[Emu]

One of the questions I get asked (well, they don't ask me, but I hear it pretty often) is "If you're an atheist, where does your morality come from?"

It seems like I've heard dozens of answers to this question, but subtracting the possibility of faulty memory on my part, none of them have seemed to be terribly satisfying.

I've been thinking about this question for the past few days and the best answers I can come up with are framed in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, which seems awfully cheap to me. For example, I don't attack people on the street because I don't want to get beat up myself. I don't rob banks because I don't want to go to jail. These are the most low-level, childish reasons for why I don't commit crimes.

Secondary (and more powerful) reasons being that I have no desire to hurt people. I don't attack people on the street because the man I just killed may have a family of his own, people who rely on him. I find this to be a much more powerful (de)motivator than not wanting to get beat up or go to jail, but this still feels to me like a cost-benefit situation. I could steal perhaps 200 dollars from this man, but the monetary benefit would be greatly outweighed by the painful guilt I would receive. It doesn't seem all that much more noble to say "I don't do this because I would feel guilty if I did" than it is to say "I don't do this because I would get my ass kicked if I did."

But in thinking about it more, it sounds even less noble and more childish to say "I don't do this because God told me not to." And yet, as a purely emotional response, I tend to have a begrudging respect for religious morality as a demotivator for immoral behavior.

Another answer from evolutionary psychology is that our morality is programmed into us by our genes -- our ancestors cooperated together and flourished out of a respect for human dignity that has evolved naturally out of us and has been passed down genetically. While I tend to lean toward this (I major in evolutionary psych), it subtracts the philosophical bit of the question and reduces it a little much for my liking. And following this line of thought, we're again brought back to the cost-benefit analysis -- it was more beneficial for our ancestors to act and to be genuinely moral than to fake it, and hence the genuinely moral people had genuinely moral children. And soforth.

I have yet to find an answer that doesn't feel cheap, somehow. I suppose maybe it's just the way the world is and that everything comes down to a cost-benefit analysis whether I like it or not. To remove this factor from the discussion is basically to say that something is wrong because it's wrong.

Now, I'm not going to pull a Kulturkampf and go out and live life on the edge because my morality feels cheap. I still believe strongly in the moral imperative to do good, regardless of where it came from, but that still doesn't answer the question.