Spirituality part of morality?

[Angrboda]

The question is how can this be possible if spirituality has no basis?

It's possible if the brain treats the spiritual truth as real, even if it isn't. There could be an illusion that the spiritual provides the moral, as, for example, if one accepts that God's nature results in objectively moral commands, then one will perceive the commands of one's god as being moral and act "as if" they are moral.

This dovetails nicely with some recent thinking of mine. My basic idea is that morality concerns subconscious judgements about behavior. The fundamental moral impulses are subconscious and non-rational, but we use various strategies to mold these unconscious "feelings" about various behaviors into useful information for constructing a "moral worldview." So we can use consequentialism to try to reason about why specific acts morally repulse us, leading to behavioral regulation based on consequences. But we can also use virtue as a means of regulating our behavior; we attempt to mold our character in line with moral impulses, which ultimately results in moral behavior shaped by character traits, which themselves were developed by application of virtue ethics.

So, in my (fledgling) view, consequentialist ethics, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics, are all just roads to the same goal, the regulation of behavior in "moral" terms. In other words, evolution molds our brains to attract or repel, toward or away, from specific behaviors and behavior types; the various kinds of moral systems exist to "format" general rules of conduct to achieve moral ends. Consequentialism appears to lean heavily on empathy to "format" moral outcomes. Deontological ethics appears to rely on reason and social conformity to achieve similar ends. And virtue ethics relies on change of personal character traits to achieve the same end. In this view, spirituality and the religious worldview might form just another road to the same goal of behavioral regulation.