Adrian-Paul Iliescu the Autonomy of Morals. Two Analytic Arguments (Essay‪)‬

Asking whether it is possible to have a fully developed ethics with no religious presupposition is a way of asking whether ethics is autonomous from religion. Supposing that God is the supreme authority from which moral truth necessarily springs means accepting that ethics necessarily originates in religion, and not in some sort of secular morality; and, if religion, and not some purely moral element, is the very foundation of ethics, then ethics itself is heteronomous. The aim of this paper is to defend the autonomy of ethics against theism. In the first part of the text, I shall point out that some of the very arguments that are needed in order to build up the theist position on the heteronomy of ethics can be used to show that an autonomous ethics can be coherently constructed.. The whole perspective of the discussion will be conceptual and analytical; that is, I shall take theism and atheism as theoretical positions and analyze the arguments used inside them for and against the autonomy of ethics from a conceptual/analytical point of view. Moreover, I shall take for granted the common sense idea that no arguments that beg the question can be rationally accepted.