Direct Democracy Shows Where Morals Actually Come From

The religious claim about morality is that it is grounded in God: without a lawgiver there is no law, and without a law there is nothing to stop anyone doing anything. I have written about why this argument collapses under its own question. Here I want to make a different point, and it is not about whether the argument is wrong. It is about why it is still believed by so many people who have, in practice, abandoned every other part of it.

Where Morals Are Actually Grounded

Morals are not grounded in God. They are also not grounded in anything a philosopher would accept as a foundation, which is a separate embarrassment. What they are grounded in, as far as anyone can observe, is public consensus: the slowly shifting agreement of a population about what is acceptable, enforced by approval, disapproval, law, and habit.

You can see this directly by watching morals change. Slavery, the position of women, the treatment of children, cruelty to animals, homosexuality, debt, usury: every one has moved, in some cases reversed, within recorded history, and in every case the movement was a movement of consensus. No new revelation arrived. The population changed its mind, and the morality followed.

A religious person will say that consensus is not a sufficient grounding, and I agree that it is not the kind of grounding they wanted. But wanting a foundation is not evidence of having one. Consensus is what there is. The only question is whether people can see it.

Why They Cannot See It

Here is the point I actually want to make.

Under our current political arrangements, the consensus that grounds morality is invisible. It happens, but it happens nowhere in particular. Opinions shift in millions of private conversations, in what gets laughed at and what gets frowned on, in which jokes stop being told. Eventually a legislature notices and updates a law, years after the fact, and the update is credited to the legislators.

At no point does the population see itself deciding anything. There is no moment when the shift in consensus is visible as a shift in consensus. So people look for the source of morality somewhere else, somewhere more evident, and religion is standing there offering a very evident-looking answer: it came from above, it is written down, here is the book.

The appeal of divine grounding is not that it is true. It is that the real grounding is hidden, and people cannot believe in a source they have never seen operate.

What Direct Decision Would Make Visible

Now suppose the population decided moral questions directly. Whether euthanasia is permitted. What the law says about abortion. Whether a given medical technology may be used. How animals may be treated.

Some things would happen that have nothing to do with the outcomes.

The population would watch itself decide. It would see, on a particular day, a particular majority settle a particular moral question, after an argument in which the considerations were laid out. It would see the question come back a decade later and be settled differently, because the consensus had moved, and it would see that the movement was its own.

The process that has always grounded morality would become evident, and once evident it is very hard to keep believing that morality came from somewhere else. You cannot watch yourself and your neighbours settle the question of euthanasia by vote and go on thinking that the answer was written on a tablet three thousand years ago. Not because anyone argued you out of it, but because you were there.

That is the erosion I expect. Not an argument against divine morality, which has been available for millennia and changed few minds, but a demonstration, repeated every few months, of where morality is actually made. People who take part in the making do not need a story about where it came from.

Why This Matters Beyond Religion

There is a practical reason to want this, apart from the pleasure of watching a false belief lose its grip.

A morality believed to come from a fixed source cannot move fast, because moving it looks like disobedience. A morality known to come from consensus can move as fast as the consensus does, and it can move with sophistication, because it does not have to pretend that its conclusions were always there.

We are going to need that. Genetic engineering, the prolonging of life, artificial minds, the alteration of human nature itself: these are moral questions of a kind the Bronze Age did not face, and the moral equipment of the Bronze Age, ten rules on a stone, is not going to be adequate to them. A society that knows it makes its own morality can make new morality for new problems. A society that believes it received its morality can only search the old text for a verse that fits, and there will not be one.

Direct democracy erodes the divine grounding of morality not by attacking it but by showing the alternative at work. That is a stronger method than argument, and it comes with the added benefit of producing a morality that can keep up with the world it has to govern.