Question for Atheists; What is your moral system?

[VarlosZ]

Utilitarianism, explicitly. (1) You seek the greatest good for the greatest number – “the good” is defined as happiness, but due to the difficulty in measuring the utility of others, “the good” is often effectively defined as preference fulfillment.

(2) We’re just looking forward, not backwards. You don’t keep your promise because you gave your word, you keep it because of the bad consequences that would follow from breaking your word. And if you know you can create more utility by breaking your word, you’re obligated to do so. (Of course, the act of giving your word usually has a strong influence on the consequences of your decision to honor or not honor it.)

(3) Everyone’s happiness counts the same. The serial child molester should figure just as prominently in your calculations as the world’s greatest philanthropist.
I think there are a lot of people who are effectively utilitarians, but who are turned off to being explicitly so by the kind of unrealistic examples that Blaster Master mentioned. Like this:

@Blaster Master

Or another example, say there’s a grumpy old man in the neightborhood that no one likes and has no living family, is it moral to kill him because it would make just about everyone in the neighborhood happy that he’s gone?

Sure, you could dream up a hypothetical situation in which it might be best to kill the old man; specifically, in this case, if you knew you could keep it 100% secret, and/or people wouldn’t care if they found out he was murdered. But that’s just not realistic. In the real world, you don’t kill even thoroughly objectionable people because nobody likes to live in a society in which people are murdered. It leads to general misery. Also, you can’t know that nobody in the world likes or cares about him, so you’re dealing with a probability instead of an absolute, and the chance of unforseen suffering has dimished the expected utility of the killing. Similarly, you yourself may be caught and thrown in jail, leading to massive quantities of misery for you and your loved ones.

Essentially the same problems arrise with your shoplifting example, though it is more realistic that such a thing could actually be justifiable.

I’m seriously not trying to nit-pick, but I don’t get the difference between “preferable” and “good” in this context. That is, both imply that maximizing happiness will necessarily produce moral results.

Not “produce” moral results. They are moral results. Saying that such an outlook could justify killing or stealing, and that killing and stealing are “obviously” immoral, is missing the point. They are not (we think) inherrently moral or immoral. They are one or the other for different, more fundamental reasons.

I can’t speak for all utilitarians, but generally the reason that we choose happiness as the ultimate good is because it is the only thing that is desirable for its own sake. I.e., it is the purest good; any other good can be made bad by circumstance.
(All of this is subjective, incidentally. My moral sytem isn’t “better,” per se, just “preferred.” It’s ultimately based on some arbitrary axioms, like everyone else’s morality. If anyone ever counters my argument by saying “I don’t care about preventing misery,” that would be the end of the rational portion of our debate. I could still make an emotive argument about why he should care, but there would be no logical reason for our disagreement.)

[cosmosdan]

@Valteron

We KNOW it changes, but you are asking what is the ultimate motor? Frankly, you have me there.

Maybe one anecdote will help. Take cruelty to animals. My late dad (1917-1995) was, when I knew him, a kind man who would never have hurt our pets. He used to come in and feed our cats when we were on vacation and spoil them. But he once admitted that as kids in North America in the 1920s, he and his friends would love to climb into a tree, grab baby birds from nests, throw them down to the ground and stomp them. We kids asked him why he would have done that. He thought long and said, “Life was hard for us and so we made it hard for others”.

I am also reminded of the line in the movie “Mississippi Burning” where the FBI man from the south, in answer to the question of where racial hatred comes from, tells a story about how his father was “So busy hatin’ the niggers he never knew it was poverty that was killin’ him.”

Does it have something to do with the higher standard of living in a society?

For that matter why do I now regret that I used to impale worms on hooks and then pull those hooks into the mouths of fishes and kill them? It now seems to me monstrous and horrible (unless you need the fish to eat) and yet it did not seem so when I went fishing with my Dad in the 1950s. Why?

It is a mystery indeed. I remember hunting frogs with a sharp stick for a spear when I was a kid. If my grandson did it I’d discourage it.

I’d like to think there is something within us that calls us to care about the intangibles like love, compassion, justice, etc. It seems it is heard more clearly in some people than others and those people help inspire and motivate the rest of us, but I can’t say I have any real evidence that is so.

[Resistance_is_Character-Formin]

I try to be nice to people I like, and decent to those I’m indifferent to. If I feel like being a jerk to people I don’t like, I don’t lose sleep over it.