Kingston Philosophy Café

Yvonne Plowright asks "Can there be any good without God?"   

"I will explore the question of whether ethics needs a religious foundation. My references will include Plato’s “Euthyphro” and Simon Blackburn’s “Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics”. I will also discuss Divine Command Theory and look at Richard Swinburne’s paper “God And Morality”, in which he argues that “the existence and actions of God make no difference to the fact that there are moral truths, but… they make a great difference to what those moral truths are.

I shall challenge the notion that morality has its origin in religion and argue that there is no evidence to show that atheists behave less morally than people from a religious background. I will argue that we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong -the outcome of millions of years of human evolution which is incompatible with divine command theory.

My conclusion will be that ethics does not need a religious foundation and I will end by appealing to: (1) Kant’s view that reason is both the pilot and engine of moral agency and it is the power of reason that governs behaviour; and (2) Hume and Mill’s account of moral agency and the power that governs our behaviour: that it consists in several things, including reason, a desire to act rightly and an aversion to acting wrongly, that originate in natural desires and aversions. It is our own nature, not some supernatural force that is the source of our morality."