It used to be that it was simple to figure out what was right and wrong, you could always look it up in the bible or ask the local priest. Much more sophisticated people might not be happy with this and so had to find an new path. For most people however, the way things where was not something you questioned.

In the twenty-first century however the old systems of beliefs don't work anymore, they are (and will forever be) irreparably broken. Two things in the twentieth century, both arriving as a result of technology, conspired to kill it:

1. The destruction of the traditional farmer units with their close-nit family structures.
2. Hundreds of new technologies which gave rise to entire new ethical situations that where not something people would have considered before.

The inevitable result of this is that believers in the old faiths had to try to reinterpreted their believes in light of the new situations, with often comical (but deadly) results, such as members of the Jehovah's witnesses who refuse to accept blood transfusions because God told them not to drink the blood of animals.

But if we are to have the best future we can get, it can't be based on remnants of some of the teachings of goat-herders who wandered the plains of Judea five thousand years ago or on some carpenter with too high a supply of LSD. It has to be based on something real, and measurable.

My humble suggestion is that we based it on the same thing that has worked so well for us all these years: the intelligent pursuit of happiness, specifically our own.

Not just any happiness, but long term real happiness. Focusing on short term happiness is going to send us all to the gutter but it is in the nature of mankind to seek to better itself where such personal improvement is reasonably likely to be possible and bear the fruit that makes such pursuit worthwhile.

Such a system works, and my hope is that it will bring as much happiness to us as it did when it when we used it to turn starving peasants into middle-class families, whose biggest food related worry is how to loose weight.

So how do we go about constructing such a morality?

If this morality is to last, then the freedom to do as you see fit must be counter-balanced by the responsibility to accept the results of the actions that one makes. I suspect that this will be much harder to swallow than the freedom but it is just as necessary.