Bon (my view) mot: Morality imposed is morality denied.
It seems to me the principle purpose of morality is the definition of character, which is your identity. An identity is that part of you that persists in the face of storms, setbacks, inconveniences, and all sorts of troubles.
We can accept, with the Buddha, that life is suffering, by which he meant both pain and constant vague dissatisfaction. Meaning is the sense of transcending those things, and of fashioning from them joy and contentment. Morality is a tool in the service of the creation of meaning.
Extending this, all the Buddha really said was “look, you’re all vaguely unhappy, and you accept this because you don’t know any better. I have a better way that solves the problem.” That better way was his particular “technology”, but the whole project arises from the simple recognition of a problem–unnecessarily diminished quality of life–and the realization that solving this problem is possible.
The benefits of his technology–the 8 fold path, which in roughly the same form can be found in all religions–were realizable even for atheists. You did not need another life in an astral body to live better NOW using his ideas. This is the point of morality: it is the pathway to transmuting pain into pleasure. It is the reason we suffer voluntarily, and don’t complain about it.
One could perhaps even speak usefully of “Moral Hedonism”, which is the term one could use for the pleasure that follows living an honorable and ordered life. Even Buddhists readily admit the need for the desire to achieve Enlightenment.
To this, I would contrast “Physical Hedonism”, which rejects all non-physical forms of pleasure, and thereby rejects the possibility of moral transcendence, or the necessity of discomfort in this life. Since this is manifestly a counter-factual position, it leads necessarily to INCREASED suffering and discomfort. That our rates of depression and anxiety disorders have been steadily increasing in the last 100 years can be attributed directly to our general cultural embrace of Physical Hedonism, which of course is the dominant theme in what I term Sybaritic Leftism, or soft Socialism.