Without God, is everything permitted?

The possibility of non-theistic morality

I was recently invited to speak at the Durham Union to oppose the motion “Without God, all is permissible”. It was an absolute pleasure, and I have posted a full transcript of my speech below if you’d like to read it. It suffers a little from having to fit a lot into an 8 minute timeframe, but I hope it’s a relatively fresh angle on the question (or, as much as anything can be fresh in such an ancient debate). Enjoy! :)

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If God does not exist, is everything permitted? This is Ivan Karamsov’s question for an atheist worldview. Those among you fortunate or unfortunate enough to be subjected to a lecture series on propositional logic will recognize this as a conditional claim. We could easily rephrase it another way: if God does not exist, then there are no moral facts. The truth conditions of such a conditional are simple: if there is a single counter-example of a philosophical system where there are moral facts, and yet God does not ground them, then the conditional is refuted, and we must dismiss the motion. The conditional nature of this claim also makes it unrelated to your actual belief in God. You could, like Hugo Grotius, be a theist who thinks morality would still be there without God. You could also, like Richard Dawkins, be an atheist who also rejects objective moral facts.

As has now become almost cliche to say, we in the UK live in the wake of a fundamentally Christian worldview. No doubt many will see this as a vote in favor of the proposition, and I do as well. However, it can also blind us to the genuine possibilities of deriving ethical systems from non-theistic premises. We only need one counter-model to disprove the motion, so for the avoidance of doubt, I propose 3. Though do bear in mind, these are highly simplified versions of each system. Whole books have been devoted to explaining just one of them.

The first is moral Platonism, where what is good is defined by the “Form of The Good”. This form is not an agent, but an abstract object or paradigm, analogous to how the number 7 grounds all the individual uses of the term “7”. “But Joe” I hear you ask “there are also gods in Plato’s metaphysics”. This is undoubtedly true, but Plato does not think that gods or any one god grounds the good. The gods do not define what is good, but rather they are good inasmuch as they reflect this metaphysical form of the good. This is how Plato has objective, absolute moral truths without appealing to a God. Additionally, if we are going to play the genealogical game, it’s worth noting that this Platonic idea also underpins Christian theology about God’s goodness, having filtered into the Church via Plotinus and St Augustine.

The second is the modern Kantian philosopher Christine Korsgaard. Her full argument is pretty complex, but I can give a simplified gloss here. Essentially, she argues that we are already committed to believing in binding moral truths by virtue of valuing human agency. When we take a reasoned action, we implicitly endorse the reasoning behind that action, and thus introduce valuation into the equation. Whether we know it or not, we are then playing the moral game, with valuing agency at its core. In order to be consistent, we must then value the reasoned agency of others. She thus endorses a form of deontology where we are bound to value other people and their agency, by the same token that we value our own. It has a whiff of the transcendental argument about it. Korsgaard’s overall moral philosophy is elegant and complicated, but starts from one thing as being valued - agency, and infers everything else from there.

The third is Theravada Buddhism (or, again, a very simplified presentation of it). The ethics of Theravada Buddhism rest on an intricate set of philosophical foundations. The first is a recognition that we are all in the shared boat regarding Samsara, or the suffering-infused cycle of reincarnation. The second is the noble eightfold path , which among other things, says we should care for others. This grounds their particular version of the golden rule. The third is the search for enlightenment, which is equated with the cessation of suffering and of reincarnation. Theravada Buddhists even divide their ethics into multiple parts: those ethical principles based on the broader goal of enlightenment, and those based on lay-practice, with a larger emphasis towards mutual care and alleviation of humanity’s suffering.

Now, you do not need to agree with any of these moral systems for the purpose of my argument. You can reject the form of the good, or Korsgaard’s ethics, or Theravada Buddhism, or all three. My point is that they are coherent philosophical systems that have both a moral code, yet do not ground this moral code in God. Any one of them would be sufficient to refute the notion that without God, everything is permitted. I use three to illustrate the breadth of counter-examples on offer.

Now, at this point I can almost feel an objection dancing around the room. Each of these cases postulate that something “just is” good as a first principle. If you were to ask Plato why the form of the good was good, he would probably just stare at you blankly, and not just because he would be confused by the black tie. If the Buddha was asked why it is desirable to achieve enlightenment and free yourself from samsara, he would have to concede that those things just are good, they just are desirable. And it is true. We have to do this. You cannot get an ought from an is. At some point you have to postulate a first principle that just is “good”. But, I hasten to add, this is what the theist must do as well.

If I ask “why is God good?”. That is, what is it about God that makes Him good? The theist must do one of two things: they must either appeal to some descriptive fact that makes Him good: He is all-loving, all-generous, all-kind. Or they have to stipulate that God just is good, either by will or, as Aquinas would have it in his response to the Euthyphro dilemma, by essential nature. The trouble with the first path is that it kicks the can down the road. Then it is not God that defines goodness, but one of these properties, which the atheist equally has access to. The issue with the second path is not that it is some sort of “gotcha”, but we find that grounding goodness in God eventually comes up against the same problem as grounding goodness in anything else. In the final move, we must sit back and declare that something “just is” good. The Open Question argument is something any moral system has to confront. Far from having a philosophical advantage, the theist and the atheist are in very similar boats, and can only weigh their moral anchor with this initial, irreducible stipulation.

If I have done my job right, this brief speech has demonstrated two key things. The first is that not only are there moral systems that do not ground morality in God, but that these are some of the oldest ethical systems in history. I could go on. We could talk about Aristotle’s Eudaimonic virtue ethics, the less deific variants of Stoicism, or the nature-loving Cynics. The fact that we do not take notice of these systems is not because they do not exist, but because we have a cultural blindspot. In the history of philosophy, non-theistic moralities are almost everywhere. The second is that any moral system, whether it features a God or not, must stipulate as a first principle that something just is “good”. Religion holds no advantage over atheism here, it just has a neat enforcement mechanism.

You can argue that God exists and He does ground morality in this world.. You can even say that God is the best way to ground morality. But what you cannot say is that God is the only way to ground morality. And that is the very thing you would need for this motion to carry. It is not true that without God, everything is thereby permitted. And what’s more, we find that both religious and non-religious morality rest on the same argumentative maneuver. The genesis of any moral system, is to think something irreducibly good.