What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[tonechaser77]

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?

So...184 pages later and I certainly haven't read through all of them to see if this view has been stated. If it has, my apologies...
 
From a naturalistic perspective this has been addressed through the combined approaches of modern neuroscience, genetics, psychology, anthropology and other disciplines explanations have been posited for the biological origins of moral behavior. From this seat, morality is neither objective nor transcendent. It is the culture dependent expression of a set of neural systems that have evolved to allow our navigation of complex human social systems. 
 
A thesis growing in popularity that I subscribe to is that moral behavior arose in humans as an extension of the biological systems involved in recognition and care of mates and offspring. The systems are ancient, encoded in our genome and hard-wired into our brains and coupled with the ability of humans to predict future consequences of our actions, it allows us make choices to maximize not just short term but long term gain. Moral decision-making is informed by the biology of social attachments but is governed by principles of decision-making more generally. So we not only look for the right choice but for the optimal choice, based on satisfying a wide range of constraints and assigning priorities to them. This doesn't mean morals are innate but implies the capacity for moral reasoning and predisposition to moral behavior are innate. Just like a language needs to be learned, so do the codes of moral behavior and also like language moral codes are culture specific. 
 
I think the next question anyone would ask is if morals aren't objective why does it feel like they are?
 
The answer is because they evolve from neural systems grounded in emotion, in particular in attaching emotional value to different stimuli, including imagined consequences of actions. We evolved from other animals without reason (or with varying degrees of problem-solving faculties). For these animals to survive, neural systems are adapted to encode urges and beliefs in such a way as to optimally control behaviour. Attaching varying levels of emotional valence to different types of stimuli offers a means to prioritise certain factors in making complex decisions (i.e., those factors most likely to affect the survival of the organism or the dissemination of its genes). or humans, these important factors include our current and future place in the social network and the success of our social group. In the circumstances under which modern humans evolved, and still to a large extent today, our very survival and certainly our prosperity depend crucially on how we interact and on the social structures that have evolved from these interactions. We can’t rely on tooth and claw for survival – we rely on each other. Thus, the reason moral choices are tagged with strong emotional valence is because they evolved from systems designed for optimal control of behaviour. Or, despite this being a somewhat circular argument, the reason they feel right or wrong is because it is adaptive to have them feel right or wrong.