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Is there? I find myself unpersuaded by assertions of morality divorced from their effectiveness in achieving real world aims. Moral statements are nothing but polite fictions for aiding collective action. If this collective action amounts to escalating protection and promotion of falsehood, of what use is the polite fiction? Democracy is "good" because it's worked (better and for longer than it has had any right to work) for solving collective action problems. Now that it's stopped working, is it still good?
Debating nihilists is always a fool's game, but call me a fool…
If you define "good" as "effective at achieving collective aims", that just passes the buck. What is it that defines those aims? What is it that we collectively want that democracy used to be good at achieving? Survival, yes. Hedonistic self-interest, to a point. But humans aren't single-minded selfish pigs, any more than they're perfect selfless angels. Humans have conscience. Secure immediate survival and comfort for a group of people, they'll want to use whatever power and wealth they have left to change the world in ways that they think are 'right' even though they won't affect them personally. Whether that's charitable left-coded "help the needy" stuff, or punitive right-coded "go after sinners and stop them from sinning" stuff. We call this morality.
It's maybe harder to justify the idea that there is a single objectively-correct morality that all those people are groping towards from different directions. But ignoring morality as a powerful force in human affairs, albeit a changeable, relative morality, is just closing yourself off to a major aspect of the human experience, forcing you to make up bullshit just-so stories to explain behavior that's obviously morally motivated. Even Nietzsche didn't go that far - the whole point of his theory is that there is such a thing as "slave morality" that has massive (negative) weight, something that is anything but a convenient name given to what people would be motivated to do by self-interest regardless (because in fact, for good or ill, it causes people to act against their true self-interest).
Drives honed by billions of years of natural selection.
We have drives. They're complex and fuzzy. They arise from a mixture of genetically installed circuits and early socialization. So what?
Conscience isn't a concept well enough defined to be part of a meaningful factual assertion.
Those are both lefty charity perspectives. The religious zealot believes he's charitably saving souls.
I'm not denying that morality as a powerful force exists. It obviously does. I am saying it is not an independent object worthy of philosophical analysis. What you call morality, this powerful force shaping affairs, is merely evolutionary psychology writ large, not something independent and eternal like mathematics.
It doesn't have to be to be worth bringing up, though. This started as a tangent about whether Trump 'should' take Caesar-style dictatorial power or not. If someone says "I don't think he should, because morality", it doesn't matter whether morality is an eternal absolute of the universe or a bunch of fuzzy drives encoded into the human brain by natural selection. A Caesar or Trump's ruthless ambition is also a fuzzy drive encoded into his brain by natural selection. Everything is, and the stars will keep on spinning regardless. That's life, at least if you're an atheist.
Sure, but what grinds my gears is laundering subjectivity as objectivity by speakers asserting that moral facts that just so happen to support their position. It's good and right and honorable and beneficial to have an opinion and express it. It's dishonest and annoying nonsense to present an opinion as fact, and no statement about morality whatsoever can be construed as a fact.
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