Atheism and morality

[Inigo]

You have asserted that morality is instruction. I will dispute this premise now.....However, a more fundamental problem is simply equating "morality" with instruction, favoring, and an agent. Since morality is not a thing, it cannot be equated to an agent without a category error (see also, Leibniz' law).

This is question begging. I am not equating morality with a thing. I am concluding that it is one. And not just a thing, but an agent - a mind with beliefs and desires.

You are attempting to challenge my premise that morality instructs. I take it to be an essential feature and thus one that is non-negotiable. This isn't peculiar to me. Every work of moral philosophy that I have ever read, and every article on moral philosophy that I have ever read, has talked of moral requirements, commands, instructions, favourings and so on. It has made use of those terms. I assume that the authors of those books and articles are, then, talking about something that they sense is in the business of requiring, commanding, instructing, favouring. I assume that all of these philosophers are talking about the same thing I'm talking about. I assume that we have a common experience: that we have experienced the world as a place that contains external instructions and that we are using moral terms to refer to these things.
The bottom line is that what I am talking about when I talk about morality - and it appears that what every moral philosopher who has ever written on the topic is talking about as well - is something that instructs, whatever else it does.

Now, perhaps instructions can just somehow exist, all by themselves, un-issued by anyone. I think that idea is incoherent. I think you do as well if you're honest. But perhaps it isn't. But I can't conceive of how an instruction can exist all by itself. I can't conceive of how anything non-agential can issue an instruction. I can easily conceive of how something non-agential can give the appearance of instructing. But upon discovering that the thing is non-agential we do not hesitate to conclude that the instruction is not real, merely apparent.

Morality really instructs. For to believe an act wrong is to believe it 'not to be done' or 'required not to be done' or 'commanded not to be done' or 'favoured not to be done'. These are commonly offered as partially capturing just what we mean by 'wrong'.
Apparent instructions are not real instructions. An act is not wrong if it merely appears 'not to be done'. It is wrong if and only if it is actually 'not to be done'.