Where do atheists get their morality from?

[genkaus]

Second is that our wills are what I call "cognitively opaque". We can inspect the results, for example by apprehending a feeling of wrongness when we contemplate some act, but the reasons for that judgement aren't accessible to our introspection — the reason we came to that apprehension is computed somewhere below consciousness. It's like math. If someone asks you, "What is 8 times 7?" the answer 56 quickly pops into mind, but there's no knowledge of how your mind determined it was 56, nor why it was able to accurately select the answer. Morality is the same way. We know that we feel murder is wrong, but not why we feel that way. And certainly there have been plenty of attempts to explain why the things we consider moral are moral, but these are all post hoc; they are attempting to explain the feeling, not attempts to suggest what moral feelings we should have. (e.g. if an ethicist attempted to argue that we should think of examples of the color orange next to the color blue as immoral; we would consider the arguments ludicrous, not on the basis of the argument he makes, but because it so clearly contradicts our intuitive moral judgement on the matter. Ethics justifies intuition, not the reverse.)

I'd disagree both with regards to mathematics and morality. I don't think that either the feeling of moral wrongness or the determination of mathematical answer could be achieved without the concepts being taught at some point in life. A person who has never attended a math class wouldn't know that 8x7= 56. Similarly, you wouldn't think that murder is wrong unless you have been explicitly or implicitly exposed to the idea of valuing human life while growing up. It is when we accept and internalize those concepts - whatever the reason for that acceptance may be - that we can experience those moral feelings seemingly intuitively. For example, if a person is taught from the beginning that the only morally correct sexual relations are between a man and a woman and he accepts it because either it comes from an authority he trusts or because it seems rational in his worldview where purpose of sex is to produce children or because of his own single-target sexual preference or simply because it doesn't contradict anything in his worldview - then, upon encountering the idea of homosexual relations, he genuinely would feel the "moral wrongness" of it.

The job of an ethicist would then be much more nuanced. He would be required to provide a template against which our automatic intuitions can be measured and corrected. He'd be required to not only explain why we feel what we feel, but also if we should feel that way. He'd be required to tell where moral judgment is inapplicable. For example, based on a personal preference of finding raw meat to be icky, I can easily use post-hoc justifications to translate it into a moral principle and declare sushi fans to be immoral. However, an ethicist would point put that since it is a matter of personal preference, moral judgment is inapplicable here. Further, based on Christian morals pounded into me since childhood, I may genuinely consider homosexual relations as immoral - even though my own personal preference may lie that way. Again, I'd require an ethicist to tell me that the basis, i.e. the learned concept, is wrong and therefore, my intuition in this case is unjustified.