For those of you who are athiests, where do you get your morals and ethics from?

Question

If there is no higher power to hold you responsible for your actions, then how do you decide what is right or wrong? Do you go by what feels right?

Why not just forget morals all together and live for yourself, having as much fun as possible?

Answer 1

Same place you do. You just give some imaginary sky daddy the credit.

Answer 2

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Answer 3

I'm an atheist. I live by a very strong moral code. I have loads of fun.

You're confused. Theists who attain their morality through dogma do "good" out of fear. It's a selfish motivation. "If I'm bad, I'll go to hell."

But empathy is a natural trait that helps us live as a society. Some have more than others. This is where an atheist's morality comes from. An atheist doesn't need the threat of hellfire to do good. We act on our natural capacity for empathy.

-Your last line sums it up nicely: "Why not just forget morals all together and live for yourself, having as much fun as possible?"

It's sad some people need the fear of "God" in order to do what's right.

Answer 4

i have morals based on my unbringing. As i suspect most people do. Religion played a part in my upbringing and all it did was make me paranoid that i was always being watched. I had to let that go. And now im in the process of letting christianity go. I am not atheist, i am pantheist. Because i educated myself about the Bible, and also my experience of never "hearing" God or recieving an answer to prayer.

My morals come from my own sense of what i feel is right and what is wrong, not a book. I dont like hurting anyone, i dont like being selfish, i like to respect people, i believe strongly in freedom of choice... i love to love, i love joy and i love people. So i live a life that reflects that.... That shapes my morals....

Answer 5

I get mine from a little shop in town, where else?

Really, are you so evil that if not for the threat of eternal damnation you would be a rapist, a murderer, a thief? Everyone has an inborn moral sense of right and wrong. Some, of course, have been so abused by life in one way or another that they lose their bearings, which is why there are criminals. And, apparently, christians.
Oh, and I hold MYSELF responsible for MY actions.

Answer 6

I live by my own moral code, and I decide what is right by my own heart. I don't need to rely on fairy tales and boogeymen to make sure I am a good girl. I act with purpose, thinking about how i would want to be treated or if I will regret an action in the future.

Answer 7

If you're wondering why not many answer, it's because this question gets asked 10 times a day, and we're sick of it. In fact, it's part of an atheist drinking game....everytime we see this question, we get a drink!

Morals and ethics were around LONG before religion. No one needs a god to know right from wrong. And if they do, then they need more help than religion can give them.

Answer 8

Tehcnically, yes, "what feels right." The origin of that "feeling," of course, is natural selection.

"...much about morals can be explained by evolution. Since humans are social animals and they benefit from interactions with others, natural selection should favor behavior that allows us to better get along with others.

Fairness and cooperation have value for dealing with people repeatedly (Nowak et al. 2000). The emotions involved with such justice could have evolved when humans lived in small groups (Sigmund et al. 2002). Optional participation can foil even anonymous exploitation and make cooperation advantageous in large groups (Hauert et al. 2002).

Kin selection can explain some altruistic behavior toward close relatives; because they share many of the same genes, helping them benefits the giver's genes, too. In societies, altruism benefits the giver because when others see someone acting altruistically, they are more likely to give to that person (Wedekind and Milinski 2000). In the long term, the generous person benefits from an improved reputation (Wedekind and Braithwaite 2002). Altruistic punishment (punishing another even at cost to yourself) allows cooperation to flourish even in groups of unrelated strangers; the abstract of Fehr and Gächter (2002) is worth quoting in full:

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.

Finally, evolution does not require that all traits be adaptive 100 percent of the time. The altruism that benefits oneself most of the time may contribute to life-risking behavior in some infrequent circumstances."

Theists get their morals from the same place--how do you think they know which parts of the Bible to accept and which to reject (it's impossible to take ALL of the Bible literally, because there are contradictions)?

You've got a lot of refuting to do--lots of sources listed. Good luck. :)

Answer 9

It's common sense. Don't steal. Don't hurt others. Treat others the way you would want to be treated. These aren't exactly difficult concepts. You don't need them written out word-for-word to realize that they're important.

In any case, someone who does the right thing only because they think they're going to be held responsible for it someday isn't NEARLY as moral as someone who does the right thing just because it's the right thing to do.

Answer 10

The interesting thing is, they do have morals and believe some things are right and wrong. There is an anthropological argument that comes from this known as the “moral argument.” The argument is this: Man has within him a moral nature, a sense of “oughtness”; where did it come from?

As C. S. Lewis said, “Human beings all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.”

You see, there arises in all of us, in any culture, universal feelings of right and wrong. Wherever you go, people in every place and every walk of life, say things like: “That’s not fair.” “How would you like it if someone did that to you?” “That’s my seat, I was there first.” “Come on, you promised.” When people say things like that, they are appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which they expect the other person to know.

The other person doesn’t say, “forget your standard,” but almost always tries to make an excuse to show that they really didn’t go against the standard. As C.S. Lewis said about this standard, “...the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm.” You know, there are reasons why you should be let off the hook. That time you were unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money came when you were very hard-up. You never would have promised that if you would have known how busy you were going to be. And then comes the argument between these two people. It is clear that they both believe in a standard or they couldn’t argue about it. You can’t argue that a football player committed a foul unless there is some agreement about the rules of football.

If morality is simply something learned from our culture, as they want us to believe, then why are the moral teachings of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Indians, Greeks and Romans so very similar? C. S. Lewis talked a lot about this. Has there ever been a culture where people were admired for running away in battle? Or admired for being selfish (even though they might differ about who you should be unselfish to)? Men have differed on things like whether you should have one wife or four, but they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked. In the words of Thomas Mayberry, “There is broad agreement that lying, promise breaking, killing, and so on are generally wrong.”

And whenever you find someone who says they don’t believe in right or wrong, you will find them going back on it a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you break one to him, he will immediately be complaining “It’s not fair!” Even a thief gets upset and feels wronged when someone steals from him. As it has been said, “If there is no God, no atheist can object on moral grounds if I want to kill him.”

I had an atheist friend some years back that I would always argue creation/evolution with. One day he came in and told me how mad he got from watching a documentary on the Holocaust. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I thought, “Why are you so mad; it’s just survival of the fittest, right? You don’t even believe there is such a thing as right and wrong.” You see, no matter how much he denies it, he feels that standard as well as I do.

So, where did it come from? We don’t see it in animals. Oh, they will sometimes act nice toward their own families, and evolutionists will try to point to that as the beginnings of morality, but that is a far cry from what we see in humans. A dog doesn’t feel guilt from stealing another dog’s bone. Apes don’t sit down and talk about morals and ethics. If an ox gores a man to death, it is not arrested, tried, and condemned to the electric chair. We recognize its inability to make moral judgments and so we might just confine it in a sturdier pen and warn people to stay away. If we evolved from animals, how did we come to be moral creatures?

Could non-moral matter combined with time and chance be an adequate cause for this? If people are merely products of physical evolution and “survival of the fittest,” why do we sacrifice for each other? Where does courage, dying for a cause, love, dignity, duty, and compassion come from? This seems to be the opposite of what evolution would produce; in a struggle for survival, will the existence of a conscience help or hinder survival?

How does “survival of the fittest” fit with jumping on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers? Or pushing someone out of the way to take the oncoming car yourself? It is often the strong who do these things. How can you procreate and pass your genes on to your offspring if you are dead?

As Eric Lyons has asked, “Why are humans moral beings if, as evolutionists teach, we merely evolved from lifeless, mindless, unconscious matter over billions of years? Why do humans feel a sense of ‘ought’ to help the poor, weak, and oppressed if we simply evolved by the natural law of ‘might makes right’ (i.e., survival of the fittest)?”

I have to agree with John Adam, “...according to the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest, a loving human with a conscience is at a great disadvantage and would be unlikely to have survived the evolutionary process.”

To me, it fits much better that there is a moral God who placed morals within us.

Answer 11

society just works better when we get along. oh and some are legally mandated. but there is evidence that our aversion to things like murder, theft, rape, etc. are innate, based on the fact that we are social animals.... we are also sympathetic by nature, therefore the well being of those around us directly affects our own well being