Atheists and believers have a moral compass, just not the same one.
In some aspects, the moral compass was incredibly alike between the two groups; they both highly rated fairness and protecting the well-being of vulnerable people, for instance, and both highly endorsed liberty but not oppression. However, the groups diverged when it came to matters of group cohesion, such as valuing loyalty and respecting authority, the study found
"Virtually everyone", atheists and believers alike, scored high on these two values, showing that they valued protecting the vulnerable and being fair toward others; and they saw these values as moral issues, Ståhl said. However, he found differences between believers and disbelievers on the other three values: authority (respecting authority figures, such as police, parents and teachers), loyalty (being loyal to one's group, such as a country — not burning a country's flag, for instance) and sanctity (not doing anything perceived as degrading, usually in a sexual sense, such as being promiscuous).
"Those three values are thought to be serving group cohesion, keeping the group together," Ståhl explained. "When it comes to the binding values, there's a dramatic difference [between the groups]. Religious people score much higher on those — they view [them] as much more relevant for being moral compared to the disbelievers."
In contrast, "atheists don't really think of [these three values] as relevant for morality to the same degree," he said.
In a difference, Ståhl found that atheists were more likely than believers to base their judgments about what is or isn't moral based on the consequences of their actions. For example, in the hypothetical trolley problem, a person has to decide whether to let a runaway trolley kill five people stuck on the track ahead of it, or whether to pull a switch to divert the train, but kill one person stuck on the alternate track.
"In that situation, the disbelievers are more inclined to say 'flip [the] switch and kill the one person rather than five,' because they are assessing the relative harm," Ståhl told Live Science. "Whereas believers are more icky about that because they feel like they're actively killing someone, and they shouldn't kill. So, they are less comfortable with those calculations."
https://www.livescience.com/moral-compass-atheists-believers.html