Enlightenment Ethics

It's interesting that the Democrats are reasserting their morals in light of the evidence that the recent election was determined by "moral" issues. What is the difference between the two sets of moral values? The logic used to create them, for one.

Democrats have re-embraced Enlightenment ethics, opposing themselves to what they feel are ethics guided by fundamentalist Christians (and I refuse to call them "evangelical" or the "religious right" because being evangelical does not mean fundamentalist and belonging to a religion does not mean Christian).

Question: Keeping in mind the reciprocal relationship between fundamentalist Christian ideology and material prosperity for the few, are the morals created by the neoconservative right based on a system of ethics at all? I've already problematized the way values underlie any system of ethics. But I think its appropriate to consider that morals created out of economic (rather than truly life-giving) values and the phony religious rhetoric used to keep the current system in place are not created out of an ethical system at all.

Hence the term "unethical." It seems to me that when we are talking about molar politics, we should examine the values that underlie the ethical system to determine if the morals produced by the ethical system are truly moral. The value underlying Enlightenment ethics is progress; the value underlying neoconservative "ethics" is maintaining an economic and ideological status quo. (That's not to say the Enlightenment thinkers ignored economic prosperity, but they took it for granted that progress meant progress for all of humanity rather than for the top five percent of the wealthy).

What I find so ironic is that neoconservatives will argue that their idea of status quo originated in eighteenth-century America. No it did not. The founders of this country subscribed to Enlightenment ethics, which is one reason the country prospered as it did.

Don't forget about Marx. Love him or hate him, he has a tendency to sneak up on people.