Without Objective Morality, Is Everything Permitted? The Meme, Dostoevsky and Moral Realism

Last updated: October 21, 2026

“Without objective morality, everything is permissible” is a modern version of a line usually credited to Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the tidy English sentence “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is hard to find in that form in The Brothers Karamazov (1879 to 1880). What the novel does contain is a cluster of related lines: Ivan Karamazov argues that “There is no virtue if there is no immortality”, and his brother Mitya asks whether, without God, “All things are lawful then” (both in Constance Garnett’s translation). One of its most influential carriers was Jean-Paul Sartre, who quoted it as Dostoevsky’s in his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (Mairet translation). Whether the claim is true is a separate question, and the step from God to morality is less popular among professional philosophers than you might think: in the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, about 62 percent accepted or leaned towards moral realism, while about 67 percent accepted or leaned towards atheism.

The meme answers the question with lunch. Above a screenshot of a tweet it says, with two deliberate typos, “Without objective morality, everything si permisible”. The tweet reads “Ate half my sandwich prolly save the other half for later”, and the photo shows a long sub roll eaten along its entire length from the top, every centimetre still there, hollowed out in the wrong dimension. The joke lands because nobody needs a theory of value to feel that this is wrong, and that feeling turns out to be one of the more serious arguments in the debate.

Ivan Karamazov’s Idea, in Five Different Mouths

In The Brothers Karamazov the idea rarely comes as one tidy sentence; it travels in fragments, spoken by different characters with different motives.

At the monastery gathering in Book II, Pyotr Miüsov reports that Ivan once told a room of mostly ladies that people love each other only because they believe in immortality, and that without that belief “everything would be lawful, even cannibalism” (Book II, chapter 6). Ivan confirms it: “There is no virtue if there is no immortality.” Later, after telling Alyosha his poem of the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan says “The formula, ‘all is lawful,’ I won’t renounce”, and asks whether his brother will renounce him for it; Alyosha kisses him instead (Book V, chapter 5). In Book XI, Mitya worries aloud about what becomes of people “without God and immortal life”, and quotes a friend’s breezy reply: “a clever man can do what he likes” (Book XI, chapter 4).

Smerdyakov, the servant who killed old Karamazov, tells Ivan: “You used to say yourself that everything was lawful”, and adds that Ivan is the real murderer, Smerdyakov only his instrument (Book XI, chapter 8). That looks like the novel’s verdict on the idea: a thought that sounds clever in a monastery parlour ends in a corpse, and Ivan has to live with what someone else did with it.

Whether the famous line “exists” depends on how strict you are. On the Internet Infidels site, David Cortesi argued in 2000 that it does not appear in the Garnett text; Andrei Volkov, a native Russian speaker, replied in 2011 that the Russian of Mitya’s speech contains it word for word, split across two sentences, where Garnett chose “lawful” and Pevear and Volokhonsky “permitted”. Both agree it is a character’s line, tested by the plot. Dostoevsky did hold a version of the worry himself: in a letter to a reader, N. L. Osmidov, he asked why, without God and immortality, he should not “kill, rob, steal” (as quoted by Louis Midgley in BYU Studies). As a believer he meant it as a warning, and the novel shows what happens to people who treat it as a licence.

How Sartre Turned a Warning Into a Starting Point

Sartre accepted the conditional and turned it around: if God does not exist, everything is permitted, and that is exactly why we carry the full weight of our choices.

According to the SEP, many thousands of Parisians crowded into the lecture towards the end of 1945; the book followed in 1946. Sartre’s wording, as Philip Mairet translates it, is “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”, and he adds that “for existentialism” this is “the starting point” (marxists.org). With no God and no fixed human nature, Sartre argues, we find no values ready-made to excuse our behaviour, which is why man is “condemned to be free”. His example is a student in occupied France, torn between joining the Free French Forces in England and staying with his mother. No moral rulebook settles it, and Sartre’s advice is famously unhelpful: “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent.” Our post on Sartre and the true self has the longer version.

Nietzsche Thought the Atheists Were Cheating

Nietzsche agreed with Dostoevsky’s worriers on one thing: if you remove God, you do not get to keep the old morality for free.

In The Gay Science (1882), section 125, a madman brings the news that “God is dead” to people who already do not believe in God. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Nietzsche’s point is less that atheism is true than that a culture which has stopped believing has not yet noticed what goes with the belief: in section 343, “the whole of our European morality”. He made the charge personal in Twilight of the Idols (1889), mocking George Eliot and English freethinkers who dropped the Christian God and held on all the more tightly to Christian ethics. Christianity, he wrote, is a system, and pull out belief in God and the whole falls apart; his verdict on the English was “For Englishmen morality is not yet a problem” (Ludovici translation, “Skirmishes in a War with the Age”, 5).

Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is what follows when “the highest values devalue themselves”, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes from his notebooks. He described it as a coming crisis that might, at a terrible price, be worked through. Our posts on Nietzsche on morals and on nihilism and the search for meaning go into both halves of that project.

Moral Realism vs Anti-Realism: What “Objective Morality” Means

Moral realism is the view that moral claims state facts and that some of them are true; moral anti-realism denies at least one of those two things.

Geoff Sayre-McCord’s entry on moral realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it simply: realists hold that moral claims purport to report facts and are “true if they get the facts right”. Richard Joyce’s companion entry on moral anti-realism sorts the rivals into three families. Noncognitivists say moral judgments express attitudes and do not aim at truth at all. Error theorists say they aim at truth and “systematically fail to secure it”. Non-objectivists accept moral facts but make them depend on minds, cultures or choices. Joyce adds a detail the meme skips: anti-realism is not the same as moral scepticism, and non-objectivists can even accept moral knowledge. The word “objective” in the meme does specific work: it means facts about right and wrong that hold whatever anyone thinks.

The theist version adds a further step: objective morality needs God. Plato had already poked a hole in it. In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether the holy is “beloved by the gods because it is holy”, or holy because the gods love it (Jowett translation). If the first, goodness is independent of the gods and they are just good judges of it; if the second, morality looks arbitrary. Theists have sophisticated replies, but the dilemma helps explain why many philosophers keep realism and drop God. The survey arithmetic shows it: if about 62 percent lean realist and about 67 percent lean atheist, at least about a quarter of all respondents must be atheists who lean realist.

Nietzsche’s version of the question, whether moral values are facts or perspectives, gets its own post on Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

Mackie’s “Queer” Facts and the Error Theory

The strongest modern case against objective morality is J. L. Mackie’s error theory: moral talk aims at objective facts, and there are none.

In Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), Mackie argued that if objective values existed, they would be entities “utterly different from anything else in the universe”, and we would need a “special faculty of moral perception or intuition” to know them (p. 38, quoted in Harvard lecture notes on Mackie). An objective good would have to carry its own built-in demand, what Mackie called “to-be-pursuedness”, and he found such a property too strange to believe in; he famously called such properties “queer”, hence the name argument from queerness (SEP). His second argument, the argument from relativity, pointed to moral disagreement across cultures, which he thought was better explained by different ways of life than by some people failing to see moral facts.

This is where the meme’s logic wobbles. If the error theory is true, “everything is permissible” is false too, because “permissible” is itself a moral claim, and the same Harvard notes point out that nihilism in this sense does not imply that everything is permitted. Mackie himself did not stop at the negative thesis. The subtitle of his book says right and wrong are invented, and the philosopher Michael Ridge has argued that Mackie held some pruned moral claims to be true. A world without objective morality, on Mackie’s picture, is a world where the rules are ours to argue about.

Why Some Philosophers Trust the Gut Feeling

Ethical intuitionists answer Mackie that moral intuitions are evidence, much as perceptions are, even when nothing more basic proves them.

The tradition is a British one whose names include Henry Sidgwick and W. D. Ross, who in The Right and the Good (1930) listed basic duties such as fidelity, gratitude, justice and non-maleficence, and called such principles “evident without any need of proof” (SEP, Intuitionism in Ethics). Michael Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism (2005) grounds the view in the principle of phenomenal conservatism: if something seems true to you, you have some justification for believing it “in the absence of defeaters” (IEP, Phenomenal Conservatism). If torturing someone for fun seems wrong to you after careful thought, that seeming counts as evidence, and the burden falls on whoever says otherwise. Huemer’s critics reply that seemings can be products of upbringing, which is where the next objection starts.

The best objection is evolutionary. Sharon Street’s 2006 evolutionary debunking argument, discussed in the same SEP entry, asks why intuitions shaped by natural selection to help our ancestors survive should track objective moral truth at all. A 2019 Oxford study of ethnographic records from 60 societies by Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Mullins and Harvey Whitehouse found that seven cooperative behaviours, including helping family, returning favours and dividing resources fairly, were judged good wherever they appeared (ScienceDaily summary). Curry summed it up as “Everyone everywhere shares a common moral code.” A realist reads that as a shared perception of moral facts; a debunker reads it as evolution’s fingerprints. Helping your group is on the list too, a reminder that cooperative morality can include loyalty against outsiders.

What Follows If There Is No Objective Morality

On almost every serious position in the debate, “everything is permitted” turns out to be the one conclusion that does not follow.

Realists deny the premise, and intuitionists add that you know some acts are forbidden better than you know any clever premise. Error theorists like Mackie say that “permitted” fails along with “forbidden”, and then go on to argue about which rules to adopt. Sartre says the absence of God piles all the responsibility onto you. Nietzsche says it leaves you with work to do. The one character who acts as if everything were permitted is Smerdyakov, and his story reads as a warning about a parlour slogan taken literally by someone with a grudge.

For a different take on how ethical theories sort good from bad, read C.M. Black’s We Are the Meme: How Ethics Take Us Beyond Naughty and Nice.