DISCUSSIONS.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF MORAL OBLIGATION.
When President Schurman, in his paper on the Consciousness of Moral Obligation in the November number of the Philosophical Review, says that the Theological theory is as impotent as the Empirical theory to explain the 'ought' feeling, that it is impossible to identify the proposition 'I ought to do this' with the proposition 'God or Man will punish me if I do not,' I think he occupies ground which is quite impregnable; when, however, he goes on to say that this 'ought' feeling is an inexplicable and unanalyzable datum of our intelligence, I think that the view, supported as no doubt it is by an abundance of high authority, is still open to question.
Kant's analysis of the sentiment of duty had the conspicuous merit of placing in a clear and strong light the radical distinction between actions which are truly moral in their motive and actions which are not. In so far as any consideration of the attainment of reward or the avoidance of punishment, either in this world or in the next, enters into the motives for any act, just in so far it becomes not a moral act at all, but one dictated by policy. If, however, all possible springs of action could be summed up in the desires to avoid pains or to attain pleasures, as is ordinarily taken for granted, then it would seem necessary to hold that moral acts were motiveless. How, then, was their possibility to be explained ? Kant's answer was, that as in his view the intellectual side of the mind impressed on the phenomena given by sense pure forms of thought, such as Time, Space, and Substance, so the Practical Reason impressed on contemplated conduct the pure form of Universal Law. The pure form without any content, he argues with much ingenuity, is sufficient. Whatever edict can be imposed in a universal form, that is the law that ought to be obeyed. 'Lie not,' 'Steal not,' can be thus imposed in universal form, but no conceivable law could make their opposites obligatory. Any law which made lying and stealing obligatory would be plainly self-destructive.[1]
Kant's idea was a suggestive one, and embodies no doubt an aspect of the truth. It was only, however, by reading into the word
- ↑ The central idea of his theory bears a close resemblance to a doctrine of Spinoza's, by which it was probably suggested. Ethics, pt. iv, prop. lxxii.
