“The West, perhaps even the world, is being haunted by the invisible menace of an ethics crisis”. Thus begins my new book, the Religion of Good: A Wiccan’s Guide to Ethical Insights for Individuals of Any Religion or None. I’ve been a Wiccan priest for 20 years. I’m currently the High Priest of Waxing Moon Circle and was the High Priest of Daoine Sidhe for 8 years.
My book started out as just me on a quest. It’s a common Pagan teaching that we’re free and that we should figure out our ethics for ourselves. I used to think we all knew what’s good, but life experience has shown me that there are a lot of different ideas out there. Around 2017, I started looking into figuring out exactly what my ethics are in a much more specific way than just being a “good” person or following the Wiccan Rede. By this time, I had long since needed to know ethical answers not only for myself but for anyone who might need ethical guidance from me as a priest. I wanted to do more than just follow my heart. I wanted to really get what this whole ethics thing is about and what my opinions about ethics, specifically, are.
Armed with my BA in Greco-Roman Classics from Reed College, my childhood at San Francisco Zen Center, and my 20 years of experience as a Wiccan priest, I figured, “all I need to do is hit the books”. So I hit the books, starting with philosophy. I knew I could already rule out religious dogma. After all, which religion’s right? Christianity? Islam? Hinduism? Wicca? Nobody knows, and yet, tragically, humanity keeps fighting holy wars. But I had high hopes that philosophy would save me. Sadly, it did not, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I quickly learned that there are three main branches of ethics theory in western philosophy: (1) virtue ethics (starting with Aristotle), (2) something called deontology (going back to Immanuel Kant), and (3) something called consequentialism (John Stuart Mill being one of the big names for that one). I had high hopes that, if I just introduced myself to each of these, I could pick one and go. So, I read Aristotle’s works on ethics, Kant’s Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals, and J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism. But none of them really seemed to work. I felt baffled and frustrated, but put it on the back burner to deal with life.
Then the pandemic hit, and I found myself thinking about this problem more and more. With the help of a sociologist, Steven M. Tipton at Emory University (author of In and Out of Church), I discovered that I was not alone in feeling that no rational approach worked. At Tipton’s advice, I read Alasdair McIntyre’s book After Virtue. McIntyre is a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. In After Virtue, he explains exactly why he thinks none of the Western philosophical approaches work.
Virtue ethics is basically the concept that being good involves having various virtues, such as courage, patience, mercy, etc. But which set of virtues ought you to have? Which virtues are actually good? No system of virtue ethics can tell you.
Kant’s theory involves something called the categorical imperative. That’s a fancy word for, “how would it be if we all did that?” If I feel like punching certain philosophers in the nose, because they haven’t provided me with satisfactory ideas about ethics, I’d need to ask myself whether I think it should be a rule for everyone that anyone can punch anyone else in the nose whenever they feel like it. You’d probably conclude that that’s a bad idea and that, instead, the rule should be that people shouldn’t punch each other in the nose. Kant’s idea is that each of us decide what we’d will as universal rules for everyone and that each of us would base our ethics on those rules.
But McIntyre has an objection to the categorical imperative. Let’s suppose a theocrat were to say, “My religion is the one, right, true, and only way. My god is the one true God. I therefore will as a universal law for all people that everyone should be forced to convert to my religion, by the sword if necessary, and I’d want the same to be done to me, if I were not already a member of my religion.” Obviously, that’s right out! Neither McIntyre, Kant, nor I think that’s ethical, and hopefully you don’t either, particularly when you realize that multiple religions have adherents with that same stupid attitude! So much for categorical imperatives.
Consequentialism is the idea that we should maximize happiness for all and minimize suffering. That sounds great! Except for just one problem, argues McIntyre. Different people have different ideas about what happiness and suffering mean. At first, I was suspicious. It sounded sophomoric. But then McIntyre gave numerous examples. Here’s the sort of thing he discusses (though it’s not exactly from his book, it’s very much in the spirit of it.) The Stalinist authoritarian communist defines happiness in terms of everybody getting their bare necessities met, but the price we pay is our freedom (the party must always win!). On the other hand, the free market capitalist defines happiness in terms of freedom, and the price we pay for it is that some people will be dirt poor and die on the street. It doesn’t matter that both sides use propaganda. The point is that consequentialism can change radically depending on what you think happiness and suffering are all about.
I had hit a brick wall! I felt like there was no solution. I briefly considered moral relativism (the idea that ethics simply comes from different cultures, and that there’s no actual truth to the question of ethics beyond that). I figured it may be depressing, but that I ought to face the truth, no matter how hard it may be. But I don’t think it is the truth. There are a lot of problems with moral relativism. What happens if you punch me in the nose, because your culture demands that you punch people on the nose on alternate Tuesdays? That’s small consolation to me and my blood nose! Moral relativism doesn’t seem to account for how ethics works between cultures, and it doesn’t really make sense to me that there’s no truth to ethics whatsoever. Doesn’t ethics have something to do with not hurting people, and maybe even helping them? It somehow seemed reductio ad absurdum to just think that any and all cultural ideas about ethics are completely relative.
I talked with Steve Tipton about it, and he explained to me that there’s a middle way, which he described as ethical pluralism. It’s undoubtable, he pointed out, that different cultures have different values, but many people believe that there is a truth about goodness. The social sciences don’t actually know that ethics is positively purely relative. It might just be like the blind people and the elephant: every culture touches the ethics elephant from a different angle and feels something different (a snake, a rope, a wall, etc.), but the elephant’s an elephant. I found out that there’s also a contemporary philosophical theory called moral realism, which argues against pure moral relativism, without denying that cultures have different perspectives.
How was I going to get over this brick wall I had hit? In 2021, the answer came. To make a long story short, I came to conclude that goodness is an ineffable mystery that comes from the spirituality of all of us as one. The good news is that spirituality is an approach that helps us get at ineffable mysteries. I came to conclude that goodness is a real pattern, which arises from the relationships among all sentient beings. We can touch it through myth, ritual, and trancework, all of which is aimed at getting touchpoints on that ineffable mystery, because that’s one thing myth, ritual, and trancework are really good at doing. It’s a spiritual practice, not a logical proposition. Like all spiritual practices, you have to experience it to understand it. I hope you all will reproduce the experiment.
Realizing that I had something to share with the world, I came to see that what had started out as a personal quest, and later a Pagan journey, had become an epiphany about the solution to the ethics crisis that I believe the whole west is currently embroiled in. I had something to say to the world, so I set about writing a book. The result is the Religion of Good.
I say a lot more about this subject in the book. I unpack my ideas much more thoroughly. The book is not a philosophy book, but a spirituality book. Only about 30% of it (tops) really deals with the problem abstractly, and I only bring in just enough philosophy to help my readers understand the problem I’ve been wrangling with. The rest of it is about spiritual practices that help us model goodness in our minds through all-of-us-as-one experiences, and I help readers design their own mythic symbolism, rituals, and trancework, to empower them to take a DIY approach to all this. The good news is that we witches got this! We’re myth, ritual, and trance engineers, after all.
If you’d like to learn more, please visit my website here: https://www.ivanrichmond.com/religion-of-good/
If you’d like to order it on Amazon, you can do so here: https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Good-Ivan-Richmond/dp/195835905X