- What is the difference between religion and philosophy? The class eventually agreed on that religion has a godhead figure that is the central focus, while philosophy is just a set of beliefs, a code of ethics to adhere to.
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Okay, this will be technical and untechnical and thus open to a lot of potential criticism from other people who know about these matters, but I want it to be legible.
Firstly, no, that’s not philosophy. (And you’ve just defined religion as a subset of philosophy as well, since religion is also a set of beliefs, just including a belief about a godhead and its role in deciding ethical truth.) I think you’re confusing ‘philosophy’ with ‘life-philosophy’, which is just barging into ethics-territory. What sort of ethics is a life-philosophy and what is the differentiation between it and religion? Well, most (but not all) life-philosophies which are distinct from religion are subjectivist ethical stances based upon experience. This sort of way of thinking about ethics is partly along the track to a more successful metaethical theory (that is, a theory about what sort of ethics is best), but only if people realise why, which they never do. How is it different from religion? It’s to do with where the values are believed to be - do I judge, or am I judged?
Subjectivist ethics at its heart is far too basic. Something like ‘This has worked for me well in the past, let’s go with it.’ is a subjectivist claim that might underpin a life-philosophy. But it’s better than the worst sort of subjectivism, which is ‘I like this, let’s go with it.’ Obviously you can like the wrong sorts of things. You might be a child-torturer for example, and like it. But equally, you can value the wrong experiences. You can say ‘well, torturing that child was fun and no one stopped me, let’s go with it.’ Not a very good life philosophy.
The important thing about non-religious life-philosophy is that really, if it’s going to get very far, it needs to be antirealist. What is that? Well, (avoiding the technical description), instead of accepting that there really is a concept of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in philosophical parlance, we accept that ethical questions instead want to find the answer to a different question. Not ‘is this right or wrong?’ but something else. Subjectivism demands that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ become almost meaningless if it’s the case that what you like, or what has worked for you, is ‘right’. We all believe on some level that things can be just intrinsically wrong or right, regardless of what people think. (We might think that even if everyone on the planet thought child-torturing was right, it still wouldn’t be, which obviously isn’t a subjectivist position.) So this other question is the one we need to work out for any subjective-orientated theory to get much further. It’s a difficult question to find. Possibly the question stems from ‘should I do this, or should I not do this?’ Answering this question in subjectivist talk then asks, ‘is this right or wrong?’ and leads to the questions ‘do I like it?’ or ‘did it work for me before?’. Instead, under antirealism, after asking ‘should I do this?’ we should think instead slightly more widely. ‘Has this worked for me before, and has it worked for me for reasons that others would accept as being justification for action if all were exposed to them?’ Something like this.
An antirealist theory based upon life experiences might, for example, say the following. ‘I have considered my life, and always found that telling the truth worked best overall. When I consider other people I respect for their ability to promote harmony, I find that they have also been truthful. Therefore, I consider truthfulness to be closer to the correct way of acting than untruthfulness.’ (This is a little bit vague as an example and raises some unhelpful questions, but the idea is there.) What we are trying to do here is essentially aim our actions in a better direction than simply picking ideas out of the air. Our past actions should be our guide. If we do this, although telling the truth is not ethically ‘good’, it earns the right to be thought of as good, for all the past occasions in which it resulted in pleasing situations rather than unpleasant ones. This can be universalised (applied to all sorts of judements). ‘It has more often resulted in more pleasing situations whenever any person has not interfered in another person’s private life. Therefore, generally, we should respect privacy.’ for example. It need not say that privacy is the be all and end all, and is ‘right’ - it just needs to say that if we are treating our ethical theory as a guide to action, then there are strong reasons to favour privacy over invasion of privacy.
Another antirealist approach is to look to the future and not the past. If, before acting, I think to myself very carefully, being sure to rid myself of all prejudices (hmm), ‘if I were in someone elses shoes, would I want this to happen?’, then perhaps I can decide whether an action is right. If I think about myself in all sorts of different shoes, then I might see how my actions will affect different people. If I am not comfortable being in the situation they’d be in, then I must consider my action very carefully. This is the guide, rather than past successes of different types of action. (What sort of qualities it takes for some action to be better than another I bring up right at the bottom of all this.)
So that’s very loosely the way you can go with subjectivism and life-philosophy.
The alternative to subjectivism is objectivism. That is to reinstate the idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and rather than saying what is ‘right’ has anything to do with what I personally think, there are some rules that exist whether I think about them or not, and my actions can be judged in degree as far as they accordance with them. This is the angle religion takes, although a lot of people are keen to take the attractions of objectivity in religion and taint it with their own variant subjective ideas. But ignoring that, there is some attraction. For a start, everyone is supposed to be doing the same sort of thing, and thus getting on okay. It’s unifying. Also, it takes the pressure out of having to decide - you just do what the rules say. But there are general problems with objectivist theories. For a start, everyone disagrees a lot in spite of these rules. It certainly doesn’t seem that the way the world works (ethically) is any evidence for an objectivist theory of ethics. It may be that this disagreement might be explainable, (e.g. ethics is hard, people just aren’t trying - if they really really looked, they’d see that the Bible has got it all right after all…) but it’s not good evidence that the theory is correct. The fact that everyone’s arguing about how to lead their life suggests that there is no right answer. No one is going to look at the various religions with their various objective theories and think ‘well, that’s certainly solved all the world’s problems’.
To me, this disagreement is a strong reason not to pick a religion as your starting point for ethics, unless you happen to believe in a God first. (But we all know philosophy has a lot to say about the extent God can be brought into a theory of ethics.) Religion as ethics causes as many problems as it solves, and I think it tends to shut people off to the actual point of an ethical theory - to guide action. More and more it seems as though christians are such in the dogmatic sense only - they obey these sorts of rules and believe these sorts of things. But no longer is it necessary (it seems) to be compassionate, or to see the point of these rules as anything other than a selfish way to getting oneself to the pleasures of heaven. I’d happily be Christian if it looked to me like Christian life was much more appealing than any other, but really, it seems to be marred overall with bigotry, hatred and secularism. This is not where ethics should find itself heading. When I find myself promoting other people’s interests a lot better is when I find that I’ve put myself in their shoes before saying anything. I don’t a religion for that.
So that’s a vague discussion of how philosophy, ethics, metaethics and religion all muddle together. It’s not conclusive, exhaustive, or perfectly expressed, but go read some philosophy books if it interests you. (Blackburn’s ‘Ruling Passions’ might be a place to start.)
One way perhaps is the promise of afterlife or the eternal salvation of the soul. Yet, philosophers believe in the existence of the soul too; also, religion dictates morality; yet philosophy cultivates it. Why does one choose to partake in one and forego the other? (I’m thinking of aethists as an example)
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Philosophers USED to believe in the soul, but you’ll not find many who do at the moment. It’s all part of culling excess ontology. (That is, only believing things exist without actual evidence if you really can’t come up with a better idea.) But functionalism and various forms of materialism are looking like they might get somewhere in explaining the mind as a supervenience relation rather than a separate entity. (It might be that this afterlife business is just a load of tosh conceived because people thought there was a soul. Very disheartening if true!) But anyway. I think what we can say here is more that ‘cultivation’ is some sort of measurement for the antirealist. If it ‘cultivates’ then it’s probably the way forward, rather than whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. So whilst religion looks at the soul as improved through its regulations, antirealism looks at general cultivation and refinement of life-experiences over time as the ethical guide.
All very complicated though. I don’t like ethics much anyway, I don’t think it should be part of philosophy at all.
Hope this helps a bit or is in some way interesting.
-James
