Reply to Haughness

Although Haughness claims that I was attacking a straw man in "Humanism and Postmodernism," his response to it is a good example of the foundationalist sentiment within humanism that I wanted to critique.

Humanism and Postmodernism: A Reconciliation

Humanism is often characterized as a secular alternative to religion in our quest for a good, moral, and self-fulfilling life. Much space in humanist publications is devoted to exposing the internal contradictions of theistic philosophies and their negative social and personal consequences, while extolling the virtues of doing without the belief in God, spirit, the afterlife, and other standard religious assumptions.

Relativism and the Limits of Rationality

We have no choice but to live our lives from the standpoint of value. As sentient beings we embody a network of needs, desires, preferences, and long term goals which determine the course of action, and we cannot, even for an instant, step completely outside this network. Even if we decide to question our preferences, or to evaluate them, we do this from the standpoint of yet other preferences which act as a standard for evaluation. The very desire to conduct such an inquiry expresses commitment to a value, that of self-understanding.

Atheism

Atheism - disbelief in God (the Judeo-Christian-Muslim deity) or any sort of supernatural god or gods - is a direct conclusion or corollary of naturalism. The articles in this section place atheism in the broader context of naturalism, suggesting that atheists might profitably expand their horizons beyond mere disbelief into a positive endorsement of a naturalistic worldview. Atheists strongly identifying as such, or those not in a market for a comprehensive worldview, will decline this invitation, which is fine. Naturalism isn't for everyone.

Post-modernism and Anti-Foundationalism

Although post-modernism is rightly criticized for its claim that science is simply a white, male, Western privileging of certain culturally-bound discourses, the anti-foundationalist turn in philosophy is congenial to science and naturalism. The articles in this section take an anti-foundationalist, mildly culturally relativist stance in debates about religion, rationality, morality, and human rights, while respecting science as the arbiter of factual claims about the world. 

Social Policy

By providing a unified picture of ourselves embedded in nature, culture, and biology, naturalism serves as the basis for enlightened social policies. Naturalism holds that persons are not self-created, but owe their successes and failures to the conditions into which they were born and developed. Therefore, major social and economic inequalities cannot be justified on the basis that individuals strongly deserve their status.

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