Secular Moralism

I found this essay by Andrew Koppelman interesting. He is reviewing a book by a Catholic philosopher who thinks that, deep down, it is not possible to care about human rights without believing in god. Koppelman's answer is that whatever the results of philosophy, it simply is possible to be an agnostic worker for human rights. Perhaps agnostics have no defensible basis for their belief that people should be free and fed, but then nobody has a defensible reason for belief in god, either. To Koppelman (and to me) all moral systems have components of invention and faith. Religion solves no moral problems, it just changes the problem from "why do you care about other people?" to "why do you believe in god and how do you know what he wants?"

Koppelman:

Wherever you situate yourself in this landscape, your view of the moral universe won’t—and can’t be—a neat, closed system with all the loose ends tidied up. Recognizing this can inoculate us against two related errors: One is to think that we have all the answers. The other, perhaps even more malign, is to be too confident of what the other fellow’s beliefs entail: that his or her “belief in God produces fanaticism” or “atheism leads to immorality.” . . . We’re all stumbling around in the dark, grabbing as much of the elephant as we can. It is unseemly to mock one another’s shortsightedness. Taylor’s book does a wonderful job of elucidating the predicament that is, at the deepest level, what unites us.