Are there any morals left

Most take moral theories to be prescriptive. The descriptive accounts of what people do is left to sociologists and anthropologists. There have been many different proposals. Many claim that there is a necessary connection between morality and religion, such that, without religion in particular, without God or gods there is no morality, i.

Divine Command Theory is widely held to have several serious flaws. Most think that right and wrong are not arbitrary -- that is, some action is wrong, say, for a reason. Aristotle, and most of the ancient Greeks really had nothing to say about moral duty, i. What aspects of society they want to defeat may vary. In the early s they were obsessed with Jews, evolution and immigration.

As such they formed the backbone of the revived Ku Klux Klan. The moralistic fundamentalist was, however, largely a Democrat and even sometimes a Progressive.

People forget the Progressives and the Democrats were quite openly racist at the time. The most successful fundamentalist in American politics was anti-evolution crusader William Jennings Bryan, who was the presidential candidate of both the Democrats and the Progressives.

By the s fundamentalists started abandoning the Democrats as the party moved toward acceptance of civil rights for black Americans. Evangelist John R. Rice, the editor of the voice of fundamentalism, The Sword of the Lord , warned: "It is better for both Negroes and whites to run with their own kind and intermarry with their own kind.

The mixing of races widely differing is almost never wise Thus if a girl would do wrong to marry a Negro boy, she would be wrong to keep company with him, mixing regularly with him in social life. To Rice, who spoke for the majority of fundamentalists of his day, integration was a communist plot where "hotheads in the North advocate using armed forces to compel white people and colored people to send their children to the same schools, while in the South, leading men in the government and out have banded themselves together to avoid what they think would result in intermarriage and the mongrelization of the race and the breakdown of all the southern standards of culture.

At each stage of their campaign they presented their prejudices as if they were gospel. Since they hated Jews, blacks, Mormons, Catholics, immigrants, God hated them as well, or at the very least, would tolerate them if they kept to their assigned place in society. Fundamentalist politics was always a combination of two things: hatred for groups they targeted and their own moral superiority.

They were "God's people" in direct touch with Jesus and following divine orders. They were redeemed and forgiven and all others were filthy sinners unworthy of respect or rights.

From such reasoning it is a slippery slope to the wealthy feeling that the Golden Rule justifies their treatment of the poor, military victors believing that it justifies their treatment of the vanquished, misogynists their treatment of women and so on. A shortcoming of the Golden Rule is that it has done little to prevent acts such as slavery Credit: Getty Images.

Because of this, Axial Age philosophies invariably supplemented the Golden Rule with a more comprehensive code of ethics, and did so in divergent ways.

Some theories, especially in Europe, appeal to the authority of a moral judge such as a god, ruler or wise human. Other theories, like Confucianism, appeal to the stability of social order and the harmonious relationships of different people. Still others appeal to a conception of human nature, arguing that humans serve a particular role in the Universe and thus we ought to work towards fulfilling this role.

Such appeals are used to justify rules of conduct that determine how we should act day to day. These principles often depart surprisingly little from what came before, continuing to uphold unequal social hierarchies, slavery, misogyny and violence.

The difficulty is that if one appeals to any higher authority, order or ideal as grounding the principles of ethics, then one faces a dilemma. On the one hand we might want to say that this authority, order or ideal is inherently just, such that whatever principles flow from it must be correct.

In response to this it is tempting to argue that the authority, order or ideal we are appealing to is justified on some further grounds, such as its benevolence towards humanity.

However, if this is so then what we are appealing to cannot be the ultimate source of ethics. This leaves ethics with a real challenge. Are there any ethical principles with the same self-evident value as the Golden Rule, but that can produce a comprehensive theory of how one should live without needing to appeal to a higher authority or ideal?

The last years have seen a flowering of new approaches to ethics. One of these is the argument that ethical principles ought to be duties that everyone could obey as universal laws without exception or contradiction. The philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that we could identify such principles by imagining the opposite: principles that would contradict themselves if universally applied.

To simplify one of his conclusions, he thus proposed that it is never moral to lie under any circumstances because if there were a universal law that lying was acceptable nobody would believe anyone. We should design ethical principles that promote these values, and these are principles we will all have reason to endorse. One approach to deriving ethical principles is to explore how they might work as a universal law that applies to everyone Credit: Getty Images.

Both approaches offer a combination of coherent moral guidance and a self-evident appeal that go beyond previous ethical thinking. This article is part of a BBC Future series about the long view of humanity , which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time.

The first is that these two approaches disagree not only about the foundations of ethical theory but also what people should do.

In aiming to maximise well-being, utilitarian views endorse the conclusion that we should redirect the trolley, killing one person rather than five. While killing one person and killing five people are both bad, they argue, killing five is five times worse than one. The Kantian tradition, on the other hand, evaluates these choices based on how well they would translate into universal laws.

Consider the option recommended by utilitarians above: redirecting the trolley away from five people so that it kills only one. However, this principle is contradictory because it implies that human lives both have intrinsic value and so should be saved and that they can be treated as a means to obtain some other end and so can be sacrificed.

Kant thus believed that any universal law for rational beings would thus have to conclude that killing, like lying, was never justified, even to prevent the death of a greater number of people. The complexity of the real world is something that theoretical principles can struggle to capture Credit: Getty Images. There is a strong tradition of philosophers trying to overcome these differences to produce a unified theory of ethics.

However, most philosophers maintain that such a unification is at best a long way off, and that the fierce debate surrounding cases like the trolley problem indicate that it may not be getting any closer. Another problem is that both utilitarianism and Kantianism are deeply embedded within a set of cultural norms that are reductionist seeing the world as composed of individual component parts , dualistic seeing a clear division between right and individualistic seeing the goal of ethics as empowering individuals to do the right thing.

However, there is a more profound objection to this framing: it is simply inappropriate for guiding ethical decision-making in the real world. Think back to the trolley problem. This example was custom made to provide the perfect framework for evaluating these theories. Unfortunately, real world ethical problems are not so clear-cut.

They invariably involve complex choices with uncertain outcomes and are faced by groups or systems not all powerful decision makers. While a small number of researchers have engaged with the ethics of complexity or the realities of uncertainty , their work is very much an exception.

Will unmanned vehicles follow the best ethical principles when required to balance human lives?