Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 117 No. 3 £1.50 March 2012 Anton Chekhov and his ‘White Dacha’, Yalta, Ukraine (see page 17) EDITORIAL – OUR SECULARISTS ARE PAPER TIGERS. WARSI: LOOK ABROAD! Baroness Warsi, a vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party, complained last week that “Britain is under threat from a rising tide of ‘militant secularisation’ ... religion is being sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere.” A prime example given of the danger to Christianity in this country was the recent judgement that local councils could not have prayers as item 1 on their agenda! They can of course have prayers before the meeting itself begins. It’s common sense that a committee of various beliefs cannot start with one sect’s prayer formula, but may, if it wishes, start with a non-sectarian minute’s silence. This sham problem contrasts with the genuine persecution suffered at the hands of religious fundamentalists today by Christians in many parts of the world, eg Coptic Christians murdered in Egypt, Christians murdered in Nigeria, death threats for apostasy in Pakistan for wishing to convert to Christianity, stating one’s atheism on the Internet a capital crime in Saudi Arabia ... and the list goes on. Baroness Warsi should rather address the pathological state into which some of the so-called ‘great’ religions of the world are now mired. NEW ADDITIONS TO THE HUMANIST LIBRARY Cathy Broad 2 MORAL THEORY FOR NATURALISTS Catherine Wilson 3 EXISTENTIALISM, ATHEISM AND HUMANISM Gary Cox 7 VIEWPOINTS Terry Liddle, Chris Purnell, Beatie Feder 11 AMERICAN BANKS AND BRITISH BUILDING SOCIETIES Peter Griffiths 13 BOOK REVIEWS Norman Bacrac, Jim Herrick, Jennifer R. Jeynes 14 CONWAY’S RADICAL THOUGHTS IN AMERICA William B. Jensen 18 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 20 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk Chairman: Chris Purnell Vice-chairman: Jim Herrick Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Hon. Archivist Carl Harrison Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Angelo Edrozo, Sean Foley, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerna Maintenance: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected] ADDITIONS TO THE HUMANIST LIBRARY, February 2012 Bekoff, Marc Animal manifesto 2010 Caputo, John After the death of God 2009 Dawkins, Richard The God delusion 2007 Dennett, Daniel Science and religion 2011 Jeffreys, Sheila Man’s dominion 2011 Juergensmeyer, Mark Terror in the mind of God 2003 Power, Mick Adieu to God 2012 Rubens, Tom Politics and neo-Darwinism 2012 Ruthven, Malise Islam 2012 Cathy Broad, Librarian, Humanist Library and Archives 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 and freethought 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 Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is now £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65) CONWAY HALL EVENING CLASSES, 24 April 2012 Conway Hall is running evening classes developed for a general audience by members of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group: Brendan Larvor, Peter Cave and Prof. Richard Norman: To make a booking or for more information about dates, tutors and further details on course content, please email [email protected] or call 020 7061 6744 or look up www.conwayhall.org.uk/courses 2 Ethical Record, March 2012 MORAL THEORY FOR NATURALISTS Catherine Wilson Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Aberdeen Lecture to the Ethical Society, 19 February 2012 A certain myth is lodged in many people’s minds. It recounts how, in 1859 Charles Darwin induced a crisis by presenting compelling arguments for the evolution of plants and animals and proposing that humans had descended from ape-like forebears. According to the myth, a catastrophe was unleashed. With Divine Creation and so Heaven and Hell rejected, there was no basis for morality. All was permitted. If slavery, polygamy, infanticide, warfare, and racism were accepted by your culture, that was your morality and it was fine. No wonder, say the tellers of the tale, that today people behave worse than ever and are confused. There are many reasons to disbelieve this account. The problem of bad behavior – fraud and cozening, raping and pillaging, pick pocketing, and the seduction of innocent maidens, along with moral uncertainty — have always been with us even in the supposedly pious ages. Second, it was never true that the Christian theory of morals was the only one going. Third, the natural origins and the transformation of species had been actively discussed since the early 1700s, and philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith had already developed secular theories of morality. But the Darwinian revolution is important. How can we understand morality from a naturalistic, post-Darwinian perspective? How is it related to the behavioural instincts and impulses that are the results of tens of millions of years of evolution? And how can beliefs and practices be evaluated? I will try today to suggest some lines of thought on this question. The Origin of ‘Conscience’ Darwin himself was fascinated by the origins of what he called ‘conscience’ or the moral sense, which he discussed in Chapter 5 of The Descent of Man. Group- living animals, we now know, possess the capacity to form alliances, to categorize others as mates, friends, enemies, leaders and subordinates. They also may also punish offenders, or engage in acts of relationship repair, mediating fights or expressing contrition for harming others. Empathy and sympathy are deeply-rooted in human psychology. Where apes share food in response to begging, perform favours for one another, come to one another’s assistance, humans offer food, and perform numerous tasks co-operatively including hunting, building, and cooking, and child-minding. They care for their children even when these children, by reason of some misfortune, are exceedingly unlikely to have children of their own; they risk their lives to save others from drowning or fires. For a long time, the notion that every animal is, in Richard Dawkins’ phrase, a ‘survival machine’ seemed to make the conclusion that a human being is disposed to do anything to advance his or her own chances of survival and maximum reproduction. We now understand that selfish genes can build unselfish animals for their, the genes, benefit. It can be better for your genes to Ethical Record, March 2012 3 have two children and care for them properly so that they will have children of their own rather than 10 children whom you ignore all of whom die of starvation. Patterns of reciprocity and mutual aid can develop that make selfishness a losing evolutionary strategy. Our evolutionary history can account for the origins of feelings of duty, obligation, and guilt, without appealing to supersensible entities and states such as God, the soul, the life to come. But naturalism still seems to leave all moral beliefs and practices on the same footing. While all cultures have rules about who can have sex with whom and about what sort of interpersonal violence are allowed, and while there is some overlap, these codes varies from culture to culture as facial features, dress, architecture, and manners vary from culture to culture. We may admire some forms more than others, but these preferences don’t seem to correspond to objective judgements. So is there any escape from moral relativism? First, note that our moral obligations and prohibitions arise from the ability to see that particular actions and conditions are better for other people and animals than the alternatives. What makes them moral is that they imply that effort or sacrifice of some sort is being made in order to prevent harm. When the chimpanzee described by Franz de Waal climbed a tree with a stunned bird and attempted to launch it by spread its wings and dropping it, it was acting from a moral motive, taking trouble to try to improve another animal’s condition. Shifting from Subjective to More Objective What then is moral knowledge? A moral truth is a realization about a better alternative that you could come to on the basis of information and reflection, from which you could not retreat on the basis of more information and more reflection. In this way it is analogous to a scientific discovery. It is true that oxygen and not phlogiston is the principle of combustion because information derived from experiment and reflection will lead you from the phlogiston theory to the oxygen theory, but not from oxygen to phlogiston. Existing accounts of moral progress cite the shift from subjective to more objective perspectives, or from indifference to greater empathy with others, or both.