Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

just because some people do not like the sound of something, or do not want to do it themselves, that does not mean that it is wrong.

If I do something, will it (so far as I can tell) make everyone involved happier, or will it make them more miserable? This is the “felicific calculus,” or calculation of happiness, and it is the central move in the ethical system known as utilitarianism.

Bentham extended the principle to animal welfare, writing: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Does this harm anyone? Does it cause suffering? If it does not—if it makes those involved happy and hurts no one else (except through a self-inflicted “repugnance”)—then where is the problem?

reason critically, rather than accepting situations just because they have always been that way. They ask how those situations developed, and wonder whether, sometimes, what IS might NOT BE RIGHT, AFTER ALL.

“Do you know why it is that women know less than men?” and answers herself, “It’s because they are less exposed to a wide variety of experiences since they have to stay

Christine de Pazan, 1405

we simply cannot know what either sex is “really” like, because there has never been a society in which women were not influenced by male domination.

J S Mill

“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852

“The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system.”

Frederick Douglass

“chiasmus,”

You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly

before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron!

Eloquence—as the humanists of earlier centuries, and orators in every culture, had always known—is of essential importance to human beings.

Language also plays a big part in binding us into what Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the “bundle of humanity.” We communicate and connect with each other. And that is the fourth of the ideas that has helped humanists to expand their field of concern.

one could live joyously and openly, acknowledging all the parts of one’s life instead of leaving some in shameful obscurity.

class, race, and sexuality matter more than most of his peers admitted.

Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of arbitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity.