Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

CHAPTER 23: HUMANISM

1. “Good without God”: From the 19th century, revived by the Harvard Humanist chaplain Greg Epstein (Epstein 2009). Other recent explanations of humanism: Grayling 2013; Law 2011. History of American Humanism: Jacoby 2005. Major Humanist organizations include the American Humanist Association, https://americanhumanist.org/ and the other members of the Secular Coalition of America, https://www.secular.org/member_orgs; the British Humanist Association (https://humanism.org.uk/); the International Humanist and Ethical Union, http://iheu.org/; and the Freedom from Religion Foundation (www.ffrf.org).

2. Humanist Manifesto III: American Humanist Association 2003. Predecessors: Humanist Manifesto I (mainly by Raymond B. Bragg, 1933), American Humanist Association 1933/1973. Humanist Manifesto II (mainly by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, 1973), American Humanist Association 1973. Other Humanist manifestoes include Paul Kurtz’s Secular Humanist Declaration, Council for Secular Humanism 1980, and Humanist Manifesto 2000, Council for Secular Humanism 2000, and the Amsterdam Declarations of 1952 and 2002, International Humanist and Ethical Union 2002.

3. R. Goldstein, “Speaking Prose All Our Lives,” The Humanist, Dec. 21, 2012, https://thehumanist.com/magazine/january-february-2013/features/speaking-prose-all-our-lives.

4. The rights declarations of 1688, 1776, 1789, and 1948: Hunt 2007.

5. Morality as impartiality: de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2012; Goldstein 2006; Greene 2013; Nagel 1970; Railton 1986; Singer 1981/2010; Smart & Williams 1973. The “impartiality” umbrella was articulated most explicitly by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900).

6. For an exhaustive (if eccentric) list of Golden, Silver, and Platinum rules across cultures and history, see Terry 2008.

7. Evolution explains the existence of mind despite entropy: Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett 2003. Natural selection is the only explanation of nonrandom design: Dawkins 1983.

8. Curiosity and sociality as concomitants of the evolution of intelligence: Pinker 2010; Tooby & DeVore 1987.

9. Evolutionary conflicts of interest within and among people: Pinker 1997/2009, chaps. 6 and 7; Pinker 2002/2016, chap. 14; Pinker 2011, chaps. 8 and 9. Many of these ideas originated with the biologist Robert Trivers (2002).

10. The Pacifist’s Dilemma and the historical decline of violence: Pinker 2011, chap. 10.

11. DeScioli 2016.

12. Evolution of sympathy: Dawkins 1976/1989; McCullough 2008; Pinker 1997/2009; Trivers 2002; Pinker 2011, chap. 9.

13. Expanding circle of sympathy: Pinker 2011; Singer 1981/2010.

14. For example, T. Nagel, “The Facts Fetish (Review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape),” New Republic, Oct. 20, 2010.

15. Utilitarianism, for and against: Rachels & Rachels 2010; Smart & Williams 1973.

16. Compatibility of deontological and consequential meta-ethics: Parfit 2011.

17. Track record of utilitarianism: Pinker 2011, chaps. 4 and 6; Greene 2013.

18. From Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson 1785/1955, p. 159.

19. Unintuitiveness of classical liberalism: Fiske & Rai 2015; Haidt 2012; Pinker 2011, chap. 9.

20. Greene 2013.

21. The importance of philosophical thinness: Berlin 1988/2013; Gregg 2003; Hammond 2017.

22. Hammond 2017.

23. Maritain 1949. Original typescript available at the UNESCO Web site, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001550/155042eb.pdf.

24. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: United Nations 1948. History of the Declaration: Glendon 1999, 2001; Hunt 2007.

25. Quoted in Glendon 1999.

26. Human rights not particularly Western: Glendon 1998; Hunt 2007; Sikkink 2017.

27. R. Cohen, “The Death of Liberalism,” New York Times, April 14, 2016.

28. S. Kinzer, “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” Boston Globe, Dec. 23, 2016.

29. ISIS more appealing than Enlightenment: R. Douthat, “The Islamic Dilemma,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 2015; R. Douthat, “Among the Post-Liberals,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2016; M. Kahn, “This Is What Happens When Modernity Fails All of Us,” New York Times, Dec. 6, 2015; P. Mishra, “The Western Model Is Broken,” The Guardian, Oct. 14, 2014.

30. Universality of proscriptions of murder, rape, and violence: Brown 2000.

31. God as enforcer: Atran 2002; Norenzayan 2015.

32. Fatal flaws in arguments for the existence of God: Goldstein 2010; see also Dawkins 2006 and Coyne 2015.

33. Coyne draws in part on arguments from the astronomer Carl Sagan and the philosophers Yonatan Fishman and Maarten Boudry. For a review, see S. Pinker, “The Untenability of Faitheism,” Current Biology, Aug. 23, 2015, pp. R1–R3.