Morality

[emjay]

So what if you did all that... tried to live a virtuous life according to your conscience, but not in reference to God, because you did not believe in God, what then?

I can answer this according to what Dante explains in the Divine Comedy. And since Dante is about 99% in accord with Thomist ethics what he says is fairly standard for Christian theology. 

According to these people, human beings all have an essence, or human nature, which is common to us all. Living a virtuous life is living in the way that is best for this nature, and allows the greatest flourishing for ourselves and others. 

Here Christian theology agrees with Plato, who wrote that we all desire what is best. We have a natural desire to live well and flourish. This is all about love, and living morally is ultimately loving the proper things in the proper amount. 

The clearest analogy is with a healthy diet. Science can tell us what is best for us to eat. This is not something we can choose for ourselves, or that differs according to society. Just because you happen to like potato chips more than anything else, and the TV commercials are telling you to eat potato chips to the exclusion of all else, doesn't mean it's healthy. Your physical nature can't be changed according to your personal taste or cultural differences. People are people. 

Ideally, we would love to eat a balanced healthy diet. I've heard people claim that if we were left alone, without advertising or artificial flavorings or whatever, we would just naturally choose all the best foods. I don't know if this is true or not, but as an analogy to Platonic ethics it's pretty good. If our personalities are not misinformed or deformed, we naturally desire to live well. 

As with a diet, other kinds of behavior have a natural balance which is determined by what human beings just are. Living morally means aiming your behavior toward that natural best outcome. Though there will be variations according to place and time, there is in fact one set of behaviors which suits human flourishing best. We are still in an ongoing debate as to many of the details. 

Immoral behavior is loving an unhealthy thing too much (as in Neo's example of sugar) or in loving healthy things too little (for example as someone who never exercises at all). Christian ethics is about loving passionately the proper things. 

People who live this way are living as "God wants." This last is in scare quotes, because it isn't really true to say that God wants anything. God is fully complete, with no lack, and so wants nothing. "God wants X" is allegorical language which means "X aims you toward what is best." 

From this you can see that people who aimed their lives toward what is best will be living in a Godly way, whether or not they've ever heard of God. Dante says specifically that when we wake up on Judgement Day, a lot of Christians are going to be surprised by who's ahead of them in line. 

As always, this theological view of things is different from the popular view of God as sky-daddy giver of arbitrary law. I've been told on this forum that I'm not supposed to talk about the more intellectual view because supposedly all the evil Christians in America don't know it. But if Dante said it so clearly then I don't think it's wrong to say that it's genuinely Christian.

I don't deny the value of virtue ethics and suchlike as a philosophy in and of itself but how would you relate that sort of view to the Bible though?, as it's undeniable to me that the Bible does indeed contain a lot of arbitrary and immutable laws/rules. And what about context? 'Honour your father and mother' may make sense as a general rule, but not as an absolute rule; ie if hypothetically someone's parents are abusive, should they still honour them without question? It seems to me that, at best, the Bible can reflect some of morality/conscience, just as any other discussion about it could, but not in itself dictate it.