Absurdist Ethics: How to Be Good Without Instructions

The most common objection to absurdism is ethical: if nothing matters, why be good? If the universe doesn't care, why not lie, cheat, steal? Why not be selfish?

Camus spent his entire career answering this question, and his answer is more rigorous than most critics give him credit for. It runs through The Rebel, his most ambitious philosophical work, and it lands here:

In The Rebel, Camus argues that the moment you revolt against the absurd — the moment you refuse to surrender to meaninglessness — you are implicitly asserting that something matters. And if something matters to you, you must recognize that something matters to everyone else, too. Revolt is not solitary. It's a statement about the human condition, not just your condition.

"I rebel — therefore we exist," Camus wrote. Not "I exist." We. The rebel discovers, in the act of rebellion, that they are connected to every other conscious being facing the same void.

This is the Assembly's ethical foundation: we don't behave well because God is watching. We behave well because the person next to us is pushing a rock too, and we know what that feels like.

Camus was a journalist who covered poverty, colonialism, and injustice in Algeria. He fought in the French Resistance against the Nazis. He was not a passive philosopher. His absurdism led him toward engagement, not away from it — but toward a specific kind: justice without ideology.

The Assembly follows this: we oppose cruelty not because the universe forbids it but because cruelty adds unnecessary weight to rocks that are already heavy enough. We support justice not because it's cosmically ordained but because a world with less suffering is a world where more people can push their rocks in peace. This is modest, practical, and sufficient.

The earth doesn't care about you. You should care about the earth anyway. Not because nature is sacred in some metaphysical sense — the Assembly doesn't do sacred — but because this is the only hill we have. If the hill is destroyed, there's nowhere to push. Caring for the planet is the ultimate act of long-term absurdist thinking: making sure future Sisypheans have a mountain to climb.

Camus was a Mediterranean man. The sun, the sea, the physical world — these were his sources of joy. Protecting them is protecting the conditions for the only kind of happiness he believed in: the happiness of being a body in a world, feeling the warmth, tasting the salt.

The hardest ethical question for an absurdist parent: what do you tell your children about meaning?

The Assembly's position: tell them the truth, age-appropriately, and show them what it looks like to live well without cosmic guarantees. You don't have to say "nothing matters" to a five-year-old. But you can say "we get to decide what matters." You can model joy that isn't contingent on belief. You can show them what it looks like to be kind without being commanded to.

Children are natural absurdists. They play without purpose. They love without reservation. They build sandcastles knowing the tide is coming. We don't need to teach them absurdism. We need to not teach them out of it.

Absurdist ethics are simpler than they sound: be honest. Be kind. Reduce suffering where you can. Don't add weight to other people's rocks. Revolt against cruelty the way you revolt against meaninglessness — not because you'll win, but because the revolting is the point.

The universe provides no moral instructions. That doesn't make morality impossible. It makes it yours.