Kitcher on what secular ethics can learn from religion

“Religion is not something that is merely a matter of belief, but is something for life,” said philosopher Philip Kitcher, paraphrasing Tolstoy at the start of his lecture on what secular ethicists can learn from religion. During the talk, delivered at the Humanities Center on April 30th and sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Kitcher used Tolstoy’s insight as a way of introducing a program which he called secular humanism, which seeks to develop nothing less than an “alternative framework for life.” 

This ambitious program attempts to respond to what Kitcher sees as a dilemma: how is it possible to build strong communities without a religious basis? “Secular humanism really needs serious work,” Kitcher admitted, citing the “breakdown of community structures” as a problem to which secular humanism must respond.  Secular humanism ought to recognize the historical success of religion in the area of community-building and it ought to construct secular replacements for the best aspects of religion, he said. 

According to Kitcher, both religious and secular ethics share a basis in a social dilemma: we are creatures of limited responsiveness who nevertheless want to be social.  Kitcher sees rules about ethical conduct as a collective attempt to navigate the conflicts that arise when limited animals engage in complex and demanding group behavior. The need to regulate our conduct and work out conflicting demands provides the basic motivation for human ethical development.

Kitcher was most interested in finding areas where religious and secular ethics could overlap. Still, he rejected the idea of appealing to a “transcendent realm” or any source of authority which surpasses the here-and-now in order to build community and resolve conflict. The rejection of transcendent authority distinguishes secular humanism from “refined religion,” a position which advocates finding secular re-interpretations of the notion of transcendence. The “transcendent is a distraction,” Kitcher said. “Horizontal relations among individuals and in society is what matters.”

While Kitcher was critical of appeals to the transcendent, he also distanced himself from the kind of hard-line atheism of “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. “I’m a soft atheist,” Kitcher joked, “I have said a lot of harsh things about religious doctrine, but I am not Richard Dawkins.” 

One of the major differences between Kitcher’s perspective and the New Atheist position is Kitcher’s focus on the beneficial aspects of religion. For Kitcher, religion is a successful model of how to build community. From this perspective religious leaders are “conversation openers” who are adept at “introducing new forms of conversation” about ethical life. They may not be a source of ethical authority, but they are people who managed to come up with novel insights into the problem of humans’ limited responsiveness to the ethical demands of group life.

One common challenge to secular humanism is the belief that only a divine authority can provide certainty moral codes. But Kitcher countered that human-created ethical beliefs can possess a form of objectivity. On his account, truth or objectivity can be ascribed to stable elements of ethical doctrines that most people share: for example, the belief that we should care about the suffering of those around us, or that we should refrain from killing other humans. 

Although he maintained that ethical beliefs can be objective, Kitcher also claimed that there is no single perfect ethical system. Beliefs about how to overcome the problem of limited responsiveness and obtain a more just society are constantly evolving, and so “the ethical project is a collective project, always unfinished.” 

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  Maya Krishnan is an undergraduate philosophy major.