The history of Western normative ethics has produced a wide range of plausible normative ethical theories that make no essential reference to God. Prominent examples include virtue ethics, consequentialism, social contract theory, Kantian ethics, Scanlonian contractualism, and care ethics. By contrast, the main theistic accounts -- divine command theory and theistic natural law theory -- have had a much harder time of it. The majority of ethicists therefore find divine command theory and theistic natural law theory among the most implausible. There are thus strong prima facie grounds for thinking normative ethics is autonomous, and thus independent of God. This is surprising on the hypothesis of orthodox monotheism, as the latter has naturally suggested to perhaps most theists that God is the ultimate ground of moral principles (which seems to be a straightforward implication of the widely-held aseity-sovereignty doctrine according to which (i) God is an absolutely independent being, dependent upon/derivative of nothing and (ii) everything distinct from God depends upon her for their existence). By contrast, the autonomy of normative ethics is not surprising on naturalism, for on the latter hypothesis, there is no such person as God, and thus there is no expectation that God is the ultimate ground of moral principles. The autonomy of ethics thus provides at least some evidence for naturalism vis-a-vis theism.
