As usual, I couldn’t really figure out what to write on the site upon making it. To procrastinate on actually writing something on my site that I made specifically to write in, I atttempted to create a better comment section, since the current one uses Utterances and needs one to log into GitHub; I tried to make an anonymous comment section kind of like 4chan and failed spectacularly and gave up halfway through.
At any rate, I imagine there is no better way to write a piece than to dig up some old discourse and elaborate on why I hold the opinions I expressed back then. I suppose there is no more fitting way in which to start than with the grounding for most of our worldviews: morality. Most of what I will say has already been covered by smarter people several times over, but this is a personal attempt to articulate it in my own way. Full disclosure, I use ChatGPT a lot to elaborate on my thoughts, and I am too lazy to rewrite whatever it says. Much of this is my ideas put together by AI.
To begin with, we must first clarify what morality is. At its bare bones, morality is one’s sense of right and wrong. It is the basis of almost every social order in human civilization, as well as the seed of almost every opinion an individual holds. If someone thinks abortion is murder, or that there ought to be more social justice for those deemed underprivileged, or that certain governments should never cross certain lines no matter the consequences, all of it traces back to that individual’s sense of right and wrong. Strip away that sense, and it becomes nearly pointless to hold views that don’t directly benefit oneself.
And yet, for something so essential, morality has no actual basis in reality when approached from a secular perspective. Two people of similar upbringing can hold radically different ideas about right and wrong, and neither is more correct. Much of moral debate presumes we all already share some axioms (for example, that murder is wrong), but even those axioms are groundless. In fact, they frequently collapse the moment they become inconvenient. When a controversial political commentator is shot, many cheer and go out of their way to justify it. The supposedly universal axiom evaporates when the target belongs to the out-group. What is taken as “universal” is, in practice, always conditional. History is a record of this selectivity: murder, rape, exploitation, oppression, all permitted or even celebrated when done to the other. Morality, despite its grand claims, has never been applied universally.
Some people argue that morality is subjective, yet still institutionally useful. I see little difference between saying morality is subjective and saying morality does not exist. Anyone can think anything, but thought without grounding carries no value. Music taste, for example, is subjective, but music still exists and one can still analyze and decipher music; morality has no such material existence. Morality is mere preference. No valid moral take exists at all, since all takes are equally baseless.
But even if morality is ungrounded, the question remains: why does it feel so inescapably binding? The answer is twofold: evolution and culture. Evolution endowed us with moral instincts because they served survival. Fairness within an in-group fosters trust, reduces conflict, and allows cooperation. To treat others decently is, in many cases, simply a strategy to secure reciprocal treatment. Culture then amplifies these instincts and molds them. What we call “cultural morality” in itself grows out of two forces: self-interest and collective pressure. The rules we adopt are the codification of our fears and dislikes. We forbid others from doing to us what we would not want done ourselves. And at the same time, what the majority finds repulsive or intolerable eventually crystallizes into law. The result is not an objective code of right and wrong, but a local consensus shaped by disgust and expedience.
The force of morality is its biological compulsion. Our biology influences us more than we realize. People will reproduce rather than adopt, even though adoption is probably more moral, because the biological drive to reproduce overwhelms moral reasoning. The drive creates the illusion of universality. People are emotional creatures; most act on instinct, not thought.
Attempts to “ground” morality in reason or duty are, in my view, attempts to disguise this emptiness. But you cannot ground what has no grounding. You may want to, and we as humans that rely on the existence of that grounding have every incentive to, but that does not change the reality. If you see an apple, it is an apple. You can write libraries convincing yourself otherwise, but the apple remains. Morality is the same: a brute fact of human instinct, not a truth about the world.
In a lot of ways, I believe religion partly acts as an attempt to ground morality. If it was not created to do that, it has at least evolved to do just that; theists very frequently use religion to ground their morality. But in my opinion, adding a deity into the mix doesn’t ground morality so much as it adds another layer of questioning to it. In most religions, God himself provides no basis for morality, other than that he commands it. But why should we follow a command just because it is a command, and what makes God’s sense of morality so much superior to ours? Divine commands, in my opinion, cannot provide a true foundation for morality, only the illusion of one. God’s commands are only authoritative if one accepts them, and accepting them requires prior moral agreement. One cannot find a true foundation without finding an actual reason, but unfortunately, a reason beyond basic biology does not exist.
In conclusion, morality is ungrounded. It is a product of evolution, culture, and human emotion, and while it may be useful, it does not reflect any objective reality. All moral systems, whether secular or religious, are ultimately attempts to give structure to something that has no inherent structure. Morality is therefore a human invention, not a universal truth.