The link between religion and morality has been the subject of numerous debates for a while. In his book, James Rachels questions whether morality depends directly on one’s religious beliefs by scrutinizing the nature of the subject matter. Furthermore, Rachels posits that morality should be viewed as independent from religion.
However, the author’s position regarding the problem also incorporates a range of important details that make his statement all the more profound. For instance, Rachels purposefully opens his analysis with an ethics panel, thus questioning the legitimacy of linking religion to morality. Specifically, the author draws the readers’ attention to the fact that the ethics panel in his story was represented solely by religious leaders.
This observation implied that the panel was predisposed to a certain degree of bias from the start. Furthering the discussion and restating his argument, Rachels points to the misalignment between the Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory. According to Rachels, the Divine Command Theory represents a system of knowledge about right and wrong based on the ideas and statements taken from Holy Scriptures.
Apart from implying a significant amount of obscurity caused bicultural differences, translation difficulties, and other issues, the Divine Command Theory becomes highly questionable as a source of moral guidelines, yet Rachels also points to how different it is from the Natural Law Theory, thus making the former a very unreliable source of ethical standards. The Natural Law Theory, in turn, implies the need to use reason as the foundation for determining moral principles.