(November 29, 2014 at 6:09 pm)vincent150 Wrote: It has been said that as an atheist the meaning of your life is basically to maximise the amount of pleasure and minimise the amount of pain in it. Can the answer to this question be then there is no reason why someone should be moral if it will [not] benefit your life? Yes like it has been said a lot of times, the reason for most morals is it helps society as a whole, but if not following one of these rules would help someone, and they are living life by the rule maximise pleasure, why should they not break the rule?Bertrand Russell:
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
So, it's true, if a moral rule does not increase a person's overall happiness, they would not be inclined to support it. Which particular rules are you worried about atheists breaking?