Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Oct 29 Trosko and Deb & Sarda

As wonderful as it may seem to build a moral code for humankind as I read Trosko to suggest, I think this is quite an unrealistic fantasy. He mentions religion extensively as it shapes the moral and ethical foundations of many people’s views. Yet, he suggests that because religious affiliation varies so widely across human-kind, we should abandon it as our guide to bioethics and adopt a new code for determining the moral values shaping the biological nature of humans. I think that the key products of religion are the moral and ethical beliefs which shape the nature of our actions. And furthermore, to suggest that simply because people participate in and practice a wide spectrum of religions indicates we ought to abandon these faiths for one unified human morality merely imposes a new sort of ‘religion’ upon society. The fact that many moral values across the diverse religions are the same or similar indicates we have already reached a point where most of humanity already agrees upon some general code of ethics so why would we need to create a new worldwide biological morality when we can just recognize the shared values and respectfully disagree with one another about our differences? To think that everyone will agree with a new ethical code is pure fantasy and to enforce it a potential infraction against one of the very codes of freedom it might seek to endorse.