Atheism and Ethics

[Lucian]

Consider one of the most common and intuitive stories humans have told about normative content.  That we should not anger the gods or the spirit of the land or the king...or...honestly..whatever, because of what will or might happen if we do.  This invokes a specific or general harm in the explanation of a normative command.  Then we have the various carrot and stick deontologies which are all doubly harm-based..in that they invoke harm as both a consequence and a promise.  

I think we need to be super clear going forward that when I say I think it's safe to assume that a person talking about bad stuff is talking about harmful stuff I don't mean that I believe that there actually is any harm in a given x.  Just like I don't believe that there are any gods to do that purported harm.  Just that I recognize and acknowledge that people making such a claim are invoking harm. We don't have to agree that a harm is real or actual  and it doesn't require a treatise on morality as the individual sees it for a system to be recognizably harm based or harm interested in an accurate and descriptive sense.  

What you'll find in the literature is that there is broad intersubjectivity in moral content - harm is a part of that - but that even in harm interested or harm based systems the correlation between morality and harm is not universal.  It's more often conditional.  That there is space for a good bad guy, and a bad good guy.  For unintended consequences.  I think this reflects our experience in reality with morally motivated actions and actors - and..often enough, we find some proverb or utterance or whole ass narrative to that effect in the cultural products of societies across the globe.  In that sense, it's a negotiation with reality; between how we think things ought to be or ought to happen, and how they are or do. 

Returning to the beginning...I think it's intuitive for us to believe that doing the good thing will lead to beneficial results.  With religious ideologies doing the good thing -is- the beneficial result...explicitly.

Interesting. I need to get around to reading on this side of things more, will defer to your more widely read views for now until have had read enough to be constructively belligerent. Any suggestions for resources that you get your info from on this?