Today I will conclude the series “The Road to Moral Progress” in which I’ve been working to uncover the historical origins of the progressive morality that dominates higher education, most of the media, and other centers of power in the West. In this series I have been in conversation with J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In the two hundred years covered by Schneewind (1600 to 1800), moral philosophers worked to construct an alternative to the traditional morality of obedience (See the post of July 10, 2023). By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the idea of morality as obedience to authority had come into disrepute not only because of wide-spread abuse; it now seemed insulting to the freedom and dignity of humanity to demand that one rational agent submit to moral guidance from another. The search began for a moral theory in which each rational agent is self-governing.

According to the ideal of moral self-governance every rational agent has independent access to the moral knowledge they need to guide their lives and the motivation to act in keeping with this knowledge. Of the many moral philosophers that worked on this project during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I chose to focus on Hugo Grotius. But Grotius along with all the others failed to discover a satisfactory theory of self-governance (See the post of July 24, 2023). In that post I concluded:

Indeed, individuals were presumed to be competent to use their reason to discern the moral law given in nature. Nevertheless, that law—whatever its origin—was not the product of the human will. Though reason possesses power to discover the moral law, it cannot create it. Self-governance, then, does not live up to its name. As long as the moral laws we must obey derive from the will of another or from blind and purposeless nature, we are not truly self-governing. A truly self-governing agent must not only be able to discern the moral law embedded in nature but must also be the author of those laws.

It seems that early modern philosophers did not realize that implicit in their rejection of the morality of obedience is rejection of all moral sources external to the rational agent. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant drew this inference and incorporated it into his theory of autonomy.

Immanuel Kant and the Invention of Autonomy

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed a new way to reconcile maximum human freedom and dignity with the idea of obedience to moral law. Kant was the first moral philosopher to use the concept of “autonomy” in a moral theory. Before his time, it had been used in political thought to designate a sovereign state that can legislate and enforce laws within its territory. In the morality of autonomy rational agents give the moral law to themselves. Explaining the steps by which Kant developed his theory of autonomy and how previous thinkers influenced him is beyond the scope of this essay and my expertise. But I think I can state his theory in simple terms without too much distortion.

According to Kant, a truly moral act must be motivated by something more than desire for happiness, goodness, perfection, or beauty. These ends may accompany a moral act, but they are not definitive for its moral status. To be moral, an act must be done because it is right, without regard to the consequences. In other words, to act morally is to obey the moral law simply because it is the moral law.

Is Kant, then, turning his back on the ideal of self-governance and returning to the morality of obedience? No. He is reconciling the two ideals in a higher order. The moral law we obey is the law of reason, which is constitutive of human nature. It is the command legislated by the factor that constitutes us as rational agents. That is to say, this law derives from the inherent structure of reason. Kant labels it the “categorical imperative,” in opposition to a “hypothetical” imperative. The categorical imperative is an unconditional command, obedience to which is an end in itself. A hypothetical imperative is reason’s recommendation of an effective means to an end other than obedience.

The self that gives itself the moral law is a higher self, a self that is free from the deterministic forces of nature, including those of the lower aspects of human nature, which apart from the guidance of reason are irrational, blind, and chaotic. The rational self is the region of the universal and harmonious. In a way similar to mathematics and logic, its moral content is the same for all rational beings. It is as true for God as it is for human beings. The categorical imperative demands that we will for ourselves and others only what we can will as a universal law for all rational agents.

Obedience in Kant’s theory of autonomy has nothing to do with servility. We do not serve an alien authority: clergy, kings, philosophers, or even God. We obey ourselves. We are truly and fully self-governing in a way that affirms our maximum freedom and dignity.  To avoid misrepresenting Kant, however, we must remember that the “self” that governs is a transcendental self, universal reason common to all rational agents, known only through the categorical imperative. The empirical self that is governed is the lower, unruly, desiring self.

Beyond Autonomy

As we have seen, Kant’s morality of autonomy is anything but arbitrary, subjective, and indulgent. Kant reconciles the morality of obedience with human freedom and dignity by placing both the legislator and the recipient of legislation within the one human person. In self-governance, the transcendental self commands the empirical self to submit to universal reason. The moral person envisioned by Kant is a paragon of self-control, motivated solely by duty. From all accounts, Kant’s personal morality was of a strict type, almost Stoic. Nevertheless, Kant’s conclusion that maximum human freedom and dignity demand a moral theory in which human beings create their own laws is pregnant with some very un-Kantian possibilities.

Attempting to trace contemporary progressive morality back to Kant’s theory of autonomy would oversimplify matters greatly; contemporary culture was created by the confluence of many streams. However, because Kant saw clearly the radical implications of rejecting the morality of obedience, he set the benchmark for all future moral philosophies that share this rejection. Once one accepts the principle that human freedom and dignity are incompatible with obedience to external law, the only option left is to transfer the grounds and guiding principles of morality from outside to inside the human person. Kant located the guiding principle in universal reason. But many people find reason too abstract and duty too cold for their tastes. After all, should not moral action lead to individual happiness? Would not our feelings be better guides to happiness than universal reason? Why locate our true identity in a transcendental self we experience only indirectly as a legal demand when we experience directly a stable combination of tastes, feelings, and desires that urges us toward our own unique form of happiness?

Contemporary progressive morality flips Kant’s autonomy theory upside down. Instead of reason, feelings become the ruling self, the guiding principle that issues the categorical imperative, and reason becomes the obeying self, a mere instrument to serve the feelings.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As this series has made clear, working out the moral implications of attributing maximum freedom and dignity to human beings was among the central driving forces for modern moral philosophy. It seemed obvious to many thinkers that the morality of obedience is incompatible with such a view of humanity. Is there a way of escaping the moral logic that drove modern culture to the edge of nihilism?

Perhaps the way forward beyond the impasse in which we find ourselves today is to rethink the original transition from the morality of obedience to the morality of self-governance. In my opinion, we should not give up on attributing maximum freedom and dignity to human beings, and clearly a slavish type of obedience is incompatible with such a view of humanity. The first step in rethinking morality is asking from where western thinkers derived the firm conviction that human beings possess maximum freedom and dignity? To make a long story short, they derived these ideas from the Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation, salvation, and redemption. Human beings are made in the image of God and the Son of God became one of us, loved us enough to die for us, and will unite us to God in the resurrection to eternal life.

But obedience to God and moral law is also an essential part of the Christian faith. How does Christianity harmonize the maximum freedom and dignity of humanity with a life of obedience when the enlightenment thinkers could not? The one-word answer is eschatology. Christianity envisions humanity as living in two states. The present state in the body is a time of wandering and temptation, a time where faith and hope and the first fruits of the Spirit are the ways we participate in the future state. In the present life we need to trust and obey. In the future resurrection we will be endowed with eternal life and with perfect freedom and dignity. We will be united to God in a state Paul called glory, incorruptibility, and immortality (1Corinthians 15) and the Greek church fathers called theosis or divinization.

Apparently, the enlightenment thinkers collapsed the two states into one, got rid of eschatology, and attributed a kind of divinity to humanity before the time. Kant transferred the Christian tension between the present and the future states into the human person as the distinction between the empirical self and the transcendental self.

It seems to me that one of the most urgent tasks for Christian thinkers today is articulating a Christian view of the moral life in direct confrontation with bankrupt progressive culture. Such a view will demonstrate how Christianity incorporates obedience, self-control, moral law, and humility into a way of life that does far greater justice to human freedom and dignity than progressive alternatives.

In case you are interested in thinking about this project further, you can find my thoughts in two books:

1. God, Freedom & Human Dignity: Embracing a God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered World (InterVarsity Press, 2013)

2. The New Adam: What the Early Church Can Teach Evangelicals (And Liberals) About the Atonement (Cascade, 2021).