re: Stunning Admission By Renowned Atheist; Decline of Christianity is Hurting Society

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You shouldn’t

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Exactly. But others seem to think empathy is enough to override this selfish desire and amounts to a good basis for morality.

If it's not morally wrong to be selfish, why should I care about empathy as a compelling reason for anything?

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This is an urge most of us feel at some point and it’s almost always overridden by the perceived harm such an action would bring to us.

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Almost always, but not always. But even so, it's still a selfish motive. My point is if morality is boiled down to a utilitarian desire for survival or self-promotion, you can justify a lot of otherwise "immoral" behavior as perfectly consistent with that moral paradigm.

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For instance, there are very few benefits I can think of which outweigh the high likelihood of spending most of my life in prison.

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For you, sure. And yet we have generations of people who wouldn't mind going to prison for "street cred" or other reasons that are more influential to those individuals than the thought of being incarcerated for long periods of time.

So the conflict with a utilitarian framework of morality may not be so bad for those who naturally want to act in the best interest of others because they believe it's in their own best interest to do so, but the conflict lies with those who don't care about others or who don't even care about themselves. We have no basis to condemn them if they are simply acting in a way that they feel is best.