Atheists; what do you base your morals on?

[Darkstar]

Well, some people don't feel emotions. It's like flat out gone. Yet they still have a sense of duty and praise.

It isn't due to their actions, it's simply due to mental illness.

A sense of duty and praise are not unusual to have even if you have not emotion...I think. I could be wrong, I just don't see any obvious reason for it, unless empathy is paried with emotion here.

I'm not sure what you mean by the second sentence of your reply.

When I referred to someone who didn't have empathy, I was referring to someone like a psychopath.
Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously characterized by shallow emotions (including reduced fear, a lack of empathy, and stress tolerance), coldheartedness, egocentricity, superficial charm, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, criminality, antisocial behavior, a lack of remorse, and a parasitic lifestyle.

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Psychopaths have been considered notoriously amoral – an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. There are little firm data on patterns of moral judgment, however. Studies of developmental level (sophistication) of moral reasoning found all possible results – lower, higher or the same as non-psychopaths. Studies that compared judgments of personal moral transgressions versus judgments of breaking conventional rules or laws, found that psychopaths rated them as equally severe, whereas non-psychopaths rated the rule-breaking as less severe.

A study comparing judgments of whether personal or impersonal harm would be endorsed in order to achieve the rationally maximum (utilitarian) amount of welfare, found no significant differences between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. However, a further study using the same tests found that prisoners scoring high on the psychopathy checklist were more likely to endorse impersonal harm or rule violations than non-psychopaths were. Psychopaths who scored low in anxiety were also more willing to endorse personal harm on average.

Assessing accidents, where one person harmed another unintentionally, psychopaths judged such actions to be more morally permissible. This result is perhaps a reflection of psychopaths' failure to appreciate the emotional aspect of the victim's harmful experience, and furnishes direct evidence of abnormal moral judgment in psychopathy.