Six Ethics: A Rights-Based Approach to Establishing an Objective Common Morality

review.

Appendices A, B and C have been reprinted with the permission of the Human Rights Library at the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center —   http://www.hrcenter.umn.edu

"Nothing which breathes, which exists, which lives, or which has essence or potential of life, should be destroyed or ruled over, or subjugated, or harmed, or denied of its essence or potential.

In support of this Truth, I ask you a question – ‘Is sorrow or pain desirable to you?’ If you say ‘yes it is’, it would be a lie. If you say, ‘No, It is not’ you will be expressing the truth. Just as sorrow or pain is not desirable to you, so it is to all which breathe, exist, live or have any essence of life. To you and to all creation, it is undesirable, and painful, and repugnant.

—Jainism, The Acaranga Sutra

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

—Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Gilmer, 1816

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Foreword

I retired in 2002. At the time, I would often get together with a friend of mine who was generally more conservative than I was on most major issues; he had retired from the same company at the same time and we had spent many hours over several years discussing and debating current topics of all kinds. He knew that I was not a religious person, and he was certainly not a religious zealot; but one morning he began talking about a young relative of his who was excited to have been accepted at one of the most prominent fundamentalist Protestant Christian universities in the nation. He knew that I had attended school in the same southern city and asked me what I thought about the choice. Fortunately for me, the fundamentalist school had been founded the year I graduated so I had a good excuse for not passing judgment.

The truth is I was disturbed by the choice but I wanted to avoid a topic that had the potential to derail an otherwise productive and friendly relationship. On the other hand, I began to ask myself how I would respond if he or anyone else challenged me to discuss my own beliefs. What were they? Or, perhaps more to the point—did I actually have a belief system that I could articulate? Clearly, this was a situation that many who identify as persons of faith would never be faced with.

What did I believe in? I knew I was passionate about what I thought of as ethics and morality, but having vigorously rejected several traditional and commonly held Judeo-Christian moral precepts, on what precisely did I base my concepts of ethics and morals? I also knew that I hated hypocrisy and considered the sexual, economic, social or spiritual exploitation of one person or group by another to be among the greatest of moral wrongs.

For several years I was distracted by other projects, although the challenge was always in the back of my mind and I occasionally wrote essays to myself on various subjects like democracy, human rights, ethics and religion in general. Finally, in mid-2007, I began to get serious and to keep versioned copies of the various threads of thought to eventually compile into a coherent statement of principles, if not of belief, as such.

When I first tried to write down what I believe, I found that I automatically tended to focus on what I didn’t believe and my justification for skepticism or—in some cases—contempt. Remnants of this attempt are scattered throughout the following work, most notably in Section II, under the heading Ethical Agnosticism, and in Section XIII. My thoughts returned to the issues of human rights, civil liberties, war and peace.

Having been a student of the social sciences—majoring in sociology and political science but with some background in psychology as well—I decided to begin at the beginning: Why does anyone believe anything? I began a serious search for the most current, authoritative and relevant sources in the disciplines of religion and religious history, the origins of religious and ethical thought, genetic influences, the influence of science and modernism, evolved concepts of the individual and of human rights, etc. I concentrated on the historical and continually shifting intellectual boundary between revealed truth and deductive truth; and, specifically, on where the major religions of the world drew that boundary. More than a third of what follows is dedicated to an exploration of how the current major world religions relate to reason, modernism and an evolving contemporary understanding of the individual, human rights and human dignity; and how the beliefs of those religions have transformed the political landscape both in the United States and worldwide.

I have confirmed to myself that I am not a person of faith; at least insofar as that is understood to be a willingness to subjugate one’s reason to rationally unsubstantiable religious convictions. When faced with a set of circumstances having multiple possible outcomes, I will consistently go with the probability presented by the preponderance of evidence. When forced to make a decision where insufficient evidence exists, I will go with whatever outcome most closely mirrors my own worldview—with no delusions that the decision is anything other than an educated and hopeful guess. Finally, when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, I am more than simply willing to change my position; I consider such a change a fundamental constituent of intellectual integrity. I do not pretend to know what cannot be proved and I can prove neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God. My personal answer to this dilemma is to postulate that each individual has the freedom to determine the nature of his relationship with what Aldous Huxley calls the divine Reality,¹ while humanity as a whole is responsible for determining right and wrong, good and evil, in the context of the interactions among human beings. This is, of course, essentially a humanist approach.

While I was not surprised to find that fundamental or radical people of faith believe that their revealed truths transcend mere human reason, I was stunned to discover how far many will go to denigrate reason, logic and the scientific method—and those who employ them—in an effort to reinforce the validity of their own beliefs; sometimes going so far as to actually define human reason as Satan’s tool to misdirect the faithful from an orthodox understanding of God’s revealed truth. This brought me to a variation on my original question: "Why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or non-rational² beliefs?"

I have not spent my life in academia studying these questions and issues and, therefore, the following is, at a minimum, presumptuous. At the same time, however, my lack of formal academic credentials imparts something of a detachment from any individual academic discipline. I knew, at least, that I had the intellectual skills to identify and evaluate sources, that I was an educated and informed generalist and—based on my life and work experience—I assumed for myself an ability to synthesize information from many disciplines into one cogent exploration of a topic. Once I had decided to try and articulate my beliefs I was faced with the choice of following through and leaving myself fairly open to a charge of being intellectually or academically way beyond my depth, or of failing to follow through and judge myself, at best, an intellectual failure and, at worst, an intellectual coward. I chose to make the attempt.

The inherent strength of the generalist is that he or she can comprehend, integrate and articulate widely divergent concepts from a broad range of scientific and intellectual disciplines. Concepts that are related and can be built into an intellectual whole that is not necessarily obvious to individual specialists due to the narrower limitations of their professional perspectives. What follows is not a statement of belief; it is a proposed approach to developing a universal standard for public morality and ethics and a justification for that approach. It draws upon and synthesizes both facts and well-defended theories and hypotheses from genetic, religious and cultural anthropology; biology, psychology and sociology; game theory; political science, economics and history; and, of course, religious beliefs and teachings of all the major faiths.

While I have a forty-year-old double major (BA) in sociology and political science, that hardly qualifies me as an authority in either field, much less in the spectrum of the other specialties referenced. My method has been to locate the most authoritative experts in each discipline, individuals who have already done the required research among their primary sources. Since I would not have had the expertise, resources or time to do my own research for so many disciplines, I sought out the most highly regarded scholars whose writings included both original work and what academics refer to as surveys of the literature. This was my strategy to cover as many primary sources as I was able within the constraints that I faced. It might be thought of as an educated journalist’s approach—rather than a purely academic approach—to an academic or scientific issue, but one that has enormous social consequences.

The individual ideas articulated here are not original, but I have never encountered them integrated and systematized in a way that can be used as a guide for action and decision-making and as a justification for those decisions.

Put most simply, I believe that it is every individual’s right and responsibility to both benefit from and contribute to the best world he or she can envision, and that that vision must be based on reasoned self-interest, enlightened and focused by the history and cumulative experience of humankind. The following builds upon and defends the position championed by the late author, journalist and noted antitheist Christopher Hitchens, that human rights are neither natural nor divinely ordained but are the result of tens of thousands of years of human ethical development guided by reason; some principles even predating the emergence of our species.³ The origins of this position are reflected in a number of Enlightenment writings as well as in more recent works that I have extensively referenced, where appropriate, in the text. One further word on credibility. This will be initially published as an eBook. To be available on as many devices as possible, eBooks do not permit footnotes or an index; all of the notes must be listed at the end. I would ask that, when you encounter an endnote, please take the time to reference it; many of the deductions and conclusions rest, for their credibility, on the authority and integrity of my sources.

This story is to some extent episodic rather than strictly chronological, as can be deduced from the structure and organization. However, it is not a story that can be told in sound bites; it requires a commitment to invest the time necessary to understand the relationships between human genetics, the development of rational, ethical, and moral belief systems and the influence that these belief systems exert upon human behavior, whether as individuals, individuals within groups or among groups. To fully comprehend the importance of this spiritual and ethical evolution to our world today, we must then trace the influence of those individual and group behaviors on the social, economic and political development of modern democracies and other forms of government over the past two hundred years. Needless to say, what follows are relatively brief summaries of the relevant topics.⁴

This work is not and was never intended to be definitive in any sense of the word. First of all, since it began as an exercise in personal introspection, I try to speak consistently in the first person (or the collegial we where I want to draw in the reader). I occasionally employ the hypothetical one when I could use you and I or you and me; but, I hope, only when I am speaking very generally or theoretically.   I take full responsibility for my own conclusions, whether or not they turn out to pass a general test of intellectual viability or, more prosaically, common sense. While I consider the conclusions reached here insightful and of significant consequence, I consider my approach to be a pragmatic and accessible exercise in ethics and political science and in no sense purely philosophical, much less esoteric.

Furthermore, all of the intellectual disciplines referenced (and by necessity, frozen) here—including genetics, religious and cultural anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, game theory, political science, economics and history—will continue to develop and produce deeper insights into the origins, development and relationships among ethical, religious and scientific thought. As new concepts develop, they should be evaluated as to whether or not they can contribute a clearer common understanding of human dignity and rights. Far from an attempt at being definitive, I would like my work to be seen as the beginning of a far-reaching dialogue that would re-explore, re-analyze and re-articulate every topic touched upon here from the perspective of other individuals and groups, both religious and nonreligious, and of diverse cultures and intellectual disciplines.

I’m still not sure if I can adequately answer the question What do I believe in? but I am comfortable that I have answered my own questions concerning my criteria for moral and ethical behavior. I am also convinced that what I learned along the way, and the conclusions that can rationally be drawn from that education, are worth sharing. This is, at least, a start.

Six Ethics

A Rights-Based Approach to

Establishing an Objective

Common Morality

Section I.   The Lazy Approach to Weltanschauung

A sense of one’s place in society, a knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil, and an understanding of death and what comes after, all appear to be virtually universal human spiritual and intellectual cravings. Most people, however, are ill-prepared, ill-equipped and unmotivated to invest the time and intellectual capital required to objectively evaluate a range of belief systems, much less to establish and articulate their own worldview. The acceptance of a prepackaged, shrink-wrapped, worldview is by far the preferred method of scratching one’s fundamental spiritual and intellectual itches.

Accepting a prepackaged worldview has a number of advantages. First, you don’t have to think. As a matter of fact, the most fundamental religious and political traditions discourage the application of mere human reason—much less the scientific method—to precepts that are deemed beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mortal and that have been revealed as true, unchangeable and unchallengeable. This can be very comforting; not only is the individual spared the difficulty of having to think, but people who do think and might challenge your complacency can be labeled as sinners who are outside the fold. Bertrand Russell is alleged to have remarked that many people would rather die than think; in fact most do.⁵

Second, one almost always becomes one of the chosen people. Only you, and people who think just like you, will: a) go to heaven, b) be saved, c) be elevated in reincarnation, d) become the New Soviet Man, e) be showered with the attentions of seventy young virgins, etc. This can also be very comforting; if you follow the rules, you shall reap your eternal reward—everyone else burns in the fires of Hell or the Gulag or is reincarnated as an iguana.

Third, one no longer has to surrender deeply held prejudices—be they religious, cultural, ethnic, racist, sexist, homophobic, or any other articulatable but irrational reason to hate someone. There is, for everyone, a prepackaged worldview tailor-fit to your needs. In fact, it appears more and more probable that, in today’s spiritual-intellectual environment, one’s prejudices are more likely to inform one’s religion rather than the tradition of one’s religion informing one’s prejudices.

Given the complexities and priorities of life, it is completely understandable that most people will never objectively examine their own belief system—much less anyone else’s—especially if their belief system has been passed down by generations of forbearers. However, the inevitable result of this spiritual and intellectual reticence is that it allows the individuals and institutions that prepackage and maintain the smorgasbord of Weltanschauungen to have enormous and disproportionate power to impose their particular collections of prejudices on greater and greater numbers of individuals. To some extent, their power is proportional to the number of people they can seduce to accept their worldview; as well as to the amount of violence they will tolerate, or even instigate, in order to further their own political or—ostensibly—religious aims. As Voltaire observed: In truth whoever is able to make you believe in absurdities will also be able to make you commit atrocities.⁶

For many of the most dedicated believers, religion and ideology transcend reason. They have frequently in the past, and appear to be prepared to again, elevate the non-rational or the irrational to the level of supra-rational when simple reason stands as an inconvenient obstacle to an essentially political end.

This is not a modern phenomenon; and is neither confined to nor completely absent from any past or present religious tradition. In fact, such elevation of irrationality has frequently played the central role in massive disruptions of the progress of humankind from barbarism to relative civilization; in every case, resulting in the slaughter of from tens of thousands to millions of human beings in the name of someone’s worldview. It appears, sadly, that humanity—now armed with weapons of mass destruction—may be headed down the same road again; and there is no shortage of chosen peoples willing to destroy the non-believers.

So far, we have used the terms worldview and religion almost interchangeably; it should be obvious at this point that both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong’s communism and Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, as well as many other -isms, fit the definition of quasi-religious worldviews sometimes called belief systems. An argument can be made that they are not properly religions; however, the messianic elements, the hero and ancestor worship, the death cults, the Armageddon-like final struggles and Gotterdammerung-like death throes, all support the contention that they were packaged like religions, that they specifically exploited the same human spiritual and intellectual needs, and that they can be considered as quasi-religious belief systems for the purposes of this discussion.

The Role of Reason and Logic

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882)⁷ were taken grossly out of context and, along with the social philosophies of Thomas Robert Malthus⁸ and Herbert Spencer,⁹ used to form the basis of what became known as racial, cultural and economic Darwinism; together, social Darwinism. According to Darwin, any given trait might advance, impede or have no effect on an individual’s ability to survive and pass that trait on to subsequent generations; there is no right or wrong, good or evil or any other judgment associated with a trait other than its ability or inability to enhance the survivability of the individual’s genetic material. All three of the social theories derived from Darwin’s monumental work shared the basic misconception that a trait that advanced an individual’s chances of survival was a good trait while any trait that impeded an individual’s chances of survival was a bad trait.

Raised from the micro level of genetics to the macro level of pseudo-sociology, many came to the conclusion that in the Darwinian struggle between races, cultures and economic classes, the group that gained ascendancy was superior, by definition, in both a physical and a true moral sense.¹⁰ Social Darwinism was eventually discredited; however, misguided Darwinian social theories persisted. In the early twentieth century, many U.S. states passed eugenics laws permitting the isolation and forced sterilization of American citizens who were viewed as having defective genes—in many cases including alcoholics, homosexuals, psychotics or impoverished racial or ethnic minorities.¹¹

Another tragic and willfully malicious use of social Darwinism was made to rationalize the virtual re-enslavement of African Americans in the South after the Civil War. As a number of contemporary authors have documented in the past fifteen years, a weary northern populace permitted southern businessmen, lawyers, politicians and even clergymen to employ a version of racial Darwinism to justify a permanent second-class citizenship for the black race. In addition to disenfranchisement, this pseudo-paternalistic involuntary servitude took several forms, including peonage and convict labor, and—one way or another—it ensnared the majority of the African American population that was unable to escape the Deep South between the removal of Federal troops in 1877 and World War Two. As I will discuss in the essay, The Shame of a Nation, social Darwinism appears to have been tailor-made to justify outrages against human rights and dignity that in many ways were as bad as or worse than the antebellum legal institution of slavery.¹²

The eugenics laws were eventually repealed and the practice stopped in the 1960s, but not before thousands had suffered and not before Nazi Germany had adopted these American statutes as a model for the Nuremberg racial hygiene acts of the mid-1930s.

In the minds of most people in the West, Friedrich Nietzsche and others like him, who attempted to redefine the boundaries of human behavior purely in terms of the logical pursuit of unalloyed self-interest, failed miserably to provide a successful blueprint for determining acceptable moral and ethical human behavior outside the guidelines of revealed religious tradition. Leaders like Hitler, who, like almost everyone else, failed to understand the nuances of what Nietzsche was actually trying to say, used many of the same concepts in establishing the behavioral boundaries of a morbidly self-absorbed German master race. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, perhaps resonating even more with the God is dead approach whether or not they ever attempted to appreciate thinkers like Nietzsche, did the same in the Soviet Union and China, even going so far as to redefine truth as anything that advanced the cause of world communism and falsehood as anything that did not.

It is no wonder that by the 1950s the majority of people in the West were convinced that all attempts to define morality and ethics in anything other than traditional religious terms—Judeo-Christian, that is—were doomed to failure and even, prima facie, evil. There ensued in the United States an opportunistic, politically motivated scramble to condemn Godless communism and to demonize anyone who dared to mount a reasoned defense of any of Marx and Engels’ conclusions about unfettered capitalism. Two millennia of Christian condemnation—and reluctant acceptance—of the necessary evils of financial markets were swept aside, and the more recent memory of the nineteenth century experiments with Christian communal societies was forgotten or expunged. All in a hugely successful attempt to permanently associate capitalism with Christianity in the same way that communism was associated with atheism.

The result is the wedding of laissez-faire capitalism and fundamentalist Protestant Christianity; two prepackaged worldviews for the price of one—and neither based on a reasoned study of the human condition.

The Role of Government

Modern pluralistic, representative democracies have avoided inherent conflicts among competing worldviews to the extent that they have guaranteed an individual’s right to choose a belief system and, at the same time, restricted behavior intended to force one’s view on others. A fundamental underpinning of the success of this approach is the axiom that behavior proscribed as socially dysfunctional outside the context of religion is not rendered acceptable by being associated with a particular belief system or religious rite. Thus, temple prostitution, human sacrifice and polygamy are illegal practices, even to those who believe they are permitted, or even mandated, by their particular religion. Most governments protect some otherwise prohibited behaviors when these occur within a religious context, but only if it can be demonstrated that within that context, the behavior does not frustrate the intent of the law. A common example is the legal, ritual consumption of small amounts of wine by young people during religious services or other religious observances.

Whether or not specifically stated, this approach to balancing the interests of competing worldviews is based on the principle that, under the eyes of the law, reason—backed by observable and repeatable experience—must trump positions arrived at solely by the unsubstantiated revelations of any particular religious tradition or conviction; no matter how ancient and no matter how pervasive. No natural or revealed religious canon ought to dictate the content of civil and criminal law ostensibly based on reason.¹³

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,¹⁴ specifically prohibits legislatures from making laws respecting any religion; clearly, any law that runs counter to scientifically accepted fact and to clearly observable, quantifiable experience, and respects only an unsubstantiable religious belief, must be unconstitutional; even if it appeared reasonable when it was originally enacted. If we add to this the widely accepted legal principle that a crime must have a victim (not, unfortunately, enshrined in our Constitution), the state’s only compelling interest in prohibiting a behavior is to protect a clearly defined victim from an articulable, quantifiable harm.

Morality in a Democratic, Religiously Plural Culture

Recent events have shown that in order to govern itself and to interact in positive ways with other societies, a society must take an approach to religion that transcends mere maintenance of religious freedom and the lack of imposition of any one religious tradition. The basic tenets of such an approach might be summarized as follows:

First, it is clear that it is freedom of conscience, not freedom of religion, as such, that must be preserved. Most religions are closely identified with the concept of a deity, but it is necessary that a free society preserve and protect not only freedom of religion, but also the freedom to believe that morality and the moral principles that underlie individual and group behaviors can legitimately flow from a source other than a deity. Buddhists and Secular Humanists are among those whose beliefs and ethical principles are not derived from the revelations of a god.

Second, preserving freedom of conscience does not always entail preserving or protecting freedom of behavior. When a specifically religious practice becomes clearly divisive and a threat to public order, the society has both a right and a duty to regulate that behavior. This should be done as judiciously and benignly as possible.¹⁵

Third, societies that lack a clear basis for determining right and wrong and that thus operate in a moral vacuum are no more likely to be good, either in their governance or in their relationships to other societies, than individuals who operate in a moral vacuum. A democratic, religiously plural culture must be able to articulate a basis for morality and moral behavior that encompasses most individual religious traditions and that is equally acceptable—or at least marginally tolerable—for all. This approach to determining correct versus incorrect behavior is, of course, philosophical or non-religious ethics.

Ethics is the application of logic and reason to the problem of determining the relative goodness of various courses of action. While logic is an essential element of ethics, the core is the context within which goodness is identified and measured. Thus we have had many brands of religious ethicists, each determining goodness within the narrow confines of a revealed canon. What is required is an extra-religious set of principles that individuals, a society in general and governments can use to logically assess the relative goodness—morality, if you will—of various courses of action.

A Starting Point

The basic elements that might be used to establish such a set of principles already exist in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (Appendix A). This document is nothing less than a prescription for a world without war. It is based on the combined wisdom of hundreds of men and women from every corner of the civilized world who were familiar with the five thousand-plus year recorded history of humanity and who had lived through the worldwide catastrophe of the previous thirty-five years.

The Declaration is not an academic work or an esoteric text of revealed wisdom; it is based on the idea that removing the identifiable underlying human conflicts that have been responsible for war will help lead to a cessation of war. It plainly articulates those human rights that, if honored, are likely to result in a world order without most of the current incentives to resort to armed conflict. These include rights of conscience, political rights, economic rights and social rights. The drafters were not naïve; nor did they believe in the perfectibility of human beings or society; but they were convinced of a direct link between a world evolving toward universal respect for human rights and an absence of war.

If what has been missing is a universally acceptable lens, or filter, of the total human experience through which we can logically assess the morality of our actions, then the U.N. Declaration comes as close as humanity has ever come to providing that filter.

From the standpoint of a discussion of faith versus reason, a significant problem with this document is that it is an artifact—entirely man-made—neither perfect nor complete and was never proffered as such even by its authors. Supporters of using religious teachings as the basis for an ethical approach to public morality rely on the intellectually flawed, but emotionally powerful argument that their texts are inerrant, not subject to reinterpretation due to changes in the human condition and are, in short, the Word of God.

In their books American Fascists¹⁶ and American Theocracy,¹⁷ Chris Hedges and Kevin Phillips document the rigidly authoritarian tendencies of many Christian fundamentalists. Hedges, the son of a rural upstate New York Presbyterian pastor, articulates a profound, simple and sensible approach to the inerrancy of scripture: We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.¹⁸ There is an echo here of Augustine of Hippo writing over fifteen centuries ago: Be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are farfetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.

The truth is that the only way to preserve the core of any of these religious traditions is to guarantee freedom of conscience for everyone; and the only way to achieve this is to establish a standard for ethical behavior that both transcends and encompasses the vast majority of individual religious beliefs. Hence, we have the nomination of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the starting point for developing an ethical approach to public morality that treads as lightly as possible on the prerogatives of individual private morality.

Section II.   The Origins of Ethical and Religious Thought

Ethical Agnosticism

Even those who think of themselves as people of faith have been known to change their views over time. Today, more and more people no longer believe in a strictly anthropomorphic deity, and many believe that men have created their gods in their own image—not the other way around. If there is a prime mover, the nature of such a force and the extent of its presence, comprehension and power are unlikely to be fully understandable to men.

In the developed West, fewer and fewer believe that people in other eras recorded the inerrant word of their gods; universal truths fixed for all time and subject to critique neither within their own cultural contexts, nor within new cultural contexts. Nor do they believe that these authors¹⁹ wrote under the never-to-be-repeated guidance of a deity. They, therefore, do not believe that any body of sacred texts of any religion is the infallible word of a god; nor that there is any such thing as a religiously-revealed natural law other than can be deduced by the application of reason to a direct study of nature itself, including, of course, human nature.

Many also challenge the common position that Genesis—or any other creation mythology—is an analogy or a metaphor for the origins of the known universe and that the account is scientifically accurate albeit with the timeframes having been adjusted to be comprehensible to the people of the ancient world. To accept this premise leads one to accept a number of falsehoods, such as that God is male, and that God created man before woman and, therefore, that the order of creation has permanently fixed the subservient position of women vis-à-vis men. This is nothing but self-serving male chauvinism.²⁰

For increasing numbers of people of all faiths, it is impossible to accept that there is a god-creator of the universe and of the human species who is a misanthrope and who has made rules and demands that, when obeyed, allow one segment of humanity to claim dominion over the rest of humanity. Too often the concept of a chosen people has been used as an excuse to treat the unchosen as less than human. In the history of the world’s major and minor religions there are scores of supposedly chosen peoples; if there is a God for all humankind, then there must be a God of all humankind. In an environment of so many One True Religion(s), how can anyone possibly arrogate to himself the infallible ability to understand the Will of God?

The Logical Roots of Ethics and Morality

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins conducts a review of the literature regarding the possible genetic bases for altruism.²¹ Several scenarios are discussed, including kinship altruism (I will protect my genetic material), reciprocal altruism (We will protect each other’s genetic material), reputational altruism (The status of my genetic material is advanced by my reputation for showing compassion and sharing my resources) and dominance altruism (I am so rich and important that I can afford to share resources with those of lesser status).²²

As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins naturally focuses on the genetic science that argues against an exclusively religious origin for altruistic, moral, ethical or good behavior. As a student of sociology, however, I am more interested in observed behavior rather than in the genetic origins of behavior. Matt Ridley covers much of the same territory in his book The Origins of Virtue,²³ in which he expands upon the intellectual dilemma posed by the conflict between Dawkins’ selfish gene²⁴ and displays of altruistic behavior that appear, at least superficially, to work against the purely selfish preservation of individual genetic material. This is a debate that has been going on for decades and, despite the comprehensive treatment by Ridley, probably will continue for some time. However, from a behavior-oriented standpoint, a major lesson we can take from The Origins of Virtue is that whether a behavior appears to be altruistic is often more relevant than whether it actually is altruistic.

Christopher Hitchens²⁵ and a number of religious and secular humanists claim—and provide convincing evidence—that every modern moral precept that governs how we interact with other human beings can be derived from the pre-human desire not to be harmed by others. It is a very short step from Do not cause me unnecessary pain to the mutually beneficial bargain If you do not cause me unnecessary pain, I will not cause you unnecessary pain. In The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer²⁶ recapitulates an argument he made in The Science of Good and Evil, that we developed from social primates and that pro-social, cooperative and even altruistic behaviors are evolutionarily essential to the survival of any social species. According to Shermer, the roots of these behaviors are heavily influenced by genetics.

Ridley points out that both societies and economies began with the exchange of things of value. While this exchange is not unique to our species, cooperation, language, and the specialization of labor have permitted humans to evolve the sophistication of the exchange, both social and economic, gradually over time. Early ethical bargains can also be looked at as exchanges of something of value, even though no trade goods change hands and no specialization of labor is required. Thus, these ethical exchanges form a link between more primitive primates and a species that has shown itself capable of building entire societies and economies around the concepts of cooperation and exchange. According to Ridley, such exchanges are so important to the development of the human species, as well as society itself, that human beings have developed a specialized area of the brain that is adept at identifying those who are out to exploit the system—cheaters or freeloaders, if you will.

Given the increasing sophistication of the human mind, it is inevitable that kinship groups or tribes of early humans would generalize the concept into some version of Do not do unto others that which you would not have them do unto you. This is the Ethic of Reciprocity, which we will revisit later. Early man’s primal desire to avoid unnecessary pain was channeled by both the genetic roots of altruism and a reasoned assessment of his social environment.

A logical next step is a bargain that takes place either between individuals or among the members of a group. It is also based on self-preservation or, ultimately, on group survival: If you defend me against those who would do me harm, I will defend you against those who would do you harm. All of these early bargains are examples of Dawkins’ reciprocal altruism, spiced heavily with unadulterated self-interest, but also with a common interest that recognizes the benefits to survival that cooperation presents.

From these self-centered ethical bargains we derive the modern virtues of loyalty, sacrifice and patriotism. It can even be said that our concept of justice derives from a shared understanding of what constitutes harm and unnecessary pain and, just like with other exchanges, we have become sensitized to those who would exploit an ethical bargain. Thus, lying, stealing and cheating, which are more likely to cause social or economic harm, become ethically unacceptable behaviors in addition to the obvious physical harms of assault, rape and murder.

Within this framework, it is easy to postulate how certain sexual behaviors would come to be understood as harmful. For ancient humans, kinship relationships were critical to maintaining group integrity. They governed inheritance and responsibilities such as the care of an aging parent, and they preserved a clan’s place in social and political hierarchies. Pairings cemented bonds within and among clans and groups and were often accompanied by a significant transfer of wealth. It is not hard to see how an individual (or even an entire group) would be viewed as having been harmed by procreative sex outside of these rigid familial structures.

Therefore, with respect to the ten commandments, we can conclude that five of the six that govern interactions between human beings²⁷ have been largely derived from the simple aphorism, Do not cause me unnecessary pain. Thou shall not covet may seem somewhat trivial compared to murder but it makes no sense whatsoever to include a trivial transgression in such a list. However, if we define it to mean not simple lust or desire for and instead as cheating or exploitation—that is, as the resolve to undermine cooperation and to exploit Ridley’s exchange in order to improve one’s own condition unfairly at the expense of others, then its inclusion makes sense. This is referred to as zero-sum behavior,²⁸ and given our genetic sensitivity to the fairness of the exchange, it becomes clear that to covet is at least as serious an ethical violation as any of the other commandments and likely to lead to a breach of one or more of them. One might think of coveting as the cosmic thumb on the scale of the fair exchange, frustrating reciprocity.

The first and second commandments:²⁹ You shall have no other Gods before Me and You shall not make for yourself an idol, deal directly—and it would seem only—with the relationship between the Hebrew people and their God rather than with any responsibilities the Hebrews had to each other. However, many scholars have interpreted numbers three and four as having a strong element of interpersonal ethics.

Very briefly, the third commandment: You shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain, is interpreted by many as an admonition not to use the name of the Lord to establish a curse on one’s fellow man. For example, the attribution of God’s will behind the visitation of a hurricane or an earthquake upon an insufficiently pious city is exactly the kind of arrogant and vain allegation that tramples on the prerogatives of God, Himself, and this is envisioned as an egregious violation of the third commandment.³⁰ The element of interpersonal ethics and the recognition of the danger of using God’s name to threaten or justify personal harm are obvious.

Perhaps having a slightly less obvious link to ethics, but still relevant to our discussion, is a contemporary reading of the fourth commandment: Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your manservant or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates. It appears, despite its deeply religious expression, that this is actually a very early—perhaps the first—attempt to strike a balance between vocation and recreation couched as a simple balance between labor and rest. Certainly the inclusion of servants,³¹ livestock and travelers would appear to push the admonition beyond the purely religious to an extraordinarily modern view of the increased productivity inherent in such a balance. Here too we have a link to interpersonal ethics—including the humane treatment of servants, slaves and livestock—and an implied harm in the failure to strike this balance.

There is always an exception, and in this case the exception appears to be the fifth commandment: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. Pre-agricultural groups of humans lived in a world that repeatedly confronted them with a scarcity of resources that threatened the very existence of the group. Frequently, the first line of defense was to reduce the number of mouths to feed by sacrificing those who could not contribute to the hunt for resources; these included, of course, the old and the infirm. This was seen by the group to be