People get breathless about Peter Singer. I had the chance to catch up with our good friend snowqueen in Melbourne, and she was all, “OMG you’re going to see Peter Singer.” And I had to make a terrible confession: I haven’t really been aware of Peter Singer’s work since I read ‘Animal Liberation’ in the late 70’s. My mom showed it to me. She was convinced it was satire.

Since then, Singer become well-known with his work on ethics and the environment. His talk was called “Ethics Without Religion”.

He raised three points that believers often make when asking atheists how they can be moral without religion:

1. Who is to say what’s good or bad without a god?
This view provides a paradox: is something good simply because god likes it? Then goodness is arbitrary. But if you take the opposite view that god is good because he likes good things, then we could save time by ignoring god, and worshipping the set of values that he holds. Either god is an arbitrary tyrant, or there’s a notion of good that is independent of what god wills, and we don’t need a god to have it.

2. But if goodness is independent of god, maybe we still need god to reveal it to us.
Well, people with scriptures are very selective about the things they accept from scripture as ‘goodness’. They’re not using scripture — they’re using their own moral sense.

Singer mentioned that Jesus is not much help for Christians. According to him, divorce is adultery (though many Christians ignore this), he says nothing about abortion even though many Christians are certain it’s wrong, and he requires someone to sell everything he has, contrary to papal opulence and prosperity gospels.

3. Religion gives us the motivation to do what’s right by offering eternal rewards or punishments for our actions.

But does this help? We can compare the behaviour of religious v non-religious people. The notoriously religious USA doesn’t seem to offer a model of social utopia compared to secular Europe, which offers health care, lower crime, and higher rates of charity.

Singer makes the argument that human morality is an evolved phenomenon. We seem to come to similar moral judgments regardless of background. Singer points that in some cases there’s a ‘yuck’ factor to some of our moral judgments.

But this moral sense only works on situations that humans would have been familiar with, and in cases outside of human experience, our evolved response is not good enough. Xenophobia could be instinctive, but in our global post-tribal world, we need to get over it. Climate change is another issue that could be disastrous, but we don’t have an evolved response for it. It’s too gradual, too long-range.

Or consider this example posed by Singer: If a child was drowning, would you wade in, wrecking your pair of shoes? Of course. But for the cost of a pair of shoes, you could save the life of a child via Oxfam. It doesn’t hit us the same way, though, because the child is more remote. Again, our evolved response is not good enough.

Singer describes his sense of morality as concern for those people who could be affected by our actions. Are atheists borrowing morality from religion? Quite the reverse. Religion is borrowing from our innate moral sense.