Venusian Ethics
The essential difference between popular religious
ethics and Venusian religious ethics is that while in
the popular view morality is concerned with the relation
between man and God, in the Venusian view it is
concerned with our relationship to each other. In
popular religions, acting rightly means obeying divine
commands, but in the Venusian religion it means acting
so as to promote human well-being.
To
put it in another way, popular religions regard morality
as something that has been imposed from above by a
supernatural lawgiver, whereas Venusians regard it as
something that has been worked out – and is still being
worked out – by themselves, in the process of learning
to live happily together. In brief, popular morality is
largely authoritarian, while Venusian morality is
social.
In
the Venusian view, authoritarian morality is like the
morality of small children, to whom “right” means simply
“what pleases the grownups” and “wrong” means what makes
them angry. To small children the reason they should
not hit their playmates is that the teacher will be
angry and will punish them. They make a great step
forward towards maturity of moral judgment when they
realizes that the fundamental reason they should not hit
their playmates is that it hurts them.
There is a similar step forward in our own morality when
we pass beyond the idea that virtue consists in blind
obedience to an arbitrary authority, to the realization
that, basically, to act ethically means to act for the
common good – in other words when we pass from
authoritarian to social morality. |
