Atheism and Ethics

[Angrboda]

The problem here for both of us is that without reviewing the relevant studies across societies and seeing the proportion of people who see what as moral and immoral and why, we can’t really armchair theorise our way out of this I think. I guess that is a question though for you as I don’t know - have you read many studies on this. I haven’t, so am at a disadvantage here

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.  Now...sam harris summed this up much better and more succinctly than I can or will..but, in short....  If we're not talking about harm, at all, when we talk about morality and bad things...I have no clue what we're talking about.

I think you're committing Moore's naturalistic fallacy. The fact that harm is often associated with immorality doesn't mean that harm is morality. The same with benefit. What is beneficial may or may not be good in a moral sense.