A bill to be introduced by Christian Democrat Rev. Fred Nile, MLC into the NSW parliament raises the spectre of philosophical illiteracy and the ‘blind’ morality of the Middle Ages, says a leading Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic commentator.

 

“Secular ethics classes are crucial to building a free-thinking culture, and Mr Nile seeks to turn the clock back to before the ‘Age of Reason’ by seeing these classes banned from NSW public schools,” said Dr Bede Harris from the University’s Faculty of Business.

 

According to Dr Harris, courses in secular ethics exist as an alternative to scripture classes that have long been offered by NSW public schools. “They provide a choice to parents who do not wish their children to receive religious education. The Rev. Nile opposes such courses on the grounds that secular humanism provided the foundation of Nazi and communist ideology,” he said.

 

“However, humanism was a philosophy which emerged during the 16th and 17th centuries. Its proponents argued for a set of ethical principles that would be discoverable by reason rather than faith and would provide a framework for individual morality and just government. The ideas of the secular humanists laid the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment, whose thinkers were responsible for modern theories of human rights and democracy.

 

“It is difficult to imagine a set of values more different to Nazism or communism, which shared a disdain for individual dignity, subordinated the will of individuals, and established systems where any acts, no matter how heinous, were justified if they served the will of the nation or the party.”

 

Dr Harris said the ethics course provided to NSW schools by the St James Ethics Centre, which has no religious affiliation, is closely related to secular humanism.

 

“The course focuses on ‘collaborative inquiry, logical reasoning, critical thinking and the capacity to evaluate good and bad moral reasoning’. It shows that blind appeal to authority and moral relativism are bad moral reasoning, making it aligned to humanism and providing an excellent basis for teaching children how to make value-based judgments.”

 

Dr Harris believes that the controversy highlights an important question, “should ethics education be provided to all students as a normal part of their curriculum?”.

 

“The capacity to use reason to solve ethical problems is fundamental to good citizenship. It is a skill that our education system is clearly not imparting to students.

 

“I see this in my own teaching, where I ask students to comment on the implications for our legal system of the Nuremberg Trials. Many students consider the trials to be ‘victors’ justice’, arguing that the perpetrators of the Jewish genocide should not have been tried because what they did was lawful in Germany at that time.

 

“They held that basic human values are irrelevant to law, and that as long as the law has been promulgated in accordance with the prevailing system, it ought to be obeyed. If that is the case, then slavery, torture and undemocratic rule can never be labelled as wrong, and human rights can have no restraint on law.

 

“Few recognised that human dignity requires that law, even if it is based on the will of the majority, should be subordinate to higher human values, which is the function of philosophy to discover.”

 

Dr Harris believes philosophical illiteracy is reflected in the current low quality of public debate in many areas. “Whether we should have a Bill of Rights, how we should treat refugees, whether our electoral system is fair and what limits there should be on freedom of expression are all issues that have been reduced to political slogans. Our national ethical blind spot needs correction.

 

“Citizens need to be able to debate questions from the perspective of what is right and wrong – not just what is convenient or inconvenient, cost effective or wasteful, popular or unpopular,” he said.

 

“Since religion is based on faith rather than reason, it cannot provide values suitable for the resolution of public policy questions and we should look to ethics to do so.