Secular humanism is the view that human beings have the capacity — through reason, empathy, science, and the accumulated wisdom of human culture — to understand the world, to act ethically, and to build lives of genuine meaning, without recourse to divine authority, religious revelation, or supernatural sanction. It is not simply the absence of religion but an affirmative position: a confidence in human potential, a commitment to evidence-based inquiry, and an ethical framework grounded in the shared conditions of human life rather than in the commands of any god. The secular humanist holds that morality is not diminished by the absence of divine enforcement; it may, in fact, be ennobled by being genuinely chosen.
The intellectual lineage of secular humanism runs from the Renaissance recovery of classical learning through the Enlightenment defense of reason and individual conscience. Auguste Comte attempted, in the 19th century, to construct a “Religion of Humanity” that would retain the social and emotional functions of religion while replacing its supernatural content with the worship of humanity itself — a project that was earnest, influential, and somewhat absurd, but that established the pattern of secular thought taking morality and social cohesion seriously rather than abandoning them to religion. John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher, gave secular humanism its most sophisticated philosophical form in the 20th century, arguing in “A Common Faith” (1934) that the values traditionally associated with religion — commitment to ideals larger than oneself, a sense of the continuous community of human life — could and should be preserved in naturalistic form. The “Humanist Manifesto” of 1933, which Dewey signed, and its successors in 1973 and 2003, provided formal statements of the position. Paul Kurtz, who coined the term “eupraxsophy” (roughly: good practice through wisdom) and founded the Center for Inquiry, was the most energetic institutional advocate for secular humanism in the late 20th century.
The philosophical significance of secular humanism lies in its insistence that ethics is a natural domain — that questions about how to live are answerable through reason, experience, and reflection, not through revelation. This places it in productive tension with both religious ethics and with moral relativism: against religion, it holds that divine authority is not necessary for genuine moral obligation; against relativism, it holds that some answers to moral questions are better than others, and that human reason is competent to find them. The secular humanist ethical tradition draws on consequentialism, on virtue ethics, and on human rights theory, holding that human flourishing — individual and collective — is the proper measure of ethical success.
The term is frequently misused, most notably in the United States, where “secular humanism” became, from the 1970s onward, a term of abuse deployed by religious conservatives to describe virtually any deviation from their preferred values. In this usage, it functions as a conspiracy theory: secular humanism as the hidden ideology driving public schools, the media, and the courts against traditional religion. This usage is almost entirely disconnected from the actual philosophical tradition, which is a coherent, longstanding, and largely benign set of commitments. The misuse has had the ironic effect of forcing secular humanists to spend considerable energy explaining what their position actually is, while simultaneously being identified with it by opponents who have no interest in accuracy.
What secular humanism represents, at its most considered, is the attempt to take human life seriously on its own terms — to find, within the finite span of a human existence, sufficient grounds for moral seriousness, aesthetic pleasure, intellectual inquiry, and genuine solidarity with other human beings.