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There's a big problem with this train of thought, and that's the ought-is problem. You can't get to morality from objectivity. There is no such thing as moral truth written into the objective universe. Thus, the phrase "The epistemological foundation of moral law" isn't really something that fits together with reality. There is no epistemological basis for moral law in a rational sense. You might counter that there are commonalities between humans, and to an extent you would be correct, but no particular human is objective, and the human race among all the known races isn't particularly special necessarily. A thing that is not human will have different values, and even different humans may have different values.

You have a morality imparted upon you by the civilization you live in and all the baggage attached to it. You think your morality is self-evident and self-proving to any rational person, but that's because you're a product of your civilization and have been built by those influences. In another society, the idea that an important man can't cut down an unimportant man where he stands would be ludicrous and offensive. In yet another society, the idea that a conqueror can't cut down the conquered would be ludicrous and offensive. There's an island in the pacific islands near India that has a neolithic tribe living there, and any human being who steps foot on their island is immediately murdered, and to do otherwise is considered ludicrous and offensive. In their own ways, they're all right, but they're also all incompatible with the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and thus it is wrong for one man to murder another.

The context here is a discussion where people suggest rejecting religion or fairy tales and other stories because they're "delusion". In that sense, if you reject those things then you're rejecting culture and history on a large scale, which is effectively assuming you can take facts and logic and magic yourself into a value system. The most famous attempt at this still ended up inheriting the values of the culture of the time, and still ended up the most murderous ideology in history. In another post in this thread, I talked about some examples of objective facts we learned from the crazy stories of the past, you can't just assume we know everything there is to know if we wipe all that out.

Objectively speaking, life on earth isn't meaningful. We all live on a tiny speck of dust surrounding an inconsequential star, and we're likely to be extinct within a mere million years or so, but even if we survive that we're going to eventually have to deal with our yellow dwarf star entering the red giant cycle and our planet and everything about it will be swallowed by billions of years of atomic fire until the sun uses up its fuel entirely and becomes an ultradense chunk of matter slowly cooling over millions more years. And we're unlikely to figure out any way out of the inevitable. All traces of the human race will be wiped out, anything you considered good, anything you considered evil, not that anyone or anything will ever even know we existed anyway, on a timeline that is possibly going to see the universe become a slowly dying and dwindling place over timespans we can't even begin to imagine.

Given that fact, and the fact that we'd all die out of despair if we think too hard about that sort of cosmic existential horror, we humans cluster around meaning or value we can find subjectively the same way our ancestors huddled around the primitive fires they learned to create out of nothing but sticks. Pretty it up with fancy words, but we're just trying to figure out the ways to live, and there's no mathematical equation for doing so. But those who came before us had ideas they thought worked, and so they'd pass those messages on through stories. And they also pass messages to us through genetics, where many subtle parts of our genome whisper in our ears about lessons those who came before us learned.

We have the capacity for both violence and peace, both prosocial and antisocial practices, because regardless of our personal desire for a peaceful and prosocial world, the world is an ever-changing place and individuals constantly will be tested with the reality that you can't always make friends, you can't always make peace, and people who are good sometimes or even often die. So we can't assume that one path or the other is written in the atoms of the universe, and we also can't assume that one path or the other has any moral value in the face of a truly nihilistic universe. We realize that, and that's one interpretation for why we stepped out of the garden of Eden when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil -- once we understand its nature, we can never go back to the dumb primate bravado that we're definitely dong the right thing no matter what we do.

Postmodern man is an idiot. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be committing suicide. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be so depressed or otherwise mentally ill so widely. We're better off materially than many of our ancestors but they would say they're better off in ways that matter than we are. We think we're the most moral humans to have ever lived, but we tried to wipe our slates clean to get there, and that's not how human beings work. We lose our ancient wisdom, we lose the epistemological basis for the few things we think can actually work. Eventually we lose our morality because it's just loose sheets of paper sitting on a table.

I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily saying that all morality is subjective in the sense of cultural relativism. What I'm saying is that there's a lot more going into a successful value system than we think, and we are arrogant to throw out the basis of our current values to think we'll somehow be able to do better without ancient wisdom trying to just wipe the slate clean and keep writing.

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