Ethics

Oxford Handbooks Online

Ethics
C. Stephen Evans and Robert C. Roberts
The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard
Edited by John Lippitt and George Pattison

Print Publication Date: Jan 2013 Subject: Religion, Theology and Philosophy of Religion, Ethics
Online Publication Date: Jun DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601301.013.0012
2013

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines Soren Kierkegaard's thoughts about ethics and his use of ‘the ethical’ his works, suggesting
that the ethical is the most used concept in his works and his views about it are complex. It evaluates his treatment
of the ethical in his Fear and Trembling and his opinion about the significance of the divine authority in The Book
on Adler, and also considers his account of ethical obligations towards others in his Works of Love.

Keywords: Soren Kierkegaard, ethics, ethical, Fear and Trembling, Book on Adler, ethical obligations, divine authority, Works of Love

IN all of Kierkegaard's enormous literary output, perhaps no concept is used in more different ways than the

concept of ‘the ethical’. This makes any attempt to summarize in a single chapter what Kierkegaard said about
ethics a hopeless undertaking. Hence in what follows we make no attempt at a comprehensive survey of the
subject. Rather, after a brief account of some of the different ways ‘the ethical’ figures in his authorship, we will
focus on two areas of ethical thinking about which we think Kierkegaard has important things to say: the relation of
divine commands to moral obligations and the nature of virtues and the roles they play in ethical life.

One might think that the complexity of Kierkegaard's literature, and especially the pseudonymous character of so
much of it, makes it impossible to give any account of Kierkegaard's view of the ethical, since no single, coherent
account can be found in his writings. The problem, it might be thought, is not just that Kierkegaard's views are
complex, but that no coherent view is present. To some extent, we will try to avoid this problem by focusing our
attention on non-pseudonymous works. However, in the end, the problem is not a serious one for us, since our
purpose is not to say definitively what Kierkegaard thought about ethical questions, but rather to point to some
themes in Kierkegaard's writings that provide helpful insights for contemporary ethics. For this end, it does not
matter whether the insights in question are Kierkegaard's or merely ‘Kierkegaardian’. Insights can be found in
Kierkegaard's writings. This is primarily an essay on contributions Kierkegaard has made and can still make to our
ethical thinking.

I. The Ethical as a Stage or Sphere of Existence

We begin with a brief review of some important ways ‘the ethical’ arises in Kierkegaard's writings, although after
some initial exploration and clarification, we will set most of them aside. It is natural to think first of Kierkegaard's
idea that there are three ‘stages’ or ‘spheres’ of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These
‘stages’ play a major role in Kierkegaard's writings. Indeed, one of us has written an introduction to Kierkegaard as
a philosopher that is organized around this idea (Evans 2009). The claim that there are spheres of existence
pervades Kierkegaard's authorship, and provides a unifying structure for it. He uses both ‘stages’ and ‘spheres’ to
describe these ways of living, since he thinks that a fully developed person would characteristically traverse these
‘spheres’ in passing through the stages of life. However, since a person may choose to remain in a particular
stage, these ‘spheres’ can also confront each other as rival views of life.

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 Ethics

In Either/Or II and also in Stages on Life's Way, Judge William, a major pseudonymous character, describes the
ethical life as a path to a unified self, achieved through enduring ethical commitments. On his account, the ethical
life requires commitments to friendship, a personal vocation expressed primarily in work, and, above all, lifelong
monogamous marriage.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his influential book After Virtue, sees Either/Or as occupying a strategically important place
in the history of ethics (MacIntyre 1984: 36–50). According to MacIntyre, Either/Or embodies Kierkegaard's
recognition that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason failed. He thinks that Kierkegaard's own
solution was to ground morality in an act of will, a ‘radical choice’ for which no reasons can be given, since it is a
choice about what will count as a good reason. MacIntyre's reading of Kierkegaard fits nicely with Kierkegaard's
reputation as the ‘father of existentialism’, since on this reading Kierkegaard's view of the ethical resembles that of
Jean Paul Sartre (Sartre 1957: 15–22). This reading has been influential and has given rise to some important
debates (Davenport and Rudd 2001). However, we think that MacIntyre's account of Kierkegaard's view of the
ethical takes us down the wrong track, for several reasons.

First, MacIntyre's reading ignores the pseudonymous character of Either/Or. Even if the reading were in some
sense correct, it would not necessarily tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought about the ethical life, but only
about the views of the aesthete ‘A’, Judge William, and other pseudonymous authors whose writings appear in the
book. To understand why Kierkegaard might have created these pseudonymous authors and their views one must
read what Kierkegaard says in his own voice.

Second, it is by no means obvious that MacIntyre's reading gets even the pseudonymous authors right. The
aesthete in volume I seems to endorse a kind of arbitrariness in how life should be lived, but Judge William gives
reasons why the ethical life should be preferred to the aesthetic life, reasons that even an aesthete should
understand and be moved by. Perhaps someone might think that the book's inconclusive ending, with no evidence
that either the aesthete or the Judge has changed his views, shows that Kierkegaard thinks the choice must be a
‘radical’ one. However, if this line of reasoning were correct, one could infer that a novelist like Dostoevsky thinks
that the choice of religious faith is arbitrary and unjustifiable, simply because in The Brothers Karamazov Ivan does
not convert Alyosha, nor Alyosha Ivan. We surely cannot infer that there are no good reasons for a choice simply
because a literary character (or even a real person) is not moved by those reasons. Humans, whether fictional or
actual, are not fully rational and are not always moved by good reasons.

Finally, it is important to distinguish between ‘the ethical’ as a stage or sphere of existence, and ethics as a
pervasive feature of human existence. Existence is partly a series of choices, and a choice is at least partly an
exercise in value-ranking. If I regularly choose to play computer games rather than read philosophy, I am implicitly
saying that I care more about computer games than I do philosophy—and this is to rank the values by which I live.
If we think of an ethic as a set of value-rankings, then every human, regardless of which ‘sphere’ or ‘stage’ of
existence he or she occupies, must have an ethic. This is as true of the aesthete or the religious individual as it is
of an ‘ethicist’. Thus human existence has an ethical dimension that is universal and inescapable, which must be
distinguished from ‘the ethical stage’ or ‘sphere’ that represents a particular approach to human existence.

There are also good reasons to think that the concept of the ethical ‘stage’ is not completely uniform in
Kierkegaard's writings, but is treated differently in different contexts. In Either/Or the ethical stage seems to include
a strong emphasis on acceptance of social roles and institutions such as marriage. In Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, on the other hand, the ethical stage involves the discovery of the self as an ideal that must be
distinguished from social roles and expectations (SKS7: 222/CUP: 244). In Either/Or Judge William clearly thinks of
himself as a deeply religious man, and there is no sense of a sharp distinction between ethical and religious
existence. In Postscript, however, the ethical life is seen as the beginning point for forms of the religious life that
are more than ethical and that must be distinguished from the ethical life.

II. ‘The Ethical’ in Fear and Trembling

We should say something about the treatment of ‘the ethical’ in Kierkegaard's widely read Fear and Trembling. In
this pseudonymous work, Johannes de silentio characterizes Abraham's action in being willing to sacrifice his son
Isaac at God's command as a paradigm of faith. Johannes argues strongly that Abraham's faith cannot be
understood in ethical terms: ‘The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he intended to murder Isaac; the
1

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 Ethics

religious expression is that he intended to sacrifice Isaac’ (SKS4: 126/FT: 241). In this work the ethical is linked both
to ‘the universal’, and to what can be rationally defended and explained (SKS4: 172–207/FT: 71–106). The life of
faith, by contrast, is a response to God's call to a particular individual made through a revelation to that individual.
Thus, the person who acts on the basis of faith does not rely on what we today might call ‘public reasons’.

Although Fear and Trembling is a powerful and important book, it would be a mistake to treat it as Kierkegaard's
definitive account of the ethical life. To begin, we again have a pseudonymous author, one who cannot be
automatically identified with Kierkegaard; Johannes de silentio confesses that he does not have faith and does not
understand it or how to acquire it. The major polemical target of the book seems to be eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, who in different ways see the ethical life and the life of faith as
essentially similar. Johannes, at least for his purposes, accepts a characterization of the ethical life that resembles
the Hegelian view that the highest expression of the ethical is to be found in Sittlichkeit, the laws and customs of a
people. (We disagree with those who think the relevant conception of ‘the ethical’ in Fear and Trembling is
Kantian.2 ) Johannes accepts what he sees as the dominant conception of the ethical life because his main point is
that faith cannot be reduced to the ethical life in that sense. Thus, as Ronald Green has argued, the book is not
fundamentally about ethics at all, but about faith (Green 1992). In particular it is a sustained argument that the life
of faith must be sharply distinguished from the ethical life understood in Hegelian terms.

To gain some sense of what Kierkegaard has to say about ethics that might be helpful to contemporary
discussions, we must therefore look primarily at Kierkegaard's non-pseudonymous writings, and not to Either/Or,
Fear and Trembling, or even Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In the non-pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard
speaks in his own voice, and also we find him addressing questions about the ethical as a universal and
inescapable element of existence, not simply as a ‘stage’ of existence. We shall focus on two distinct but equally
important areas: the place of divine authority in ethics, and the virtues, the personal characteristics that we must
acquire to be fully whole and healthy.

III. The Significance of Divine Authority for Kierkegaard

One of the most significant works of Kierkegaard is one that he never published, though he worked on it perhaps
more than any other of his works, leaving at least three complete versions in his papers at the time of his death:
The Book on Adler. Adolph Peter Adler was a Danish pastor who was deposed and pensioned by the Church
because of his claim to have received a direct revelation from God. Kierkegaard was drawn to the case because it
seemed to him to embody what he termed the ‘confusion’ of the contemporary age, a confusion that is rooted in a
failure to grasp the significance of divine authority: ‘the concept of authority has been completely forgotten in our
confused age’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 76/BA: 4). For Kierkegaard this confusion is no slight intellectual problem, but a
‘calamity’ that has ramifications for politics, religion, and ‘everything else’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 78/BA: 5).

In The Book on Adler, as well as other closely related works such as ‘The Difference Between a Genius and an
Apostle’, Kierkegaard discusses the concept of divine authority chiefly with respect to the question of a special
revelation as the basis of Christian belief. He argues that the decline of religious belief in the modern world does not
stem from the intellect but from the will; the cause of this decline ‘is not doubt about the truth of the religious but
insubordination to the authority of the religious’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 78/BA: 5). Christian faith is grounded in an
apostolic revelation that ought to be believed because it has divine authority. In the modern world, however,
‘profundity has been mistaken—for authority; the intellectual—for the ethical; being a genius—for being an apostle’
(Pap. VIII 2 B 27 78/BA: 5). As this last quotation implies, Kierkegaard sees the loss of divine authority as
devastating not merely for religious faith but for ethical life as well.

MacIntyre is right to credit Kierkegaard with realizing that the Enlightenment project of grounding ethics in human
reason was doomed to failure. However, the solution, as Kierkegaard saw it, was not to ground ethics in an act of
human will, but to seek to recover divine authority as the basis of ethics. Kierkegaard is concerned about what
Christine Korsgaard has called the ‘sources of normativity,’ particularly the kind that we call moral obligation
(Korsgaard 1996). The essence of normativity is that it constrains us. What we ought to do is what we are
somehow bound to do, obligated to do. But what is the source of this normativity? Korsgaard and other
contemporary philosophers think that an account can be given without invoking divine authority, but Kierkegaard
believes this is not possible.

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IV. Works of Love and the Source of the ‘Ought’

There are of course a variety of ways in which the term ‘ought’ is used in English. Some of these are not difficult to
explain. For example, if someone wants to drive from Waco, Texas, to Austin, Texas, on the fastest, most direct
highway, then that person ought to take Interstate Highway 35. The kind of ‘ought’ that such ‘means to an end’
situations involve seems straightforward. Perhaps somewhat more significantly, one may say that a person who
wants to have an honest character ought to be especially careful to be truthful in small matters. Even this kind of
‘ought’, however, still seems short of the unconditional obligation that we think of as a moral duty. It is this kind of
‘ought’ that requires explanation.

In Works of Love Kierkegaard gives a powerful account of ethical obligations towards other humans as summarized
in one of the great commandments found in both Judaism and Christianity: ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. He
argues that this obligation to love is grounded in a human person's relation to God. The duty to love is rooted in
God's command, and thus the human person has a task assigned by God. Kierkegaard compares the human
person who carries out this task to a well-brought up child, who is away from his parents and with strangers, but
continues to behave as his parents have taught him (SKS9: 189–90/WL: 189–90). Such a child does not worry
about how other children are behaving, nor how the strangers may view his behaviour, for the ‘child never forgets
that the judgement is at home, where the parents do the judging’ (SKS9: 189/WL: 189). A person's responsibility to
love others is thus grounded in the fact that he is ultimately responsible to God, who will pass judgement.

Kierkegaard thinks that without this sense of being accountable or responsible to someone or something ‘higher’,
ethical life lacks ‘earnestness’. The modern world, as he sees it, has attempted to develop alternatives to divine
authority as the foundation of the ethical. What are the alternatives to God as the foundation of this moral task?
There are several possibilities, but Kierkegaard believes that all of them fail, and fail disastrously.

One possibility that has been extensively explored by existentialists is that the individual can be the ground of
moral obligation. (This is ironical since, as noted earlier, Kierkegaard is often called ‘the father of existentialism’.)
For example, someone might think that a person can simply adopt an ideal as his or her commitment and try to be
faithful to it. Kierkegaard thinks that such an account cannot do justice to the actual character of the ethical life. A
freely adopted ideal cannot bind if its normativity stems from the person's choice, for such a choice can always be
undone. ‘The deficiency in even the most noble human enthusiasm is that, as merely human, in the ultimate sense
it is not powerful itself, because it has no higher power over itself  ’ (SKS9: 191/WL: 190). Kierkegaard's Anti-
Climacus expresses the same idea, by calling the commitments of an autonomous self with no relation to God
‘experiments’, regardless of the energy that the self devotes to them (SKS11: 184/SUD: 68; trans. modified).

What about the Kantian view that the source of normativity is human reason? In a well-known journal entry
Kierkegaard clearly rejects the claim that human reason can itself be the source of the moral law that binds us:

Kant was of the opinion that man is his own law (autonomy)—that is, he binds himself under the law which
he himself gives himself. Actually, in a profounder sense, this is how lawlessness or experimentation are
established. This is not being rigorously earnest any more than Sancho Panza's self-administered blows to
his bottom were vigorous. (SKS23: NB15: 66 [JP1: 188])

This entry is very cryptic, and it is hard to know what lies behind it. A Kantian might object that for Kant the dictates
of the moral law are ‘categorical’ and therefore absolute, anything but ‘experimental’. Why does Kierkegaard think
that human reason is a poor candidate to be the ground of genuine moral obligations?

We don’t think it is possible to answer this question with certainty, but we can at least speculate plausibly about
why Kierkegaard finds reason an inadequate ground. First, there is the question of the authority of reason itself.
Even if reason dictated that humans should behave in a certain way, we might ask, with Dostoevsky's Underground
Man, why we should care so much about being rational (Dostoevsky 2005: 134–5). The Underground Man
notoriously says that ‘man has always and everywhere—whoever he may be—preferred to do as he chose, and
not in the least as his reason or advantage dictated, and one may choose to do something even if it against one's
own advantage; and sometimes one positively should (that is my idea)’ (Dostoevsky 2005: 130). The
Underground Man goes on to claim that choosing what is not rational can preserve ‘what is most precious and most
important to us, namely our personality and our individuality’.

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 Ethics

However, even if we do want to be rational, we must inquire about the nature of reason itself. Kant clearly believes
that reason is a kind of timeless, universal faculty that all humans possess, one that delivers the same judgements
for all. Kierkegaard, by contrast, seems to think that human reasoning is always the reasoning of a concrete,
existing human. He is sceptical that any of us embodies ‘pure’ reason; our thinking reflects our hopes, passions,
fears, and desires, and it is unlikely that universal moral principles can emerge from such thinking.

Besides this problem, one may wonder whether Kant's ‘categorical imperative’, even if it is a universal principle of
reason, can justify concrete action-guiding principles. It has seemed to many philosophers that Kant's principle is
too formal, too abstract, to tell actual humans what they must do. It looks as if many different and incompatible
‘maxims’ can be universalized without obvious irrationality.

Contemporary Kantians, such as Korsgaard, have seen the problem here, and have attempted to give Kantian
ethics more content by claiming that the moral law stems from the activity of reason when applied to a conception
of oneself. For Korsgaard, the particular maxims that have authority for an individual ultimately stem from the
identity of that individual, since ‘a view of what you ought to do is a view of who you are’ (Korsgaard 1996: 117).
Since it is clear that people can and do conceive of their identities very differently, it follows that people who
conceive of their identities in different ways will see themselves as having different obligations, and on Korsgaard's
view will actually have different obligations.

From Kierkegaard's perspective, this kind of view is not a solution but part of the problem. Real moral obligations
bind or constrain the self. How I think about or conceive of myself cannot do the job, since if I find that my self-
conception limits what I wish to do, I can simply go to work to change how I think about myself. A moral obligation
cannot come simply from how I think of myself; it is rather something that (among other things) tells me how I
should think about myself.

A final alternative to God as the foundation of moral obligation is to see our duties as grounded, not in ourselves or
in our reason, but in society. Initially, this seems promising, since society does seem to have some genuine
independence of the individual and also seems to be something ‘higher’ or superior to the individual. Perhaps we
should think of our moral obligations as rooted in a kind of social agreement humans have made. Kierkegaard
considers this strategy, but finds social agreement to be a poor substitute for God as well.

A key question to ask about any such agreement is whether it is supposed to be an actual agreement or merely a
hypothetical one, a promise that humans would make, or would be rational to make, if they were in a certain
situation. The problem with a hypothetical agreement is that it lacks authority. I am not obligated to give money to a
charity simply by the hypothetical fact that I would have promised to give the charity money if some condition had
been actual that in fact never became actual. It might be true, for example, that if I had attended a certain meeting
and heard an appeal, I would have promised to give money, but how does such a hypothetical fact bind me, who
did not attend the meeting or make any such promise?

Perhaps, then, we should think of the agreement as actual rather than hypothetical. Advocates of such a view
might claim that the agreement has been made tacitly or implicitly. Kierkegaard thinks that such a view will not
work. No such agreement has been made; nor would actual individuals be able to come to such an agreement,
even if they were to try to do so:

Or should the determination of what is the Law's requirement perhaps be an agreement among, a common
decision by, all people, to which the individual has to submit? Splendid—that is, if it is possible to find the
place and fix a date for this assembling of all people (all the living, all of them?—but what about the dead?),
and if it is possible, something that is equally impossible, for all of them to agree on one thing! (SKS9:
119/WL: 115)

The lack of a foundation for the moral ought has led directly to the ethical confusions of the modern world,
according to Kierkegaard, a world he describes as a ‘vortex’ in which nothing stands firm (SKS9: 119/WL: 115).

V. Divine Commands as the Foundation of Moral Obligations

It is one thing to criticize candidates for the foundation of morality; it is another to provide an adequate alternative.
Why does Kierkegaard think that God's commands can provide an adequate basis for moral obligations? To answer

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this question, we will first list what we consider to be desiderata for a good candidate to be the foundation of moral
obligation. All these derive from features of genuine moral obligations that seem to require explanation. Obviously,
this account is philosophically controversial, and some may be sceptical about one or more of the features we
here identify. In a more spacious context we would attempt a defence of them, but here we simply point to features
of the moral life as Kierkegaard saw them, features that we also notice and that seem to fit most people's moral
experience.

One important feature of moral obligations is that they are objective, the kind of thing that people can be mistaken
about. The mistakes can be of various kinds. Sometimes I am obligated to do something, but fail to realize I have
the obligation. Sometimes people with ‘overactive consciences’ believe they are obligated to do things that they
have no obligation to do. And sometimes people correctly see that they have an obligation in a certain situation but
are mistaken about the content of that obligation. So an adequate account of moral obligation should be able to
account for this objectivity, explain how people can have true and false beliefs about their moral obligations.

A second important feature of moral obligations is that they provide compelling reasons of a distinctive kind for
actions. Let's consider a simple case of obligation. Perhaps I have borrowed money from a friend. I now have the
money to repay the friend and am obligated to do so. If I am morally obligated to perform an action, then not only
do I have a reason to perform that action, the reason is (at least normally) an overriding one. It will not do to say
that I don’t need to repay the money because I don’t want to, or because I can think of other things to do with the
money. If I have a good reason for defaulting on my obligation (say, my children will starve to death if I pay back
the money), then the overriding reason must itself be a moral one. An account of moral obligation should help us
understand the overriding, serious character of a moral reason for performing an action.

A third feature is closely related to the second. An account of moral obligation should not only explain why we
have reasons to perform our moral duty; it should also explain why we should be motivated to do so. It should help
us understand why we should care about morality, why moral reasons should (and often do) move us to action.

Finally, an adequate account of moral obligation should help us understand the universality of morality. We do not
mean that moral obligations cannot be in some way unique and tailored to the individual. But morality is universal in
at least two ways. First, all are subject to the claims of morality. No one is so ‘special’ as to get a free pass to
ignore those claims. Second, some of our moral obligations extend at least to all persons. (Some in fact certainly
extend further than this, incorporating animals.) If some racist member of my society believes that the world would
be a better place if the population were reduced, and proposes to achieve this end by killing people who are
members of another race, I have an obligation to oppose this and do what I can to stop such evil, even if I do not
know the people he proposes to eliminate or have any relation to them except that they are fellow humans. So part
of what we want explained is why all humans are subject to moral obligations, and why we have some moral
obligations that extend to how we relate to all people, including people we don’t even know, and people who
cannot benefit us in any way.

Before trying to show that Kierkegaard thinks of divine commands as satisfying these requirements, it is helpful first
to sketch how he links God and moral obligations. To begin, he thinks that God's commands create unconditional
obligations for humans:

But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be
to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God's wisdom is beyond all comparison with yours, and
God's governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your own shrewdness. All you have to
do is obey in love. (SKS9: 28/WL: 20, trans. modified)

God's commands should be obeyed because God has absolute authority over humans. To God ‘every human
being, not by birth but by creation from nothing, belongs as a bond servant, and in such a way as no bond servant
has ever belonged to an earthly master, who at least admits that thoughts and feelings are free…’ (SKS9: 118/WL:
115).

Interestingly, Kierkegaard does not seem to think of divine authority as linked to rewards and punishments. In fact,
he says that divine punishments are not really punishments, and should be welcomed and not feared. When God
chastens an individual, it is for the individual's own good, since God is completely loving (SKS8: 156–66/UDVS: 44–
60). So, for Kierkegaard, God's authority does not rest merely on God's absolute power. Rather, the relation is

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 Ethics

grounded in the fact that God, who is completely loving, has created us out of nothing to enjoy a relation with
himself. We could say that our obligations to obey God stem from the history of our relationship with God, just as
many obligations to other humans are grounded in our past relations with those persons, except that our history
with God goes back to our birth and does not end at death: ‘But that eternal love-history has begun much earlier; it
began with your beginning, when you came into existence out of nothing, and just as surely as you do not become
nothing, it does not end at a grave’ (SKS9: 151/WL: 149–50).

It is important to see that in endorsing the claim that God's commands create overriding obligations for humans,
Kierkegaard is not claiming that all ethical truths depend on God's will. God does not command it to be the case that
God is good, or that love is good. Such truths rather provide part of the underpinnings of Kierkegaard's claim that
God's commands generate obligations. A God who was not essentially good and loving would not be a God one
would be obligated to obey. Here Kierkegaard's view is similar to that of Robert Adams, who has argued that only
the commands of a loving God would generate moral obligations (Adams 1999: 250). This is important because it
blocks one common objection to a divine command account of moral obligation, the claim that seeing moral
obligations as divine commands would make our obligations arbitrary. This objection originates in Plato's
Euthyphro. Since truths about the good are not rooted in God's commands, there is no reason to think those
commands are arbitrary. God commands what he commands because of his love for the good.

It does not follow from this that truths about what is morally obligatory can be derived directly from truths about
what is good. It is one thing to know that an act is good, or even that it is the best act one can do in a situation, and
quite another to know that an act is obligatory. It is possible, at least for some acts, that God's knowledge of the
good and love for the good leave him no discretion with respect to what he commands. Even if this is the case, his
command adds a new moral dimension to the situation.

An analogy between moral and legal obligations may help here. I am only an average driver and it would not be
good for me to drive in excess of 100 miles per hour on a crowded highway. On many German autobahns there
are no speed limits, however. Thus, if I am driving on one of these German roads, it would be good for me to drive
at a moderate speed but I have no legal obligation to do so. Similarly, many (perhaps even all) of the acts God
commands would be good to perform even if God did not command them. However, the fact that God commands
them gives them a new moral quality by virtue of God's authority over his human creatures. Actions that God
commands to be done are not just good but obligatory; actions God commands us not to do are not just bad but
forbidden.

It is evident, we think, that God's commands meet the desiderata we sketched for being the foundation of moral
obligations. First, if an obligation is rooted in a divine command, then there can be a fact of the matter about
whether an act is morally obligatory, and people can be right or wrong in their beliefs about such facts. Thus moral
obligations rooted in divine commands have the desired objectivity.

It is often alleged that moral theories that view morality as consisting of objective facts fail the second test,
however, because it is mysterious how the fact that an act is obligatory could be motivating, could provide a
reason for acting in that way. Moral obligations that are grounded in God's commands could clearly be motivating,
however, if we suppose, as Kierkegaard does, that our greatest good lies in knowing God and having a loving
relation with God. For Kierkegaard a relation with God is the greatest good a person can have, and thus anything
that contributes to such a relation has incomparable value: ‘To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another
person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved’ (SKS9:
111/WL: 107, italics original). One of the ways love expresses itself is by a desire to please the person one loves;
to fail to want to please the other is to have a less than ideal relationship with the person one loves. Of course love
does not always satisfy the desires of the other, since the other might desire something harmful or immoral. But
even in those cases the lover will feel a certain regret that he or she cannot please the lover. God, naturally, since
he is supremely good, will never desire what is genuinely bad (though Kierkegaard thinks what God asks of us
might not seem good to us, with our limited wisdom), so it will always be appropriate to want to satisfy God's
desires. So we can see that God's authority not only provides a reason to obey his commands; we also have good
reasons to care about doing so, for it is linked directly to our own deepest good. Because the relation to God is
more important than any other, we can also understand why the obligations that are grounded in this relation would
trump a person's other reasons for action.

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Finally, seeing moral obligations as generated by divine commands helps us understand how morality can have
universality, in both of the senses we discussed above. First, moral obligations are binding on all humans because
the facts that ground the obligation apply equally to all. All humans were created by God from nothing and are
made in such a way that a relation to God is the greatest possible good, and thus every human person has an
overriding reason to care about God's requirements.

To see how morality can be universal in the second sense, in which some of our obligations require us to take into
account the good of all persons, we need to say a bit more about the content of God's commands as Kierkegaard
understands them. God's fundamental commands are to love God unconditionally and our neighbours as
ourselves, as summarized in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It is easy to see why God should command
us to love himself, since, as we have seen, God is supremely good and loving and a relation to God is the highest
good possible for humans. Since God is supremely good, God is worthy of love, and humans find their own deepest
happiness in loving him. But who is our neighbour and why should we love our neighbours as ourselves?

Kierkegaard is very clear that the category of the neighbour is inclusive. Although ‘the neighbour’ is concrete in
the sense that the next person you see is the neighbour, the neighbour is also ‘all people’ (SKS9: 58/WL: 52). This
means that the neighbour must not be limited to those people who are like me or have something in common with
me, such as family, friends, or fellow countrymen. To be sure, since the neighbour includes all people it includes
spouses, children, friends, and fellow citizens. However, the person who draws a distinction between ‘us’ and
‘them’, however that line is drawn, and thinks that moral obligations extend only to those who are ‘us’, fails to love
the neighbour, however good a husband or wife or friend or citizen that individual may be.

If we ask why we should love our neighbours in this sense, there are at least two different questions we may be
asking. We may be asking why it is a duty to love our neighbour, but also why it is good to love our neighbour. We
shall tackle the second question first. Kierkegaard clearly holds that it is good to love the neighbour, so much so
that if we really understood our situation we should not even need to be commanded to love the neighbour. ‘The
commandment is that you shall love, but, ah, if you will understand yourself and life, then it seems that it should not
need to be commanded, because to love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not
really living’ (SKS9: 368/WL: 375). Perhaps for the perfected saint or people who have achieved eternal life through
death, there is no need to command love of the neighbour at all. This point is important, since it links Kierkegaard's
view of moral obligations to his view of the virtues, which we discuss in the next section. Moral duties have as their
telos a transformation of the individual who is subject to those duties, a transformation that makes duty less
important (even finally dropping out of the picture altogether) as we become the kinds of persons we were meant to
be. However, most of us are not perfected saints, and Kierkegaard thinks that for actual human beings, it is good to
be commanded to do what is good for us; we should not be too eager to ‘leave the school of the commandment’
(SKS9: 369/WL: 376).

However, loving the neighbour is not merely good for the lover. It is good because it is a way of recognizing the
intrinsic worth and value of the people who are loved. As we have seen, God himself is supremely good, but since
every human shares in a ‘universal divine likeness’, Kierkegaard thinks that every person possesses an intrinsic
worth and dignity as well (SKS9: 128/WL: 125). To love the neighbour is simply to recognize this special status that
human persons enjoy simply as humans, regardless of what earthly station they may occupy. Kierkegaard
compares human existence to a play, in which the various actors play different roles; one person plays the king
while another plays a beggar (SKS9: 92–3/WL: 87–9). When the play is over, however, all the actors are simply
human beings. In a similar way, despite the differences in worldly status, every human being possesses an ‘inner
glory’ as a creature made in God's image (SKS9: 93/WL: 88). People are like sheets of fine paper, in which there is
different writing on each page. Nevertheless, if one holds the paper up to the light one sees a ‘common watermark’
(SKS9: 94/WL: 89). This watermark is the ‘inner glory’ that humans possess when they are seen as special
creatures of God.

We can therefore understand why God's fundamental command to humans is this command to love the neighbour
as oneself. In commanding us to love all persons, God is commanding us to imitate his own love, which is universal
and impartial (SKS9: 69/WL: 62–3). However, for Kierkegaard, though neighbour love is truly good and good for us,
it is also a duty, and it is good that it is a duty. For we are dominated by self-love and what Kierkegaard calls
‘preferential love’, the natural loves we have for our erotic lovers, spouses, children, friends, and those who are
generally like us or can benefit us in some way. Love for God is the foundation for the neighbour love which both

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extends beyond these natural, preferential loves, and also transforms them. Thus, Kierkegaard says that God is the
‘middle term’ in love for the neighbour (SKS9: 111/WL: 107). When I love the neighbour, I love him or her not
merely because he or she is my friend or my family member (even if the person is a friend or family member). I love
the person because of the inner glory he or she possesses as God's creation. This not only prevents me from
drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in such a way that I can ignore ‘them’; it also humanizes preferential,
natural loves, by protecting against all forms of domination and oppression. Since men and women are equally
children of God, a man must neither make himself a god to his wife, nor make his wife an idol to himself. If I love
God, I will naturally want to obey God's commands, including the command to imitate God in loving all those whom
God has created in his own image. Our obligations to care about the good of others is thus a universal obligation;
seeing our moral obligations as divine commands helps explain why we are obligated to care about the good of all.

VI. The Place of Virtues in Kierkegaard's Thought

In his Point of View for My Work as an Author, in many of his journal entries, and elsewhere in his works,
Kierkegaard makes it clear that he thinks of himself as a kind of missionary to ‘Christendom’ and regards his
writings as the chief vehicle of his missionary work. His mission is ‘again to introduce Christianity into Christendom’
(SKS12: 41/PC: 36) to awaken his contemporaries to a way of life to which most are notionally committed, but which
in reality they have ‘forgotten’. He thinks that in his outwardly Lutheran society in nineteenth-century Denmark,
little real Christianity is to be found, and he means by this that very few of his sophisticated contemporaries
actually live or ‘exist’ in a way that is informed by Christian categories such as authority, obedience, love, and
faith. He also thinks that the academic way of thinking about ethics and theology in his time, by removing such
concepts from their living context, contributes little more than confusion to the discussion. These Christian
concepts come across as unreal and thus undemanding: ‘…science and scholarship have become fantastic (pure
knowledge)’ (SKS27: Pap. 365: 3 [JP1: 649]).

Accordingly, he writes about these concepts, but not in the ‘theoretical’ mode and mood that one expects from a
university professor or professional theologian. (Such a mode is more likely to induce moral sleep than awakening.)
Instead, he writes literary or ‘poetical’ (one could also say ‘rhetorical’) works, many of which take a point of view
on living that is different, in one degree or another, from Kierkegaard's own, but in each of which are found
characters—from the aesthete ‘A’ of Either/Or I to the almost-but-not-quite Christian Johannes Climacus of
Fragments and Postscript—who live intensely their points of view on life. Such works Kierkegaard attributes to
various pseudonyms. Under his own name he writes a variety of other works, most of which consist in sermon-like
discourses or deliberations that he often calls ‘upbuilding’ or ‘edifying’. These works are also literary or rhetorical,
and the style and mood in which he writes them are essential to their upbuilding purpose. He uses pseudonyms
because he is unusually attentive, as an author, to the relation between the ideals he attempts to communicate and
his own person and ethical character. He comments in his journal,

Patience, faith, humility, etc., in short, all the Christian virtues in non-actual dangers (for example, when a
person shirks making the right decisions, refuses to take the showerbath of actuality so that he is actually
scoffed at, is actually destitute, is actually hated by the world, etc.) are like heroism in peacetime. It is as if
a soldier on the drill ground in a peaceful military exercise to capture a peewit-house assumed a martial air
like that of Daniel Rantzau in battle. What is comical about it is the martial air—and the danger is pure
nonsense, make-believe, a stage setting. Children play soldier, in peacetime men play war, and most men
play at religion. (SKS20/KJN4: NB2: 36 [JP1: 941])

If his readers are to be ‘built up’ in consequence of reading his works, the setting of the works needs to be reality,
not fantasy. Accomplishing this through writing is a really tall order, but that is Kierkegaard's project, and he strains
every nerve of his enormous talent to fill it.

What does he propose should be ‘built up’ by the aid of his writings? An answer is suggested by some of the
concepts on which his writings focus and which they aim to clarify. The two concepts that are most widely
addressed in Kierkegaard's works, both pseudonymous and signed, are faith and love. Faith is central to Fear and
Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and The
Sickness Unto Death, as well as many of the upbuilding discourses. Love is central to Either/Or, Stages on Life's
Way, Works of Love, and many of the discourses. Faith and love are two of the ‘theological virtues’ of medieval

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Christian thought (the other is of course hope). It is clear that Kierkegaard's edifying missionary purpose is
ultimately to awaken faith and love in his readers, his writings being an instrument of the work of the Holy Spirit, as
he would no doubt affirm. But auxiliary to faith and love are a number of other virtues that are explicit foci of some
of the discourses: hope,3 gratitude,4 contrition (sorrow),5 humility,6 patience,7 courage,8 honesty.9 There are also
virtues that go by the names of emotions: joy,10 fear,11 and wonder,12 for example, and trademark Kierkegaardian
virtues: soberness, earnestness, and primitivity (a somewhat misleading translation of a Danish term [Primitivitet]
which connotes being the individual God intended a person to be). These last are ethical or spiritual attitudes or
demeanours without which, according to Kierkegaard, it is not possible to exemplify the virtues that go by the more
traditional names.

Thus Christian virtues are at the very heart of Kierkegaard's literary project. In making virtues central, his work is
similar to that of classical philosophy from Socrates to the Hellenistic philosophers (Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics),
whose purpose was the practical one of making people virtuous and wise through their conversation and writing.
Speaking to the court that condemned him to death, Socrates says,

…I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say is the greatest benefit, by trying to
persuade him not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as
wise as possible, not to care for the city's possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other
things in the same way. (Plato 1997: 36c, 32)

Similarly, Aristotle declares in his Nicomachean Ethics that

…our present inquiry does not aim, as our others do, at theoria [contemplation]; for the purpose of our
examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no
benefit to us. (Aristotle 1926: 74; our translation)

Analogously, a major preoccupation of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics was to use philosophical reflection to
transform souls in accordance with one or another ideal of character or virtue (apatheia, ataraxia), set within the
context of a larger vision of reality (see Nussbaum 1994 and the essays in Seneca 1995). Pierre Hadot
summarizes: ‘It is philosophy itself that the ancients thought of as a spiritual exercise’ (Hadot 1995: 126). Hadot
emphasizes that this ‘ethical’ purpose of philosophy was not limited to the Hellenistic philosophers’ purely ethical
writings, but that they saw all aspects of their corpus as serving this purpose. Ethics was not, for them, fenced off
from metaphysics (or theology) and epistemology in the way that it may be for us, but was about an entire vision of
properly formed human life in the universe. Thus, in his ethical reflections Kierkegaard is seeking to revive not only
the Christian virtues in his reader but, in the service of these virtues, also the ancient pagan practice of reflection
(or philosophy—Kierkegaard calls himself a ‘poet-dialectician’) aimed at the spiritual transformation of human lives.

His thought about human existence resembles classical thought also in the way that he balances and integrates
passions, emotions, feelings, interests, and enthusiasms, on the one side, with thought, reflection, deliberation, and
dialectic on the other. Aristotle tells us that the moral virtues are rational dispositions with respect to both actions
and passions (Aristotle 1926: 2.6, 88–97), and Kierkegaard's persona Johannes Climacus describes the task of
becoming a Christian as ‘pathetic-dialectic’ (not ‘pathetic and dialectic’)—as a matter of both thinking correctly and
feeling correctly, of both conceptual clarity/propriety and proper passion (concerns and emotions (SKS7: 350–
2/CUP1: 385–7)). These aspects of the task are integrated. The passions are to be shaped by the thought and the
thought is to be enlivened and driven by the passions. Climacus comments that ‘in strong passions and the like, I
have material enough, and therefore pain enough in forming something good out of it with the aid of reason’. Then
in a footnote he says, ‘With these words I wish to call to mind Plutarch's splendid definition of virtue: “Ethical virtue
has the passions for its material, reason for its form.” See his little book on the virtues’ (SKS7: 150/CUP1: 161–2).
Aristotle makes virtues dispositions to rational choice, and choice a matter of desire:

…moral virtue is a choice-making state of character…choice is deliberated desire of things that are up to
us…The origin of action is choice…, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end.
Hence choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a moral disposition. (Aristotle
1926: 2.6, 1107a 1, 94, 3.3, 1113a 10–11, 140, 6.2, 1139a32–4, 328; our trans.)

By ‘moral disposition’ (hexis êthikê) Aristotle means a concern, care, interest, emotion disposition, or aim. So
Aristotle's idea, like the one from Plutarch that Climacus endorses, is that moral character is the rational formation

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of our interests, concerns, and emotion dispositions.

But what does ‘rational’ mean? What is the standard of rationality? Because Kierkegaard aims to reintroduce
Christianity to Christendom, he does not accept uncritically the standards for the rationality of concerns and
emotions that prevail in his society. To accept those standards would be to abandon his project, which involves
reintroducing standards of rationality that have been ‘forgotten’. In Two Ages, Kierkegaard says,

…it must always be kept in mind that reflection itself is not something pernicious, that on the contrary the
prerequisite for acting more intensively is the thorough kneading of reflection. Antecedent to inspired,
enthusiastic action are: first of all, the immediate, spontaneous inspiration, then the period of prudence,
which, because immediate inspiration does not deliberate, seems to be superior by virtue of its ingenuity in
deliberation, and then finally the highest and most intensive enthusiasm which follows on the heels of
prudence and therefore perceives what is the most prudent thing to do but rejects it and thereby gains the
intensity of infinite enthusiasm. (SKS8: 105/TA: 110–11)

What Kierkegaard here calls ‘prudence’ (and which might well be translated as ‘shrewdness’) is the normative
order characteristic of average everyday bourgeois practical reason: pay the least for the most, guard your
reputation, avoid dangers and maximize your safety, invest for the future, don’t make yourself a laughing stock.
Then, he says, when through careful reflection you have fully understood the prudent course of action, do not do
that, but what is right by the standards of the eternal. Then your love for the good will be properly intense and
clear-minded, because you’ll know what you’ve turned your back on.

Since Kierkegaard's ultimate aim is to foster the Christian virtues in his reader, his writings are pervaded by
juxtapositions, comparisons, and contrasts, on the supposition that one understands a way of life best by seeing
how it differs from other similar or not so similar ways of life. Without a clear view of the contrasting case, a person
is more prone to mistake his merely ethical or even aesthetic existence for the existence of a Christian. If he is in
fact not on the road toward Christian formation, a vivid presentation of his own life (the ‘stage’ he is at) in contrast
with the Christian one may ‘wake him up’. Perhaps the most obvious case of contrasting juxtaposition in
Kierkegaard's writings is Either/Or which, after richly displaying ‘aesthetic’ thinking about life in the first volume,
presents in the second volume explicit comparison of that way with the ‘ethical’ way of thinking, on such topics as
romantic and marital love, the temporal nature of human existence, and the nature of choice. As we pointed out
earlier, the notion of the ‘stages’ on life's way provides a sort of framework for all of Kierkegaard's writings; and it
works its upbuilding purpose by explicitly juxtaposing and contrasting these virtues or ways of forming the human
self.

We have also remarked about Kierkegaard's stress, in Works of Love, on the fact that Christian love is divinely
commanded. Its commanded character marks a very stark contrast, according to Kierkegaard, with the character
of romantic love and friendship. The latter kinds of love are ‘spontaneous’, being more or less natural responses to
more or less obvious qualities in the one that is loved. By contrast, Christian love is not a reaction to the beauty,
friendliness, cleverness, virtue, or other attractions of the one loved, but an obedient response to God's order that
this one should be loved—this one who may very well be ugly, surly, witless, or vicious. Nor is Christian love just
the same attitude as romantic love or friendship, except in being commanded; it is a different attitude, a different
orientation to the other, one in which one's bearing towards the neighbour is at the same time a response to God.
Romantic love and friendship do not necessarily involve any explicit response to God. But as we’ve also pointed
out, Christian love is, after all, a response to something attractive about the neighbour who may be ugly, surly,
witless, or vicious, namely the ‘inner glory’ consequent on his or her being created in God's image. The
neighbour's inner glory is a genuine attraction, but it is visible only to the one who loves in response to God's
command and in the way that is commanded; it presupposes a special way of seeing and being attracted to the
neighbour, a way that necessarily coordinates with one's love of God. And this in turn presupposes a particular
understanding of human nature, in light of the Jewish and Christian doctrine of creation.

VII. Conclusion

We have stressed chiefly two aspects of Kierkegaard's contribution to ethical thought. For him, first, all true ethics
is grounded in theology. For him, God is the creator, lawgiver, lover, and redeemer of humankind, the most
important being in the universe and thus the central focus of any well-lived human life. The highest kind of ethical

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life is thus also a religious life—a God-relationship—as he often calls it, which is at the same time a relationship with
our fellow human beings. This relationship with God and human fellows depends on a particular formation of the
human self. A person who is formed in this requisite way is disposed to take certain emotionally coloured attitudes
towards God, his neighbour, and himself, in the particular situations of his life, and in conformity with those attitudes
he is also disposed to make choices and perform actions. This ethico-religious formation of the human self has an
array of aspects that together constitute human wholeness in the individual case. Each of these aspects supplies
something that is needed for the excellence of the individual's relationships with God and fellows. In supplying what
is needed, these aspects of personality reflect the nature of God, of our human nature (both original and spoiled),
and of the kinds of situations that are generic for any human life. They go by the names of the traditional biblical
virtues: faith, hope, love, obedience, patience, humility, gentleness, self-control, courage, forbearance,
compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, contrition, joy. Kierkegaard saw the task of becoming a Christian as that of
putting on these virtues, and the task of the philosophical Christian missionary to Christendom as that of
highlighting their structure and their challenge in the most unavoidable possible way. Some of these virtues can be
acquired only by being receptive and obedient to God's law. So there is a link between Kierkegaard's emphasis on
divine commands and his focus on the virtues that we have explored as the second important aspect of
Kierkegaard's thought about ethics. In the end, ethics for Kierkegaard is all about personal transformation.

Bibliography

References

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Kierkegaard (Rock Island, IL: Augustana College Library).

Aristotle (1926). Nicomachean Ethics, Eng. trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Davenport, John J. and Rudd, Anthony (eds.) (2001). Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative,
and Virtue (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.).

Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2005). The Best Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky Including ‘Notes From the Underground’ (New
York: Modern Library).

Evans, C. Stephen (2009). Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Green, Ronald (1992). ‘Enough Is Enough: Fear and Trembling Is Not about Ethics’, in Journal of Religious Ethics
21, 191–209.

Hadot, Pierre (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Arnold I. Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell).

Kiekegaard Sören (2006). Fear and Trembling, eds. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Korsgaard, Christine, M. and Cohen, G. A. et al. (1996). The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).

Macintyre, Alsdair (1984). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press).

Nussbaum, Martha (1994). The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Plato (1997). Apology, trans. G. M. A Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett).

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1957). Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library).

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Schrader, George (1972). ‘Kant and Kierkegaard on Duty and Inclination’, in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed. Josiah Thompson (Garden City New York: Doubleday).

Seneca (1995). Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, eds. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Suggested Reading

Davenport and Rudd (2001).

Evans C. Stephen (2005). Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

—— (2009).

Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love's Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard's Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).

Gouwens David, J. (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Lippitt, John (2003). Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (London: Routledge).

Roberts, Robert (1995). ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of “Virtue Ethics” ’, in Merold Westphal and Martin
Matustik (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 142–66.

——— (1997a). ‘Existence, Emotion and Character: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard’, in Alastair Hannay and
Gordon Marino (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 177–
206.

Rudd, Anthony (1993). Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Westphal, Merold (1996). Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West
Lafayette: Purdue University Press).

Notes:

(1) All references to Fear and Trembling in this chapter will be to the translation by Sylvia Walsh (Kierkegaard
2006).

(2) See e.g. Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1967: 109; Schrader 1972: 324–5.

(3) See SKS5: 15–37/EUD: 7–30; SKS5: 185–205/EUD: 205–26; SKS5: 250–69/EUD: 253–73.

(4) See SKS5: 39–56/EUD: 31–48; SKS5: 129–42/EUD: 125–58; SKS5: 361–81/EUD: 377–401.

(5) See SKS5 391–418/TDIO 7–40.

(6) See SKS5: 269–82/EUD 275–90.

(7) See SKS5: 185–205/EUD: 181–204; SKS5: 185–205/EUD: 205–26.

(8) See SKS5: 335–60/EUD: 347–76; SKS8: 413–31/UVDS: 321–41.

(9) See SKS5: 391–418/TDIO: 7–40.

(10) See SKS8: 309–431/UDVS: 213–341.

(11) See SKS5: 391–418/TDIO: 7–40.

(12) See SKS5: 391–418/TDIO: 7–40.

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 Ethics

C. Stephen Evans
C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University. He formerly held positions at Calvin
College, St Olaf College (where he directed the Hong Kierkegaard Library), and Wheaton College. He is the author of many books,
including Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2004), Kierkegaard: An
Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford
University Press, 2010) and Divine Authority and the Foundations of Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Robert C. Roberts
Robert C. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Baylor University. He writes on topics in ethics and moral psychology and is
influenced by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. Recent books include Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge
University Press, 2003) and (with Jay Wood) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford University Press,
2007). He is currently finishing Emotions and Values, which will be published by Cambridge. He has published a dozen or so essays
on Kierkegaard, and a book on Philosophical Fragments: Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard's Philosophical
Fragments (Mercer, 1986).

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