Helge! It’s been a while.

Just for personal taxonomy (I know these aren’t the generally accepted definitions, but I use them just to make the distinction clearer in conversation), I usually use “ethics” to denote a rationally determined system of utilitarian “rules of the road” for a functioning society; they usually prioritize fairness and justice or loyalty and patronage because a principle-based system of ethics is easier to understand and maintain than having an arbitrary rule for every discrete situation. That, I think, maps well to what you describe in your last paragraph. “Morality,” by contrast, I use to denote the non-rationalized concepts of “good” and “evil.”

The kind of axiomatic moral determinations Gould uses — that some things are at their core EVIL, not just unjust or inequitable — certainly looks like a different beast. If all he meant were the kind of generally agreed-upon social standards that you describe in your last paragraph, then he would have no cause to say that the generally agreed-upon social standards of another social milieu which diverge from his own — trophy-hunting in the 1700s, racism in the American South, etc. — are illegitimate or wrong, because that definition of utilitarian moral/ethical construction can’t privilege one sufficient structure over another.

I don’t know that I ever said, or even implied, that religion CREATES moral beliefs, if by that you mean that either a person’s specific moral standards, or more importantly the entire concept of moral value itself, are downstream from imposed (external to the person) moral dogma. In fact, I think the opposite is implicitly true, and it certainly seems to be the unexamined subtext of Gould’s own writings: That he accepted morality (the idea of there being actual good and actual evil, the substrate to judging any particular act or idea as itself good or evil) as an objective reality, which nevertheless cannot be accounted for in the strict materialism which was his conscious worldview.

I haven’t read Dworkin, but from how you described his framework, it doesn’t appear to be the kind of structure that animated Gould’s moral sense. One cannot rationally construct one’s own free-floating moral framework, and then judge people in another cultural milieu two centuries before against it.

Dworkin demonstrates how he builds a self consistent axiomatic framework of moral beliefs. As you say, its foundations are sort of free-floating, detached from an externally imposed edict, because of Hume’s Guillotine: You cannot get from is to ought.

I don’t believe that you’re correct in crediting religion with creating moral beliefs. People need moral beliefs to live together, and when you get enough people in one place someone has to write the moral beliefs down in case someone disagrees. It’s as simple as that.