Secular Morals

"Moral relativism" is propaganda; it's the invention of people who don't understand and don't want to understand that people can disagree on morality. Differing moralities consider each other immoral. Why is this hard to understand? It's not that liberals or Marxists (these are, please note, two different creatures) want to erase moral distinctions. They are absolutely brimming with moral judgments of their own. They simply don't agree with some of the moral judgments of conservatives.

—Mark Rosenfelder

It’s a common view among religious people that humanists are moral relativists, since they seldom enunciate a coherent moral philosophy; they sometimes say something is immoral (“an immoral war”), but it appears to be mostly a rhetorical device rather than a true moral conviction. In fact, secular humanists do have self-consistent moral views, but these tend to be private, unconscious, and not based on any scripture that they can conveniently refer to when pressed. In this article, I am going to outline some of these moral views, deriving them from some basic secular-humanistic principles and then showing how they apply in the real world.

It goes without saying that a group of billion people defined solely by their lack of belief in a deity will have a very wide variety of moral views. I will talk about several different moralities here and the moral dilemmas that they answer differently, but these will only be the major moral systems inside secular humanism; in particular, I am going to skip the brand of secular conservatism common in China. What is left mostly coincides with political liberalism, but in this article I will focus exclusively on moral and ethical aspects, and only use political examples when there is no other way to illustrate my point.

The basic assumption of secular humanism is that there is no god, or at least no god that intervenes with and cares about people’s lives. Therefore, there is no supreme moral authority that can tell us clearly what is right and what is wrong and that we must obey. Instead, we need to determine what is good on our own, which means that we must use empirical facts as well as our own reasoning to discover what is moral. Furthermore, it’s only logical that our moral system should concern itself with sentient beings only, which in our world means humans, more or less; we’ll start worrying about other species when we meet an alien civilization.

The above paragraph is a standard and almost trivial description of secular humanism. It completely ignores the issues that subdivide secular humanists, such as the many dimensions of pragmatism vs. idealism. But most of all, what it misses, and what every moral championing or lampooning of secular humanism that I have read misses, is that morality is in its nature interpersonal. Moral systems are ultimately about what actions are good, but since the good is defined as what is good for people, what does not affect other people has nothing to do with morality.

What a person does with himself, or with other consenting people, subject to the caveat that the consent is informed and freely given, is outside the scope of morality. It’s trivial that it’s not moral or immoral for me to flip my hourglasses, or rub my eye. It’s much less trivial but no less true that it’s not moral or immoral for me to masturbate, or have criminal fantasies, or reenact a rape scene with a consenting adult. Not only is it neither moral nor immoral for people to do something that both consent to, but also it is immoral to the point of repugnance to forbid such consensual acts.

I can’t stress the importance of informed consent enough; a 26-year-old having sex with an 8-year-old is rape because 8-year-olds are invariably too young and ill-informed about sex to be able to give informed consent. Pedophilia is in the same category as making someone sign a contract written in print too fine for him to be able to make out the letters rather than in the same category as consensual sex between adults. And when other people are involved, as in the case of obscenity in the media, morality does come into play, although often the facts show that no harm is caused to anyone and that moral censorship invariably has net negative consequences.

This, I think, is the main feature distinguishing secular-humanistic moral systems—at least those that are not associated with fascism or communism—and religious moral systems. If god exists, then it’s ubiquitous everywhere, so every action you take affects it, in which case it may be immoral for me to flip my hourglasses. But in the real world there is no god, so this is a moot point; you can say it’s stupid for people to engage in premarital sex for some reason (and you will be wrong, but that’s beside the point), but to say that it’s immoral is downright absurd.

Of course, this leaves ethics with a tremendous leeway in determining which actions are moral and which are immoral. What makes people less likely to recognize how central it is, I think, is that beyond trivial proscriptions of murder, rape, theft, and so on, secular moral systems tend to be very empirical. Religious moral systems are seldom concerned with facts, as the myths that buttress the proclamation that homosexuality is immoral show; hence, it’s easy for someone acquainted with religious morality not to recognize the moral judgment inherent in statements such as, “the US should increase its minimum wage to eight dollars an hour,” just because they don’t use the appropriate buzzwords.

Although most moral judgments of secular humanism are strictly
empirical and consequential, not all of them are. Many secularists rail against corruption and oppression not because they’re bad for the economy but because they hurt people; just because they use the word “immoral” less than religious fundamentalists does not mean they’re less worked up over things they consider immoral.

There is no contradiction between being an intellectual and having a conscience, despite claims by Christians that agreement with reality doesn’t matter because “Jesus appealed to the conscience.” Being closely wedded to empiricism may make secular-humanistic moralities look less passionate, but it doesn’t make them any less prepared to combat immorality. The rarity of emotional appeals to the heart in a large swath of secular humanism and the lack of myths such as the lies religious fanatics tell about sex are not symptoms of moral weakness, but of concern for what is good for people in the real world.

You don’t need to be concerned about what people do in private to have morals; this, I think, is the essence of most secular-humanistic moralities and of the ultimate difference between them and religious moralities. It’s possible to rail against such sources of harm as poverty, war, religion, and social exclusion without vehement appeals to first principles, tradition, or scripture. If I don’t use moral language when debating people, it’s because it’s usually unconstructive, not because I don’t have a sense of justice.

To be completely honest, the idea that what a person does in private is never moral or immoral is not the defining marker of secularism. Sometimes the distinction breaks down more along a liberal vs. conservative line than along a secular vs. religious line. Most commonly, I think, the general moral principles I have described belong to people who are both liberal (or socialist, mostly) and secular. But either way, this moral philosophy is grounded in non-theism, even if some theists subscribe to it; hence this article does in fact describe most secular-humanistic moralities.