By Mark McEvoy

Ever since the 2004 election, talk of “moral values” has been much in vogue. Moral values, we are told, are what swung the election Bush’s way, and Democrats are out of touch with moral values. Almost invariably, the phrase “moral values” is understood to mean “religious values”: Evangelicals are regarded as the key demographic in Bush’s victory, and they, more than any other segment of voters, cited “moral values” as the issue most important to them. The hot button issues generally regarded as resonating with moral values voters are gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia-as opposed to, say, the death penalty, war and the high poverty rate.

What should we make of this identification between moral values and religious values? Socrates, on this issue as on many others, has much to teach us. In Plato’s Eutyphro, Socrates raises the question whether that which is pious-or morally good-is good because God approves of it, or whether God approves of it because it is morally good. Let’s throw light on Socrates’ question by way of an example. Suppose we agree that murder is morally wrong. Socrates question would be: Is murder neither good nor bad until God decides which it is, so that it is his decision which makes murder morally wrong; or is murder already morally wrong so that its moral wrongness explains why God disapproves of it?

Though the question may sound purely academic, it ultimately shows that moral values are not correctly understood as religious values. Suppose we take the first option: what makes murder morally wrong is that God has decreed that it is wrong. The problem is that this seems entirely arbitrary. If God has a completely free hand in deciding what is morally right, he could just as easily have decreed that murder was morally good as that it is morally bad. Nothing, on this view, is either good or bad until God decides; and there is no reason for any of God’s decisions regarding whether he approves or disapproves of something. We certainly could not, so long as we are entertaining this view, explain why God disapproves of murder by saying that it is because murder is wrong. Worse, when someone says that “God is good,” all they could possibly mean, according to this view, is that “God approves of himself”-which doesn’t sound nearly as impressive.

So suppose we choose our other answer: murder is already morally wrong, and this is why God disapproves of it. On this view, things are already good or bad regardless of what God thinks about them. If a thing is good, God will approve, and if it is bad, he will disapprove. This certainly avoids the problems encountered by our first answer: there is nothing arbitrary now about what God decides to like or dislike, and when we say God is good, we are no longer merely saying that he likes himself. The problem here is that our new answer accepts that what is morally good or bad is independent of what God thinks. After all, we are now supposing that it is the fact that a thing is already morally good that makes God like it. To put it another way: it isn’t the fact that God approves of something that makes it morally good.

To apply Socrates’ lesson to contemporary society, there are religious values, and there are moral values. While there may be overlap between the two, they are not identical. Religious values can be, and often have been, morally wrong. Take Pope John Paul II’s condemnation of condom usage as a means of reducing the spread of AIDS in Africa, for example. And where religious values are moral values (take the prohibition against murder once again), it is not the fact that a religion has endorsed a value that makes it morally worthy. Rather, what makes the religious value here the right value, is that murder just is morally wrong. Religions recognize this fact, but it is not this recognition of it that makes it a fact.