Nono, Tacky, I've spent a significant portion of my life pondering these questions, and I've concluded that rationality is not attractive nor self consistent as a moral system, at least if you're referring to Sam Harris' version of it. It's buzz words.
It goes something like this..
We can all agree that human flourishing is good for us because if we didn't we would've all killed ourselves. Evolution selects for self preservation. So we're all advocates of our own self preservation and by extension the preservation of humankind.
However, the problem that arises in any rationality-driven moral system is two-fold. Firstly, morality is now subjective, so nobody can agree on what is or isnt moral. Secondly, the system needs to be better than the other moral systems, or its kinda useless. So, rationality needs to address these two issues.
The first one we can address because as long as we believe in our own self-preservation, Sam et al argue, we can derive that human flourishing is better for us than not. It goes like this: I am a human, I like not being stabbed, so I will work together with other humans to create a system where we don't stab each other. Ergo, it is in my best interest to boost human flourishing, even if only for my own selfish desires!
Except, of course, when an individual actor neither believes they can advocate for change or believe their own actions make a significant difference. They can just fuck other people over and get away with it. Our morals are automated and driven by intuition, not logic. Just look at global warming or any significant worldwide problem and how we're dealing with that for proof. We intuit these things.
If you nevertheless accept that we all care about human flourishing, then the idea would be that we can evaluate what actions lead to more human flourishing. Every time we make the wrong decision we just correct our mistake and, ergo, we are lead to utopia over time. So, it's a self-correcting system.
Because it is a self-correcting system, Sam et al. argue it's a better system than the religious alternatives. All the religious alternatives are not evolving, so they can't learn from their own mistakes.
That's precisely why all the Christians still own slaves and stone people. Oh wait, they don't.
Most Christians are taught to value human life, and it's that valuation that acts as a foundation for everything we do, including accepting new traditions and customs. In contrast, rationality has logic as its foundation, but it's not a very powerful driver for motivation. Just look at how war propaganda is driven. It's all sob stories, tragedies, and unfairness devised with the sole purpose of making people angry enough to support the war. Imagine CNN hosting a fucking discussion about the pros and cons of supporting Putin in his Ukraine war. Lol. We already know rationality won't work. We will just go with our intuitiom and what's comfortable and then post-rationalize our reasons after the fact.
But one could argue that I'm using logic to try to attack rationality, so surely we can simply recognize these problems and fix them. I tend to agree with this, and the best evidence we have shows us that religions are good at making us moral. There is no evidence whatsoever that rationality will work nor has it ever lead to demonstrable benefits for a society. It's like communism, where every society that is communist fails and then communists say, bro that wasnt a true communist system. Same with nonreligious societies like the Soviet union. The rationalists will say, bro, that wasnt a true rational society nor did it advocate for human flourishing. Well my question is why the fuck is it so difficult for us to realize the importance of human flourishing if it's so intuitively clear to all of us that it's important. In contrast, all the evidence we have so far supports religion as a good moral foundation. So all these rational people should really advocate for religious systems.
At school, we should be trained to do good as a matter of intuition and hold God as the highest standard for us to aspire towards. That way, we can address the wide range of people from different intellectual backgrounds with digferent aspirations. Most people don't need to care about rationality but they'll be kept in check, for the most part, if they believe in God. We should teach people to choose to do Good as a matter of reflex, instead of presenting dry philosophical arguments to an audience that doesn't care.
