Deano - you raise some well worked, but nonetheless interesting philosophical issues. The problem about saying values must come from some Divine authority is that it leaves open the question of where that Divine authority came from, and the consequent infinite regress.

Modern secularists can live with this level of uncertainty, and focus more on the evident stability of most systems of morality - so almost all of us accept the "golden rule" of "doing unto others what we would have them do unto us". Rawl's "veil of ignorance" was a 20th century restatement of this, Mill on "self-regarding" actions one in the 19th century. But stable systems are also ones which can adjust - if they don't, they fracture. So in recent decades we've come to see more "others" as being enough like us that as a society we've adjusted previously held moral positions - such as that certain sexual orientations are immoral, or that belief in a God is necessary for living a moral life.

I don't totally accept all of his views, but I thoroughly recommend Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which is a serious attempt to approach our ideas of morality empirically.

This post was last modified: 08-05-2016 01:04 PM by Tim Lund.