Atheism and morality

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Well, I keep saying what I understand morality to be (instructions and favourings that have inescapable rational authority). And I keep distinguishing morality itself from moral sensations and beliefs (which I term 'moral phenomena'). But most seem to ignore these important distinctions and continue to think that all one needs to do is provide some kind of causal story about the development of our disposition to have moral sensations and form moral beliefs to have accounted for 'morality'. When in fact all that person is doing is explaining the existence of moral phenomena - something whose existence is not in doubt. But unless one identifies morality with moral phenomena (which would be as cretinous as identifying a belief about a chair with a chair) one is saying nothing about morality itself.

you are absolutely correct in thinking that to challenge my premise that morality is an agent one would need to provide an example of an instruction that has not been issued by any agent yet is a real instruction nonetheless. And then one would need to show that morality could be made of the instructions of this alternative kind of thing and that those instructions would be ones that have inescapable rational authority. It is a tall order. Good luck!

You still haven't differentiated morality from instinctive behaviour, which, in reality is harder to over-ride than is morality.

You keep referring to moral phenomena. Which came first? The phenomena or morality? It would seem to me that morality cannot exist in a vacuum where there are no moral phenomena to describe.

In fact I would say the phenomena were probably happening for thousands of years prior to the formation of the concept of morality.

This would imply that morality only exists because of the phenomena that support it. That you wish to externalize it is your problem.

It would appear, in fact, that morality is merely the sum of the phenomena that support it. This is going to head down the set theory route.