There is a great essay by Arthur Leff (Yale Law Professor) entitled “Unspeakable Ethics, Natural Law.” He is explaining the difficulty modern people are having with ethics and morality now that they have discarded the idea of God and His transcendent laws of behavior.
In one part of his essay he says the following: “I want to believe and so do you in a complete, transcendent,… set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe and so do you in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves what we ought to be.” You can see the problem here according to Leff. We all want to be our own gods, setting up our own morality. But then how do we get others to go along with this arrangement?
With God out of the picture, Leff says every human becomes a “godlet” with as much authority to set standards as any other godlet. For example, if a human says “thou shall not commit adultery,” he invites “the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in bar rooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand sez who?'” In other words, what gives one person the authority to prescribe what is good for another person? Here’s the key question. How can we get others to obey our idea of morality if we are all gods unto ourselves?

I’ll discuss more of this essay in a future blog post.