I know that I’ve been doing this a lot lately, but the Atheist Experience has been giving me a lot to think about and, as should be clear by now, disagree with. Now I’ve gone on record disagreeing with Matt Dillahunty’s pronouncements on secular morality and I’m sure I’ll get into that again, but the simple problem is that morality isn’t simple and far too many people seem interested in spitting out a simplistic, easy-to-digest, easy-to-impose moral solution.

It just doesn’t work that way.

So let’s keep this as simple as we can. Morality, in its simplest terms in this case, is the set of rules that ensure cohesiveness and cooperation amongst the members of a given society. It’s really what makes a society an ongoing concern. It’s ideas that can, and often are, codified into laws that govern behaviors and is based, as people should well know, enlightened self-interest and empathy. We don’t want to get murdered, thus we don’t murder others in hopes that they will reciprocate. It’s a very basic concept.

The problem is, not everyone actually agrees, not just to the “I don’t want to be murdered” part, but to the specifics hiding within that wish. Sure, you don’t want to get murdered, but those people over there, they’re not as good as you and therefore, they can be murdered or enslaved or beaten or robbed or abused or whatever else the individual can come up with. You might not agree but your agreement doesn’t change the facts. This is why we make laws, so that we can be very clear and often, unnecessarily legalistic, in spelling out exactly what people are allowed and not allowed to do.

So this brings us back around to morality. Matt, and others to be fair including people like Sam Harris, start with a subjective goal in mind, that of “well-being.” So long as everyone adopts the same subjective goal, you can build a moral system, according to them. The problem is, not everyone is going to agree on what constitutes well-being. Maybe someone wants well-being for themselves. Screw everyone else. If they get enough power and authority, if they become the  god-king of the universe, then they’re going to be doing pretty well, right? It doesn’t really matter what the peasants are doing that you abuse, so long as they can’t rise up and depose you, right? I don’t know that it’s even a realistic goal to insist that everyone has the same interpretation of well-being or any other central ideal. Well-being for who and how and a million other questions? Good luck on getting a universal consensus.

Because thereafter, they claim that once the subjective ideal is agreed to, everything else is objective. Nope, sorry. Not everyone is  going to agree how to reach that goal and it’s foolish to think that they will. You’re going to get one  group of people over there that want universal equality and all of that, which is absolutely great to wish for, and another group over there who think they’re better than everyone else and if they have to ride to the top on everyone else’s backs, so be it.

The only way to solve the conundrum is exactly how we do it today, which is essentially mob rule. The most people with the most economic, social and political power, they win! They get to make the rules! The people without power or influence, they lose. I’m not saying that that’s not the way we should do it, in fact, I don’t think it can happen any other way. It’s just not objective in any way, shape or form and that’s the problem.

Right now, there are groups out there who want to achieve well-being through various political models. Some want capitalism, some want communism, some want socialism, some want pure anarchy. So, which one is “objectively” correct? Because even though we know, through many experiments, that communism results in terrible outcomes, there are still lots of people out there, some of them in political power, who are totally enamored with it. These are people who don’t learn lessons. Then, you have a lot of religious people who desperately want a theocracy. That never works well. Just look at the cesspool in much of the Middle East. That doesn’t matter to them because they want to be in power and ultimately, that’s what all of the disagreements are about. Who gets to make the rules and who has to follow them?

Morality is an inherently messy proposition, precisely because you’re not going to get the kind of universal agreement that a lot of these secular morality proponents think they’ll achieve. They are just assuming that they’ll be the ones that wind up in power and have the influence and the authority to make the rules and that’s no different, really, than what the religious have done for centuries. They are declaring themselves righteous in the same way that the church has declared itself ordained by God and thus, it gets to rule. Anyone who doesn’t like it or who doesn’t agree, they can either leave, or in far too many cases, be killed as heretics and enemies of the state. Those are the people who tend to get “cancelled”.

In reality, the path doesn’t change because you slap a brand new label on it. Society only works with rules and those rules don’t have to be fair for all. We may strive for that, depending on what the ruling class identifies as “fair”, but fairness rarely looks particularly fair to those on the outs with the powerful. I’m not just talking about the murderers and the rapists and the pedophiles, I mean the people who wake up one day and say “wait a minute, that’s unjust!” Yup and you can do nothing at all about it, until society changes again, as it invariably does, or there’s a bloody revolution. Then the winners get to set the rules and hope that they can bamboozle the sheep into putting up with it for a while, at least until they’ve made their wishes into law for a while. This isn’t objective. It never has been and it never will be. It doesn’t matter what color lipstick you put on the pig, it’s still a pig and people need to stop pretending otherwise.

Wouldn’t that be nice?