A Gift or a Given? On the Role of Life in Løgstrup's Ethics

If we are going to give nature a place in ethics, do we have to think of it as created by a benign and intelligent creator, as otherwise it must remain normatively neutral – or can we find a basis for value and normativity in nature that is independent of any such theistic conception? This is obviously a fundamental question in ethics, with a long pedigree stretching back through history. My aim in this paper is to outline the issue as it figures in the ethics of the Danish twentieth-century theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup. I have chosen to discuss his work in this context as I think it raises the question in a particularly interesting and acute way; for as we shall see, Løgstrup very much stands at the point of tension between these two options, which has made his thinking on this issue hard to place. To some, it is obvious that he was a creation theorist, basing his ethics on the claim that our lives have been created; but to others, it is equally obvious that this is something he was committed to avoiding by offering a secular and humanistic ethics instead. My aim here is not to settle that interpretative question conclusively – which like comparable questions concerning the place of religious commitments in thinkers like Spinoza, Kant and Hegel is perhaps ultimately unresolvable – but rather to explore the options that are available, thus hopefully shedding light on the kind of complexities this question can raise.