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Ethical Episodes

This One’s For You

by Joel Marks

There is no such thing as right or wrong! Three years ago I made my constant readers’ heads spin when I first made that claim in ‘An Amoral Manifesto’, in Issues 80 and 81 of Philosophy Now. This was startling coming from me, not only because the statement is startling in itself, but especially because, for an entire decade, I had been writing a regular column for this magazine called ‘Moral Moments’, in which I pressed home the importance of moral reasoning in all facets of life. Now, suddenly, that was down the tubes!

Well, not really suddenly. For at that point it was already three years since I had had my original ‘anti-epiphany’, realizing that my commitment to morality was, despite my avowed atheism, itself a kind of theism. I had only been a ‘soft atheist’ who, like most New Atheists, embraced Socrates’ idea (from Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue) that morality was independent of religion.

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