This is something that always appealed to me:

With an estimated 14 percent of Americans professing to have no religion, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies, some are choosing to send their children to classes that teach ethics without religious belief.

One of the reasons we came up with our July 20th ceremony was part of a broader effort to formalize our belief system. Several of the people that I was hanging out with at the time wanted to have a place to take their kids to learn their own belief system, rather than a Christian one.

My problem is that, while I'm not a theist, I'm not an atheist (in the sense of someone who believes there is no God) either. I'm a skeptic. In fact, the Unitarian Church can serve the function described above (I actually did attend a Unitarian Sunday school as a teenager). The problem with Unitarians is that they tend to be "progressive."

Back in the eighties, Keith Henson and I used to occasionally discuss trying to take over, or start up, a Unitarian congregation that would be libertarian, rather than "liberal." But it seemed like a lot of potential effort, with an uncertain outcome, and nothing ever came of it. In the nineties, he decided to crusade against Scientologists instead. It probably would have been smarter to take on the Unitarians...

The defining characteristic of religion is some core belief that must be accepted, or not, by faith without proof. Being a good scientist does not preclude belief by faith. It does require a clear understanding of the difference between belief by evidence and belief by faith.

This is why I want school choice. My kids will be taught my religion at their school. Your kids will be taught your ethics at their school. Perfect religious freedom without the government coercion we have always had via public schools. We've just changed the groups whose religions the public schools infringe.

Yours,
Wince

Spend time discussing ethics with your own kids on Sunday's seems a good start ...

"The defining characteristic of religion is some core belief that must be accepted, or not, by faith without proof."

My initial reaction to this statement was that it was untrue, but then I realized I was reacting to what I hear anti-religious people sometimes saying, which is along the lines of "The defining characteristic of religion is some core belief that must be accepted, or not, by faith in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary."

Although I am a person of faith, I think my beliefs are true enough that you can't go and conduct some experiment which would explicitly show my beliefs are incorrect. And I think I'm hardheaded enough to change my belief if you can. However I have definitely discovered over the years that interpreting evidence has a lot to do with your initial assumptions.

I know this is a big topic, but is there a good place to go for a primer on how ethics works without a belief in God?

I am a Christian, and so I try to learn right and wrong based on that starting point. But I think I need to better understand people who don't believe in God, yet want to have an ethical system.

I've tried to reason it out myself, but I always get back to "why is that good (or bad)?" I can see that a non-theistic ethical system (vs. no ethics at all) would, on balance, give a greater number of people longer, healthier, and, probably (but not certainly) "happier" lives, but I can't see any reason why I should consider this "good." There's been lots of ethical systems out there, including ones involving raiding, pillaging and plundering, human sacrifice, slavery, and all sorts of things. But without an absolute arbiter of "good" and "bad" how do we make value judgments between ethical systems? Or on a more personal level, on what basis would we condemn an individual(or ourselves) for not precisely following the ethical system we have set up? It seems to me that there is too much incentive for individuals to violate a non-objective ethical system for their own good.

I think (my opinion) that ethical systems without theism only actually work when generally underpinned with a societal ethical system based in theism.

It's likely that my understanding is unsophisticated, and I need to better understand the underpinning for ethics without theism.

Jeff: Try Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness" or any of her other essay collections. It's a start.

Rant warning!

No actually Jeff makes a very central point and telling him to go read (and implicated: adhere to) a(nother) point of view or competing system not only misses that very point but illustrates it.

It's fairly simple.

Bias: I feel strongly about the topic. It's been a while but I studied ethics and moral philosophy (among other things*) at university but I'm confident there hasn't been any significant changes (it would be very big news).

There is no known system of morals or ethics that works unless its adherents have and share a very high level of faith in that very system. None. Give that some real thought. Such continues to be the case even if one chooses to interpret systems such as capitalism, communism, etc. as moral/ethical systems rather than economic, administrative, or political systems. Remove faith in the system itself and it collapses (however some of them are good at reconstructing themselves but those are the very same that have the most limited aspects in relation to morality & ethics).

That was the first part: faith is paramount (no matter what adherents to any particular system might read into the word "faith" beyond its basic meaning).

And here's the next and last excruciatingly simple part: beyond that it's all a mess. It really can't be put any better, the lack of common ground or principles is truly staggering. You can find similarities of course but for any kind of specific "positive" similarities you need to cast the net very narrowly. So narrowly in fact that if you want to compare similarities you might as well just pick two or more known examples of similarity and skip the net-casting part: the results will be mostly identical.

The only thing I feel confident enough to state is actually a true similarity is the "negative" similarities described above, i.e. shared dis-similarity.

It is the one field within Philosophy that has had practically zero improvement throughout the known history of the human species despite a tremendous amount of work being put into it (and a profuse output as well, which would be good if it wasn't for the fact that none of it sticks beyond serving as historical material on the topic).

Yeah that's right; there is a very ugly reason why those studying ethics and moral philosophy are tortured with reading through what amounts to summaries of all major opinions on the subject during the last two thousand years plus. It's all an enormous lesson in defeat and if the student is moderately smart** they realize that all those failures all the way back from the antique classics to the very latest ideas all represent exactly the same status quo.

Zip, zilch, nada, even the definition of the terms themselves as anything else that empty placeholders for vague hyper-subjective concepts escape actual consensus.

* I spent years and all I got was a lousy diploma in "Falling Between Chairs" from Unseen University ^_^

** the moderately stupid ones become living quotation dictionaries instead ^_^

p.s. all the above does not equate to different moral or ethical systems being equivalent --far from it-- but a gross misunderstanding of it might help explain the appearance and rise of the idea of moral and cultural equivalence (I can't say this for sure but I find it extremely likely).

Jeff,

Here's an off-the-cuff answer - please don't hold me to it.

You can dispense with:
the need for an objective truth,
the need for God,
the need for faith,
and instead you can simply ask people what their principles are (however ungrounded those principles may be).

It turns out that people who disagree on a lot of things can still agree on a few basic ethical principals such as "fairness is desirable", ""do onto others as you would do onto yourself", and so on.

Once you've got that kind of agreement, all the normal trappings of religion such as congregations, services, Sunday school, etc can all based on the idea that people should think about, and talk to each other about, how to consistently apply those principles.

There will be a lot to talk about. For example, the argument in America over whether torture is justified and should be legal is an example of how people who actually agree on a lot of ethical and moral principles can still disagree on how to apply those principles.

The conversation can take the rest of your life, and can be very rewarding. No need for God, and there isn't even any need for faith, so long as you understand that your principles aren't "right", but instead, just agreed upon.

I suspect some will argue that there is a utilitarian argument hiding in there, and behind that, an argument for selfishness, but just as you can do biology without worrying about atoms, you can do ethics without worrying about utility and selfishness. And without worrying about God, if you're so inclined. :-)

Hillary-Supporter, it won't work. Those "basic ethical principles" are too vague to help much in the real crunches of life. "Do onto others" isn't useful if I say that an unborn child should be defined as one of the others, and you decide to disagree. Or if one has to kill people in one group in order to protect people in another.

And I don't think those basic principles are stable. I suspect they are habits left over from more religious times, and that non-religious people are dropping a few of them each generation, without noticing what they are doing. In my experience, without even thinking.

I find it grimly amusing when some of my fellow Boomers, who tossed overboard various of their parent's moral norms, are shocked when their children discard a few more.

John, that's interesting.

Which principles do you think the boomer's children are rejecting?

Below is a view that might be too Western-centric or Judeo-Christian-Islamic centric, and perhaps it is just simply too liberal (as you would expect from a "Hillary Supporter") but I'll take a stab at answering your comment.

Religions change over time, but they also maintain an underlying continuity. My guess is that the underlying principles, such as "fairness is desirable" and "do onto others..." don't change at all, or at least not very quickly.

In the last 500 hundred years, there has been an ever-widening notions of who counts as a person, and who counts as an equal. Race, gender, education, wealth, marital status, sexual preferences, and other descriptors are all being discounted as divisive factors. The social unrest that was part of the 1960s was part of this trend. So was the American & French revolutions. So was the Enlightenment and Renaisance. While these changes caused discomfort for some, the changes can also be viewed as the realization of "do onto others...", fairness, and other principles which underly many religions. Even the abortion argument demonstrates a widening acceptance of who "do onto others" applies to, as one side emphasizes a woman's autonomy while the other side emphasizes the personhood of a fetus. Maybe the next battles will be about animal rights, and someday about AI rights, but again this would be an example of doing onto others....

My point is that there was no philosophical need to refer to God while these changes were going on. So long as "Do onto others" was something that people could agree on, social change (or the lack of it) could occur (or not) while there was basic continuity for ethics and/or religion. I suspect "Do onto others" (and other principles) will continue to be helpful to people thousands of years from now, regardless of all the changes that will have occurred, and whether they are religious, secular, or maybe even something altogether new.

Even if you think the above is completely off the mark, if you have any other comments on the general topic, I'd be interested in what you have to say.

"Which principles do you think the boomer's children are rejecting?"

The particular example that sticks in my mind is a woman who went off to college and slept with lots of different boys, and was devastated when her daughter went to college and slept with lots of boys and girls. I remember her saying, "Why don't they do something?" (Who "they" were I didn't ask.)

Another example. In my youth (born in 1950) divorce was still a catastrophe, and not common. My generation has made it common, and now younger people are often not getting married at all, just cohabiting.

Another example. In the 1950's and 60's there was still debate about legalizing contraceptives. (Sounds weird I know. Google "Griswold Decision.") Moralists said that contraception would lead to abortion which would in turn lead to infanticide. Guess what, in parts of Europe infanticide is now the leading cause of death of infants. And the definitions of those who would "be happier if dead" keep widening. To the point of now including a lot of old people.

At each stage of this progress people like you (and me in years past) just shrugged the matter off, and assumed that wherever you were at the moment was some sort of natural stopping place, and that decay would go no further.

Also each generation has been re-defining morality to include fewer realms of life. I suspect you have just dropped all the above questions from the concept of morality. Morality is just "fairness." Something that doesn't cramp anyone's style.

I would say that what you advocate simply will not work. Rand's "secular Sunday schools" concept does not work. There has to be some authority to decide what is moral. You don't have one, and so you will keep dropping bits of moral law each time a hard decision arrives.

Let me suggest a different example of how morality oozes away without God, taken from what I would guess is still part of morality as you currently define it. I would guess that you consider slavery an absolute evil, and the enslaving of black Africans an especially detestable example of this evil. Am I right? Hmmm? Not a grey area, right?

But black Africans are being enslaved in large numbers right now, currently, in Sudan. SO, if George W Bush announced a crusade to free those slaves, (one that was likely to be popular and help Republicans win elections) how many "Hillary supporters" would support him? And how many would decide that their moral principles need a little tweaking? How flexible would your morality be? And what would a "secular Sunday school" teach? How would it arrive at a decision? And, whatever the decision, where would it get the moral authority to persuade any significant number of people?

If you're looking for a ceremony, maybe you could give away presents on Isaac Newton's birthday.