In modern ethical treatises we find hardly any mention of God; and the idea that if there really is a God, his commandments might be morally relevant is wont to be dismissed by a short and simple argument that is generally regarded as irrefutable. 'If what God commands is not right, then the fact of his commanding it is no moral reason for obedience, though it may in that case be dangerous to disobey. And if what God commands is right, even so it is not God's commanding it that makes it right; on the contrary, God as a moral being would command only what was right apart from his commanding it. So God has no essential place in the foundations of morals.'
The use of this argument is not confined to a recent or narrowly local school of philosophers; it was used by the British Idealists when they dominated British philosophy, and, as we shall see, it was used much earlier than that. Nor is its use confined to people who do not believe in God; on one occasion when I attacked the argument, my chief opponents were not atheists but professing Christians. This is not surprising; for the argument was used by Christians of an earlier generation, the Cambridge Platonists, as a stick to beat that dreadful man Hobbes with. (I shall have more to say about Hobbes later on.) And they in turn got the argument from Plato's Euthyphro.
Let me summarize that dialogue. Euthyphro and Socrates are discussing the trial in which Euthyphro is to appear as prosecutor of his own father. Euthyphro's father had tied up a peasant who killed another peasant in a drunken brawl, notified the authorities, thrown the prisoner into a ditch, and put the matter out of his mind; meanwhile the prisoner died of hunger and cold. Euthyphro (Mr. Right-mind, as Bunyan might have called him) feared lest the gods might punish him if he sat at meat with a man who had done such a deed, unless he set matters right by prosecuting the offender. He must have known that this would be an ineffectual gesture; the old-fashioned Homeric idea that Zeus will punish men for callous insolence to the poor was not going to impress the Athenian court.
Socrates (that is, I presume, Plato) finds it outrageous that a man prosecutes his own father over the death of a no-good peasant (he reiterates this term 'thes' to rub it in how little the man's death mattered) and he tries to dissuade Euthyphro by tricky arguments, in a style much admired and imitated by modern moral philosophers. Euthyphro is easily tied in knots by asking him whether pious deeds are pious because they please the gods, or please the gods because they are pious deeds; whether men ever disagree except about moral matters, for which there is no decision procedure like arithmetical calculation or physical measurements; and so on. But Mr. Right-mind is not convinced; again and again he cuts himself loose from these dialectical knots with the assertion that it doesn't matter who was the murderer and what relation he was to the prosecutor and whether the victim was a peasant, but only whether a man was foully done to death in a way that all the gods must hate. The dialogue ends with Euthyphro telling Socrates he has no more time for discussion and going off on his legal business.
Was this, as the received view represents, a victory for Socrates? Or was it a victory for simple piety over sophistical tricks? Euthyphro admittedly had one weak point: he believed in many gods who were sometimes at variance with one another and so might command different things. But this is irrelevant for our purposes; for Euthyphro's unswerving fidelity to the divine law would be no less objectionable to modern moral philosophers if he had believed in one God. The main issue is whether a man's moral code ought to be influenced in this way by beliefs about Divine commands.
In the first place, I want to reject a view—which some Christians have at least approached—that all our appraisals of good and bad logically depend on knowledge of God. To get a clear and indisputable example I shall take a bad sort of act. For there is a logical asymmetry between good and bad acts: an act is good only if everything about it is good, but may be bad if anything about it is bad; so it might be risky to say we knew an act to be good sans phrase, rather than to have some good features. But there is no such risk in saying that we know certain kinds of act to be bad. Lying, for example, is bad, and we all know this; giving a man the lie is a deadly insult the world over.
If a philosopher says he doubts whether there is anything objectionable in the practice of lying, he is not to be heard. Perhaps he is not sincere in what he says; perhaps his understanding is debauched by wickedness; perhaps, as often happens to philosophers, he has been deluded by a fallacious argument into denying what he really knows to be the case. Anyhow, it does not lie in his mouth to say that here I am abandoning argument for abuse; there is something logically incongruous, to use Newman's phrase, if we take the word of a Professor of Lying that he does not lie. Let me emphasize that I am not saying a sane and honest man must think one should never lie; but I say that, even if he thinks lying is sometimes a necessary evil, a sane and honest man must think it an evil.
Now it is logically impossible that our knowledge that lying is bad should depend on revelation. For obviously a revelation from a deity whose 'goodness' did not include any objection to lying would be worthless; and indeed, so far from getting our knowledge that lying is bad from revelation, we may use this knowledge to test alleged revelations. Xenophanes rejected traditional Greek religious beliefs because the gods were represented as liars and cheats; and (if Browning could be trusted) it would be a fatal objection to the claims of the Druses' Messiah Hakim that he commanded his followers to lie about their religion under persecution. It is not that it would be too dreadful to believe in mendacious deities; a revelation destroys its own credibility if it is admitted to come from deities or from a prophet who may lie. We know lying to be bad before needing to examine any alleged revelation. Sir Arnold Lunn has jeered at unbelievers for esteeming truthfulness apart from any supernatural hopes or fears, and has quoted with approval a remark of Belloc that one can't be loyal to an abstraction like truth; a pagan Greek would have retorted that Lunn and Belloc were akolastoi, incorrigibly wicked
, if they could not see directly the badness of lying.The knowledge of God is thus not prerequisite to our having any moral knowledge. I shall argue however that we do need it in order to see that we must not do evil that good may come, and that this principle actually follows from a certain conception of God. If I can make this out, the sophistry from which I started will have been completely refuted; for accepting or rejecting this principle makes an enormous difference to one's moral code.
I must first clear up an ambiguity in the phrase 'doing evil that good may come'. We cannot ask whether e.g. Caesar's death was a good or bad thing to happen; there are various titles under which it may be called good or bad. One might very well say e.g. that a violent death was a bad thing to happen to a living organism but a good thing to happen to a man who claimed divine worship, and this would again leave it open whether doing Caesar to death was a good or bad thing to do for Brutus and the rest. Now when I speak of 'not doing evil that good may come', what I mean is that certain sorts of act are such bad things to do that they must never be done to secure any good or avoid any evil. For A to kill a man or cut off his arm is not necessarily a bad thing to do, though it is necessarily bad that such a thing should happen to a living organism. Only by a fallacy of equivocation can people argue that if you accept the principle of not doing evil that good may come, then you must be against capital punishment and surgical operations.
Suppose that A and B are agreed that adultery is a bad sort of behaviour, but that A accepts the principle of not doing evil that good may come, whereas B rejects it. Then in A's moral deliberations adultery is simply out: as Aristotle said, there can be no deliberating when and how and with whom to commit it (EN 1107a16). For B, on the other hand, the prima facie objection to adultery is defeasible, and in some circumstances he may decide: Here and now adultery is the best thing. Similarly, Sir David Ross holds that the objection to punishing the innocent, viz. that then we are not 'respecting the rights of those who have respected the rights of others', is only a prima facie objection; in the general interest it may have to be overruled, 'that the whole nation perish not'—a Scripture quotation that we may hope Sir David made without remembering who was speciously justifying whose judicial murder.
It is psychologically possible to hold the principle of not doing evil that good may come independently of any belief in Divine commandments: I have already cited the example of Aristotle on adultery. We have to see whether this is also logically consistent.
We must first settle what sort of answer is relevant if a man asks 'Why shouldn't I commit adultery?'; only then can we see what reason against, if any, is decisive. One obviously relevant sort of reply to a question 'Why shouldn't I?' is an appeal to something the questioner wants, and cannot get if he does so-and-so. I maintain that only such a reply is relevant and rational. In post-Kantian moral theory another sort of reply has been offered as relevant—an appeal not to an agent's Inclinations but to his Sense of Duty. Now indeed you can so train a man that 'You must not', said in a peculiar manner, strikes him as a sufficient answer to 'Why shouldn't I?'; he may feel a peculiar awe at hearing this from others, or even on saying it himself; it may even be part of the training to make him think he must not ask why he must not. (Cf. Lewis Carroll's juvenile poem 'My Fairy' [link goes off the campus server].) The result of such training is what people like Sir David Ross call 'apprehending obligation'. When I speak of the Sense of Duty (in capitals) I shall always be referring to this notion.
Now, as we know, a totalitarian regime can make a man 'apprehend' all sorts of things as his 'obligations', if Providence does not specially protect him. But on the Sense of Duty theory a man so trained is admirable if he does what he thinks he must do, regardless of the nature and quality of his acts; for is he not acting from the highest of motives, the Sense of Duty? If a young Nazi machine-guns a column of refugees till he bleeds to death, instead of retiring for medical treatment, is not his Sense of Duty something to fill us with awe?
To myself, it seems clear that although 'You mustn't' said in this peculiar way may psychologically work as a final answer to 'Why shouldn't I?', it is no rational answer at all. This Sense of Duty, as Bradley said (Appearance and Reality, c. 25) 'is empty self-will and self-assurance, which swollen with private sentiment or chance desire, wears the mask of goodness. And hence that which professes itself moral would be the same as mere badness, if it did not differ, even for the worse, by the addition of hypocrisy. We may note here that our country, the chosen home of Moral Philosophy, has the reputation abroad of being the chief home of hypocrisy and cant.'
Let us forget about the Sense of Duty, for I think it can be shown that an action's being a good or bad thing for a human being to do is of itself a fact calculated to touch an agent's inclinations. I shall here appropriate the powerful arguments, in the spirit of Aristotle, recently developed by Mrs. Philippa Foot. Moral virtues, she argues, are habits of action and avoidance; and they are such as a man cannot rationally choose to go without, any more than he can rationally choose to be blind, paralytic, or stupid; to choose to lack a virtue would be to choose a maimed life, ill-adapted to this difficult and dangerous world. But if you opt for virtue, you opt for being the sort of man who needs to act virtuously (just as if you choose to take up smoking you opt to be the kind of man who needs to smoke); moreover, you cannot decide at the outset to act virtuously only when it is not too awkward or dangerous or unpleasant—that is deciding not to have the habit of virtue at all. If, for example, you opt for courage, you may perish through facing danger a coward would have shirked; but our world is such that it is not even safe not to be brave—as Horace said, death pursues after cowards too. And if you opt for chastity, then you opt to become the sort of person who needs to be chaste; and then for you, as Aristotle said, there can be no deliberating when and with whom to commit adultery; adultery is out.
But somebody might very well admit that not only is there something bad about certain acts, but also it is desirable to become the sort of person who needs to act in the contrary way; and yet not admit that such acts are to be avoided in all circumstances and at any price. To be sure, a virtuous person cannot be ready in advance to do such acts; and if he does do them they will damage his virtuous habits and perhaps irreparably wreck his hard-won integrity of soul. But at this point someone may protest 'Are you the only person to be considered? Suppose the price of your precious integrity is a most fearful disaster! Haven't you got a hand to burn for your country (or mankind) and your friends?'. This sort of appeal has not, I think, been adequately answered on Aristotelian lines, either by Aristotle or by Mrs. Foot.
It is just at this point, I think, that the law of God becomes relevant. I shall not argue as to the truth of the theological propositions I shall use in the following discussion; my aim in this essay is to show that if a man accepts them he may rationally have quite a different code from someone who does not. And the propositions I shall use all belong to natural theology; in Hobbes's language, I am considering only 'the Kingdom of God by Nature'.
If God and man are voluntary agents, it is reasonable to believe that God will not only direct men to his own ends willy-nilly like the irrational creatures, but will govern them by command and counsel. The question is then whether God has given laws to man which forbid whole classes of actions, as human laws do. There appear strong reasons for doubting whether God's commands could be like this.
Laws have to be framed in broad general terms because the foresight of legislation is limited, and because the laws would be unmanageably complicated if the legislators even tried to bring in all the contingencies they could themselves foresee; nor can there be somebody always at every man's elbow to give him commands suiting the particular contingency. But God is subject to none of these human limitations; so it is not a grossly anthropomorphic view of God to imagine him legislating in general terms because hard cases make bad law?
It is not a question, I reply, of God's knowledge and power, but of man's. Man's reason can readily discern that certain practices, like lying, infanticide, and adultery, are generally undesirable, even to the point that it is generallv desirable that men should not
think of resorting to them. But what man is competent judge in his own cause, to make exception in a particular case? Even apart from bias, our knowledge of the present relevant circumstances is grossly fallible; still more, our foresight of the future. Some men, like Dr. Buchman's disciples, have claimed to have Divine guidance in all conjunctures of life; but such claims are open to doubt, and certainly most men are not thus favoured. So unless the rational knowledge that these practices are generally undesirable is itself a promulgation of the Divine law absolutely forbidding such practices, God has left most men without any promulgation of commands to them on these matters at all: which, on the theological premises I am assuming, is absurd.The rational recognition that a practice is generally undesirable and that it is best for people on the whole not even to think of resorting to it is thus in fact a promulgation to a man of the Divine law forbidding the practice, even if he does not realise that this is a promulgation of the Divine law, even if he does not believe there is a God.
This is not a paradox. You have had a city's parking regulation promulgated to you by a No Parking notice, even if you are under the illusion that you may ignore the notice and think it has been put up by a neighbour who dislikes cars. And similarly anyone who can see the general objectionableness of lying and adultery has had God's law against such actions promulgated to him, even if he does not recognize it as God's law.
This means that the Divine law is in some instances promulgated to all men of sound understanding. No man can sincerely plead ignorance that lying, for example, is generally objectionable. I am not saying that a sane and honest man must see that lying is
absolutely excluded, but he must have some knowledge of the general objectionableness of lying, and this is in fact a promulgation to him of the Divine law against lying. And he can advance from this knowledge to recognition of the Divine law as such, by a purely rational process.To make this point clearer, let us consider a modern ethical philosopher who says 'I do on the whole object to lying, but this is just a practical attitude I take up—it is quite wrong to call it "knowledge"'. I do not say of him what I should of a man who professed to have no special objection to lying: that he is just a vicious fellow, or a fool talking at random, who deserves no answer. What I do say is that his very protest shows that he does possess that sort of knowledge which is in fact God's promulgation of a law to him. His erroneous philosophy will not allow him to call it knowledge; but that does not prevent it from being knowledge—philosophers in fact know many things that their own theories would preclude them from knowing. And since he has this knowledge, he has had God's law against lying promulgated to him, even if he does not believe in God.
Thus, whatever a man may think, his rational knowledge that it is a bad way of life for a man to be a liar or an adulterer is in fact a promulgation to him of the Divine law; and he is able to infer that it is such a promulgation if he rightly considers the matter. As Hobbes said:
These dictates of reason men use to call by the name of laws, but improperly: for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves: whereas law, properly, is the word of him that by right hath command over others. But yet if we consider the same theorems as delivered in the word of God that by right commandeth over all things, then are they properly called laws.
There is a current malicious interpretation of Hobbes on which 'the word of God' would mean whatever the sovereign chooses to decree to be canonical Scripture. High-minded people are prepared to talk about Hobbes with reckless disregard of the truth: the late Lord Lindsay, in his Preface to the Everyman Leviathan, perpetrated a horrid mangling of Hobbes' text, giving the false text an air of authenticity by the use of antique spelling. [Ftn.: p. xvi of Everyman edition. Lindsay's version confounds Law and Right of Nature; which Hobbes emphatically distinguishes in the very passage (c. 14 ad init.) that Lindsay claims to be quoting!] But what Hobbes himself says elsewhere is: 'God declareth his laws by the dictates of natural reason.' As an historical footnote I add that a very similar line of reasoning is to be found in Berkeley's youthful sermon on Passive Obedience. The debt Berkeley owes to Hobbes is quite obvious: but no doubt a clergyman could hardly cite such an authority explicitly without destroying the edifying effect of his discourse.
But what if somebody asks 'Why should I obey God's Law?' This is really an insane question. For Prometheus to defy Zeus made sense because Zeus had not made Prometheus and had only limited power over him. A defiance of an Almighty God is insane: it is like trying to cheat a man to whom your whole business is mortgaged and who you know is well aware of your attempts to cheat him, or again, as the prophet said, it is as if a stick tried to beat, or an axe to cut, the very hand that was wielding it. Nebuchadnezzar had it forced on his attention that only by God's favour did his wits hold together from one end of a blasphemous sentence to another—and so he saw that there was nothing for him but to bless and glorify the King of Heaven, who is able to abase those who walk in pride. To quote Hobbes again 'God is King, though the nations be angry: and he that sitteth upon the cherubim, though the earth be moved. Whether men will or no they must be subject always to the Divine power. By denying the existence or Providence of God, men may shake off their ease, but not their yoke.'
This reasoning will not convince everybody; people may still say that it makes sense, given that there is a God, to defy him; but this is so only because, as Prichard said, you can no more make a man think than you can make a horse drink. A moral philosopher once said to me: 'I don't think I am morally obliged to obey God unless God is good: and surely it is a synthetic proposition that God is good.' I naturally asked him how he understood the proposition that God is good; he replied 'Well, I have no considered view how it should be analysed; but provisionally I'd say it meant something like this: God is the sort of God whom I'd choose to be God if it were up to me to make the choice.' I fear he has never understood why I found the answer funny.
I shall be told by such philosophers that since I am saying not: It is your supreme moral duty to obey God, but simply: It is insane to set about defying an Almighty God, my attitude is plain power-worship. So it is: but it is worship of the Supreme power, and as such is wholly different from, and does not carry with it, a cringing attitude towards earthly powers. An earthly potentate does not compete with God, even unsuccessfully: he may threaten all manner of afflictions, but only from God's hands can any affliction actually come upon us. If we fully realize this, we shall have such fear of God as destroys all earthly fear: 'I will show you whom you shall fear', said Jesus Christ to his disciples.
'But now you are letting your view of the facts distort your values.' I am not sure whether this piece of claptrap is meant as moral reprobation or as a logical objection; either way, there is nothing in it. Civilized men know that sexual intercourse is liable to result in child-bearing; they naturally have quite different sexual morals, one way or another, from savages who do not know this. And they are logically justified in evaluating sexual intercourse differently; for they have a different view of what sort of act it is. Now for those who believe in Almighty God, a man's every act is an act either of obeying or of ignoring or of defying that God; so naturally and logically they have quite different standards from unbelievers—they take a different view as to what people are in fact doing.
'But suppose circumstances are such that observance of one Divine law, say the law against lying, involves breach of some other absolute Divine prohibition?'—If God is rational, he does not command the impossible; if God governs all events by his Providence, he can see to it that circumstances in which a man is inculpably faced by a choice between forbidden acts do not occur. Of course such circumstances (with the clause 'and there is no way out' written into their description) are consistently describable; but God's Providence could ensure that they do not in fact arise. Contrary to what unbelievers often say, belief in the existence of God does make a difference to what one expects to happen.
Let us then return to our friend Euthyphro. Euthyphro regarded his father's act of leaving a poor man to die forgotten in a ditch as not just prima facie objectionable, but as something forbidden by the gods who live for ever; and he was horribly afraid for himself if he went on living with the offender as if nothing had happened. He did well to be afraid, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To be sure, it is not all of wisdom.
The fear of God of which I have spoken is such fear as restrains even the wish to disobey him; not merely servile fear, which restrains the outward act, but leaves behind the wish 'If only I could do it and get away with it!' And, as is proper in a paper of this kind, I have confined myself to what Hobbes called the Kingdom of God by Nature. It is no part of our merely natural knowledge of God that we can boldly call God our Father and serve him in filial love: we are his children, if we are, purely by his free gift of the Spirit of adoption, and not by birthright: and the fear of God for his power irresistible is at least the beginning of wisdom—without it there is only pitiable folly. I agree, indeed, with Hobbes that gratitude for God's benefits would not be a sufficient ground for unreserved obedience if it were severed from fear of God's irresistible power.
That fear is an ultimate suasion. We cannot balance against our obedience to God some good to be gained, or evil to be avoided, by disobedience. For such good or evil could in fact come to us only in the order of God's Providence; we cannot secure good or avoid evil, either for ourselves or for others, in God's despite and by disobedience. And neither reason nor revelation warrants the idea that God is at all likely to be lenient with those who presumptuously disobey his law because of the way they have worked out the respective consequence of obedience and disobedience. Eleazer the scribe (2 Maccabees 6), with only Sheol to look forward to when he died, chose rather to go there by martyrdom—praemitti se velle in infernum—than to break God's law. 'Yet should I not escape the hand of the Almighty, neither alive nor dead.'
The wicked can for the moment use God's creation in defiance of God's commandments. But this is a sort of miracle or mystery; as St. Paul said, God has made the creature subject to vanity against its will. It is reasonable to expect, if the world's whole raison d'être is to effect God's good pleasure, that the very natural agents and operations of the world should be such as to frustrate and enrage and torment those who set their wills against God's. If things are not at present like this, that is only a gratuitous mercy, on whose continuance the sinner has no reason to count. 'The world shall fight with him against the unwise.... Yea, a mighty wind shall stand up against them, and like a storm shall blow them away.'
HTML version prepared 4/5 September 2000 by Ed Brandon.