Plato and Moral Philosophy

There's an interesting sentence in Robinson and Groves' book on Plato, which I've been reading. Commenting on Euthypro's confidence that he has behaved morally because he has obeyed religious edicts, Plato asserts that true moral knowledge can only be achieved through philosophical thinking and debate. He has a point, in that people sometimes commit immoral acts in the name of religion (blowing up innocent people comes to mind). By the same token, moral acts can be religiously unorthodox. For example, the actions of the Good Samaritan in Jesus' parable (Luke 10) were obviously moral in that he showed compassion to a man who had been "set upon by thieves" and left for dead. Jesus' point was that ritual cleanliness, which made the priest walk by on the other side of the road, is no substitute for compassion. The moral deed was impious.

Back to Plato: the authors conclusion is "Only when people turn away from the dogmatism and irrationality of religion can true moral philosophy begin."

Now, that may very well be true when the religion you are talking about is that of the ancient Greeks. At the time of Plato, the pantheon was made up of a bunch of immoral, capricious louts who did, basically, whatever they wanted without much regard for moral law. The gods were to be appeased (and avoided), not emulated. It's probably true to say that more sophisticated Greeks took this religion with a very large dose of salt, even if they didn't say so publically. (After all, Socrates was tried and put to death for blasphemy). However, the context of ancient Greek mythology and folk religion is scarcely the same as that of Christianity. There is a consistency to biblical morality that is not found among the broody mob on Mount Olympus. And if there is a development of interpretation in some areas, even this can be put down to the dawning of the light upon the faithful, rather than change in what God calls "good." You simply cannot label all religious moral teaching as equal. You cannot tar all faiths with the same brush. It's irresponsible to do so, it's deliberately misleading, and it's very poor scholarship.

What's the alternative - secular ethics? Morality that is not informed by religious tenets, such as the Ten Commandments, doesn't have a good track record, either. Some of Plato's own ideas about good government, for example, would be considered immoral today, especially his theories about different classes of people being entitled to different degrees of liberty. Some of his ideas sound like Stalinism, and Stalin certainly was not motivated by religion! It's also worth remembering that Plato had time to think philosophically because the society in which he lived required slavery. Plato seemed to think that there was an objective moral good that could only be discovered by philosophy. That idea would be ridiculed by secularists today. Nowadays, ethics are almost always regarded as situational, except by those who have a reference point beyond specific circumstances.

Christians have such a reference point. It's called the Bible. I don't think we need to apologize for believing in moral absolutes. Christianity may, during its history, have been responsible for some shameful acts (though not as many as some would have you believe). Those acts have, however, been committed in violation of revealed moral law, not as a result of the perversion of morality by religious dogmatism.

What if the conclusion was: Only when people turn away from the dogmatism and irrationality of secular humanism can true moral philosophy begin. Wouldn't that, too, be unnecessarily offensive, given that there are many forms of secularism? So why is it acceptable to make sweeping generalisations about religion? Possibly because when you convince yourself that biblical morality is outmoded and untenable, you are left with no morality really worthy of the name, and that is what you wanted all along?