1. Wouldn't things be easier if there was a cosmic moral order?
2. Have you come across the idea that we can be moral without God thanks to our genes?
3. Is atheism incompatible with moral absolutes? Does it restrict us to consequentialist morality?
4. How does one determine their 'authentic self'?
Here are my answers as written in an email:
Is life simpler with a cosmic order, God and morals written into the firmament? Maybe, but it's also stultifying. Imagine if tomorrow God revealed himself to humanity and said these are the rules and this is what I had planned for each of you. You can either follow the rules and my plan for you and go to heaven, or not and go to hell. This would essentially be the Bible with all the ambiguity taken out. Now imagine that you disagree with one of the rules, perhaps pertaining to abortion and/or you don't like what God has outlined for you - perhaps he wants me to be a public servant instead of an academic or school teacher. What then?
The key thing to understand about religion is that it solves the problem of identity coherence by sublimating the individual will to a monolithic external standard. The will can thrash and fight but eventually it will be broken against this implacable monolith. The upshot is that you will have inner peace in the form of purpose and psychic harmony. The downside is that all semblance of your own unique personal drives, your daimon, will be lost. It's no coincidence that Nietzsche calls this kind of living 'slave morality'. Religion gives you purpose and harmony but at the cost of your will to freedom. Some religious people will disagree citing the notion that you have to 'find' God's path for you within yourself. My retort to this is that then you don't need God. If God only helps those who help themselves then God is redundant.
Religion appeals to those who want to abrogate their responsibility for choosing certain values. It would be nice, they think, to be told what is right and good, because then you could just do it, you wouldn't have to worry about whether abortion is wrong or whether making a girl have her rapist's baby is evil. Moreover, you wouldn't have to make that choice and stay by your reasons for it. The religious approach of saying 'I have to behave this way, it's written in the Bible' is the purest kind of bad faith--the somewhat snide phrase the existentialists used to describe people who don't responsibility for their choices. In a sense, religious morality is not being 'good' at all, but rather simply following the rules. In Dungeons and Dragons this distinction between 'good' and 'lawful' is explicit. Religious people are lawful, not good. Indeed, I recall a very religious Senior Resident at my old college who committed some pretty atrocious acts, including expelling a student who was simply helping his mate while he looked for accommodation, thereby putting two people onto the street in a rental crisis rather than 1, all under the guise of following the rules.
The atheist approach is of course the opposite - to set the will free and to take ownership of your value choices. This is noble morality, and it is defined as 'the right to make promises'. In this framework your word is paramount, because it is only by the strength of your integrity that people, including yourself, can judge your moral fortitude and strength of character. Inevitably, your value choices will be stronger and more easily maintained if they are founded on good reasons, so atheist ethics replaces the primacy of faith with the primacy of reason.
On the issue of morality in genes, I think this has jumped the gun a bit regarding what morals are. I like to distinguish between morals as values written into the firmament and ethics as subjective values. If you reject the possibility of a divine order then morals become impossible and you are left with ethics. People are scared of that state of affairs because it means they can't say Hitler or their favourite bugbear was evil, only that his actions go against their values. Furthermore, they worry that in the absence of external standard people will behave as barbarians.
The first matter isn't a problem and the second isn't true. Hitler thought he was a great person, right down to the last moment. He was supported in this view by tens of thousands of other Germans. His experience perfectly underscores that values are subjective. We indeed cannot say that Nazi Germany was evil. We can however, present arguments regarding its social inexpediency and more generally, arguments about why we think it was an unethical state. This latter cluster of arguments has exactly the same nature as moral arguments, but they aren't backed up by a cosmic order, so they remain contestable. And values should be contestable in a liberal-democratic society. How else can ensure that outmoded ideas are abandoned? Moving values from objective to subjective simply entrenches an acceptance of humanity as fallible and underscores the primacy of reasoned argument in changing people's values. It lays the foundations for liberal-democracy: you must try to convince the heretic of the error of their views and if it becomes a matter in requirement of a tie-breaker you can vote to change the law. You cannot, however, ever use violence against someone just because they disagree with the values you hold on faith.
With regards the second issue, of the seriousness of atheist values, a few things are always forgotten here:
1. Most people want to be 'good'. Their definitions of what 'good' is will differ, but just because values aren't written into the firmament won't mean that people suddenly regress to enslaving their neighbours.
2. In order for someone to achieve 'being', which is a catch-all term for purpose, psychological coherence, psychological well-being and a host of other factors, people have to behave with integrity regarding their autonomously determined values. This makes their values serious. The only difference between this and monotheism is that here the individual is the enforcer of his own moral authority rather than God intervening from outside. This connects ethics and self-interest, which to me seems the only way to expect people to actually behave ethically. Why people think the evilly-inclined will behave morally simply because an invisible boogey-man might be watching is beyond me.
3. We still have laws to handle people whose behaviour is terribly inexpedient socially, like mass murderers, we just don't base that law in morals but instead in social expediency, again because that is a contestable notion while morals aren't.
Evolutionary arguments about morals are off on the wrong paddock. They essentially say that morals, in my terminology, don't exist, but that ethics can still have seriousness because social approbrium is in our genes. This has two catastrophic flaws. First, it opens up ethical conduct to smart arses whose rationality allows them to realise that ethics are just mores that they can overthrow as they please. This is bad for them and society. Second, it ignores the fact that ethics, and the feeling that their ethics are serious, is something people need on a deep level. These are precisely the ultimate terror of theists bringing these issues up with atheists, so it hardly allays their concerns. I'm writing a book on all this stuff at the moment which should be ready mid-year that launches directly from this observation. Namely, that the new atheist movement is pathetically shallow when it comes to the existential or spiritual elements of ethics and instead fixates on scientific answers to questions that most people don't care about. People don't actually care that the universe is heading for heat death, but they do care that they can say Hilary Clinton is a more upstanding person that Donald Trump.
Moving on...
There is nothing about atheist morality that locks it into consequentialism. I can hold human rights as an ethical value on the basis of the inherent dignity of a human being, for example. I don't need to make consequentialist arguments about the social expediency of human rights. More generally, I can use the categorical imperative as a touch-stone and the utilitarian calculus as a touchstone and go with one or the other depending on the ethical quandary at hand. I can also throw in virtue ethics. There are plenty of hypothetical situations where all three might be relevant considerations. I should note as well that the utilitarian calculus is axiomatic at its core--the calculus is drawn out of thin air. What is it about 'pleasure' or 'utility' that makes it transcendentally important? How are we to judge consequences except on the basis of some deeper absolutes? The notion that atheism reduces ethics to consequentialism is the extension of the piss-weak narrowly scientific way of thinking I criticised above. Science is causal, ethics aren't. I can imagine that a lot of rational ethical arguments will involve a great deal of consequentialist reasoning, but they don't have to.
I've left your best question for last: How would you suggest someone determine their authentic values?
Frankly, I don't really know. This question is obviously of critical importance, but it's where we step out of philosophy and into either counselling or worse, guru-ism. I'm very reluctant to do that. The philosophy preserves the objectivity of value judgements, by which I mean that I can write all this philosophy and never pass judgement on anyone's specific values. If I step out of that into life coaching I need to then start presenting arguments regarding why I think certain values are better or worse than others. I can of course do that and often do, but I think it is fundamentally different to the core project herein.
I think those two professions, counsellors and gurus (whether of the life coach or mystic variety), do provide a pointer though. I think one of the main techniques for finding your values is to talk to and imitate people who you want to be like or least consider articulate touchstones (potentially touchstones for what not to do). Ask them for advise, ask them for their story, ask them for their values and their reasons for holding those values. I find autobiographies can be immensely valuable for this, especially when written latter in life because then the people are more open about their failings and limitations. Note that these role models can also be fictional. I draw immense inspiration from the depiction of adult King Arthur in The Once and Future King.
Similarly you can identify movements, ideas, tropes and structures in society that resonate with you and that you can comport yourself to. These includes cities, occupations, political parties, hobby groups, clubs, abstract arguments, whatever. If you practice mindfulness (in the psychoanalytic sense not bullshit new-age Buddhism) then you should be able to notice when you're having a deep positive or negative reaction to something and internalise that reaction appropriately.
These are all external sources of values. We should not neglect internal sources. Indeed, I follow Nietzsche in being a little bit fatalistic in this regard, though I am not as Eudemonistic as say, David Norton. It seems reasonable to hypothesise that just as we receive various biological parameters such as height, IQ, strength and aptitude we might also receive various psychological parameters orienting us toward certain things. I think it is important to reflect on 'who you are'. This is tough. The only real advise I have noted to date is to reflect on what things attracted and repelled you as a young child (i.e. examine your earliest memories). For example, I quite enjoyed sport as a young child, my large extended family and the notion that we can all contribute collectively to a shared experience of being winners (I was and am very competitive, but I was repulsed by the notion of glory). Jung talks more forcefully of being driven by an inner urge to complete his research, and my ex-girlfriend [redacted] was similar regarding her legal career, but I think such individuals are very rare.
Authentic values are a combination of who you are and who you want to be. You cannot be a professional basketballer if you are 5 foot tall or a professional pianist if you have no work ethic. This authentic self develops over time through an interplay with your existing sense of self and external stimuli. For example, I was very left wing prior to studying economics and sceptical of the market, statistics and rational choice theory. However, these things interacted with other values that I had around efficiency in the division of social resources, just distribution of resources, the need for precise answers and the need to test hypotheses so that nowadays I hold quite strongly to valuations of the market, statistics and rational choice theory. I think the shortcoming of the eudaimonistic approach is that it downplays the role of external stimuli and encourages the individual to affirm their juvenile will as pre-eminent. That is the opposite of religious thinking; my view is a bit more nuanced.
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