Good Entropy

Confessions of an Ex-Moralist – NYTimes.com

But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist
because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two
feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing
because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too.
It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without
commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did
not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding
us for doing what He wanted.

And what is more, I had known this.
At some level of my being there had been the awareness, but I had
brushed it aside. I had therefore lived in a semi-conscious state of
self-delusion – what Sartre might have called bad faith. But in my case
this was also a pun, for my bad faith was precisely the belief that I lacked faith in a divinity.

Joel Marks