Hmm... might try a bit of reframing to see if the analogy holds:
Secular ethics: start with a goal (e.g., the well-being of conscious creatures, quality-adjusted life years, etc), evaluate different approaches to achieving that goal (e.g., kill your neighbor, don't kill your neighbor), measure results, then codify norms into law and insti…
Hmm... might try a bit of reframing to see if the analogy holds:
Secular ethics: start with a goal (e.g., the well-being of conscious creatures, quality-adjusted life years, etc), evaluate different approaches to achieving that goal (e.g., kill your neighbor, don't kill your neighbor), measure results, then codify norms into law and institutions, being sure to build in mechanisms that allow us to update norms as we get new information.
Religion: a group of people lived a long time ago and created an arbitrary set of rules. I either follow the rules exactly as written (sometimes writing whimsical books in the process https://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/, sometimes flying planes into buildings), or I follow the ones I like and ignore the ones I don't, most likely using secular ethics (or their fruits) as my guide.
Let's allow that both camps have their share of non-adherents, and that both camps have a bunch of people that have basically adopted the secular ethics of their community. In that case, the primary difference between religion and secular ethics is that religion spits out fundamentalists and/or AJ Jacobs, neither or which are very fun at dinner parties?
I don't think the analogy holds. Both camps (if there even are two camps) both spit out fundamentalists. But the bigger problem is that the goal and values of secular ethics is smuggled in from another source and this is an issue raised in the article itself. This echo's Nietzsche's complaint that secular ethics is resting on the Christian set of values. I don't see how your analogy could possibly escape this problem.
Hmm... might try a bit of reframing to see if the analogy holds:
Secular ethics: start with a goal (e.g., the well-being of conscious creatures, quality-adjusted life years, etc), evaluate different approaches to achieving that goal (e.g., kill your neighbor, don't kill your neighbor), measure results, then codify norms into law and institutions, being sure to build in mechanisms that allow us to update norms as we get new information.
Religion: a group of people lived a long time ago and created an arbitrary set of rules. I either follow the rules exactly as written (sometimes writing whimsical books in the process https://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/, sometimes flying planes into buildings), or I follow the ones I like and ignore the ones I don't, most likely using secular ethics (or their fruits) as my guide.
Let's allow that both camps have their share of non-adherents, and that both camps have a bunch of people that have basically adopted the secular ethics of their community. In that case, the primary difference between religion and secular ethics is that religion spits out fundamentalists and/or AJ Jacobs, neither or which are very fun at dinner parties?
I don't think the analogy holds. Both camps (if there even are two camps) both spit out fundamentalists. But the bigger problem is that the goal and values of secular ethics is smuggled in from another source and this is an issue raised in the article itself. This echo's Nietzsche's complaint that secular ethics is resting on the Christian set of values. I don't see how your analogy could possibly escape this problem.