Chapter Three The Challenge of Secularism to Philosophical Ethics

Abstract

Our symposium has had as its theme, “Ethics and the Challenges of Secularism.” Secularism, the sense that religious unbelief is the default option, is of central concern for ethics because despite claims to the contrary, it is not clear that a “thick” and robust ethic can stand alone apart from religious foundations, as in the case of Kantian deontology and its “postulates of practical reason,” or else more casually in the everyday moral intuitions by which most people live, but which are based on religious sensibilities handed down from the past. The alternatives seem to be either an unsatisfying, minimalist ethics of consent (I agree not to kill you without your consent if you agree not to kill me against my will) or else a utilitarianism of acts that leads to abhorrent conclusions.

This brief essay was presented as one of two concluding reflections to the conference, “Ethics and the Challenge of Secularism: Russian and Western Perspectives,” held May 25-26, 2012, at the University of Notre Dame. The conference, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, was sponsored by the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Theological Commission of the Moscow Patriarchate, and hosted by the Center for Ethics and Culture and the Philosophy Department, University of Notre Dame. It was composed on site, without reference materials on hand, and it is reproduced here as written, with only minor modifications.