What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman
What It Means to Be Moral
ALSO BY PHIL ZUCKERMAN
Society Without God
Faith No More
Living the Secular Life
The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Society
(with Luke W. Galen and Frank L. Pasquale)
Invitation to the Sociology of Religion
Strife in the Sanctuary
The Oxford Handbook of Secularism (ed.)
The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois (ed.)
What It Means to Be Moral
Copyright © 2019 by Phil Zuckerman
First hardcover edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zuckerman, Phil, author.
Title: What it means to be moral : why religion is not necessary for living an ethical life / Phil Zuckerman.
Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004152 | ISBN 9781640092747
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics. | Religion—Controversial literature.
Classification: LCC BJ1031 .Z82 2019 | DDC 170—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004152
Jacket design by Sarah Brody
Book design by Jordan Koluch
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: WHY MORALITY CANNOT BE BASED ON FAITH IN GOD
2. Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
3. The Insidiousness of Interpretation
5. Sally, Butch, and Plato’s Dilemma
PART TWO: THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SECULAR MORALITY
7. Where Do You Get Your Morals?
PART THREE: CHALLENGES TO SECULAR MORALITY
11. Secular Solutions to Immorality
Conclusion: The Necessity of Secular Morality
In the end, it all came down to God.
Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology, had accused President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers. The allegations were dire enough to result in the convening of a special Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, held publicly on September 27, 2018.
Dr. Ford’s testimony was wrenching. Judge Kavanaugh’s denials were forceful. And given the recent national consciousness-raising of the #MeToo movement, and the uncertain balance of the Supreme Court in terms of tilting progressive or conservative for the foreseeable future, as well as an impending midterm election that was predicted to possibly flip the House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic control, the political stakes were about as high as they could get.
The senators had to decide if they would believe the testimony of a woman claiming to have suffered a traumatic sexual assault by Judge Kavanaugh—and thus possibly reject him as a candidate for the Supreme Court—or if they would believe his vehement refutations of those accusations and vote to confirm him as a justice in the highest court of the land. Both the senators and the country were deeply divided; women were more likely to believe Dr. Ford, while men were more likely to believe Judge Kavanaugh;1 those on the left were more supportive of Dr. Ford, while those on the right were more supportive of Judge Kavanaugh.
Which side, in this fraught case, held the moral high ground? The Democratic senators surely felt that they were in the right by supporting a woman who courageously stepped forward to speak publicly about a sexual assault she had experienced, while the Republican senators undoubtedly felt just as confident that the right thing to do was to support a man facing unsubstantiated accusations of a decades-old