Moral standards

[Ben Davis]

In an atheist world, where do the standards by which moral actions are measured come from?

In a nutshell, individuals who work well with others have a higher level of survivability. This has resulted in human development of behavioural frameworks which we call morality or ethics. There are 4 main sources, regularly documented, which provide a naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) basis for these:

1. Instincts for social behaviour. These are evolutionary traits which results from thousands of generations of interaction. Over time, brains which are more adept at particular types of social behaviour have been selected for which has resulted in an innate propensity towards commonly beneficial behaviour.

2. Education. We are taught values by our parents/guardians which they believe (or have evidence for) will provide us with a greater level of survivability and/or success as we develop. The social aspects of this education are integrated with our instinctive social behaviour to form moral/ethical value-systems. These systems tend to be more successful at coping with complex human interactions because they can cope with a greater level of variety/variation and still provide value-adding outcomes.

3. Experience. We tend to layer personal experiences over the top of our instincts and education as we receive real-world feedback on our actions. This facility allows us to tailor our value-systems to our situations, generally providing more successful results in their application. This increases the sophistication of our systems, catering for a greater level of variety/variation.

4. Authority (some see this as a subset of Education). We tend to develop behavioural role-models. This can save us time as we don't need to rethink every situation/dilemma, we can just apply our role-models approach. We can also be our own Authority because humans are habit-forming creatures. This is a fairly unsophisticated approach, requiring little labour which makes it successful though it doesn't cater very well with variety/variation.


The rabbit-hole goes far deeper than that but this is a reasonable overview. By comparing value-systems, we can see that religious-style morals fall heavily under category 4 while non-religious ones tend towards category 3.