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