How Non-Religious People Ground Their Ethics

During the combative New Atheist years of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, another atheist focused on ethical living instead of debate.

If anyone thinks of the New Atheists, they probably think of the most combative atheists with public profiles. One prominent atheist remains lesser known but focuses on the existential questions that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens touched on but didn’t build a career out of.

Greg Epstein is the atheist chaplain at Harvard University. In 2009, he wrote Good Without God, a short explanation of how atheists and the diverse flavors of non-believers find meaning and base morality. In his introduction, Epstein writes:

“…we must become the superintendents of our own lives. Humanism means taking charge of the often lousy world around us and working to shape it into a better place, though we know we cannot ever finish the task.”

It’s a neat summary that is built out in greater detail in the book’s body.

Loss without God

One of the most profound moments of life is its beginning and end. The non-religious response to death is to remember the lost and comfort the living:

“We do not try to paper over the deep wounds by saying, ‘They are with God now.’ We try to comfort one another, to offer hugs, kisses, time, patience, and presence, because no supernatural force can offer these things, and we need them.”

The concrete support that non-religious people like Epstein offer is similar to the community that churches are supposed to create for grieving members. How many people have donated to a fellow churchgoer’s service? Aren’t food drives to remove the burden of preparing meals to make room for grieving familiar to long-time church members? Beliefs may vary across groups, but the responsibility to assist people grieving loved ones remains the same.

People who are the most committed to God as the source of morality may not object to practices of comfort being similar across belief systems. But non-religious chaplains still have to explain what they base their morals on.

The Source of Morality

Many religious people object to the idea that people can be good without submission to a higher power. About a third of Americans believe that belief is an important part of morality.

Epstein quotes German psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm to explain how non-religious people reason through ethics:

“Humanistic ethics, for which ‘good’ is synonymous with good for man and ‘bad’ with bad for man, proposes that in order to know what is good for man we have to know his nature. Humanistic ethics is the applied science of the ‘art of living’ based on the theoretical ‘science of man.’”

Individuals may be different, but they have enough in common that groups can be studied. Georgette Bennett and Jerry White wrote a book called Religicide, a study of crimes committed against people because of their religious beliefs. They covered cases like ISIS killing the Yazidis or China imprisoning and killing Muslim Uhygurs and Tibetan Buddhists.

Their study of the conditions that lead to genocide is only possible because humans can be studied in groups, and behaviors can be predicted.

As for the source of morality, being a good person is a choice someone makes. Morality isn’t handed down from on high. It’s practiced.

Anyone who’s interested in a fuller exploration of morality from a non-religious point of view won’t do much better than Good without God.