Over at The Stone, Joel Marks writes:

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.

What Marks wants us to confront is that there’s no ground beneath the feet of people who use words like “right” and “wrong,” just as there’s no ground beneath the feet of people who rely on some conception of God to bolster their moral positions. In short, he wants to draw attention to the fact that a great many secularists, if pressed, probably can’t back up the moral positions that they take. With that in mind, he says, they might as well just give up on morality.

And what would be the consequences? He claims that, ultimately, very little would change:

It seems to me that what could broadly be called desire has been the moving force of humanity, no matter how we might have window-dressed it with moral talk. By desire I do not mean sexual craving, or even only selfish wanting. I use the term generally to refer to whatever motivates us, which ranges from selfishness to altruism and everything in between and at right angles. Mother Theresa was acting as much from desire as was the Marquis de Sade. But the sort of desire that now concerns me most is what we would want if we were absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as moral right and wrong. I think the most likely answer is: pretty much the same as what we want now.

In short, we can continue to make what we now call moral claims … but instead we’ll simply call them personal preferences. While some people will argue that this makes it a whole lot more difficult to convince anyone else that you’re right — after all, you’ll be asking them to simply adopt your preferences rather than their own, won’t you? — Marks doesn’t think so.

I’m not so sure. There are some things about which we can be sure that we’re simply expressing a personal preference and we feel just fine when people disagree or ask us to explain our preferences. I think “The Wire” is probably the best television show I’ve ever watched and I can come up with all sorts of reasons for the way I rank it in comparison to other shows. You might find these reasons compelling and you might not; either way, we’ll have an interesting conversation. If you don’t accept my preference for “The Wire,” I’ll simply say that it’s your loss. No harm, no foul.

But do I simply have a personal preference against genocide? Or is it wrong? Clearly, I want to argue that it’s the latter, that it’s always impermissible to (even attempt to) engage in genocide. But what does this mean? Marks claims that there’s nothing underneath the claim I want to make, no reasons beyond my own preferences. In other words, he seems to be charging me (and, I expect, most of us) with using morality as a bludgeon. Since I can’t prove that there’s any such thing as objective right or wrong, or (perhaps) since I can’t find a reason that will impact other people on this issue, I’m simply putting Morality in the place of God and declaring both my belief in it and the necessity that you also believe in it.

I’ve written a lot (for example, here and here) about ways in which we might ground the idea of human rights without appealing to God or Truth or Morality or some other objective foundation. If you click on either of those two links in the previous paragraph, you’ll see I’ve argued that my way of doing things wouldn’t simply ground the idea of human rights in my own personal preference, but instead in an international overlapping consensus. My sense is that this serves as a way of responding to Marks without referring to an ungrounded Morality and thus of answering my question about whether or not ex-moralism is the necessary route for all of us to take.

In other words, we can insist that genocide is always wrong — we can call it immoral — and we won’t simply be expressing a personal preference or just bludgeoning others with a Morality that has no foundation.