Why 'should' atheists be moral?

[robvalue]

There is no independent reason to be moral, as a neutral universe doesn't care about us, our actions or what may be "good" or "bad".

From a human's perspective, most people have empathy. That allows you to have a feel for what it's like for other people to experience the results of your actions. Seeing someone suffer usually makes you feel bad, as you can reason that you would not like to suffer either. So at a basic level each person defines their own morals by what they think is and isn't acceptable to do to others based on the feelings the actions would provoke in them.

And as has been mentioned the side effects of being nice often make you feel good, and we understand that cooperation leads to a more pleasurable society for everyone.

But to answer why should we be moral: Because we care about other people. So we impose that "should" on ourselves. But the thing is, "being moral" isn't a consistent set of behaviours to be followed. Each person defines what is and isn't moral, so by definition they have decided what they should and shouldn't do. It's a tautology. From humanities viewpoint, we should be moral because it helps us all and we generally want a good society rather than chaos. We want health and happiness rather than harm and sadness. From a universal point of view, "should" has no meaning. We're all a bunch of atoms and stuff, doing what atoms do.

Of course you have unusual people like sociopaths who feel no empathy and as such will have trouble creating morals. The reason for them to be moral in a very broad sense is so they don't get punished by the law. But in a sense thats not being moral, it's following a code.

To me, morality is just about harm versus benefit for each action. This analysis will vary from person to person. Any other definition of moral makes no sense to me. Following a list of rules given to you is not being moral, it's been obedient. It's being amoral.

Religious types say they get their morality from the bible but they lie (mostly). Firstly because morality isn't about determining what is good if you're just doing what you're told without question. Secondly, all but most extreme religious types do not do what the bible says, instead they apply their own moral judgement to it and then decide to do it or not. So in fact they have used their own morality, and just used the bible as justification. If you define morality as what God says is moral, then it's pointless to say it has any value, and again Christians don't follow it anyway.