit in the long run. So there should be restrictions on behavior within a family itself. But, how this could be done? This is based on judging some act and aspect as good and some other as bad. Ethics, which is sometimes called the moral philosophy is simply categorizing things into black and white so that people are encouraged to choose the white. And this division need not be rational, as it is not built at the level of an individual, but at the level of a group. The rules and classification would change from one society to another.
The New Testament and Ten Commands
Religion has a strong bond with ethics. One of the reasons for this could be the fact that all religions need a well-structured society of its followers for its existence. Due to this reason religions and society are afraid of chaos. What most of them had done to prevent someone from choosing the dark side is that they presented the image of an almighty God, who can do everything. In any religious ideology we could see that God is the supreme power, and good deeds are rewarded with the afterlife in the heavens. Here we are not looking at these stories, instead, we are interested in the history of ethical rules.
In the Hebrew Bible, morality and religion are connected by God’s commands. Such command could be already seen in the first chapter of genesis. God created everything by his commands, and he also created humans by his command. He also tells Adam that Adam is free to eat fruits from any tree, except that from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That is Adam and Eve were free to do anything in the garden, except eating that fruit. But, they disobeyed the command and were expelled from the garden. Here we could see the picture of a supreme power who would punish those who disobeyed him. But, if we are looking closely at the story we could say that there are lots of symbols in that. For example, the human disobedience isn’t directly told in the story, instead of Eva is influenced by the vicious advise by a serpent. The serpent was explaining to her that if they could eat that forbidden fruit, they would become as powerful as the almighty God, and she also thought that it is good to eat. It is told in the story that after eating the fruit, for the first time they feel that they are naked, and an angel who visited them was wondered by their effort to hide their nakedness. Actually, the act of eating the forbidden fruit is driven by the desire to gain knowledge or wisdom. Whatever the reason as they disobeyed the God they ‘fall into sin’ and was expelled from the Garden.
Later in the chain of events, Abel is killed by Cain, and evil spreads in the earth, which is described as the corrupted state of the heart. Here the reader has to notice that by “spread of evil” it means that people are actually moving away from the commands of God or God himself. So, clearly there is no way of establishing a good society in the midst of the darkness already spread there. So he commanded Abraham to leave his ancestral land. There was a command to Abraham to kill his son, a deed which was prevented at the last minute. His grandchildren reached Egypt due to famine and at that time people of Israel were suffering for generations under the rule of Pharaoh. Moses was the hero who liberated the people from the suffering and during his journeys through the desert he is getting ten commands from God. These commands are mainly given in two tables. The first table concerns our obligations to God directly. The second table is more important in our discussion which concerns our obligations towards our fellow being. As we could guess most of the commands in the second table are negatives. Only the first one is different which tells us to honor our father and mother. These give rise to a set of rules and a concept of a kingdom that is different from that of Greeks(will discuss later).
But, here we have to see that God has given these ten commands in the context fo a covenant with the people of Israel. So, it did not apply to the whole world or the human race. But the covenant that God had made with Noah after the flood applies to the whole human race.
In the New Testament the theme of God’s commands was recapitulated. Jesus sums up all the commands under two main categories, the command to love God with utmost dedication and the command to love neighbor as self. It is not surprising to see the similarity of this with the tables in which the ten commands were given. There are differences between the Hebrew Bible and the new testament so that one could clearly say that they are different. However it preserved the picture of the perfect man. The perfect man means someone who is leading a life without committing any sin. But, when we consider the acts of Jesus, it is mainly based on the concept of love. Instead of giving strict and dry commands, he taught his fellow being to love, even the enemies. Later Jesus became a symbol of self-sacrification. It is explained that he died on our behalf. This could be also explained as his love towards his fellow beings which became his willingness to die for them. So, by their disobedience, Adam and Eva violated their relationship with God. But, the relationship is restored by God’s forgiveness through redemption.
What we have to see here is that the notion of God is the central concept. There is a clear division between good and evil. People are restricted from evil by the commands of the almighty. The power of God is making a kind of fear, or one could say that one doesn’t want to be away from God. Here the ethics of social life is truly bound to stories of God and the past.
I think people often think that it is not possible to talk about ethics without religion. Indeed it is a part of theology. But does that necessarily mean that there is no ethics without a belief in a power or a God? Further, we could talk about Greek civilization.
abstract thoughts 