Why be good?

[henryp]

What I am asking is: what is the BASIS for objective moral behavior? Where does it come from?

Well, that's a different question to the one you originally asked, and there's two important points to keep in mind here, but one really important thing we need to get out of the way before we can even get to that:

There is no objective morality in EITHER of our positions.

From a purely secular point of view, there is no objective morality; there is, however, an objective framework through which we can develop a situational, context-driven system of morality. You may have heard of it: it's called reality. You can use reality to develop a sense of what's good or bad, because in reality we are beings of a specific nature, who react in predictable ways to stimuli, and for whom that stimuli has specific ramifications; we generally feel pain universally, and it denotes a specific thing for us all, namely bodily damage. Therefore, since pain not only feels bad, but has a specific function biologically that is objectively bad for us, we can determine that causing pain is bad, as its effects are uniformly bad for humans, which we are also, and pragmatically we don't want to be hurt, nor do we want to live in a society that permits that. There are exceptions- vaccinations being an obvious one- but this is a situational ethical scenario, and there is an overriding benefit to vaccinations that renders the temporary pain useful. That's all you really need; a series of at times very basic observations about how we live and interact in reality, and an understanding that occasionally the rules we derive from that may conflict with each other, and that this happens in every ethical system. Morality isn't some incredibly complex thing that's a huge puzzle to figure out without god, it's just a lengthy process to fully encompass, full of ifs and buts and conditional statements. That doesn't mean the benefits of having it aren't obvious, if you take a moment to think about it.

The faulty assumption here, is that other humans being harmed is bad.  What we'd do in your line of thinking, which I think starts out right, is determine what we need to do to assure we don't feel pain (if we care about that).  If the best way is to form a global team human with a bunch of rules that say 'no hurting' eachother, then so be it.  But that's fairly impractical, inneffective, and certainly not the only path.

As we've seen through out history, a popular solution is to amass a bunch of power to protect yourselves from others being able to hurt you.  Another is to form small groups that takes care of themselves.  

So what we're talking about here with your reality based system isn't really related to morality.  It's just self-preservation.  Because from the actual framework, being a brutal dictator is just as legit a solution as being a hippy in a commune or being a psychopath mass murderer who doesn't view his own death as a particular problem.