April 8th post by Thomas Luminoso

In the assigned reading there were many questions of moral decision-making. Many of the religious laws that were stated were stated very plainly as to the rules you must follow in order to be a good person. I found that the Religious law was quite far from say, something like virtue ethics and the golden mean. That’s because something like the golden mean tells you that there is more leniency and balance with your moral decision making while the Bible tends to be cut and dry with what is right and wrong. For this reason I find Biblical morals to function more like duty based moral, where you have a set of rules that you are suppose to follow and if you don’t you are sinning. A very clear example of this is Exodus 20:1, which states the Ten Commandments. The commandments are very clearly stated as to how you are suppose to act, for example, “ You shall have no other God before me”. This is very clearly stated; there is really no way to manipulate the rule in any way. What I do find to be interesting is that people who read the bible tend to read it many different ways. Some read the text with a more “Golden mean” way of thinking. For example, one might say that a child stealing candy from a candy store isn’t that same thing as someone robbing a bank and therefore one is more of a sin than the other. Others may interpret this rule as more plain writing and follow it as stated with no leniency in practice.

An example of a more utilitarian form of ethics can also be found within one of the assigned Bible readings. In the story of the Pharaoh telling the midwives to kill all of the baby Hebrew boys the midwives decide that it was best for the most number of people to not kill the babies. They follow a more duty-based form of ethics because they aren’t doing it because of their duty to Religious Law. However, they are also doing it because they want to help the people around them. Even though them saving the boys were going against the laws of the Pharaoh they decided to follow their own moral code.

From what I’ve concluded from these readings the Bible tends to display duty based moral code based off of religious law. However, the writing itself can be related and used by looking at it from different moral codes such as Utilitarianism and Virtue ethics, as I had mentioned above.