Definition
Secular ethics refers to moral frameworks that derive their principles from sources other than religious revelation — typically reason, evidence, human wellbeing, and shared social values. It is ethics worked out without reference to a divine lawgiver.
Secular ethics is not a single doctrine but a family of approaches. It includes consequentialist reasoning about outcomes, rights-based reasoning about persons, virtue-based reasoning about character, and contractarian reasoning about agreement. What unites them is that the grounding is human, not supernatural.
Why it matters
How it works
A secular ethic asks: who is affected, what do they need, what is fair, and what can be justified to all involved? Answers are reached by argument and reflection rather than by appeal to scripture, and they remain open to correction when better arguments appear.
Dawkins argues that most people, religious or not, already reason this way in practice — selecting which scriptural rules to follow by an independent moral sense. That independent sense, he suggests, is doing the real work.