Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Building on my recent argument that an all-good, all-powerful God is logically incompatible with all the evil in the world, I explore what grounding ethics can have without the God of traditional theism. While theists have argued that ethics is grounded either in God’s commands and/or in his nature, I show that no such adequate grounding exists, even if my argument—showing that the God of traditional theism is logically incompatible with all the evil in the world—were shown to be unsuccessful, and I further show that such a grounding is impossible, given that my argument is successful. I then go on to provide an account of the norms on which an ethics without God can be appropriately grounded and show how an ethics, so grounded, can be appropriately related to our biological and cultural past, present, and future, as understood through Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this way, I hope to undercut a recent attempt to use Darwinian evolutionary theory to debunk ethics.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel15070781
Author: James P. Sterba
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,046
OpenAlex ID: W4400077334