If I’m a Roman citizen in pre-BC Rome, what specifically would keep me on the estraight and narrow in my dealings my my fellow citizens. What social reinforcements would there be for me to be fair and just in that historical context?
(a) Law.
(b) Ethical philosophy.
The same answers would apply to pretty well any society, I should think. Was there a reason why you picked classical Rome?
I can see I phrased my question poorly.
In Judeo-Christian belief systems people often look to God and the Bible to inform the system of personal and public ethics under which people operate when no one is looking. What was the answer to a Roman merchant asking “Why should I be fair?” other than the fact that a solider would flog, fine, jail or crucify him if he got caught cheating? Roman Gods were often petty and capricious and very human in their passions, how were they going to inform an ethical system of behavior?
Was it because Zeus says so? Because the Judge and will punish him? Because his fellow citizens will spurn him? What made him behave?
In the end was it all about the law separate from any divine considerations?
You assume that Jesues was the first one to propose the “Golden Rule”. Treat others in a way that you would expect to be treated. This was good advice in any society. Then, now, and prehistory. For societies to exist there had to be social norms. It was not good business practice (or manners) to screw people over. Why deal with vengful customers everyday when you couyd be dealing repeat customers? Society was quite small back then and you reputation could have been your livihood.
There’s no particular reason why a society has to extract its moral or ethical principles from theistic beliefs. Judeo-Christian societies have done so, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Romans, basically, copied the Greeks. They had a pantheon of God with associated myths to explain the existence of the world, the development of humanity, etc. And, quite separately, they had philosophy to help them to live a "good’ life, and indeed to help them decide what a good life was. And, as we know, they had very highly developed philosophies, which have shaped philosophical thinking (including theology) in the western world ever since.
Man is a social animal and, one way or another, my happiness is always to some extent dependent on the happiness of others, whether that be my immediate family or the wider community. Pretty well any ethical philosophy that is going to be any use to poeple, whether religiously-based or not, has to accommodate this. Hence most of them deal with the inevitable trade-off between my happiness and the happiness of others, and evolve concepts such as fairness, honesty, reciprocity, etc. Quite simply, ethical systems which promise happiness through unadulterated selfishness fail to deliver, so they get discarded.
I shouldn’t be posting on a subject like this when it’s far too late to look for cites and check up on what I’m saying… Just popped in to say that virtue is a Roman concept – from vir, man. Basically they had this idea of proper conduct, the way a man should behave, to behave otherwise would result in socaila embarassment, shame and even ostracism (to say nothing of pointing and laughing).
Zeus was a Greek god, not a Roman one. The Romans did crib quite a bit from Greek religion, but they were grafting it onto their own pre-existing beliefs. This isn’t really my field and I must confess I don’t know anything about how the Roman Jupiter differed from the Greek Zeus, but I’m sure they weren’t identical.
I do know that the Roman Mars wasn’t the whiny blowhard that the Greek Ares was, so the rest of the Roman pantheon may have been less petty than their Greek counterparts. I hope a Classical scholar will come along and fill in the blanks here.
With the Romans you get a whole lot of cultural baggage with your ancestry. If you violated ethical codes, you risked shaming your ancestors, and that’s one thing a good Roman wouldn’t want to do.
Admittedly, this sounds a little Godfatherish (“never go against the family”*) but one’s ancestry certainly played a major role in Roman social and ethical life.
*pedantic note: technically, Michael says to Fredo “Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever” but this line is probably more familiar in its misquoted form.
Is there any reason to believe that Judaism didn’t extract its moral precepts from the ethics of the society that created it? I suspect those ethics came from a simple effort to keep the peace.
Point taken. But Jewish rules of behaviour are presented as having been handed down by God, and observing them is taken to be good and desirable on the axiom that doing the will of God is good.
My point is that other societies could, and did, have rules of behaviour principles not presented as having been instituted by god or gods, and could look to a different axiom to justify them as moral precepts, e.g. that self-knowledge, or social harmony, or almost anything else, is inherently good.