Relation to others· Moralscoredifficulty
The source of morality
What gives morality its authority?
Everyone feels that some things are simply not done, but where does that demand get its force? If the good is grounded in God, a society that loses its faith risks losing its morality too, and the line ascribed to Dostoevsky looms: if God does not exist, everything is permitted. If morality rests on reason, on feeling, or on an inherited agreement, it survives secularization, but it remains to be explained why it still binds those who no longer want to play along. To take a position is to say what really upholds our duties, and what would be left of them the day that support gives way.
Grounded in God
0The good owes its authority to God: it is because a good God wills, commands, or embodies the good that our duties bind absolutely. Reason can read the moral law, but it does not ground it; without this guarantor, only preferences and calculations would remain, with nothing that truly forbids.
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The law of reason
1Moral obligation holds for every rational being: a demand that reason discovers or gives itself, like a truth that depends on no decree. Believer or not, whoever reasons runs up against the same duties; it is the universality of reason, not a higher will, that gives morality its force.
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Hegelinferable
The question here is no longer what makes an action good, but where morality draws its authority. Against the command of a transcendent God as against the purely formal law of reason, and without reducing to sentiment, Hegel roots obligation in reason become concrete: spirit objectified in the mores and institutions of a community, the Sitten from which takes its name. The authority of the good is thus immanent and historical, yet rational, not an arbitrary and revisable convention.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §142-156 (mores, Sittlichkeit)
Moral sentiment
0Morality is rooted in a natural sensibility: sympathy, pity, revulsion at the sight of suffering. Reason clarifies, compares, and corrects, but it does not create obligation; the heart is what first tells good from evil, and a shared human nature explains why moralities, beneath their variations, resemble one another so much.
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A tacit convention
0Morality rests on a tacit agreement, sedimented by a society's history: a tradition of shared judgments about what is done and what is not. Neither the law of a pure reason nor a mere impulse of the heart, this convention holds because we renew it together; its authority is real, but immanent, situated, and therefore revisable.
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- Descriptive QuestionThe Euthyphro dilemma
Is the good good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? One branch makes morality arbitrary, the other seems to make it independent of God; theologians have been seeking a way between the two ever since.
God's relation to the good - Descriptive QuestionWithout God, is everything permitted?
If no transcendent guarantor upholds our duties, do they keep their binding force, or do they become choices that can always be undone? Secularized societies put the phrase to the test every day.
morality without a guarantor
Sub-problems to deepen this axis's discussion
- DescriptiveOmnipotence and the good
If God is all-powerful, does the good depend on his will to the point that he could have commanded otherwise? Descartes ventures it for the eternal truths, Ockham for certain precepts of the moral law, and arbitrariness looms.
God's will - DescriptiveCan a feeling bind?
Observing that nature made us compassionate states a fact; concluding that we ought to be so crosses the step from is to ought. If morality is only a feeling, what do we say to someone who does not feel it?
the authority of a feeling - DescriptiveThe force of custom
Can a rule that rests only on our agreement bind someone who withdraws from it? Custom binds as long as it is shared, but the reformer who contests it seems to appeal to something beyond it.
custom - DescriptiveDoes explaining morality destroy it?
If we can tell how our values were fabricated (history, evolution, ressentiment), does their claim to the absolute collapse, or does a norm's origin say nothing about its validity?
the history of morality
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveWhere does morality get its authority?
What makes a moral criterion binding on us: reason, nature, a shared sentiment, society, or God? And if nothing grounds it, does morality still have any hold?
moralityCriterion of right action - PrescriptiveMoralDoes morality need God?
Does the good owe its value to God's will, or is it good independently of him? If God did not exist, would everything be permitted?
moralityExistence of God - DescriptiveFound, imposed, or made?
Is a norm inscribed in the nature of things, is it merely might dressed up as justice, or do we make it through a fair procedure? And can a rule that is merely constructed still bind?
the moral ruleStatus of norms (metaethics)