Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 108 No. 4 £1.50 May 2003

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The animals look pleased to see Charles Darwin writing his true account of their Origin, while His Omnipotence, The Deity, looks on in amazed consternation as His claims to the Genesis are disproved. Drawn by Albert Bon

HYMNBOOKS OF DISSENT 1840 - 90 Jim Clayson 3

THE SPES GENES DAY -A GREAT ANNIVERSARY Chris Bratcher 10

NATURALISING ETIHCS Steve Ash 16

A LETTER FROM CANADA Ellen Ramsay 21

VIEWPOINT Vivien Pixner 22

A LIBERALISM CAUTIOUS BUT ACTIVE - Book Review Donald Rooum 23

DAVID YEULETT (1918 - 2003) David Wright 23

ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Fax: 020 72428036 Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] Officers Chairman of the GC: Terry Mullins. Hon. Representative:Don Liversedge. Vice Chairman: John Rayner. Registrar: Edmund McArthur. SPES Staff Administrative Secretary to the Society: Marina Ingham Tel: 020 7242 8034 LibrarianlProgramme Coordinator:Jennifer Jeynes M.Sc. Tel: 020 7242 8037 Hall Manager:Peter Vlachos MA. For Hall bookings: Tel: 020 7242 8032 Caretakers' Office: Tel: 020 7242 8033 Editor, Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac New Member Dr. Jeffrey Segall, London NW2 Obituary David Yeulett (1918-2003) (see page 23) SALE OF BRADLAUGH HOUSE Bradlaugh House (47, Theobalds Road) has now been sold by its owner the National Secular Society, to a firm of Human Rights lawyers. Needing more space, the previous tenants, the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the International Humanist and Ethical Union all moved to 1 Gower Street, WC1. The National Secular Society retains its office in Conway Hall. • INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS' DAY The commemoration of this annual event takes place on Thursday 15 May at 12 noon in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, WC1. Everyone invited.

SPES MAY EVENING CLASS : THREE BRITISH ECONOMIC THINKERS Tutor: Dr Susan Pashkoff Tuesdays, 13, 20, 27, 1900 - 2100h £2 per meeting including refreshments

Tuesday 13: ADAM SMITH Tuesday 20: MALTHUS Tuesday 27: RICARDO

SUGGESTED PRELIMINARY READINGS (OFTIONAL)

Adam Smith (1776): An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (the Liberty Edition is a ppk version of the Oxford edition and is really cheap). David Ricardo (1821) Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (any edition will do, although the Cambrige University Press is the best).

2 Ethical Record, May, 2003 HYMN BOOKS OF DISSENT - 1840-90 Jim Clayson Lecture to the Ethical Society, 24 November 2002

Charles Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, believed the Devil had all the best tunes. Far be it from me to agree with a Christian, but in many respects he was right. Deists, Freethinkers, Atheists and Good Old English Pagans had some very fine songs and verse.

Song and poetry had long been the province of the population at large. In the C l7th the Leveller troops had used broadsides, a single printed songsheet, to warn their comrades against the usurpation of Cromwell's Government by the Grandees. In the CI8th convivial, political and debating societies used song within their meetings. The Dissenting chapels, some of them descendants of the Cl7th sects were particularly prone to publishing their own hymnals, usually in the form of small printed texts.

The population at large sang of love, adventure and their contempt for the established Church. Political Societies, expanding in numbers with the advent of access to cheap print, celebrated the French Revolution and sang tributes to Thomas Paine in ' defiance of those who deemed themselves their betters. Members of the London Corresponding Society produced several songbooks, as did Clio Rickman, a member of the Society For Constitutional Information and close friend of Paine himself.

So too did the associates of Thomas Spence, members of his society publishing a volume devoted to his ideas in 1816. Freemasons had sung of Reason throughout the Cl 8th, or their allegiance to the Crown, depending on which wing of the movement they adhered to. Confusingly, they often sang of both, a conundrum I will leave to them to resolve.

The Dotty Trinity Many of the more intellectually active Masons gravitated towards Unitarianism, the version of Christianity that sees the idea of God being three parts, independent yet wholly one, as slightly dotty. Not a hard conclusion to draw, but illegal at the time. No doubt it makes sense to people who can barbecue their fellow religionists over minor points of doctrine. • As early as 1775 Dr Kippis produced a hymn book of recognisably Unitarian beliefs for his congregation. It nevertheless relied heavily on Church of England and Methodist forms. The former prescribed by custom, the latter dictated by the inroads Wesleyanism was making amongst the Church of England congregations disgusted by the alliance between Church and State in this country.

A further advance was made in 1800 when the Norwich Unitarians produced a Hymn Book, edited by William Enfield, that incorporated verse written by members of his congregation. They included notable poets of the day like Anna Letitia Barbauld and the radical philosopher and Freemason, William Taylor.

I3arbauld was the daughter of Norwich merchant and Divine who had gained national renown through her anti-slavery poems. Taylor was a wealthy merchant who had abandoned trade and espoused literature as a profession. He contributed to many of the leading journals of the day, most significantly The Monthly Magazine, platform of Radical Unitarianism. He was also one of the few intellectuals in the country who

Ethical Record, May, 2003 3 could understand German and introduced the most notable philosophers of that country to England.

The Norwich Hymn Book was a major influence on Robert Aspland, editor of and contributor to the first Hymnal to define itself as specifically Unitarian. He was supplied with a copy by Anna Barbauld and drew much of his material from it, including verse from George Dyer and William Taylor. Another contributor was William Drennan, Presbyterian and founder member of the United Irishmen. Asplanels Hymnal was the one used at South Place Chapel until Eliza Flower prepared a new one during the momentous years of the late 1830s.

South Place Chapel's Hymnal South Place originated in a sect founded by Elthanan Winchester, an Evangelical Preacher from America. Amongst its later adherents was Richard "Citizen" Lee, radical poet and bookseller of the London Corresponding Society. When Winchester's congregation moved to grander buildings in Finsbury, their former premises became the home of radical London, hosting the usual agglomeration of Atheists and Deists who were to provide the backbone of the City's political and social thought for the 19th ce ntury.

South Place grew in importance largely due to the presence on its platform of William Johnson Fox. From all accounts Fox was a little bit special. Reputedly a charismatic orator, yet at heart a freethinker, he was the intellectual bridge. between Unitarian dissent and the Secularist Movement that followed. Both G.J. Holyoake and W.J.Linton knew him personally and attended his Chapel. As an M.P. he was one of the few to vote in favour of the Chartist Petition when it was brought to the House of Commons.

He was held in such high regard that the National Reformercarried a quote from him on its masthead. When he died it was a Freethought bookseller who handled the remains of his library. Fox is a truly seminal figure in the nineteenth century, and a sadly overlooked one.

The Hymnbook compiled by Eliza Flower served South Place for over thirty years and was not revised until 1873. Even then the original one hundred and fifty Hymns and Anthems were retained. The Revision coincided with the tenure at South Place of a second "freethinking" minister, Moncure Conway. His innovation to the new Hymn Book was to incorporate verse from outside the Western European tradition.

Just as the religious movements compiled their hymnbooks, so too did the movements of political dissent and revolution. The London Corresponding Society published several songs in its short lived Moral and Political Magazine. Several members, the ballad singer Richard Thompson and bookseller Thomas Williams produced political songbooks. The latter was widely circulated, one copy being discovered in the possession of men pressed into the Navy just after the mutinies of 1797.

The more genteel Society for Constitutional Information had no book of its own but a member, Thomas Rickman did produce one. Like Thompson, Rickman had experience as a professional singer in the pleasure gardens of London and Bath.

Thomas Spence, the political theorist and land reformer, was a member of the

4 Ethical Record, May, 2003 Corresponding Society and his followers, including the bookseller Williams were often associates of that organisation. In 1811 they produced their own songbook, for use at their "Free and Easies", gatherings for political discussion held in various London Pubs.

The Owenites Many of them were involved in attempts at revolution during the ensuing decades. Some very quickly embraced Robert Owen's version of co-operative schemes and factory Reform from the 1820s onwards. It is often overlooked that Owen's ideas were formulated in order to deal with the threat of imminent revolution in the years 1817 to 1820.

No doubt there were several political songbooks circulating in the early Cl9th that have been lost to us over the years. One that has survived is The Wreath Of Freedom: Or The Patriots Song Book, Being A Collection of Songs in favour of Public Liberty: published at Newcastle. some time in the 1820s.

The followers of Robert Owen did produce a volume, one that ran to several printings. It first appeared in 1838, later editions coming out in 1841. The story.behind it is something of a conundrum. The first edition appears to me to have been the work of the Manchester and Salford branches. No mention is made of it in the New Moral World or the minutes of the central organisation that would suggest it was imposed from above.

If my supposition is correct, a great hand in its compilation must have been played by Robert Buchanan and his partner. Now a forgotten figure, Buchanan was a well known personality in Owenite circles. One of several important poets produced by the movement, John Critchley Prince was another; he edited several journals including The Herald of Progress, a truly wonderful publication.

Buchanan was also a regular contributor to the New Moral World and one of the Owenite Missionaries whose task was to tour the branches as a lecturer, helping to get new societies off the ground. Buchanan also wrote a definitive History of The Evils of Priestcraft, a small volume that laid the foundations of organised Secularism. Buchanan also, according to GJ Holyoake's reminiscences, contributed to the Chartist Northern Star in 1848 and various Scottish publications in the years before his death in 1866.

Owenites, of course, formed the political and theoretical backbone to the Chartist Movement that sprang to life in the late 1830s. Chartism itself was an amalgam of many causes. Opposition to the New Poor Law of 1834, a demand for the extension of the suffrage and a protest against the vicious sentences handed out to Glaschu [Glasgow (Ed.)] Cotton Spinners in 1838. It rapidly embraced the radicals who had cut their political teeth in the eighteen twenties and thirties.

Its most distinctive feature was its localised organisation, the branches often receiving help from long established Owenite groups and in many cases sharing their premises and membership. The one thing it did not possess was a song book wholly of its own. There were many fine poets amongst the Chartists, but only one locality, Leicester, produced its own Song Book, at the initiative of Thomas Cooper.

believe the main reason for this omission was the Owenite Social Hymn Book, possibly the most influential political song book of the century. Now Owenism has yet Ethical Record, May, 2003 5 to find a serious historian. When it does I believe its membership will turn out to be a vital spark of intellectual light in this country. Its overwhelming the ,I,rniartChrnairlr, ethos was an appeal to reason, and certainly there are resonances of Thomas Paine in this, but for Owenites this was a practical appeal. Above all, it led them to working things out for themselves, much to the chagrin I might add, of Robert Owen himself.

It was the split within Owenism, caused by the patriarch's wish that Christians remain unoffended by his followers, that led Charles Southwell to found the pioneering Secularist journal The Oracle of Reason in 1841. For a while the Chartist journalist Julian Harney acted as its distributor in Sheffield. But the succession of editors, Southwell, Holyoake, Pattison and William Chilton, led the fight against organised religion when Bronterre O'Brien was Robert Cooper urging fellow Chartists to avoid antagonising the clergy, something which many of them delighted to do.

The London Investigator It is noticeable that the leading radical publishers of the day, Henry Hetherington, James Watson and John Cleave, produced more Secularist volumes than they did Chartist. Former Owenites were the leading philosophical dissidents of the decade and broke vital ground in this country's intellectual life. les about time they got the credit they deserve.

It was the former Owenite, Robert Cooper, who initiated The London Investigator This was the journal that gave Charles Mackay and James BA/. Thomson their first secular publications. It also gave an editorial debut to Charles Bradlaugh. Thomson is well known as a radical poet but Mackay's reputation is somewhat more obscure.

Mackay fails to mention his secular experiences in his Autobiography but his Or Prular Ornuirir, estrangement with the movement stemmed from a publicly expressed belief that the Confederate States had a right to secede from the Union. Mackay did not endorse their advocacy of slavery, though.

Secularists regularly published poetry and song in their journals but the first songbook did not appear until the Huddersfield Society produced a small volume for use in their Sunday school in 1870. Holyoake had devoted an issue of his Reasoner to Poetry of Progress in 1846. But this was really just a compilation of American verse, particularly J R Lowell. — . The first volume issued under the auspices of Austin Holyoake The National Secular Society was printed by Austin 6 Ethical Record, May, 2003 Holyoake in 1871. It contains a compendium of verse, song, recitations and ceremonial. He appears to have been motivated by the need for Secular Services and commemorations. His Burial service, used at the funeral of John Watts, then editor of the National Reformer, was widely adopted and he included it along with many pieces from the Owenite book. At the back of Austin Holyoake's mind was the production of a manual for public speakers in the secular cause.

Unfortunately his guide to elocution is rather a sorry affair, suggesting that regional dialect and accents be avoided. Austen suggested that a good model for speakers would be lawyers presenting cases in the local crown courts. In doing this he probably intended that speakers be intelligible beyond their own districts. But in doing this he struck a blow against the rich regional variations in language that made English such a colourful language. The case of Welsh, Scots, Cornish or Gaelic speakers was never considered.

Holyoake's book sparked a veritable flood of successors, the most notable being that produced by Annie Besant in 1876. Although it received a frosty (.2,1r 14,ralar filjrunir1r. reception from the poet James Thomson writing in Foote's Secularist, Besant's collection remains a valuable compendium of mid to late Victorian radical verse. Drawing on three major sources, Austin Holyoake, The Hymn Book of South Place and WI Linton's English Republic, it is a landmark publication in the genre. Others swiftly followed. A penny collection was issued by a Kingston publisher, K. Green. Harriet Law produced a compendium based on the work of G.H. Reddalls, for many years editor of the Secular Chronicle. She also published sheet music for congregational singing. By the time the dissidents ousted by Bradlaugh from the National Secular Society considered one for their British Secular Union, a correspondent pointed out that there Annie Besant had been a glut of such items over the previous few years.

Not discouraged by this, Joseph Mazzini Wheeler produced a collection to be sold through the columns of The Freethinker in 1892. Wheeler, son of the Chartist Thoms Martin Wheeler, had been brought in London after his father left one of the Chartist Land Company's sites, O'Connorville. He compiled a fine collection, drawing on radicals throughout the century including the Spencean poet Allen Davenport and the Chartist turned Secularist John Bedford Leno.

But Wheeler was harking back to earlier days with his choice. For during the 1860s there had been a major fissure in the older Chartist and Owenite cultures caused by a very public disagreement between the son of Robert Buchanan and the Rossetti/ Swinburne literary camp.

Buchanan Junior had begun his publishing career in the radical papers of 1850s Glaschu along with his best friend David Gray. The two of them had moved to London to seek literary fame in the early 1860s. Rossetti and Swinburne, both Oxford graduates, had got jobs on the literary reviews in the capital and took a particular delight in mocking the efforts of aspiring young poets. One of the victims of their Ethical Record, May, 2003 7 offhand remarks was a posthumous volume by the younger Buchanan's friend Gray.

He reacted with fury, nailing Swinburne and Rossetti for their shameless plugging of each other's work through the various columns they wrote. Swinburne in particular had cultivated a reputation as a literary rebel and in doing so had taken great care to offend as many people as possible. Buchanan flayed them both in an 1871 article The Fleshly School of Poetry. In doing so he appeared to join the general chorus against Swinburne who had become a somewhat vocal standard bearer of atheistical versification. Although his politics appeared radical and republican, in private he took a quite opposite stance, delighting in the barbarities practised by the Turks in their Balkan Empire. He professed particular admiration for a mass rapist, seeing him as the contemporary personification of the Marquis de Sade. Most of his admirers knew nothing of this and his volumes had great appeal amongst the more rebellious. Annie Besant in particular drew heavily on Songs Before Sunrise for her National Secular Society volume.

The Progressive Association By the later pan of the century each and every emerging political or quasi-religious group felt the need to have their own "hymn" book. The most interesting though, is that produced by an otherwise obscure organisation calling itself the Progressive Association. In many ways this Society was the summation of late Victorian genteel radicalism. Founded by John Charles Foulger in 1881, it aimed to bring enlightenment to the working classes. Amongst its members were GJ Holyoake, the veteran secularist. Theodore R Wright, once amongst the leading Secularists, co-founder of the British Secular Union and member of the Committee at South Place. His wife, the widow of Austin Holyoake, also took a prominent part in the Association. Less happily it was also the venue where Eleanor Marx was unfortunate enough to meet Edward Aveling.

The PA was an amalgam of Owenism, South Place Ethicalism and '80s Secularism (The Secular Review writers)and what was to become 1880s Hyndmanism. The differences between the latter two groups can be seen in the pages of the Secular Review where Wright and Bax argue over "English/Owenite" socialism and "German", meaning Marxian teachings.

Bax remained profoundly unaware that one of the few champions of Karl Marx in the later 1870s was Harriet Law, editor of the Secular Chronicle,who profiled him in her pages. She also published his response to George Howell's calumnies on the International Working Men's Association.

The Hymn Book itself was edited by Henry Havelock Ellis and Perceval Chubb. In essence the younger members were more influenced at the time by Thomas Davison, founder of the Fellowship of the New Life, and unintentional architect of the Fabian Society.

In a caustic letter to Ellis, Davison comments that his compilation owed more to Positivism than his teachings and an analysis of its contents bears this out. The most prominent writers in the first edition are William Mark Wathen Call and Louisa Bevington. Call comments in a later communication that he hadn't written much since the 1850s but happily acknowledges his debt to Positivism. Bevington, a most able and intriguing poet, admits the influence of Call but soon became an anarchist and departed to Munich.

The Progressive Association split in 1884, the more socialistically minded 8 Ethical Record, May, 2003 departed for Hyndman's Democratic Federation (which also produced a songbook under the editorship of the former Etonian schoolmaster J. L. Joynes). Another contributor, Edward Carpenter, produced his own "hymnal-: Songs For Socialists, which became the basis of most Labour songbooks of the early C20th.

Working Class Culture Eliminated In the process most vestiges of working class culture had been steadfastly eliminated from the canon. Ironically when the Hymnbook Committee at South Place came to reformulate their own Hymns and Anthems in 1889 it was to the Progressive's compilation they looked, as an annotated copy in the British Library attests.

Yet within a year Foulger was writing to the General Committee at South Place requesting that the two organisations merge. Not long afterwards the Positivists compiled their own hymnbook, also copying prodigiously from the Progressives.

Along the way the political groups had left the culture of the working classes to their own devices. That now centred around the Music Halls, as a prescient article by Annie Besant in Our Corner acknowledged. Music Hall performers had managed to defy management censorship through an intimate knowledge of their audience.

The best of them, Marie Lloyd, Billy Bennett, Daisey Taylor, and later in the century, Elsie Carlisle, could imply more with a vocal inflection than was comfortable for many Fabians. The only groups who stayed in touch with this tradition were the militant atheists who concentrated their propagandist efforts on street corner meetings. Notable in this field were Ernest Pack who was writing blasphemous poetry of a high standard, and J.W. Gott whose Rib Ticklers incurred the last prosecutions for blasphemy until Mary Whitehouse exercised her homophobia against the publishers of Gay News in the nineteen seventies.

Meanwhile Cecil Sharp was trying to rediscover William Cobbett's ideal pastoral at the bottom of his garden. Agricultural workers, however, had long ago learned never to sing their raciest numbers to the local vicar or his friends.

But perhaps the last words in this piece are best left to the poets themselves. These lines were written for the jubilee of Victoria;

I don't like parsons I long for the day For And I don't like kings When they all The Crown and altar I think they're Go away A bullet and halter Both quite dreadful things No peace, No quarter For them at all

THE HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY The Library at Conway Hall is open for members and researchers from Tuesday to Friday from 1400 to 1800

The views expressed in this Journal are not necessarily those of the Society.

Ethical Record, May 2003 9 THE SPES GENES DAY : 27 APRIL 2003 - A GREAT ANNIVERSARY Christopher Bratcher Sanunary of two lectures to the Ethical Society 27 April 2003

Friday [25 April] was the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's announcement of the double helix structure of DNA. The discovery had momentous consequences: as they laconically put it "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material". 30 years ago, a way was discovered to sequence [i.e., separately identify] genes.

Watson was at the Royal Society last Wednesday, with other giants of the field, to celebrate what increasingly looks like the greatest leap in scientific understanding of C2Oth to yield a continuum of knowledge for human benefit. That Friday was also the target date, set in 1990, for sequencing the entire human genetic code, all 3 billion letters long; and on 14 April this epic multi-national achievement was announced. Celebratory articles, and debates on ethical implications of that knowledge, proliferate: the site www.guardian.co.uk/genes runs to seven pages of links to them. In honour of the occasion I wore rather ancient and grubby jeans.

Today is our opportunity to recognise this, by recounting the theory, and to consider what, in particular, is the status of these tiny stretches of DNA, that we term genes. We shall also look at the status of memes, socio-biological explanations, and the morality of genetic engineering. Ethical issues are clearly a separate matter. What you make of genes affects your attitude to altering them. Sorting out genes may of itself resolve some false moral concerns. The overriding impression of the day was the ferocious and deep knowledge of our regular attenders, who were there in number. Maybe we should rename ourselves the Ethics & Natural Sciences Society!

My particular catalyst is my reading of Genes: a philosophical inquiry, by Gordon Graham, the Prof. of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen [Routledge Pbk, 2002]. The core of this book is his analysis of what Richard Dawkins meant in his celebrated series of books. Graham's judgement is balanced and genuine, making sharp points often by simply recounting and standing back in detachment from the several soft and hard sciences involved.

Darwinism First, there is a factual claim as to natural history: that species have not had separate creations, but all forms of life evolved from earlier ones over millions of years, in a sequence that takes us back to the simplest forms and congregations of cells. The second element is the -how-: that the only mechanism is the interaction of random alterations in nature, and natural selection — i.e., the relatively more numerous descendants of that altered stock. As such this hardly amounts to a mechanism; and that is part of its strength. It just happens so.

An ancilliary aspect is the rate and mode of change: that this takes place by means of very small modifications, and that Nature does not make saltations, or leaps. To propose that certain transitions cannot be made gradually can either be an attack on evolution itself, or the mechanics of the theory, or neither. Such opposition is not to be confused with the theory of -Punctuated Equilibrium", espoused by Steven lay Gould, which merely lays emphasis on the evolutionary spurts that occurred, and the presumed

10 Ethical Record, May, 2003 bunching in frequency of adaptations that give rise to them. [In many ways, this dispute replays the early days of geology, the rock on which Darwinism is founded. There, the contest was between uniformitarianism, which accounted for rock formation by the gradual sedimentary deposition that we typically see today, and catastrophism, that laid stress on massive volcanic / watery events.] Gould's quite distinct view is that there may be some further feature, concomitant with adaptation, which stabilises the ensuing state.

Enter Genes In bio-chemical terms, a gene is a length of DNA on a chromosome that acts as a production determinant: for [say] a string of amino acids, which on assembly constitutes [say] a particular protein, which in combination with others constitute [say] haemoglobin of a particular kind or origin.

Let us look ontologically at the elements of this. The material itself can last for thousands of years in biological trace material before decomposing. But its nature is to produce a copy of itself in fresh material: the notion of a gene is a copying machine and a construction machine, rolled into one. The copying machinery may perform sequentially for ever, given a cell in which to perform; though it could be so fractured [as in the "pickled" strand mentioned] that it ceased to do so. It may, distinctly, cease to have a particular, or any, construction effect: and it ceases to be that gene, or a gene at all. Many sequences of DNA that have the appearance of a gene, and used to be considered to be without consequence, and redundant, are now being found to play a part in the enfolding of the chromosome. Some others "switch on" other genes, and some function to repair them; such strings are genes by the above definition but they have no direct effect on the formation of expressed characteristics.

So, how are we to define a gene: by the immediate stuff of it, as part of an immense molecule; by its mechanism of reproduction; by the sum of its replications, with or without its mutations; or by various staging posts in its causative function, which, in combination with that of other genes, has a particular expression in a product, such as a cell that convulses in certain circumstance into the shape of a sickle, that in turn has particular effects in the body in which it operates — say, as affected by malaria? The particular format of the gene is not always necessary, let alone sufficient, to cause such effects. There is more than one way of producing formulations of haemoglobin with that property. Indeed one could expect that, across nature, new routes, or convergences, would crop up to selected ends. Yet we may usefully describe a gene as "for" sickle-cell anaemia, provided we do not assume that all others must be "for.' something of that kind in the so called phenotype, the creature concerned.

What we mean by a gene, determines its identity, and the criteria by which we consider a gene to be one and the same. There is no right answer to this, but only misleading consequences if the material and various functional definitions get muddled. One may [if suffering severely from philosophy] ask is a kettle, a kettle, if it has a hole, or is not on a heat source, or otherwise isn't performing; or whether it is the same kettle, if its clone in form or function replaces it when it burns out. The inherent function of a gene, that it codes, is part of its core definition. It is by that criterion that we term, by verbal engineering, a string of material a gene; and we isolate them, and insert new elements, by enzyme engineering. These two processes are not always kept distinct.

Philosophical interest in genes comes from the Frankenstein monster that may arise from bundling together these different definitions, and then attempting to bind the Ethical Record, May, 2003 Ii result to something that is barely coherent in another context: a unit of natural selection. Thus, Dawkins' definition, used in The Selfish Gene, is the author of almost all'his woes of misunderstanding: "A gene is any portion of chromosomal material [so far, so good] which potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural select ion-.

It is crucial to keep in mind both that differential survival, or selection, is a matter of census — and that it applies to the numbers of creatures or plants as a whole. The latter arc the "units of natural selection", if one wants to bestow that title. Selection, unless we are doing genetic engineering, is not applied to genetic material, any more than to the particular stuff that is the immediate expression or phenotype of a bunch of genes, other than by virtue of its being within such a unit. However, for Dawkins, -the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection". Leaving aside what an individual as a genetic unit might be, we have the notion of a significant unit.

It is also worth keeping in mind that we share most of our genes with all other animals. Most genes do not enter into natural selection at all, in the sense that they are neither selected for, or against. They simply have no bearing, however essential they are to life, on the aspect that enables the being to differentially survive. The extinction or transmutation of a species is not attributable to their presence. Some genes — and one could infer all — suffer mutations, that by the -copying" criterion of identity, make them no longer the same gene, but almost all those mutations are neutral: the string staggers on doing the same job, in one species or another. In this sense, as he puts it

- they are the immortals, or rather they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title". Therefore one could say that nothing is less appropriate as a unit of natural selection, significant or otherwise.

Are We Machines For The Survival Of Our Genes? We know, of course, what Dawkins means: beings are selected because of certain characteristics: by definition. [One of the issues one can repeatedly take with the theory is that it is axiomatic]. We can isolate those selected characteristics as a quantum, if you like, within this process, and as having a history across generations. If those characteristics are produced by a particular gene, or set of them, we can transfer significance across to the persisting run of genes.

What then becomes of the monster? Dawkins in The Selfish Gene puts it in the driving status seat, by asking us to regard ourselves, from its perspective, as machines for its survival. I am reminded of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos's definition of his occupation: -A mathematician may be defined as a machine for convening coffee into theorems." Or, he could have said, a machine for transmuting one equation into another: or for the preservation of the Greek alphabet on wall boards. Dawkins' proposition is like a mathematical one: it is essentially rejiggable according to the choice of what will go before the operator sign. He has reversed, for effect, the natural view that genes are merely the machines for the preservation of expressed characteristics. I have inherited a passion for Southampton Football club, which will outlast me. You could see me as a machine that achieved the club's successful propagation in the behaviour of two sons; which does not make me a machine for that. My wife certainly did not select me for that passion, and however faithfully I instil it, the Saints will march on, or not, according to events beyofid the control of anyone at the fan level.

He famously termed genes so, and I feel I must make comment. He defines 12 Ethical Record, May, 2003 selfishness as behaviour that increases one's welfare at the expense of another: so far, so good. Welfare is however defined as "chances of survival". If one assumes that all survival is at the expense of another, and determined by past behaviour in the sense of everything one does, then all survivors are born of selfishness, and any characteristics they have, and the genes that may have had a production role in them, likewise. But the deduction depends on one or more tautologies. Similarly, Darwinian "survival of the fittest" collapses into the "survival of the surviving". Only if one gives a meaning to -fittest" that has a criterion other than survival outcome, can something useful be said.

Sociobiology And Evolutionary Psychology Sociobiology attempts to apply the findings of the neo-Darwinians to the understanding of social behaviour, and was born of the study of sterile insects. [By dropping to the gene level, one can extend the notion of descendants to kin bearing the same gene, and the best strategy for maximising them explains such insects' sacrificial behaviour.] Game theory justifies trusting behaviour on selfish grounds. The interesting issue, not discussed, is whether such behaviour should therefore be termed unknowingly selfish, rather than ethical. I see no reason for doing so just because we are equipped to be able to behave so; but if we trust because we know it is to our advantage, then we cannot claim praise: virtue ceases to become its own reward.

Evolutionary psychology extends the analysis to mental traits; to be accounted for by projected intermediate states providing an advantage, which in turn depends on the general schematic of evolution, and not on genetics. As such, it can become a playground. II find the theory most useful in providing an argument for what we do not have: most tellingly, some psychic powers, which for reasons I won't go into, would have produced behavioural chaos that would have been a disadvantage at any stage.] The notion of states of advantage shares the difficulties and near vicious a-priori-ism of "the selfish gene", and "survival of the fittest". The projection is termed -reverse engineering": such and such must have come about because of such and such earlier advantage. It is the must that I want to dwell on. It looks as if this is a process of deduction. But the verification lies unreachable, in natural history.

Steven Pinker says, in his well known book, How the Mind Works : -Precision hands and precision intelligence co-evolved in the human lineage, and the fossil record says that hands led the way". What on earth does this mean? What is precision intelligence, if not another way of describing the scope given by opposed thumbs? How does the fossil record show independently when that sort of intelligence, whatever it is, cropped up, and/or that hands are essential to it, or a concomitant? Was there a period when we had hands but were stumped by what to do with them? An underlying philosophical doubt about the enterprise is the quality to be explained, such as emotion, and the advantage, either vacuously general, or that there are as many distinctions in traits as we have the capacity to make.

Our discussion delightfully strayed into the bogus measurement of IQ, and the declining brain size of domestic pets, who apparently have less need of areas of grey cells than their feral ancestors. It is not obvious that they are being accidentally bred for this, or otherwise gaining an advantage thereby.

We also should ask whether the hypothesis explains mentality, as distinct from mere behaviour. OK, an animal that can take on board evidence of a predator, and be driven to evasive action, will survive. But need this involve representations, chains of reasoning and felt emotions? It is the scarpering, not consciousness - thinking and Ethical Record, May, 2003 13 feeling - that gives the advantage. Why is mind, properly so called, needed at all? That question is, of course, trampled almost to death in the Philosophy of Mind.

The Culture Club And Survival By Acquired Behaviour : Memes The real evidence of the influence of behaviour on survival is contemporary. We collectively survive -better" now (as defined by growth in world population) through practices relating to health and food production, and not because our genes are materially different from those possessed in by our ancestors in the dark ages.

All sorts of counter-intuitive deductions arise if we reduce humanity to genes and their variables within populations, with a survival criterion. The growing population of Third World slums may be said to be better fitted to their environment than many white European communities with declining birth rates, with the most obvious, and biologically trivial, genetic difference between the races being expressed in their looks. Those looks, sadly, often make them not regarded as -one of us"; but the environment, and the exclusion, is a matter of culture.

Dawkins takes this on board. He said: "For an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution-. So much for the selfish gene: enter, by analogy, the meme: a cultural unit of selection, that replicates by imitation. Daniel Dennett suggests as candidates both specific tunes and single issue causes, and classes of things, like music in general, and computer viruses. At which point the concept unravels. What counts as replication, or imitation? It is not even clear whether we inherit memes, or catch them. The notion sits easiest in the area of teenage fads and fashions, where one may think uncritical adoption is driven by mating instincts, which is explanation enough! The concept seems to have no purchase on deliberate acts of creativity: as a general theory it fails, and had no (vocal [Ed.]) defenders amongst our attenders.

The Ethics Of Genetic Engineering SPES has addressed the issues of genetically modified food, notably in a talk by Donald Rooum. Hence, and because the immediate anniversary was the completion of the human genome, I restricted myself to the problems of the possible use of that. The issues divide between genetic screening, genetic modification, and the Brave New World of human cloning.

The dangers of screening are physical, in the instance of pre-natal invasive checks (where it is said that more foetuses are lost by miscarriage attributable to it, than are terminated because of it), but the ethical issues are primarily social, if one leaves aside screening where termination or procreation is the issue. Compulsory informing of the individual concerned is an ethical issue. More worrying is the use of the information by third parties. The practical consequence is the splitting of humans into risk types as if they were different species, and in particular, the ending of universalism as the basis of insurance. You can be sure that favourable annuity rates will not, by contrast, be offered to the impaired!

The scope for applying engineering beyond patently inherited specific physical conditions seems limited, particularly because the genome only extends to roughly 30,000 genes, almost all of which are shared with our nearest species: too few, and too undifferentiated, to make plausible single gene repair for more complex characteristics. This engendered an interesting anecdotal debate on Nature v Nurture, which ended, of course, in compromise.

14 Ethical Record, Ma); 2003 The Human Rights objections to modification of personality, and particularly, sexuality, of existing people are obvious, and not particular to gene "therapy". There is, by the way, a neat argument against tinkering with the purported gene for "one sort"[don't ask] of homosexuality, which is transmitted through the maternal side. Such a gene would show itself only in the so-called homozygote. The heterozygote [50% of the overall population] would still be carrying the gene in a recessive form. So there would be no real prospect of such "sexual cleansing-.

There is no sustainable philosophical objection to genetic "trespass", unless one clings to the religious notion that Nature's endowment is inherently good, simply because it is untouched by anything other than actions directly affecting phenotypes. This is a bit like saying we can adapt or knock down church buildings, but must not alter the Architect's ground plans for buildings of that type. Nature's ground plans are being adapted all the time. One could object to particular modifications, such as the creation of the "oncornouse", with its cell regulation against cancer removed (aside from cruelty issues) on the lines that one was deliberately creating something that was bad in itself, and not for itself: but it is in that general respect no different to other forms of functional deprivation in husbandry. We are content to prevent or alter specific functions by breeding or cloning: as in mules and the seedless grape.

The other common objection is that of the risk of producing a catastrophic alteration that is irreversible or unstoppable. However, this reduces to the argument that no improbability is too small if the effect is undesirable: this is, essentially, Pascal's wager [which can be neatly reversed, because the catastrophe of possible heresy in the hands of a bad God, for a believer, makes disbelief the safer optiong.

We finally looked, amongst other things, at "designer babies" [elimination of non-medical "defects"] and human cloning. Issues of in-vitro fertilisation, and the discarding of failed or damaged embryos are separate matters. We concluded that it was the purposes behind such endeavours that were likely to be wrong; and doomed to failure, not least by the weight of expectation. Natural twin clones turn out to be different — and certainly distinct — persons, and they live in the same time environment. Parents who try to impose replication of themselves by normal means [strict control] are usually thwarted, by the very inherited characteristics of stubbornness and mono- mania that drove the enterprise, or by their crushed expression that produces a pale shadow of the parent. Thank goodness for that. 0

NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY CONFERENCE Saturday 7 June 200 SECULARISM AND THE FUTURE for all interested in this topic Guest Speaker: JOAN SMITH

1000-1630h inc. exhibition Registration/coffee 1000-1030h Cost £5 inc. tea/coffee and light lunch. Please book a place for catering but payment may be made on the day. Tel. NSS office 0207 404 3126 or email [email protected] Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WCIR 4RL

Eth cal Record, May; 2003 15 NATURALISING ETHICS Steve Ash MSc Summary of a lecture to the Ethical Society, 13 April, 2003

The topic of this discussion is the naturalisation of ethics. The argument I shall be positing is that underlying source of morality can only be understood in terms of naturalism. The primary motivation for this is a claim that classical attempts to define morality have failed. A failure that I argue makes the naturalistic definition of ethics the only viable option. In the first part of this discussion I will outline classical attempts to define ethics and show how they have been refuted. Due to limited space this will have to be a brief summary (a fuller account is available on request). In the second part I will move onto ethical naturalism and how it may resolve the problem of both descriptive and normative ethics.

Classical Attempts at Moral Definition The first form of duty ethics was divine command ethic. Plato gave the first refutation of this. The question he raised was as follows: Are 'moral laws' good because they are made by a God who defines 'the good', or does God create 'moral laws' because they are good.

A paradox emerges from this, that if the latter is the case then God is redundant in ethical terms, because 'good' pre-exists him; if the former is the case then God, being thus unrestrained by morality, can make anything a 'moral law', even those things we find intuitively wrong, like child abuse. Defenders against a 'redundant deity' argument must claim that only God knows what is good. But if this is so not only is it a bizarre notion of 'good', a 'good' we can never experience as good, but also necessitates that everything we experience, or regard, as good is in fact delusory (including notions such as the 'torture of innocents is wrong'). Such a view is deeply counterintuitive. Those who defend the first position but want to preserve our intuitions have to argue that God also gives us the intuition to know the moral laws he makes good. But having such a moral intuition totally undermines the divine command principle.

After this refutation the Intuitionist approach is now more common amongst both Theists and Atheists alike. This view sat well with Intuitionist approaches in Logic, and similarly could be applied to either principles or facts in the ethical domain. But the obvious problem with this approach is its inherent subjectivity: there may be a few general intuitions about extreme situations but there is no intuitional agreement beyond this. Moral Intuitionism has thus suffered a similar decline to Logical Intuitionism.

The last bastion of duty ethics is therefore a rational position. This is sometimes in a strong form, as in Kant's attempts to rationally define moral duty, and some times in a more pragmatic form. Kant's position is complex, but essentially he believed in universal moral laws which could only be known through reason. According to Kant we have a moral duty to obey such laws once discovered, whether they are in our own interest to do so or not, and regardless of our intuitions. We need not concern ourselves with the difficult question of how these moral rules are discovered in order to find problems with this view. It has often been shown to lead to ethical absurdities, the most well known being the universal moral law 'never lie' (based on the logical necessities of communication) forcing us to expose our friends to their enemies. Problems like this demonstrate the error of adopting a purely rational criterion for

16 Ethical Record, May, 2003 morality. Arguably Kant has exchanged God for Reason, or Logos, here.

More pragmatic rational duty moralists argue from the principle of an ethical contract (or social rulebook) which they claim we have a duty to abide by. Here the argument is that we can be led by objective rules leading to a greater good (whether defined as justice or social stability). The problem with this is not so much that it is false, than that it may not really be duty ethics. If we base our obligations on an objective good we are talking in terms of consequences rather than obedience to rules. The duty moralist thus has to argue that we are not clever enough to see all the consequences of our actions and that tradition has produced a better set of rules than we can reason for ourselves. This is plausible, but in practise such 'moral traditions' are widely divergent, leading to charges of relativism (avoidable only by Fundamentalism). Another problem with this 'blind rule' based ideology is its tendency towards behavioural conditioning rather than moral choice. In short we can conclude, with Hume, that this is a sociological phenomena rather than a moral one.

Those who want to maintain a genuinely ethical position generally appeal to rational consequentialism rather than moral rule books these days. The problems that the would-be consequentialist has to solve are metaethical ones, primarily "What does 'Good' mean?" and "Good' for whom?". If we define 'good' in personal subjective terms we run the risk of lack of moral cohesion, as well as other forms of moral relativism, and so an objectivist approach has tended to be sought. The only real objective good that everyone agrees on is human happiness and so the question then follows whose happiness is paramount. Egoists have plausibly argued that we should only attend to our own happiness, as even this is ultimately personal and beyond the access of others. But this has seemed to many contrary to what we normally regard as ethical. In reaction to Egoism others have proposed an Altruism rooted in the religious notion of self-sacrifice for the good of others. To many others this seems an over reaction that is certainly not 'good' for the practitioner.

It was due to these considerations that Utilitarianism emerged as the main theory of consequentialism, a philosophy coming in many flavours but basically promoting the 'greatest good for the greatest number'. In classic utilitarianism there is no good apart from the greatest 'happiness' or 'utility'. But there are still problems associated with Utilitarianism. Bernard Williams raises the problem of the 'drowning men'. In this thought experiment we are faced with two drowning men, both of whom will drown if we do not save the them, and only one of whom will drown if we help the other. One of the two is a skilled doctor, who we don't know, while the other is our best friend. The question is who do we save? The Utilitarian is committed to answering 'the skilled doctor', but this is not the answer most people would give. Again rationalism has missed the 'human element'.

Intentional Ethics - Virtue Theory The perceived failings of Consequentialism, have recently caused some moral philosophers to look again at Intentional Ethics, in particular Virtue Theory. In simple terms this states that it is our immediate intentions that count in ethical behaviour rather than actual results (which will not be entirely in our hands). The obvious objection to lntentionalism is that all too often good intentions have bad results. If the result of ethical behaviour is supposed to be 'the good', simple Intentionalism doesn't seem enough. The ancient Greeks who placed great emphasis on virtue as the basis of ethics, realised this a long time ago and Aristotelian Virtue Theory attempted to solve the problem by arguing in favour of Eudaimonia. This meant 'right relation to the

Ethical Record, May, 2003 17 Daimon'. In Aristotelian terms, our Daimon was our inner self and our potential being. Aristotle believed in a precision mechanism world, in which everything had its place, or at least played a role in a greater cosmic purpose. This role was identical to that person's inner potential, and when developed and expressed, in the 'right relation' to others and the world as a whole, the result was fulfilled happiness, or Eudaimonia. Virtues were essential components of this natural order. Today we cannot take Aristotle's worldview seriously, but modern neo-Aristotelians attempt to recouch things in terms of a more psychological framework of natural expression and self actualisation. But this reduction fails to convince everyone.

What's more the prospects of virtue theory in general are not good particularly in the light of its critique by Nietzsche, who plausibly demonstrated the psychological and cultural roots of 'virtue' in his work The Genealogy of Morals.

The Objections To Naturalised Ethics What I think many of the above problems point to is that even though no grounds have been found to exist for pre-existent moral truths, most people are none the less aware of an independent basic moral reality: a moral reality that is partly subjective, but independent enough to be rationally accessible and to transcend cultural indoctrination, or mere personalistic reaction. For me this means we need to look again at the naturalisation of ethics.

The technical definition of naturalisation in ethics is the derivation of moral truths from non-moral facts. Or less technically, that moral reality is rooted in natural phenomena, and so theoretically analysable scientifically. This perspective has been opposed by the majority of philosophers since the time of Flume, and is still regarded as refuted by most. However ethical naturalism comes in many forms and not all are easily refuted.

The most influential objections consist of the anti-naturalist arguments of Hume and GE Moore. The latter is widely held to have refuted ethical naturalism by use of his so-called naturalistic fallacy. But this is in fact very doubtful. Moore's basic point was that however we define moral truths in terms of natural facts (the satisfaction of desire for instance) the moral perspective is not removed, for we can still ask 'is that good?'.

Moore regarded this as proof that moral discourse was irreducible to natural terms and so naturalism was a fallacy. Moral truths, he argued, were non-natural (Moore being an Intuitionist or believer in transcendent moral laws). It is his last point which is the most dubious of course - how can anything be non-natural? The concept is an empty one, if by natural we mean everything that exists in nature. At best this only seems to lead to a dead-end dualism. Furthermore, even if moral discourse were irreducible, and I'm prepared to believe it is, this does not mean that moral reality has a separate existence from natural phenomena.

One way of understanding why is through the innovative linguistic philosophy of Donald Davidson. Briefly, Davidson argues that subjective or intensional talk, while not reducible to objective or extensional talk still none the less supervenes on the physical world. That is, changes in the natural base of the subjective phenomena necessarily causes changes on the subjective level, while changes in the subjective phenomenon do not necessarily cause changes in the natural base. Therefore due to this supervenience relation, the argument goes, the subjective phenomena are natural phenomena even though their description is not reducible to natural description. This 18 Ethical Record, May, 2003 irreducibility must then be due to the necessities of language rather than reality. In other words, it is the only way we are able to describe the world, but not necessarily the way the world really is. The fact that moral talk is not reducible to natural descriptions is a linguistic reality rather than a fact about the world. Therefore continually asking whether these naturalistic features are good may be a misuse of language, and so the naturalistic fallacy itself a fallacy.

Another influential objection to naturalism in ethics is the is —ought distinction first popularised by Hume, and the closely related fact — valuedistinction popularised by AJ Ayer. In the latter it is stated that values are of a totally different order from facts and so cannot be derived from them. The distinction itself is thus questionable and Ayer's argument against Naturalism arguably circular. Similar arguments apply against Hume.

The Eco-ethical Model The development of a naturalistic account of ethics would be part of an ongoing empirical study, but for the sake of completion I shall propose an initial hypothesis as a working model. This model which I shall call the eco-ethical model is mostly couched in terms of our contemporary understanding of biology (though it doesn't follow that a naturalistic account would have to be).

I propose two aspects to this model. One is an objective consequential aspect, the other is a subjective intentional aspect. The objective aspect may be seen in terms of an objective Life principle and an evolving eco-system. I shall leave the definition of Life principle open, but it can be seen as anything from a Darwinian mechanical survival principle to a Nietzschean principle of conscious expansion and growth.

The Life principle should be seen objectively as the driving force of evolution, which results in the production of an evolving eco-system. In consequentialist ethical terms 'good' consequences would be those that are in line with the Life principle and that develop, strengthen and protect the ecological relations it produces.

More important however is the subjective aspect which can be seen as the internalisation of the Life principle, the motivating principle of life felt as a psychological drive and its manifestation in the dispositions and traits selected by our evolution. Thus the urge to save our friends is a biological disposition rooted in an ecology of traits ensuring our survival and growth, a disposition we intuitively define as moral, and use a unique language game to describe. These dispositions can be experienced as emotions or rationalised as virtues (a comparison between Aristotelian virtue theory and Ecological virtue theory would be an interesting project).

Being partly determined by nurture and free will, and free of the instinctual determinism of other animals, the human species has the free choice to ignore or sublimate its drives. The moral choice would be to follow our natural dispositions in their basic or sublimated form and so is basically egoistic, but an egoism rooted in an ecological framework.

The internalisation of the Life principle would be the main link between the objective and subjective aspects of morality, due to this fact that egoistic dispositions not only serve the individual in a narrow sense, but also their place in a network of relations. There is also another important link however. This is the psycho-social link. This covers two areas, our tendency to be behaviourally conditioned by our social environment and our capacity to rationally analyse our situation, both of which are Ethical Record, May, 2003 19 evolved natural dispositions and speed up an ecological evolution by adding a more conscious factor. This element also rescues the model from charges of socio-biology and emphasises the human constructions which deploy and sublimate our basic dispositions.

Obviously this is merely a vague outline of what a naturalised ethic of the kind I envision would be like, and deliberately so as it is only a starting position for further work. However it is possible to be more specific in some areas, for instance the recent discovery of reciprocal mutualism in the animal world is one area. Animals have been observed to co-operate with co-operators and compete with competers, in a way that parallels our common sense tit-for-tat morality. This seems to depend on a close community, however and research in behavioural ecology suggests we should only expect to find this behaviour in humans under the social conditions of community, or in the presence of a social ideology, which acts as the environmental cue for this genetic trait. This raises the possibility not only of a naturalised descriptive ethics but a practical normative ethics as well.

The Problem of Immorality One outstanding problem here, that some may already have realised, is the problem of immorality and moral contention. If morality is based on natural dispositions in appropriate environments, combined with psycho-social constructions, how is it possible to be immoral or to have moral disagreements? Something that seems at the heart of moral philosophy. I think there are many possible answers to this, the simplest being dysfunction, but obviously this alone is not enough. I suspect that the bulk of the problem is to be found in the psycho-social domain.

This area is a unique one for humans and so is a relatively recent evolution within nature. I would suggest it is one that is still imperfect in terms of its fit into an ecological framework, evident by the current damaging effect human society is having on the environment. Both our rational attempts to inductively approximate an ecologically sound consequentialism and the cultural evolution are flawed and yet to be perfected. This I would argue is the source of immorality and moral contention. Something that also reflects our limited natural ability to step outside our biological and cultural conditioning. This also explains why there can be clashes between traditional codes of behaviour and our intuitive moral sense, what the Romantics called 'the ethical revolt against morality'.

I shall end with what may turn out to be the final ethical mystery in a naturalised context. Given that we have a wide variety of dispositions that may manifest in different environments, and that these dispositions can be deployed, combined and sublimated in a variety of ways, how is that we can prefer one to the other? Why is the sublimation of our aggressive drives into play seen as better than their sublimation into blood sports, or why an environment that triggers reciprocal mutualism is seen as more desirable than an environment that triggers an equally natural pure competition? There seems to be a mysterious aesthetic at work. However it is not impossible to reach a naturalistic conclusion to this mystery as well.

It is quite possible that we have an innate evolved disposition to favour conditions that are closer to a more coherent and closely interconnected mode of life. A kind of drive to align our behaviour with an evolving eco-system. Modelling this in practise, especially within the context of a strict Darwinism, might not be easy, but it is certainly a logical possibility and I think would be the final plank in a compete theory of naturalised ethics. 20 Ethical Record, May, 2003 A LETTER FROM CANADA Ellen Ramsay

After decades of lobbying, Canadian gay and lesbian people are finally cracking open the nut of government resistance to equal rights. Two years ago, the Liberal government of Jean Chretien amended 68 federal statutes to allow same sex couples rights from shared pensions to income tax recognition. What the process revealed, however, is a split in the government between those members (including 3 government ministers) who have publicly declared support for gay marriage, and the continuing intransigence on the part of the government on the issue before the courts. In fact it appears that this is a battle to be decided by the courts rather than the House of Commons.

On 12 July 2002 the Ontario Divisional Court ruled that the federal government had two years to amend its position on gay marriage to conform to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Instead of amending its position however, the government has chosen to appeal the decision even if it means taking it to the Supreme Court. It is anticipated that the government will not win its appeal. The federal government'S rejection on gay marriage is based on an 1866 British court decision that reserves marriage as an institution between a man and a woman.

Diocese Votes To Bless Homosexual Unions This situation provides a backdrop for another debate in Canada, one involving the Anglican Church. Last June, the diocese of New Westminster (including Vancouver) became the first diocese in the worldwide Anglican community (Church of England) to formally endorse motion 7 in favour of the blessing of gay and lesbian relationships.

The motion, which calls on bishops to create a new rite for homosexual unions has been voted on three times, each time with a majority in favour of the motion. Bishop Michael Ingham, however, declined to assent to the motion until last year. The diocese vote in favour of the motion, 215 to 129, sparked a backlash whereby 12 conservative priests representing 8 parishes in the diocese (20% of the diocese) walked out. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has claimed that the actions of the diocese in Canada are causing problems for the world's Anglican leaders.

The result of the Synod vote on motion 7 was the formation of a breakaway faction who desire to side-step the liberal bishop presiding over them in favour of a 'flying bishop' appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Officially this is referred to as granting 'Alternative Episcopal Oversight' and has been granted in cases in England and the United States with disputes around the ordination of women.

The debate has sparked biblical citations to support their views. On the liberal side of the church, Luke is quoted to demonstrate that Jesus debated the interpretation of scriptures with the leaders. On the conservative side, a troubling passage from Leviticus 20:13 is cited which states -If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."

For those who share the perspective that religion is the breeding ground of delusion and intolerance, the schism comes as no surprise. The fact that this debate takes place in the context of a much larger political debate in Canada on gay rights, shows that even the church is influenced by secular society. Ethical Record, May, 2003 21 VIEWPOINT •

I was delighted to read the accounts of Harold Blackham, now a centenarian, in last month's ER (Apri1,03).

My memory of him goes back a long way. In 1935 I joined a class called 'Straight Thinking' which he was teaching at the City Literary Institute. I was 20 and in search of some kind of guide through the problems of adult life in that turbulent period. Having left school at 16, I had never encountered any teaching in philosophy, logic or how to think.

Harold Blackham was an excellent tutor and I took notes of his lectures which I kept and referred to for many years. They have disappeared in the course of the years but I like to think that I have absorbed most of the content - and the guide has served me well. I am still grateful to him for setting me on the path of straight thinking.

Vivien Pixner - London NW3.

SPES ANNUAL COACH OUTING

SUNDAY 6 JULY 2003 ON THE SECULAR TRAIL TO BRIGHTON.

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112 coach fare

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SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are:

the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism, the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields.

We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the renowned South Place Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society's journal, Ethical Record, is issued ten times a year. Funerals and Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is 118 (£12 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65).

22 Ethical Record, May, 2003 A LIBERALISM CAUTIOUS BUT ACTIVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS ON LIBERAL THEMES. Written and published by Tom Rubens, 162 pages, £8.50. Available from: 94 St John's Court, Queens Drive, London NI 2HN. Reviewed by Donald Rooum

The first paragraph of Tom Rubens' title essay in his latest book advocates the world- wide realisation of a list of traditional liberal objectives, such as equality of opportunity, equality before the law, democratic political systems accountable to the electorate, peaceful resolution of conflicts 'as far as possible', and so on. Of course It may be that only some pans of the programme ... will be actualised, and perhaps even these successes will not be permanent', but the liberal acts without the certainty of attaining perfection, in the hope of achieving some improvement. It concludes with, a discussion of the necessity, and difficulty, of 'dismantling monopoly capitalism'.

Then we get to the other 24 essays, which writer and readers can all enjoy. ibm Rubens delights in finding related passages in a wide range of literature, and arguing from them to controversial conclusions. In 'Liberal humanism and secular loneliness', for instance, he quotes Baudelaire, Arnold, Ibsen, Conrad, Tennesse Williams and Becket, and mentions Sartre and Somerset Maugham in passing, to show that loneliness dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the challenge to religious thought was becoming decisive. Earlier writers did not feel isolated in the same way, he says, because for them God was always present.

The essays are short, and to be read separately. This is a book to keep handy, for dipping into in moments of relaxation.

DAVID YEULETT (1918-2003)

David Yeulett was a foundling (one rumour had it that his father was an aristocrat) who was sent to school at the Coram Foundation. The schooling there was very religious and he later came to object to being taught that he was a 'miserable sinner'. He encountered more compulsory religion during World War II in the Army in North Africa. Eventually, he came across the National Secular Society's Headquarters (when it was in Borough High Street), read its literature, realised that all the religion he had been force-fed was nonsense and became an outspoken atheist.

David did voluntary work at the N.S.S. office in Holloway Road and at Conway Hall until his deteriorating physical condition prevented him from travelling. He also worked for a few years during the 1990s at Conway Hall as a caretaker and as a cleaner. He acted as Barbara Smoker's chauffeur when her duties as funeral officiant took her far afield. On one memorable occasion the car engine burst into flames and everyone had to evacuate the vehicle very quickly.

David took a great interest in history, especially when it involved religion. He was also very interested in national history and evolution and natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and floods. He emphasised that whether anyone lived or was killed by these phenomena was purely a matter of chance and had nothing to do with being struck down by any God.

During the last few weeks of his life he refused to go into hospital and was looked after by his daughter Ruth until his last day, 11 April and he died in hospital later that evening. David Wright Ethical Record, May, 2003 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY The Library, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8037/8034 Registered Charity No. 251396 Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] No charge unless stated

MAY 2003 Tuesday 13 EVENING COURSE 1900-2100h THREE BRITISH ECONOMIC THINKERS: 1 ADAM SMITH Dr Susan Pashkoff £ 2 inc. refreshments.

Sunday 18 1100h "Fire Burns Both in Hellas and in Persia But Men's Ideas of Right and Wrong Vary From Place to Place" (Aristotle). ARE RIGHT AND WRONG JUST A MATTER OF GEOGRAPHY? asks Jane O'Grady

1500h I, CARAVAGGIO: MY PAINTINGS AND MY PHILOSOPHY aka Alberto Bona

Tuesday 20 EVENING COURSE 1900-2100h THREE BRITISH ECONOMIC THINKERS: 2 MALTHUS Dr Susan Pashkoff £ 2 inc. refreshments.

Sunday 25 Bank Holiday Weekend. No Meetings

Tuesday 27 EVENING COURSE 1900-2100h THREE BRITISH ECONOMIC THINKERS: 3 RICARDO Dr Susan Pashkoff £ 2 inc. refreshments.

JUNE Sunday 1 1100h MYSTICISM AND LOGIC: a critical response to Bertrand Russell's book of 1918. Christopher Hampton

1500h ETHICAL DILEMMAS: Should Freedom of Religious Expression be Defended by Secularists? Edmund McArthur says YES. Debate

Sunday 8 1100h GEORGE HERBERT PERRIS (1866-1920): A Case Study of an Ethicist and a Radical Robert Gomme

1500h THOMAS MORE's UTOPIA: A 21st Century Perspective John Rayner

NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY CONFERENCE Saturday 7 June 2003 SECULARISM AND THE FUTURE Guest Speaker: JOAN SMITH 1000-1630h inc. exhibition. Registration/coffee 1000-1030h Cost £5 inc. tea/coffee and light lunch. Please book a place for catering but payment may be made on the day. Tel. NSS office 0207 404 3126 or email [email protected] Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WCIR 4RL

Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hail, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL Printed by J.G. Bryson (Printer) Ltd. 156-162 High Road, London N2 9AS ISSN 0014 - 1690