Response from Lisa Cassidy on September 18, 2009

Your question reminds me very much of a quote from the Russian author Dostoyevsky: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." Crime and Punishment is his wonderful novel. The main character proposes to do exactly as you say, commit a murder just to test the limits of ethics. Spoiler alert: it doesn't turn out all that well.

Can there be ethics without a higher power to act an the heavy, the enforcer? I certainly think so, knowing many ethical atheists.

There are any number of schools of thought that can give us ethics without religion. Three popular options are deontology, utility, and virtue. Kant, the deontologist, thinks that respect for rationality is a reason to be moral. Mill, the utilitarian, thinks that arriving at a greater good is a reason to be ethical. Aristotle takes another route: we ought to organize our lives not around a set of rules per se, but around developing well-balanced characters.

Imagine you talk with your own Raskolnikov, who is set on murder because there is no God. You try to reason with him, perhaps discussing some of the classic arguments mentioned above. This person still disagrees, say. By virtue of being adamant, does that make him right?

Of course not. I think at its heart ethics is a social enterprise. We need it to get along in the world. People who refuse to assent to the most basic ethical principles (such as not murdering others) are fundamentally dangerous, literally anti-social, and cannot be allowed to pursue their plans.