Atheism and Ethics

[Paleophyte]

I like this topic because I believe that moral standards can actually be fairly simple to apply.

"Treat others as you would want to be treated." If you can feel pain then you can understand why inflicting pain on someone else without a cause is bad. Because if you punch someone for a reason which doesn't make good sense then what is preventing someone else from punching you?

What about emotional pain? Should you feel comfortable bullying someone but then be upset when it happens to you?

Lying is another easy example to justify, if you lie too much then no one will trust you.

So if we don't want to watch our society descend into a chaos where people inflict pain on each other, steal from each other and lie one to another then we have every reason to live as though these virtues of fairness matter. 

It also gives us a good reason to establish a Justice system which punishes behavior that is far outside the accepted norm.

The Golden Rule really is golden. Not to be forgotten. And it's often pointed out these days that most societies seem to have evolved their own version of it.

The difficulty with the Golden Rule is that the common version, cited above, isn't the best one. Just goes to show how "simple" morals are anything but.

"Do unto others as you would have done unto you" is a good rule but it presumes that what I want done unto me is good for anybody else. It assumes a common perspective that, while largely accurate for broad strokes, can fall down when you get into the picky details. A better formulation is "Do unto others as they would have done unto them."

That said, the world would be a much better place if more people followed any version of it.