Schneewind - Kant and Natural Law Ethics

Kant and Natural Law EthicsAuthor(s): J. B. SchneewindSource: Ethics, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Oct., 1993), pp. 53-74Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381693 .

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Kant and Natural Law Ethics*

J. B. Schneewind

Alan Donagan had a remarkably wide knowledge of the history of casuistry and moral philosophy. Although he was interested in the history for its own sake, he also drew on his understanding of it in working out his own ethical theory. He aimed to build upon a tradition of thought he accepted rather than to present a view constructed de novo. Saint Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant were central to his endeavor; they have longer entries in the index to The Theory of Morality than any other philosophers. The importance Donagan attributes to Kant is indicated by a remark he makes in his preface about G. E. M. Anscombe's famous paper "Modern Moral Philosophy," which se- verely criticizes the whole basis of Kant's enterprise in moral theory. "Had I not become persuaded that she was mistaken," Donagan comments, "I could not have embarked on the present study."' We must be glad that he came to this conviction, but he does not explain how he did so.

In this article I confirm Donagan's conclusion by refining our understanding of the relation between Kant's moral philosophy and natural law interpretations of morality. In his own brief reference to Kant's historical situation, Donagan notes that Kant was indebted to Wolff and his follower Baumgarten, as well as to the British moralists and Rousseau. These are important Kantian sources and have, rightly, been much studied. But Donagan, like other historians, says nothing of Kant's relation to the natural law tradition.2 I argue here that a relation to the "modern" variant of that tradition was important to Kant's understanding of his own theory, and that when we see why,

* My thanks to Richard Flathman, Larry Krasnoff, Andrews Reath, Elijah Milgram, and Mack Walker for comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to Stephen Darwall for his very helpful discussion of the version I read at the University of Michigan.

1. Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. xiv-xv; G. E. M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," in The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), vol. 3, pp. 26-42 (originally in Philosophy [1958], vol. 33).

2. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

Ethics 104 (October 1993): 53-74 ? 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/94/0401-9265$01.00

53



54 Ethics October 1993

we also achieve a fuller grasp of his relations to the other philosophers he found helpful-and of Anscombe's error.

I

We tend to think of Kant as having created single-handedly a revolution in moral philosophy. This view of his work is not new. It is asserted in the first modern history of ethics, Carl Fridrich Staudlin's Geschichte der Moralphilosophie, published in 1822. "When Kant came on the scene," Staudlin writes, "it had become the ruling tendency in Germany to derive not only morality but religion and Christianity from the principle of happiness. Everyone started with the natural drive to happiness and found in it a guide to all duties and virtues.... Kant let his dissatisfaction with this be known in 1763.... Since the year 1785 [with the publication of the Groundwork] he has begun a new era in the history of moral philosophy. . . a revolution in the philosophical investigation of morality."3

Staudlin was a Kantian, trying to ensure recognition of his mas- ter's originality. His belief, and ours, that Kant was a profound innova- tor is by no means unwarranted, but Staudlin's statement is less than helpful in showing exactly where and how. Of course, numbers of philosophers had claimed that happiness would guide us to all duties and virtues. But Kant was not revolutionary in rejecting such views. As Staudlin perfectly well knew, others, even in Germany, had done so.4 In particular, some of the natural law theorists who took Grotius as their hero had quite different theories, developed by Kant's time in conscious opposition to consequentialist positions. Along with everyone else, they held that doing what virtue directs is in fact the best way to obtain happiness, in the next world if not in this; but their

3. Carl Fridrich Staudlin, Geschichte der Moralphilosophie (Hannover: Gebruder Hahn, 1822), pp. 960-61. The 1763 publication to which Staudlin refers is Kant's "Enquiry concerning the Clarity of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics," in his Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 248-75.

4. Kant did not know the work of Richard Price, and Reid's ethical writings were published too late for them to have had any effect on Kant's development. For Kant the most important theory rejecting an ethic based on happiness or the satisfaction of desire was that of Christian August Crusius, widely known as the main opponent of Wolff. In his Guide to Rational Living, ed. Giorgio Toneli (1744; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), Crusius argued that the will has an inner structure through which it imposes certain constraints on action, and thereby disqualifies some desires and validates others; that the central difference between prudence and virtue is that in the former, one is acting to satisfy one's own desires, and in the latter, to carry out God's aims that need not accord with any of one's own desires; and that God has so made the will that when we recognize a divine command, we feel a special motive for compliance. Gellert gave popular lectures from 1744 until his death in 1769 in which he echoed some of Crusius's anticonsequentialist views-as Staudlin points out in his history, p. 954.



Schneewind Kant and Natural Law Ethics 55

belief that obedience to moral law has this outcome for each and all did not commit them to a theory explaining morality simply and wholly in terms of consequences. To understand Kant's originality on this issue, we must first assess his debts.

In this article I argue that the modern natural law theorists pro- vided Kant with what he took to be the determining problem for practical philosophy.5 He did not accept their solution; but he thought they were essentially right in seeing one issue-the issue of social conflict-as the first problem for which morality had to be suited. The natural law theorists thought only a morality built around a specific concept of obligation would be serviceable. They ran into difficulties in explaining the concept. Kant meant his own position in ethics to clear up the difficulties, which seem at first to be technical. It looked, that is, as if they could be handled within the framework accepted by the natural lawyers themselves. Kant, however, proposed a solution to the technical problems that required a radical transformation of the outlook from whose way of proposing the issue he started. Elsewhere I have indicated some of the social and political bearings of Kant's innovations in ethics.6 Kant was, I believe, motivated by these implica- tions to work out a truly revolutionary philosophical ethics. If we can see how Kant began with the natural lawyers' problem and yet reached conclusions so different from theirs, we will have a good sense of the radical nature of his innovations.

Leibniz and Wolff described themselves as holding natural law theories, but their views were greatly at variance with those of the Grotians.7 Among other things, they, unlike the Grotians, were thor-

5. On the whole subject of the modern natural law problematic, I am much indebted to the general discussion and the papers at the conference on the theme "Pufendorf and Unsocial Sociability" organized by Istvan Hont and Hans-Erich Bodecker and held in Gottingen in June 1989. This article, esp. Secs. V-VI, is a development of the paper I presented there. David Sachs raised some acute and important objections to that paper; I hope that this article shows that I benefited from them.

6. For a general statement, see my "Autonomy, Obligation and Virtue," in Cam- bridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. sec. 1. See also my "The Misfortunes of Virtue," Ethics 101 (1990): 42-63, and "Natural Law, Skepticism and Method," Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991): 289-308.

7. Leibniz's disagreements received their classic statement in his "Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf" (1706) (in Leibniz: Political Writings, ed. Patrick Riley, 2d ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], pp. 64-75). The French Huguenot scholar Jean Barbeyrac, who translated both Grotius and Pufendorf into French, translated Leibniz's Latin objections and included this translation along with his own "Reflec- tions of the Translator" in the 4th ed. (Amsterdam, 1718) of his translation of Pufend- orf's short compendium, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, first published in 1673. Some telling criticisms of Wolff's claims to be a Grotian are presented by E. Reibstein in "Deutsche Grotius-Kommentatoren bis zu Christian Wolff," Zeitschriftfiur auslkndisches

bffentliches Recht und Volkerrecht 15 (1953): 76-102.




oughgoing consequentialists.8 Kant rejected this aspect of their position, though he accepted other points stemming from their perfec- tionism. To bring out the full range of Kant's originality in ethics would require examination of his complex relations to the so-called Leibniz-Wolff school, to the Shaftesburyan sentimentalists, and to Rousseau; but in this article I focus on his relations to the Grotian natural lawyers.9

II The vocabulary of natural law theory was very widely used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its terms accordingly came to be so vague that almost any outlook on the regulation of practice could be expressed in them. Yet in the seventeenth century there was a distinctive line of natural law theorizing that was recognized as such by contemporaries and was opposed by growing numbers as the century wore on. Starting with Grotius's On the Law of War and Peace of 1625, the so-called modern natural law theory was developed further by Hobbes, Pufendorf, Cumberland, Locke, Thomasius, and dozens of other expositors and commentators. In many but not all respects it stood in opposition to the Thomistic interpretation of natural law, which received an elaborate and influential restatement by Suarez in 1612 and was accepted by such Protestants as William Ames and Nathanael Culverwell.

The modern natural lawyers differed among themselves on matters of considerable importance. Yet it is perhaps safe to generalize to the extent of saying that they understood the regulation and guidance of human conduct primarily in terms of rights, duties, and obligations. These were to be explained by appeals to laws backed by the will of God, the laws of nature. The lawyers eschewed discussion of what the good is, and they concerned themselves very little with questions about the improvement or perfection of individual character. In opposition to them Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, Wolff, and others of like mind took the question of the good and of individual perfection to be the central questions of practice and gave only a secondary place to questions of obligation, rights, and duties.

Several concerns motivate these contrasting approaches. I will note one that is central to ethics. The natural lawyers, as I have argued

8. For a brilliant study of Leibniz's consequentialism, see Ren6 Save, Leibniz et l'Ncole moderne du droit nature (Paris: PUF, 1989).

9. Rousseau, despite his well-known aversion to the positions of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, is in an important respect a Grotian. Briefly, he agrees that people are now prone to conflict as well as to sociality, but he does not think we are so in the state of nature. Society itself, which we think will improve our lot, breeds and sustains the tendency to conflict that threatens its own existence.




elsewhere,'0 took it that controversy, disagreement, and a tendency to conflict are ineradicable among human beings, who nonetheless want or need to live with one another." Various explanations of the tendency to conflict are offered. Hobbes, for instance, attributes it to fear of death and desire of glory, neither of which can be stilled by any finite amount of wealth or power. Locke attributes it instead to the unalterable tendency of human opinion to divergence, together with the desire we all have to make others share our own view on that most important of all matters, what one must do to be saved. Whatever their differing explanations, the natural lawyers agree in holding that the tendency to conflict cannot be removed by any means within human reach. Since we want nonetheless to live in company, the problem is to control the propensity to conflict. The solution to this problem, in its most general outlines, is what natural law provides. And it is understandable that duties and rights, and the obligation to live within the constraints they impose, should be in the foreground of a view that sees the human condition in this way.

The perfectionists, among whom I include Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Wolff, believe that objective knowledge of the human good is available to at least some people. They also believe that the universe in which we live is divinely ordered and therefore harmoni- ous, and that if a sufficient number of people knew the basic truth about the universe, harmony among human beings would also arise. Although each of us, on their view, seeks primarily his own perfection, the perfection and therefore the good of one person cannot in the end be in conflict with the perfection of others. As Leibniz puts it: "It is most true that one cannot know God without loving one's brother, that one cannot have virtue without having charity . . . , and that one even advances one's own good in working for that of others: for it is an eternal law of reason and the harmony of things ... that our duty must also be our happiness."'2 Conflict, therefore, is due to metaphysical ignorance. Metaphysics shows us the ultimate nature of things;

10. J. B. Schneewind, "Modern Moral Philosophy: From Beginning to End?" in Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory, ed. Patricia Cook (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).

11. I do not have in mind specifically moral conflict, i.e., disagreement about what is right or good or virtuous, but straightforward personal or political or organizational conflict. This view of our common life has been recently expressed by, e.g., Geoffrey Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971), chap. 2; and by Stuart Hamp- shire, in the title essay of his Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), and more powerfully and eloquently in his Innocence and Experience (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). That it underlies Rawls's Kantian outlook is of course evident.

12. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Felicity," in Leibniz: Political Writings, trans. and ed. Patrick Riley, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 84.




and moral laws-which the perfectionists are also willing to call "laws of nature"-are directives teaching us how to attain the perfection made appropriate to us by that nature. Given this view, it is understandable that obligation and allied concepts are, if not neglected, relegated to a secondary position in their thinking.

The modern theorists of natural law rightly supposed that it was agreed on all sides that God exists and is concerned that things should go well for his creation, and that he has therefore laid down directives for us. Like the older natural law writers they also took it as generally accepted that God has so made us that by reason alone, without revela- tion, we can come to learn what God's directives for us are. One of their aims was to show that the reasoning involved in discovering the laws of nature is empirical. Only so, they held, could there be a hope of reaching agreement among groups hopelessly divided on religious matters. Although the perfectionists did not disagree with the theologi- cal part of this position, they generally held that the way to knowledge of God's directives was not through purely empirical investigation but rather through deductive argument starting from self-evident prem- ises and then demonstrating how things must ultimately be.'3

Kant's early writings show him working along lines laid down by Leibniz and Wolff. He himself allows us to see that through the work of Rousseau, the British moralists, and Crusius, he came to find his early rationalism inadequate as far as morality is concerned. He does not report any direct influence from Grotius or Pufendorf on his thought about ethics. But I suggest that his moral philosophy shows that he came to accord a central place to the insights and problems that shaped the work of the Grotian natural lawyers. He came, that is, to think that conflict is ineradicable, and could not be removed, even in principle, by the completest possible metaphysical knowledge of how the world is constituted. In reworking the apparatus of the natural lawyers, he departed radically from some of their deepest convictions. But because he accepted their view of the central problem to be addressed by morality, he thought he had to refurbish their conceptual apparatus even if it involved such departures.

III

One reason for taking Kant to have accepted the natural law problematic of conflict is the fact that he makes the concept of moral law basic and defines other moral concepts in terms of it. This is standard for the natural lawyers. Christian Thomasius, for example, in his explicitly Pufendorfian Institutiones Jurisprudentia Divinae of 1688, comes very

13. As usual, such a summary blurs important matters. Experience in the form of confused and indistinct ideas may give starting points for knowledge, but knowledge is attained only after these ideas become clear and distinct.




rapidly to a definition of law in terms of the command of a superior (1.1.28). He then goes on to define the concepts of duty (1.1.33), subjective right (1.1.82), obligation (1.1.134), just or right action (1.1.143), permitted and honorable action (1.1.145), and finally just person (1.1.153), all via the concept of law.'4 Leibniz's ethical definitions work in quite a different way, starting with justice as a virtue:

Justice is the charity of the wise. Charity is general benevolence. Benevolence is the habit of love. To love anyone is to delight in his happiness. Wisdom is the science of happiness. Happiness is durable joy. Joy is a state of pleasure. Pleasure . . . is a sense of perfection.'5

These definitions are repeated in various other works. And when Leib- niz elaborates on justice, he reverts always to the connection ofjustice with wisdom and the pursuit of perfection and gives law no independent standing.'6

Kant's assertions about the empirical aspects of human nature give further evidence of his acceptance of the natural law problematic. 17 On this point his essays on history are important. Kant famously sees humans as desiring and needing one another's company and support yet at the same time resisting social control and tending to unlimited self-aggrandizement. Nature brings about the development of human capacities by means of mutual antagonism in society, Kant says, explaining that "by 'antagonism' I mean the unsocial sociability of men, i.e., their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society. Man has an inclination to associate with others.... But he also has a strong propensity to isolate himself from others, because he finds in

14. References are to book, section, and paragraph numbers of Christian Thom- asius, Institutiones Jurisprudentia Divinae, 7th ed. (1730; reprint, Aalen: Scientia Ver- lag, 1963).

15. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Ethical Definitions," in Leibniz: Selections, ed. P. P. Wiener (New York: Scribner's, 1951), pp. 567-68.

16. See, e.g., Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, "Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice," in Riley, trans. and ed., esp. pp. 59-63. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that Kant gives the same definitions as the lawyers.

17. For an extensive discussion of these aspects of Kant's views, see Allen W. Wood, "Unsocial Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kantian Ethics," Philosophical Topics 19 (1991): 325-51. I disagree with several points of interpretation in this paper, but Wood's discussion of Kant's statements on the empirical data about human nature is excellent.




himself ... the unsocial characteristic of wishing to have everything go according to his own wish."'8

The theme is developed in later works, for example, in the "Con- jectural Beginning of Human History," where the Rousseauian strain in Kant's historical thought is quite evident, and in the Anthropology, where Kant lays out some of the psychological causes of our conflicts with one another. The inclinations to freedom and sex might not lead to endless conflict, but the "maniasfor honorfor power, andfor possession" must, since they can only be gratified in society yet their very nature requires that they lead us to compete.'9

Another aspect of Kant's view of the facts about human inter- course reveals a further connection with the Grotian school. Natural law theory is sometimes supposed to be ahistorical, and in some of its aspects it certainly is. But in explaining the origins of private property the modern natural lawyers, especially Pufendorf, developed a rudi- mentary theory of historical development which flowered in Adam Smith's doctrine of the four stages through which the human economy develops.20 The perfectionists developed no views of history of this kind. Kant's philosophy of history served other purposes than those of the Grotians, but in presenting history as having meaningful outcomes not intended by any individual agents, Kant shows himself again to be working within the modern natural law problematic of conflict.

IV To explain how Kant's theory of obligation resolves difficulties within the Grotian understanding of that concept, I must begin by outlining

18. Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History," in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter, various dates), 8.20-21 (hereafter, GS); translation in Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant: On History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 15. See also Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie, GS 7.322, trans. M. Gregor as Anthropology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 183.

19. Kant, Anthropologie, GS 7.268, Gregor, trans., p. 135; emphasis in original. See also Metaphysik der Sitten Vigilantius, GS 27.692, where Kant attributes to us "the instinct of antagonism or rivalry, i.e. the inclination to work against the perfections of others, or to outdo them." These lecture notes date from 1793-94. Arthur Schopenhauer's famous fable of the porcupines, at the very end of Parerga and Paralipomena, gives a brilliant image for this view of the human condition. The porcupines huddle together on a cold winter day to warm up, but their quills drive them apart; the need for warmth brings them together again and the process is repeated until they find the right compromise between freezing separately and being pricked in company. "Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men's lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable draw- backs once more drive them apart" (trans. E. F. J. Payne [Oxford: Clarendon, 1974], vol. 2, pp. 651-52). Kant might have pointed out that humans react to problems like this by learning how to improve matters; Schopenhauer makes no such comment.

20. See Istvan Hont, "The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufend- orf and the Theoretical Foundations of the 'Four Stages Theory,'" in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 253-76.




the natural law view. Everyone prepared to argue philosophically agreed that God's directions for the behavior of human beings are addressed to agents who, unlike rocks and trees and frogs, are rational, free, and responsible, and that we can now see the reasonableness of those directions. Within this common framework, the natural lawyers held some distinctive views. I list the most important of them:

1. The natural lawyers all distinguish advising or counseling someone to do something from obligating her to do something. In either case one person is giving a directive to another. But advising can be done by an equal or by a teacher. The counselor helps someone achieve a goal she already has, and leaves it up to her to choose whether or not to act as she is advised. Obligating, by contrast, can only be done by an appropriate superior. It does not involve consulting the ends the obligated person happens to have. It is done in order to make the obligated person act as the obligator wishes. Since the obligated person is made to do something, the lawyers say that the act commanded is made morally necessary by the command. Acts one is merely counseled to do, by contrast, are not morally necessary.2'

2. The authoritative superior backs her directives with the threat that something bad will occur to the obligated person in case he does not comply. The superior should have in mind some good to be brought about by compliance, but-or so at least some of the modern natural lawyers think-she can obligate even if she does not.22 To do something because it is obligatory, then, is to do it because it has been commanded by a proper superior who backs the command with the threat of punishment. Thus there could be no obligation were there no will on the part of a proper superior. God's will always supports laws aiming to bring good to his creatures-hence, there is a consequentialist aspect to Grotian as well as Thomistic natural law thinking. But even supposing some good to be brought about by compliance, the good taken by itself and unrelated to the will of a superior would not obligate.23

21. Barbeyrac chides Leibniz for ignoring, or being unable to accommodate, the distinction between advising and obligating (pp. 471-72).

22. So Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 30; so also Samuel Pufendorf: see De jure Naturae et Gentium (1672). I cite from the translation by C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather, The Law of Nature and of Nations (Oxford, 1934); see bk. 1, chap. 6, sec. 4, p. 89.

23. On this point the natural lawyers differ sharply from the perfectionists. Wolff's account is characteristic of the latter: "To obligate [verbinden] someone to do or omit something is only to connect a motive of willing or not willing to it.... Whatever gives a motive to will or not to will an act obligates us to do nor not do it" (Christian Wolff, Verniinftige Gedancken von der Menschen Tun und Lassen [1720; 1733], 1.1.8). The will of a lawgiver is not the only source of obligation. Baumgarten, whose ethics textbooks Kant used during his entire teaching career, was a Wolffian. He begins his theoretical treatise, the Initia philosophiae practicae primae, with a discussion of obligation. But there is no mention of law or a lawgiver at the start, as there is for Thomasius. Obligation



62 Ethics October 1993 3. Natural lawyers and perfectionists agree that awareness of our

obligations provides us with a motive to carry them out. They agree also on a general view of human motivation. We are moved by the prospects of what we take to be good-what we desire, or think will be pleasant or helpful-and what we take to be bad-what we are averse to, or think will be unpleasant or harmful. Naturally, there are disagreements on the details. And some at least see that they must make allowance for irrational refusal to pursue what the agent believes to be the greatest available good.24 But even these writers agree that insofar as our behavior is rational, it is motivated by the pursuit or avoidance of perceived good or ill. The natural lawyers and the perfectionists tend to disagree, however, on the status of will and its connection with motivation. With the exception of Hobbes,25 the lawyers take will as a faculty of soul different from desire and reason, even if related to both. Unless it is so, they believe, we cannot give an adequate account either of freedom or of moral responsibility. The perfectionists disagree on this point, and their account of freedom is quite different from that offered by the lawyers.

Two further points of great importance to the natural lawyers were also of concern to Kant, although they did not seem to matter in the same way to the perfectionists. I shall not be able to consider them in this article, but I mention them as further evidence that Kant was indeed working within the natural law tradition.

4. Grotius introduced into natural law theory a distinction between perfect and imperfect rights; Pufendorf developed it into a distinction between perfect and imperfect duties; and the distinction was so widely accepted that we may consider it a key part of modern natural law thinking. Perfect duties are quite precisely specifiable, as are the duties arising from a contract; they require behavioral compliance but make no demands on one's inner motivation; and the one to whom a duty is owed is entitled to use force (direct or legal) to exact compliance if it is not otherwise forthcoming. The reason for this difference is that performance of perfect duties is essential if society is to exist. Carrying out imperfect duties enhances social life, but society could continue even if they were ignored. Imperfect duties cannot be exactly specified: they are like the general duty to be charita- ble. Their fulfillment requires the proper inner motivation in some

is explained as Wolff explains it, in terms of the motives that irresistibly move us to something-so that we are, in the helpfully ambiguous vernacular, bound to do it-and Kant, in his lectures, distances himself quite carefully from this position.

24. See, e.g.,John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 2.21.37 and follow- ing, where Locke explains his view of choice and free will, revising the view given in his first edition.

25. And perhaps of Cumberland, who refuses to discuss free will.




form of direct concern for others; consequently, no one can be com- pelled to perform them. Moreover, merit accrues to the performance of imperfect duties but not to that of perfect duties.26

5. No one except scoundrelly French free thinkers and probably tie wicked Hobbes would have denied that God's existence and provi- dential superintendence of his creation must somehow be shown to be essential to morality. For the lawyers one key aspect of God's function in morality is his deliberate attachment of sanctions to his com- mands. They resisted the move to make the sanctions into merely natural consequences of prohibited behavior. Thus Locke attacked Cumberland for interpreting sanctions naturalistically, Leibniz rejected Locke's position on the matter, and Barbeyrac attacked Leibniz for having made obligation "absolutely independent of the divinity and founded solely on the nature of things."27 Because God must be conceived as our ruler, we are to show the proper attitude to him not only in worship but in our behavior to one another as well. We are not to think of ourselves as acting at our own discretion, and we are not self-ruled. Every natural lawyer cited Saint Paul's dictum in Rom. 2:14-15, which says that there is a law written in the human heart so that all people can be "a law unto themselves." But no natural lawyer took this to mean that human beings create or construct that law. They understood it to mean only that even unbelievers can, at least in principle, find out what the law requires.

The Grotian account of obligation and its relations to other moral concepts gives the natural lawyers a theory well suited to coping with the problems set by the unsocial sociability of humankind. They need the distinctions between obligating and advising, and between the en- forceable and unenforceable, because they believe people have to be made to do certain things if society is to exist, as God wills it should. Hence, the necessity of such acts must be independent of whether the agent wants to do them or not. They also need these distinctions to accommodate religious convictions shared by all parties to the debate. God is a God of love as well as of justice. The distinction between imperfect and perfect duties accepts this duality and its bearing on our lives. What we do as an imperfect duty must express some form of love; only what we do as a perfect duty constitutes strict justice. Second, our proper stance in relation to God is deference and obedience-the opposite of pride and self-assertion. The centrality of obligation in the natural law understanding of morality carries this view,

26. For a fuller account of the distinction, see my "Pufendorf's Place in the History of Ethics," Synthese 72 (1987): 123-55.

27. Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, trans. John Maxwell (London, 1727), chap. 5, sec. xxii; Locke, 2.28.6; Leibniz, New Essays, 2.28.5; Barbeyrac, p. 470.




because it shows how morality without obedience to another is literally inconceivable.

Kant's relation to the natural lawyers is thus complex. He is indebted to them for his belief in the importance of the unsocial sociability of our nature, and he accepts the consequent need to build a moral outlook around obligation. Yet he rejects their insistence that morality requires obedience to another. Both aspects of this relation to natural law theory are evident in Kant's distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives. He plainly uses it to do the work done by the natural lawyers' distinction between counseling someone and obligating someone. Like them he distinguishes what has to be done for personal reasons from what is socially necessary, and like them he identifies the latter with what is morally significant and of overriding importance. But Kant's way of drawing the distinction quite strikingly omits any place for a counselor or obligator.28 It is, of course, no small difference.

V Why did Kant think that these two apparently inseparable aspects of the natural law view-the centrality of conflict and obligation and the understanding of obligation as requiring the imposition of an external will-had to be forced apart and that to do so he needed to devise a new understanding of obligation? A look at the problem of the relations among freedom, moral necessity, and motivation will point toward an answer. Since Pufendorf's account of obligation is the fullest ever given by a Grotian natural lawyer, I begin by reviewing its main points briefly.

Pufendorf tells us in De Jure Naturae that obligation "is that whereby one is required under moral necessity to do, or admit, or suffer something" (I.i.2 1, p. 20). In explaining moral necessity he aims to accommodate two features of obligation. First, obligation must be compatible with freedom. Otherwise responsibility would be excluded and there would be no room for the kind of law that concerns the natural lawyers. Second, for Pufendorf obligation has motivational force. My belief that I am obligated must be efficacious or must actually affect my will.

Pufendorf is trying to avoid a position shared by Hobbes and Cumberland. Both of them are quite clear about what they mean by 'necessity' and how moral obligation can be efficacious. For Hobbes, to be obligated is to be made to act in a certain way through one's awareness that death or other major evil threatens unless one does so. Moral necessity is unlike physical necessity in that it operates

28. Kant derived his distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives from Crusius.




through the human faculties of thought and deliberation, but it is not otherwise different. Every man seeks what is good for him and flees what is evil, Hobbes says, "by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward."29 The necessity of an obligatory act is the necessity of a means to an end. Its necessity arises, moreover, from the necessity to act for an end that one cannot help but have. Cumberland's account of moral necessity is in all essentials the same.30

Although Hobbes and Cumberland have very different notions of the status of the good, both of them equate the moral necessity of an action with the motivational force that makes the agent do it. For Hobbes good is a function of desire: I think good whatever I desire, and I am necessarily moved by my strongest desire. For Cumberland the will is determined by a kind of natural necessity to pursue what the intellect presents to it as the greatest good. Pufendorf agrees that in general the will by nature seeks what is good and shuns evil (I.iv.2, p. 53; cf. I.iv.4, p. 56), but he does not hold this to be the explanation of moral necessity. In Hobbes's theory, he says, "no place is left for free will" (I.iv.2, p. 54). He is trying to replace the position of Hobbes and Cumberland with one in which the agent's motivation is not itself the essential element in moral necessity.

Pufendorf's statements about the difference between obligation and coercion bring this out clearly. Obligation, for Pufendorf, arises from law. And a law, "defined as a decree by which a superior obligates a subject to adapt his actions to the former's command" (I.vi.4, p. 89), should be promulgated for good reasons. But the reasons are not what give rise to the obligation: "Although a law should not lack sound reasons for its promulgation, still these do not constitute the real grounds for obedience to it, but it is rather the power of the enactor, who ... lays an obligation upon his subject ... even though the reason for [his command] be not entirely clear" (I.vi. 1, p. 87). The last phrase in this remark is quite important. To say that the reasons for my sovereign's command are not clear to me is to say that even when I know what I am commanded to do, I may not see the good that my

29. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 1.1.7. 30. Cumberland says: "There is nothing which can superinduce a necessity of

doing or forbearing anything upon a human mind deliberating upon a thing future, except thoughts or propositions promising good or evil to ourselves or others consequent upon what we are about to do. But because we are determined by some sort of natural necessity to pursue good foreseen, especially the greatest, and to avoid evils, hence those dictates of reason which discover to us that these things will follow from certain of our actions are said to lay upon us some kind of necessity of performing or omitting those actions, and to oblige us" (5.xxvii, p. 233). Cumberland's work was published in the same year as Pufendorf's DeJure, 1672; in his second edition Pufendorf cited Cumberland frequently.




compliance would produce.3' In that case, which is the common case, I cannot be moved to obey by my own perception of that good. But the sovereign's power can move me because she can "bring some grave evil upon the disobedient" (I.vi.12, p. 102).

Obligation is like coercion, then, because both involve the threat of evil for refusal to do what one is ordered to do. But there is a crucial difference between obligation and coercion or compulsion: "In the latter the mind is forced to something by mere external violence contrary to its intrinsic inclination, while whatever we do from an obligation is understood to come from an intrinsic impulse of the mind, and with the full approbation of its own judgement" (III.iv.6, p. 386). For Hobbes and Cumberland, the moral necessity of obligation is the necessity that causes one to use the means to an end one's psychological makeup compels one to pursue. For Pufendorf, the "intrinsic impulse of the mind" takes the place of the necessity of the end as the source of moral necessity.32

Here we reach the core of the difficulty for Pufendorf's theory. In order to preserve the kind of freedom he thinks presupposed by responsibility, he must explain how it can be contingent whether an obligated agent in fact complies or doesn't, while showing that it has been made necessary for her to comply. He could do this if he could distinguish between the motivational force arising from a command and the justification for giving the command. He could then say that justification shows that failure to act is impermissible and thus makes the act morally necessary, while allowing that the agent is not psychologically necessitated to do the act. He would then need to explain how whatever makes the act necessary in terms of justification can supply a motive for doing it-without removing the agent's ability to omit it.

There seems to be no way in which Pufendorf can work all this out within the limits of his own theory. Like Hobbes and Cumberland he seems to work with a univocal idea of necessity. He is committed, moreover, to the view that we are motivated only by what we believe

31. "To few only has it been given to examine how the duties of life flow from their first sources," so most men take the moral rules on authority, particularly those which can only be reached by "a longer deduction," i.e., the more specific and particular rules which are actually of use in daily life (Pufendorf, I.iii.5, p. 42). So most men only know what the rules are, or, more precisely, most only believe that the rules are as the authorities state. Not knowing or having any belief about the reasons for the rules, the majority cannot see the good to be produced by compliance, the good which is God's reason for laying down the rules.

32. See also ibid., I.v.8, p. 73: Physical impossibility "offers an obstacle, which so hampers the will that it cannot free itself for actions.... But a moral impossibility affords no obstacle superior to the power of action inherent in the will, since it arises entirely from the will itself." Pufendorf does not explain how the will can give rise to such impossibilities.



Schneewind Kant and Natural Law Ethics 67 to be good or ill. If obligation is to motivate, its efficacy must arise from some perceived good or ill. But there is none that Pufendorf can call on. The agent need not know the good, if any, that compliance would bring about. And acting from fear of a threatened ill is not acting from obligation. It is not acting from an "intrinsic impulse of the mind" of the kind that bare knowledge of an authoritative law is supposed to generate. Pufendorf needs a broader motivational theory than he has-one that allows for rational motivation by something other than the good. He also needs a distinction between what makes an act psychologically necessary and what makes it necessary in the sense that its omission is not justifiable.

VI

Nowadays it is fairly common to make a distinction between justifying reasons and explanatory reasons, between morally compelling reasons and psychologically compelling reasons for action. Even if we have reservations about the distinction, we have some idea of what those who use it have in mind. The moralists of the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, however, were not as firmly in possession of the distinction. Barbeyrac was perhaps the first to use it in philosophical argument, giving it a role in his defense of Pufendorf. Leibniz, he says, has failed to distinguish what are "certainly two different questions: Why is one obliged to do or not to do certain things? and What is the motive most capable of bringing men to carry out what they recognize to be their duties?"33 It was not, however, until Francis Hutcheson's Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), of which Kant owned a German translation, that the distinction was put to positive theoretical use. Hutcheson contrasts what he calls exciting reasons and justifying reasons. The former show "a quality in the action, exciting the agent to do it"; the latter indicate "the truth expressing a quality engaging our approbation."34 Though he gives Grotius the credit for first seeing the difference,35 what he makes of it is all his own.

33. Barbeyrac, p. 446; see the discussion on pp. 444-45 as well. Barbeyrac later allows that Pufendorf should have been clearer than he was. "I admit," Barbeyrac says, "that the thoughts of [Pufendorf] are not sufficiently distinct here and that he would have done better to distinguish that which properly gives the superior the right to command from that which puts him in a position to command effectively (p. 491).

34. Francis Hutcheson, Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. B. Peach (1728; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 121.

35. Ibid., p. 121 n, and see also p. 227, the letter to Gilbert Burnet dated October 9, 1725. Grotius does indeed draw something like the distinction Hutcheson notes, in On the Law of War and Peace, trans. Kelsey, Prolegomena, 1.1.1.1-2. He puts it in narrow terms: he is concerned with the difference between the causes that actually prompt a country to go to war and the reasons put forward as the pretext. Grotius makes no systematic use of the distinction, nor does he offer any full account of obligation. I do not know whether Hutcheson had read Barbeyrac's defense of Pufendorf, though




He uses it to defend his previously published view that morality is centrally a matter of feeling, not reason. Exciting reasons, he argues, presuppose a desire or appetite: without that, no truth discovered by reason would move us to do anything. Justifying reasons also presuppose a feeling, a unique moral feeling. Reason discovers no truths about actions from which it follows that the actions are good. Means- ends truths allow such an inference only if the end is already approved, whereas God's willing an act allows such an inference only if God's willing is itself already approved. To get from a truth about an act to approval of it then requires a nonrational step, a step taken, Hutche- son holds, by the moral sense, which supplies the unique feeling of approval. The feeling arises when we notice certain facts-for example, that someone has acted from a generous motive-but it is not the same as noticing the fact. Hence, justifying reasons require one sort of feeling, but motivating or exciting reasons require another sort. Reason-contrary to rationalists like Clarke and even Grotius-has no foundational role to play, either as justifying or as moving.36

Hutcheson then applies his distinction to the issues of obligation and moral necessity. "Mr. Barbeyrac," he says, "in his annotations upon Grotius, makes obligation denote an indispensable necessity to act in a certain manner. Whoever observes his explication of this necessity (which is not natural, otherwise no man could act against his obligation) will find that it denotes only 'such a constitution of a power- ful superior as will make it [im]possible for any being to obtain happiness or avoid misery but by such a course of action.' "37 The parentheti- cal remark picks up on a main aspect of the difficulty with the Grotians' idea of obligation that I noted in the previous section. And Hutcheson's comment on the explanation of the moral necessity in obligation is that it gets its force from the agent's selfish desire for his own happiness. The only other alternative is that to be obliged to do something means that spectators would approve the act; and this, of course, presupposes the moral affection.38

Hutcheson's view, in his early writings, is that benevolence, rein- forced by the moral sentiment, cooperates with self-love in making society possible. His discussion of justifying reasons may have forced

it is likely that he had. John Balguy took up the distinction in his two tracts on The Foundation of Moral Goodness, published in 1728 and 1728, and Richard Price used it to clarify his aims in his Review of the Principal Question in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael (1758; Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), p. 16n.

36. Hutcheson, pp. 123-29. 37. Ibid., p. 130. Peach reads "possible" but the first edition supplies the correction

required by the sense. 38. In common with most other writers of the time, Hutcheson treats 'being

obliged' and 'being obligated' as interchangeable.




Kant to realize that there were serious questions about the adequacy of natural law views of moral knowledge and motivation.39 But no Grotian could have accepted Hutcheson's positive theory. He does not explain moral necessity in a way that avoids the problem in the Grotian idea of obligation to which he points. He tells us instead that the necessity here is no more than a matter of desire or feeling. But to say this is to deny the Grotians a conceptual tool they thought they had to have.

VII

Hutcheson himself, who in his early writings deprecated the concept of obligation and its allies, would not have been worried by the point, but others were.40 The idea of moral necessity was under discussion in the eighteenth century, partly because of its wide use in natural law theory and partly because of its role in discussions of God. In the first series of his famous Boyle Lectures, Samuel Clarke, attempting to refute Spinozistic views of God, insists that God is not a necessary but a free agent. He needs also to guard against making God an arbitrary agent. To do this he distinguishes between a necessity of "nature and fate" and a "necessity of fitness and wisdom."'" He attributes the Spinozistic position to failure to see the important difference between "moral motives" and "physical efficients";42 and he argues that we can admit that God necessarily chooses the best, while holding that the necessity here is "not a necessity of fate, but such a moral necessity as I before said was consistent with the most perfect liberty." Moral necessity is as "certain, infallible, and to be depended upon" as anything can be, but it leaves God perfectly free.43

Hume must have had at least Clarke in mind when he declared that "there is but one kind of necessity, as there is but one kind of cause, and ... the common distinction between moral and physical necessity is

39. See Dieter Henrich, "Hutcheson und Kant," Kantstudien 49 (1957): 46-69. I do not know whether or not Kant had read Barbeyrac against Leibniz, well-known though the disputation was.

40. "Ought," Hutcheson remarks, is "another unlucky word in morals" (p. 141). 41. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, 10th ed.

(1704; London, 1749), p. 68; the discussion begins at p. 64. Three decades earlier Cumberland had tried to show how it can be that although God is not bound by laws backed by sanctions, he is nonetheless bound by his own understanding of the best end to direct us to that end. This is consistent with God's liberty and shows that Hobbes was wrong in holding that God rules only in virtue of his infinite power (Cumberland, chap. 7, secs. vi-vii).

42. Clarke, pp. 72, 100. 43. Ibid., pp. 116- 18. Clarke and Leibniz engaged in extensive discussion of moral

and other kinds of necessity in their widely read correspondence, published in English in 1717 and frequently reissued.




without any foundation in nature."44 As I have indicated, Hobbes, Cumberland, and Hutcheson would have agreed with Hume. But if there is only one kind of necessity, then it seems impossible to explain how there can be moral necessities that leave me free not to do what it is necessary for me to do. Yet obligation was taken by Pufendorf and the other Grotians to be just this sort of necessity.

Leibniz had no desire to rescue the natural lawyers but, like Clarke, he thought that there are different kinds of necessity. He himself spoke of obligation as moral necessity, as the natural lawyers did. "Right is a kind of moral possibility," Leibniz says, "and obligation a moral necessity. By 'moral' I mean that which is equivalent to 'natural' for a good man: ... we ought to believe that we are incapable of doing things which are contrary to good morals."45 The good man is one who has clear and distinct knowledge of the perfections of things, and this knowledge actually causes him to bring about the greatest perfection he can. Though he is incapable of doing otherwise, this kind of determination to action is what constitutes freedom: "moral necessity . .. comes from the free choice of wisdom in relation to final causes."46 Leibniz thus explains moral necessity as a means-ends necessity, as the necessity of doing some act to bring about the agent's end.

Kant accepted the Leibnizian idea that there are different kinds of necessity. But Leibniz's moral necessity could not, on Kant's view, serve the purpose to which it had to be put, explaining obligation. Our desires for goods, Kant held, are contingent. Any desire can be abandoned if the cost to us of pursuing it is too great. This enables us to escape from any means-ends obligation at our own good pleasure. We can treat being obligated in this way as like being advised, where it is up to the agent whether or not to pursue the end about which she is advised.47 Kant saw that the analytic necessity that Leibniz also expounded would be unsuitable for explaining obligation. The idea of a nonempirical synthetic necessity seemed to give Kant what he needed to turn Hutcheson's distinction betweenjustifying and exciting

44. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), 1.3.14., p. 171.

45. Leibniz, CodexJuris Gentium (Praefatio), in Riley, ed., pp. 170-71. 46. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (1951; LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985),

sec. 349, p. 334. In "Reflections on the Work that Mr. Hobbes published. . . on Liberty . . ." adjoined to Theodicy, Leibniz says: "Mr. Hobbes refuses to listen to anything about a moral necessity either, on the ground that everything really happens through physical causes. But one is nevertheless justified in making a great difference between the necessity which constrains the wise to do good, and which is termed moral, and that blind necessity whereby ... things exist without intelligence and without choice, and consequently without God" (p. 395).

47. Barbeyrac had come close to pointing out exactly this objection to Leibniz: see p. 472, where he accuses Leibniz of confusing duty with utility.




reasons to good use in giving a positive account of the necessity involved in obligation. The moral law imposes a synthetic necessity on all rational wills; to finite agents the necessity is expressed in terms of the moral ought. Moral necessity is not causal necessity, so we can fail to do what it is morally necessary for us to do. Freedom and responsibility might thus be compatible with the strictest moral necessity.48 The agent's own rational will could do the job for which the natural lawyers brought in the will of God.

If the rational will explains the moral necessity due to justifying reasons, Kant had also to explain the motivating or exciting power of the recognition of this necessity. He did this, after a long period of hesitation, by introducing the sole a priori motive, respect. In doing so he makes a fundamental break with the motivational theories of both the natural lawyers and the perfectionists.49 Respect is a motive that, unlike all others, is not oriented to good. It arises only-and necessarily-from recognition that we are bound by the moral law. If goods provide motivating reasons to act, so does acknowledgment of the moral law. And doing something because the law says you must is as rational as doing something because it brings about something desirable. We can be acting reasonably in doing our duty even if we do not know or consider what good will result from doing it. A motive not oriented to an end is a necessary counterpart to a nonteleological law of human action.

The philosophical device that enabled Kant to take this line was, of course, his general view of mind as activity imposing order. The synthetic necessities of practice, like those in cognitive experience, are not discovered in a world independent of us. They are imposed on the world by us. Respect and the fact of reason are our empirical awareness of the a priori activity of the noumenal self. Kant thus thinks he can capture the natural law insistence that there is no obligation without will, while clarifying the kind of necessity carried by obligation. More particularly, he thinks he can use this account to explain the distinction between counseling and obligating. Kant takes the rational will to explain the necessity of the means-ends connection central to natural law thought as only one kind of practical necessity. Moral necessity is the other. He can thus think that the natural lawyers, lacking this standpoint, either had no explanation of moral necessity or reduced it to means-ends necessity, with the problems accompa- nying that reduction.

Kant begins the Groundwork with an analysis of the concept of duty, which he thinks is at the core of commonsense morality. He

48. This is not the same as the problem of making freedom compatible with causal necessity.

49. Similar moves were made earlier by Price and by Crusius.




neither rejects nor questions its Grotian focus, as he might well have done-after all, he was familiar with attempts to minimize the importance of obligation for our understanding of morality. We can understand why Kant accepts this starting point if, as I have argued, he saw the Grotian problematic as raising the issues he himself had to resolve. But can we adequately treat him as a Grotian? Didn't the Grotians treat morality as a means for attaining a desired end, whereas Kant refused to accord morality a merely instrumental status? Am I not implying that for Kant morality has exactly that status, since its point is to enable us to live sociably despite our antisocial propensities? Here I can only touch on two lines of thought about this objection to my historical thesis.50

First, most of the Grotians (Hobbes, again, excepted) did not treat the social living that natural law is to make possible as independent of the elements in human nature that make us appropriate subjects of law. As Grotius says, "maintenance of the social order ... consonant with human intelligence, is the source of law."' For Pufendorf, our social existence is to express both our freedom and our recognition that we have a superior-God-who imposes obligation on us. The distinc- tively human life is lived only by and among those who can obey laws. Thus the laws of nature help to define the very end that their own observance makes possible. And since there are good arguments to show that God intends us to live together, the end is not optional for us as personal ends are. The distance between the Grotians and Kant is not as great as it seems at first. Kant's innovation is the claim that to define as well as to show us the possibility of the appropriate kind of social life, means-ends laws are not enough. Laws invoking nonin- strumental necessity must be available.

Second, Kant reflected on the relations of law and end throughout his career. From the early General Natural History to the late third Critique he was concerned with the ways in which behavior governed by nonteleological laws results in what we must think of as purposively designed ends. Morality is a case in point. Though directed by a formal law, moral action has outcomes that serve as ends of action for moral agents even if the agents are not motivated by desires for them. I do not think it implausible to suggest that Kant viewed the operation of the moral law, independent of desired ends though it is, as leading to a solution to the problem from which the Grotians started.

Kant rejected consequentialism, then, in order to make room for a new understanding of obligation that he thought would enable the

50. I am grateful to Andrews Reath, who asked for some comment about the Groundwork and who raised the 'instrumentalism' objection, and to Richard Bett, who pressed the objection further.

51. Grotius, sec. 8; emphasis added.



Schneewind Kant and Natural Law Ethics 73 concept to function as the Grotians thought it had to: in regulating our unsocial sociability. Kant also used his unorthodox view to resolve difficulties about the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties that had arisen in the course of discussion of Pufendorf's formulation of it.52 He went on to develop a new way of showing that the moral agent must be a religious believer. The natural lawyers might have been pleased that Kant took so seriously the issues they thought central to practical philosophy. But they would have had to reject the main innovation that he employed to resolve them: the view that in morality we are obligated not by another but by ourselves.

VIII

What Anscombe claims, in the paper that Donagan found so challeng- ing, is that the concepts of moral obligation and moral duty "ought to be jettisoned" because they cannot now be made intelligible.53 They are incoherent because they are essentially tied to a law-centered understanding of morality. Such an understanding requires acceptance of the view that there is a divine law, which in turn requires acceptance of a divine legislator possessing "superior power." Give up the belief that there is a divine lawgiver, and the concepts dependent on that belief can no longer be made intelligible. Kant tried to get around this problem, Anscombe says, by introducing the idea of legislating for oneself, an idea, she adds, that is quite absurd. He failed to save the concept of obligation, and with it any special moral sense of 'ought' and allied terms. A similar failure, Anscombe holds, faces any attempt to construct notions of moral obligation and duty, or of a moral 'ought', without calling on a divine legislator. It does not occur to her that there may be problems in explaining moral obligation even with a divine legislator.

Anscombe suggests a quite different view of the prospects for a coherent secular understanding of 'ought' and (presumably) 'obligation' in a later paper, "Rules, Rights and Promises." There she treats 'ought' and 'need not' as one of several pairs of modal terms. Modals are learned "by those of normal intelligence as they are trained in the practices of reason." And what are they? They "are essences created and not merely captured or expressed by the grammar of our languages."54 There is no word of divine legislation in this account of 'ought', yet the implication is that the modal 'ought' is sufficient for morality.

52. See the important paper by Wolfgang Kersting, "Das starke Gesetz der Schul- digkeit und das schwachere der Gtitigkeit," Studia Leibnitiana 14 (1982): 184-220.

53. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy." 54. G. E. M. Anscombe, "Rules, Rights and Promises," in Collected Papers, vol. 3,

pp. 97-103. The quotations are from p. 103 and p. 100, respectively (emphasis in the original).




Hume saw something of this, Anscombe suggests, but she does not reassess Kant in the light of her newer account. Yet she might have considered that perhaps Kant, like Hume, was trying to work out a theory of modal concepts. Like Hume he believed that the whole set of modal terms is best understood as indicating something contrib- uted by the mind to experience. Their accounts of that contribution are, of course, radically different, but they are working with the same thought: that the "has to be," "cannot be," "ought to be," "need not be" have a different status from the "is." In addition, the modal concepts are in important respects tied together across science and morality, although embedded in characteristically different kinds of response to their application. If Hume's account of 'ought' is at least a candidate for serious consideration, then so, one might think, is Kant's. And so, of course, Donagan thought it was.



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Schneewind - Kant and Natural Law Ethics