AOF Activities & Events

So you're secular, that's great. Take a bow. That's enough, sit down. Now ask yourself, why be moral? Why care for others?

Religious believers often attack the secular community on just this, the idea that irreligion means no ground for morality. And sometimes in reply secularists ... change the subject.

In fact, a good deal of empirical evidence shows secular societies do tend to be kinder, more ethical, and more benevolent. Like Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Estonia, Japan. But exceptions exist. What of Pol Pot, Stalin, or Red China? And a theoretical framework for secular morality has proven elusive, a bit like nailing down jello.

Facing this question, even old Bertrand Russell threw in the towel, famously quipping, "I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it.”

In the 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod used computer simulations to show how normative moral rules, sharing the features of human moral codes, must naturally evolve in any social context over time. But (kicker here): the evolved moral rules had distasteful features. They depend, for example, on a balance of power, the strong crushing the weak. Much like what we see in nature, or in Roller Derby. And not exactly the kind of moral code we'd like. (Is it?)

Now Ron Garret graciously visits to offer a coherent model for a secular moral code defensible from a scientific point of view, and is also aligned with humanistic ideas of simple kindness. His proposed framework, “idea-ism” (a pun on the word “idealism”), was inspired by Richard Dawkins’s proposal, introduced in his seminal 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” that memes or ideas are replicating entities subject to Darwinian evolution, much like genes. Ron Garret argues that this idea ought to be taken even more seriously than Dawkins himself took it, and that it leads to a moral code that has all of the features that modern secular communities tend to gravitate towards naturally. As such, it can serve as a principled answer to the faith-based critique of secular morality.

A bit about Ron Garret, Ph.D. He is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, angel investor, blogger, filmmaker, and non-believer in unicorns (an a-unicornist). His Google tech talk, “The quantum conspiracy: what popularizers of quantum mechanics don’t want you to know”, has over a million views on YouTube.

This is another standup presentation of the AOF Speaker Series. We had to say that. We had to brag.