The Death Penalty Is Not A Useful Tool

http://thecollegeconservative.com/2012/10/02/the-death-penalty-is-californias-last-useful-tool/

I’ve experienced death as a reality only so much in my still young life. Both my grandfathers passed away in my late college years and we’ve had to euthanize three cats since I started college, two strays and one we’ve had since I was in high school. The most recent one I watched with my own eyes, overdosed with a barbiturate and slowly drifting to a permanent sleep. Death is something we must accept as unavoidable and natural, the flipside of life. But the enthusiasm to exact justice through it has always troubled me as an ethical quandary. Why kill people to make things right, even if those people have killed others? It won’t bring the victims back and it won’t bring any sense of closure to the survivors or those close to the victims. There’s even cost measures to consider of how expensive it is to hire people and put together the shots that first put the person into unconsciousness, then anesthetize/paralyze them and finally stop their heart. The idea is that it’s more humane than electrocution or hanging, but I would think treating even criminals with some sense of dignity, even in incarceration, is better than taking their lives into your hands and snuffing them out. I can’t be sure of the comparison of maintaining jails, even if it was strictly for the most heinous of crimes (murder, rape and abuse), against taking the lives of those who have done such atrocities to other human beings, but my conscience tells me that we should not try to accelerate mortality for the sake of morality.

Death might be a final solution, but it is not an effective or permanent solution to crime, however horrible those acts may be. Rape, murder, and many other things might be argued to deserve this execution of justice in a conclusive manner, but I don’t see how this really addresses the issue of crime as a whole committed by people in the future or even as we speak. Killing criminals here and now will only stop killing for a time before more killings are committed. Premeditated or otherwise, the mindset of someone intent on doing such things is not so much whether they’re caught, but how to get away with it. Capital punishment of this degree is not a deterrent to criminals, especially when you consider that they may not even value their own life if they think others’ lives are fodder to them. When you claim it’s effective to kill people for crimes that may require it ethically is like making the comparison to amputating an arm that has irreparable damage. The limb is part of a body, while individual humans are part of a community that can function without them directly in it. Of course these people shouldn’t be treated as those who do lesser crimes of theft or the like, but giving them basic dignity, as terrible as they may be, is as ethical as punishing them is a basic ethical prerogative. And regardless of if you think criminals deserve to be treated as humans, does it make sense in any way to prevent others from being killed by completely different assailants by eliminating an assailant that, barring escape, is unable to kill others if incarcerated. The mere possibility of them escaping should weigh less heavily on your conscience than the fact that you decided they weren’t permitted to live anymore.

While it may cost significant taxpayer money to keep prisoners in jail, it is preferable to killing them and trying to take mortality into our own hands and play a proverbial God. And this is nothing compared to the shared guilt the entire country would share if the person executed happened to be innocent because of a rushed trial and ruling. There could be streamlining of the process and the benefits involved with prisoners, to say nothing of decriminalizing marijuana and giving different punishments for misdemeanors, such as forced community service or the like. The idea that the punishment should fit the crime can be taken too literally. Perhaps a better principle would be severity of punishment fitting severity of the crime, but it still could be interpreted to take retributive justice instead of rehabilitative justice, where the criminals, in many cases, can be improved with some form of treatment or otherwise letting them stew in their guilt and see the gravity of their crimes.

I know this seems very passive, but in terms of ethics, we cannot always be proactive in solutions, especially if they’re intended to be expedient instead of effective. Efficiency doesn’t always mean haste. And even speed is not essential to solving the persistent problem of crime, since it likely takes a generation or two to make lasting change on how people regard the desirability of actions like stealing or assault. Time heals wounds of both a personal and societal nature. You move on past someone’s death by mourning, you prevent crime by showing the inherent issues with it. When you start using the threat of death to motivate people to restrain themselves, you’re using fear as the impetus, which is only useful so long as people continue to fear. When they either abandon or overcome that fear, you no longer have the power you possessed before in terms of rule of law. People should avoid being both illegal and immoral in their behavior. It shouldn’t be merely the consequences of their actions as regards law enforcement, but their own conscience that makes them contemplate whether to go through with it or not. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Religion No Longer Essential For Ethics

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/dalai-lama-facebook-religion-is-no-longer-adequate-science_n_1880805.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-derr/beyond-religion-altogether-religious-notes-on-dalai-lama-post-religious-ethics_b_1885346.html

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/news/regions/asia-pacific/dalai-lama-tells-internet-religion-no-longer-adequate

http://markandrewalward.blogspot.com/2012/09/dalai-lama-religion-is-no-longer.html#.UF54Vo1lRXM

The Dalai Lama has brought himself into the spotlight yet again with a Facebook and Twitter post 2 weeks ago stating, in brief, that “grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate.” He’s brought praise from atheists and humanists, to say nothing of preaching from Christians and others who insist that you can’t have ethics without a spiritual or a religious basis. I spoke in part about Gyatso’s text “Beyond Religion: Ethics For A Whole World” which he referenced in a Facebook post I spoke about in “An Ethics For Everyone” These claims are controversial, but a remotely objective look at them, without presuppositions on either the sacred or secular, we can see there are commonly held values that we can utilize in a shared ethics and morality. The distinction between ethics and morality is difficult, but I have one perspective I’ve read on that is both concise and accessible. It is also pertinent to lay out these shared ideals about right and wrong, of good and evil, and elaborate how they make sense in a secular worldview, with no recourse to divine revelations. And finally, the supposed inconsistency of absolutist and relativist ethics can be resolved by a moderate point of realism, or even pragmatism if we want to be more philosophical. Ethics and morality are complex areas of life, but we shouldn’t needlessly complicate them with unnecessary or otherwise irrational factors that aren’t pertinent to our basic determination of what is right and wrong.

Ethics can be explained as an individual’s code of what is right and wrong, developed through experimentation in a sort of practical fashion. Morality, on the other hand, is a shared societal or cultural code which people are expected to conform to. The former is more individualist, but not so opposed to collaborative efforts, while morality creates a sense of collectivism that is concerning, but doesn’t deny individuals to a certain extent. In short, ethics are personal tenets and more experiential in nature, developed by an almost scientific methodology, while morality is a cultural set of beliefs concerning what is good and bad, almost to the effect of mores and norms, which are closer to taboos; related to acceptability instead of culpability. The distinction of individual and group values could potentially create a polar dichotomy, where each opposes the other. But instead I would suggest a prioritizing of the individual without eschewing the collective, more specifically, the community of which we are inevitably a part of in one way or another. Any community is composed of individuals to begin with, so the nuance is recognizing that there will be some disagreements, but there will also be common ground that exists by necessity of the average human being functioning remotely normally (i.e. not a sociopath). In that way, you have coexistence without conformity to the letter of the law. The spirit would still be recognized, so that’s not gone either. A society where one can have ethics that don’t necessarily conflict with morality, but morality doesn’t override ethics is an ideal and possible existence we can work out.

The values that are essential to ethics, according to Tenzin Gyatso, are: love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness: and can be found and discerned outside of religious authority. Objectors will claim that in scientific and secular reasoning, since ideals and values are non material things, they can’t be verified or demonstrated in the way we demonstrate gravity or other things with clearly physical properties. The problem with that argument is that it applies to numbers, yet they are believed to be extant in their own sense, just like concepts of truth, justice, even logic, which are immaterial and abstract in their nature. The verifiability and falsifiability of something isn’t strictly limited to the physical, especially when, by its very premise, it is admitted to be non physical. It’s more important in some cases whether it has practical value or relevance to human affairs. Love, compassion, forgiveness, patience and tolerance all have some basis in neuroscience, no doubt. But our experience and practice of them is more important in considering their universal value to everyone. When you love, you can understand compassion; when you are compassionate, you can practice forgiveness; when you practice forgiveness, you gain patience; when you gain patience, you develop tolerance. The interrelation of these values is complex, no doubt, but I would say the basis is compassion, which is a form of love that is nuanced, not granting it without some degree of reciprocity, but nonetheless understanding and not becoming either selfish or abusive. With compassion, you understand love, forgiveness, patience and tolerance, since they all have their connections to compassion, the core value and the one commonly misunderstood as passivity, but should be an active practice.

Ethics can be objective, true regardless of our opinions one way or the other, without being absolutely and ultimately true, which would suggest no critical thought on our part. And they can be subjective, dependent on the individual’s perspective, without being hard relativist, where there is no underlying ground for making claims of truth and fact to begin with. This is a hard position to convey with people tending to have fairly simplistic ideas of how right and wrong or good and evil work, thinking many times in black and white, but ironically admitting of grey areas when it comes to their own gain or loss. That entails we acknowledge in some way the relativity of ethics, but only when it applies to self interests. If it involves much more people, we try to sound more consistent and morally upright, but our hypocrisy cannot be pushed away. To accept the relativity of morality and ethics is not to abandon them as binding on us in any sense. It’s a basic necessity of human life to have rules that restrain us or otherwise guide our actions. But we shouldn’t take them as unquestionable or not subject to alteration or even abandonment if they merit it. Cultural influence on the acceptability of something should not be the primary voice. Popularity is not an acceptable standard, especially if it’s just based on conformity instead of critical thinking. Our voice of reason, even a sort of innate common sense or conscience, should guide us, especially when the practice being judged as condonable is, in fact, damaging in one form or another. Dehumanizing people through slavery or even trying to appear equal through such a thing as civil unions contrasted with marriage is not ethical and should not be painted as such for the sake of social expediency. We should work hard at always improving our ethics and not letting them remain easy for us to follow. As the proverb goes “Familiarity breeds contempt”. Skepticism about ethics shouldn’t go to the level of nihilism, but it shouldn’t be abandoned because it might breed insecurity or fear. It’s how we face the fear and insecurity that further tempers our future principles.

Of course it will be difficult for many people, who tend to only be philosophers when it comes to things that have already passed, mulling over them. Or we fixate on religion and spirituality as something of more philosophical import than the fundamentals: logic, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics and epistemology. Speculating on the mysterious and awe inspiring can be done right or it can be wasted contemplation without underpinning it with sound thinking. Understanding things and also recognizing the limits of our knowledge of them are both essential to having a well thought out and realistic worldview. We shouldn’t live seeking to merely go through every day in security, especially if it ruins any possibility of change, innovation or progress. Of course, not all progress is good, not all innovation is beneficial and not all change will make things right. It is our response to these things is reflective of our character. Patience is a virtue and compassion is the ideal from which we develop that. And we don’t need any supernatural underpinning to discover compassion’s importance. Until next time, Namaste and aloha

Ingenuity and Iniquity

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/24/how-creativity-connects_n_1450099.html?ref=religion&ir=Religion

Of the things one could connect to dishonesty, the characteristic of being creative is probably the last we’d even consider.  A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that people who require more creativity in their jobs are more likely to engage in underhanded behavior at work. It’s commonly harmless or at least mitigated compared to tax fraud or such things, but the idea is that those with a tendency to be inventive also can find ways to justify their behavior. This is, however, highly correlation based. There are plenty of creative people who most likely don’t behave like this and many who aren’t creative that do. The inverse may be the case: doing immoral things may lead to more creative thinking in the future by virtue of going outside expected norms and laws. This could be a good thing, but the potential abuse still remains. If being creative is a quality of any person, the more they have, there is a higher chance they may have a habit of being unethical, even if it’s simple things like skimping on a tip.  These two relations pose a question of how our ethical behavior is related to creativity and vice versa. Are we ethical because we lack creativity or do we become more creative by breaking ethical norms?

Ethics could conceivably emerge from our ignoring creativity and seeing what is predictable and what is practical, benefitting the whole instead of the parts. This is not to say we can’t appreciate innovation, but it still has to be within boundaries of some sorts. Art schools won’t let a student just go anywhere with their ventures, especially when religion or politics are concerned. If you go too far with them, you’re threatening stability and offending people. While the former might be grounds for genuine ethical concerns, the latter is guaranteed with any endeavor in the arts or just in conversations. Someone will find your opinions unbelievable and strive to change your ways. So ethics, in this theory, serve as a safeguard against people breaking out of the limitations society implicitly places upon the arts, so as not to disrupt order. Of course there is the possibility that this isn’t ethics so much as tradition, norms and mores, all of which are prone to be shattered in one way or another and a common perspective is that these don’t really hurt the common good, since they aren’t automatically galvanizing people to action, but bringing things to the surface that were once hidden. In that sense, creativity and ethics can coexist in this model, which is hopefully what can be accomplished with the other.

Creativity may emerge from ignoring the mundane and seeing things in a new light, breaking down boundaries and limits we put on ourselves. In this context, creativity is more beneficial than ethics, at least in the sense that new things can aid us with time and experimentation. Of course with any such novelty, especially scientific discoveries, one should be careful, which is applying a sort of ethics to the process. But to prohibit new ideas because they threaten a status quo or the like under the guise of ethics or morals is where such things as censorship arise from. This is where creativity is good, but like ethics before, there is the potential for abuse in creativity for its own sake instead of benefitting society with discoveries in medicine, or even mere aesthetic appreciation in the arts. But to have some kind of message behind our creations is important as well even if it is simply observing something already presented by others. To put a new spin on it is where imagination can bring new vigor and awe to life that we became accustomed to. Those that are abnormal can many times have a view on things that is not damaging, but actually edifying and building us up more by bringing together so many myriad vantages and resulting impressions. This is not to say there isn’t a point where we cut off the genius from the insane, of course. But the potential for creativity’s abuse should not make us stifle it entirely for the sake of security either.

Creativity and ethics can coexist, but it remains difficult to focus entirely on one or the other without recognizing a need for both depending on context and circumstance. Being creative might be a way people justify their otherwise unethical actions or it might simply be a consequence of the imagination going wild and people motivated by their ingenuity to go outside the norm, which doesn’t always equal being immoral, but heterodox at best. Creativity has potential for corruption, but is not evil in itself. Ethics benefit us, as well as possessing potential for excess or deficit as with any good thing. And immorality is sometimes only judged as such, but is not necessarily evil at all, but merely pushing boundaries beyond stiff and resistant traditions and normalcy. Fundamentally, equity and moderation are necessary to maintaining a cohesive and dynamic whole person, which includes both being civil to other human beings, but also realizing that you can’t please everyone and someone at sometime is going to be offended by you and there’s nothing that can be done except move forward. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

An Ethics For Everyone

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/beyond-religion-dalai-lam_n_1125892.html?ref=religion

http://www.buddhismtoday.com/english/ethic_psy/032-ForASecularMillenium.htm

http://www.davidpaulboaz.org/Excerps_of_Mind/ANewSecularEthicofCompassion.pdf

With Christmas on the horizon, I thought I’d talk about something else humanity shares besides holidays celebrating the winter solstice or otherwise occurring around that time. It’s not our religious impulse (which I’ll admit we have in part) so much as our ethical impulse. Of course there are those that are unethical in their behavior by psychological compulsion and mental illness, but many times, these people realize the damage that their actions do to others. The rarest group of people do not realize even somewhat that they affect others in any way and focus only on their own advancement. But no person with any relative mental capacity needs religious devotions, rituals or belief in any supernatural agent to conceptualize and hold ethical and moral principles. A secular ethics, based purely in the everyday experiences and apart from any feelings of the sacred or holy, should be something that even deeply religious people can understand, however much they regard ethical merit as unimportant, as is the case with Christianity at its core, even if it also advocates many of the same things you would find with nontheistic traditions, the eupraxophy that Paul Kurtz spoke of in relation to Confucianism, for example.

The first key point that we can agree on to one degree or another is concern for the other, better expressed as compassion. Even etymologically, it has similar ideas to words like sympathy and empathy in the roots of the word we partly derive passion from, the Greek “pathos,” meaning experience or suffering in the emotional and existential sort of sense. A starting definition I’d propose is “willingness to understand the suffering of others and take it into account in your own life”. The Dalai Lama in his new book, Beyond Religion, defines it in a very altruistic sense as “a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being,” People arguing that ethics and morals are rooted in religion would say this is too idealistic and presumes people will all behave this way naturally. I don’t think that’s what’s implied here. Both ethics and morals are nuances of the same study of good/bad or right/wrong behavior with our fellow humans. Ethics is understood from its Greek root “ethos” as a principle for people as a whole to live by, while morals, derived from Latin “mores,” is more social and cultural in its construction, though it could be reversed just as easily with particular interpretations of the terms’ uses. Ethics and morals are both products of education, but not necessarily from the same source. Ethics come from experience and reasoned philosophical consideration, while morals are usually indoctrinated, strictly or otherwise, from a particular community you’re raised in. I, being raised Christian, had certain norms instilled in my mind that I still retain, but probably would’ve gotten elsewhere, such as an ethic of reciprocity and virtue ethics in some form, emphasizing that I should act based on principles instead of purely based on perceived benefits or losses.  I would probably prefer to call myself ethical as opposed to moral, since morals suggest your behavior is not determined by principles that have experience behind them, but are conformed to because of submission to an authority. Ethics could be formulated as changing principles for behavior, but this does not mean they are purely relative to cultures. Ethics can be understood pragmatically as something that you put into practice and adjust by recognizing that different situations demand different actions. But one can incorporate both virtue ethics and situational ethics into this as well by valuing compassion above all else as the basis for your principles. But as I said in “Heart and Mind, Love andWisdom”  this should not be purely about helping others. Neglecting a principle of egoism, contrasted with egotism that only values the self; would only hurt your ability to help others. To balance ethical conduct and the core values it represents is as important as understand what the values are and should be, descriptively and normatively respectively.

Another especially important thing to recognize in terms of our ethical behavior is the implementation on a larger scale. It’s one thing to govern your own behavior consistently, but when contexts increase in scope and vary much more, then there is need for collaboration and boiling ethics down to basics that can be agreed upon in a secular context without recourse to revelation of any sort. If we fail to consider that our own ethics may not be so different from each other, but also that there will be particular prohibitions with morals that come out of various cultures and faiths, then we cannot advance the discussion that much more. Compassion as a virtue applies very well here as well, emphasizing its primacy in considering ethics. Another formulation in more technical terms may be reciprocity, which is the idea behind the rule commonly formulated by Jesus as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but existed in earlier forms as far back as Confucius, Buddha and Hindu writings. While opponents of the idea of what I insist on calling relative or situational ethics would claim that this creates potential for abuse in the form of claims that “might makes right”, this is primarily the case when you do not implement compassion or you implement compassion superficially to benefit yourself instead of others. When you try to benefit others, but cause them harm that is excessive and/or unnecessary, even practical concerns would not be justification. If the economy has to take a small dip or shock to adjust prices, for instance, in a more free market economy than we have today with corporations controlling prices and inflation in some form or fashion, then the suffering is permissible. But when you do such things as the state communist regimes in China or Russia did, instilling the power in a small group of people and impoverishing the vast majority, then this is neither economically feasible nor ethically acceptable. The very concept of business ethics reflects this concern and in a much more secular area of life than, say, abortion ethics, which becomes more religiously charged in talking about what constitutes a person. Secular ethics can still apply there as well if we apply the principles similarly While abortion is questionable after the point Roe v. Wade decided, 25 weeks of gestation, there are extenuating, but rare, circumstances, where it is a necessity to perform an abortion to save the life of the mother, who could conceivably bring forth more children in the future if there are no serious complications with the partial birth abortion procedure. As painful as it may be for people to admit such a thing in the context of abortion, those same people may ironically permit such “acceptable losses” in a military situation where even more lives are at stake, many of them as innocent in their involvement with the war as a fetus is in terms of its alleged right to live or be treated humanely when considering developmental stages of said fetus.  Applying principles consistently but also considering when those codes are inflexible and should be less rigid and considerate of situations outside of our control is yet another reflection of the benefits of utilizing the Buddhist middle path in ethics.

Shared ethics, like shared holidays (Xmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, etc), are things we can all find in secular life and observe to be true even if we disagree on why we should behave in those ways. Ethics can be agreed upon with basic principles, such as the golden rule, compassion for others, being mindful of extenuating circumstances, etc. By no means am I saying that these are unquestionable absolutes. One can look at these issues from various circumstances and perspectives and get radically opposed positions. Understanding where we come from in developing our personal ethics, many times from morals acquired by cultural or religious education, is, like many things, a seemingly tedious, but necessary step in improving relationships with our fellow humans, whether we agree on the source of morals. What’s more important is behaving well towards others without neglect of self or others entirely in the process. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

A 'Bible' For Believers and Nonbelievers Alike

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/11/leading-atheist-publishes-secular-bible/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9446000/9446028.stm

What if you took the Bible and edited out all the supernatural references and got to the core of its ethical teachings? That’s not quite what the new release by philosopher A.C. Grayling purports to be, but it’s certainly an equally interesting read. His idea is to take what are more secular, humanist and philosophical texts and draw the ethical principles from them. I haven’t read it yet, but it already promises to be an excellent read just from the idea it presents to any reader, religious or nonreligious. Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu, Aristotle, and many other thinkers would probably feature in such a text, and probably Jesus to an extent as well, though certainly taking a backseat to someone like Mencius for another example.

The arrangement of the text itself resembles the Bible, with the two column method commonly seen. Some might jump to the conclusion that this is meant to offend in some way; borrowing the style of the Bible to present a counterpoint. But I don’t see where you’d get that unless you think borrowing a text’s style is anything like plagiarism, which it really isn’t. Formatting for books doesn’t have nearly as strict copyright laws around it as the content of a book itself looking oddly familiar. The very idea of the Bible itself just being edited of all the supernatural stuff may already have been done, but this is another species entirely. When you’re talking about a collection of humanist and secular thinkers of various stripes and their thoughts on ethics and values, it probably will bring more people in with the inclusivity and the subtext only implying that the book is humanist in focusing on the human condition and relationships thereof. There’s no reason to think of this as some literal bible for Secular Humanism or even Religious Humanism of the various types that exist. The main title: The Good Book, is a tongue-in-cheek nod to what many people have historically called the Bible, popularized in the South culturally, from what I understand.

More importantly, when people think of the word ‘bible’, they usually associate it explicitly with a religion and its tenets. But the term can simply mean book in a more archaic sense or a text that is widely read by a group in a sense of being authoritative about that subject (e.g. the fisherman’s bible). But neither of those definitions imply that this is any attempt to formulate an extensive enumeration of atheist beliefs; especially considering that beliefs of any one atheist are as variable as the beliefs of any one theist. Atheist creationists exist, atheist deontologists exist, and other seemingly contradictory beliefs can be held by an atheist as long as they don’t directly contradict the general principle that all atheists can be said to share: skepticism towards God and claims about it. So in this way, the so called “humanist bible” is moreso a humanist “collection” than a “bible” in the common understanding.

Another example of this explicit “parody/satire” of sorts on the ironic notion of an “atheist bible” was published four years ago by Joan Konner, aptly called The Atheist’s Bible. It’s notably shorter, barely a third of the length of A.C. Grayling’s near compendium sized text, but I enjoyed it so much when I first got it, I read it straight through over an hour. It admittedly has flaws that reviewers have aptly pointed out, even though they’re in the minority, since many people enjoy it for simply being a collection of clever quotes. The main flaw is that there are people referenced that are decidedly not atheists, such as Benjamin Franklin and even Paul of Tarsus at a few points. The majority of the book is atheist in nature, criticizing God, decrying the ideas in one form or fashion and otherwise being snarky about believers in God or God itself. Woody Allen features in his own chapter, as well as Bertrand Russell, so clearly the focus is there, though one may wonder why certain atheists aren’t included as much. Part of the intent of the book may have been a sampling or just a particular group of atheists, skeptics and the like. This would not be unlike the collection of essays put in The Portable Atheist, which includes pantheist writers and general critics of religion that might still be believers in a private sense, like Baruch Spinoza or David Hume, who nonetheless merit being considered in the category of skeptics, which is only a slight step apart from disbelief outright.

All in all, the book should be a nice contribution to comparative ethics, and humanist ethics in particular, since the goal was to convey a more natural philosophy in contemplating what the good human life is and how we can live it. The Bible posits ethics from a source that has no real bearing on human life, something that’s superhuman, which reminds me of the graphic novel Supergod, where the ‘gods’ people have created to solve worldwide problems, including Krishna and Dajjal (the Antichrist figure from Islamic eschatology), don’t think like humans, so their solutions to the problems don’t even consider humans as ends in themselves, but means to whatever end they have in mind.

The book’s goal can be said to be in contrast to, not outright opposition and hatred of, ethics based on positing absolute principles of behavior that apply equally to all situations, not unlike say anti abortion advocates that say abortion is always wrong, even in cases where the mother would die or if she was raped. To have an ethics that doesn’t consider the situation could even be said to be un-Christian, even if we assume that there are certain beliefs about morality that are held more commonly by Christians, such as judging that particular sexual behaviors or even sexual orientations are bad things and should be opposed. The example that comes to mind is the term “situational ethics” which most people, including myself for a while, associated with humanist ethics in origin. But it appears that it was first formulated by a Christian in an explicitly God derived context. The idea is that there is one overriding principle that supersedes other laws, and that is love. Not just any love, though, but agape love, the unconditional love that Jesus advocated in the Gospels. The man behind this theory, Joseph Fletcher, eventually became an atheist, but that doesn’t mean that the idea cannot still have a similar humanist application in saying that the highest good is love and that in every situation, with all other laws alongside it, love stands above them as a principle that is not only common, but accessible regardless of beliefs or education. And that kind of ethics is a better start than creating a system that works only for those that refuse to think or don’t have the intellectual capacity to think beyond obedience to the law. Here’s hoping I either splurge on the book or wait until my birthday. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Where Human Ethics Begin

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/09/humanists-launch-huge-godless-ad-campaign/

http://www.examiner.com/humanist-in-portland/american-humanist-association-launches-largest-atheist-ad-campaign-ever

http://www.considerhumanism.org/

http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2010/11/11/american-humanists-launch-highly-public-anti-christian-campaign/


http://friendlyatheist.com/2010/11/09/consider-humanism-the-largest-atheist-ad-campaign-ever-2/


I don’t recall if I blogged on the America Humanist Association’s ad campaign of 2008 near Christmas/Xmas, which consisted of the phrase, “Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness’ sake,” but this is more general, which I hope will make it more accessible. When the holiday campaign came around, we had the usual suspects harping on a supposed secular “war on Christmas” that are a decided minority. Though if the opposition and criticism of this new ad campaign is any indication, the 200 grand being spent on this campaign is probably nothing compared to the amount of money Answers in Genesis spent on their own moral high horse billboards, ranging from thoughts on abortion to cosmogony. It always seems ironic to me that the same people who are so faithful in their God are worried about a minority of atheists/humanists and their attempts to make people see their side of things when they’re supposed to be focusing on more important things, like feeding the hungry, providing for widows and orphans, stuff that’s in the Bible alongside their apparently more pointed call for evangelism. And it’s not as if Christians haven’t called themselves humanists over the centuries, albeit it’s the same issue with the term liberal as it’s evolved over time and cultural immigration.

The main problem of the criticism of the ad campaign is that it relies mostly on non sequiturs to distract the reader from what are the genuine problems that exist within Christianity that take the form of literalists and such like Ken Ham, who despite the evidence to the contrary, believes that the Earth is only a little over 6000 years old. He notes the contextual problem of quoting the verse in the Bible saying that women should not teach and should be silent, saying that it’s not saying women are not equal in God’s eyes in terms of their personhood and thus should not be treated as chattel or second class citizens as they were before women’s suffrage. But he then clarifies that the verse referenced does clearly state that women should not be spiritual leaders (e.g. priests or even ministers), and should perform their proper roles, such as being housewives and other domestic duties. Honestly, the man is stuck in the 50s; around 30 years after women had been given voting rights. But blacks had not yet been given such a privilege, since they were apparently lower than white women, who up until recently had been considered less than white men in their merit for voting privileges.

And in reaction to the quotation of the prophet Hosea speaking of the eventual fate of Samaria, having abandoned the orthodoxy of that era, their women and children being threatened with brutalities, Ham points to the practice of abortion as something that humanists are somehow directly responsible for. Though one already has to point out that abortion is in many cases just a buzzword to get people’s attention and draw them away from the real issue: in this case that God would apparently stand by and watch while its creation is progressively conquered, raped, and pillaged because they supposedly lose their blessing from the Almighty if they decide not to practice particular rituals of ancient Judaism. It’s no different than the people insisting that AIDS was a punishment from God alongside hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks. When you boil down even natural disasters alongside willed terrorist attacks to God’s sovereignty, you’ve reduced your alleged divine judge and creator to a bean counter that tries to equal out everything to work out in the end for those poor people who suffered the loss of children, what little they had managed to bring together in impoverished economic times and otherwise had been oppressed by people that thought that either their power or their influence gave them a right to do whatever they felt justified to do to those that were less than them or deserved their so called “help,”. All the while, the divine architect sat idly by, and seems not to care whether someone says it’s God’s judgment or that the evils of the world, natural or human, are simply a reflection of the sinful state of the world and are not things that God wills. At least with the latter explanation, you at least admit that the problem is not something that can be solved by everyone believing in the exact same thing by coercion or even voluntarily, but something that lies deeper in humanity itself.

And this is where humanist ethics can align quite squarely with Christian ethics; especially those admonitions to aid those in poverty, famine or otherwise suffering outrageous misfortune through little fault of their own beyond either being born in or living through times of difficulty, political, religious or otherwise. And then there’s issues like gender equality and abortion, which while it may seem that there is little ground for common understanding, it’s not as if all humanists insist that abortion must be the default option for women, but that it should be an option of consultants for those women in these positions, whether by accident or premeditation or anything in between. Just because humanists in the more atheistic sense might disagree on why they agree with Christians on the need to help the hungry and impoverished of the world and vice versa with Christians, does not mean that they have to be at each others’ throats as if their dissonance about whether there is a “God” was the be all and end all of their interaction with each other. This isn’t the Middle Ages, to put it somewhat bluntly, so why not find the common ground that we share instead of being fixated on the stark differences? They’re relevant to consider, but not to the exclusion of common ethical impulses we both have. So while not all humanists may have these beliefs that we should be charitable; some are even eugenicists and Social Darwinists in the strictest sense; the majority of humanists are people that love and care for their fellow humans with only the human element as their motivation. Is it that bad of a perspective to want to help people just because they’re also people? Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Sam Harris and Ethics/Morality

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/25/ted.sam.harris/index.html


I’ve read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and own both versions (hardback and paperback) as well as a paperback copy of The End of Faith long recommended to me by my second roommate. While I don’t share his enthusiasm or background in philosophy and neuroscience, I can agree in principle with the thoughts he espouses in this article, which line up with what I recall being important in Letter to a Christian Nation. Religion in the sense of a fundamentally unquestionable system does limit one’s perspective of moral and ethical issues. Fundamentalism, legalism and theocracy all express this type of dangerous thinking in one form or another. His more controversial thesis that has popped up in “atheist/secularist” videos I see on Facebook or the like is the connection of science with morality/ethics. The idea seems contradictory and paradoxical at first glance, and the clarification Harris puts forward makes for a mind-bender.

Normally religion/faith and science/logic are categorized as being concerned with two different spheres: beliefs on the one hand with faith and facts on the other hand with science. With ethics, one is concerned with what are termed normative claims much more than descriptive claims: that is, with what one ought to do over what people believe about ethics in general. The argument, then, is that science, being concerned with brute facts about nature and things above or below the observation of the naked eye, has no reasonable say in the area of ethics, since it is concerned with what are termed abstract facts. Concrete facts are those such as observation of gravity, measurement of mass/volume/etc as well as investigating the galaxy we live in down to the subatomic world of the very stuff that we’re made of. Abstract facts look into what are universal ideas to humanity, but manifest in diverse ways, conditioned by environment and genetic predisposition: including belief in God, belief about good and evil and what makes something true and false. Two out of these three admit to such diversity that the question boils down to faith, with truth or falsity breaching into the scientific disciplines in terms of verifying hypotheses and models (otherwise called theories in common parlance).

But Sam Harris argues that while there are things that are inexplicable and almost transcendent that we experience (he has been involved in Tibetan Buddhist meditation and Hindu spirituality to some extent), there are facts that are scientifically observable that are not conducive to human flourishing and consciousness thereof. The example of pouring battery acid on a girl’s face because she wants to read is extreme, but relevant no doubt with Harris’ focus on the issues that come with Islamic theocracy and terrorism. He notes that every ethics you look at, however much it may boil down to faith in one area or another, is concerned with human suffering, with the consciousness of that phenomenon and how to alleviate it when it is especially heinous. So Harris concludes that we should be more concerned with issues that affect everyone on a day to day basis or on a larger scale than things like abortion, contraception, or gay marriage (however much I speak on two of these issues, ironically). Being concerned with worldwide hunger, poverty, education, and nuclear proliferation strike Harris as much more important in a principled ethics that doesn’t consider things in terms of traditions resistant to change and archaic ideas of what good and evil are. In order to advance society to a point where there is less need to resort to violence or war, we must first take a stand for a form of objective ethics and direct our efforts afterwards towards alleviating the suffering that comes from the issues that otherwise reasonable people ignore in favor of such short sighted notions as protecting marriage or the unborn as if either of them will just disappear one day. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.