Without God, is everything permitted?
On the axis: The source of morality · morality without a guarantor
If no transcendent guarantor upholds our duties, do they keep their binding force, or do they become choices that can always be undone? Secularized societies put the phrase to the test every day.
Dostoevsky has one of his characters say: if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Secularization puts the question to everyone: what does morality really rest on?
Your choice above is recorded in your profile. See my profile →
Justification
Sartre is resolutely atheist: his defines itself as the attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheist position. If God does not exist, there is no divine craftsman to have conceived an essence of man, and so no value inscribed in an intelligible heaven: everything must be invented. The absence of God is not lamented, it is the assumed starting point.
Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheist position.Existentialism Is a Humanism
Existentialism Is a Humanism (atheistic existentialism) · Being and Nothingness, conclusion (the idea of God, in-itself-for-itself, is contradictory)
Justification
No teleology presides over existence: being is first of all contingent, de trop (superfluous), without reason to be, as the nausea of the hero Roquentin reveals. Meaning is therefore neither given nor discovered but constructed through each person's choices and commitments, which invent their own values. A measure of absurdity remains, as the backdrop of this radical contingency, but it is not, as in , the last word.
Nausea (1938), the experience of contingency · Existentialism Is a Humanism (man invents his values)
Anchors: Dostoevsky · Sartre
leads to: Existence of God (Does morality need God?) · The meaning of life