Religious vs. secular morality
Justin Thrift, Editorial Page Editor
Issue date: 2/17/10 Section: Editorials and Opinion
Nobody is capable of proving the benefits (or side effects) of organized religion.
Most people, religious or not, accept that a difference in opinion between the devout and secular will forever more probe unanswerable questions about human existence. But is it unreasonable to place the source of human morality outside the realm of these unbounded questions? That the ethics of atheists can be just as moral as those of churchgoers?
This is exactly the proposal behind newly published research. The study comes from Harvard University's Dr. Marc Hauser along with Dr. Ilkka Pyysiäinen from the University of Helsinki in Finland. Their research, which was recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, claims that "individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios," regardless of their religious backgrounds.
The researchers found that while nearly all religions provide moral codes that can succeed in organizing society, people with no religious background still display strong intuitive judgments of right and
wrong in line with the pious.
This is fairly logical research: If someone does not prescribe to the traditions and teachings of an organized church, there is no reason why good morals should not be intuitive in their social behavior. If this research was not true, then any person not exposed to a religious upbringing would be unable to distinguish between right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized. The threshold of what makes a person good and bad would be mutually exclusive to the religiously involved.
This, we know, is not the case in society.
The team analyzed multiple psychological experiments in order to test individuals' moral inclinations. One study explained in the essay was a Web-based survey of thousands of male and female subjects with broad political views, levels of intelligence, ages and vastly different amounts of religious experience. Subjects were asked to read and judge "the moral permissibility of an action on a seven point scale (where 1=forbidden, 4=permissible, 7=obligatory)." As Hauser and Pyysiäinen convey in their essay, the research repeatedly shows that the "pattern of moral judgments" of subjects with religious backgrounds does not widely
Most people, religious or not, accept that a difference in opinion between the devout and secular will forever more probe unanswerable questions about human existence. But is it unreasonable to place the source of human morality outside the realm of these unbounded questions? That the ethics of atheists can be just as moral as those of churchgoers?
This is exactly the proposal behind newly published research. The study comes from Harvard University's Dr. Marc Hauser along with Dr. Ilkka Pyysiäinen from the University of Helsinki in Finland. Their research, which was recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, claims that "individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios," regardless of their religious backgrounds.
The researchers found that while nearly all religions provide moral codes that can succeed in organizing society, people with no religious background still display strong intuitive judgments of right and
wrong in line with the pious.
This is fairly logical research: If someone does not prescribe to the traditions and teachings of an organized church, there is no reason why good morals should not be intuitive in their social behavior. If this research was not true, then any person not exposed to a religious upbringing would be unable to distinguish between right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized. The threshold of what makes a person good and bad would be mutually exclusive to the religiously involved.
This, we know, is not the case in society.
The team analyzed multiple psychological experiments in order to test individuals' moral inclinations. One study explained in the essay was a Web-based survey of thousands of male and female subjects with broad political views, levels of intelligence, ages and vastly different amounts of religious experience. Subjects were asked to read and judge "the moral permissibility of an action on a seven point scale (where 1=forbidden, 4=permissible, 7=obligatory)." As Hauser and Pyysiäinen convey in their essay, the research repeatedly shows that the "pattern of moral judgments" of subjects with religious backgrounds does not widely
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