CHAPTER 1O RELIGION, LAW, AND POLITICS

“’If God is dead, everything is permitted.’ Those who have begun by identifying morality with a
body of divine commands naturally conclude that if there were no God, there could be no
moral rules or principles.” (p. 227)

“However, it may still be argued that religion is needed to complete morality, to make it more
secure or more satisfactory than it could be on a secular basis alone.” (Ibid.)

“One problem is ‘the dualism of practical reason’. On the one hand it is rational to act morally;
on the other hand it is rational to pursue one’s own long-term interests.” (Ibid.)

“Paley, perhaps, offered the neatest package, defining virtue as ‘the doing g^ood to mankind, in
obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness’, which definition, as he
says, makes the good of mankind the subject, the will of God the rule, and everlasting
happiness the motive of human virtue.” (Ibid.)

“But even if we do not put it in so crudely mercenary a way, it is clear that belief in an
omnipotent and benevolent God, who both makes moral demands on men and is concerned for
their welfare, would entail that there is no practical discrepancy between what is morally good
and what conduces to the most genuine happiness.” (Ibid.)

“Kant, having argued that there can be no sound speculative proof of the existence of God,
thought that there is a cogent moral argument for this conclusion, that since God is needed to
ensure the ultimate union of virtue and happiness. his existence can be established as a.
necessary presupposition of moral thought.” (p. 228)

“If the assertion of the existence of God is a factual claim. it cannot be given its sole or basic
warrant by the desire to reconcile the two primary judgements that we are inclined to make in
the sphere of practical reason.” (Ibid.)

“In any case, the dualism would be acute only if the two principles. that it is rational to act
morally and that it is rational to try to maximize one’s own total happiness. were taken as
objectively prescriptive truths. as commanding. categorically and authoritatively. what are
sometimes incompatible courses of action. But I have argued that nothing has this status.”
(Ibid.)

“The rationality of prudence consists in the fact that a man is more likely to flourish if he has. at
any one time. some concern for the welfare of later phases of this same human being, and that
evolution, social tradition. and individual experience and training have encouraged and
‘reinforced’ this egoistic prudential concern.” (p.229)

“On our view of morality, we can defend only nearly absolute principles. But a theist can
believe that strictly absolute variants of these are commanded by God, and that we both must
and can safely obey them even when from the point of view of human reason, the case against
doing so seems overwhelming: we can rely on God to avert or somehow put right the
disastrous consequences of a ‘moral’ choice. But though a theist can believe this, it would
gratuitous for him to do so without a reliable and explicit revelation of such absolute
commands.” (Ibid.)

“If he had to work by inference from general assumptions, he. could not reasonably ascribe to
God any more complete an absolutism than a secular moralist could construct using the same
empirical data. And unless it can be shown independently that there is some merit in an
unqualified absolutism, it is no advantage for theism that it makes it barely possible to hold
such a view.” (Ibid.)

“It would also seem to entail that obedience to moral rules is merely prudent but slavish
conformity to the arbitrary demands of a capricious tyrant. Realizing this, many religious
thinkers have opted for the first alternative. But this seems to have the almost equally
surprising consequence that moral distinctions do not depend on God any more than. say,
arithmetical ones, hence that ethics is autonomous and can be studied and discussed without
reference to religious beliefs, that we c:an simply close the theological frontier of ethics.” (p.
230)

“But the dilemma has these stark alternative consequences only if we assume that moral
qualities come in one piece, as unanalyzable atomic units, which must simply be assigned to
one place or another, as being either wholly independent of or wholly constituted by the will of
God.” (Ibid.)

“In fact, we can take them apart. It might be that there is one kind of life which is, in a purely
descriptive sense, most appropriate for human beings as they are - that is, that it alone will fully
develop rather than stunt their natural capacities and that in it, and only in it, can they find the
fullest and deepest satisfaction. It might then follow that certain rules of conduct and certain
dispositions were appropriate (still purely descriptively) in that they were needed to maintain
this way of life.” (Ibid.)

“All these would then be facts as hard as any in arithmetic or chemistry, and so logically
independent of any command or prescriptive will of God, though they might be products of the
creative will of God which, in making men as they are, will have made them such that this life,
these rules, and these dispositions are appropriate for them.” (Ibid.)

“But, further, God might require men to live in this appropriate way, and might enjoin
obedience to the related rules. This would add an objectively prescriptive element to what
otherwise were hard, descriptive, truths, but in a quite non-mysterious way: these would be
literally commands issued by an identifiable authority.” (p. 231)

“Finally, it might be that though it is a hard fact that this life, these rules, and these dispositions
are appropriate for men, this fact is not completely accessible to direct human investigation;
men cannot by observation and experiment discover exactly what life is ultimately most
satisfying for them; but given that God knows this, desires that they should so live, and has
somehow revealed corresponding explicit instructions to them, men can reasonably resort to
such revelations to infer this indirectly, so as to complete their determination of this required
and ultimately satisfying life.” (Ibid.)

“This theory is at least coherent; and in the face of it the dilemma falls apart. The descriptive
component of moral distinctions is logically independent of God’s will: God approves of this
way of life because it is, in a purely descriptive sense, appropriate for men. But the prescriptive
component of those distinctions is constituted by God’s will.” (Ibid.)

2. Contacts and overlaps between morality and law

“The view of the status of ethics for which I have argued in the first part of this book is well
illustrated by the analogy of law. Most people would agree that laws are made, whether
explicitly by legislators, or surreptitiously by judges, or informally by tradition and custom.” (p.
232)

“This amounts to saying that all law is positive law: it is law wholly in and by being 'posited’ by
some society or institution, though not necessarily by a legislature or ‘sovereign’. But there is a
contrary view, that behind positive law there is natural law, that some legal principles are valid
in themselves without having to be made, and are therefore valid at all times and in all
communities, that they can be discovered by reason, and moreover that they control and limit
positive law: what purports to be the law of the land is really so only if it is made in ways that
agree with principles of natural law, and it can be determined not to be the Jaw after all, no
matter what the legislature or anyone else has said, if it is shown to violate natural justice.” (p.
233)

“The doctrine of natural law is clearly an analogue of objectivism in ethics.” (Ibid.)

“Natural law itself has sometimes been seen as being intrinsically objectively prescriptive. at
other times as deriving its prescriptive component from divine command.” (Ibid.)

“The argument of this book therefore has, as a corollary. the rejection of the doctrine of natural
law as a philosophical theory. Whether it is. none the less. a useful fiction is a further question.
and one to which no general answer can be given.” (Ibid.)

“A question often discussed is whether the law should enforce morality. Taken literally, this
question has an absurdly simple answer: great parts of what both the criminal and the civil law
enforce, at all times and in all states, are also requirements of morality - not killing or assaulting
other people, honesty, respect for property and for other rights, the keeping of agreements,
and contributing in various ways to a community's organized joint purposes. In all such matters
some restraints on individual inclination are needed if men are to live tolerably together.” (p.
234)

“The real question, therefore, is whether the morality of one part of a society should be legally
reinforced in its attempt to extend itself to other parts, or whether a morality which enjoys
widespread lip service should be supported by the law against one by which people live but
which they are ashamed to avow.” (Ibid.)

“Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which
determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who' adhere to
them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike.” (p. 235)

“But in practice this would either force resistance to the imposed morality into the open, and so
transform the second situation into the first, from which point the argument would go on as
before, or, more probably, spread the hypocrisy further so that it infected the machinery of law
enforcement as well. Experience has shown that such corruption is the usual result of an
attempt to enforce a morality that enjoys almost universal support on the surface of which
some considerable part is insincere.” (Ibid.)

3. Political applications and extension of morality

“If politics is the general theory of how human communities function and can flourish, then (as
Aristotle saw) ethics is a part of politics. Equally, if ethics is the general theory of right and
wrong in choices and actions, and of what is good or bad in dispositions and interpersonal
relations and ways of living, then political activities and aims and decisions come within its
scope. In any case, the two cannot be kept apart.” (p. 235)

“The choice of political goals belongs to morality in the broad sense:it goes with views about
the good life for man. But since there will always be divergent conceptions of the good,
different preferred kinds of life, a good form of society must somehow be a liberal one, it must
leave open ways in which different preferences can be realized.” (p. 236)

“No doubt there are extreme forms of injustice and exploitation which, if they persist, will give
rise to disastrous civil, international. and inter-racial wars. But there is more than one kind of
exploitation, and the very means used to remove one can themselves turn into another.” (p.
237)

“Conflicts of interest are real, inevitable, and ineradicable. There is no question of doing away
with them, but it is increasingly important that they should be limited and contained.” (Ibid.)

“There is clearly scope and need for political and especially international applications and
extensions of something like morality in the narrow sense. But more specific techniques of
negotiation and coercion have to be developed and strengthened, and gradually increasing
reliance on them is one factor that may make them more reliable.” (Ibid.)

“One important aid - we can hardly call it a device, for surely no-one needed to devise it - in the
containment and adjustment of conflicts is that those who are active in affairs. and also those
who control or influence them, should understand what is going on and think clearly and
reasonably about it.” (Ibid.)

“A first step is made when both sides see that there are points of view from which each of the
rival descriptions makes some sense. A second, harder, but necessary step is made if they can
each see some force in the opposing point of view, that is, give some weight to the values and
ideals that underlie the aims of their opponents - in other words, introduce into their thinking a
bit of what we called in Chapter 4 the third stage of universalization.” (p. 238)

“Conflicts can be of two kinds: those that have an independent source in a prior clash of
interests, and those that are selfsustaining, where each party’s fear and distrust of the other is
itself the motive for the behaviour that gives the other party good reason to fear and distrust
it.” (Ibid.)

“Of its own accord this second pattern can generate steadily increasing tension. What is
needed, but harder to find, is a supplementary mechanism that will put the process into reverse
and gradually reduce the artificial tension, leaving only the independent, prior clash of
substantive interests to be adjusted.” (Ibid.)

“Admittedly what political problems require is not merely applications but also extensions of
these long established devices, and it is not clear what the appropriate extensions are; but in
seeking them we may be aided by a clearer understanding of the character and working of
existing morality.” (p. 239)

“Indeed, there may be a significant disanalogy here. In so far as the objectification of moral
values and obligations is not only a natural but also a useful fiction, it might be thought
dangerous, and in any case unnecessary, to expose it as a fiction. This is disputable. But what is
not disputable is that for the changes and political extensions that are now necessary we
cannot rely on the past achievements of evolution and social tradition, nor have we time to let
them grow by a future process of natural selection.” (Ibid.)