Religion and Ethics

What Religion and Ethics covers

Component 02, compulsory. Four normative theories, what moral language is doing when it is used, the nature of conscience, and how the theories bear on euthanasia, business and sexual ethics.

The 12 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

• Aquinas and the precepts of natural lawRecall questions on telos in Aristotle and Aquinas, eudaimonia and the human end, why natural law is both teleological and deontological, the eternal, divine, natural and human tiers of law, the key precept, the five primary and the secondary precepts, and interior and exterior acts.Open →
• Applying and evaluating natural lawRecall questions on natural law as a guide to real decisions, whether goodness depends on purpose, proportionalism, real and apparent goods, the doctrine of double effect and self-defence, and the criticisms from design, human nature, the is-ought gap and the diversity of human lives, alongside its strengths.Open →
• Fletcher's propositions and working principlesRecall questions on agape and where Fletcher took it from, legalism, antinomianism and situationism, all six of Fletcher's propositions, the four working principles of pragmatism, relativism, positivism and personalism, Fletcher's account of conscience against Aquinas', and situation ethics as a middle way.Open →
• Applying and evaluating situation ethicsRecall questions on whether Fletcher's agape is genuinely religious, situation ethics as a method for real decisions, the charges of subjectivity and consequentialism, the churches' reaction, whether it is a Christian theory, John Robinson's contribution, its strengths, and how it compares with natural law on moral certainty.Open →
• The categorical imperativeRecall questions on maxims, hypothetical and categorical imperatives, the universal law, end-in-itself and kingdom-of-ends formulations, the lying promise, contradictions in conception and in the will, the formulations as one principle, autonomy and heteronomy, and applying the end-in-itself formulation to a business deal.Open →
• Duty, the summum bonum and evaluationRecall questions on duty and acting from duty, the good will, the postulates of freedom, immortality and God, the summum bonum, and the evaluation of Kantian ethics, including conflicting duties, abstraction, the place of sympathy and love, its strengths, and a lie that would save a life.Open →
• UtilitarianismRecall questions on the principle of utility, psychological hedonism, the hedonic calculus and its seven criteria, act and rule utilitarianism, strong and weak rules and rule worship, punishing the innocent, higher and lower pleasures, preference utilitarianism, and whether good can be measured well enough to decide.Open →
• EuthanasiaRecall questions on sanctity and quality of life, voluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, assisted suicide, persistent vegetative state, active and passive euthanasia, acts and omissions, ordinary and extraordinary means, double effect in pain relief, the slippery slope, palliative care, and natural law, situation ethics and utilitarianism applied.Open →
• Business ethicsRecall questions on corporate social responsibility, stakeholders and shareholder theory, whistle-blowing, the claim that good ethics is good business, globalisation and supply chains, greenwashing, flourishing under capitalism and consumerism, Kantian and utilitarian approaches to business, and religious assessments of business practice.Open →
• Ethical language and meta-ethicsRecall questions on meta-ethics and cognitivism, ethical naturalism and its strengths, the naturalistic fallacy, the open question argument and the is-ought problem, intuitionism and moral knowledge, emotivism and its link to verification and relativism, and whether moral terms describe objective facts.Open →
• ConscienceRecall questions on Aquinas' ratio, synderesis and conscientia, vincible and invincible ignorance, the apparent good and guilt, Freud's psychosexual development, id, ego and super-ego and his account of guilt and religion, how Aquinas and Freud differ, the criticisms of each, and whether conscience exists.Open →
• Sexual ethicsRecall questions on religious teaching about sex before and outside marriage and same-sex relationships, Christian, Jewish and Muslim positions, secularism, legal change in Britain, the harm principle, natural law, situation ethics, Kantian ethics and utilitarianism applied to sexual ethics, and whether sexual choices are private.Open →

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Take Religion and Ethics further

The same content, four other ways.

Commonly confused

Pairs that lose marks when they are blurred together.

• Deontological ethics vs Teleological ethics

  Deontological ethics: judging an act by whether it conforms to a duty. Teleological ethics: judging an act by the end it brings about.

• Act utilitarianism vs Rule utilitarianism

  Act utilitarianism: judging each act by the balance of good it produces on that occasion. Rule utilitarianism: judging acts by rules that produce the most good when generally followed.

• Cognitivism vs Non-cognitivism

  Cognitivism: the view that moral statements make claims capable of being true or false. Non-cognitivism: the view that moral statements express attitudes rather than state facts.

Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the word telos mean, and why is it the starting point for natural law?

   Model answer

   Telos means the end, goal or purpose that something is directed towards. Natural law begins from the claim that everything, including human beings, has a built-in purpose, and that an action is good when it moves a thing towards that purpose and bad when it frustrates it. Morality therefore becomes a question about fulfilling human nature rather than about obeying arbitrary commands.

2. 2

   How did Aristotle use the idea of telos in his account of nature and the good life?

   Model answer

   Aristotle argued that to explain anything fully you must state its final cause, the end it exists for. An acorn is directed towards becoming an oak, and an eye towards seeing — ends belonging to the things themselves rather than assigned to them by a maker. He applied this to humans: our distinctive capacity is rational activity, so the human telos is eudaimonia, a flourishing life lived in accordance with reason and virtue. Goodness is thus measured against a purpose written into nature.

3. 3

   How did Aquinas take Aristotle's idea of telos and give it a religious development?

   Model answer

   Aquinas, writing as a Christian theologian, kept Aristotle's claim that human beings have a natural purpose but placed that purpose within a created order. On his account, God is the author of nature, so the purposes we discover in ourselves are God's design. He also extended the goal beyond this life: our final end is not just earthly flourishing but the beatific vision, perfect union with God, which reason alone cannot deliver.

4. 4

   What is the difference between Aristotle's eudaimonia and Aquinas' account of the human end?

   Model answer

   Aristotle's eudaimonia is a this-worldly flourishing achieved through the exercise of reason and virtue over a complete life, and it needs no God to make sense of it. Aquinas accepted that as the natural end but held that it is incomplete. For him the supernatural end, seeing God, lies beyond natural human powers and requires grace and revelation, which is why divine law is needed alongside natural law.

5. 5

   Why is natural law sometimes called both teleological and deontological?

   Model answer

   It is teleological because the whole framework rests on purpose: acts are assessed by whether they serve the human telos. It is deontological in practice because the precepts derived from that purpose function as binding rules that hold regardless of the outcome in a particular case. This is why natural law can look absolutist at the level of the primary precepts while still being grounded in an argument about ends.

6. 6

   Name the four tiers of law in Aquinas' scheme, in order from highest to lowest.

   Model answer

   Eternal law, divine law, natural law and human law. They form a descending chain: the eternal is God's own ordering of reality, divine law is what God has disclosed in scripture, natural law is the share in that ordering which human reason can work out, and human law is the concrete legislation of particular states.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.

Religion and Ethics revision questions

What does Religion and Ethics cover in OCR A-Level Religious Studies?

12 subtopics: aquinas and the precepts of natural law, applying and evaluating natural law, fletcher's propositions and working principles, applying and evaluating situation ethics, the categorical imperative, duty, the summum bonum and evaluation, utilitarianism, euthanasia, business ethics, ethical language and meta-ethics, conscience and sexual ethics. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.

How is Religion and Ethics organised?

By the OCR H573 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.