My grandparents believed that morality was based on organized religion. Later on religion began to fall out of favor in Clovis, California, which meant that morality was--some people believed--baseless, merely a temporary social contract. Joan Didion's response can stand for the dilemma all this caused. In the 1960s she surveyed the Haight and began to feel that the center no longer held, quoting Yeats.
Didion wrote, "You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing --beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' . . . ."
From Didion's standpoint, what we have instead of religious morality is an agreement about how behave. She refused to call that morality, and she had a point.
In short, some intellectuals believed in the 60s that morality had been created by God or that it had no compelling basis at all. But what if there are more than those two possibilities?
What deters the hungry lioness from eating her own litter? Not the Ten Commandments. Not a social contract.
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