CHAPTER V

THE MOTIVE OF AUTHORITY

§ 14. The categorical imperative. § 15. The basis of authority. § 16. The authoritarian tradition. § 17. Austere morality. § 18. Authority vs. morality. § 19. The sentiment of reverence.

§ 14

RTHODOX morality has just been treated as standardized morality. In this chapter and the next I shall develop its implications as the

morality of authority.

By the morality of authority I mean morality formulated in terms of duty. Among moral philosophers the most uncompromising exponent of this conception is Immanuel Kant; for whom it seems that the one necessary, sufficient, and all-inclusive criterion of morality is that morality commands.1 Now for Kant this means that no merely utilitarian morality can ever be moral. The utilitarian says, Be good and you will be happy. But this, says Kant, is mere advice. It means only, Be good if you wish to be happy; and it is open to the reply, But I don't wish to be happy. The utilitarian imperative (Kant can speak only in terms of "imperatives") is thus a hypothetical imperative, while the imperative of morality is always a categorical imperative. Morality offers no advice. Morality cares not to persuade you of the wisdom, or profit, or beauty

1 This in spite of Kant's no less positive insistence that morality is also freedom. Of this Professor Dewey remarks (The Influence of Darwin and Other Essays, p. 65) that " The marriage of freedom and authority was then celebrated with the understanding that sentimental primacy went to the former and practical control to the latter". I question "the understanding", but this neatly describes the result.

of goodness. Morality is interested only in the authority of goodness. And therefore morality speaks exclusively in terms of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not ".

For Kant, then, the issue of morality takes the form of authority v. utility. And his vindication of morality is a laborious defence of this distinction. It is my purpose in the presentation of authoritarian morality to show that the distinction is false; and that not only is authority based upon utility, but that among the several elements involved in the assertion of authority utility is morally the most respectable.

§ 15

Although Kant wrote nearly a century and half ago, his scholastic formulation is valid to-day as an expression of the popular idea of morality. Even by those who propose to take their duty lightly, morality is commonly conceived as duty. But morality has not always been viewed as duty. In the ethical literature of the Greeks the conception is at least not prominent; and the modern reader of Greek ethics, at least the reader bred in the protestant religious tradition, has the sense that a certain undefined but familiar element is missing. Greek ethics is cast mainly in the form of a discussion of "the good". This suggests a very different picture from that to which we are accustomed. Instead of the child being admonished by his parents, or the soldier receiving orders from his superior officer, we have before us the picture of a youth to whom the various possibilities of life are being unfolded and who is now invited to choose for himself that which is most lovely and beautiful. His elders and friends may indeed take upon themselves the responsibility of enlightening his choice. But the assumption is that nothing but enlightenment is necessary. To judge that this or that is good is as a matter of course to choose it.

It is true that the conservative Greek morality was cast in the form of reverence for the gods and obedience to the law of the state. But the Greek gods were hardly adapted

to the role of moral authorities. Apart from the scandalous stories told about them, which Plato properly deplores, they seem to lack the necessary authoritative relation. They are authorities, it would seem, only in the sense in which to-day wealth and fashion are authorities in matters of taste and social convention. They may interfere in human affairs, if they care to do so, because they have the power, but it is not clear that their power rests upon any special basis of right.

The Kantian conception of morality reflects a totally different tradition, the tradition, namely, of protestant Christianity, which is mainly an Old Testament tradition, thus a Hebrew tradition. Kant, we remember, was bred in the atmosphere of German protestantism and German pietism. Now in the Old Testament God is Jahveh, or Jehovah, the tribal god of the Hebrews, and as the tribal god he is in some sense the father of the tribe. But the idea of fatherhood embodies two motifs. The father may be expected to forgive offences against himself, such as one in another relation will never forgive. On the other hand the father is especially authorised to punish. How deeply instinctive is this conception, both parents and teachers can testify. The parent who does not hesitate to punish severely is often fiercely jealous of punishment by another, and the child will take meekly from his parent what he would resent from the teacher. It may be said, then, that both the Old Testament and the New Testament teach the fatherhood of God. But while in the New Testament God is the tender parent, in the Old Testament he is the stern parent. The New Testament teaches God's mercy, the Old Testament asserts his authority.

But the tribal god was something more than a father to his tribe, in the customary human sense. The human father begets his children, but he does not create them; he is not infrequently surprised by what he has begotten. In the Hebrew cosmology God was both the father and creator of man, and likewise the creator of the world. This meant that the authority of God was absolute, and

further that God was the sole and final source of any authority to be found in the universe. The logic of the conception is very simple: shall I not do what I will with my own? And what is so truly and certainly my own as that which I have created? That this is the true logic of property would be conceded, I believe, both by communists and by individualists; whose point of difference regarding property would then lie in the question of who has created it. But it seems that no human being does more than partially create. Even the novelist who creates characters is dismayed to find them taking courses of their own. God, however, is the absolute creator. And therefore he has absolute authority.

Such I take to be the final "basis of authority" underlying, however obscurely, every authoritarian theory of morality, not excepting those which are avowedly agnostic or atheistic; underlying likewise every authoritarian theory of the state. In the mediaeval tradition, persisting well into modern times, morality was based squarely upon the will of God, all right was divine right, and all earthly authority was a question of to whom God had delegated authority. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, which came to a head in seventeenth-century England, was a reply to the divine right of popes. It fell before the divine right of the people-for the rights of the people had to be no less divinely authenticated than the rights of kings. The eighteenth century "rights of man" were still to come. It seemed out of the question to establish any human relations without erecting a "seat of authority", which was always God's authority. Thus we find divine right asserted quite as despotically in Puritan New England as in England herself under Charles the First.

§ 16

So long as the morality of authority implied the background of a theocratic universe, with God as the creator and father, it stood for an idea, and for a genuinely moral

idea, even if, as I shall point out later, the idea failed to warrant authority. Under the growing influence of rationalism the theocratic conception lost its power and the authority of church and king declined. But the demand for authority survived-as it survives to this day. It was now, however, no longer an idea but a tradition.

In morals the seat of authority was now said to be, not external, but internal. The quality of authority was bestowed upon our perceptions of good and bad. The "moral sense" was defined and set apart, secure from criticism, from our sense of other things. And Bishop Butler set up the authority of "conscience." As Butler would have it,1 the deliverances of conscience are in no sense my personal judgments, either reasoned or instinctive, of the goodness or badness of things. Conscience, like the "daimon" of Socrates, is "the voice of God", speaking within me and compelling me to do blindly what on my own judgment I should hardly choose to do. The tradition of authority survives to-day, somewhat attenuated and disguised, among the moralists who hold that the word "ought" expresses something unique and per se unanalysable, and among the political philosophers who find a similar unanalysable in the conception of "sovereignty". The implication is that these conceptions proceed from a power other and higher than ourselves. The authoritarian tradition survives under the seemingly most adverse theoretical conditions in the moral idea seductively described as "self-realization"; which, following T. H. Green, warns you that your only "real self" will be that which chooses a "common good", expressing in the end the will of God.

Modern science has parted with the will of God. It is the special claim of science that she brings us down out of the clouds of empty abstraction, romantic imagination, and

1 As a matter of fact, Butler's analysis of "conscience" is really an analysis, so modern in some respects that he more than anticipates T. H. Green, of the process of reflection; and it is interesting to note that, while Butler's sermons were written to oppose Shaftesbury, both moralists made the essence of morality to consist in reflective action-and both used the term "reflection ".