Category Archives: Moral Philosophy

Conclusion: The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-Governance to Autonomy and Beyond

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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).

Interlude: Why Bother?

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Today I want to step back from the current series (The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-governance to Autonomy and Beyond) and address a question some of you may be asking:  Why bother with so much history? Why approach the contemporary moral climate in such a roundabout way?

Why History?

As many of you know, I am very interested—bordering on obsession—in how certain very powerful segments of contemporary culture came to think as they do about morality. But some readers may be wondering why we need to understand the historical origins of the crazy ideas that emanate from university social science, education, and literature departments. What does it matter from where Hollywood and Silicon Valley got their twisted values? Whatever their origin—you may be saying to yourself—these ideas contradict the reason and common sense of every right-thinking person: everyone knows that we are born male or female, men can’t have babies, and people are not born equal in every respect.

Indeed (you may concede), it is helpful to realize that progressive philosophy presupposes that the goal of human progress is liberation from all limits. But we don’t need to study the entire history of modern moral philosophy to see that striving toward this goal is futile. We already know that achieving it is impossible! And if the goal that drives a historical process is impossible, we can be sure that this striving has been misdirected from the beginning. So, why trace out how it went wrong?

Good Observations…

I admit that you don’t need to know the historical origin of a bad idea to see that it is illogical or immoral or empirically false or impractical. It may be only curiosity that leads some of us to ask how otherwise intelligent people could believe that a person can be born in the “wrong” body or that it is morally permissible (or even imperative) to give female hormones to an underage school boy (with or without parental consent) or to attempt by way of surgery to transform a female body into a male body. Perhaps so. But there may be more at stake than merely satisfying a curiosity.

I see your point, but consider that these ideas appear absurd to you only because you hold to a different way of looking at the world. And your worldview also has a history. You believe in the God revealed in the Bible: the all-knowing, omnipotent, all-wise, Creator of heaven and earth, the author of the moral law, and the hope of the world. You were taught to accept the limits imposed by the Creator, to trust God even when you do not understand God’s ways, and to worship God alone. Judged by this worldview, the modern progressive view—that we ought to aspire to divine status—appears not only rebellious, disobedient, and immoral but absurd, insane, and suicidal! Viewed through this lens, we see that the divisions in contemporary culture result not merely from the clash of a few contradictory moral ideas but from the collision of two diametrically opposed worldviews.

You may suggest, then, that the most reasonable response to the errors of progressive culture is to preach the Christian gospel and explain the worldview implicit therein and call for conversion. For only then can people see what is wrong with progressive moral philosophy. I agree with this strategy up to a point. Each misguided moral perspective makes sense only when placed within the complete progressive worldview. Likewise, Christian morals make sense only within the Christian worldview. Challenging each progressive absurdity individually will probably be ineffective. Complete conversion is needed.

To share Christianity effectively with some people, however, it may be necessary to explain the historical origins of the progressive worldview. Most progressive-leaning people are not postmodern philosophers or social science professors who incessantly quote postmodern philosophers—usually, I might add, without understanding them. They are not Hollywood actors or tech industry workers who say whatever they need to say to fit into their corporate cultures. Nor are they politicians who do whatever it takes to hold together a progressive coalition. For the most part they are college educated professionals whose main impulse is to conform to the trends dominant among other college educated professionals. Their moral beliefs are an unstable mixture of progressive and traditional ideas.

Reasons for Studying History

How might learning about the historical origins of contemporary progressive philosophy help people to rethink their progressive ideas? Three ways come to mind:

1. It dispels the illusion that progressive ideas are self-evident.

When everyone around us voices progressive ideas, the rewards for conformity are great and the punishment for nonconformity is severe. We have little motivation to question them. But the study of history demonstrates the contingency of progressive morality. Chance and circumstance—not merely reason and goodwill—contributed to the construction of progressive culture. When a way of thinking loses the aura of self-evidence, we are forced to ask the question of its truth.

2. Understanding the genesis of the progressive worldview frees us to ask where it might lead in the future.

I admit the difference between historical development of an idea and the logical unfolding of an idea. Logic is timeless; history is temporal. History does not necessarily follow the path of logical implication. Chance and human freedom and caprice also influence the flow of history. Nevertheless, there is a certain resemblance between logical and historical movement. Each generation tends to modify or contradict or extend the ideas of preceding generations. One generation argues that belief in human dignity demands freedom from kings and priests. The next generation demands freedom from all traditional moral rules, and the next asserts freedom from God and nature. What’s next? Where will it all lead?

3. Historical study places before us a decision between two starkly different worldviews and ways of living.

As I said above, most people hold to a mixture of progressive and traditional beliefs. Studying the origin and historical development of progressivism demonstrates that these two types of beliefs are incompatible. Progressive moral values presuppose a progressive worldview and traditional beliefs presuppose a traditional worldview. The history that led to the creation of contemporary progressive culture gradually replaced God, Christ, and creation with humanity, science, and technology. Perhaps the study of history will help some people see that these two worldviews are incompatible. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose between them and reform your life accordingly.

The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-Governance to Autonomy and Beyond (Part Two)

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This essay is part two of a series I began on July 10, 2023 in which I am pursuing the question of the origin of the moral climate that dominates large segments of modern society. Before the modern era, the ideal moral person dutifully conformed to the moral tradition handed them by their forbearers. The church was the chief guardian and the clergy were the main interpreters of this tradition. People were expected to obey their betters or else.

Note: As in part one of this series, also in this essay I am relying on J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In addition, I will use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s (SEP) entry on “Hugo Grotius” written by Jon Miller. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grotius/

What is Self-Governance?

Around the year 1600 confidence in the authority of tradition and the church began to wane. Moral philosophers began to seek ways to replace tradition and the clergy with other sources of moral knowledge and establish another ideal for a moral person. That other ideal was self-governance, that is to say, the view that every rational agent has independent access both to the moral knowledge they need to guide their lives and to the motivation to act in keeping with this knowledge.

None of the early architects of the morality of self-government denied the existence of God. Practically all of them believed that a creator God was necessary to morality. However, they focused not on supernaturally revealed moral law but on the moral guidance woven into the created order and in human nature. Human beings possess the power of reason, which enables them to discover the moral law embedded in nature.

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645): Pioneer of Self-Governance

As an example of the change from the ideal of obedience to that of self-governance, we can examine the thought of the Dutch lawyer and statesman Hugo Grotius. Hugo Grotius transformed the medieval moral law theory into a modern one. His works were studied for 200 years after his death and even today he is still recognized as the father of international law. According to Jon Miller [“Hugo Grotius” (SEP)], we can get a handle on Grotius’s moral theory by looking at his answers to four questions about the nature of morality, questions about the source, contents, obligatory force, and scope of moral law.

What is the source of the moral law?

As I said above, no early modern moral philosopher denied the existence of God. Nor did Grotius do so; nevertheless, he did not want to root our knowledge of the moral law in a source accessible only by faith in divine revelation. He makes this clear in a famous (or infamous) passage:

What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede [etiamsi daremus] that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him (Quoted in Miller, SEP).

To discover the moral law, we must look at nature. “The mother of right—that is, of natural law”—Grotius explains, “is human nature” (Quoted in Miller, SEP). In another place he says,

The law of nature is a dictate of right reason, which points out that an act, according as it is or is not in conformity with rational nature, has in it a quality of moral baseness or moral necessity; and that, in consequence, such an act is either forbidden or enjoined (Quoted in Miller, SEP).

Clearly, viewing nature as the repository and reason as the measure of the moral law gives plausibility to the idea of self-governance.

What is the specific content of the moral law?

According to Grotius, we find two contrary drives in human nature, the drive for self-preservation and the need for fellowship with other human beings. The challenge of living successfully in human society is finding a way to harmonize these two seemingly contrary drives. For Grotius, the system of rules that harmonizes, or at least balances, these two forces is the law of nature. And this system of rules must be discovered by empirical observation and study of human behavior. It cannot be derived deductively from first principles.

The theoretical status of moral law, in the Grotian understanding of it, has more in common with the empirical sciences than it does with theology or metaphysics.

What gives moral law is obligatory force?

If the moral law is merely a set of rules that balances self-interest and sociability, what gives it the force of obligation? The laws that govern the physical world do not obligate human beings to obey them. If moral rules are merely guides for living successfully in the world, why do we incur guilt by breaking them? Is morality no more than prudence and enlightened self-interest? According to Schneewind (pp. 73-75), Grotius never answered this question. He merely asserts that some acts are inherently good and some inherently evil and that we should do good and avoid evil. But if you ask why we should prefer good over evil, the answer seems to be that doing good will lead to success in living and doing evil will lead to failure. Whence then the obligation?

What is the scope of moral law?

According to Grotius, the moral law applies to every human being. Since all (or most) human beings are rational and social and have independent access to the law of nature, everyone falls under the jurisdiction of the moral law. Religious disagreements, class differences, and other distinctions between human beings do not lessen the binding nature of moral law.

The Instability of Self-Governance

As time passed, the Grotian concept of self-governance proved unstable. It contained inner contradictions that eventually caused its dissolution. Originally, the ideal of self-governance was opposed to obedience. Obedience had to be rejected because it divided human beings into those who commanded and those who obeyed, masters and servants, learned and ignorant…all to the detriment of the ideals of universal human dignity and freedom. Self-governance promised to do greater justice to human dignity and freedom.

But the concept of self-governance could not completely rid morality of obedience to an alien law and obligations not imposed on oneself. 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. The name given to this type of moral ideal is autonomy, which means something like “law unto oneself.”

Next Time: The Invention of Autonomy

The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-Governance to Autonomy and Beyond

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In a previous essay (“At the Edge of Ruin,” June 22, 2023), I shared some insights I received from reading J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In that essay I reflected on the significance of the tension between voluntarism and intellectualism in the history of modern moral philosophy. In passing I mentioned Schneewind’s compressed summary of that history: from obedience to self-governance to autonomy. Today, I want to begin a brief series using this summary as a window into the soul of contemporary culture.

Morality in General

As preparation for comparing and contrasting these three views of the ideal moral life, let’s make some generalizations about morality. Every moral ideal must answer certain questions about the nature of morality:

(1) What is the ground of the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad?

(2) How can we discern what is right and good in life’s circumstances?

(3) What is the proper motivation to act in a right and good way?

(4) What is freedom?

(5) What is the nature and extent of human dignity.

Obedience

In the Bible and for most of Christian history, the ideal moral stance of the individual was a spirit of humble obedience to God’s commands. Human beings stand under divine authority and God has graciously revealed his wise and good will. The first verse of Psalm 119 pronounces a blessing on those “who walk according to the law of the Lord,” and the hymn continues to praise God’s laws for 175 more verses. The Old Testament book of Proverbs begins with this maxim: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (1:7). The Lord promises to bless Abraham, not only because he believed (Gen 15:6 and Romans 4:3), but also because he “obeyed me and did everything I required of him, keeping my commands, my decrees and my instructions” (Gen 26:5). The New Testament also exalts the life of obedience. Jesus does the “will” of his Father (John 4:34, Matt 26:35, 42). He “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Hebrews 5: 8b). And obedience to God’s will remains an ideal in the life of the Christian.

Obedience in Practice

The ideal of obedience answers the questions above in the following way: In the Bible and in traditional Christian moral theology, (1) God’s holy character and good will determine what is right and wrong and good and bad. (2) Human beings, being blinded by pride, misdirected desires, and limited knowledge, need divine guidance and wisdom to discern the right and good way. God knows perfectly his character and will and in various ways has communicated to us what is right and good. (3) Human beings ought to be motivated to obey God as a response to his perfect character and his love demonstrated in creation and in Christ. However, the Bible also warns of the destructive consequences of disobedience that follow naturally from misdeeds or that are inflicted by the divine Judge. (4) In the Bible, freedom is the removal of all impediments that hinder the soul from knowing and loving God and conforming to the divine life. True freedom is found only through union with Christ in the power of the Spirit. Faithful obedience to God’s will in the present anticipates the future realization of perfect freedom. (5) For Christianity, true human dignity or worth is grounded in God’s plan to share his eternal life and power with his human children. There is no greater dignity than to be a child of God. Obedience is our way of stepping into the character of that future eternal life insofar as possible in the present life.

Obedience Abused

By 1600, however, the ideal of obedience had come into disrepute in the eyes of many moral philosophers. In the medieval church, the ideal of faithful obedience to God’s will was used to justify the demand that the people obey the clergy and the Christian state. The people were expected to obey without question their “betters” in spiritual and secular matters. In the century of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke (1609-1690), however, demands for blind, “servile” obedience to authority seemed more and more out of step with the progress of reason. Galileo had demonstrated by empirical evidence that the earth orbits the Sun, and Newton had discovered the mathematical laws of celestial motion. Descartes proposed that all knowledge be grounded in the human mind’s power to establish a point of certainty within itself. Hobbes and Locke, each in his own way, proposed that rational analysis of human nature itself could discover moral principles sufficient to found a governmental order and legitimate its exercise of coercive power. In this climate many thinkers were searching for a new understanding of morality to replace obedience to authority. The stage was set for the new moral ideal of self-governance to make its appearance.

To be continued…

At the Edge of Ruin

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I have been engaged in a decades-long quest to understand the philosophical assumptions that have driven Western culture, especially in the United States of America, to the brink of moral anarchy and metaphysical nihilism. I have read shelves of books in service of this quest. For the past six months I have been reading J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998) . There are very few books I think worth careful reading even once, and I could count the number of books worth reading twice on my fingers and toes. Schneewind’s book is among the latter. I read it very carefully in the spring and I am over halfway through my second reading at present.

In 554 dense pages, Schneewind analyses the thought of hundreds of thinkers. It would be foolish of me to attempt to map the bewildering variety of theories. Nevertheless, I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned from reading this history about those contemporary assumptions driving us to ruin.

The Quest of Modern Moral Philosophy

Schneewind marks the beginning of the distinctly modern approach to morality with the career of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and ends the story with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Before modernity, moral theology and philosophy were not distinguished to the point of becoming separate spheres of knowledge and distinct academic disciplines. Until around 1600 the dominant approach to morality was obedience to authority. In the century and a half between Grotius and Kant the disciplines split apart and the dominant approach shifted progressively from obedience to authority (that is, to God, state, and church) to self-governance, and finally to autonomy (self-legislation).

What prompted the development of a distinctively modern moral philosophy? To oversimplify but not falsify matters, the Protestant Reformation (1517 and following) provoked a crisis of faith, gave birth to philosophical skepticism, and disrupted the moral and political order in Europe. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) articulated this new skepticism in a sophisticated and fashionable way. In a collection of essays, he advised his generation on how to live well in a culture where everything is doubtful. In response to the religious conflict and the skepticism this struggle provoked, Grotius and those who followed in his wake worked to articulate a moral philosophy that could be agreed upon by people who differed greatly in religion. This objective energized a line of thinkers that lead from Grotius to Hobbes to Locke to Kant.

The Great Debate

According to Schneewind, the moral philosophers working on this project fall into many conflicting and overlapping schools of thought. But almost all of them fall on one side or another of the great debate between voluntarism and intellectualism, which has roots in late medieval philosophy. Voluntarism argues that the distinctly moral nature of an action is grounded in (and only in) the command of a superior. Obligations and duties, the distinctions between right and wrong and justice and injustice are created by (and only by) the commands of a superior. The motives for obeying the laws thus promulgated are fear of punishment and desire for reward. Voluntarism can take shape in theological or secular forms. Theological voluntarists (William of Ockham) argue that God and human beings do not share a common moral world. Right actions are right because God commands them, not because they conform to God’s moral nature. Secular voluntarists (Hobbes) argue that what is obligatory is determined by the legislation of the state. There is no law before or above the state.

 Intellectualism argues that the distinctly moral nature of an action is rooted in the eternal nature of a moral universe shared by God and other rational creatures. The distinctions between right and wrong and justice and injustice are unchangeably present in the eternal nature of things. Obligations and duties arise from the inner necessity of reason to conform to truth. We are rightly motivated to moral action by the impetus of reason to conform to the rational order. For some intellectualists God plays an essential role in their philosophy. Leibniz (1646-1716), for example, understands God as the most perfect being and views moral action (divine and human) as seeking under the guidance of reason to increase perfection in the world. Loving God is the most rational act possible for a human being. Secular leaning intellectualists set aside the question of God and ground moral action in the autonomous moral order.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Voluntarists criticize intellectualists for subordinating God to a moral order that exists independent of the divine will and choice. God’s power and freedom, voluntarists charge, are limited if God and all rational beings share an eternal moral universe. Additionally, if human beings share a moral universe with God, they can know the divine mind simply by reflecting on their own minds. And this theoretical overlap between the divine mind and the human mind opens the possibility of deification of the human mind, making God irrelevant to morality, and grounding the right in the human essence.

On the other hand, the intellectualists criticize voluntarists because they apparently make the divine nature and will inscrutable and arbitrary. As far as we can know, the voluntarist God is beyond good and evil as we understand them. God is pure power and must be obeyed for that reason alone. Additionally, a state based on the voluntarist philosophy would be by definition tyrannical.

There were many thinkers in this 150-year history that attempted to avoid the extremes of both voluntarism and intellectualism by weaving into their systems elements of both. Immanuel Kant’s concept of autonomy can be considered an attempt of this kind. Autonomy is the idea that rational beings legislate laws for themselves not by an act of will but by an act of reason, which they are obligated to obey.

What Failure Teaches

Early modern moral philosophers were searching for a rational theory of morality that could overcome doubt about the reality of a moral order in an age when traditional authorities no longer commanded universal respect. They wished to reestablish the consensus of culture that had been destroyed by the Reformation and the religious wars that followed. Their failure to find compelling grounding for morality and the exposure of the limits and problems of both voluntarism and intellectualism raised the real possibility that morality has no grounding at all.

I find it significant that no philosopher discussed in Schneewind’s history attempted to create a new morality or rejected all moral rules. All accepted the necessity of the rules that make for social peace and cooperation as well as many other traditional moral rules. Philosophers in this era, instead of taking traditional moral rules for granted or accepting them on authority, felt compelled to establish the grounds of their truth, discover how we know them, and pinpoint what motives should compel us to live according to them. They understood themselves as apologists for a moral order they thought necessary for the continuance of civilization.

However, by acknowledging that traditional rules cannot (rationally) and should not (morally) be accepted on authority or taken for granted as traditional and by failing in their quest to establish morality by reason alone, they unwittingly opened theoretical space for the idea that there are no moral structures that transcend and define the limits of individual actions.

At the Edge of Ruin

In the 225 years since Immanuel Kant, hundreds of other moral philosophers worked on the Grotius-to-Kant project. The also failed. Twentieth-century existentialism (Jean Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir) and a variety of post-modern theories are premised on the failure of the project. If morality cannot be grounded and justified by traditional authority or universal reason, and if intellectualism and voluntarism destroy each other, the only ground left for justifying anything like morality is within the inner world of the unique individual. In analogy to intellectualism, the individual’s inner world replaces the universal moral order and in analogy to voluntarism, the individual’s desires replace the will of God or the laws legislated by the state. The particular desires, feelings, sense of self, wishes, and aspirations of the individual guide that individual in their external behavior. Authenticity—that is the fit between external behavior and internal desire—replaces conformity to authority- or reason-based rules.

In view of the general skepticism in Western society toward a traditional or rational moral order, we are taught in schools and in the media, not respect for moral law and rational order, but respect for the inscrutable and arbitrary inner world of the individual. What is not acknowledged is that apart from integration into the external moral and rational order, the inner world of the individual is chaotic, irrational, and self-contradictory. Hence to affirm the inner world of the individual as the basis of the moral order is to embrace the ruinous nightmare so feared by the early modern moral philosophers. Not only are the rules necessary for social peace and cooperation left ungrounded, it becomes thinkable that an individual may justifiably refuse to live by them if they do not fit harmoniously with their inner world.

At the edge of ruin…that is where we live today.