MM - thank you, I hope I will continue to make as much sense.
Yes, there is automatic morality and deliberate morality. Let’s look at these through the lens of Nietzsche, who laid the groundwork for morality be understood in terms of its components, “drives”.
The task as you outline it means: to disentangle the drives that make up the “Humean” morality , and see them in light of “good and bad” or “weak/diseased and strong/vital”. This is deriving an “is” from an “ought”. We can define, as Nietzsche would do, the typical Northern European Christian in terms of what he believes and how he acts in response to his beliefs.
For example, what distinguishes a (Nietzschean) strong man from a weak man within the bounds of European Protestantism (I keep the context limited to avoid contradictions where possible) is that the strong man will necessarily be a sinner, and, if he is a Christian, be troubled by that. In this Christianity, strength equals unhappiness. Its slightly less forbidding in Catholicism, the Church arranged for that with confession, intoxication, celebration, etc.
So Humean morality here would be simply very confused. It would not be able to distinguish the person from his context, thus it would not be able to see the two different drives (vital strength and Christian conviction) as different origins, different “is”'s. But to create morality from the given conditions, which is what we’re “planning” here, we can disregard the Christian conviction itself, and work with the strength with which the conviction is held instead. So then we have a) vital strength and b) strength of conviction. We have these two components of a man, without having an ought. Now we can produce an ought for these two strengths to attain to, strictly to maximize the value of these strength to the one who has it.
Now to draw to this logic to our own situation, to situation of a present-day human, and for this experiment we need a strong one. In order to derive a greater is from a lesser using an ought, we have to observe the lesser is, the present. What we need to do for that is to distinguish the drives of which he is composed, disentangle them, establish what shall(/can) be the top-drive, and then interpret all these other drives in terms of their value to the top drive.
For this, the top drive has to be “symbolized”, made Signifier of a logos.
In the case of the strong Protestant/sinner, this is precisely what Nietzsche did.
The method is sufficiently given by Nietzsche, but only in the form of his application of it, which departs from a very specific context - the Northern European man defined to himself in terms of protestantism. It still holds value extrapolated as Man defined in terms Christianity, but is already less potent there. He did not perceive the drive-structure of an Italian as well as he perceived his own.
So what matters to us here is not Christianity or Anti-Christianity at all, that is Nietzsche’s problem. Our directive is to dissect our own drive-structure, identify these drives not by their actual objects, but by the type of objects to which they may pertain.