Can religion or a state ever be ethical ?

[detail]

Thomas Paine once said:

My country is the world,
and my religion is to do good.

Is there not undoubtable a direct connection of religios and state moral with supression ?
Can anybody judge against a moderate nihilism , asserting others as well as oneself the
right to live?

We all know that ethics tries to evoke moral values for the society, how can anybody assure
that this doesn't end up in submission to psychological terror?

[LuckyR]

You've lost me. Since religions and governments are large groups (by definition) how could they not possess ethical standards? That's what they do.

[fati]

The code of ethics in the profession has many uses. At the professional level, the code records values by which professionals can be held accountable for the actions of their members. In addition, as society agents control of many professions to professional organizations themselves, professionals have developed standards to provide the basis for self-regulation. At the individual professional level, the Code provides practical control for industry members who may encounter ethical or ethical dilemmas about their professional behavior in specific situations. If the professional finds that he is in a moral or moral state of tension, then the code can help to provide advice, which is self-evident. The process of developing code has an impact on its application. By including professional and professional students in professional code development and code review and revision, it is more likely that more people will be entitled to ownership of the resulting documentation. With extensive ownership, it is believed that more compliance is considered more reliable

[Mark1955]

Is there not undoubtable a direct connection of religios and state moral with supression ?
We all know that ethics tries to evoke moral values for the society, how can anybody assure
that this doesn't end up in submission to psychological terror?

I’d suggest that any ethical ‘standard’ involves some repression or coercion to require you to follow the standard. Depending on how far your ethical values differ from the standard so the degree of psychological terror required to make you conform will vary. A sociopath will thus find unacceptable what you and I regard as simply polite behaviour and a higher functioning sociopath might try and use ‘rights’ legislation to assert that imposing your ethical standards on him is unacceptable and a form of psychological terror.

[Todd Scull]

It seems that the two classes (“religion” and “state”) share the quality of being a collection of individuals working to achieve goals determined by those who are tasked with making decisions. I will refer, therefore, to “organizations” to include both “religion” and “state”.

Organizations “act” through a dynamic that involves making decisions, implementing those decisions, and those not making or implementing decisions but choosing to be a member. Each of these three groups, I argue, are operating under a different set of ethical obligations (though they may share certain obligations in common). Another layer of complexity is the way in which decisions are made and executed. For example, in an organization whose power is centralized in a single unelected individual, the ethical dynamics are different than in an organization whose power is more distributed among its members, and so on.

Given this, I would argue that yes, a “religion” or “state” can be ethical acting in accordance to a set of norms that are considered ethical. Perhaps those acts must be deemed ethical in accordance with those norms consistently such that they constitute a clear majority of those actions of the organization.

What I find most interesting, though, is determining the nature of the various ethical duties of individuals within different types of organizations, and what would be the criteria for determining an organization’s identity as being ethical.

[Pantagruel]

I guess any organization which has and follows its own set of standards can be said to be operating "ethically."

Huxley distinguishes between collectives which function as groups and those which function as crowds, the former being characteristically much smaller in size. I'd say that very large organizations (church/state) are managed by groups whose objectives are not always in the best interests of the whole of the organization and its individual members (i.e. are not universalizable within that organization). So inevitably the espoused ethic of the organization diverges from the dominant ethic of the presiding group. This lack of ethical foundation creates a state of disconnection for the individual members, who can either fall back into a primitive "crowd" mentality of militant enthusiasm, or suffer from a debilitating state of ennui (as described by Durkheim).