Emrys Westacott, The Virtues of Our Vices: tA Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9522.pdf

Morality, in my view, is not some special nonnatural domain. it is a human invention, although as a number of recent studies in evolutionary ethics have suggested, it probably has its roots in our evolutionary heritage. For the most part, moral systems were not consciously designed with particular ends in mind; they emerged naturally, and those that helped their societies to thrive tended to be selected in. Within recorded history, moral revolutionaries like Moses, the Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, and Muhammad sought more or less consciously to construct new ethical systems. They did so with certain goals in mind, and in most cases viewed the moral rules they proposed as reflecting a divine will. This divine sanction justified viewing the rules as objectively correct; it also provided people with a motive to abide by them. 

The enlightenment secularized our view of morality but sought to uphold the objective status and binding force of moral principles by seeing them as dictates of reason rather than divine commandments. since the eighteenth century the secularization of our culture has proceeded apace, and this has made possible a more relativistic view of reason and a more flexible concep­tion of morality. of course, there are plenty of religious believers who still think that the moral precepts they favor express God's will. The more traditional among them even hold that we have a duty to make our society mirror some divinely ordained ideal. But a thoroughly secular approach sees things differently. Moral­ity is a tool. it is a set of values, beliefs, principles, practices, and ideals that we use to help promote certain personal and social goals. naturally, people can and do sometimes disagree over what these goals should be. Fascists will sacrifice individual rights to achieve a certain kind of political state; liberals see the state as serving to guarantee basic individual rights. some people posit ideals of nonviolence and brotherly love; others value rugged individualism and the frontier spirit. But wherever there is com­ mon ground, there is room for reasoned discussion, and we can entertain some hope that, in the long term, people's fundamental values will tend to converge. 

-- Emrys Westacott, The Virtues of Our Vices: tA Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9522.pdf

---SPSmith