morality without religion
Reply #35 - December 05, 2013, 08:04 PM
Just shooting the shit here with some of my thoughts about the Islamic (or any theistic) ethical code and why it is perceived by some to be superior to a purely secular one.
The important thing in judging the efficacy of a voluntary ethical code is to gain an understanding of their purpose, and to gain such an understanding one has to recognize why they would be promoted by self-interested individuals in a competitive environment. The general hypothesis from rationalist sorts seems to be that a voluntarily set of individually altruistic communal ethics would evolve in order to improve the fitness of the group that subscribed to it, ie group selection. However the obvious problem with this model is that it fails to recognize that at an individual level one would gain a selective advantage simply by not restricting oneself to the ethical code.
The alternative, and imo, much more compelling hypothesis about such ethical systems would be that they are promoted to bolster individual fitness. The way that this would occur is by their effect of placing constraints on the behaviors of others. If one looks at the history of religions, one can see that this is clearly the modus operandi of religious traditions throughout history, including Islam. For example, Islam places arbitrary restrictions on the expression of human sexuality. It should be obvious how the promotion of such a doctrine on others could increase one's individual fitness.
Thus once one understands that the extremely arbitrary prohibitions of Islamic doctrine were not designed to restrict the individual proscribing them, one can recognize why these individuals can see no morality in a secular ethical framework, for example humanism. It simply hasn't had the same long history of enforcing arbitrary constraints on human behavior that religion has, and thus has no use for such individuals.