“Morality” Means “Religion”

Debunking people’s favorite trump card

Image by ChatGPT

One of people’s favorite ways to “win” an argument is with an appeal to morality. If someone disagrees with you, they’ll tell you that your argument is “immoral”, and, therefore, obviously wrong.

And this is often a good, rhetorical tactic, especially if a crowd is watching. Because a crowd loves morality, and individual people love being on the side of “morality”, because it makes them feel proud.

But there’s another reason why an appeal to “morality” is often a good rhetorical tactic. And it is simply this: all appeals to “morality” are entirely unfalsifiable, and, therefore require no proof, and cannot be disproven.

Consider murder, for example. Most people will agree that murder is “morally wrong”. But can we “prove” it? How would we go about doing so? If you think about it long enough, you’ll realize that it is quite impossible to actually “prove” that murder, or anything, is “wrong” in some universal sense. We can’t “prove” that murder is “wrong”, but rather, we simply have to rely on other people believing it to be so.

To illustrate this further, consider the fact that we tend to demand “evidence” for most claims about the world. But we never demand evidence for claims about morality. This is because there is no evidence of…