"Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals"
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Herbert Read stresses a chronology that reshapes moral authority: ethical sensibilities grow out of life itself, long before creeds and commandments. If morality is antecedent to religion, it is not bestowed from on high but rooted in social instincts that enable creatures to live together. The claim extends beyond humans. Care for offspring, sensitivity to distress, reciprocity in grooming and food sharing, even rudimentary ideas of fairness in play and coalition-building appear across species. Such behaviors are not fully fledged ethics, but they sketch the scaffolding of moral life: empathy, restraint, and expectations about how others should act.
Read, a British poet, art critic, and anarchist thinker, often argued for organic orders that arise from within communities rather than from imposed authority. The appeal to animal sociality aligns with a lineage from Hume and Darwin to Kropotkin, who saw mutual aid as an evolutionary force. Religion, on this view, does not create morality; it codifies, amplifies, and sometimes distorts the social intuitions already present. Rituals and doctrines can reinforce cooperation and widen concern, but they may also harden boundaries and justify domination. The underlying compass remains the evolved capacity to respond to others, strengthened by reflection and culture.
Seeing morality as prior to religion has political consequences. It undermines the claim that without religious sanction society would collapse into chaos, and it supports the possibility of secular or pluralistic ethics grounded in shared human sentiments. It also invites humility about animal kinship: the gap between human conscience and animal sociality is one of degree and articulation, not creation ex nihilo. Human morality becomes distinctive when empathy is extended beyond kin and tribe, when rules are made explicit and subjected to reasoned critique. Yet the seed from which such universality grows is older than temples, embedded in the pulse of social life that religion only later names and organizes.
Read, a British poet, art critic, and anarchist thinker, often argued for organic orders that arise from within communities rather than from imposed authority. The appeal to animal sociality aligns with a lineage from Hume and Darwin to Kropotkin, who saw mutual aid as an evolutionary force. Religion, on this view, does not create morality; it codifies, amplifies, and sometimes distorts the social intuitions already present. Rituals and doctrines can reinforce cooperation and widen concern, but they may also harden boundaries and justify domination. The underlying compass remains the evolved capacity to respond to others, strengthened by reflection and culture.
Seeing morality as prior to religion has political consequences. It undermines the claim that without religious sanction society would collapse into chaos, and it supports the possibility of secular or pluralistic ethics grounded in shared human sentiments. It also invites humility about animal kinship: the gap between human conscience and animal sociality is one of degree and articulation, not creation ex nihilo. Human morality becomes distinctive when empathy is extended beyond kin and tribe, when rules are made explicit and subjected to reasoned critique. Yet the seed from which such universality grows is older than temples, embedded in the pulse of social life that religion only later names and organizes.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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