Can ethics stand on reason alone, without needing God?

[NoMercyElliot54]

Divine command theory holds that moral facts depend entirely on God's will, an action is good specifically because God commands it, and without God there would be no objective moral facts of any kind at all, only subjective human preference dressed up to look like something deeper and more binding than it actually is. This view gives morality a clear, authoritative source and a genuinely non arbitrary foundation, but it runs headlong into the ancient Euthyphro dilemma, does God command an action because it is already good independently, in which case goodness exists prior to and independently of God's will, or is an action good purely and only because God happens to command it, in which case morality collapses into nothing more than divine preference, arbitrary in exactly the way the theory was originally trying to avoid.

Secular moral realists argue that objective moral facts can exist entirely without any need for God, grounded instead in facts about wellbeing, suffering, and flourishing that are, they argue, just as real and mind independent as ordinary facts about physics or chemistry. On this view, causing gratuitous suffering is genuinely wrong in exactly the same objective sense that water genuinely boils at a specific measurable temperature, a real fact about the world rather than merely a personal preference or a culturally relative custom.

Moral anti-realists, by sharp contrast, argue there simply are no objective moral facts at all, with or without God in the picture, and that moral claims are ultimately expressions of attitude, emotion, or evolved social convention rather than genuine descriptions of independent facts about the world. On this more deflationary view, saying cruelty is wrong is less like stating a fact and more like saying boo to cruelty, a genuine, meaningful and important expression, but not a factual claim that could turn out to be objectively true or false the way a scientific claim could.

What almost everyone across every one of these camps actually agrees on in practice, regardless of their preferred deep metaphysical foundation, is that certain specific actions, torturing children purely for entertainment being the standard example, are genuinely wrong. The real disagreement is not usually about which actions are wrong at all, but about what, if anything, ultimately grounds and explains that near universal shared moral intuition in the first place.

[Layla79]

The Euthyphro dilemma has genuinely never gotten a satisfying answer from divine command theory in the literal thousands of years since it was first posed, and I think that persistent silence tells you something meaningful and important on its own, regardless of anyone's specific prior religious commitments going into the debate.