What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[Catholic_Lady]

This is kind of a spinoff of the WHY BE GOOD thread.

The question I have for atheists, isn't "why by good." I think it's simplistic and deeply flawed to think that the only reason to "be good" is to avoid Hell. And of course, I believe that anyone can be a good person regardless of beliefs.

The question I have for atheists is how do we know what IS good?

Religious or not, we all somehow know that certain things are intrinsically, universally immoral. Let's use murder as an obvious example. So if murder is wrong, where did this law come from? If this is a universal truth, where did this truth come from and who/what determined it to be what it is?

This is the sort of question that used to bother me a lot when I was a Christian. 

 There are logical reasons why murder is considered immoral.  Instability would not be good for a social species  and killing each other would definitely hurt our ability to live with one another. It makes sense that our society has  evolved to the point that  we disapprove of murdering innocent people. 


Our view on murder has changed from biblical times. For example, we no longer put people to death for cursing their parents, having an affair or being raped while in the city. Those would be considered innocent people today. They weren't considered innocent in the Old Testament world. Our views change on these issues. 

There are no easy answers. Once I became an atheist I had to rethink about what I considered moral. I couldn't just accept what the bible said was good anymore. I had to ask myself why certain actions were bad or good. In the long run, I feel that this has made me a better person but when I first lost faith this questioning really frightened me.

Thanks for the answer!

I'd actually argue that it was always immoral to kill people for the reasons you stated above. I don't think morals change. I guess in the OT times people thought it was ok, so it was considered ok by society, but I believe objectively it was always immoral.

I do think it is important to ask ourselves why we believe what we believe about morality and not just blindly follow a certain path just because our religion tells us to. It is important to understand *why* it does.

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This is kind of a spinoff of the WHY BE GOOD thread.

The question I have for atheists, isn't "why by good." I think it's simplistic and deeply flawed to think that the only reason to "be good" is to avoid Hell. And of course, I believe that anyone can be a good person regardless of beliefs.

The question I have for atheists is how do we know what IS good?

Religious or not, we all somehow know that certain things are intrinsically, universally immoral. Let's use murder as an obvious example. So if murder is wrong, where did this law come from? If this is a universal truth, where did this truth come from and who/what determined it to be what it is?

It's quite simple really, you use empathy combined with reason to determine options cause and promote suffering and which options cause and promote pleasure.

Thank you for the response!

I believe there are 2 flaws with this thinking.

1. Empathy can be subjective, while the morality of certain things are not. For example, a vegetarian can feel empathy for farm animals and claim that it is immoral to eat meat. Meanwhile, a meat eater can say they do not feel empathy for such animals and so eating meat is not immoral.

2. Why is it immoral to promote suffering? Where does this law come from?