>>521303090
Today's values are secularized Christian values. The philosophical and theological justifications that these values were based on have been torn down, yet the values are still widely held even by nonreligious person -- even atheists.
But how long can values remain effective, or widely held and believed in strongly enough to influence behavior, when they are unfounded, which means that people today have no real understanding of why they even hold the values they do and instead just accept them as a matter of habit or in the same manner that a person accepts a platitude: it sounds good on the face of it, but no deeper understanding is involved.
Today's dominant values are now like buildings without a foundation underneath them, or like castles floating in the air. They're big edifices of thought -- the results of centuries of careful reasoning about ethics, rooted in the general Christian tradition -- and now these edifices, in all their size and weight and complexity, rest on nothing beneath them.
All the attempts to re-justify our ordinary, widely held values have fallen short precisely because the philosophical and theological groundwork on which they were erected (justified) has been chipped away down to nothing by generations, even centuries, of secularizers, or thinkers whose project was to get rid of all those primitive supernatural relics of a bygone time. And really, the reason secular, mostly materialist, philosophers have failed to re-justify these values is because, as Hume pointed out so well (and with a lot of justification and good argumentation), is that you cannot derive an ought from an is, meaning that statements of fact are unable yo ground or justify statements of what ought to be. There are two different domains of reasoning, one theoretical and scientific, one moral or practical, as Kant would say, and the kinds of statements that belong to the moral domain or reasoning are not the same as those of the theoretical domain.