If There Is No God, All is Permitted: Theism and Moral Reasoning

For centuries in the West, Jewish and Christian thinkers (among others) have asserted that moral judgment is impossible without some concept of the deity. So convincing were they that one important character created by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky was led to express the idea (if not exactly the words) that if there is no God, all is permitted. In more recent times, some thinkers have challenged this assumption and insisted that removing or reducing the role of God is indispensable to proper moral discourse. This course examines the ways in which a concept of God has informed Western moral discourse, trying to help students engage the literature as they confront the basic question of why might one think if there is no God, all is permitted? And why might one think if there is a God, human moral achievement is diminished or impossible? Further, we examine ways in which the differing paradigms actually affect the moral conclusions we might generate and, perhaps most fundamentally, elicit the question, can we have confidence that our moral claims are true?