AAI Copenhagen 2010: A.C. Grayling - The Ethical Aspect of Atheism [3/5]

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The Ethical Aspect of Atheism

There are two different ways in which a non-theistic view of the world has ethical implications. One is that it is a feature of the ethics of rationality that one's outlook should be maximally evidence-based and truth-directed, thus ruling out supernaturalistic explanations or interpretations (as e.g. thinking that there must be tree spirits or Norse gods to take responsibilty for such phenomena as, respectively, the whispering sound of leaves and thunder among the clouds - but in particular ruling out god-of-the-gaps "explanations" and the legitimacy of acts of faith as justifications for belief).

The second is that people require moral and 'spiritual' resources - these jointly constituting the ethical aspect of life - and one reason for the continuation of religious belief is that the religions have successfully hijacked control of these matters. So a humanistic ethics must regain its voice on these dimensions of human life, not least by reminding people of, and promoting, the rich inheritance of thinking about such matters in the long secular tradition since classical antiquity.

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About A.C. Grayling:

Professor Grayling has written and edited over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are Ideas That Matter, Liberty in the Age of Terror and To Set Prometheus Free.

For several years he wrote for The Guardian and now writes a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to among others the Literary Review, the Observer, and the Independent on Sunday and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio. He writes the Thinking Read column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine. In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society.

He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He is a Trustee of the London Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Booker Prize judge, and in 2010 is a judge of the Art Fund prize group.