Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Angrboda]

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. ... 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.

I completely agree with all of this and I like the way you put it together. Morality is best understood biologically/psychologically/culturally. It isn't as though, in the absence of consciously deciding on a moral code we will be without one. Unless we're raised in a closet with minimal contact we will most likely already have a moral sense -unchosen- to be discovered, not decided upon.

There is something about consciously assenting to what we deem moral which is necessary to convey the sense of what we want the word to mean. But it may be that sense of the word carries a naive, mistaken view of human nature.

There is a growing body of literature on the mental life of babies, and in particular, recent studies seem to indicate that babies as young as six months old already have a developed moral sense, even before language acquisition. While as with any other trait, phylogeny must take account of predisposition and modification in response to the environment, I would suggest such studies indicate that while learning may shape our social, moral responses, they do not create them. (And studies have shown that for some moral judgements, the part of the brain activated is the same involved in physical revulsion at the taste of rotten meat or the sight of mangled animals. You can't 'train' that type of revulsion. Though there are important results in moral psychology that indicate that what we once thought were moral invariants are also more culturally dependent than previously assumed. [Haidt, 2012])



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anCaGBsBOxM

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As for the second point - basing one's values on an authority is the most demeaning thing one can do to oneself. A rational person would try to understand his own nature and that of his environment and base his values on that. An irrational person may choose to act on range of the moment whims and desires, but atleast he is basing his values on himself. What you ask here is for a person to subvert his own nature and desires - without so much as a reason given, but on authority - and to substitute one's own rationality and judgment for someone else's. What could be more demeaning?

Weren't you the one who was telling me that we learn our morality from authority figures, our parents and elders? Or did I hallucinate that?