Introduction

It is my fantasy that in times long past, when life for most people in Europe was uneducated, tough and frighteningly easy to lose, the various Christian churches played an important role in developing an ‘ethical framework’ that has led to what is currently the aging ‘ethical scaffolding’ of UK and western society. However, despite their former value to society, the role of churches passed its sell-by date at least a century or two ago. Our world is nothing like the rigid world of Genesis and Exodus, although many people across a range of  churches would prefer that it were. Our intensely complex international world of democracies and tofu, electricity and air travel, cellphones and in vitro fertilisation, satellites and the internet,  is the creation of Copernicus, Galileo, da Vinci, Newton, Lavoisier, Priestley, Lyall, Hume, Watt, Stephenson, Faraday, Armstrong, Darwin, Curie, Rutherford, Einstein, Marconi, Freud, Jung, Crick, Watson, Pauling, Leakey, Sagan, Hawking, Berners-Lee, Gates and ten thousand others.

The vacuum left by the departure of the churches from the centre ground of social existence has now for many years been occupied by a consumerist materialism (including the use of legal and illegal stimulants), the consumption of passive and voyeuristic entertainment (Hello-style journalism and television), and an obsession with glamour and celebrity (including royalty), sport and get-rich-quick competition. I believe that the ethical values to which these concerns point may serve well the organisations that profit from them, but they serve poorly the needs of ordinary people: people attempting to negotiate the hurdles, perils and disappointments of life, and to live satisfying and fulfilling lives. Since first writing this text, financial institutions throughout the world have been exposed as castles-in-the-air peddling fantasies: banks, long critiqued and criticised for enticing and encouraging ordinary people to borrow money that had little chance of ever being repaid, requiring public taxes to support them in order to safeguard the savings of ordinary people; fantastical and exotic stock exchange transactions  wiping billions of pounds, dollars, yen and euros from the value of companies and corporations which are then required to lay off thousands of ordinary people who lose their livelihood. 

It is also possible to hear much criticism of some churches for providing too little public steer on issues of the day, and yet encounter other churches (e.g. fundamentalist Right and the conservative Amish in the US; Jehovah's Witnesses in the UK), and religious sects (e.g. the Taleban in Afghanistan; radical Madrassas in Pakistan) that insist on such a rigid steer that individual people are granted little freedom, and non-followers may be at risk (e.g. attacks on doctors who run abortion clinics in the US; Islamicist terrorism). A new ethical framework would encourage searching for information and understanding when considering contemporary issues, would prize compassion, and would provide the principles for addressing the issues.

Although a non-religious ethical framework would in time replace past religious ethical structures, it would also build on many aspects of their insights, ideas and philosophy. For example, the Mosaic 'commandments' and the Christian 'beatitudes', although expressed in a manner unattractive to many people, address a wealth of important ideas such as respect for self, for family members, for community, for people who are disempowered or powerless, for strangers. Lifting rocks that now overlie the variously-identified virtues and vices (for example, the 'seven deadly sins' and their complementary 'virtues'), long-mocked because of the sham and hypocritical authority to which people were made accountable, reveals a treasure-trove of personal values. Buddhism is built on an impressive foundation of ideas and values. However, this is not to suggest that a non-religious ethical framework would be merely an eclectic hotch-potch of recycled ideas. It is important that the framework would be underpinned both by a deep existential philosophy, and some congruent theoretical principles.