Ray Harvey

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it.

Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. That’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Humans, say today’s politicians, both right and left, aren’t capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; so these bureaucrats must help us live our lives for us.

Nowhere is this (unquestioned) conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with a good example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion is so ingrained into the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

That principle is the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then using drugs is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of custom.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question.

Yet if you believe in freedom, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

It is frequently argued, for example, by the religious contingent, that if you legalize drugs, the usage of drugs will increase.

“Common sense and common experience tell us this,” says lawyer and radio talk-show host Dan Caplis, incessantly.

Next, we’re offered as evidence that the number of drinkers did increase after prohibition — a statement which is, at best, misleading, and here’s why:

Prior to prohibition, when drinking was still legal, the number of drinkers in this country was on a significant downward trend. For a decade leading up to prohibition, fewer and fewer people were drinking.

This fact is clear and not in dispute. But when, in 1920, the moralizers and busybodies got their way and legislated that the rest of the country must live as they deemed appropriate, and prohibition was then made into law, drinking still continued its downward trend. This went on for about three years.

It is very important to reiterate that the downward trend in drinking began long before drinking had been made illegal.

In the middle of prohibition — when drinking was still illegal — the number of drinkers began gradually to rise.

It continued to do so throughout the rest of prohibition, so that when, in December of 1933, prohibition was finally repealed, that upward trend continued for about a decade. But it was only the continuation of a trend that had already begun while drinking was illegal. This is a critical fact, but one you’ll never hear mention of when you hear people talking about “the number of drinkers increasing after prohibition.”

The next time someone says that “repealing prohibition increased the number of drinkers in this country,” be clear what that means: it means the number of drinkers was already increasing throughout the latter two-thirds of prohibition, and that the upward trend plateaued and then declined a decade after drinking was legalized anew.

Ask yourself also these questions: if, as the religious propound, making substances illegal prevents their usage, how is it that the number of drinkers began rising when alcohol was still illegal?

How is it that in Holland, where many drugs are legal and even subsidized(!), how is it that usage has decreased?

What does this tell us about “common sense and common experience”?

How is it that in Switzerland, marijuana usage has decreased even though it’s been made legal? And Spain?

There are those, of course, who argue that if drugs are legal, crime will increase. This is the biggest canard of them all.

Rest assured, if crime is your concern, illegalization should be what you want done away with.

There exists right now a multi-trillion-dollar underworld built up around illegal drugs, which legalizing would instantaneously crush, and which, as it stands, no amount of law, legislation, or litigation can come close to stopping. Why? The law of supply and demand is unstoppable: if there is a demand for something, supply will meet it, no matter what. All the conservative legislation imaginable cannot negate this fact. One might just as well try legislating against the tide.

When cigarettes and alcohol became so staggeringly taxed, do you know what happened? A gigantic blackmarket swept into the country. That meant more crime. People were smuggling in alcohol and cigarettes because these things could be sold for much cheaper on the blackmarket. They still are to this day.

Decriminalizing brings less crime.

For those who believe that if drugs are legalized, your kids are then more likely to use drugs, I urge you to remember that children have brains. Human beings have brains. We can learn, and we can be educated. We can be taught why not to use drugs. If you doubt the effectiveness of this, observe that cigarettes were legal for any age group until fairly recently, and the number of young smokers was sharply decreasing, and had been since the dangers of smoking were made known. Now that’s it’s illegal, teen smoking is on the rise again, and criminalizing doesn’t help.

Ask any honest school kid if he or she would have trouble getting drugs. Every honest school kid will tell you no. This despite the fact that drugs are illegal.

The inescapable law of supply and demand is why: if there’s a demand, supply will meet it. And no government bureaucracy and no middle-class morality can successfully fight it.

Making something illegal won’t decrease the supply of anything. It will only increase the underworld that provides the supply. This is a economic axiom.

Here’s another:

The only way to decrease supply is to curb demand.

The only way to curb demand is to inform, to educate, to decriminalize.

Each person must choose if he or she wants to use drugs or not, and whether those drugs are legal or illegal has little to do with the choice. There are many things that are legal and that every person has instant access to, but not everyone chooses to partake of. Why so?

The so-called war on drugs is a monumental waste of resources and money; it will continue to be so until the end of time. When something is made illegal, it develops a mystique. It entices. When something is legal, it becomes commonplace and mundane. It becomes no big deal. It is demystified.

Take, for instance, a person who’s grown up in an ultra-sheltered society and compare him or her to a person who’s grown up in the inner-city. Now drop them both off in downtown New York where there’s legal XXX shops on every street corner. Whom do you think will be more curious? And for whom do you think this will be more of a novelty?

And finally, for all the tax-happy liberals out there, think about this: if you legalize drugs, you can tax the living hell out of them. You can then use that tax money to educate with all your half-assed liberal programs, which benefit the “common good.” What more motivation do you need?

It is often said:

“Legalizing pot might be okay, but legalizing cocaine and methadrine, no way. I’ve known wealthy, white-collar, healthy, normal, successful businesspeople who’ve gotten so caught up in amphetamines that they’ve never been able to get off. They died. Suicide. OD. They’ve ruined their lives and the lives of their families. No way you should make these drugs legal.”

This is a repackaged version of the legalizing-creates-more-usage argument. It’s the same argument that drugs shouldn’t be legal because look at all the children born severely retarded and deformed because the mothers used crack throughout the pregnancy.

The first thing we must obviously note here is that all this happened (and still happens) even though drugs are illegal. Observe that making them illegal did not prevent these things from happening. Now ask yourself why.

Remember also that cigarettes and alcohol have ruined more lives and more families by far than every amphetamine combined. Should we therefore make alcohol and cigarettes illegal? And if not, why not? If it’s within the proper jurisdiction of government to run our lives, why shouldn’t we illegalize them?

And why, if that is government’s legitimate jurisdiction, draw the line at amphetamines, alcohol, and cigarettes? Why not let government run everything we consume — be it bacon, beer, or brats?

When gin made it into mainstream London, should it have been illegalized because it created such staggering addiction rates and ruined so many thousands of families?

We often hear: since alcohol can be and often is used in moderation, it should therefore be legal, whereas drugs cannot be used in moderation, and so should be illegal.

Leaving aside the questionable verity of such statements, since when did moderation become the standard for legalization versus illegalizing? That means, then, among other things, that for all those who can’t use alcohol or tobacco in moderation — for all, in other words, who are addicted (roughly half of all drinkers and more than ninety-five percent of all tobacco users) — these substances should be illegal? But for the rest, fine?

Freedom means you are left alone. It means you are neither helped nor hindered.

In this country, as in any just country, government’s proper role is not to be proscriptive or preventative.

In the words of Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850):

The nature of law is to maintain justice. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because the law makes them so (Frederic Bastiat, The Law).

The translators of the earliest English bibles were monks immersed in Latin. This is important to remember since they were translating directly from Greek, and agape, the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, meaning “To esteem highly.”

Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.

According to Oxford, caritas meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem.”

It was specifically contrasted with amor, a word with a distinctly physical connotation. Oxford goes on to define the original meaning of charite (as opposed to caritas) as “Benignity of disposition expressing itself in Christ-like conduct.”

The word caritas quickly passed out of the monasteries and the churches, where Latin was so frequently used, and into the then more common usage: cheritet or cherite — both deriving from the word cher, meaning “dear,” “dear one,” or “to hold dear.”

Indeed, to this very day, the word “cherish” means exactly that.

In addition to all this, there was for the same Greek word another Latin word used in those first biblical translations: dilectio.

Like caritas, the word dilectio also meant “To esteem highly.”

Etymologically, it is significant because later translations, starting in the 16th century, began rendering dilectio as love, and caritas as charity; so that some of the very earliest bibles were already using love and charity interchangeably, just as the first translators had used caritas and dilectio interchangeably.

Gradually, as the decades and centuries passed and more and more translations were produced, the word love was increasingly substituted for the word charity, until by 1881, the Revised Edition of the King James had completely replaced charity with love. That of course is how it stands today.

Love, in other words, made caritas and dilectio into one.

Remember, though, that these words, as well as the Greek word agape from which they originated, all meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; to esteem highly.”

It is perhaps worth noting also that decades before the King James translation, there was the William Tyndale New Testament, and Tyndale chose the word love instead of charite.

From a New Testament perspective, it’s virtually beyond dispute that love is the most important theme that the gospels and the epistles propound. In fact, if you were to distill the entire New Testament down to its fundamental principle, the one thing that would remain is love. No thinking person, atheist or not, can reasonably deny that.

And yet if that’s the case, why are we still left feeling slightly unsatisfied about what, precisely, it all means?

Thomas Aquinas, as he so often does, offers some help:

Natural things desire what is in conformity to their nature. . . Now, in every appetite or desire, love is the principle of the movement that tends toward the end which is loved. In natural appetite the principle of such movement is the connaturality that exists between the one who desires and the end to which he tends. We might call it a natural love.

Natural love is nothing more than the fundamental inclination which is stamped upon every being by the Author of nature.

Thomas Aquinas, like his teacher Aristotle, thought that the highest love was friendship. Both men, however, believed that friendship was just a precursor to understanding the love that is, in Aquinas’s words, caritas (charity). One of the first questions Aquinas poses in his tract on charity is whether charity equals friendship. He answers thus:

According to Aristotle (Ethics VIII, 4) not all love has the character of friendship, but only that love which goes with wishing well, namely when we so love another as to will what is good for him. For if we do not will what is good to the things we love but rather, we will their good for ourselves, as we are said to love wine, a horse or the like, then that is not love of friendship but a love of desire. For it would be foolish to say that someone has friendship with wine or a horse.

But benevolence alone does not suffice to constitute friendship; it also requires a certain mutual loving, because a friend is friendly to his friend. But such mutual benevolence is based on something shared in common.

In the fullest sense, love, charity, caritas, delictio — whatever you wish to term it — is not just another passing emotion; it’s a way of life. It’s a state of mind. It’s the highest. It is moral perfection. It’s the way one should always strive to be — which is to say: happy, kind, patient, relaxed, honest, confident, neither arrogant, nor jealous, nor unjust, always slow to speak and always swift to hear.

These are virtues grounded in reality, without any reference whatsoever to God.

A reader writes:

Dear Ray: I recently read a synopsis of a book about the question of animal rights, and I’m curious to know your take. Do animals possess rights? If so, where do these rights reside?

Thanks,

Pig Bodine

Dear Pig Bodine: Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights, as Herbert Spencer said, are “politico-ethical precepts” that define and delimit human freedom in large groups.

This last thing is emphasized because rights would not be necessary if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society. Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice, which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights, unlike math, are discoveries, not inventions. One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission? Answering that question is where you’ll first begin to glimpse the true nature of rights. Indeed, rights are not only not invented: they are an outgrowth of a crucial human need: morality.

Those who would deny rights consistently must in order to remain consistent espouse amoralism. (Amoralism meaning no good and no bad. Amoralism does not mean a different standard of good and bad. It means that there is no such thing as good or bad. In the same way, and for the same reason, that you can’t describe a lizard’s behavior as right or wrong because the lizard is amoral, so it is, according to the amoralist, with human beings.) Chronic lying, rape, genocide, coprophilia — these, to the amoralist, are all neither bad nor good; they just are. Conversely, honesty, self-control, courage, happiness — these also are neither good nor bad; they just are. To an amoralist, all human actions are exactly equal because from her viewpoint morality simply does not exist: morality, like rights, is an arbitrary human invention without any referent in reality.

Amoralism is the end result of denying the existence of rights.

If humans do not exist by right, humans exist by permission. Whose permission? Whoever holds control. Force, therefore, becomes the standard.

Rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light; and yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason rights have remained resilient is that in some sense they’re self-evident: we each own ourselves.

No freedom and no justice can exist if rights don’t exist — or, in other words, if rights are invented. Indeed, one of the definitions that Oxford gives for rights is the following: “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.” Another definition that Oxford gives is this: “Righteousness, truth, or justice; esp. the cause of truth or justice.”

The very word rights in this context has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.” The Roman juris Ulpian considered a person’s right “that which is due him [or her] given his [or her] status as a human being.” (Cambridge Ancient History: The Primitive Institutions of Rome, H. Stuart Jackson.)

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms — specifically, the freedom to move and act in a certain way. Notice that phrase “freedom to act”; it is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

But what is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made?

Rights, to begin with, are not primaries, which means this: rights are precipitated by something. This means that rights derive from something more fundamental. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition: it is the faculty of choice.

Choice is a prerequisite of morality: there can be no good or bad if there is no freedom to choose a certain course of action. Rights, in turn, are an elaboration upon morality — specifically, morality within a societal framework. That is the link between ethics and politics, which rights supply us with. It is for this reason that rights have been described by Herbert Spencer (et al) as “politico-ethical precepts.”

Rights, then, are ultimately grounded in the human capacity of choice — which is to say, free will — because human action is not automatic; and so, therefore, human survival is not automatic but entails choice. As Samual Adams expressed it:

Among the natural rights … are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are thus necessary for the full exercise of morality, because coercion is the opposite of choice. Some humans may flourish best under coercion, and some humans may even prefer coercion to freedom, but that’s not the point here. In any case, it is no argument against rights. The point here is that if you believe humans possess moral agency, you believe, perforce, that rights are inherently part of each (healthy) human: for without rights, we would not each have the authority in which to choose moral (or immoral) action. And if you don’t believe that humans possess moral agency, then you don’t believe that humans possess the faculty of choice, in which case you don’t believe that humans can think, as we shall see in a moment.

Individuation is the crux of rights.

What individuation refers to is the fact that we each have the potential to decide (or not) whether to engage the brain. As the philosophical psychologist Rollo May said:

When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will.” (Emphases added). “The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused (Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969).

That is the fundamental act of will — or, if you prefer, the fundamental choice — that determines individuation. It is an act of will which the individual alone can perform, and which the individual alone is responsible for. It is the locus of human sovereignty. (It is also, incidentally, the reason a fetus does not possess rights, but the woman carrying the fetus does: she is individuated; the fetus is not.)

The stuff of rights, then, is the faculty of choice, which gives rise to right and wrong courses of action. But choice comes first. Without choice, there is no morality, and hence there are no rights.

I am sometimes asked: where do rights reside? Are they dwell as ghosts inside us? The answer is, no, they do not dwell as ghosts inside us. Rights are principles. They reside within the human condition — specifically, the human brain, which operates by means of reason, the activation of which is chosen: it must be willed by each individual. If human action were not chosen but automatic, as it is with the beasts of our animal kingdom, then there would be no such thing as rights, because our actions would be automatic. We would live as those beasts — neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. But human action is chosen. And that is what necessitates the freedom to choose.

The evolution of the human brain is the thing that created rights. How so? Because this evolution created a rational animal called a human being — which is to say, it created the freedom of the will. In slightly more religious terms than I’m candidly comfortable with, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) otherwise put it well:

The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most conformable to His goodness, and that which He prizes the most, was the freedom of will, with which the creatures with intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed (“Paradiso,” Canto V, lines 19-24).

Animals do not possess rights because animals are not moral agents — i.e. they are not rational agents. Animals act by genetic predilection or genetic proclivity. The action of animals is not chosen in the full sense of the word. For this reason, the action of animals is amoral.

The grizzly that mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

So it is here the question inevitably arises that if animals do not possess rights, neither, therefore, do babies — or, at least, those babies who only have a few months to live — and nor, for the same reason, do severely brain-damaged people, who are unable to exercise a rational faculty. This flimsy peg (the so-called “argument from marginal cases”) is the postmodern peg that animal rights activists are now hanging their entire case upon.

The first thing to be said about it is that it’s a literal non sequitur.

The second thing to be said is that severely brain-damaged people do not possess actual rights, for the very reason that they are not able to think and reason. The unalienable right to life, liberty, and property hinges upon the capacity to think, which implies choice, and also upon one’s knowledge. In the same way that healthy children develop the moral faculty gradually, over a span of years, (healthy) children develop rights gradually as they mature into independent beings. Brain-damaged humans who cannot exercise the power of rationality — which is to say, morality — cannot, obviously, exercise their rights, because those rights reside in the very thing these people lack. Thus she (or he) does not possess actual rights. The protection of these people is something granted them for being a part of the human species (and, of course, the chance of a medical breakthrough).

In any case, the attempt to grant animals rights on the basis of so-called marginal human cases does not at all follow. In fact, it is to negate the very term rights by assuming that marginal cases are the norm and therefore the standard. To grant, for instance, an animal “the right to be left alone” (as it’s often phrased these days) means, among many other things, that there can be no such thing as meat-eating (even under dire conditions), but more than that: there can be no such thing as the domestication of animals, and no such thing as pet ownership; for, obviously, rights preclude any sort of humans-eating-or-owning-other-humans. If, moreover, it were proven that plants also feel pain and also possess sentience, as many people believe, then plants too possess the “right to be left alone,” and human beings starve because we possess moral agency, while the rest of the animal (and plant) kingdom does not starve, because they are held to no such standards — for the very reason that humans are held to such standards: the rational mind.

(If you think plant rights is a far-fetched idea, don’t read this.)

What this positions amounts to is a stupendous contradiction: animals have the right to be left alone, even though they don’t possess the very thing that necessitates rights: moral agency and the power of reason. And because they don’t possess this, they are incapable of respecting the rights of other animals (including humans); and yet their “rights” must still be respected — by humans alone, because we alone possess the very thing that gives rise to rights. This is a grave and dangerous misunderstanding of the word rights — most specifically of the human need that gives rise to rights, which need is not, incidentally, marginal case at all. If this philosophy were adopted, it would obliterate the idea of rights entirely. To say nothing of the vast legal apparatus that would be required in order to codify, systematize, and institute every animal’s “right to be left alone,” as well as the absurd spectacle of humans presuming to speak for the “wronged” animals, which does have historical precedent, and which, in fact, someone once made a movie about.

There would also, of course, be the not insignificant necessity of human punishment meted out (by humans), for that wronged beast, which beast, however, does not survive by reason but must have justice (i.e.the respect for rights) delivered unto it, even though that beast has absolutely no conception of justice, and never will. This is wrong, all wrong. The distinguishing characteristic of rights is compossibility. Thus there is a very simple, and entirely foolproof, method for determining if something is a right or not: Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights, stop where another’s begin. If you follow that maxim, you’ll never confuse the issue.

Ethics is the study of moral philosophy.

Morality is the science of human action.

First comes metaphysics, then epistemology, and then ethics.

Those are the big three of philosophy. Of them, ethics is arguably the most complicated.

Metaphysics and epistemology have a direct and immediate bearing on our most fundamental ethical questions: namely, is there such a thing as morality at all, and if so what is it made of? Can we apprehend it?

For if we didn’t actually exist — or if we did exist but weren’t actually able to know anything — there could be no question of good or bad human behavior.

We must then ask next: what, if anything, within the human condition gives rise to good and bad behavior?

And why do we act at all? Is there some one phenomena we can pinpoint that unites all these things?

The answer is yes, there is something we can pinpoint, and that something is called life.

Life is the common denominator that unites existence (metaphysics), consciousness (epistemology), and human action (ethics).

Science defines life, in part, as “any kind of self-motivated, growth or development-directed behavior that is able to respond to stimuli.”

To maintain itself, life of every kind requires action.

Death, the opposite of life, is therefore the opposite of action as well: death is inertia.

Death gives life meaning in the sense that death is what life constantly strives against.

In order to live, humans must act. But not only that — humans must act in a certain way: specifically, a way that fosters life.

Quoting philosopher (and beekeeper) Richard Taylor:

“The things that nourish and give warmth and enhance life are deemed good, and those that frustrate and threaten are deemed bad.”

In this light, the moral is that which promotes one’s welfare; the immoral is that which is self-destructive.

Some philosophers, like the egregious Kurt Baier, do not approve of equating this viewpoint with morality and instead opt to call it something else: prudential.

The reason these philosophers oppose the idea of so-called prudential morality is that they all, without exception, start with a spectacularly false and deadly assumption: namely, they believe that morality must by definition be altruistic.

This assumption effectively puts happiness and well-being far out of reach and opens the doors wide for all manner of faith-based ethics and arbitrary decree, each one ultimately and equally unverifiable.

From my viewpoint, however (i.e. the prudential perspective), morality is only a means to an end: the individual and her well-being are primary, and morality is the standard by which she achieves well-being.

Thus, rather than saying “That action is immoral, or evil,” it’s more accurate to describe it this way: “That action will harm you over time.”

Such is the nature of prudential ethics.

Since the dawn of humankind, moral philosophy has been dominated by religion of one kind or another – so much so that the overwhelming preponderance of people in world history have been (mis)led into believing that morality cannot exist if God is dead.

It is a grim irony indeed, therefore, to discover after all these millennia that morality not only can exist if you kill God, but that morality can only exist if you kill God.

In the words of the late Walter G. Everett, philosopher:

Moral law is just as real as human nature, within which it has its existence. Strange, indeed, if man alone of all living beings could realize his highest welfare in disregard of the principles of his own nature! And this nature, we must remember, is what it is — is always concrete and definite. Indeed the sceptic nowhere else assumes the absence of principles through obedience to which the highest form of life can be attained. He does not assume that a lily, which requires abundant moisture and rich soil, could grow on and arid rock, nor that a polar bear could flourish in a tropical jungle. No less certain than would be the failure of such attempts, must be the failure of man to realize, in disregard of the laws of his being, the values of which he is capable. The structure of man’s nature, as conscious and spiritual, grounds laws just as real as those of his physical life, and just as truly objective (Walter G. Everett, Moral Values, 1918).

Man is the rational animal. Humans are the ethical primate, the reasoning brain the thing that distinguishes the human essence. As such, human life requires very specific things, not all of which — fulfillment and joy, for instance — are material (like food and water).

These “things” are what philosophers call values.

A value, by definition, is a thing that you want, or a thing that want to hold onto.

“When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life,” said Nietzsche.

So. Life requires values — whether shelter, love, sex, transportation, medicine, money, laughter, literature, food, drink, or anything else — and these, in turn, to obtain and maintain require action.

Thus, life requires action.

That is our first ethical crux.

As you can see, it is a crux that derives from the nature of human life here on earth, without any reference whatsoever to God.

Aristotle asked:

“What is the good?” (in his language agathon).

That to him was the foundational question of all ethics.

And in his meticulously reasoned treatise on the subject — Nicomachean Ethics — he answers in no uncertain terms:

“We may define agathon as that for the sake of which everything else is done.”

The good, then, is the end object of an action; the good is the goal.

And here we come to our second ethical crux:

The locus of the good is found in goal-directed behavior, the pursuit of values.

In philosophical terms, goal-directed behavior is also known as teleology.

And that is why certain ethical systems, like those of Mr. Aristotle and Mr. Spinoza, among others, are sometimes described as “thoroughly teleological.”

It is a term that refers to the goal-directed nature of all life, and here specifically to the fact that human good and human evil reside in the very nature of goal-directed action (or in the case of evil, its lack), which in turn resides in the nature of human survival.

Life requires action, yes, but to be more precise, life requires action that is directed toward certain life-sustaining values, which we know as goals.

All entities, sentient or insentient, have a specific essence, or nature. Only living beings, however, can pursue values, and they do so for one reason alone: staying alive.

So. The pursuit of life is teleological action. Life is goal-directed behavior.

That formulation is entirely Aristotelian, yet it can easily be validated without any reference at all to Aristotle: for we can see all around us in nature, and in ourselves, that life requires goal-directed action.

Indeed, as mentioned previously, science defines life as, in part, “goal-directed behavior.”

The essence (or identity) of a living thing determines how that particular thing must behave in order to maintain its life.

“In this way, a good X is that X which fulfills its nature.”

This is also a thoroughly Aristotelian formulation.

It is also why it is not inappropriate to say, for instance: “That sturdy cottonwood is a good tree.”

Or: “That fast greyhound is a good greyhound.”

And conversely: “That lame horse is a bad horse.”

The cottonwood and the greyhound are good because they have fulfilled their nature; the lame horse is bad because it has not.

These, though, are not moral pronouncements, not quite.

There is in them, however, a close connection to morality, and for this reason I believe that even a religious person can glimpse here, at last, how it is that good and evil are indeed secular and rooted exclusively in life on earth.

The final component required for demonstrating morality as a human gauge by which we live in this natural world is the faculty of choice.

There can be no good or evil if there is no choice.

Life requires action: crux one.

The good is that which fulfills its nature: crux two.

Humans (a species that lives primarily by its reasoning brain) must choose to fulfill its nature: crux three.

And that is why humans, the rational animal, are also the ethical animal.

Choice is the sine-qua-non of moral philosophy because chosen action is the exact opposite of automatic action, and automatic action is neither moral nor immoral but amoral: blame or praise can only belong to an act that is willed.

Reason must be willed.

As a matter of fact, the very locus of choice is in the uniquely human faculty of reason.

“Reason,” said John Milton, “is also choice.”

And:

“You have been given reason, which can distinguish between bad and good.”

Said Dante.

Reason does not operate instinctively. We choose to activate it, or not, and that choice determines all our others.

When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused (Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969).

And that, finally, is the answer the overwhelming question: “How can there be good and evil without God?”

Because whether God exists or doesn’t, the human brain does not operate instinctively. It needs a standard, a guide.

Which is precisely what morality provides.

Thought precedes action; action sustains life; and life, as Goethe taught us, is a process of valuing.

The process of valuing is the thing that grounds morality in this world, here and now.

Morality is required by the nature of the human brain itself.

Quoting G.H. von Wright:

The attributes, which go along with meaningful use of the phrase the good of ‘x’, may be called biological in a broad sense. They are used as attributes of being, of whom it is meaningful to say that they have life.