Relation to others· Morals
The law of reason
Axis: The source of morality — What gives morality its authority?
Moral 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.
Philosophers 3
Kantexplicit
Morality rests neither on God's will nor on feeling, but on the autonomy of practical reason, which gives itself its own law. Any ground other than reason's self-legislation, whether happiness, perfection or a divine command, would make morality heteronomous: one would obey for the sake of something other than duty. God is postulated only to make possible, in the highest good, the union of virtue with proportionate happiness, never to ground moral obligation.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, II (autonomy and heteronomy) · Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic
Show inferred positions (2)
Jonasinferable
distinguishes two sides of ethics: an objective side, the ground of obligation, which he seeks in being itself and not in the will of God, on which he refuses to make an ethics meant for all depend; and a subjective side, the feeling of responsibility, which moves the will without grounding the obligation. The kinship with the law of reason lies in the rational discovery of a universal demand; but the ground is ontological, not a formal law that reason would give itself, and it is against that he has the feeling arise from the object, from the good that demands to be.
The Imperative of Responsibility, ch. II, IV
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)
- 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 - 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