Atheism and Moral Values

[smoothmoniker]

mmmmmmmkay.

I've avoided this thread, and it looks like for good reason. If I may, let me jump back to the original question.

There are two dominant perspectives on what moral values consist of. I'll call them "from above" and "from below". All of the other moral systems, utilitarianism, natural law, divine command ethics, moral relativism, nihilism, they all fall into one of these two categories.

The "from above" view does NOT require some big in-the-sky deity. All it states is that moral value exceeds individual acts, and individual acts can have the property of the value. In other words, there is something external to an action that can either apply or not apply, and that something is not determined by the act itself. An act can be "good", and that "good" means something apart from the act itself.

The "from below" view holds that there is nothing that exceeds the act itself, and that all moral language is only just language - it is a way of grouping together a bunch of features about certain kinds of acts, and referring to them by common characteristics.

Natural Law ethics is a "from above" perspective. It holds that there are universal values that exceed individual acts (the value of human life, the inherent dignity of sentience, the rights of persons, etc.), and individual actions may be judged by that external standard. In order to make sense of this, we should recognize that "the value of human life" is not a moral argument. It is a value premise, and moral arguments then proceed from it. There is no moral argument for the value of human life - it has to be taken as a given, and then arguments about how we ought to act proceed from it.

Utilitarianism (maximize pleasure, minimize pain) is also a "from above" view, I think. It takes as its starting premise that the suffering of sentient beings is bad, and then develops from that a system of ethics. But, it takes as a given the starting premise that suffering deserves primary place in our decisions about how to act. There is no argument as to why pain and pleasure should be the starting grounds for moral argument (many other moral systems, including eastern religions, do not include these as starting premises), it's just a given, and then argument proceeds from that point.

All arguments from evolutionary psychology are "from below" ethics. If we argue that certain actions become codified as "moral" because they had evolutionary advantage, we are using moral language to group together "things that had evolutionary advantage." There is nothing that exceeds the acts themselves, only a set of features that they share in common. To use the word "good" can never mean anything more than "this action is similar to other actions that, taken together, helped sustain human society."

Whew.

So, here's how this fits. I think it is impossible to get from naturalism (atheism, lack of any non-material or non-natural dimension to reality) to any of the "from above" view on morality. If you deny that there is anything higher than brute physical interactions of molecules and forces, then there can be nothing that exceeds individual transactions of energy. In a naturalist worldview, it's nonsense to say that an action has a property (rightness, or goodness) apart from the very physical properties of the actual transaction. When I strike someone on the face, there is only the complex physical interaction of my hand meat striking their face meat, and the electro-chemical interactions of their nervous system producing something that their brain meat perceives as pain. There is nothing in that transaction that matters, apart from the physical interactions. It's nonsense to presume otherwise.

Many people are fine with that. "We don't need a superseding property of morality" they say, "the physical descriptions are enough." That's fine.

But if all of moral language is "from below", there is a greater problem, I think. If moral language is merely descriptive of evolutionary advantage, then we have no reason to continue to act "morally".

We have no moral obligation to evolution. That's all fine and dandy that the moral prohibition on killing got us this far, but what is that to me? I'm here. I have no obligation to the scheme that got me here, and no obligation to whatever members of my species might follow me on this planet. Why should moral notions that evolved to promulgate our species continue to have any sway over my decisions?

And now we come down to it. I know many atheists and naturalists who are extremely ethical people, generous and kind, thoughtful and selfless.

I do not think that belief in something non-natural is needed in order to be a good person.

But I don't think atheists have any good reason for being good.