Where Morality Actually Comes From, If Not From God

The question comes up in a lot of different phrasings, but it boils down to the same thing: without God as the source of moral law, what stops morality from just being arbitrary personal preference? I understand why the question feels urgent to people who've always had morality anchored to something outside themselves. I don't think the anchor it needs has to be supernatural, though.

The version of secular ethics I find most compelling grounds morality in something fairly concrete: the actual, observable effects our actions have on the wellbeing of other conscious beings capable of suffering and flourishing. That's not arbitrary in the way "just personal preference" implies, it's testable and reasoned about the same way other empirical claims are, even if it doesn't have the certainty of a divine command. We can argue about specific applications, and people do, but the underlying commitment, that suffering matters and flourishing matters, doesn't require a supernatural source to function as a real, binding framework.

I'd also push back gently on the assumption that divine command actually solves the arbitrariness problem rather than just relocating it. If something is good only because a deity commands it, that starts to look arbitrary in its own way, dependent entirely on that particular deity's will rather than on any deeper reasoning about why it's actually good. Philosophers have been arguing about this exact tension, sometimes called the Euthyphro dilemma, for over two thousand years, and I don't think divine command ethics resolves it as cleanly as it's often presented.

I don't think secular ethics is easier than religious ethics. I think it just puts the hard work of moral reasoning in a different, and to me more honest, place.