Morality Without Religion by Peter Singer and Marc Hauser

[One] problem is that there are no moral principles shared by all religious people (disregarding their specific religious membership) but no agnostics and atheists. This observation leads to a second: atheists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious believers, even if their virtuous acts are mediated by different principles. They often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, including involvement in movements to abolish slavery and contribute to relief efforts associated with human suffering. The converse is also true: religion has led people to commit a long litany of horrendous crimes, from God’s command to Moses to slaughter the Midianites, men, women, boys and non-virginal girls, through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, innumerable conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Moslems, and terrorists who blow themselves up in the confident belief that they are going straight to paradise.

[Another] difficulty for the view that morality has its origin in religion is that despite the sharp doctrinal differences between the world’s major religions, and for that matter cultures like ancient China in which religion has been less significant than philosophical outlooks like Confucianism, some elements of morality seem to be universal. One view is that a divine creator handed us the universal bits at the moment of creation. The alternative, consistent with the facts of biology and geology, is that we have evolved, over millions of years, a moral faculty that generates intuitions about right and wrong. For the first time, research in the cognitive sciences, building on theoretical arguments emerging from moral philosophy, has made it possible to resolve the ancient dispute about the origin and nature of morality.

Consider the following three scenarios. For each, fill in the blank with morally “obligatory”, “permissible” or “forbidden.”

1. A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking
   on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch
   that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person,
   but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is _____.

2. You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond and
you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will
survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is
_____.

3. Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical
care, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough
time to request organs from outside the hospital. There is,
however, a healthy person in the hospital’s waiting room. If
the surgeon takes this person’s organs, he will die but the
five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person’s
organs is _____.

If you judged case 1 as permissible, case 2 as obligatory, and case 3 as forbidden, then you are like the 1500 subjects around the world who responded to these dilemmas on our web-based moral sense test [http://moral.wjh.edu]. On the view that morality is God’s word, atheists should judge these cases differently from people with religious background and beliefs, and when asked to justify their responses, should bring forward different explanations. For example, since atheists lack a moral compass, they should go with pure self-interest, and walk by the drowning baby. Results show something completely different. There were no statistically significant differences between subjects with or without religious backgrounds, with approximately 90% of subjects saying that it is permissible to flip the switch on the boxcar, 97% saying that it is obligatory to rescue the baby, and 97% saying that is forbidden to remove the healthy man’s organs. . When asked to justify why some cases are permissible and others forbidden, subjects are either clueless or offer explanations that can not account for the differences in play. Importantly, those with a religious background are as clueless or
incoherent as atheists.

These studies begin to provide empirical support for the idea that like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong, interacting in interesting ways with the local culture. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social mammals, and are part of our common inheritance, as much as our opposable thumbs are. These facts are incompatible with the story of divine creation.

The full article is here.

Excerpt from Chapter VI (Beginnings of Scientific Technique) of The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell

“We are accustomed, in our own day, to protests against the empire of machinery and eloquent yearnings for a return to a simpler day. In all this there is nothing new. Lao-Tze, who preceded Confucius and lived (if he lived at all) in the sixth century B.C., is just as eloquent as Ruskin on the subject of the destruction of ancient beauty by modern mechanical inventions. Roads and bridges and boats filled him with horror because they were unnatural. He speaks of music as modern high-brows speak of the cinema. He finds the hurry of modern life fatal to the contemplative outlook. When he could bear it no longer he left China, and disappeared among the Western barbarians. He believed that men should live according to nature — a view which is continually recurring throughout the ages, though always with a different connotation. Rousseau also believed in the return to nature, but no longer objected to roads and bridges and boats. It was Courts and late hours and the sophisticated pleasures of the rich that roused his ire. The sort of man that seemed to him an unspoiled child of nature would have seemed to Lao-Tze incredibly different from those that he calls ‘the pure men of old.’ Lao-Tze objects to the taming of horses, and to the arts of the potter and carpenter; to Rousseau the carpenter would seem the very epitome of honest toil. ‘Return to nature’ means, in practice, return to those conditions to which the writer in question was accustomed in his youth. Return to nature, if it were taken seriously, would involve the death by starvation of some 90 per cent of the population of civilized countries. Industrialism as it exists at the present day undoubtedly has grave difficulties, but they are not to be cured by a return to the past, any more than were the difficulties from which China suffered in the time of Lao-Tze, or France in the time of Rousseau.

Science as knowledge advanced very rapidly throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that it began to affect the technique of production. There was less change in methods of work from Ancient Egypt to 1750 than there has been from 1750 to the present day. Certain fundamental advances had been slowly acquired: speech, fire, writing, agriculture, the domestication of animals, the working of metals, gunpowder, printing, and the art of governing a large empire from a centre, though this last could not attain anything like its present perfection before the invention of the telegraph and steam locomotion. Each of these advances, because it came slowly, was fitted in, without too much difficulty, to the framework of traditional life, and men were at no point conscious of a revolution in their daily habits. Almost all the things that an adult man wished to speak about had been familiar to him as a child, and to his father and grandfather before him. This had, undoubtedly, certain good effects which have become lost through the rapid technical progress of modern times. The poet could speak of contemporary life in words that had become rich through long usage, and full of colour through the embedded emotions of past ages. Nowadays he must either ignore contemporary life or fill his poems with words that are stark and harsh. It is possible, in poetry, to write a letter, but difficult to speak over the telephone; it is possible to listen to Lydian airs, but not to the radio; it is possible to ride like the wind upon a fiery steed, but difficult, in any known metre, to go much faster than the wind in an automobile. The poem may wish for wings to fly to his love, but feels rather foolish in doing so when he remembers that he could order an aeroplane at Croydon.

…The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next, and there are still wide fields, notably that of religion, into which the experimental spirit has hardly penetrated at all. Nevertheless it is this spirit which is characteristic of modern times as contrasted with all earlier ages, and it is because of this spirit that the power of man in relation to his environment has become, during the last hundred and fifty years, so immeasurably greater than it was in the civilization of the past.”

The full book can be found here.