Why 'should' atheists be moral?

[Mister Agenda]

For those of you that refer to evolution as the basis for morality, do you realize that doing so reintroduces teleology into the process?

I suspect that is not actually the case. Evoluton is the proximate cause for our moral 'instincts', not their purpose.

If evolution leaves us with a human nature and acting contrary to it is not in the best interest of humanity, then “best interest” introduces intentionality, or desired ends, into the evolutionary process, at least where humans are concerned.

Our nature also includes anti-social impulses. Our 'moral intutition' is not the sum of human nature, else our history would have been a lot less violent. Because evolution is undirected, it does not favor pro-social over anti-social impulses, it only favors what leads to us reproducing successfully, and apparently a mixed bag of impulses does that job the best.

That’s not a problem for believers but it is for those who think evolution is a wholly undirected process.

It's only a problem for people who badly misunderstand how evoluton works...or have a blind spot regarding it.

There is a second problem with evolution based morality. It cannot adjudicate between conflicts between communities and individuals.

Huh. Maybe that's because it isn't teleological.

The reproductive advantage of one can easily become the liability of the other.

I really can't grok how you can understand evolution well enough to make that statement and understand it so poorly that you think evolution has done something that requires intention to explain. Don't you see the conflict between those positions?

Our moral sentiments make us care about doing the right thing. They aren't very good at telling us what the right thing is, especially in complicated situations. All they do is make us want to try. It takes experience and reason to arrive at better ways to organize our communites and adjudicate our conflicts. But without our innate empathy and sense of fairness as motivators, we'd likely be doing a much poorer job that we are, not that we still don't have room for tons of improvement.

I'm trusting here that by 'evolution-based morality' you're not talking about 'we should act this way because we evolved to act this way'. That would be a fallacy. We also evolved for males to have harems of 1 to 3 females on average, that doesn't mean I should have 2 wives.

---

Sure it is. Once you have rational beings capable of acting contrary to evolved instincts then morality has already started to play a role in how that species evolves. Mankind has now reached the point where we can effectively shape the direction of our own evolution by eugenics, genetic manipulation, selective abortion, etc. In so doing, people must make moral choices based on something other than their evolutionary history.

Our evolved moral instincts are altruism, empathy/sympathy, and our senses of fairness and reciprocity. Those sentiments are exactly what we need to temper our reason when making such moral choices.

---

So what are you saying, that reason is not reliable because it evolved. If so how is it possible to know anything at all?

Reliability and unreliability come in degrees. It doesn't follow that if our reason isn't always perfectly reliable, we can't know anything at all. And for the areas where our limitations are most problematic, we have devised methods and instrumentation to correct for our fallibilities and foibles. And whether or not you accept evolution, it is undeniable that our reason isn't perfectly reliable, so it seems that the idea that we can't know anything if our reason isn't reliable would be a problem for everyone regardless of whether it's that way because of evolution or some other reason