An Upcoming Challenge for Secularists on Ethics

[T]hey've never faced the fact that while they've rejected so many other doctrines of their childhood preachers, altruism is the one they've never been willing to let go. -- Ben Bayer

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While I cannot, off the top of my head, recall exactly where I first learned the above insight, I do recall seeing words to that effect by Ben Bayer and admiring what a great connection he had made.

Bayer elaborates on that connection at length in the upcoming Breaking Free from Faith-Based Morality, which will be published by Ayn Rand University Press in December.

In addition to its preface appearing at New Ideal, the book is available for preorder through Amazon.

Below is the conclusion of a look at America's "culture-wide religious fervor," which emphatically includes the secular part of the left:

I love the cover! (Image from Ayn Rand University Press, via New Ideal.)

Each of the other [left-wing] activist movements demands similar Abrahamic submission. Whether we are to sacrifice economic prosperity to Gaia's pristine wilderness or economic freedom and property rights to the classless society of the future, the activists demand we surrender ourselves and our values on the altar of the allegedly "higher" end of serving some Other. This moral outlook enjoins the virtue of humble self-sacrifice, and condemns heretics who commit the sin of prideful self-esteem. Even though many of the modern activists think of themselves as secular, they draw these core doctrines from none other than Judeo-Christian religion -- whether they know it or not.

More rational thinkers in the secular camp may agree there is something wrong with the religious fervor that motivates these activists, but concede that there is something noble about their (professed) ends. They may say that the Bible verses quoted by Talarico and Warnock are from a primitive mindset, but they motivate people to uplift the poor (etc.). But how do these thinkers know that their conception of the noble end is noble and not itself a product of that same primitive, religious mindset?

I think secular altruism -- the doctrine that morality consists in selfless service to others -- is in fact such a product, a holdover from Christianity's two-millennia monopoly over our thinking about right and wrong, good and evil. [bold added]

This will come as no surprise to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Ayn Rand's critiques of altruism. What this book will do, I hope, is both to make it easier for Objectivists to apply that critique to today's cultural particulars and help some of today's secular leftists reach a point of being intellectually ready to consider that critique and thus learn of a much more practical and intellectually fertile way to think about morality.

I'm glad to hear about this book and look forward to reading it over the holidays.

-- CAV