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Chapter Two

Can you be moral without God?

Yes, you can be just as moral as you can be with God.

But of course, there’s more to it than that. In reality, the whole concept of morality, of right and wrong, of good and evil, is something of a puzzle.

No one has yet come up with a rational explanation of why some things are right and others are wrong. Philosophers have proposed various “fundamental” rules, but none of them are entirely self-justifying. The utilitarian philosophers (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill), for example, argued that we should act so to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This isn’t a bad rule of thumb, but what, exactly is “good,” and how do we measure and compare it? Immanuel Kant came up with his “categorical imperative” that we should act in such a way that the rule on which our behavior is based would work if it were universally applied. (For example, it is not right to lie, because if lying were universally practiced then all communication would become hollow – and even lying would no longer have an effect.) This is another decent rule of thumb, but why should we take it as some kind of ultimate truth?

Let’s try to get to the bottom of this, if indeed there is a bottom. Then perhaps we can figure out how morality should really fit into our lives.

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© 2006 by C.S. Yanikoski, Harvard, Massachusetts