Religious Teaching and Executive Orders

In the third season finale of the West Wing there is a heavy plotline discussion of the virtues and vices of political assassination, a concept certainly ripe for ethical discussion. That aside, there's a single line in there that, when I was young, struck me. As they discuss the principle of the Execute Order, Leo McGarry, the White House Chief of Staff, points something out: A President can rescind his own executive order.

This is not surprising to me. After all, any single body capable of dictating policy is generally also credited with the ability to overturn that policy.

Still, I was having a conversation with a friend, who's very religious, and we were discussing some bits of religious ethics that have never sat particularly well with me and, all of which, I've come to notice, hinge on this sentence of Monarchy Ethics, which allow the High Authority to suspend his own commandments.

I posed to him a few premises that gave him some issues, as a pretty secular ethicist, and I'll explain why those problems arose in a little bit.

The Law proposed by an Omniscient God is Absolutely Right.

In being Absolutely Right, the Law cannot be suspended based on circumstance.

How can God suspend what is Absolutely Right?

These two premises gave him some issues, and that's because he, like any person who believes that a morality can be created and enforced by people, believes that Absolute Right in as intrinsic value, which is to say that if a law is Absolutely Right, it cannot be suspended.

A religious fundamentalist should take issue with the notion of Absolute Right, and here's why:

The value of "Absolute Right" is not intrinsic.

The Law is "Absolute Right" because God says so.

Ergo, if God decides to say something is not Absolutely Right, then that is true.

Basically:

The Law is Good because God says it's Good.

Goodness does not exist on its own merit. It exists based on the opinion of the Universal Curator. This is the religious position (not mine).

With this proposed, we can get to the Biblical issues that we were discussing.

God says in the sixth commandments: Thou shalt not kill.

However, refraining from murderous behavior is only bad if God says it is. There are instances throughout the Bible of God choosing to suspend this verdict, and many occasions when God states that the it is Good to kill.

The same is true for Idolatry as presented in Islam, and could be made manifest (though it might not be) in any monotheistic religion that praises its Divine Ruler as the single authority on the law.

For those who are wondering about the example of Idolatry in Islam that I alluded to, God says there shall be no Idolatry (a point Muslims make clear), but that ruling does not apply to worship of the Kaaba, which becomes a central vessel of worship for Muslims (the very definition of an idol).

This can be reconciled, of course.

However, in the reference that religious leaders so often make to the Brothers Karamazov, that thought that "without God all things are permitted" there is a sense of hypocrisy, and something to be said for dirty pots and kettles.

With the permission of God, we see that which we consider Evil made Good. We cannot acknowledge the existence of a Moral Absolute beyond the Divine Opinion, and any morality dictated by opinion can never be called Absolute.

This, of course, is not a refutation of the religious principles, but rather an observation of the failure of religious ethics to live up to the high principles they claim to possess.