How Do You Determine Moral Principles Without Religion?
• Understand that this life is the only one we have. Morality should not prescribe how we live in this life in order that we obtain better position in a possible afterlife. Instead, morality should maximize utility in this life, while we are alive and after we are gone (should these be the goals of our moral code). One can imagine a moral code with different goals, but it remains that this life is the only one we have. • Notice that morality does not come from religion. Morality comes from a variety of sources, but a supernatural god is not one of those sources. If a modern human were to stone to death an adolescent for not honoring his/her father and mother, we would certainly think him/her amoral. Yet, these are the prescribed punishments for such acts, according to Abrahamic texts. Since modern humans do not follow their religious texts to the letter, they must have some method for determining which prescriptions to follow and which to discard. The reasoning behind this sieve is the
