> As a counter-point let me ask a non-religious person,
> what makes an act good?
You might be interested in reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris for an in-depth start at an answer to that question.
It's a secular look at morality and how we can reason about morality without a foundation of unscientific ideas (e.g. the existence of a deity).
In essence it makes the point that the religious idea of morality driven by a god with a big stick in the sky who'll discipline you if you step out of line isn't moral at all, and neither do most religious people actually adhere to it in practice.
E.g. we're not stoning homosexuals or burning witches as we once were, and it's not because the scripture changed, but because of secular progress despite of scripture. How do you decide which instructions to cherry-pick from the Bible or whatever piece of scripture it is you believe in?
He essentially defines an act as "good" if it's a net increase in human happiness and well-being. Burning people to death of persecuting homosexuals, not so much. Looking out for your fellow man so he'll look out for you. Note that this isn't the same thing as reducing morality to hedonism.
Anyway, I'm doing a poor job of paraphrasing the gist of that book so I'll stop. But if you're genuinely interested in what constitutes a good act or moral behavior in the secular sense there's a lot of well-researched and interesting works you can read on the subject.
"He essentially defines an act as "good" if it's a net increase in human happiness and well-being."
John Rawls, one of the foremost liberal philosophers of our time spends the bulk of his most famous book arguing agains that very idea. My take away is that from a secular perspective it is impossible to argue from first principles what is good and bad. It's also obviously not a very strong argument. If there was a tiny country that did dispicable things to it's citizens but it had nuclear weapons, by this argument, the 'good' thing would be to allow those citizens to continue to suffer rather then have the world intervene and potentially be obliterated in a nuclear war. However, the citizen's of that country would still be correct to say that the rest of the world was unjust.
It's not the definition. It's my poor recollection of a book I read over a year ago for the purposes of a HN comment. I'm not trying to establish some all-encompassing holistic definition of morality right here in this comment chain.
I'm just replying to the religious OP (@cmdkeen) that if he's interested in what secular people have to say on the subject of morality there's a lot written on that subject. I found Sam Harris's book on it interesting, but it's certainly not the first or the last word on a secular definition of morality.
Having said that I'll elaborate a bit more on my poor recollection of the book.
> 1. It focuses on human as only a human can be happy.
I think for the purposes of the book, yes, but there's nothing intrinsic about his idea of morality that's isolated to Homo Sapiens. If you wanted to maximize human and canine happiness you could do that too to some degree.
> 2. net increase is relative, so this is relative to the author's life/view of the world.
> 3. Well-being doesn't mean anything. Does he defines it too?
He argues that this largely isn't the case.
The basic idea he's putting forth is that there's actions you can perform which will make people happy (e.g. being nice to them) and sad (e.g. subjecting them to genocide).
Obviously this is not a single-axis spectrum. So he's setting forth the argument that happiness can be attained similarly to how we maximize the performance of a hill-climbing algorithm.
If we were in real-time able to monitor the net happiness of every human (and also animals, if you insist) and tweak our societies so that net happiness would go up we'd arrive at a moral society.
So thus we can say that some societies are more moral than others. E.g. every modern western state would be morally superior to the Mongol empire by this happiness ratio we can say the society is "better", and once we have a metric we can work to maximize happiness in our own societies.
I think the main hole someone who's religious would poke in this would be "but that's not morality, you're just optimizing for hedonism!". I think to some degree that's true, but from what I've read of secular literature on the subject the idea of "morality" is pretty much discredited.
It's based on the notion of absolutes, usually handed down by some deity. Once you get rid of that (because deities don't exist) what do you replace it with? Some combination of "don't do harm" and "let's make everyone happy" most likely.
jdright raises some good points. Which is kind of the point, no-one has come up with a good "right" way to live or act and it is often even harder without a theist grounding to decide on some pretty major points. You can clearly construct ethical philosophies but it is very hard to compare them to others and say whether one is better than another. Especially once you start getting into "brains in vats" territory.
Plus going back to burning witches and stoning homosexuals, really? Firstly there's some really interesting language translation behind "suffer not the witch to live" - in that isn't what it really says. Burning people has to be seen in the context of history and politics.
It isn't about "cherry picking". Different traditions have their basis, I'm not sola scriptorum, the CofE believes in "scripture, reason and tradition". But in all cases it is about looking at scripture as a complex document full of metaphor, stories and allegories. Then making an argument based on that which can be debated, discussed and a conclusion arrived at - and one that can later be decided as perhaps wrong.
What you also need to bear in mind is that significant parts of what Jesus is recorded as saying is pointing out areas of religion where the Jews had become caught up in process or tradition rather than the underlying message.
I'm just giving you a book recommendation pertinent to your question of how a non-religious person might define "good".
Another commenter in this thread, @marcosscriven, also linked to The God Delusion. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being quite informative too.
> no-one has come up with a good "right" way to
> live or act and it is often even harder without
> a theist grounding to decide on some pretty major
> points.
This is just something you're asserting without arguments. Proponents of secular explanations for "morality" would argue the opposite.
There's no innate compelling reason for why Reasoning about morality from a theist background would be easier. I think all evidence points to the contrary.
Perhaps you disagree with that, but we could have a more interesting discussion if instead of blindly asserting our positions we'd back them up with some arguments, don't you think? :)
There are a lot of societies on the planet today that have little to nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian tradition or are otherwise without a scriptural moral tradition.
Do you really think those societies or their members are more inherently immoral? At best the idea is naïve, at worst xenophobic and offensive.
> Plus going back to burning witches and
> stoning homosexuals, really?
> [...]
> It isn't about "cherry picking".
> Different traditions have their basis,
> I'm not sola scriptorum, the CofE believes
> in "scripture, reason and tradition".
I wasn't mentioning homosexuals and burning witches to rile you up, but rather as an extreme (but I feel appropriate) example of how much of scripture is at best the source of ambiguous instructions when it comes to moral issues.
You're quite correct that the moral tradition of Christianity doesn't stop at scripture. I'm not only agreeing with that, but suggesting that that post-scripture process is actually the only relevant process by which we arrive at moral truths.
Why is it that we've decided to put more emphasis on some stories in scripture than others? That really is largely a process that can best be described as cherry-picking. How do we decide what to cherry-pick?
I think the evidence is clearly on the side of the secular argument that humans are social animals, therefore we need to exist (mostly) peacefully in groups, which gives rise to "moral" principles like not screwing with your neighbor least he screws with you back.
Scripture is really just an adaptation of these principles in the form of stories and allegories. Those stories are important to reinforce those ideas in society, but to say that they're the primary source is putting the cart before the horse.
It's a secular look at morality and how we can reason about morality without a foundation of unscientific ideas (e.g. the existence of a deity).
In essence it makes the point that the religious idea of morality driven by a god with a big stick in the sky who'll discipline you if you step out of line isn't moral at all, and neither do most religious people actually adhere to it in practice.
E.g. we're not stoning homosexuals or burning witches as we once were, and it's not because the scripture changed, but because of secular progress despite of scripture. How do you decide which instructions to cherry-pick from the Bible or whatever piece of scripture it is you believe in?
He essentially defines an act as "good" if it's a net increase in human happiness and well-being. Burning people to death of persecuting homosexuals, not so much. Looking out for your fellow man so he'll look out for you. Note that this isn't the same thing as reducing morality to hedonism.
Anyway, I'm doing a poor job of paraphrasing the gist of that book so I'll stop. But if you're genuinely interested in what constitutes a good act or moral behavior in the secular sense there's a lot of well-researched and interesting works you can read on the subject.