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MORAL OBLIGATION AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON CONCERNS FROM IMMANUEL KANT, G. W. F. HEGEL, AND ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2010

H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Rice University
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Abstract

Once God is no longer recognized as the ground and the enforcer of morality, the character and force of morality undergoes a significant change, a point made by G.E.M. Anscombe in her observation that without God the significance of morality is changed, as the word criminal would be changed if there were no criminal law and criminal courts. There is no longer in principle a God's-eye perspective from which one can envisage setting moral pluralism aside. In addition, it becomes impossible to show that morality should always trump concerns of prudence, concerns for one's own non-moral interests and the interests of those to whom one is close. Immanuel Kant's attempt to maintain the unity of morality and the force of moral obligation by invoking the idea of God and the postulates of pure practical reason (i.e., God and immortality) are explored and assessed. Hegel's reconstruction of the status of moral obligation is also examined, given his attempt to eschew Kant's thing-in-itself, as well as Kant's at least possible transcendent God. Severed from any metaphysical anchor, morality gains a contingent content from socio-historical context and its enforcement from the state. Hegel's disengagement from a transcendent God marks a watershed in the place of God in philosophical reflections regarding the status of moral obligations on the European continent. Anscombe is vindicated. Absent the presence of God, there is an important change in the force of moral obligation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , July 2010 , pp. 317 - 340
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Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2010

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References

1 In this essay, the term “cardinal” is used in the first sense given in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2d ed., 1960)Google Scholar: “of basic importance; main; chief; as, cardinal principles.”

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3 For ease in identifying references to God, and following traditional usage, pronouns and other terms referring to God are capitalized.

4 In this essay, “prudence” is used to identify seeking one's own welfare and the welfare of those for whom one is most concerned. As Kant puts it, “Skill in the choice of means to one's own highest welfare can be called prudence in the narrowest sense.” Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 33 [Akademie edition, IV.416]Google Scholar.

5 Much has been written addressing the issue of moral pluralism. See, for example, Harman, Gilbert, Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wong, David B., Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Wong, David B., Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For my early arguments on this matter, see Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “Can Ethics Take Pluralism Seriously?” Hastings Center Report 19 (September 1989), 33–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

6 “And His righteousness is to children's children, to such as keep His covenant” (LXX Psalm 102:17–18).

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14 For an overview of Agrippa's pente tropoi, his five ways of showing that controversies, such as those regarding the canonical content of morality, cannot be resolved by sound rational argument, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Pyrrho 9, 88–89. See also Sextus Empiricus, “Outlines of Pyrrhonism,” I.15.164–69.

15 A moral framework grounded in permission can, by default, function as a practice into which moral agents can enter independently of any particular content-full morality (i.e., without affirming or assuming a particular ordering of primary goods). Such a moral framework underlies the market. This moral framework, anchored in actual permission, functions as a transcendental framework. It provides the necessary conditions for a general human practice that allows participants to act with an authority derived from their common agreement. This practice will thus implicitly include the agreement only to use each other with permission. Permission, in the sense of authorization, creates a web of moral authority. But this perspective does not establish an obligation to enter this practice based on the goodness or the rightness of always acting morally in this way. Only “within” the practice is there a sense of rightness and wrongness. See Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

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17 The issue in the background is not just whether God approves of the good because it is good or whether the good is good because God approves of it (the issue that Plato raises in the Euthyphro). The matter is more complicated, because there is the further question as to whether the correct ranking of the good is the one endorsed by God because it is the correct ranking, or whether it is correct because God affirms it as correct. Then there is the more profound question as to whether, given an omnipotent Creator God, one can make adequate sense of the good, the right, and the virtuous without reference to this God. Is it possible, absent reference to the Holy (that is, to God) to make sense of a dependent, created universe, including the morality that should structure relationships within such a universe, without reference to the Creator? See Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “The Euthyphro's Dilemma Reconsidered: A Variation on a Theme from Brody on Halakhic Method,” in Pluralistic Casuistry, ed. Cherry, Mark and Iltis, Ana (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 109–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 A traditional interpretation of Confucian moral thought requires one to weigh one's obligations to the good of one's family, friends, close associates, and community higher than one's obligations to distant and especially anonymous others. See, for example, Ruiping Fan, “Which Care? Whose Responsibility? And Why Family?”

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21 The critical works of Kant refer to those published beginning with the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, which critically bring into question what had been the taken-for-granted understanding of epistemology, metaphysics, and morality in Western European philosophy.

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32 Ibid., 137, Akademie ed., V.133.

33 Hegel's reference to the death of God is not without controversy. For some further reflections on the matter, see Amengual, Gabriel, “Nihilismus und Gottesbegriff,” in Hegel-Jahrbuch (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 38–44Google Scholar; and Franke, William, “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-Secular Postmodernity,” Religion and the Arts 11, no. 2 (2007): 214–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, secs. 258–60. “Category” in this essay is used in the first sense given in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2d ed., 1960)Google Scholar: “an ultimate concept or form of thought; one of the primary fundamental conceptions to which all knowledge can be reduced.” Although the state is the highest category of Sittlichkeit, the highest category of the state is world history, that is, the transition to Absolute Spirit within which philosophy is the highest category.

35 In his account of moral categories, Hegel begins with an abstract account of rights claims and then shows that this discourse is one-sided and incomplete without an account of the good that he addresses under the rubric Moralität. Hegel then creates a distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit, thus fashioning a new terminology for his moral philosophy. As Michael Inwood notes, “All three German words for ‘morality’ derive from a word for ‘custom’: Ethik is from the Greek ethos, Moralität from the Latin mos (plural: mores), and Sittlichkeit from the German Sitte. But only in the case of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’) does Hegel stress this genealogy: Ethik has little significance for him, but is occasionally used to cover both Sittlichkeit and Moralität. Moralität is regularly used for ‘individual morality’, especially as conceived by Kant.” Inwood, Michael, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The difficulty that Moralität poses and that Sittlichkeit solves is the problem of establishing canonical moral content. Moralität seeks but fails to establish particular content-full moral obligations as canonical. The content of morality, Hegel argues, is necessarily contingent, sociohistorically conditioned. As with all actuality, for Hegel there is a necessary dimension of contingency. Abstract right and Moralität must therefore be understood within the particularity and contingent content of Sittlichkeit, which takes shape within a family, a civil society, and a state.

36 Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Wood, Allen W., trans. Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 157, sec. 130Google Scholar. The Latin derives from the famous phrase “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (“Let there be justice, though the world perish”).

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42 The nonmetaphysical account of Hegel's project, which this essay embraces, understands Hegel's mature project as an attempt to appreciate categorial thought, to understand how one can think about thinking about being. Hegel's project is the examination and ordering of the ways that thought apprehends being and being is for thought. This account underlying this essay is deeply indebted to the work of Klaus Hartmann. See, for example, Hartmann, Klaus, “On Taking the Transcendental Turn,” Review of Metaphysics 20, no. 2 (1966): 223–49Google Scholar; Hartmann, Klaus, ed., Die Ontologische Option (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartmann, Klaus, “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel, ed. MacIntyre, Alasdair (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 101–24Google Scholar; and Pinkard, Terry, “What Is the Non-Metaphysical Reading of Hegel? A Reply to F. Beiser,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 34 (1996): 13–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., and Pinkard, Terry, eds., Hegel Reconsidered (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 For an introduction to some of the controversies regarding what Hegel really meant about God, see Brinkmann, Klaus, “Panthéisme, panlogisme et protestantisme dans la philosophie de Hegel,” in Les Philosophes et la question de Dieu, ed. Langlois, Luc (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 223–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, William, “Hegel's God, Transcendence, and the Counterfeit Double: A Figure of Dialectical Equivocity?” Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 91–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, William, Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)Google Scholar; Hodgson, Peter C., “Hegel's God: Counterfeit or Real?” Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 153–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Houlgate, Stephen, “Hegel, Desmond, and the Problem of God's Transcendence,” Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 131–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lauer, Quentin, Hegel's Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Kreines, James, “Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant's Epistemic Limits and Hegel's Ambitions,” Inquiry 50, no. 3 (June 2007): 306–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nichols, Craig M., “The Eschatological Theogony of the God Who May Be: Exploring the Concept of Divine Presence in Kearney, Hegel, and Heidegger,” Metaphilosophy 36, no. 5 (October 2005): 750–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Olson, Alan M., Hegel and the Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

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46 “Noetic” is used in the adjectival form of the second sense given in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2d ed., 1960)Google Scholar: “cognition, esp. through direct and self-evident knowledge.”

47 See Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “Critical Reflections on Theology's Handmaid,” Philosophy and Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 53–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 At the close of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in the third part (“The Philosophy of Mind”) in the section on “Philosophy,” Hegel states: “This notion of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the truth aware of itself….” Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. Wallace, William (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 313, sec. 574Google Scholar. Hegel considers philosophy to be the esoteric study of God (ibid., sec. 573). Indeed, Hegel's point is that philosophers philosophizing are God. Here Hegel recasts, shorn of metaphysical foundation, Aristotle's account of the life of the unmoved Mover, God, which is the life of thought thinking itself: “And thought in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thought in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the substance, is thought.” Aristotle, , Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes, Jonathan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2, 1695, 1072b18–22Google Scholar.

49 Kalkavage, Peter, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2008), 455Google Scholar.

50 Kaufmann, Walter, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966)Google Scholar; Althaus, Horst, Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Tarsh, Michael (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 254.

51 On this point, Kaufmann quotes Heinrich Heine's (1797–1856) report about an evening with Hegel:

I, a young man of twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: “The stars, hum! Hum! The stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky!” For God's sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: “So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother?”—Saying that, he looked around anxiously, but he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to play whist… .

I was young and proud, and it pleased my vanity when I learned from Hegel that it was not the dear God who lived in heaven that was God, as my grandmother supposed, but I myself here on earth. (Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation, 367)

For a slightly different translation of this passage, see Heine, Heinrich, Heinrich Heine's Memoirs from his Works, Letters, and Conversations, ed. Karpeles, Gustav, trans. Cannan, Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1910), 114Google Scholar.

52 Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, 298, sec. 564.

53 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 191 [414].

54 Western Christianity began its journey to Hegel's philosophical domestication and recasting of God when, from the early second millennium, it began to presuppose an analogy (i.e., an analogia entis) between what human moral rationality could know about created being and the being of God. This move allowed Western culture to assume that philosophical accounts of natural law and discursive accounts of philosophical rationality could substitute for the perspective of God. For an account of how different this Western position was from that of the original Christianity, see Bradshaw, David, Aristotle East and West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Philosophy was assumed to be able to discover and lay out a moral perspective that was the same as the perspective of God. In time, this led to recasting God in terms of philosophy's interests. For an account of the quite different original Christian epistemology, grounded in a noetic experience of God, see Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Salem, MA: Scrivener Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Engelhardt, , “Sin and Bioethics: Why a Liturgical Anthropology Is Foundational,” Christian Bioethics 11, no. 2 (August 2005): 221–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Engelhardt, , “What Is Christian about Christian Bioethics? Metaphysical, Epistemological, and Moral Differences,” Christian Bioethics 11, no. 3 (December 2005): 241–53CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Engelhardt, “Critical Reflections on Theology's Handmaid.”

55 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 3, “Of the Ultimate Sanction of the Principle of Utility.”

56 Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, secs. 430–37. In his treatment of “Phenomenology of Mind” in the Encyclopedia (he also treats the issue in his book The Phenomenology of Mind), Hegel examines the struggle for recognition under an encounter that initially leads to a master and a slave, but that culminates in the emergence of a universal self-consciousness, a step on the way to morality.

57 Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, sec. 130.

58 Hegel put the matter of categorial change in this fashion: “All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.” Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. Petry, Michael John (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), 202, sec. 246 AdditionGoogle Scholar. For Hegel, when categories change, reality changes, because there is no independent perspective beyond our categories, save our categorial reflections on the categories (which thought about thought is Absolute Spirit), that could serve as an independent and objective standard. Hegel with malice aforethought has attempted to deflate any acknowledgment of the existence and perspective of the transcendent God, so as firmly to place reality within his categorial account.