pariah

My guess is this. We are all in it for greed, for ourselves...we are social animals, ergo we thrive in society. It is instinct alone that causes us to wish to prosper.

Therefore we form societies.

Society creates morals to protect its individuals from things that would inhibit their prosper...and so we end up with it being immoral to kill. It is all based on the so called golden rule, is it not? Perhaps a bit of kant...

Well tell me why I am wrong. lol.

trillian

The only problem I have with your view of it is that society created morality. We evolved it.
Ever heard of the wild juvenile elephant bulls in Africa? They culled the older males and the teenage bulls went berserk. They had evolved to teach their young proper "elephant morality". They needed role models. Chimps do the same thing. Its not unique to humans.

trillian

Pyrrho

Whether there is a god or not is completely irrelevant to ethics. The only possible addition would be a bully theory of god, where you do as he says or else he'll smite you. And that is not ethics at all.

fatherphil

i knew a guy who hung to the belief that he could do anything as long as the rest of society held to the appropriate moral code. he considered it the fringe beginning of anarchy and as long as not too many folk abandonned social norms, we would all be ok.

pariah

I was not saying it was unique to humans. I was observing humans as a social animal like chimps. I'm sure the same rules would apply to chimp society although I have not studied it.

Society is made up of humans. Therefore it was the humans who did decide the morality, only as a collective (society) instead of an individual. Of course we evolved it, we evolved into living in societies where we benefit from the rules we create (morals). Or do you still disagree?

And of course morals exist independently from religion, however theists would have you beleive that morals come from religion. By saying source of morals of an atheist, I really only meant someone whos morals did not come from theism (which ends up being almost the same anyway).

mshah2k

What is the basis of your morals if not from some form of religion?

Pyrrho

If this question is directed at me, I'll be happy to point you in the direction of the basis of my morals. But first I want to know why you think that religion would be at all relevant to ethics. If, say, some powerful being tells you to do something, it may be a good idea from a practical standpoint to comply so it does not harm you, but how would this have anything to do with ethics? How is that any different from a child in a schoolyard, who wants to avoid a beating from a bully, doing what a bully wants the child to do?

Silent Acorns

The source of atheistic morals is the same as the source of theistic morals, mutual protection and quid-pro-quo.

I doesn't take a genius to realize that the vast majority of people (i.e. everyone except perhaps a few rare exceptions) are better off as part of a social group than alone against the world. So people have evolved into social animals to take advantage of mutial protection, aid, etc. The primary flaw of social groups is that individuals can leech of the group without aiding the group as a whole. If everyone did this the advantage of being in a group would be next to nil.

To counteract this, we have evolved a sensitivity to and a strong dislike of cheating. Few things upset us more than to see cheaters go unpunished, and we all feel good when a cheater has been caught and given his due (as long as we aren't the ones who cheated, of course).

If you don't buy it, consider this: research has shown that the average person is not very good at basic logic. Given an abstract problem, even scientifically trained people make fundamental errors if they are not given adequate time to do a proper analysis. However, the same research has shown that when the same problem is re-phrased into a "spot the cheater" form, the vast majority (around 90%) quickly solve the problem correctly. I don't have a link, I read it recently in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works.

It appears that we have evolved an instinct for understanding the logic of cheating. I believe that this explains both our preference for "morality" in others and our universal desire to "sin".