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posthuman

An article by Robert Griffiths from Philosophy Now about the limits of humanism and its relation to theism, which concludes :

Humanists are not much interested in the moral status of sentient non-humans (let alone the moral status of the wider natural world). Norman, for example, is the author of a document entitled ‘Being Good’, available on the website of the British Humanist Association. This document is mostly concerned with how it is possible for a human being to lead a meaningful life once they have abandoned religious belief. It is essentially a sort of therapeutic guide for disabused or disappointed theists (as are most humanist texts). Reflecting contemporary humanism as a whole, it is anthropocentric in a quite bizarre way, as if decades of discussion of the possibility that both sentient non-humans and non-sentient natural things might have moral value has never occurred. There is a curiously unbalanced concern with the apparent effects that offloading a belief in God will have on an individual human, and a need to show that one could nevertheless have a meaningful life. There is no mention at all of how being good touches on animal rights, and barely any discussion of the environment.

To this extent, humanism, which issues from, and spends a great deal of its time going over, a theist-non-theist debate that’s largely eighteenth century in character, is out of touch with the moral concerns of younger generations today. Many of the latter are entirely uninterested in spending time refuting belief in God. As apatheists, they have moved on; their concerns are now for the planet and for all sentient beings. Humanist ethics cannot really talk to these people, and it does not really try. Even as their numbers grow, one imagines that in time humanism must fall away along with the religious beliefs it is obsessed with repudiating, but with which it is too concerned to be sufficiently alert to contemporary issues of real moral importance.

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