Question for non-theists: What grounds your morality?
Some important notes:
- This is an ontological, not an epistemological question about ethics. I am aware atheists can be very moral beings.
- This is a question for non-theists who hold to objectivity in ethics (moral realists) - e.g. it is always true that murdering someone for no reason is morally wrong, etc.
- Grounding morality in: evolution (naturalistic fallacy), sentiment (subjectivity), or human reason (ultimately subjective, for whose reason are we speaking of? And human reason, limited as it is, cannot construct moral laws) seems incoherent. Short of Platonism, are these all the options a non-theist has at his disposal?
*I'm relatively new here. I'm sure this issue has been discussed before, but I've missed it.
- This is an ontological, not an epistemological question about ethics. I am aware atheists can be very moral beings.
- This is a question for non-theists who hold to objectivity in ethics (moral realists) - e.g. it is always true that murdering someone for no reason is morally wrong, etc.
- Grounding morality in: evolution (naturalistic fallacy), sentiment (subjectivity), or human reason (ultimately subjective, for whose reason are we speaking of? And human reason, limited as it is, cannot construct moral laws) seems incoherent. Short of Platonism, are these all the options a non-theist has at his disposal?
*I'm relatively new here. I'm sure this issue has been discussed before, but I've missed it.
Comments (75)
I am not sure notions of eternal punishment or reward are that admirable.
But ultimately Buddhist ethics are grounded in the reality of karma - that all intentional actions have consequences - and founded on the inter-dependent principles of ??la (morality), Prajñ? (wisdom) and Samadhi (meditative absorption). These are compared to the 'three legs of the tripod', three legs being necessary for the structure to stand. However the ultimate aim of Buddhist teaching is, in my opinion, transcendent.
Buddhism and the God Idea, Nyanaponika Thera.
Grounds
To assume an ontological answer is to assume the reality of socially constructed norms.
To be a moral realist then is to accept the reality of socially constructed norms as objectivly reality
No, I don't think anyone can go back in time, literally or figuratively to say what reality was for the individually at various times throughout history. We must judge history based on our own normative understandings and valuations. Similarly we now judge Newton's theories as an incomplete understanding of the world based on our point if view, not his.
Many would accept a $5.00 bill as payment for a $5.00 debt. Offering a debtor less than what is owned for no good reason might invoke their laughter. Not all norms are all that normative, some norms have evolved along with our understandings, and these continue play a crucial part in the social construction of reality.
(Y)
We generally like freedom and dislike harm (including other animals), and that can, and do, inform judging actions in terms of morality.
Which hardly are matters of arbitrary, ad hoc opinion, not mere whims of the moment; who ever called liking freedom or disliking harm random or discretionary anyway?
If you require myths and commands to understand that, then there's a good chance you're a bit scary. :)
The objective versus subjective thing is misleading from the get-go.
When you are asking for the grounds of a position, i.e. "Why do you hold to that position?" you are, by definition, asking an epistemological question. To insist that it is an ontological question is to beg the question. You are smuggling some kind of an answer into your question: the only "grounds" you will accept must be some kind of "thing" or fact in the world, right? I suppose this leads to your next stipulation:
Quoting Modern Conviviality
Moral realism is usually understood as the statement that (a) moral claims are statements of facts (more than just facts about our own thoughts and feelings), of the way the world is (outside our heads), and (b) at least some moral claims are true. Is this what you mean by moral realism?
Quoting Modern Conviviality
Why do you think so? "Incoherent" means, strictly speaking, contradictory. What contradictions do you see in these positions?
ETA: Some of the answers posted here (, , ) propose to ground all or most of morality in some particular moral dictum (the Golden Rule, the primacy of personal freedom), but these are not really answers to the question posed in the OP. These are proposals for theories of morality that reduce most moral claims to some fundamental moral principle. But these proposed grounds are themselves moral principles, and so they cannot ground all of morality.
Some of my moral judgments are more secure than others, and at times I seek to ground some less secure opinions in more secure, more fundamental convictions. But, as I wrote above, this kind of query cannot provide the grounds for morality as a whole.
We might try to explain morality as a natural - or a supernatural - phenomenon, but this can only tell us what is, not what ought to be.
he bathes quickly. Does a man drink much wine? do not say that he does this bad-
ly, but say that he drinks much. For before you shall have determined the opinion,
how do you know whether he is acting wrong? Thus it will not happen to you to
comprehend some appearances which are capable of being comprehended, but to assent to others" - Epiktetos
On an aside, I think DCT is the closest thing we have to an ontological grounding of morality
Might want to look into Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism. It still runs into the difficulty of justifying how exactly morality is objective, but it manages to seem to fuse projectionist and non-cognivitism into a distinctly cognitivist morality. Our attitudes towards things are projected onto the world and in turn we "perceive" this very projection and formulate truth-apt statements.
But in general with a lot of philosophical debates and meta-ethical ones you get four camps, some form of non-naturalism, naturalist reductionism, expressivism and eliminativism, the former two being realist and the latter two being anti-realist. It's not perfectly cut like this in real life but in general it's a basic template that most issues end up being structured as.
Again what your talking about is moral epistemology, not moral ontology. Many moral teachers may teach many different moral doctrines. This does not in any way broach the question of the ground of moral truths.
The fundamental question of Buddhism is: what is the source and the end of suffering. Nirv??a, as 'the end of all suffering', is exactly that: the end of all suffering. It is, therefore, a supreme good, and one around which the Buddhist teachings serve.
But I'm not trying to forward any argument, just explicating and making important distinctions.
That is an assertion, or, if you like, a proposition, by which you claim to have essentially eliminated Buddhism from answers to your original question.
This is very new for me. I'm not going to attempt to respond critically, only to ask how does the Buddhist know that 'all intentional actions have consequences'?
I would think through a combination of observation and inference. The word 'karma' comes from the root word for 'hand' (kr-) - the implication being 'action' or 'deed', and its consequences. It is not hard to observe this relationship in day to day life.
To turn the question around - how can the link between action and consequence NOT be fundamental to a moral philosophy? The idea that actions don't have moral consequences is surely one of the main grounds that theistic philosophies fault atheism for, isn't it?
And besides, there are biblical verses that can be cited as being an implicit recognition of the same principle, specifically, 'as you sow, so shall you reap', which is practically folk wisdom (although no less true for that.)
The deeper issue for Buddhism is, if karma is always to have consequences, then it must, somehow, extend beyond physical death; because if physical death 'wipes the slate clean', so to speak, then there are no consequences for evil actions beyond what occurs in this physical existence. That, of course, is a deep question; suffice to say that in theistic traditions, it is dealt with in relation to doctrines of eschatology, i.e. 'the fate of the soul after death', typically depicted in terms of heaven and hell (and limbo, in traditional Catholicism).
I don't want to take the thread in that direction, beyond observing that both theistic and Buddhist religious cultures acknowledge the concept of 'a life beyond' as essential to their ethical doctrines.
Excellent question. I don't think anyone else in this thread has an answer to it.
As a member of a social species, I need others around me to be happy and recognize that to piss them off would be to possibly lose them and make me unhappy.
The approaches you don't appear to be exploring are (a) virtue ethics, a process of learning good action grounded in the interplay between your reason and experiences with the social practices you find around you; and (b) a grounding of ethics in how we are with and for each other, the I-you relation, which many Continental philosophers are into, but which has been propelled into the analytic way of doing ethics by Stephen Darwall's 'The Second Person Standpoint'.
The most universal and coherent moral foundations are composed of shared sentiment (i.e: our shared desire to go on living and to live freely) and "human reason" (if you're asking whose reason we're speaking of, the answer is our reasoning; our shared human reasoning).
The social contact is a good metaphor for the form that my moral arguments tend to take. If we have similar goals in life then we may come to an agreement between us to abstain from certain actions and to accept the burden of performing some other actions in order to serve our end goals more effectively.
"More effective"... Some moral systems are more effective than others (although different moral systems sometimes do different things) at achieving their goals. How do you know there are objective rights and wrongs instead of a spectrum of better and worse?
The goals of my moral framework extend only as far as our shared human condition/experience/desire, but luckily there are some basic shared desires that are nearly universal in humans (the aforementioned two for instance). Many non-non-theists try and take issue with my moral framework by claiming that "it's not objective" even while they assent to my moral propositions because they share basic human desires. It seems ironic to me that this issue of non-universality is so important to so many thinkers even though it forces them to nest their moral foundation in some absurd claim to supreme truth which renders their moral system less persuasive and less useful overall.
In short, present me a set of circumstances with moral implications and I'll try to convince you of what I think is the best available moral decision to make. I won't convince you on the basis that a certain decision is good because it is universal, or contains a certain ultimate virtue, but because it demonstrably promotes/preserves stated values and ends that at the time you agree are morally praiseworthy or obligatory.
Of late I have found that morality as a mutually agreeable cooperative strategy designed to promote shared values and goals (and avoiding undesirable ends), is quite useful for convincing people of a particular moral course of action even while they reject it as "morality". For instance, one person might hold (or want to hold) that doing violence against another is universally immoral, but when presented with the right circumstances (such as the need to defend yourself when suddenly thrust into a violent prison system as an inmate) almost everyone would happily consent to do violence once it becomes clear to them that a strategy of mutual cooperation is not available and that doing harm to others is necessary for self-preservation. (if you're interested @Modern Conviviality, just say so and I'll happily paint such a circumstantial picture, as I would be happy to do for any other supposedly "universal" moral commandments). I sometimes call this a "breakdown of morality" in order to emphasize that when conflict is inevitable (when no cooperative strategies are available) the utility of typical intuitive moral positions can go flying out the widow...
I can understand your invocation of a universal/collective type of human reasoning to apprehend and intuit morality as human persons, but it still seems unsatisfactory for our purposes. Our 'collective reason' is still human, and so by inference: imperfect and limited. Are you speaking of a Platonic 'collective human logic' which has a special ontological status similar to God's ontological status? Unless moral laws are somehow built into the logical structure of thought (in a Platonic kind of way), which is coherent but difficult to articulate.
But this is perfectly explainable when we distinguish between epistemological and ontological morality. As a theist I agree with many of the ethical habits, desires, and beliefs of my atheist colleagues. There is no problem here. The problem concerns how the atheist can appropriately ground his moral life in an objective (not universal) way.
I'm a big fan of virtue ethics. Studied it lightly, but still retain the fundamentals I think. You're right I blatantly missed the option. However, does virtue ethics go beyond describing what the good life is / what is truly good for man qua man - to answer the question of grounding? If I remember, Aristotle just takes it as axiomatic/self-evident that man truly ought to desire what is good. That it is constitutive of his nature, in a normative way. It is self-evident like 2+2=4 is. Am I correct here?
I think your 'ought to' isn't right, but otherwise, yes. It is for Aristotle the nature of humanity to pursue eudaimonia, flourishing, and the route to this is 'the good'. The details of the virtuous dispositions that will enable us to enact the good are mostly acquired from what people say is blameworthy or praiseworthy, i.e. from the shared Athenian culture which we all know is the best possible culture the world has ever seen - kind of thing.
There's a lot of modern work on virtue ethics which began from Elizabeth Anscombe's paper of 1958, 'Modern moral philosophy', which you can find online. The major work I've read and thought about is 'After Virtue' by Alasdair MacIntyre, which tries to construct a virtue ethics for the present era. Pardon me if you know all this.
I don't know how moral facts are discovered by reason. But they are. And yes, "moral laws are...part of the rational/epistemic enterprise itself". Insofar as something is intelligible, it is grounded in the rational enterprise. Thus all of morality stems from reason. This is my understanding.
The "laws" I'm interested in are built into reality in the same way that an ideal chess strategy is built into a particular configuration of chess pieces on a chess board.
It is neccessary to have a starting value though; a goal. In chess the goal is winning capturing the enemy king. Reasoning allows us to come to positions about what is objective better or worse in terms of achieving that goal. In chess there are a host of known moves which are almost universally terrible to make (in almost every chess situation), and there are moves which are thought to be very strong. In real world moral terms gouging each-others eyes out is almost universally inconducive to our shared goals; a bad move. But it always depends on the circumstances...
The foundation is shared goals; what we humans want. The moral agreement that can exist between us encompasses the scope of our shared or non-mutually exclusive (life, love, happiness, etc...), and our physical capacity to actually follow a mutually beneficial strategy of cooperation (if physical circumstances make cooperation impossible or necessitates conflict (especially deadly conflict) then there can be no shared moral agreement between us relevant to the situation).
Is the human condition an objective authority?
I reckon it's not, but we ARE humans, and as such a morality which serves and pertains to the human condition is the best morality for us. I cannot open a window into some objective dimension and pull out some ultimate and necessary moral purpose. I know this isn't what many thinkers are looking for, but I can promise you that it's very robust when done right.
Take "the desire to go on living" for instance. When survival dilemmas arise coming to an agreement about how to work together in order avoid death is something that all humans generally will get on board with (and of the humans who do not desire to go on living, they generally don't pose any problems).
I am aware of this great revival of a great moral theory! - indeed the most sound and flexible secular moral theory on offer. I say I am 'aware', but only as someone who follows, in a peripheral way, the trends in modern ethics, but have not read either Anscombe or MacIntyre, yet! I'm still reading & understanding the ancient/medieval positions before I grapple with their modern iterations.
Well wait a minute, I think we have come back round to the beginning again. In a weak sense, 'rational enterprise' sounds like something humans do 'create' and are responsible for. But 'rational enterprise' could be interpreted in a stronger ontological sense, namely, as the underlying structure of thought/reality itself.
The latter is something we humans simply participate in but are in no way responsible for - logic and its laws being the main example. So, to go back, if morality is part and parcel of Logic with a capital L then we are mere participants of morality in the same way we merely participate in using logic.
It seems like we pushed the problem back one step! How do we ground logic itself? I think this isn't a problem for most people, as we are comfortable with the thought that logic is necessary and axiomatic. But Morality with a capital M does not feel necessary in the same way.
Worth noting that McIntyre converted to Catholicism, and that that Anscombe was Catholic. That might be incidental, but the thrust of McIntyre's argument tends logically towards theism. (He had previously been Marxist.)
My response to Euthyphro is stolen from Aquinas. That it is a false dilemma, in that God acts consistently with his essential character, which is the foundation of goodness. God is neither the architect of goodness nor is he the expert on goodness, He is the foundation of goodness.
We do not require that physical laws "came into existence" prior to the phenomena they govern in order to qualify as being "objective"; so why should we require it in the case of moral laws that govern the behavior of moral beings?
If it is "the nature of humanity to pursue eudamonia" (and this is taken in a positive sense as 'flourishing'), and the "route to this is the good" then why would these facts not justify the conclusion that we ought to pursue the good (meaning, of course. nothing other than 'take that route')?
Physical laws purportedly act without intention; if there is no intention, there can be no question of morality. So how could moral laws be compared to physical laws? (As I mentioned, the doctrine of karma does provide a somewhat naturalistic solution, in that it connects intentional actions with consequences in a law-like manner. However I don't think there are many analogies to that in Western ethical philosophy.)
I don't understand your objection since I wasn't talking about physical laws in the context of morality, but rather moral laws. The contention, as I understood it, was that moral laws could not be "objective" because they came into existence with moral beings. But by that argument physical laws could not be objective if they came into existence with physical entities. Or are you saying that only physical things can be objective? If you want to say so, that would be a separate argument, and it would also make it look like you had bought into the logic of the very ones (physicalists and materialists) you generally seem to be seeking to refute.
I'm pretty much a subjectivist on morality, so I don't think anything really objectively grounds it. I would say that an individual person's system of morality, insofar as it is coherent, is grounded in subjective first principles. However, once you make use of these first principles and assume their value is true, there are many logical truths we can derive from it.
i.e. 1. Murder is always wrong --> subjective principle
2. Abortion is murder (I personally reject this premise so to me the argument is not at all sound)
-----------
3. So therefore abortion is wrong, too. The conclusion follows from the premises.
First principles themselves are based on what I would call existential choices made by the individual subject. So accepting premise #1 as true would be such a choice.
I'm not sure if there's anything that can objectively ground morality, not even God. If morality is the divine command of God, it just seems to be that God is putting forth her own preferred subjective system of morality.
I was just trying to be pedantic about the source in ancient Greek, not express an opinion of my own. It's commonly accepted that the ancient world didn't have this sense of 'ought' in the language, so if one thinks they must have meant it all the same, one has to go by a roundabout route. That's part of what Anscombe says: that the very idea of duty, of 'ought' in our cultural traditions derive from a God who was unknown to the classical world.
"The unexamined life is not worth living"
It seems fair to say that both Plato and Aristotle, in their perhaps different ways, recommended the pursuit of eudamonia and the 'good life'; and that such a recommendation is certainly an "ought" of sorts; although obviously not an "ought" imposed by a transcendent authority; which is the narrower way you seem to be interpreting it.
Do you think the examined life is necessarily a moral life or that philosophy is the correct methodology for examining life. It didn't seem to work out too well for Socrates. He was democratically judged to be impious and a corrupting influence by 280 of 500 Athenians.
Well, what do you mean by 'an "ought" of sorts'? That's the question. I still want to emphasize that I'm reporting a view of the ancients which was specifically revived by Anscombe's paper 'Modern moral philosophy' of 1958, which you can find online, and greatly reinforced by MacIntyre. Their view is that 'ought' is about a law-based version of ethics, which Plato and Aristotle didn't hold; that the virtue-based view of ethics is quite different.
I'm not clear on what you're asking here. Are you offering these: "a moral life" and 'philosophy-as-methodology' as alternative ways of living an examined life and asking which one is the necessary and/ or more correct way?
OK, I haven't read those two and nor do I intend to. If what you say exemplifies their view, then I would say that it seems like a myopic, or one-dimensional view to me on the face of it.
Does not virtue ethics consist in saying that one ought to live a virtuous life? Surely not all 'oughts' consist in following rules. One model of morality says that it consists in following rules, and another says that it consists in moral intuition; in following a cultivated natural moral conscience; whichever way one understands morality it makes sense to say that one ought to be moral.
I think there is a third option, consequentialism, that one should take account of outcomes, besides virtue ethics and deontic or rule-based notions.
Your 'ought' here is a meta-ethical question, or so I read it, and I quite agree, if we are even going to bother with ethics, it makes sense to say that one ought to be moral.
It's hard to extend the 'ought' to particular acts, whereas rule-based people and consequential people seem to find it easy. Of course this is all part of a debate stretching back to Hume about 'ought'. I don't understand why you say in advance you won't read certain philosophers: they have something interesting to say, in my opinion - they both fiddle with the is/ought problem en route to their ethical views - and they set the scene for modern virtue ethics between them. A couple of years ago I was never going to read any of this ethics stuff, but here I am, all the same.
It means that God is not constructing moral laws or designing the contours of what is normative arbitrarily, He is himself that standard, that locus. It emanates from His nature (necessarily)
What, do you show that at the Pearly Gates? X-)
Paul Boghossian is Silver professor of philosophy at New York University, where he was Chair of the Department for ten years (1994?"2004) and responsible for building it into one of the top philosophy programs in the world.[1] His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and research professor at the University of Birmingham.
Timothy Williamson is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.
He is currently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of New College, Oxford. He was previously Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh (1995?"2000); Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Oxford (1988?"1994); and Lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin (1980?"1988). He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 2004 to 2005.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA),[1] the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters,[2] Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Simon Blackburn is a British academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language; more recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy. He retired as professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching every fall semester. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the professoriate of New College of the Humanities. He was previously a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and has also taught full-time at the University of North Carolina as an Edna J. Koury Professor. He is a former president of the Aristotelian Society, having served the 2009?"2010 term.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (born 1955) is an American philosopher. He specializes in ethics, epistemology, and more recently in neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is the Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.[1] He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University under the supervision of Robert Fogelin and Ruth Barcan Marcus, and taught for many years at Dartmouth College, before moving to Duke.[2]
His Moral Skepticisms (2006) defends the view that we do not have fully adequate responses to the moral skeptic. It also defends a coherentist moral epistemology, which he has defended for decades. His Morality Without God? (2009) endorses the moral philosophy of his former colleague Bernard Gert as an alternative to religious views of morality.
In 1999, he debated William Lane Craig in a debate titled "God? A Debate Between A Christian and An Atheist".[3]
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that God is not only not essential to morality, but moral behaviour should be independent of religion. A separate entity one could say. He strongly disagrees with several core ideas: 1. that atheists are immoral people; 2. that any society will become like lord of the flies if it becomes too secular; 3. that without morality being laid out in front of us, like a commandment, we have no reason to be moral; 4. that absolute moral standards require the existence of a God( he sees that people themselves are inherently good and not bad); and 5. that without religion, we simply couldn't know what is bad and what is good.
Dan Fincke also argues in defense of objective morality.
there are plenty of theist Buddhists.
no, i don't know the percentages, but willing to assume than Siddartha - living 2500 yrs ago was a "theist" (Hindu for sure).
as of course Jesus was a Jew.
Hindus also affirm this theology.
What's your source?
What limit do you put on human reasoning??
It is a theist human reasoning "limited as it is" that has him believing in his "God". If it was not his human reasoning that led him to his belief in his god's dictated morals then why was it his particular "god" that he choose to follow rather than the many others gods that have been portrayed in men's script?
If a theory that grounds morality, whatever that means, is to have relevance to ethical concerns, it will be tested for its ethical implications and either found fortuitous or unfortuitous depending on its treatment of the ethical issues within its scope. If we would use our intuitions in ethical problems and real life scenarios to judge derived moral statements from a grounding theory and that theory's rightness - be these derived entities a product of ratiocination or sensibility; is it really the theory which is logically prior, or the embodied practice of ethical decision? And if we already have the capacity to evaluate ethical decisions, to live ethically, can it be said that a grounding moral theory provides anything more than a set of heuristics to judge how to act and how to live in the abstract?
Presumably it's the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Why is something right or wrong?
Quoting fdrake
I suppose it's a way to avoid relativism. What if my ethical intuitions differ from yours? Do we simply accept the difference, or do we claim that one or the other of us is wrong? If the latter then we need to look to something other than our intuitions, else it's nothing more than a battle of he said/she said.
Asking why something's right or wrong doesn't require believing in the necessary existence of a sufficient justification, only that to satisfy the questioner there will be a sufficiently persuasive justification for them. If someone could not possibly be convinced by any explanation they're playing a different game than 'explain to me why this is right (or wrong)'.
An emotivist who believes all ethical statements are power plays or persuasive expressions of raw sentiment, or a cognitivist who beliefs that 'moral statements' are truth apt, perhaps can be arrived to by reason and are either true or false (or all false) will still have to act ethically and be effected by the ethical as a normative-juridical structure. They will face similar trials and tribulations in life irrelevant of whatever extraneous philosophical apparatus they're hedging their bets with. They will, usually, try to do what's right and if not that try to do what they can reasonably get away with. They will have been doing all of that, thinking ethically, acting ethically for a long time and will surely have been effected by the ethical dimensions of life since their birth.
Believing that there is some extraneous, foundational philosophical apparatus that will vouchsafe anyone's moral choices completely divorces the ethical from the political - how to conduct ourselves and what should we, as a collective, strive for. Leaving the ambiguities in - some things are right, some things are wrong, maybe there's no ultimate ground, maybe there is an ultimate ground, not only provides a more accurate catalogue of our approaches to morality, but keeps the ethical and the political together. To do what's right is to negotiate with the world around you; sometimes even from the ground up.
If the answer to the question is just persuasive and not explanatory then it's sophistry. Some (especially moral realists) will want more than that.
One way of being persuasive is to provide a good explanation and be right!
A theist will generally rely more on loyalty, authority, and sanctity, giving them a broader and more balanced moral framework, the primary benefit being more cohesive and successful social groups (not necessarily societies).
Everyone really grounds their morality in subjectivity--the way that they feel about interpersonal behavior, basically. That's the case even if you're a theist or ethical objectivist. You simply have incorrect beliefs in those instances. What's really going on is that your ethical views are grounded in how you feel about interpersonal behavior.
Humans have the capacity to make moral judgments. These judgments are rooted in empathy, the feeling invoked when considering the condition of others. We don't have to be taught that it's"wrong" to cause another pain and suffering; we literally feel it to be so - if we function properly (sociopaths do not function properly). That act x is wrong is a semantic description of our natural empathy-based sensation of wrongness. It is a properly basic belief, and not mere opinion because we have the belief innately. The belief/feeling is analyzable and seen to be consistent with the survival and thriving of our species. So the ontic fact to which the proposition "x is wrong" corresponds is: the ingrained empathetic feeling in conjunction with the objective benefit to the species of a proper moral judgment.