Can we make others be good without God?

Yesterday I asked "Do we need God to be good?" I and others seemed to form a general conclusion that, "yes" we can be good without God, and that we can even be good without reference to a universal moral law. For example, why do I need a universal moral law to tell me that I shouldn't take things that don't belong to me? Or that it is wrong to kill someone for no good reason? This discussion deals with motivation. And I don't know that I need God or a moral law to motivate me to do some of these basic good things and to avoid doing other basically bad things.

But the discussion of my personal motivation for "playing nice" with others quickly becomes a discussion of how we get others to play nice with us. Consider this paraphrase of Kant's famous Categorical Imperative: Only do those things that, at the same time, you would will to become a universal moral law. There are striking similarities here with the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But what if someone rejects these very basic rules? What if someone decides that it is ok for them to kill someone for no good reason? Or what if they decide it really isn't wrong to take other people's stuff? There are those who reject the Golden Rule, and society must punish these reprobates. After all, to not address these people would risk complete societal collapse. How could someone open a fruit stand and sell produce if people were allowed to steal apples whenever they wanted with no consequences???

Ok, fine. So, we need to punish those who steal apples and kill for no good reason. That's clear enough, and it seems rather obvious and self-evident. But as soon as we start to impose a punishment on people who steal we are also, at the same time, imposing our idea of right and wrong. And if a society imposes their idea of right and wrong on someone else they are imposing a moral law that applies universally. In other words, if we punish the apple thief then the statement "Stealing apples is wrong" applies to more than just ourselves. We might not reference a universal moral law, but we are putting it into action, and it would be disingenuous to say that we don't believe in a universal, moral law if we are imposing our sense of morality on others.

The alternative to this, of course, is to simply say that "might makes right." In this case, we simply acknowledge that whoever has the power to enforce their moral standards is the one who is right. To return to our example of the apple thief we might say to him, "Sucks to be you", i.e. since we are in control of enforcing the rules we get to make them and it is too bad if you don't agree. But this opens the door for some rather difficult scenarios. For example, was Stalin right just because he had the muscle to enforce his ideas? Is it ok to send a particular race to the gas chambers just because we've got the power and we don't like them? These scenarios beg for a recourse for the minority. The excluded groups must have a higher moral standard to appeal to: A standard that transcends the ideas of the group in power. At some point we sympathize with an oppressed minority that cries out for justice. Ah, but what is justice??? Is it not some appeal to a higher standard?