Reflections on Week 2 Morality

Morality as a journey

In her post Kristin suggests that developing morality should be an ongoing journey, and I certainly agree with this view; in fact this MOOC has already caused me to revise my ideas on morality in terms of challenging religious dogma.

It is my view that our moral values are not a final destination we arrive at aged 18 and never examine or question thereafter! An important dimension of being human is our drive to establish a set of rules we chose to live by, and each of us remakes moral decisions on a daily basis.

As intelligent, thinking beings, surely we should examine and re-evaluate these decisions throughout our lives, updating our views in response to our life experience?

Agnosticism and morality

Kristin also argues very eloquently for faith in God as a basis for moral decisions, and asks the question:  without God, how can we have any morality?

This really made me reconsider my standpoint as I struggled to answer this question with something more coherently argued than “go with what feels right”.

I suppose that as an agnostic (I don’t have enough conviction to call myself an atheist) I believe that the basis of my morality is to enable all people to live in freedom, and I am firmly of the opinion that morality is an essential part of being human, not a part of some supernatural realm. I believe that we can search deep within ourselves, and pay attention to the world around us, and then apply our skills of logic, reasoning and justice to build a valid moral framework.

 I read that Albert Einstein once said: “A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”

Kim argues very eloquently for formulation of morality without recourse to religion, and gives an example of a medical dilemma (presented in a TV series, but such dilemmas certainly do occur in real life) where a child dies unnecessarily because the parents’ religious faith does not allow for the life-saving blood transplant the child requires. I found this problem particularly difficult to debate, but I am coming to the conclusion (for today, at least!) that if I had the power to make the medical decision, I would want to ignore the wishes of the parents and save the life of the child. In practice, though, were I in that position of power, I would do whatever the law of the land demanded of me…

But I think I’ll leave the final word to Noam who concluded her post with this superb statement:

“ I think we need to actively remind ourselves not to judge our patients, to remember to focus on our job  and be modest enough to remember our morality is not the only one out there.”