Yes, You Can Have ‘Ethics Without God’

It’s a famous philosophy book by Kai Nielsen

Thinker by Melk Hagelslag from Pixabay

Ethics Without God is an influential philosophy book by Kai Nielsen (1926–2021). It was first published in 1972 and expanded in 1990.

Here are the key points, as I see them, in each of the nine chapters in the 1990 edition.

1. We know from our own experiences that almost everyone has a basic ethical sense regardless of whether they believe in God. Some draw a broader social narrative of a Christian “Western world order” that was attacked by an atheistic Bolshevism and Nazism in the early 20th century, but when we examine the actual role of religion and atheism in this political history, it isn’t so simple. Anyway, Nielsen says, even if “I got my values from my Christian upbringing,” if he were pressed to justify his belief in these values, he wouldn’t point to their religious origin but would instead observe that “I care about my friends, about myself, and about what sort of person I am,” and so on.
2. Suppose for a moment that God exists and is good, perhaps even perfect—that in itself doesn’t mean that God is a “law-giver.” What could possibly transform God’s opinions into a moral obligation for us? We’d need some other justification for that. Even if we know “what God wishes us to do,” God’s desire alone doesn’t entail what we really ought to do. Each person must find “his own moral judgment, his own sense of what he is obliged to do,” which could include a person’s own decision to obey God for their own reasons. “A religious belief” will hang on “our sense of good and bad — our own sense of worth — and not vice versa.”
3. Plato asked in the Euthyphro: Is something good because God commands it, or does God command something because it is good? The former seems impossible; Nielsen doesn’t think anyone can “create goodness or moral obligation” just by desiring or mandating it. Regarding the latter, it’s unnecessary for God to command what’s already good, since we could recognize it as good on our own. Anyway, as adults, we want to “make our own decisions” and obey rules “because we see the point of them.”
4. He points out that “there is not the slightest reason to believe” that Christians are in touch with reality nor that secularists are “deluded.” To the contrary, he…