Humanism Versus Mystrikism
2. Key Humanist Documents
2.3 Ethics and Morality Beyond Humans
Next, McDonald [2024] objects that humanism is deficient in the area of 'Ethics and Morality Beyond Humans'. Unlike his earlier complaint about the Humanist Manifesto III [American Humanist Association 2003] in the area of 'Human-Centric Focus' (see Sec. 2.1 above), McDonald now recognizes that the authors advocate extending our moral concerns to the 'global ecosystem and beyond'. But, McDonald protests, 'this remains a secondary consideration to human needs'. How so? That sentence in the Manifesto reads: 'Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond.' To say that humanist values are 'extended to the global ecosystem and beyond' is not to imply that these are somehow of less value or tangential. The word 'extended' is value neutral, meaning that the word entails nothing about the relative value of that to which the thing in question is extended.
Now, it's arguable that writing that 'Humanists ground values in human welfare' is not the best choice of words with which the authors could have started that sentence. However, I can understand why they chose those words. Look at the opening sentence to the Manifesto emphasising a life lived 'without supernaturalism'. Clearly, advocating grounding values here in human welfare is a pushback to religions basing values in a supposed divine realm, significantly divorced from human concerns. This sentence is a reaction against supernatural dogmatism that sees our sufferings as tangential to the divine being's desires and plans. This is another case of where I think we need to take a charitable reading of the documents, paying due regard to their historical and philosophical context.
This kind of unsympathetic reading continues in McDonald's next paragraph complaining that A Secular Humanist Declaration [Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism 1980] 'does not address the well-being of non-human sapient beings or sentient life, nor does it present a comprehensive ethical system that includes these considerations'. As I showed above, this was not the purpose of this particular document, as it was fighting back against religious intolerance and persecution. The clue for its key purpose is in its title, including as it does the descriptor 'Secular'.
The third document to which McDonald points in this section is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) [United Nations (General Assembly) 1948]. Again, he misses this document's historical context. While conceding that it is 'not a strictly humanist document' (Why include it, then?), he complains nonetheless that in it, there is 'no mention of non-human life or ecosystems, and the focus is entirely on human dignity and equality'. This entire focus, as McDonald may well be aware, makes sense as the impetus for the formulation and ratification of this ground-breaking international declaration was protecting basic human rights, arising as it did from reflecting on the horrors of the Nazi atrocities and the Second World War. The work on it was driven by the urgent need to prevent what the world had endured: the persecution and mass murder of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and political opponents, the confiscation of property, the denial of secure housing and employment, cruel medical experimentation and a myriad of other moral obscenities perpetrated in the name of Fascism.
Humanist organizations around the world support the UDHR and make no apologies for its focus on the prevention of human suffering. To quibble that the UDHR does not include within its scope non-human life or ecosystems, I think, misses its stated purpose and devalues the enormous effort that scores of people from diverse cultures put into its framing and the long and difficult negotiations undergone to get the support of member nations in order to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust. There are other important but separate declarations of animal rights and environmental conservation that we can all support without diminishing the worth of the UDHR in preventing abject human suffering.
On the question of animal suffering raised here by McDonald, it's important to note that from the time of the Enlightenment very prominent humanists such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill have been advocating for the humane treatment of non-human animals. On the broader question of preserving the natural environment with all of its living creatures, the humanists John Stuart Mill, George Lefevre, Baron Eversley and William Morris founded Britain's first conservation organisation in 1865, the Commons Preservation Society.
In 1886, humanist Henry Stephens Salt had published A Plea for Vegetarianism. In 1891, he went on to found the Humanitarian League, advocating for animal rights. With the same outlook, prominent humanist, Thomas Hardy, wrote in 1910 how the common origin of all species requires 'a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called "The Golden Rule" from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom' [reproduced in Humanists UK 2022]. Other prominent humanists had their own contributions to make, including Murray Bookchin, E. O. Wilson and Lester R. Brown. (For an overview of humanist activism in this area since the mid-19th Century, I refer the reader to A Brief History of Humanist Environmentalism [Humanists UK 2023b].)
This same humanist concern for non-human life and for the environment extends to today. For example, world-renowned humanist, David Attenborough, is a tireless champion for all species. Three other internationally-known contemporary humanist advocates are Professor Peter Singer, ex-Senator Bob Brown and Lyn White. Singer received the Australian Humanist of the Year (AHoY) [Humanists Australia 2024] award in 2004, while Brown was awarded the same accolade in 2010. More recently, White received the award in 2019 'in recognition of her passionate and effective advocacy of humane treatment of animals everywhere'. Humanists Australia [2022] explains its stated value of 'Compassion' thus: 'We have compassion for all humans and other feeling beings.' In addition, Humanists Australia [2021] devoted their entire Autumn 2021 (No. 141) issue of their Australian Humanist national magazine to animal rights while Humanists UK [2021a] recently endorsed the World Organisation for Animal Health's Five Freedoms for animals.
Humanist organizations around the world are taking practical steps to preserve and rehabilitate the natural environment. I noted above the work the American Humanist Association has done with its Environmental Justice Summit and their Resolution on Environmentalism [American Humanist Association 2019]. Humanists UK is also doing great work here with its Humanist Climate Action. This is 'a volunteer-led network of Humanists UK members and supporters committed to redefining lifestyles and campaigning for policies that promote low-carbon, ethical, and sustainable living in the light of the degeneration of the Earth's climate and biodiversity' [Humanists UK 2023a]. Closer to home, I can add here Humanists Australia's [2023] Climate Change and the Environment challenge. This program puts into action its stated 'Environment' value: 'We value and respect the planet and all the life it contains' [2022]. Even more locally for me, Humanists Victoria [2018] devotes an entire section to valuing and preserving the 'Environment' in its official statement of Policy Principles. Again, this is but a very small snapshot of what Humanist organizations are doing in practice around the world—many times more, I might note, than any Mystrik community is achieving.
In fact, if it were not for the long line of seminal humanist thinkers and activists such as David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill agitating during the Enlightenment period against the Christian human-centric view that animals are mere chattels over which we have 'dominion', there most likely would be no Mystrik community today. These radicals also developed the notion that morality is grounded in the capacity for pleasure and suffering, again opposing the religious glorification of suffering and appeals to supposed divine commands. Mystrikism is also presumably indebted to the humanist biologist Charles Darwin and naturalist philosophers such as T. H. Huxley for positioning humans as animals within the broader panoply of living things. I do think if it were not for these pioneer humanists pushing back against the dogmatic religious repressions marking the previous centuries, Mystrikism would be no more than whispers in dark rooms.
