Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Angrboda]

A more general form of this question was posed in the recent Morality: Where do you get yours? thread. (My response in that thread is here.)

Basically, I endorsed the model from evolutionary psychology. However, as a philosopher, I realize this leaves some loose ends dangling. (I suspect the ends can be tied by way of understanding the nature of mind and the structure of thought, but that remains to be seen.) I'm grateful for the examples Stimbo has given. I was aware of the vast body of literature on animal morality and intelligence, but at this point I am largely ignorant of the subject, and as Stimbo noted, the examples most commonly given refer to animal altruism.

My thinking hasn't evolved much from that thread, other than to summarize my principle of ethics thusly:

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

While I borrow the phrasing from Crowley and Thelema, I intend a different meaning. In particular I emphasize two things.

First, our wills are not radically free. What we as an evolved biological organism are capable of willing, what we find hard to will and what is easy, is defined as an artifact of our evolutionary history. Our wills have been refined over time to serve the needs of our selfish genes. And something peculiar about that will, is that it deviates significantly from rational models. For example, our behavior in the face of risk/reward expectation is not linear. (See Kahneman and Tversky, prospect theory.) It's also known that we respond overly aggressively to rule breakers and rule breaking, which makes applying the classic tit-for-tat strategy essentially void, as the players in the game, us, play by a different set of rules. (And those rules are geared to our survival as a social species.) Moreover, a large chunk of our will involves cooperative ventures like families, tribes, and societies, ventures in which our evolved psychology allows us to leverage language, culture and reason into assemblages which include things like agreeing to be punished if we break rules, and so forth, which result in a sophisticated will which takes many things beyond visceral desire into account.

Second is that our wills are what I call "cognitively opaque". We can inspect the results, for example by apprehending a feeling of wrongness when we contemplate some act, but the reasons for that judgement aren't accessible to our introspection — the reason we came to that apprehension is computed somewhere below consciousness. It's like math. If someone asks you, "What is 8 times 7?" the answer 56 quickly pops into mind, but there's no knowledge of how your mind determined it was 56, nor why it was able to accurately select the answer. Morality is the same way. We know that we feel murder is wrong, but not why we feel that way. And certainly there have been plenty of attempts to explain why the things we consider moral are moral, but these are all post hoc; they are attempting to explain the feeling, not attempts to suggest what moral feelings we should have. (e.g. if an ethicist attempted to argue that we should think of examples of the color orange next to the color blue as immoral; we would consider the arguments ludicrous, not on the basis of the argument he makes, but because it so clearly contradicts our intuitive moral judgement on the matter. Ethics justifies intuition, not the reverse.)

I was going somewhere else with this, but it has escaped me. Oh well. FWIW.