Six Ethics: A Rights-Based Approach to Establishing an Objective Common Morality

Christian Volz

Description

New Book Addresses Crippling Nature of Irrational Belief in the 21st Century

Christian Volz's Six Ethics takes both a philosophical and a pragmatic approach to addressing the dangers posed by irrational belief, and proposes a framework for creating a legal and social environment where rationality and spirituality might be reconciled.

In the 21st century, as international business continues to expand and the Internet and other means of global communications, as well as immigration, continue to bring people from different cultures and groups into contact, individuals need to be prepared to live side-by-side with others who have very different belief systems as well as be self-aware of the sources and principles of their own beliefs. Six Ethics: A Rights-Based Approach to Establishing an Objective Common Morality is the result of author Christian Volz's quest to understand the nature of belief and the relationship of beliefs and ethics in the face of 21st century issues.

Volz explains that the late nineteenth century intellectual revolution known as modernism is characterized by the maturing of the concepts of human rights, civil liberties, personal freedoms and, most especially, the constituents of essential human dignity. This new, modern approach has defined these concepts based on science and the cumulative history of human ethics guided by reason and compassion, and has largely enshrined them in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"I believe," Volz says, "that there is a dangerous underestimation of the peril posed to the world's democratic societies and institutions by religious radicals and fundamentalists, of all stripes, who believe that they retain the moral authority to selectively edit these evolved concepts of human rights and dignity. Many conservative people of faith continue to reject science and reason as the basis whereby we measure, evaluate, and make decisions about the material world and the temporal relations among human beings, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of our planet. If we are to effectively counter these religious, authoritarian-conservative movements, it is helpful to understand how we got to where we are."

Citing numerous contemporary and historical sources—from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville—Six Ethics addresses a broad range of topics, interrelated by their essential relationship to human dignity and rights. These include: the origins and development of ethical, religious and scientific thought; how otherwise rational people can be so easily seduced to embrace irrational beliefs and the societal consequences when they do so; and why anyone believes anything. In doing so, he touches on many fields of study, including a consideration of genetic, psychological, sociological and political influences upon how people think within the context of a group.

Six Ethics proposes what Volz refers to as Rational Progressivism as a framework within which societies might advance toward genuine equality and true freedom of conscience for a diverse population.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Ethics
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 17 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456606916
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2014 Christian Robert Volz, Jr.
All rights reserved.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0691-6
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
Appendices A, B and C have been reprinted with the permission of the Human Rights Library at the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center — http://www.hrcenter.umn.edu
“Nothing which breathes, which exists, which lives, or which has essence or potential of life, should be destroyed or ruled over, or subjugated, or harmed, or denied of its essence or potential.
“In support of this Truth, I ask you a question – ‘Is sorrow or pain desirable to you?’ If you say ‘yes it is’, it would be a lie. If you say, ‘No, It is not’ you will be expressing the truth. Just as sorrow or pain is not desirable to you, so it is to all which breathe, exist, live or have any essence of life. To you and to all creation, it is undesirable, and painful, and repugnant.”
—Jainism, The Acaranga Sutra
 
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
—Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Gilmer, 1816
 
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty , 1859
Foreword
 
 
I retired in 2002. At the time, I would often get together with a friend of mine who was generally more conservative than I was on most major issues; he had retired from the same company at the same time and we had spent many hours over several years discussing and debating current topics of all kinds. He knew that I was not a religious person, and he was certainly not a religious zealot; but one morning he began talking about a young relative of his who was excited to have been accepted at one of the most prominent fundamentalist Protestant Christian universities in the nation. He knew that I had attended school in the same southern city and asked me what I thought about the choice. Fortunately for me, the fundamentalist school had been founded the year I graduated so I had a good excuse for not passing judgment.
The truth is I was disturbed by the choice but I wanted to avoid a topic that had the potential to derail an otherwise productive and friendly relationship. On the other hand, I began to ask myself how I would respond if he or anyone else challenged me to discuss my own beliefs. What were they? Or, perhaps more to the point—did I actually have a belief system that I could articulate? Clearly, this was a situation that many who identify as persons of faith would never be faced with.
What did I believe in? I knew I was passionate about what I thought of as ethics and morality, but having vigorously rejected several traditional and commonly held Judeo-Christian moral precepts, on what precisely did I base my concepts of ethics and morals? I also knew that I hated hypocrisy and considered the sexual, economic, social or spiritual exploitation of one person or group by another to be among the greatest of moral wrongs.
For several years I was distracted by other projects, although the challenge was always in the back of my mind and I occasionally wrote essays to myself on various subjects like democracy, human rights, ethics and religion in general. Finally, in mid-2007, I began to get serious and to keep versioned copies of the various threads of thought to eventually compile into a coherent statement of principles, if not of belief, as such.
When I first tried to write down what I believe, I found that I automatically tended to focus on what I didn’t believe and my justification for skepticism or—in some cases—contempt. Remnants of this attempt are scattered throughout the following work, most notably in Section II, under the heading “Ethical Agnosticism,” and in Section XIII. My thoughts returned to the issues of human rights, civil liberties, war and peace.
Having been a student of the social sciences—majoring in sociology and political science but with some background in psychology as well—I decided to begin at the beginning: “Why does anyone believe anything?” I began a serious search for the most current, authoritative and relevant sources in the disciplines of religion and religious history, the origins of religious and ethical thought, genetic influences, the influence of science and modernism, evolved concepts of the individual and of human rights, etc. I concentrated on the historical and continually shifting intellectual boundary between revealed truth and deductive truth; and, specifically, on where the major religions of the world drew that boundary. More than a third of what follows is dedicated to an exploration of how the current major world religions relate to reason, modernism and an evolving contemporary understanding of the individual, human rights and human dignity; and how the beliefs of those religions have transformed the political landscape both in the United States and worldwide.
I have confirmed to myself that I am not a person of faith; at least insofar as that is understood to be a willingness to subjugate one’s reason to rationally unsubstantiable religious convictions. When faced with a set of circumstances having multiple possible outcomes, I will consistently go with the probability presented by the preponderance of evidence. When forced to make a decision where insufficient evidence exists, I will go with whatever outcome most closely mirrors my own worldview—with no delusions that the decision is anything other than an educated and hopeful guess. Finally, when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, I am more than simply willing to change my position; I consider such a change a fundamental constituent of intellectual integrity. I do not pretend to know what cannot be proved and I can prove neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God. My personal answer to this dilemma is to postulate that each individual has the freedom to determine the nature of his relationship with what Aldous Huxley calls the “divine Reality,” 1 while humanity as a whole is responsible for determining right and wrong, good and evil, in the context of the interactions among human beings. This is, of course, essentially a humanist approach.
While I was not surprised to find that fundamental or radical people of faith believe that their revealed truths transcend mere human reason, I was stunned to discover how far many will go to denigrate reason, logic and the scientific method—and those who employ them—in an effort to reinforce the validity of their own beliefs; sometimes going so far as to actually define human reason as Satan’s tool to misdirect the faithful from an orthodox understanding of God’s revealed truth. This brought me to a variation on my original question: “Why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or non-rational 2 beliefs?”
I have not spent my life in academia studying these questions and issues and, therefore, the following is, at a minimum, presumptuous. At the same time, however, my lack of formal academic credentials imparts something of a detachment from any individual academic discipline. I knew, at least, that I had the intellectual skills to identify and evaluate sources, that I was an educated and informed generalist and—based on my life and work experience—I assumed for myself an ability to synthesize information from many disciplines into one cogent exploration of a topic. Once I had decided to try and articulate my beliefs I was faced with the choice of following through and leaving myself fairly open to a charge of being intellectually or academically way beyond my depth, or of failing to follow through and judge myself, at best, an intellectual failure and, at worst, an intellectual coward. I chose to make the attempt.
The inherent strength of the generalist is that he or she can comprehend, integrate and articulate widely divergent concepts from a broad range of scientific and intellectual disciplines. Concepts that are related and can be built into an intellectual whole that is not necessarily obvious to individual specialists due to the narrower limitations of their professional perspectives. What follows is not a statement of belief; it is a proposed approach to developing a universal standard for public morality and ethics and a justification for that approach. It draws upon and synthesizes both facts and well-defended theories and hypotheses from genetic, religious and cultural anthropology; biology, psychology and sociology; game theory; political science, economics and history; and, of course, religious beliefs and teachings of all the major faiths.
While I have a forty-year-old double major (BA) in sociology and political science, that hardly qualifies me as an authority in either field, much less in the spectrum of the other specialties referenced. My method has been to locate the most authoritative experts in each discipline, individuals who have already done the required research among their primary sources. Since I would not have had the expertise, resources or time to do my own research for so many disciplines, I sought out the most highly regarded scholars whose writings included both original work and what academics