It
is Time for A New Ethic
Timothy
Prewitt
Loma
Linda University School of Religion
August
30, 2015
There
have been many philosophies off which human society has based ethical and moral
code over the course of our 30,000 odd year history. They range from religious
and cultic codes of conduct down to simple duties inside small communities. The
debates and arguments about which philosophy is the most accurate and serves
society the best could go on endlessly. I would wager to say that for each
individual the moral code varies even among proponents of the same ethic. No
one has gotten it right. This is obvious just by the very fact that we have so
many different interpretations of what a moral life looks like. If morality
were simple there would be only one philosophy and everyone would agree on it.
The fact that humanity has missed the mark time and time again is even more
evident when you take a quick survey of human history and comprehend all the
dark places human morality has led us. Genocide, crusades, the Holocaust, jihad,
and innumerable atrocities have been the result of very different philosophies.
How
do we solve the problems faced by a growing society that is ever at war over
seemingly limited resources? It is clear that the answer is not religion. If
the answer were truly religion then the most influential religion of human
history would have solved the problem long ago, yet as we have seen time and
time again, the Bible fails to give humanity a solid, unified framework off
which to base absolute morals. This is evidenced in the debates we see in
different Christian denominations just within the United States. The
Seventh-day Adventist denomination has just ruled that unions cannot choose to
ordain women to ministry, and at least half the church believes women should
never be ordained simply because they interpret the Bible to say that God does
not want women to minister to men. They believe God to be sexist and arbitrary.
In the same denomination you have people excommunicating members of their
society simply because they believe the Bible says that all homosexuals will
burn in hell in the last days, thus they carry out the justice of God and do
whatever the law allows in order to remind these people that they are sinners
deserving of death.
The
Bible cannot answer the issues that society is faced with, at least not
coherently enough to provide a unified voice that causes love to pervade our
dealings with people. We must discover a new ethic, one that is universal to
all human society, one that is free of individual interpretation, manipulation,
and human bias. One might rightly argue that such an ethic does not exist and
will never exist, and this may be true, but there is one ethic that comes close
to addressing human behavior and interaction in an unbiased way. That
philosophy is Naturalism.
There
are many forms of Naturalism, thus Naturalism is not entirely free of human
interpretation and manipulation. Evolutionary Naturalism has been used to
justify eugenics and the mass murder of people, yet Naturalism rightly
understood will avoid this danger. The correct form of Naturalism does not base
its foundation off of human desires and tendencies - it is a science, it simply
observes what is. The reason this is advantageous is because most philosophies
deal solely with what ought to be, and that is the problem, because what ought
to be is often subject to each individual’s ideals and desires for their own
survival. Naturalism is the study of the natural world and the concretes of reality.
It focuses on what is actually observable.
Naturalism is free from the whims of a fickle god and the dictates of a
stubborn people.
The
father of Agnosticism, Thomas Huxley wrote, “As a natural process, of the same character as the
development of a tree from its seed, or a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes
creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”[1] He then goes on to
explain that if it turns out that indeed a supernatural being did create the
universe, then everything inside of it, including its processes, are created by
the supernatural agent and are not interfered upon by the creator because the
universe has been created to operate by these fixed laws. Not that a god could
not interfere but that the god wouldn’t, simply because he or she would not
need to. This argument comes from the idea that God has created the universe to
run a certain way. Had God desired it to run differently he or she would have
created it that way in the first place. Thus Naturalism does not simply cater
to the atheist and the agnostic, but can include the religious as well.
Naturalism does not exclude the possibility of a God who interacts with reality;
rather it shows a God whose interaction is actually built into reality itself.
In other words, the study of nature is the revelation of God.
Naturalism is not fully without use of “ought” when describing
societies morals. Ethical Naturalism is not simply the study of human behavior,
rather it is the study of what human behavior ought to be in the face of what
is. Naturalism acknowledges the observation of nature’s tendency to compete and
to create a “survival of the fittest” reality. What ethical Naturalism does is
review what the human response is to this competitive world and thus builds a
moral code off of what is concrete. Humans do not simply follow the progression
of evolution; rather we fight it at every turn. Humanity creates order out of
disorder. We plant vineyards in desserts where vineyards should not grow, we
weed gardens allowing plants to survive that are not the most fit for survival
in that given environment.
Huxley states, “As I have
already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best—what we call
goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is
opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”[2] Huxley points out
that how society is constructed is not the survival of the fittest but rather
the fitting of as many as possible to survive. Society’s hope is not in giving
into the natural processes or from trying to run away from them, but rather in
combating them. Thus is created a more solid understanding of the value of
human life out of the observations of nature.
Ethical Naturalism is not subject to the whims of a god, nor the
whims of individual ideals, neither is it a slave to the dictates of evolution.
Rather, it is a recognition of what is and a deliberate determination to do
that which brings order to the processes of an unordered system. Ethical
Naturalism does not call for the self-assertion of individuals, it calls for
self-restraint, it does not call for competition over resources, it calls for
the cooperation of society in furthering the survival of each other. Thus, inside
human society, we should not be promoting the survival of those who are most
fit to survive. We should be holding up the survival of those who are, what
Huxley would call, “ethically best.”
This is not a call for radical socialism and the support of all
humans simply because they are human, it is the call for the support of those
who are combating the natural process of equilibrium. This again is where the
“ought” comes into Ethical Naturalism. We ought to combat the processes of
evolution and put into practice our God-given ability to afford a change in the
natural process. We ought not to support a system that allows for the survival
of the fittest, but rather create one that rewards those who are ethically
grounded in their desire to create a society that is in opposition to the
natural drive to be better than one’s fellow beings.
If society, including Christianity, adopted Ethical Naturalism
in place of their previously held moral and ethical framework, we would have a
system that allowed for human diversity, desire, ambition, and progress and yet
opposed the unmoral segregation of humans who are considered less then everyone
else simply because of things such as their gender or sexual orientation. A
complete and detailed discussion of how Ethical Naturalism deals with subjects
such as gender differences and sexuality is beyond the reach of this paper, but
it does answer those questions in a way that gives personhood to the
individuals and acknowledges their worth.
Ethical Naturalism is relatively simple when it comes to
normally complex topics on human behavior. Ethical Naturalism asks two simple
questions: “Is it natural?” and “Does it cause harm to others?” You can almost
always find what the moral standard should be based off of these two questions.
For instance, Naturalism can be played out inside a discussion on
homosexuality. Is it natural? This question is normally difficult because it
goes into questions on nature verses nurture, etc. but naturalism isn’t
concerned with those facts, it just looks at what is the natural behavior. Is
it natural for two people of the same sex to be sexually involved with each
other? The answer is obviously no. Two males or two females are not physically
or biologically compatible, their sexuality serves no useful purpose. Yet is love
of one individual for another natural? The answer is obviously yes. So then the
attraction is not natural but the love that flows out of that attraction is.
At this point the second question can be introduced, “Does it
harm others?” Does one person loving someone else of the same sex harm other
people? Other than potential emotional harm done to the families who follow a
strict religious ethic, or emotional damage done to the homosexual individual
whose family disowns him or her, the answer is no. So why would we try to push
homosexuals out of our society just because their attraction is not
biologically accurate?
Religious ethics are almost always based on exclusion. They seek
to determine a standard that is set to include only like-minded individuals.
Organized religions are by their very nature exclusive and thus any ethic or
moral standard that comes out of such religious belief will be exclusive and
rigid in its interpretations of what is and isn’t ethical or moral. Ethical
Naturalism avoids arbitrary standards of morality. It is unbiased toward
religions or cultures. It is based on observational facts and not simply on the
theorizing of a few men or women. The era of Biblical ethics must come to an
end if society is ever to progress beyond the narrow and oppressive culture of
our past. That isn’t to say the Bible is useless - nothing is useless that
reveals human behavior and progress especially one as old and extensive as the
Bible. That being said, morality must progress to something universal if we are
truly going to realize a more perfect society in an ever mixing and converging
world.
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