Samantha Godwin I am surprised and a little embarrassed that the American Humanist Society would publish that infographic as explaining the nature of morality. Morality is not simply a behavior, belief or social practice typical of humans. It is also a philosophical question beyond the social phenomena of humans making moral claims or experiencing intuitions about rightness and wrongness aside, of what *ought* to be held as right or wrong. Conflating these two questions - What humans (or other animals) believe and do with what ought to be believed and done, - the naturalistic fallacy of conflating what is with what ought to be. It is moreover empirically false that, as a descriptive matter, moral beliefs and codes are universal. Even the easiest examples of behavior that ought to be regarded as morally impermissible such as rape, murder, and slavery (the former two given as examples in the infographic of moral universals) are not universally condemned as immoral. On the contrary there are numerous societies (including the West until recently) when rape was accepted by the prevailing system of norms (seen in the very widespread marital rape exception) because women were (or in some places are) basically property of their fathers or husbands. Likewise slavery, serfdom, and caste hierarchies have been regarded as morally acceptable in many or most human societies throughout history. Even today almost everywhere it is regarded as morally permissible to kill other humans in certain circumstances, with the term “murder” reserved for those cases when it seen as not acceptable – as such even prohibiting killing is not a moral universal (people simply have different words for permitted killings and unpermitted killings and different societies have different lists of when a killing fits into one category or the other). Absolutely repugnant moral systems that as a normative philosophical matter ought to be denounced and rejected are, in fact very widespread among human societies and in human history. Human behavior is shaped in part by natural selective pressures that shaped our neurology, and it is shaped in part by the social context in which we find ourselves. Neither however is necessarily driven to produce the most humane, moral, ethical, or right behaviors – the practical criteria for evolutionary success and the propagation of social norms are entirely different from the normative criteria for justifiable ethical conduct. Humanism should remain humanist and not replace supernatural religiosity with the religiosity of psudo-scientific reductionism.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 23:01:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015