Morality Without Religion, Society Without Morality

The proposition that one can have morality without religion, but not a functioning society without morality, makes two claims, and they are best defended separately. The first is that moral life does not depend on religious belief. The second is that moral life is nonetheless indispensable to any society that hopes to endure. Neither claim says that religion is useless, or that every secular person is virtuous. Together they say something narrower and more durable: the source of morality matters less than its presence.

Terms need to be fixed first. By morality I mean the body of norms governing cooperation, fairness, reciprocity and the avoidance of harm. I do not mean absolute divine law, which is only one theory of where such norms come from. By a functioning society I mean a stable order marked by low levels of violence, workable cooperation among strangers, and trust in institutions. With these definitions, the question becomes empirical and philosophical rather than a contest of loyalties.

The empirical case

The most direct evidence is how secular societies actually behave. Phil Zuckerman’s Society Without God studied Denmark and Sweden, two of the least religious countries on earth.^[i] He found societies that rank at or near the top of international measures of happiness, social trust, gender equality and educational attainment. They also have very low rates of violent crime. The wider Nordic region, including Norway, Iceland and Finland, repeatedly appears at the head of the annual World Happiness Report despite high levels of secularism.^[ii]

Two further indicators strengthen the picture, and both are less contestable than the happiness rankings. The first is corruption. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have placed at or near the top year after year.^[iii] Corruption is a direct measure of whether public officials honour the norms of their office, and it is hard to claim that societies which score so well on it lack a working morality. The second is trust. The World Values Survey asks respondents whether most people can be trusted, and the Nordic countries consistently record some of the highest affirmative answers in the world.^[iv] Generalised trust of this kind is the practical residue of a moral culture, since it exists only where strangers can expect fair dealing from one another. Homicide rates in these countries are also among the lowest globally.

The argument should be stated with care. Comparisons across nations are notoriously hard to interpret, because wealth, equality, welfare provision and history all intervene. Some comparative studies have found that higher religiosity correlates with higher rates of homicide and other social problems in prosperous democracies, but these findings are contested and I do not rest anything on them.^[v] The claim that survives scrutiny is a modest one: high levels of secularism are fully compatible with orderly, humane and cooperative societies. That is all the proposition requires. If divine mandate were a necessary condition of moral life, the Nordic cases should be impossible. Studies of individuals point the same way, finding that the non-religious are not over-represented in prisons and show prosocial behaviour comparable to that of the religious.^[vi]

The evolutionary case

A second line of evidence comes from biology. The primatologist Frans de Waal has spent decades documenting empathy, fairness, reciprocity and conflict resolution in chimpanzees, bonobos and other social animals.^[vii] Chimpanzees console the distressed and share food. Capuchin monkeys protest unequal treatment.^[viii] Bonobos reconcile after fights. In The Bonobo and the Atheist, de Waal argues that human morality grows from the bottom up, out of an inherited social psychology, rather than being handed down by a religious authority.^[ix] Darwin had reached much the same view in The Descent of Man. He observed that social instincts joined to advancing intelligence would inevitably produce a moral sense.^[x]

Developmental psychology supports the picture. Experiments suggest that infants as young as six months prefer agents who help over agents who hinder.^[xi] A pre-verbal infant has not been instructed in any catechism. If the rudiments of moral evaluation appear before religious teaching could take hold, religion cannot be their source.

It is important to say what this evidence does and does not show. Critics of evolutionary ethics rightly point out that animal sociality is not yet full morality. Human moral life involves things no chimpanzee is known to do: reflecting on whether a norm is justified, defending it with reasons, and asking whether it should apply to everyone alike. The evolutionary evidence does not close that gap. What it establishes is continuity, meaning that the emotional and social foundations of morality are older than any religion and do not depend on one. Culture and reason then elaborate those foundations into the codified, universalising systems we recognise as ethics. Religion has been one of the agents of that elaboration, but not the only one, as the next section shows.

The philosophical case

Philosophy reaches the same destination by a different road. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether the good is good because the gods command it, or whether the gods command it because it is good.^[xii] If the former, morality seems arbitrary, since the gods could in principle have commanded cruelty and made it good. If the latter, goodness exists independently of the gods, and we may in principle discover it without them.

The strongest theistic reply holds that the dilemma is a false dichotomy. Defenders of divine nature theories, such as Robert Adams in Finite and Infinite Goods and William Alston in “What Euthyphro Should Have Said,” argue that goodness is neither an arbitrary decree nor a standard external to God.^[xiii] It is grounded in God’s unchanging nature, which is essentially loving and just. God’s commands then flow from that nature and are neither whimsical nor constrained by anything outside it. This is a serious position, and the dilemma should not be treated as having refuted it outright.

But the reply, even if granted, does not make religion necessary for morality as the proposition understands it. Even if goodness is metaphysically grounded in God, the proposition concerns something different: whether human beings can recognise and practise moral norms without religious belief. The theory addresses the ground of goodness, not our access to it. A theist who locates the ground of the good in God must still accept that people can recognise cruelty as wrong, fairness as right, and gratuitous suffering as evil without first establishing that God exists. Many major theistic traditions say as much. Natural law theory holds that moral truths are accessible to reason as such, and Paul’s letter to the Romans speaks of a law written on the hearts of those who do not have the scriptures.^[xiv] Divine nature theory therefore leaves the proposition intact. It offers one account of why morality exists, while the practice and knowledge of morality remain open to believers and unbelievers alike. The proposition asserts that morality is possible without religion. It does not assert that religious accounts of the metaphysics of morality are false.

Independent grounding, meanwhile, has been supplied many times over. Kant derived the categorical imperative from the structure of practical reason. Mill grounded morality in the consequences of actions for human wellbeing. The social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau saw justice as arising from the agreements people must make in order to live together.^[xv] Outside the modern West, Stoic and Aristotelian ethics in ancient Greece, and Confucian ethics in China, built sophisticated accounts of the good life without appeal to a commanding monotheistic deity.^[xvi] Secular ethics is thus not a recent improvisation but the continuation of a very old and very wide tradition.

The terms of this debate are themselves a product of one intellectual tradition. For many Indigenous peoples, law, ethics and the sacred are not separate departments of life. Mandawuy Yunupingu, the Yolŋu educator and leader of Yothu Yindi, drew on the concept of ganma, the meeting of fresh and salt water in a lagoon where two currents mix without either losing its identity, to describe how Yolŋu and non-Indigenous Australians might share knowledge and build a common life.^[xvii] The image does not settle whether morality can exist without religion. What it offers is a picture of what a functioning society must do in either case: sustain cooperation among people who start from different foundations.

Why society requires morality

The second half of the proposition is the claim that no society can function without morality. This is where the religious and the secular have the most in common. Hobbes, who was no champion of unbelief, supplied the classic argument in Leviathan. In the state of nature, where no rules bind and none can be enforced, human life is, in his words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”^[xviii] Morality and law emerge as the rational escape from that condition.

The modern world offers a vivid illustration of what Hobbes described. When the Somali state collapsed in 1991, the country lost not only its government but the framework of trust that made ordinary cooperation possible. Armed factions preyed on civilians, aid was looted, and for many years the country sat at or near the bottom of international rankings for corruption and state capacity.^[xix] Where cooperation survived, it did so largely because local communities rebuilt it through customary law, clan obligation and mutual guarantees, which are themselves moral institutions.^[xx] Recovery has nonetheless been partial and uneven, and these customary mechanisms have varied considerably in how well they have worked, which is itself a reminder that moral order is hard won and easily lost. The example cuts in two directions that suit the proposition. It shows how quickly social life degrades when shared norms of restraint and reciprocity break down. It also shows that people restore order by reconstructing such norms, not by waiting for them to be supplied from outside. Somalia is an overwhelmingly religious country, so its fate is no argument against faith. It shows only that a society needs working moral norms, whatever their source.

Research on cooperation reaches a similar conclusion by different means. Game theory and anthropology both indicate that groups larger than small kin bands can hold together only if members practise reciprocity, punish free-riders and observe norms of fairness.^[xxi] Where those habits decay, through pervasive predation or the collapse of trust, states weaken and eventually fail. Even avowedly religious societies depend on this foundation, since they too must secure cooperation among people who will never meet again. The proposition observes only that such norms need not be religious in origin.

Anticipating the objection

The most familiar rejoinder is that without God, everything is permitted. This fails on both logical and empirical grounds. Logically, the objection assumes that morality needs a divine foundation in order to bind us, which is the very point at issue, and the divine nature reply addresses the metaphysics of goodness without showing that unbelievers cannot know or practise it. Empirically, the secular societies of northern Europe, and the countless secular individuals living decent lives everywhere, are standing refutations. If moral collapse followed the loss of faith, it would be visible in the places where faith has largely gone. It is not.

It is equally important not to overstate the case. Religion can and does reinforce moral behaviour for many people, supplying community, ritual, motivation and a shared vocabulary of obligation. The proposition does not deny this. But religion has also been invoked in holy wars, persecutions and atrocities, which shows that it is neither necessary for morality nor always sufficient to secure it. The honest position is that religion is one among several possible supports for moral life, with a mixed historical record, and not its sole foundation.

Conclusion

The two halves of the proposition fit together. The first shows that morality has roots independent of religion: in our evolutionary inheritance, in the early development of children, in rational argument, and in the demonstrated success of secular societies. The second shows why this matters: no society can sustain cooperation, trust and order without shared moral norms, so the survival of morality is a condition of social survival. The argument does not require anyone to abandon faith, nor does it claim that unbelievers are better people. It claims only that goodness does not wait on theology, and that civilisation cannot do without goodness.

Notes

^[i] Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

^[ii] John F. Helliwell et al., eds., World Happiness Report (New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, annual), https://worldhappiness.report.

^[iii] Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index (Berlin: Transparency International, annual), https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi.

^[iv] World Values Survey Association, World Values Survey (multiple waves), https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. The standard item asks whether “most people can be trusted” or whether one “can’t be too careful.”

^[v] Gregory S. Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005): 1–17. For a critical response, see Gerson Moreno-Riaño, Mark Caleb Smith and Thomas Mach, “Religiosity, Secularism, and Social Health,” Journal of Religion and Society 8 (2006).

^[vi] Phil Zuckerman, “Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being: How the Findings of Social Science Counter Negative Stereotypes and Assumptions,” Sociology Compass 3, no. 6 (2009): 949–971.

^[vii] Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

^[viii] Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” Nature 425 (2003): 297–299.

^[ix] Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

^[x] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), chs. 3–4.

^[xi] J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,” Nature 450 (2007): 557–559.

^[xii] Plato, Euthyphro 10a, https://staff.washington.edu/smcohen/Euthyphro.pdf

^[xiii] Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); William P. Alston, “What Euthyphro Should Have Said,” in Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide, ed. William Lane Craig (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 283–298.

^[xiv] Romans 2:14–15. On natural law, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94.

^[xv] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785); John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651); John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract (1762).

^[xvi] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; for the Stoics, see, for example, Epictetus, Discourses and Handbook, and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations; Confucius, Analects.

^[xvii] Aaron Corn, “Agent of Bicultural Balance: Ganma, Yothu Yindi and the Legacy of Mandawuy Yunupi?u,” Journal of World Popular Music 1, no. 1 (2014): 12–45, https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.v1i1.12.

^[xviii] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13.

^[xix] See the annual Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, in which Somalia has regularly ranked at or near the bottom (note 3 above).

^[xx] Ken Menkhaus, “Governance without Government in Somalia: Spoilers, State Building, and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31, no. 3 (2006–07): 74–106.

^[xxi] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature 415 (2002): 137–140.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, October 2026

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