Goodness and Godness in Cosmic Agapism

Abstract

This paper concerns itself with postulating the necessity of God for Good, in answer to the titular question posed in this edition: “Is an Ethics without God Possible?”. To achieve this end, I consider a specific pantheistic ethic centered on Murdochian love and evaluate a potential contradictory element to this brand of ethic, while also highlighting several important terminological considerations integral to the debate concerning objective moral realism. I tentatively provide a demonstration of moral goodness without a ‘capital G’ God while examining and demystifying the underpinning concepts of goodness and ‘Godness’ (the nature of God).

1. Introduction

James Sterba’s latest guest-edited edition of Religions poses a question that has been boggling the minds of philosophers since before the days when Plato roamed the halls of his Academy1, a question about the relationship between God and Good. In his article, “An Ethics without God That Is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution” (2024), Sterba argues that an ethics grounded in God’s commands and/or God’s nature is an impossibility and is therefore bunk. Consequently, he offers an alternative normative ethical theory that does not rely on a divine being: an ethic based on Darwinian evolutionary theory that, Sterba contends, is more compelling than its theistic rivals. Building on Sterba’s foundations—although coming to a somewhat different conclusion—I sketch out another option, a non-traditional ethic that may effectively ground moral goodness. What I call cosmic agapism is a model based on a particular pantheistic ontology, integrated with an ethic inspired by the notion that love, and love alone, has intrinsic value.

In Section 2, I offer a brief explanation of pantheism, specifically the ‘divine mind’ version under scrutiny in this paper. This section concerns the ‘Godness’ element of James Sterba’s question. In Section 3, I sketch out the ethic of agapism, which concerns the goodness element of Sterba’s question. This section includes a venture into the concept of love and what love is and culminates in an elucidation of a pantheistic ethic: what I call cosmic agapism. In Section 4, I take a brief detour into a discussion of murky terminology, stressing the importance of clarity regarding metaethical and normative terms to an investigation of this nature. In Section 5, I consider several potential perplexities concerning the cosmic agapism outlined, including whether it implies an ethical model that, weirdly, could be both subjective and objective in nature (and, if this is the case, whether the model becomes self-destructive). Overall, I hope to offer the pantheist a vision of morality that is realist in nature while maintaining the existence of a God, albeit one quite distinct from the capitalized Abrahamic God many envision when they hear ‘the G word’.

2. Godness

To state the obvious, James Sterba’s inquiry into the necessity of God for goodness rests entirely on what one means by goodness and God. Sterba’s theological quarry targets the ‘capital G’ God, that divine being of Abrahamic religions who possesses omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence (the ‘omni’ qualities). Thus, if that term is restricted to the God-concept mentioned above, my answer to Sterba’s question is a resounding ‘yes’, goodness is possible without God. Yet, my answer may change to the negative if the term ‘God’ refers to divine, extraordinary, and worship-worthy entities that do not necessarily fit the Abrahamic blueprint. Regarding goodness, I take Sterba to endorse a realist rather than an anti-realist ethic. Those who contend that right, wrong, good, and bad are not real at all take an anti-realist stance, and this does not seem to be the concept that Sterba is examining to understand its reliance on God. In what follows, I offer my own alternative to divine command theory (and other classical monotheistic ethics) and provide the basic foundations for the two hypotheses on which cosmic agapism relies.

James Sterba’s target, in his 2024 paper at least, seems to be the God of classical monotheism, or perhaps specifically the God of Abrahamic theism. For Sterba, this type of theism is somewhat of a hotbed for bunk (or, if you will, a bunk bed). Sterba’s critique of this target, I think, is justified. Still, Abrahamic theism is only one of a myriad theisms, one of which I intend to explore here as an alternative concept of Godness.

2.1. Pantheistic Metaphysics

Pantheism, an old theism enjoying somewhat of a revival of late, contends that the world is God. Thinkers such as Wordsworth, Emerson, Einstein, Tennyson and even Metallica’s James Hetfield have been identified with (or accused of) pantheistic tendencies. In recent years, several prominent new versions of pantheism have been touted by philosophers of religion. For this paper, I will focus on a particular type of pantheism that posits the universe as the divine mind. I will later cite agapism to explore a pantheistic ethic that is not contingent on the traditional God of classical monotheism, although it does involve a concept of God.

Pantheism has received much less attention in its various forms than classical monotheism has enjoyed (Buckareff 2022); therefore, this paper aims to add to the admirable progress being made in bucking that unfortunate trend. In a broad sense, pantheism can be defined as the belief that God and the world (or cosmos) are one and the same. Steinhart (2004) offers two conditions of pantheism: the first is that there exists an ‘all-inclusive unity’, and that this unity is divine in nature. Myriad viewpoints fall under the umbrella of pantheism, but one prominent version is that the cosmos is God’s mind2.

That which essentially renders Pantheism distinct via its divine suffix theos is the addition to all existence of a universal mind, a monistic anima mundi. A “God” without a mind is but a statue, or a lifeless machine: A mindless God is as contradictory as a spaceless shape. An infinitely perfect being cannot lack mind without lacking perfection, thus the proposition that “if God exists, then God has a mind” is necessarily true.

(Sjöstedt-Hughes 2025, p. 7)

The quote above explains why many pantheists scoff at Schopenhauer’s famous criticism of pantheism: it is just a different way of saying the world is the world3 (Khai Wager refers to this critique as “the objection from ontological redundancy” (Wager 2024, p. 39)). This universal mind is not exactly the same as the universe but rather the soul of the universe, just like the soul of the person is not the same as the entirety of the person.

Andrei Buckareff (2022) approaches the topic of pantheism from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Specifically, he considers whether an appropriate account of cosmic unity can be found that explains the universe as the mind of God. He settles on the claim that “God is identical with the totality of existents constitutive of the universe”, additionally arguing that the universe is God’s mind, which in turn is made up of everything that exists in the universe4.

2.2. Pantheistic Ethics

We’ve looked at the ontological claims of divine mind pantheism, but let’s briefly touch on the ethical considerations. The entire cosmos is God’s mind under divine mind pantheism; therefore, the entire cosmos is the moral community. Often, philosophers (including many pantheists!) assume that a pantheistic ethic necessitates every existing entity having equal status, morally. The ethical considerations of a stone, a river, or a far-off planet are just as significant, mutatis mutandis, as those of an infant, a conscious alien, or a dog. It is probably correct to say that a pantheist’s circle of moral worth is broader than that of the classical monotheistic theist, potentially including everything that exists in the universe. Even if that is the case, however, that does not necessitate that some parts of the world/God aren’t more important than others. Two legs could be better than four legs, and no legs could be less critical still (note that I am by no means advocating a moral hierarchy based on leg number, which would be rather ridiculous)5.

According to Richard Swinburne, a god is “a very powerful non-embodied rational agent” (1970, p. 53), and this definition certainly applies to the divine mind pantheism I am endorsing for the sake of this paper6. So, although I agree with Sterba that an Abrahamic God is not essential for grounding an objective ethic, I offer a pantheistic alternative to the completely godless Darwinian evolutionism he employs. Let’s now elaborate on a suitable pantheistic ethic that maintains objective goodness while integrating the metaphysics of pantheism.

3. Goodness

Goodness is a God term, an elusive concept “both rare and hard to picture” (Murdoch 2001, p. 51). Sterba considers the deontological Divine Command theory as insufficient due to its inconsistency with objective goodness. He offers Darwinian ethics as an objective alternative moral system. The former is grounded in God’s commands, the latter in scientific theory. Agapism, contrastingly, postulates love as the central consideration of morality.

3.1. All You Need Is Love

Many philosophers and theologians7 have argued that love is the ultimate source of moral action and ought to usurp any specific ethical rules. Joseph Fletcher’s (1966) Situation Ethics, for example, highlights agape (unconditional love) as the greatest good. Paul Tillich (1951) claims that “love is the ultimate law” (152). Taking inspiration from Charles Sanders Peirce (1893), who coined the term ‘agapism,’ pointing to his theory that love is a creative and evolutionary force in the universe, I adopt his term for this paper. According to Peirce, this type of love manifests as “a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as parent may do for offspring” (188). I will elaborate on this outward-facing concept of love shortly.

In recent years, many philosophers and theologians have ventured into new and uncharted territory in the realm of perfect being theism, attempting to retain God’s perfect nature while offering novel—and sometimes radical—concepts of God’s nature. This shift in analytic philosophy of religion and, increasingly, in analytic theology indicates that scholars seem to be more readily orienting toward a rejection of the ‘omniGod’ thesis of Abrahamic faiths. In line with this trend, Thomas Oord has recently proposed the existence of an ‘amnipotent’ God. By ascribing the quality of amnipotence—the power of uncontrolling love—to God, Oord even argues that the concern of God’s permission of evil can be met; “evil ends omnipotence” (Oord 2023, p. 6). Cosmic agapism constructs an ethic based upon the axiological claim that love is the sole property to hold intrinsic value, and the sole ‘great-making property’. Consequently, sacrificing the properties of divine omnipotence and omniscience results in a coherent and metaphysically robust theory of God and the Good.

Stemming from this conception of the divine, then, a new love-grounded ethic emerges. But what is love?

3.2. What Is Love?

Haddaway tapped into an important question when he released his 1990s one-hit wonder, “What is Love?”. ‘Love’ is also a ‘God term’; the word possesses hundreds of different meanings. To some, it expresses a strong like, for some, a sexual desire, and to others, a connection between two souls. This section will serve to clarify what I mean when I talk about love. To do so, I employ a Murdochian concept of love, a concept that hinges on Iris Murdoch’s ideas about self-emptying and connection. Murdoch proclaims, “we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central” (2001, p. 45). As we will see, Murdoch’s concept of love and the good is outward-facing, just like that of Charles Peirce.

3.3. Running on Empty

Recognizing that humans are naturally self-centered, Murdoch maintains that “we have lost a vision of the world separate from ourselves” (2001, p. 44). Murdoch does not mean this in a pantheistic sense (although I will be utilizing it for my pantheistic ethics); instead, she means that humans are practically solipsistic. We shy away from a sense of unity, being the egocentric creatures we are; yet, an “unavoidable sense of unity” (2001, p. 57) is necessary for Goodness to prevail. Tackling self-centered instincts, therefore, is the first step toward Love and Goodness. As Murdoch states, “what counteracts the system [self-centeredness] is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love” (2001, p. 65). For Murdoch, love is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real” (215). Once humans have acknowledged that self-emptying must occurs, how must pantheist moral agents act to show love, though? Murdoch’s answer draws on one particular element of Simone Weil’s moral philosophy: attentiveness.

3.4. The Center of Attention

Simone Weil tells us that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love…If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself” (Weil 2002, p. 117). By this sentiment, Weil means that attention is a bridge to love and God. Attentiveness is the vehicle that allows us to overcome our egoistic tendencies and at least begin to be good.

Of course, it will be prudent to determine exactly what we mean by attention. William James can help us here, defining attention as “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness is of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (James 2000, p. 204) Inspired by Weil, Iris Murdoch places attention at the center of love and goodness: “to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent” (2001, p. 327). For Murdoch, the withdrawal involved in James’ definition of attention is specifically a backing away from one’s ego. She argues, “Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived” (2001, p. 118). Although Murdoch was not a pantheist, her concept of love can easily and appropriately apply to pantheism when we allow that individual reality could be non-human. What is a pantheist’s object of attention? The obvious answer is the universe. Of course, the immediate follow-up question is how on Earth (or off Earth as the case may be) is it possible to give the entirety of the universe our attention? But just as we may get to know a loved one piece by piece, as it were, we can also dedicate ourselves to smaller parts of the universe. The rainforests, for example, or the patch of land I call my home, or a place of work in which I can have a positive effect.

Many believers consider worship a fundamental requirement of an acceptable religion. Can the cosmos be worshipped? Murdoch states, “Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God, which is a form of love” (2001, p. 54). As the ancient pagans may have sacrificed to particular gods to obtain particular rewards, as ancient Greek adventurers appealed to certain gods and goddesses for certain protections, and as shrines can be tailored to individual, not all, gods within a polytheistic belief system, so too can pantheists worship parts of the cosmos. Humans are limited in terms of knowledge and power; therefore, we cannot, and have no obligation to, worship the entire universe. Yet despite this limitation, giving even part of the cosmos our attention equates to loving it and worshipping it.

Elsewhere, I have argued for the correlation between pantheism, compassion, and empathy (redacted for anonymity) and highlighted that many pantheists have (through various means) tapped into the ‘oneness’ of the universe. Thus, although we may not be able to fully realize Murdoch’s ideal love, the more we accept cosmic unity, the better hope we have of dissolving the ego and facing outward.

Accepting a version of theism in which love is the only great-making property of intrinsic value leads directly to the normative claim that the Good must necessarily equate to the most loving behavior—cosmos-wide. Agapism is a realist, objective, and benevolence-based account of morality, an account that unapologetically rejects traditional deontological accounts of right and wrong. The metaethical scaffold of agapism is constructed from the contention that love is the greatest thing that holds intrinsic value, and love is expressed through attention.

3.5. Cosmic Agapism: A Good Mind

Although an idle mind may bear no fruit, an idol mind bears an abundance. As previously noted, agapism postulates that ethics hinges on maximizing a particular type of love—a love of attentiveness. Putting this postulation into pantheistic terms, moral agents ought to promote attentiveness toward the cosmos, which is also God. To butcher Aldo Leopold’s famous quote about his revolutionary land ethic, we ought to “enlarge the boundaries of the community to include [stars, planets, aliens, or collectively, the cosmos]. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the [pantheistic community]. It is wrong when it tends otherwise8” (1949, p. 219). Interestingly, Murdoch considers the world outside moral agents as an appropriate object of attention. She says, “It is so patently a good thing to take delight in flowers and animals that people who bring home potted plants and watch kestrels might even be surprised at the notion that these things have anything to do with virtue” (370). Being attentive to the world, under cosmic agapism, can be as simple as helping a bird with a broken wing or cleaning up a park on a Saturday morning.

Consequently, moral agents have a responsibility to try to attend to everything in the circle of moral worth (the entirety of the universe) as best they can. Notice the emphasis on ‘try’. As previously noted, it is impossible—for humans, at least—to reach moral perfection and effectively consider the whole world when engaging in moral deliberations9.

Skeptics may ask why love should be the guiding force of a pantheistic ethic. Why not power? Why not knowledge (particularly since, under this theory, the universe is a divine mind, not a divine heart)? Why not the laws of nature? I have two responses to this question (although I am sure that there will be concerns about which I have not yet thought).

4. On Good Terms

In this section, I advocate for the specificity and clarity of terms in the metaethical realm, which will foster more transparent and comprehensible arguments. As noted by Gael McDonald, “ethical relativism is regrettably subject to a proliferation of related terminology and, in many instances, with different meanings ascribed to similar terms” (McDonald 2010, p. 446). In this section, I provide one example of a great thinker causing confusion with meta-ethical terms. I then consider Sterba’s proposed Darwinian ethic and suggest that it is not in the category of moral objectivism on a truly universal scale.

Sterba very helpfully points out that people deny that particular ethics are objective even though they actually are. Consider the following passage that highlights the need for transparency and understanding of metaethical terms:

On the account I have offered, what are objective moral requirements here and now can change. Consider, for example, the objective moral requirement to not plunge a knife into some other innocent human being’s chest. Suppose our human nature were to change such that when someone plunged a knife into our chests, we died instantly and then immediately sprang back to life with a feeling of intense pleasure. If this became the new reality for us, then from that moment on, there would be a new objective moral requirement to plunge knives into people’s chests as often as possible. Likewise, if the circumstances of our lives were to change such that everything we needed was always in plentiful supply, the prohibition against theft could be seen to no longer apply to what we needed. So, the actual requirements of morality for here and now can be seen to change, while still remaining objective, if there are appropriate changes in human nature or in the circumstances of our lives that are relevant to the application of the basic norms of morality. Still, while, particular requirements of morality for here and now can and do change, the ultimate requirements of morality do not change, which is a very important feature of an objective morality.

(Sterba 2024, p. 9)

Sterba is correct to say that the action of stabbing an individual in the chest becomes morally right under changed circumstances (in this case, if the person could thwart proper death and experience pleasure from the action). He also highlights a vital point about objective morality. Despite different moral actions being relative to the situation (situationist morality), the system itself remains objective because “the ultimate requirements of morality do not change”. Yet not all thinkers understand this distinction, and this comprehension quagmire is partly due to murky terminology operating as a catalyst for misunderstanding.

We’ve already heard from Charles Sanders; now, let’s visit another great ‘C.S.’, Christian apologist of Narnia fame, Clive Staples Lewis. In his outstanding work, The Abolition of Man, Lewis answers Sterba’s question in the affirmative, which may surprise some since he was—at the point of writing anyway—an avid Abrahamic theist. Interestingly, Lewis also asserts that we need not appeal to the divine to ground objective, realist morality. He proclaims,

though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more ‘realistic’ basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with.

(Lewis 2001, p. 19)

Lewis defends objective morality against the “poison” of subjectivism, stabbing at a couple of normative moral models he disagrees with, one of which is utilitarianism. First, he locates his target:

They [subjectivists] claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge. I will now try to find out what happens if this is seriously attempted… Let us suppose that an Innovator in values regards dulce et decorum and greater love hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to be stripped off in order that we may get down to the ‘realistic’ or ‘basic’ ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground? First of all, he might say that the real value lay in the utility of such sacrifice to the community. ‘Good’, he might say, ‘means what is useful to the community.’

(Lewis 2001, p. 13)

Once utilitarianism has been outlined, Lewis poses several threats to it, which I need not examine here. He concludes that “The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else” (Lewis 2001, p. 15).

Despite its many merits, The Abolition of Man may involve an innocent bystander: objective (metaethically), situationist (normatively) ethics. Lewis burns utilitarianism with the detrimental brand of subjectivism, despite utilitarianism being an objective theory. On his quest to debunk subjectivism, Lewis embarks on a side quest to undermine ethics to which he strongly objects; he spends a significant portion of his book condemning two normative ethical theories: utilitarianism and instinct-based ethics. According to Lewis, these theories are subjective in nature; yet, both of these ethics, although naturalistic, still fall under the branch of objective morality. Moral situationism (in a normative sense) is regrettably subject to a proliferation of related terminology and, in many instances, condemned by attacks that mistake it for a metaethical theory.

Moral situationism10 (which I employ to designate a normative approach specifying that particular actions can be right or wrong depending on the situation) is a type of ethical realism and objectivism. It is not subjective in nature because it still holds to the view that morals are real, they exist, and they are not simply mind-dependent. Utilitarianism, on its most basic level, touts doing the greatest good for the greatest number—an objective precept, even if the specifics under the primary rule vary by circumstance—and it’s the same with an ethic based on following instinct. Sterba’s stabbing example serves to illustrate how stabbing someone in the chest can be wrong if a specific state of affairs pertains and right if that state of affairs changes. Moral situationism is what we might call a mutatis mutandis moral approach, in that unique situations can still be accommodated under moral objectivism even though right action can depend on circumstance.

Unfortunately, although Sterba’s Darwinian ethic is attractive in several ways (accessibility, science-based, and familiar), it may not be objective on a cosmic level. To say that morality is objective is to say that it applies to all moral agents everywhere, every time. It is spatio-temporally exhaustive. Yet, I can comprehend Darwinian’s model of evolution to be true for this planet, but quite different elsewhere in the cosmos. Therefore, arguably, it is not compatible with truly objective morality. Evolution may not enjoy a cosmos-wide application, like objective morality must, so if wanting to preserve objective morality, alternatives must be considered.

Cosmic agapism, which promotes doing the most loving thing for the cosmos, although not prescribing any specific deontological doctrines, is objective. The most loving action is situation-dependent. It may also be spatio-temporally dependent. Therefore, it is a situationist ethic, but still an objective one. Although what is most loving for the human race may not be the same as what is most loving for a far-off alien race, objective goodness remains grounded in a God, although that God is the entirety of the universe.

5. Perplexities

Let’s turn to the nitty-gritty and examine the potential problems with cosmic agapism (of which there are several). I use as a starting point several objections Sterba identifies against Divine command theory to see how cosmic agapism stands up to them.

5.1. Can God Ground Good?

When discussing divine command theory, Sterba highlights several big problems associated with it. One is related to the eponymous Euthyphro Dilemma outlined initially in a Platonic Dialogue and questions the relationship between goodness and Godness by asking, simply, ‘Is something good because God commands it, or does God command only good things?’. With each option comes more questions. If the latter option is true (let’s call this Option B), then arguably there is something greater than God that grounds morality. But if the former option is true (call this Option A), then the divine command theorist runs into trouble. Sterba summarizes the problem:

Acts which previously were wrong, such as intentionally killing an innocent person, theft, adultery, even hatred of God, are transformed into acts that should be performed if and when God commands them to be performed. This is because what made them wrong in the first place was simply that God commanded that they not be done. So, if God were to command differently with respect to those actions—command that they be done rather than that they not be done—then the moral character of them would change from being morally prohibited to being morally required.

(Sterba 2024, p. 4)

So, morality no longer exists on solid ground, as it were, but instead becomes an arbitrary and changeable whim of God.

Cosmic agapism sidesteps both the horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma through which the Divine command theory must wrestle. Concerning Option A, since the cosmos is a divine mind, morality must be contained within it. Additionally, the pantheistic God is not beholden to the classical great-making qualities to which the God of classical monotheism must subscribe. Regarding Option B, cosmic agapism prescribes not a complex and rigid set of commands but only one, which is consequentialist (do the most loving thing for the entire cosmos) because the guiding principle, that of love, is realist, objective and situationist. It does not comprise a set of specific rules, but only one fundamental principle11. Paul Tillich argues that the situationism of agapism actually collapses into absolutism due to its overriding and fundamental single principle.

Love is always love; that is its static and absolute side. But love is always dependent on that which is loved, and therefore it is unable to force finite elements on finite existence in the name of an assumed absolute. The absoluteness of love is its power to go into the concrete situation, to discover what is demanded by the predicament of the concrete to which it turns. Therefore, love can never become fanatical in a fight for an absolute, or cynical under the impact of the relative.

(Tillich 1951, p. 152)

Agapism, therefore, enjoys the status of absolutism and situationism; it is flexible and situation-dependent yet maintains fundamentally objective12.

5.2. Grounds for Separation?

Cosmic agapism also evades another problem posed by Sterba to divine command theory: the issue of conflicting commands. This problem has been covered substantially by critics of divine command theory. Sterba explains it as follows:

Even so, there are further problems understanding what that role would be. This is because divine commands could, presumably, come into conflict. Thus, suppose we had one divine command that we should each love and care for the members of our family and another that we should love and care for the deserving poor. Surely, these two commands would conflict when we are faced with the option of using our limited resources to either provide luxuries for the members of our family or use those same resources to provide for the basic needs of the deserving poor. Here we seem to require some kind of a background theory that compares the good that would be accomplished in each case, as well as weighs the competing obligations involved, and then makes a recommendation about what should be done.

(Sterba 2024, p. 5)

Due to the nature of cosmic agapism, its devotion to love as a sole value, there are no real conflicts between commands. This upshot does not mean, however, that there are no disagreements whatsoever as to which action constitutes the most loving thing to do. Humans, not possessing omniscience, will not have access to a failproof handbook of what to do in every situation in which a moral decision is required, which indicates that ethics simply is not foolproof, since the God of pantheism does not possess omniscience either. I will return to this point shortly.

5.3. Rage Against the Machine?

Sterba identified a further worry for divine command theorists: why should we do what God tells us? Parental status does not necessitate children as chattel, so why should God’s acts of creation fall into moral servitude? He explains,

Why then should a theist think that, through an act of creation, God would derive unconditional and lasting rights over us when we do not recognize any analogous rights issuing from acts of procreation? Clearly, we do not think that acts of procreation give rise to property rights the way we do for other acts of human production. So why think that the act of creating human beings would have such different consequences from acts of procreating human beings?

(Sterba 2024, p. 5)

Although I think there are other means to counter this objection to divine command theory, cosmic agapism avoids it completely, since every single moral agent is not a separate entity from God; it is part of it and is absorbed by it, which provides reason to follow the ethical code. Every moral agent that exists comprises God and the objective morality, so it would be absurd to deny it or actively rebel against it. On to the next!

5.4. A Problematic Agapic Calculus

Another difficulty Sterba correctly identifies as problematic for the divine command theorist relates to moral accessibility. He argues that “our role in interpreting and applying God’s commands under divine command theory would be narrowly circumscribed” (Sterba 2024, pp. 4–5). Under cosmic agapism, a similar—or perhaps even more challenging—problem may emerge. How might the cosmic agapist interpret and apply this pantheist ethic? The problem is epistemic in nature, falling under the umbrella of what Khai Wager (2024) refers to as the ‘objection from practical redundancy’.

Holding a pantheistic worldview cannot make any practical difference to a person’s life. That is, there is no sense in which a person’s pantheistic view of ultimate reality—for example, their concept of God as identical to the universe—feeds into their life. Therefore, it is practically redundant.

(Wager 2024, p. 43)

If subscribing to cosmic agapism, critics might assert, it may be impossible to access the Good, and therefore, objective morality is epistemically and ontologically isolated from human beings. The problems associated with Bentham’s famous Hedonic Calculus are almost infinitely amplified when we attempt to calculate the impacts of a moral action on the whole universe. As epistemically-limited beings, humans trying to calculate whether a moral action promotes the greatest amount of love for the entire universe is akin to my cat trying his paw at calculus (and my cat is not the cleverest of cats). We only have access to particular circles of moral worth. An imprisoned and isolated individual, for example, may only have moral coverage over a minimal section of the universe. How can that individual have any beneficial impact on the cosmos? This question may render cosmic agapeism both practically obsolete and theoretically frustrating.

My tentative counter to this hurdle will most likely seem unsavory to many ethicists. The counter is that we cannot know the precise action that will most benefit the universe, and we can understand whether our moral actions have amplified love towards the cosmos. Yet love, unlike utility, is a personal affect. So, perhaps this response is more palatable than its counterpart against utilitarianism. Doing the most loving thing towards the universe with the knowledge that we can reasonably expect to possess. It is enough to meet our ethical responsibilities. Imagine an extraterrestrial being who has a much stronger mind and has access to more knowledge of the universe than that for which humans have the capacity. A moral agent such as this may have ‘moral coverage’ over a larger portion of the cosmos. Yet, parts of the cosmos cannot consider the whole moral gamut of the universe, for epistemic (and possibly physical) constraints. If each moral agent takes into consideration the biggest chunk of the circle of moral worth she can knowingly affect, they can be good. We can only exert power or knowingly affect particular entities in a specific spatio-temporal location of the pantheistic universe. But this doesn’t render the parts morally obsolete. White blood cells can exert positive forces on the immune system, but they do not directly aid hormone production or blood clotting. Different moral agents have different moral domains.

5.5. Mind-Based Ethics Are Subjective

As specified in Section 3, subjectivism holds that morality is contingent on individual minds. If morality is mind-dependent, then it is not objective, and, in a sense, not ‘real’. The universe, under divine mind pantheism, is a single mind, which entails that the morality associated with the universe is technically subjective. We might lay the argument out like this:

• P1: If cosmic agapism is true, then morality is mind-dependent.
• P2: If morality is mind-dependent, then ethical subjectivism is true.
• C. If cosmic agapism is true, then ethical subjectivism is true.

Since I aim to demonstrate that cosmic agapism conforms to an objective ethic, this argument must be evaluated. This retort against cosmic agapism’s objective nature, although seemingly destructive, has a solution that necessitates a nod to the previous section on removing murky language. Yes, moral subjectivism indicates that morals are mind-dependent, and objective goodness does not exist. Still, only when those minds are not the actual source of morality, if morality stems from one divine mind, then there is no other mind to conflict with it.

Paul Tillich again offers a helpful hand in the form of a parallel to aid comprehension (although I ought to preface it by noting that he was not using these claims to propose or defend any type of pantheism). Tillich claims that “God cannot be called a self, because the concept of ‘self’ implies separation from and contrast to everything which is not self…since personality…includes individuality, the question arises in what sense God can be called an individual” (Tillich 1951, pp. 244–45). If Tillich is right, then we can justifiably, I think, create a parallel argument for cosmic agapism’s divine mind. The parallel would argue that the cosmos, the unity of pantheism, exists as a different and totally unique type of mind: a mind that is not subject to the usual rules of subjectivism, because this mind does not have another comparable mind in existence.

Of course, this response adds additional addenda to the book of cosmic agapism, namely that the pantheistic God’s mind must be superior to the minds within it, and that the universe’s existence includes an axiological element: that which exists is good13.

6. Conclusions

James Sterba has raised justifiable concerns about one traditional model of theistic ethics, which causes him to affirm the mutual exclusivity of (Abrahamic) God and (objective) Good. While Sterba postulates an ethic founded on and grounded in Darwinian evolutionary theory, I propose an ethic compatible with—and indeed dependent on—divine mind pantheism and agapism, an ethic based on a Murdochian concept of love as attention. I have dealt with the meta-ethical and theological aspects of Sterba’s question by examining the concept of God and the concept of goodness, while venturing into the fundamental question of what grounds goodness. I have contended that cosmic agapism can overcome several problems Sterba throws at divine command theory, and I added a possible paradox of my own to the equation, arguing that it can be solved if we remember the importance of defuzzifying metaethical terms. Good without an Abrahamic God is possible, and potentially more probable, when we cultivate inclusivism for alternative concepts of God and moral objectivism.