OK, grasshopper. A short disquisition on the moral law. I suggest you start with Aristotle, read the Ethics. It is a silly little book, limited in application to Athenian gentlemen, but it established a pattern of moral behavior that most "good men" have tried to imitate. It persuaded many others, such as the Stoics, to develop a rule of conduct in which one's duty was paramount. One was not permitted to subsitute his personal well-being for the good of the universe. It also persuaded Cicero to introduce the idea of ethics into Roman thought, and he translated ETHIKE as Moralia, creating the confusing and annoying search for some difference between ethics and morality. Epcitetus was able to prove that one could be happy and a good man even though a slave. Marcus, of course, was able to prove that one could be happy and a good man even though an emperor.
In the development of all of this moral thought, there was no place for god or the gods. Morality was an invention of human ability and intelligence. One made himself good by practice of goodness. No Greek or Roman for a moment entertained the thought that God or the gods were good, or even interested in the condition of mankind.
You can search the bible from end to end and you will not find any mention of the moral law or of ethics. True, Paul somewhere writes of the "law written in the hearts of the gentiles" and some writers have considered that to be "natural law." Leave to Aquinas to contaminate Greco-Roman moral law with religion. His futile attempt to derive Catholicism from reason resulted only in heresy. Jesus, of course, claimed to have destroyed Jewish Law and to have replaced it with a new dispensation. But both Christianity and Catholicism mocked and contradicted the moral law as the Greeks and Romans conceived it.
During the middle ages it became increasingly difficult for one to be a good man while a member of the church. The church inculcated cringing submission to itself and ultimately provided for remission of sins by the simple payment of money to a corrupt and evil papacy. The rediscovery of Greek literature in the renaissance led to new thought. (Aquinas, of course, like Augustine, could not read Greek but that did not stop these clever but ignorant men from telling other people how they should behave in the few short years that were left before Jesus returned and harrowed the earth.) Luther and the other reformers rejected the Church as a maker of moral rules (the Pope still claims to be the final authority on morals). The reformers thought that good and evil were in the hearts of man, and began the second guessing of the church, auricular confession, penance, and absolution, hell and damnation. With the enlightenment, intelligent people started looking around and discovered that there was no authentic foundation for the church's claims, for the bible, or for any kind of superstition. It was still too dangerous to express doubt in the existence of god and the authority of priests. Even Kant, the most important single moralist of the enlightenment, was a Prussian civil servant, and was afraid of Prussian absolutism. Thus he denied the morality of rebellion (even after the US Revolutionary War), and thought the killing of killers was part of the moral law.
Kant's great contribution to the understanding of the moral law was his conception of the categorical imperative, with you are all familiar, and which forms the foundations (Grundlagen) of his metaphysic of morals. The CI puts the decision on the goodness of an act clearly on the individual. No one who accepts the CI could bomb a city, or murder prisoners, or commit abortion.
Today, when a philosopher, or even an economist, speaks of the moral law he is likely to be expressing a belief in deontology. If he is by chance religious, then he may derive his duty from his god. If, what is much more likely, he is an atheist or an agnostic, he will derive his duties from discourse among moral and learned men.
There is no question that the moral law evolves. Aristotle, who in my opinion started all of this, did not believe that slavery was immoral. Jesus, who had some inkling of morality, although he is not reported to have ever said anything about it, and Paul, his avatar, thought that slaves should obey their masters. There is something truly obscene in free people preaching to slaves that they should be happy in their slavery. There is also something obscene in people to day making apologies for slave masters of the past. I have always known that had I been a slave, and not otherwise encumbered by events, that I would have struck out against my master and anyone who stood in the way of my freedom. If he resisted me, he died, and I would never have lost a minute's sleep about the wrongness of my act. Of course, slaves were encumbered by human relationships. If a slave rebelled, all of the slaves in the household would be killed. The masters gave slaves into a form of marriage because this held them in shackles stronger than mere chains.
Here we see the moral law at work for the masters. Any slave, such as Nat Turner, who rebelled without a reasonable expectation of liberty for himself and his fellows was violating the Powell Doctrine. Art is long, and life is short, so, ordinarily, a slave should wait until the opportunity is right. As soon as the federal troops draw near, flee to them. If necessary kill your master. more likely your mistress if the old man is off at war. During the Civil War slaves deserted the plantations in hundreds of thousands. Fortunately, it was not necessary for most of them to kill their masters. The federal troops took care of that.
The slave who strikes back at his oppressor is conducting himself in accordance with the moral law as long as it is not merely self-indulgence in romantic rebellion.
Even the United States Supreme Court could sometimes even show an understanding of that moral right.
You assignment for tomorrow is to read all of this stuff on the Amistad case and report on it in class tomorrow.
amistad.org |
