Baseless morality

Having refused both religion as providing a public, shared justification for morality and the Aristotelian notion of a telos, however, Enlightenment thinkers deprived themselves of any justification for moving from human nature as we find it to human nature as it ought to be. All that is left behind is an inherited (but now baseless) content for morality along with human nature as we find it. But one can hardly argue from human nature as we find it (without a telos) to that moral content. On the contrary, “the injunctions of morality, thus understood, has strong tendencies to disobey“. The project of enlightenment moral philosophers was doomed to failure.

As McIntyre tells it, the story of the Enlightenment project is the story of what happens when human nature is deprived of its telos so that moral value judgements lose their factual character and can be taken as "nothing but expressions of preference.“ Emotivism as a theory is now free to hold sway. With no conception of what a human is or of the good toward which a human life is to aim, we can likewise discard the communal cultivation of virtues, or "excellencies of character,“ that would enable us to move toward the good. We may still find ourselves using the moral vocabulary of the past and even appealing to vaguely defined, ill-defined, or undefined notions such as “rights“ (claimed especially within the sphere of individualism) and “utility“ (claimed especially within the sphere of bureaucratic organisation), but moral debate can be little more than the “indignant self-righteousness of protest“ and, inevitably, as Friedrich Nietzsche rightly understood, a mask for the arbitrary "will to power“. Morality becomes little more than an arena for the competition of wills, and it is simply the powerful, clever, or those skilled at manipulation who win the day.

Evangelism After Christendom, Bryan Stone p136