Background The Ethical movement was an outgrowth of secularism among
Victorian intellectuals. A precursor to the doctrines of the Ethical movement can be found in the
South Place Ethical Society, founded in 1793 as the
South Place Chapel on
Finsbury Square, on the edge of the
City of London. was an outgrowth from the
Fellowship of the New Life. In the early nineteenth century, the chapel became known as "a radical gathering-place." At that point, it was a
Unitarian chapel; like
Quakers, the Unitarian movement supported
female equality. Under the leadership of Reverend
William Johnson Fox (who became
minister of the congregation in 1817), it lent its pulpit to activists such as
Anna Wheeler, one of the first women to campaign for
feminism at public meetings in England, who spoke in 1829 on the "Rights of Women." In later decades, the chapel moved away from Unitarianism and changed its name first to the South Place Religious Society. It again changed its name to the South Place Ethical Society (a name it held formally, but it was better known as Conway Hall from 1929); its current name is
Conway Hall Ethical Society. The
Fellowship of the New Life was established in 1883 by the Scottish intellectual
Thomas Davidson. Fellowship members included poets
Edward Carpenter and
John Davidson, animal rights activist
Henry Stephens Salt, sexologist
Havelock Ellis, feminist
Edith Lees (who later married Ellis), novelist
Olive Schreiner and
Edward R. Pease. Its objective was "The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all." They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean, simplified living for others to follow. Davidson was a major proponent of a structured philosophy about
religion,
ethics, and
social reform. At a meeting on 16 November 1883, a summary of the society's goals was drawn up by Maurice Adams: Although the Fellowship was short-lived, it spawned the
Fabian Society, which split in 1884 from the Fellowship of the New Life.
In the United States , founder of the Ethical movement. In his youth, Felix Adler was being trained to be a rabbi like his father,
Samuel Adler, the rabbi of the
Reform Jewish Temple Emanu-El in New York. As part of his education, he enrolled at the
University of Heidelberg, where he was influenced by
neo-Kantian philosophy. He was especially drawn to the Kantian ideas that one could not prove the existence or non-existence of deities or immortality, and that morality could be established independently of theology. During this time, he was also exposed to the moral problems caused by the
exploitation of women and labor. These experiences laid the intellectual groundwork for the Ethical movement. Upon his return from Germany in 1873, he shared his ethical vision with his father's congregation through a sermon. Due to the negative reaction he elicited, it became his first and last sermon as a rabbi-in-training. Instead, he took up a professorship at
Cornell University and in 1876 gave a follow-up sermon that led to the 1877 founding of the
New York Society for Ethical Culture, which was the first of its kind.
In Britain led the Ethical movement in Britain. In 1885, the ten-year-old American Ethical Culture movement helped to stimulate similar social activity in Great Britain when American sociologist
John Graham Brooks distributed
pamphlets by Chicago ethical society leader
William Salter to a group of British philosophers, including
Bernard Bosanquet,
John Henry Muirhead, and John Stuart MacKenzie. One of Felix Adler's colleagues,
Stanton Coit, visited them in London to discuss the "aims and principles" of their American counterparts. In 1886, the first British ethical society was founded. Coit took over the leadership of South Place for a few years. Ethical societies flourished in Britain. By 1896, the four London societies formed the Union of Ethical Societies, and between 1905 and 1910, there were over fifty societies in Great Britain, seventeen of which were affiliated with the Union. This rapid growth was partly due to Coit, who left his role as leader of South Place in 1892 after being denied the power and authority he was vying for. Because he was firmly entrenched in British ethicism, Coit remained in London and formed the West London Ethical Society, which was almost entirely under his control. Coit worked quickly to shape the West London society not only around Ethical Culture but also the trappings of religious practice, renaming the society in 1914 to the Ethical Church; he did this because he subscribed to a personal theory of using "theological terms in a humanistic sense" to make the Ethical movement appealing to irreligious people with otherwise strong cultural attachments to religion, such as
cultural Christians. Coit transformed his meetings into "services," and their space into something akin to a church. In a series of books, Coit also began to argue for transforming the
Anglican Church into an Ethical Church while holding up the virtue of ethical ritual. He felt that the Anglican Church was in the unique position to harness the natural moral impulse that stemmed from society itself, as long as the Church replaced
theology with science, abandoned supernatural beliefs, expanded its Bible to include a cross-cultural selection of ethical literature and reinterpreted its creeds and liturgy in light of modern ethics and
psychology. His attempt to reform the Anglican church failed, and ten years after he died in 1944, the Ethical Church building was sold to the
Roman Catholic Church.
Harold Blackham, who had taken over leadership of the London Ethical Church, consciously sought to remove the church-like trappings of the Ethical movement and advocated a simple creed of humanism that was not akin to a religion. He promoted the merger of the Ethical Union with the
Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society, and, in 1957, a Humanist Council was set up to explore amalgamation. Although issues over charitable status prevented a full amalgamation, the Ethical Union under Blackham changed its name in 1967 to become the
British Humanist Association, establishing humanism as the principal organizing force for non-religious morals and secularist advocacy in Britain. The BHA was the legal successor body to the Union of Ethical Societies. Between 1886 and 1927, seventy-four ethical societies were started in Great Britain, although this rapid growth did not last long. The numbers declined steadily throughout the 1920s and early 30s until only ten societies were left in 1934. By 1954, there were only four. The situation became such that, in 1971, sociologist Colin Campbell even suggested that one could say "that when the South Place Ethical Society discussed changing its name to the South Place Humanist Society in 1969, the English Ethical movement ceased to exist." The German Ethical Movement produced two regular journals: the
Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Ethik (Berlin 1894–95) and
Ethische Kultur: Wochenschrift für Sozial-ethische Reformen (Ethical Culture: Weekly Journal for Social-Ethical Reforms). Whereas in the UK the Ethical movement organically evolved into a humanist movement, the German movement saw no such gradual transition. After the Freethinkers were
programmatically stamped out and had their leaders executed by the Nazis, the Ethical/humanist movement in Germany would not reform until after German reunification in 1991. The humanist association
Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands was founded in 1993 to promote humanism. ==Ethical perspective==