Atheism and Morality… In Spengler's The Decline of the West, the transformation of morality into ethics is seen as yet another triumph of the city over the countryside:

Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities.  The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless.  Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word "soul" by the word "brain".  And, since in the Western "brain" the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character.  The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a critique of society.

Earlier, he notes,

Unfruitfulness – understanding the word in all its direct seriousness – marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and "race-suicide" of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.

Thus the countryside's religious notion of chastity becomes, in a twisted reversal, the sterile carnality of the city, and morality succumbs to an entirely self-serving practical ethics more concerned with political than with personal virtue.

Liberated both politically and morally, man acquires a hubristic confidence in his ability to fashion ethical standards for himself.  His desires answer only to an egalitarian practicality.  The use of drugs to dull his mind, amusements to supplant his vacant intellectual life, and orgies of consumption to pacify every sensory craving are only questioned when they directly injure his person.  For him the term "consenting adults" is a masterwork of ethical reasoning, precisely because it forbids almost nothing.

What is forgotten in this transformation is the harmony attained by the old morality.  Instead there is neurosis, discontent, and anomie, delivered by man's faulty attempts to reason himself happy through the indulgence of every desire.  He reserves his moralistic fury for those who, incomprehensibly to him, question the license he has given himself.  For as sensory pleasure is all that is left to him, he lives in morbid fear of being deprived of it.

His ethical system is inherently atheistic, and exposes the problems with a purely rational ethics.  What he has can barely be called an ethics, and is more a rationalization than rational.  Its three central failings:

• It is based on the consensus of the day, a product of shared emotional impulse rather than serious examination.
• It strives for universal acclaim across diverse populations, which in turn reduces its "language" to only the ethical terminology (and standards) that the entire population can agree upon.
• It is preoccupied with immediate practical effects and avoids serious consideration of the long term consequences of questionable behavior.

Each of these failings abets the other two, but the second presents the largest problem.  Consensus and pragmatism may, within limits, still produce a workable and protective ethical system, however the pressure to tolerate more and more behaviors to broaden appeal will lead to a bias in favor of anything that gratifies someone, however abnormal or helpless the gratification.  Every ethical rule comes to be viewed according to how many people will break it and their importance within one's social milieu.

Through its quest for universal acclaim, this rootless ethics bears close resemblance to the universalist ambitions of capitalist trade to countries that condone unfriendly business practices and provide reduced protection of intellectual property (I have in mind Russia and China).  The hope of course is that increased trade will make them more like us, however it seems likelier that trade with these countries will have the opposite effect by increasing global demand for (and dependence on) products at the prices their shady markets make possible.

Pragmatism tends to indulge.  A parent intent on imbuing discipline as an abstract principle may overbear his children, but he will not do what so many parents do today by indulging them.  Indulgence pleases the parent's sense of being a loving guardian; guarding his children from want makes them happy right now.  This is surely not in any child's long-term interest, as most parents would probably agree.  One nevertheless sees it everywhere, and parental indulgence is now creeping into what is ostensibly adult life.  University culture has become an extension of adolescence, soldiers in combat are referred to as "children", and far into middle age personal responsibility has turned into personal excuse.*

So too does indulgence creep into our ethics.  We allow ourselves greater license, deprive ourselves of fewer and fewer enjoyments (to many it will seem absurd to deprive oneself of any enjoyment at all).  To what end?

I think it is the great mistake of many atheists to think that it is an easy thing to manage one's own moral health, and that difficult ethical questions can be resolved by being as tolerant of everything as possible.  Yet the transformation is so subtle that their unhappiness puzzles them.