Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

You have to judge each situation differently. Just an example I recently saw reiterated: If you are not feeling bad about the harm done to others, and you think there is nothing wrong with you, then this is an issue in how you are mentally wired.

The more common example is when a parent cannot see beyond himself to comprehend the hurt he is causing to his child. Instead, the selfish parent whines, "Why is my kid doing this to me?"

I definitely feel bad about harm done to others, and have the same attitudes towards theft and a lot of other issues as most other people. An error theory of morality doesn’t necessarily entail a change to the things we want to happen in the world, although some abolitionists would say it could. I am deliberately not focussing on my views as am trying to get at what moral realists believe. When I ask “why care” though, it is about what makes moral facts differ from other facts, it is more of a hypothetical.

 Surely it is societal standards and the resultant peer pressure that makes moral properties both motivating and binding. To belong to any societal group would surely affect one's behavior, due to its effect on one's ability to succeed within the group, would it not?

Yes, I think socialisation and peer pressure is a key factor and why moral thinking has been successful in human evolution. That said, that doesn’t seem to necessarily result from any distinct property that we have to hypothesise as moral properties, on top of just the natural / descriptive set of facts. If the motivational and binding force is outside the claimed moral properties themselves, then the “so what” question still arises for me when thinking about those properties just shifted a level. Why should society care about these properties?