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My question is summed up in the title.
Is it possible for a group of people who are completely devoid of religion to develop a set of common morals that differentiate between right and wrong? How would these develop? Would they be firm like Christian morals or would they be more ambiguous? Are there any real world examples of this?
For a real-world example: monkeys have a sense of fairness, but do not have religion-based morals. Thus they have morals without religion. Similar examples could likely be given for early humans, had someone been there to make observations.
Young children also quickly develop a sense of fairness; long before they can understand anything about religion (apologies for the oxymoron).
Philosophy is one way to arrive at morals without religious support. This is indeed a good backing of religious morality, to give people who aren't going to philosophize all day, a book on religious code of conduct.
A good example of the above, is to realize that most religions converge on most issues of morality, even though the histories of said religions might have been completely different.
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) and Jesse Graham identify at least five innate moral foundations. Some focus on the individual and others on the community. The tension between multiple individual and communal foundations guarantee there will be conflicting moral paths to choose from. That these are innate means they are present prior to rationalization and culture. One of them is “Sanctity/Degradation”. Wikipedia and YouTube offer overviews of the idea.
If religion is restricted to a cultural product, then a specific religion is not required for morality which has an innate foundation. However, because one of those innate foundations include sanctity, a foundation for religion in general is also innate. Religion may be the likely way our species expresses this moral foundation. Other species may do this differently and have different foundations.
I don’t think moral foundations theory considers other species. The data comes from our species. However, given morality as innate in humans I think we should allow for the possibility that in some way such foundations may be present in other species as well.
Given the above, I would rephrase the question as asking: “Can human societal morals develop with no concept of sanctity/degradation? Then my answer would be “no” based on Haidt’s research because the sanctity/degradation moral foundation is innate. An answer to the original question would require separating religion from the sanctity/degradation moral foundation perhaps by thinking of it more as “purity” than “sanctity”. Although no specific religion is necessary, I suspect some kind of cultural, religious or spiritual, response would be expected since we all share the sanctity/degradation moral foundation and I see no reason for us to keep this to ourselves.
Absolutely. I'd look to the framers of the US Constitution--the Bill of Rights supplants any religious doctrine in US society. Most modern democracies are likewise non-secular.
The relationship of religion to ethics is likely a function of limited understanding of the natural world and primitive mathematics. (Without rational explanations for natural phenomena, one is left with only imagination to fill in the blanks, unless one takes a strictly rational, Socratic approach.) Once you have advanced mathematics, you can start analyzing issues such as economic and material disparity.
Religion is partly used as a method of contextualizing suffering, which is often the result of disparity/disequilibrium.
Nobody knows what religion means, so this is not one question, but a collection of them. I would claim that for three prominent meanings the answers are not consistent.
Literally, from its etymology and earliest usage, religion is simply 'the link back' -- whatever binds you to an earlier history. Everyone has that, and brings it with them. That would give the answer 'no', whatever you come forward from, you are bound back to it.
In one modern sense, religion is about relationships to the supernatural. But that requires a later notion of the natural to be interposed after the tradition has lost its claim to accurately explain nature. Until it becomes obvious that people are maintaining it out of context, what we now think of as a religion is just immature science (including rational psychology as a science).
Only once the choice is made to maintain its truth whether or not it really fits to the context, because it supports meaning and a given psychology, can there be a notion of anything supernatural -- up until that point, there was just nature, and the system explained that nature. It assumed we knew on its basis how people worked, naturally, and what was ultimately best for them.
So although they had intricate ritual habits and strong theories of how the universe worked, from one POV, Homer preserves evidence that at some point Greeks seem to have had no criterion to separate religion from simple knowledge. So your answer is 'yes', primitive cultures that arise without an already separately identified science should logically all naturally lack the concept of religion in this sense.
In another modern sense, the sense in which Confucianism is one, a religion is a collected set of principles whose effects are enforced by an institution. That approach gives the opposite answer for exactly the same reason. A government is an institution, and any set of principles either is religious, or will be soon enough, because the world changes, and we choose for certain things not to change with it.
