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…