Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

There is a good reason why utilitarian arguments have so often succeeded: everyone can appreciate them. Principles like “No harm, no foul,” “If no one is hurt it can’t be wrong,” “What consenting adults do in private is no one else’s concern,” and “If I should take a notion / To jump into the ocean / Ain’t nobody’s business if I do” may not be profound or exceptionless, but once they are stated, people can readily understand them, and anyone who wants to oppose them has a heavy burden of proof. It’s not that utilitarianism is intuitive. Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern.¹⁹ The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.²⁰ (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.) Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. That explains why certain reform movements, such as legal equality for women and gay marriage, overturned centuries of precedent astonishingly quickly (chapter 15): with nothing but custom and intuition behind it, the status quo crumbled in the face of utilitarian arguments.

Even when humanistic movements fortify their goals with the language of rights, the philosophical system justifying those rights must be “thin.”²¹ A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing—that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives—is just such a principle, since it is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.

History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that eight of the thirteen British colonies had official churches, which intruded into the public sphere by paying ministers’ salaries, enforcing strict religious observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right.²²

A century and a half later, a community of nations still smoldering from a world war had to lay down a set of principles to unite them in cooperation. It’s unlikely that they would have agreed upon “We accept Jesus Christ as our savior” or “America is a shining city upon a hill.” In 1947 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked several dozen of the world’s intellectuals (including Jacques Maritain, Mohandas Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Harold Laski, Quincy Wright, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, together with eminent Confucian and Muslim scholars) which rights should be included in the UN’s universal declaration. The lists were surprisingly similar. In his introduction to their deliverable, Maritain recounted:

At one of the meetings of a Unesco National Commission where Human Rights were being discussed, someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. “Yes,” they said, “we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.”²³

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a humanist manifesto with thirty articles, was drafted in less than two years, thanks to the determination of Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, to avoid getting mired in ideology and move the project along.²⁴ (When John Humphrey, author of the first draft, was asked on what principles the Declaration was based, he tactfully replied, “No philosophy whatsoever.”)²⁵ In December 1948 it was passed without opposition by the UN General Assembly. Contrary to accusations that human rights are a parochial Western creed, the Declaration was supported by India, China, Thailand, Burma, Ethiopia, and seven Muslim countries, while Roosevelt had to twist the arms of American and British officials to get them behind it: the United States was worried about its Negroes, the United Kingdom about its colonies. The Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa abstained.²⁶