Ethics and Religion in Present Day Spain: Problems and Perspectives for the 21st Century

Abstract

There are three different starting positions on the relationship between ethics and religion in the last third of the 20^th century. Two authors may be analyzed for each of the main positions: A. Sánchez Vázquez and E. Guisán (ethics for laicism), J. L .L. Aranguren and A. Cortina (lay ethics) and G. R. de Yurre and M. Vidal (religious ethics). And, to complete the analysis of the situation, the thesis checks diverse ethics that, without being appropriate for Spain, have had an important influence on the question: ethics of liberation, ethics of the theology of God's death, projects of world ethics and civil ethics.

The second part is a systematic reflection on the possible relationships: (a) rejection or mutual exclusion, (b) incorporation of each one in the other, and (c) mutual recognition and respect with the possibility of prospering mutually. Four in-depth problems emerge from these possibilities of relation between ethics and religion: ethics and metaphysics, reason and faith, moral autonomy and immanence and transcendence.

The third part develops the conclusions and indicates the problems of ethics for laicism, lay ethics and religious ones. It also proposes the perspectives in which the relationship between ethics and religion must be set out: ethics demands autonomy, provides rationality and can achieve a horizon of sense, offerings of happiness, utopias, hope and Christian charity. Between ethics and religion there are questions that are particularly sensitive: the reference to metaphysics or not, the necessary overcoming of the concepts of "nature" and "natural law", autonomy, universality and the permanent question of whether values are constructed, invented or discovered.

Relationships between ethics and religion cannot be imagined outside an area of respect and dialogue. This approach must be continued until its possibilities are exhausted with the commitment to the reality of confronting human problems. At the same time, we cannot forget that human dignity is not questionable and that ethics has nothing to say when religion speaks about resurrection and eternal life.