THE MORAL LAW AND THE LAW OF GOD
P. T. Geach from God and the Soul, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969
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.'
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