As an atheist there is no objective morality.

You said: "But this is again essentially selfish as helping others is ONLY right in that it helps me. The drowning child would then only be valuable in that saving it would help my aims. Giving to charity in another country is likely to have no effect on my life quality so therefore it is not moral to give to charity. We also have the free-rider problem, let others act morally so benefiting me and then just act selfishly and enjoy the benefits." This is not what what I meant to say with my argument. For my reasoning I was including Kant's categorical imperative. I thought that this would become clear from what I wrote, but I should have said so directly. Sorry. The imperative goes akin to: "If you think about whether or not you should perform a certain action, imagine that everybody in a similar situation performed this action. If the result on society is positive, then it is a good action, if it is negative, it is a bad action." [1] With this kind of reasoning you can indeed answer the question: "Should I help a child drowning in the pond, despite having no actual benefit from it?" If everyone helped others who are in a life and death situation, the result would be better than if everyone ignored them, thus helping the child is the right course of action, even if I myself receive minor harm, or put myself in danger during the rescue. The only problem with this is the naturalistic fallacy. The whole reasoning above will only work if you assume that "not drowning" is preferable to "drowning" Your instincts sure tell you so, but that does not mean that it is actually true. If you have any objections with what I wrote before this point (which is mainly just a retelling of Kant's imperative), please state so directly in your next argument, because the rest of my reasoning needs it to work. So all you need for a proper moral system is a definition of something as "good". If you for example define survival as something good, then you can use the imperative to conclude a huge number of rules you should follow, for example to help others in need, or to prohibit murder. If you go further you can also conclude that stealing or bullying is bad, as it distracts the individuals, who would survive better as a group. If you define pleasure and the lack of pain as good, you can do something similar, and will probably end with a similar set of rules. As long as you have any definition of good or bad, you can work outwards from it and achieve a morality. There are a number of things that you can choose as that ulterior good, but all of them end in one of three possibilities: 1: Something inferior to "life". If you choose something like "pleasure", "happiness", or "eating peanut butter", you will end up with a definition that requires life to be possible. Without humans being alive in first place you cannot be happy, pleasured, or eat peanut butter. Thus one result of your definition is: "life is desirable", and from that origin you can create your objectively valid morality, using Kant's imperative. 2: A logic fallacy. If you for example try to define "following your desires without care for others" as the ulterior good, then you will run into a discrepancy. If everyone followed his instincts without care of others, everyone would be impeded in their own attempts by others who do the same. Thus your ulterior good conflicts with itself and is invalid. 3: Nothing at all. As I said before, true nihilism is a valid position and makes the formation of a moralistic system impossible. However, this does not mean that nihilists are allowed to do anything they want to. If a nihilist tried to hurt someone else, he would have to take action. By doing so he automatically defines "taking action" to be preferable to "taking no action". Since that action needs life to be possible, he would fall under point one and not be a true nihilist. Since true nihilism make every purposed action impossible, one could argue that regarding a moralistic system they cannot be seen as subjects, and thus are unimportant for the system. For everyone else an objective morality exists. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org...