Living a Humanist Life

The Core Principles

The core principles put forward in Living Humanism are:

Act to support and promote your own well-being and the well-being of all others.
Act to reduce and prevent pain and suffering for yourself and all others.

The origins of and rationale for these principles are discussed under the Introduction to the Principles. Their application is embodied in the remaining principles.

Well-being

A key idea in the first principle is that of well-being. This is seen here as including within its remit important areas such as health, physical and mental, education, our well-being in terms of resources (such as each of us having enough money and material things as necessary and to some degree desired), pleasure, fun and joy, and importantly well-being is considered here to include happiness and personal fulfillment.

Other approaches to living foreground happiness, and supporting our own happiness and that of others is certainly of great importance in the Living Humanism approach. However Living Humanism foregrounds well-being because happiness is seen as being a more transient (though sometimes long-lasting), internally determined, emotional and mental state, sometimes impossible or undesirable to achieve (for example when experiencing grief at the death of someone we love deeply). Sometimes it is extremely difficult for us to achieve happiness in ourselves and, perhaps particularly, in others, whose pain we might ease but whose happiness may be much more challenging for us to influence.

Ourselves and all others

The core principles mention that we should act to support our own well-being and reduce and prevent our own pain and suffering, as far as we can. I would say that, for me, sometimes there is insufficient focus in the modern world on the importance of pursuing these individual goals, and that we not often do not focus enough on looking after ourselves.

Yet, because we are social beings, part of pursuing these more individual goals means supporting others and indeed working cooperatively with others, actions which not only give us deep personal pleasure and can reduce our personal pain (e.g. avoiding social isolation), but which are an absolute necessity in our complex human societies to support the range of aspects of our individual and community well-being (safety, health, education, transport and so forth).

Doing no significant harm to others

Crucially while it is important to pursue our personal goals of well-being and reducing our own pain and suffering, this must be done while taking care not to cause any significant pain and suffering to others.

Both principles apply to ‘all others’. This includes future generations and all forms of life, as far as that is possible. Importantly, this does not mean that we can or will support the well-being of all others equally. Being human, closer relationships matter more to us. We will, in the main though not always, have intense love for our children should we have them, love our partners, and may deeply love our parents and other family members. We may also have close friends, and we will very likely prioritise our relationships with them and supporting them over supporting those we don't know. We may have loyalties to our local communities and nations too. And further, as a matter of fact, though less so than in previous generations, practically helping those far away

may be more challenging than helping people more locally.

But Humanism and Living Humanism are universalist. Aside from our inevitable close loyalties and loves, for Living Humanism, we must also be universal in our beliefs and actions, including importantly, supporting all others, those far away from us, those who are different from us, as far as we can, aiming to promote their well-being and prevent and reduce their pain and suffering, recognizing them as human beings like ourselves, experiencing the world in important and similar ways to us, capable of knowing and experiencing unwanted pain, emotional and physical, and when in need (and indeed at other times) worthy of our love and support.

In the end we wish all to be enjoying well-being and no-one to be enduring unnecessary pain and suffering. As part of our Humanist universalism and our desire for fairness and justice for all, we must support the well-being of all others regardless of race, gender, sexual preferences and other factors, and must not discriminate unfairly on these grounds or other unfair grounds.

All others: The well-being of implementers of anti-social acts/those who hurt and damage us

Promoting the well-being of ‘all others’ includes aiming to care for people who have done bad things, who have seriously hurt us in one way or another, those who have committed crimes (sometimes atrocious crimes), who have been significantly anti-social and damaged our lives and the lives of others. Promoting the well-being of all others may include our showing concern, where possible and reasonable, for those who might be fighting against us in a war, treating them with appropriate respect and tolerance (e.g. if captured, treating them in line with the Geneva Convention) and understanding that they may be people who have been misled or who may have had no choice but to fight. Our being concerned for the “well-being of all others” can, in some cases, be extremely difficult, especially when we have been personally hurt and damaged by someone else, by some other group of people, where others may have committed unpleasant and destructive acts against us, where they may be anti-social criminals or committed atrocious crimes.

Nevertheless, we need to support the well-being of these people too as far as we can, which will serve to support well-being more generally. That support for these individuals, of course, needs to be balanced against the need to protect us as individuals and our communities from those who might hurt us. So, while it will clearly not be optimal from a murderer’s well-being point of view for them to be put in prison for an extensive period, perhaps the rest of their lives, overall that imprisonment will be promoting well-being through preventing further murders by that individual and the tragedy, pain and grief associated with this. We must not pursue revenge.