Abraham cannot be justified by ordinary ethical reasoning

Kierkegaard insists that Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac cannot be defended using the standards of universal ethics, which judge actions by whether they could be justified to anyone, on rational, shareable grounds. Killing one's innocent child fails this test completely; no rational ethical system could endorse it as praiseworthy.

He argues that if we insist on judging Abraham purely by ethical standards, we must conclude he was simply a would-be murderer, not a hero of faith, since ethics offers no category for an exception made on the basis of a private, unverifiable divine command. This is precisely Kierkegaard's point: Abraham's greatness, if it exists at all, must come from somewhere outside ethics entirely.

By refusing to soften or rationalize the story into something ethically comfortable, Kierkegaard forces readers to confront the story's actual scandal, rather than the sanitized version often taught, where the terror of the command is minimized.

Takeaway: real faith, in Kierkegaard's telling, cannot be reduced to or judged by ordinary moral reasoning.