Morality is the Heroically Creative Use of Awe and Dread

Recovering secular morality by combining the standard philosophies

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What everyone should be doing used to be obvious, when prophets and priests dictated God’s supposed answers.

Discount religion’s pontifications and you face the challenge of justifying civilization’s self-indulgences on secular grounds. Moral imperatives that guide relatively free primates like us need to be reconstructed without appealing to supposedly miraculous, mountaintop revelations.

Critique of secular moralities

In the West, secular philosophers proposed four main stand-ins for theistic morality:

• Virtue theory: Aristotle said there’s a golden mean, a behavioural path of moderation that develops virtues, avoids the extremes of vices, and enables us to flourish like other species that find their niche.
• Deontology: Immanuel Kant argued that as autonomous persons we have a moral duty to be rational, to avoid making arbitrary exceptions of ourselves, treating others as means rather than ends, and to obey logically coherent maxims.
• Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill said what matters morally is figuring out how to please as many people as possible, maximizing…