Secular Ethics: Utilitarianism.

Even if secular ethics were useless I still don't see how religious based ethics are any better.

If you believe in God and believe that god is the source of morality then how can you ever know what is morally right or wrong?

How would you ever know that the holocaust was wrong? It could be part of a god's plan. You can never know.
A moral objectivist must remain silent on all moral matters surely.

theologica, i would say that the only coherent form as to being an atheist is by being a nihilist.
Because even utilitarianism as subjective as it is, it is still held as a virtue.

Any ethical theory, in particular secular ethics simply falls apart when ever we apply Humes "Is-Ought" Gap to it.

Bentham's utilitarianism was rather myopic, particularly thinking that we could quantify pleasures and pains. Mill's, however, was much more cohesive and coherent - though still incapable of giving an adequate defense of justice for justice's sake. Nevertheless, Mill does have compelling rebuttals to your objections. For example, Mill says in reply to your "Chinese dilemma", that while people ought to take into consideration the pleasures and pains of all sentient beings, they ought to be

only proportionate to our ability to affect other sentient beings' pleasures and pains. More simply, we ought to be primarily concerned with the people we interact with directly. Family, friends, neighbors, community and so forth. As our social ties weakens, so ought our actions. More good can be produced if I care for my immediate family than if I worry about some unidentified Chinese man halfway across the world. I still consider this Chinese man's pleasures, my concern is mitigated however.

Thank you for this response. It is nice to see some actual thought for a change.

I do disagree with the purpose of "pleasure" as it would assumed in that context. Though it may be possible to get out of the labyrinth in the above ways I don't find it possible to place our subjective understanding of "pleasure" as anywhere near the foundation of our axiology, especially lacking any means of objective criteria. Further, there would remain the very significant epistemic issues outlined.

Again, this is another objection which Mill at least tries to address. Mill recognizes that he cannot develop an a priori hierarchy of pleasures and pains, with some pleasures and pains being intrinsically greater than others. He supposes that a general educated consensus is suitable. In order to secure the worth of higher pleasures of philosophy, art, friendship, against the baser pleasures of the body like food and sex, Mill supposes that if we were to ask someone who has rightly

experienced two pleasures (emphasis on rightly), say philosophy and food - consensus would lean towards holding philosophy as higher. From there we can bypass the inherent epistemic difficulties.  These difficulties are present in all ethical theories - even natural law and virtue ethics. Take Aristotle for example. The entirety of the Ethics rests on the ergon argument in 1.7. However, he makes a huge epistemic leap, assuming that natural beings have functions. We easily know the function

of a screw-driver. Since it is made by man its function is defined by man. But it is far more difficult to grasp the function of natural objects, like animals.  What is the function of flower or a squirrel. We may say, flowers ought to exhibit its floweriness and squirrels ought to exhibit its squirreliness. But what is floweriness and squirreliness? We may name a few key functions, but can we know the entirety of their nature? Moreover, can we know the entirety of our own nature and ergon?

We'll see. DCT has other issues, make no mistake, but this is not one of them. The so-called euthyphro dillema is hardly more than a poorly worded, semantical gesture that implicitly defines God in an impersonal way by its' tautologus reasoning. Even rebuttals from DC Theorists themselves alleviate the issue smoothly. The better approach is to question how command is defined, and our epistemic framework.