Do you need religion to be a moral person?
Harvey Whitehouse,
Big Think,
Aug 30, 2024
Those who know me know I would answer "no" to the question in the title, because I believe that I (mostly) serve as a counterexample. But where then do ethics and morality come from. For the author (who is using this post to promote a book) the answer is 'cooperation', and he lists a set of 'universal' moral principles: "More specifically, seven principles of cooperation are judged to be morally good everywhere and form the bedrock of a universal moral compass. Those seven principles are: help your kin, be loyal to your group, reciprocate favors, be courageous, defer to superiors, share things fairly, and respect other people's property." How did he arrive at these (which I would adjudge to not be universal). "To qualify for inclusion, each society had to have been the subject of at least 1,200 pages of descriptive data pertaining to its cultural system." So what we have here, in my view, is morality as expressed by an established power based. But seriously - defer to superiors? reciprocate favours? No. That's not how morality works. Morality - for me - begins with empathy, a sense of ethics, and is not governed by any sort of universal principles but varies on a case by case basis.
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