Moral Foundation for Wandering Atheists

Greetings former and soon to be former theists.  Congratulations. Now, a bit of an issue for you... your theist guides will have warned you that atheism has no moral system, and indeed, perhaps no epistemological system (no way to say what's right or proper, no way to say what's true).

Frankly, this is true of "atheism". Atheism has nothing to it but a lack of theist rhetoric. But anyone that might be called an atheist, as reward for avoiding theistic rhetoric, will in fact have some form of morality, explicit or de facto.  Hopefully you will already realize that individual atheists, generally speaking, do have moral system. Again, often this will be explicit, but will at least be some de facto system of morality.  Similarly for epistemologies, the patterns or reasoning they use about what is really knowable will exist since they will claim to know, or at least act as if they know, certain things more in comparison to others they know less about.

The trend for people that are newly atheists or are soon to be atheists seems to be to try rebuild all the intuitions they retain from theistic morality into a system exactly the same in as many respects as possible. This phenomenon seems amply recorded in the philosophy of the nineteenth century and earlier as non-theistic reasoning took hold.

I think no one that as a theist was against murder, ostensibly because of the fifth Commandment (possibly the 6'th) in that case, because, upon deconversion from theism, suddenly became an advocate of murder.  Indeed, when making a moral system, which is what you have to do in a non-metaphysical world, dear larval atheist, one needs a mean of judging their attempt at a moral system.  One way to judge your system is by spot checking it against deal breakers... such as my need to have a morality that explains why, when, or how "murder is wrong" or "one should not commit murder".

If I am judging a moral system, if it advocates or cannot rule against spot checks such as murder, rape, stealing, then I will judge it poorly. A good moral system should postdict robust moral facts like these, and then, being consistent among known or test cases, might be considered more reliable when used to assess cases closer to the borderline, things we wonder about morally.

As a philosophical person, having gone through a lot of introspection in order to reach your non-theist or soon to be non-theist state, hopefully you will be wary, however, of taking with you too much of your previous morality, and I would suggest it might be good to minimize what you take. Further, you will use logic and rules of consistency to not take anything with you that you can't ultimately justify.  That is, you will face the possibility that you cannot re-justify even these robust test cases. Don't worry, you can do that, but do worry, it's not necessarily easy.

The problem is, however, while the theistic explanations have evaporated for you, probably more than half of the conclusions and doctinaire dictums linger on within you. As a skeptic and relativist it is important for you to have a rational and reasonable moral system lest you surely fall back into a dogmatic one, perhaps nothing but a little more self serving.

Rather than attempting to follow priests not of like mind, you may try to take your lead from scientists. This will be complicated to utter impossibility for not only are scientists on every side of every issue, but also, they say essentially nothing about moral issues. Still there is much to misinterpret when taking a lead from science.

As an anti-dogmatist as well as a mere non-theist, it's crucial from my point of view that a moral system not violate any skeptical or relativistic principles of reason, and the system I will describe in brief does not.  So for example we will not expect it possible to create just ONE moral system for all contexts. Also, justifications for a morality will be logical, meaning, if you accept certain principles, then the morality can be argued for.  E.g. while it's not possible to non-dogmatically argue that stealing is absolutely wrong, it is possible to argue that if you do not want to be stolen from, then you ought not steal from others, given that you want people to treat you consistently, and thus should treat them consistently.

(1) a moral system is a system that an individual uses to advise themselves how they should treat members of groups in which they belong
(2) even in an ideal situation, an individual will tend to have at least one distinct morality for every group to which they belong
(3) a moral theorist will naturally, over time, find common forms for moralities, common and distinguishing features, but given many moral theorists, and the scale of the task, even if it turns out possible to state a universal morality, which I doubt, one will always expect multiple answers from multiple moral systems in any single situation

Thus, lets say it is immoral to steal in all of a particular moral theorists known moral systems, and suppose as well that it may also be immoral to starve your children.  One can expect conflict when considering your obligations to your children in the near term, and considering stealing a nights meal.  In my calculation of this, the act does not become morally right, nor is it only wrong.  I hold that this is a superposition, that with respect to one group, it could be moral and necessary, and in another, immoral.  Such considerations inform a meta-morality which can deal with such conflicts, though the question is not particularly complex... a state with a police force will enforce the concept of ought and ought-not relative to the group of the state, but if well informed the state can apply a meta-ethic.  One can see that our system does attempt such analysis, and such considerations are not held to mitigate the wrongness of the act, say of thievery, but merely to advise as to the leniency of an appropriate reaction.

My moral calculus makes a clear distinction of terms:

(1) What is or isn't moral is an instruction for myself only.
(2) When someone else breaks my morality, the question is not how or if they ought to agree with me, the moral question is still for me alone, "How should I treat a person that aggrieves me?".

One can expect such a conflict, that is, someone violating my moral system, is to be decided by choosing from which group to make the moral calculation, and by taking into practical matters such as the degree of the offense and principles of respect for individual rights such that minor emotive grievances are not pursued at all, and only matters of material consequence rise to the level required in order to take action on transgression against persons which can be judged by a prior, agreed on, set of moral systems.

On the personal level, people can be expected to revert to the morality of whichever is their more close knit group. The ramification of this system is that moral arguments always draw from the shared reality of the group, all humans need food and water to survive, all living creatures need non-toxic habitats to survive, and so on.  Logical arguments can be made from acceptance of the group condition into moral advice.  This means we have to have a vibrant network of conversations, such that we know well what our shareable reality is, in order to make sound moral decisions as a group.