No matter how you may arrange your morality, whether you think it is from a higher power or by societal constraints alone – there are going to be those who don’t follow that morality or simply don’t believe you.
You will always have the factor of someone deciding that this set of atoms has every right to disassemble that other set of atoms. It does not matter how they are raised or what they are taught, unless you are willing to murder those who do not agree with your “objective” morality, they may wander away from it and in doing so come up with their own version of right and wrong. The foundation of a God inspired morality only holds as long as the belief in that God is intact. Without a belief in that God, the whole moral framework becomes suspect. This does not happen in a morality framework decided upon by men alone, because faith is not involved and the loss of faith cannot affect the moral system.
The atheist morality has more substance, ultimately.
The only objective morality I see in the universe is the law of nature – which is both cruel and kind, vicious and gentle. Eat, breathe, live, defend, kill, die. Everything else is an illusion or construct we’ve assembled via consciousness, giving us our ability to quantify such. You can believe that killing another is utterly wrong, but you’re going to have a damn hard time arguing that with the tiger bearing down on you.
Ultimately, there are no divine rights, for that matter. There is only force. How and why we decide to use that force is determined by societal constraints alone. Any “higher” morality guiding such is simply a mind game. The Bill of Rights is set aside, for example, as a list of inalienable rights. You can claim up and down the fence that these are “God given”, but if the government doesn’t believe in your version of God, you’re screwed. The only way to keep civil rights of any kind is to be willing to use force to keep them. A “right” only exists because the masses are willing to die to keep them. Which is why we have no rights in this country anymore.
All of this, however, does not mean that developing morality has no benefit. There are benefits to preventing anarchy, as a structured and peaceful society will have the means to advance science, art, etc. An anarchy will not be able to have the comfort of doing the same. Forming rules of conduct among a group is necessary to allow each to not only live, but to thrive, since protection from nefarious forces en mass has always worked, because there is simple safety in numbers.
However, having examined societies in general, I believe this starts to fall apart when two things come to pass: overpopulation and rules being made for the simple purpose of having another rule.
When a group becomes too large to be able to know each other as neighbors, you start to lose sight of the damage a new rule or law put into place does to them – it will not affect you personally anymore, because the damage you’ve done will not come back to you in the form of a lost service or lost revenue by any other definition (comfort, food, shelter, aid…) Once you can make the affect of a law be something which happens to “other” people, you have effectively de-humanized a segment of the population and your group morality starts to fail as some feel victimized.
Laws made for the sheer purpose of having another rule, will always cause damage to someone. No thought of consequence occurs in this type of behavior, and if the group is small it will be held in check by others wielding power against the lawmaker run amok. If the population is too large and the lawmakers have managed to distance themselves from the rest, then they become in a sense, untouchable and are propped up as more-than-mortal, of higher consequence than the rest. The lawmakers in turn start to think of everyone outside of other lawmakers as sub-human and you have a snowball rolling down a sharp incline.
I think the Framers understood this dynamic, which is why they wanted a strong local government system in comparison to the federal. Local governments would be in tune with their neighbors, far more than some federal branch ever could be. The federal branch was only to provide the slightest needed cohesion to pull the union of states together under one umbrella of protection from other nations and that’s it.
But once the fed became distanced and empowered as more-than-mortal, it fell apart.
