Reply To: Burn Baby Burn
The first moral code of atheism then
Atheism is a lack of belief in God. There is no atheist moral code. Take a random sample of 10 atheists in the world (China, Germany, Canada, Brazil, North Korea, Phillippines, the USA, Denmark, Russia, Vietnam) and you’ll find extremely different moral codes of which none are exceptional to atheists. Their moral codes are far more likely to resemble their own culturally emergent moral codes than some unspoken abstract “atheist” morality. There are hundreds of millions of atheists in Asia who may take very different stances on moral problems than most users here. Just because you lack a belief in God, doesn’t mean you need to develop a moral code along with the rest of the worlds non-believers.
is surely that you need evidence to make a claim. Or rather, a claim should not be accepted without evidence.
You cannot use evidence to fully spell out the foundation of a moral code. The foundation is more than specific interpretations of a moral problem solved through the fundamental rules. Whether you develop a utilitarian morality, relativistic one, a modern-western-human-rights based one or a communist-style one…it cannot rely entirely on evidence as all of them without exception rely to some extent on the subjective imposition of a subjective ideology. You can use evidence to analyse a moral problem. For example, whether you bump a person off a plane who is heading to a funeral or a professional tennis player off to a very important match to be watched by millions. If you interprate that through the subjective utilitarian moral system, you can use evidence objectively (like the financial cost of missing a game. You can also subjectively develop a system that inteprets the emotional cost of an event or absence of an event and then objectively classify through evidence the emotional toll of someone missing a funeral, etc. So moral system…cannot be entirely reasoned through evidence. Interpretation of moral problems through a moral system…it can be (depending on the system) or even must be.
What is the second moral code?
There is no atheist morality. If you are interested in a moral code which many atheists from Europe and North America believe in (knowingly or unknowingly) I suggest reading about humanism.
