How To Be An Agnostic
foundations – be they philosophical or religious – are perceived
as inadequate, undesirable or pernicious.
That religion might be regarded an undesirable basis for ethics
is not hard to understand. It’s not so much that religious beliefs
and passions have historically been implicated in all kinds
of human horror, from war to persecution, though they have.
(Then again, they’ve also been historically implicated in all kinds
of human good.) More subtly, for a plural democracy to function
properly, you need a public moral discourse that is conducted by
reasoned argument, rather than divine fi at: no single group of
individuals, like the religious, can claim to have privileged access
to moral truth. Everyone must be heard, and that means every-
one speaking the same language. Science, today, can look like
it offers such a language. Further, as Mary Warnock has argued
in her book Dishonest To God, if you do tie morality to religion,
and religion becomes a voluntary pursuit, then morality tends to
lose out in public discourse, because people assume that moral
discourse has suffered the same fate too.
When it comes to philosophical foundations for ethics, they
look unattractively problematic as well, not least since they are so
hotly disputed. Broadly speaking, two traditions have dominated
the moral scene in the West since the Enlightenment. A fi rst is
the one preferred by the advocates of happiness, Bentham’s
utilitarianism – only, it’s clear that happiness, though desirable,
is not the right target for our moral aims and is not a big enough
notion to inspire us to be all that we might be; to reach our
potential. It does not make any weighty call on our nature.
The second philosophical tradition focuses on duties and
rights, and while it is of real value, it too ultimately falls short
because duties and rights can’t speak to our full humanity, and
thereby enlarge it: what’s good for us is confl ated with what’s
obligated for us, and while the human animal no doubt needs
to be carefully managed, it’s the spirit that gives life, not the
law. In addition, the demand for rights increasingly sets us at
odds with one another, creating a grievance culture of confl ict-
ing demands and uncaring assertions.