Speaking at a 2005 American Enterprise Institute conference on The New Neuromorality, University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephen Morse argued that neuroscience will have little impact on our moral and criminal responsibility practices.
While the words "spiritual" and “spirituality” have supernatural connotations for many, they are widely used to refer to the domain of ultimate existential concerns that engage all of us, eventually. Our approach to these concerns need have nothing to do with the supernatural. Instead, the realization that human beings and their emotions, thoughts, desires and actions are empirically “at one with the universe” can ground a naturalistic, non-dualist spirituality, one that generates wonder, compassion, gratitude, and acceptance.
This section is devoted to various sallies at naturalizing morality, understanding that morality involves inherently normative questions in addition to the factual questions addressed by science. There are no pat scientific, empirical answers to questions about how we should treat one another, or what constitutes human flourishing. Nevertheless, by subtracting supernaturalist foundations for ethics, and by staying true to the facts as evidenced by science, worldview naturalism opens the door to more realistic, if improvable, answers to these questions.
Although Haughness claims that I was attacking a straw man in "Humanism and Postmodernism," his response to it is a good example of the foundationalist sentiment within humanism that I wanted to critique.
Humanism is often characterized as a secular alternative to religion in our quest for a good, moral, and self-fulfilling life. Much space in humanist publications is devoted to exposing the internal contradictions of theistic philosophies and their negative social and personal consequences, while extolling the virtues of doing without the belief in God, spirit, the afterlife, and other standard religious assumptions.
We have no choice but to live our lives from the standpoint of value. As sentient beings we embody a network of needs, desires, preferences, and long term goals which determine the course of action, and we cannot, even for an instant, step completely outside this network. Even if we decide to question our preferences, or to evaluate them, we do this from the standpoint of yet other preferences which act as a standard for evaluation. The very desire to conduct such an inquiry expresses commitment to a value, that of self-understanding.
Atheism - disbelief in God (the Judeo-Christian-Muslim deity) or any sort of supernatural god or gods - is a direct conclusion or corollary of naturalism. The articles in this section place atheism in the broader context of naturalism, suggesting that atheists might profitably expand their horizons beyond mere disbelief into a positive endorsement of a naturalistic worldview. Atheists strongly identifying as such, or those not in a market for a comprehensive worldview, will decline this invitation, which is fine. Naturalism isn't for everyone.
Although post-modernism is rightly criticized for its claim that science is simply a white, male, Western privileging of certain culturally-bound discourses, the anti-foundationalist turn in philosophy is congenial to science and naturalism. The articles in this section take an anti-foundationalist, mildly culturally relativist stance in debates about religion, rationality, morality, and human rights, while respecting science as the arbiter of factual claims about the world.
