The Ten Commandments and 'Basic Morality'

Working within the topic of morality (and avoiding the drudgery of wading through Sam Harris' assertive treatise) it seemed rather diligent to briefly consider that oft cited paragon of morality, The Ten Commandments. Evangelical Christian fundamentalists have in the past tried to tell me that whatever else I may think of their religion I should be willing to concede that the Decalogue is a good guide to moral behaviour. Sometimes that concession is made by others and it is even claimed that these commandments persist outside of Christianity. I have never accepted that characterisation nor do I see it as accurate.

One means of concession is to cast the commandments as a valid espousal of 'basic morality'. By basic morality I take it one essentially means an unsophisticated acceptance of the points as ethical or the perception that these points are valid without us seeing the need for elaborate justification. To test this we need to look at the content of the commandments by listing them. In Exodus 20:1-17 (NIV used here), God begins by identifying Himself ("I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery" - ed: who put them there in the first place?) then announces:


1 - You shall have no gods before me
2 - You shall make no graven images
3 - You shall not take the Lord's name in vain (or hold anyone who does guiltless)
4 - "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy" and not working
5 - Honour your father and your mother
6 - You shall not murder/kill (interpretive variations exist)
7 - You shall not commit adultery
8 - You shall not steal
9 - You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour
10 - You shall not covet your neighbour’s house/wife/male or female servant/ox/donkey, or "anything that belongs to your neighbour"



Clearly then we do not have ten morally universal laws. It is actually 3 standard moral pronouncements (not murder/kill, not steal, not bear false witness), 3 fair points (honour father and mother, do not commit adultery, do not covet), and 4 contingent points which are only relevant or intelligible within a given religious framework (no other gods, no graven images, do not take the Lord's name in vain, remember the Sabbath day). Of course, it is impossible not to notice that the perceived morality breaks down even internally as wives and human beings are presented as property akin to livestock and houses in the final commandment. As such one can only agree with that one if necessary qualifications are made. Therein lays the issue: once qualifications and changes enter the picture one cannot hold this list to be ‘basic’ or easily accepted.

Where does this leave us? What is positive in the Ten Commandments has no inherent link to religion (ie one could justify those pronouncements without recourse to religious beliefs) and not all of them are valid or necessarily positive. Therefore we cannot say the list represents some kind of basic morality in and of itself.

Due to work load I haven't been able finish my review of Moral Landscape and likely won't have time for this until next week. However, I have now completed the book and stand firm in my assessment that it is highly flawed (perhaps too much so to adequately cover in a short blog post). Nevertheless that review is forthcoming, but in the interim I have another salient observation concerning Sam Harris.