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 IV (The Humanitarian Revolution: Superstitious Killing: Human Sacrifice, Witchcraft, and Blood Libel) from The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

“Witch hunts are always vulnerable to common sense. Objectively speaking, it is impossible for a woman to fly on a broomstick or to turn a man into a cat, and these facts are not too hard to demonstrate if enough people are allowed to compare notes and question popular beliefs. Throughout the Middle Ages there were scattered clerics and politicians who pointed out the obvious, namely that there is no such thing as a witch, and so persecuting someone for witchcraft was a moral abomination. (Unfortunately, some of these skeptics ended up in the torture chambers themselves.) These voices became more prominent during the Age of Reason, and included influential writers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Hobbes.

Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime; he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being tortured again. (Today this experiment would not be approved by committees for the protection of human subjects in research.) The judge then abolished the use of torture in his court. The writer Daniel Mannix recounts another demonstration:

‘The Duke of Brunswick in Germany was so shocked by the methods used by Inquisitors in his duchy that he asked two famous Jesuit scholars to supervise the hearings. After a careful study the Jesuits told the Duke, “The Inquisitors are doing their duty. They are arresting only people who have been implicated by the confession of other witches.”

“Come with me to the torture chamber,” suggested the Duke. The priests followed him to where a wretched woman was being stretched on the rack. “Let me question her,” suggested the Duke. “Now woman, you are a confessed witch. I suspect these two men of being warlocks. What do you say? Another turn of the rack, executioners.”

“No, no!” screamed the woman. “You are quite right. I have often seen them at the Sabbat. They can turn themselves into goats, wolves, and other animals.”

“What else do you know about them?” demanded the Duke.

“Several witches have had children by them. One woman even had eight children whom these men fathered. The children had heads like toads and legs like spiders.”

The Duke turned to the astonished Jesuits. “Shall I put you to the torture until you confess, my friends?”‘

One of the Jesuits, Father Friedrich Spee, was so impressed that he wrote a book in 1631 that has been credited with ending witchcraft accusations in much of Germany. The persecution of witches began to subside during the 17th century, when several European states abolished it. The year 1716 was the last time a woman was hanged as a witch in England, and 1749 was the last year a woman was burned as a witch anywhere in Europe.

In most of the world, institutionalized superstitious killing, whether in human sacrifice, blood libel, or witch persecution, has succumbed to two pressures. One is intellectual: the realization that some events, even those with profound personal significance, must be attributed to impersonal physical forces and raw chance rather than the designs of other conscious beings. A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with ‘Love thy neighbor’ and ‘All men are created equal,’ is the one on the bumper sticker: ‘Shit happens.’ The other pressure is harder to explain but just as forceful: an increased valuation of human life and happiness.”

The full book can be found here.