Saturday, October 3, 2015

A New Ethic














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.








[1] Huxley, T., (2009) Evolution and Ethics. In M. Ruse (Ed.), Evolution and Ethics (p. 6). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
[2] Huxley, T., (2009) Evolution and Ethics. In M. Ruse (Ed.), Evolution and Ethics (p. 82). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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