Ethical And Theological Topics On Human Morality

He believed that in order to understand law, one must first realize what law’s purpose is. He, like Thomas, argued that law’s purpose it to benefit society by creating a morally sound order to human action and conduct. He detailed seven goods that he believed to be intrinsic and universal, and argued that laws should be enforced under the stipulation that they adhere to the enhancement of these goods, because they are what determines a fulfilling life. They are: life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion. The goods that relate to the thesis of this paper the most are knowledge and sociability, as the result of the case has a direct benefit on them and is, therefore, moral and legitimate. Legal positivists, however, disagree that morality has any place in determining what legitimate law is.

Conscience is a sense of what a person believes to be right and wrong. To form a mature conscience, people must communicate with others, that are considered to have moral wisdom, within communities. According to Richard M. Gula in his book Reasons Informed by Faith, “A criterion of a mature moral conscience is the ability to make up one’s mind for oneself about

2. Morality is not static because morals refer to personal believes of right and wrong, as well as what one ought and ought not to do. Due to morality having a more personal connotation to it, it would be require not to be static. Each person deals with their own set of challenges and challenges change and adapt over time. Since challenges and individuals change over time, one might have to think that a person’s concept of morality would have to be just as dynamic in order to still complete its function.

Our conscience is a moral guide that we are equipped with and use to determine whether to do right or wrong and to follow the rules or do what you know is right. The conscience of a person is also what holds them back from doing things that they should not do because the person thinks about the consequences and the outcome if they had followed through with their original plans. For example, in “To Kill a Mockingbird” when Cecil Jacobs provoked Scout, Harper Lee described how Scout stood her ground and did not fight him, “I drew a bead on him remembered what Atticus had said then dropped my fist and walked away... It was the first time I ever walked away from a fight” (Lee, 102).If you have ever had a difficult challenge or obstacle suddenly placed in front of you and you must overcome it in order to succeed, your task, then during your journey when you feel like giving up, your conscience makes you think about what would happen if you quit “And so hold on when there is nothing in you/Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!” (Kipling,

This specific Christian definition of conscience states: “conscience is an inner voice of special moral illumination or expertise and of incontrovertible moral authority, which reveals itself inwardly and unavoidably in consciousness and warns us to do good and avoid evil, and condemns us when we fail” (Lyons 481). This specific definition provides a road towards understanding in the complexity of the story. Also, in the plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the protagonist, Sir Gawain, has many instances in which this particular definition is proven to be true, especially in relation to his “inner voice”.

The first dimension of conscience is capacity which is the ability to recognize the good and search for it. The good is to treat others equally as well as recognize the fact that we are all guilty somehow. Sadly,

Mahatma Gandhi once said “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.” One major term in Gandhi’s dictum is justice, which means moral behavior and/or treatment. Another significant term in Gandhi’s statement is conscience, which means the part of the mind that knows the distinct line between right and wrong. Taken as a whole, Gandhi means that the mind has the power to do what righteous and outright evil. Furthermore, Gandhi implies in his statement that the conscience has the ability to put into effect just decisions. Lastly, when looked the lens of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar, Gandhi’s statement can be proven false through

Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” includes his theory on man’s development of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche believes that when transitioning from a free-roaming individual to a member of a community, man had to suppress his “will to power,” his natural “instinct of freedom”(59). The governing community threatened its members with punishment for violation of its laws, its “morality of customs,” thereby creating a uniform and predictable man (36). With fear of punishment curtailing his behavior, man was no longer allowed the freedom to indulge his every instinct. He turned his aggressive focus inward, became ashamed of his natural animal instincts, judged himself as inherently evil, and developed a bad conscience (46).

The link between morality and human nature has been a progressive reoccurring theme since ancient times (Prinz, 2008). Moral development is a characteristic of a person’s general development that transpires over the course of a lifetime. Moral development is derived by a wide variety of cultural and demographic factors that appear to influence morally relevant actions. Turiel (2006) defined morality as an individuals “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.” Individuals’ moral judgments are frequently considered to be a product of culturally specific controls that provide a framework for behavioral motivations that are sensitive to the effects of gender, education, religion and politics (Banerjee, Huebner & Hauser, 2010). While several approaches have been utilized to examine the interaction of multivariate contributors to fundamental moral differences such as: disputes about family life, sexuality, social fairness, and so on, research has suggested that ideological considerations have provided a potent and diverse explanation for the polarization of contrasting views (Weber & Federico, 2013).

Conscience, in modern usage, term denoting various factors in moral experience. Thus, the recognition and acceptance of a principle of conduct as binding is called conscience. In theology and ethics, the term refers to the inner sense of right and wrong in moral choices, as well as to the satisfaction that follows action regarded as right and the dissatisfaction and remorse resulting from conduct that is considered wrong. In earlier ethical theories, conscience was regarded as a separate faculty of the mind having moral jurisdiction, either absolute or as a representative of God in the human soul.

Many moral and religious questions arise in Elie Wiesel’s Night regarding faith in God during crisis, obligation to others over oneself, familial bonds, etc. However, the one with the most dramatic impact on the narrative and arguably the most important one in Night questions God’s role in the Holocaust. Was God absent during the Holocaust? If so, why did he abandon the Jewish people? If not, how could he permit such a terrible atrocity to be committed against His chosen people? Wiesel’s character Eliezer experiences his own faith in God’s existence be extinguished while he endures the Holocaust. While watching a child hang to death in front of a massive crowd in one of the camps, Eliezer even claims that God is dead, having been murdered with the child.

Morality only exists if we believe in God; therefore if God doesn’t exist there is no morality. There have been so many evil acts committed in the name of God that it is difficult to maintain that a belief in God equates to morality. There are situations that happen every day where decisions are made based off of human rights that contradict the word of God. Morality comes from within, it is an understanding of right versus wrong and the ability to choose what is right. Knowing all this a belief in God is not a requirement for a person to be moral. (Mosser, 2011)

Many things can contribute to what you think is morally right or wrong. Religion, for example, may create a barrier on to what extent you do something. Some religions set rules, or guidelines on which they limit what people do. Cultures, as well, contribute to people’s decisions. Many times our values and ethics disagree with different people who hold different

To be moral simply means to do what is right; however, doing what is right is easier said than done. Perhaps if one was a child, one would, to the best of their abilities, follow what his parents demand of him, this would constitute them as doing what is right. Now let us say that the child is an orphan, or does not believe what his parents say is right, should following them still be considered moral, or is it even up to him to decide? Perhaps the child has evolved past parenting all together and therefore needs no more guidance. Defining what is considered moral has now become much more complex. Sam Harris presents the same basic argument of morality in his book Letter to a Christian Nation, by applying it not to a child and his parents,

Thomas Aquinas gave a simple definition of conscience when he called it ‘the faculty of reason making moral judgements’. From this, conscience is simply a rational faculty that enables us to understand right from wrong. The faculty works on the basis of knowledge, first a knowledge of moral principles enshrined in natural law, and ideally a knowledge of diving law as revealed in the Bible. However, Aquinas recognised that conscience is by no means an infallible voice. We can have a mistaken, erroneous or uninformed conscience, and it is a moral obligation in itself to have an informed conscience. Aquinas, like Joseph Butler, believed that we have a capacity to grasp at a basic level the moral principles that should govern the right