DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9205.2011.01440.

x
Philosophical Investigations 34:2 April 2011
ISSN 0190-0536

Morality and Religion: Some Questions about

First Principles phin_1440 214..238

John Rist, University of Toronto

The word “ethics” is systematically ambiguous. It may refer to a study of

whatever laws or professional codes we choose or are obliged to live by in
society, or it may (inter alia) investigate the nature and roots (if any) of
specifically moral obligation. I am concerned now only with the second of
these options and shall maintain that apparent obligations that are not
specifically “moral” are not obligations in any absolute sense, since they
cannot be justified by metaphysical and better – as I shall argue – religious
underpinnings. Framing my discussion in this way is a broadly “modern”
approach and depends on the historical circumstance of a Christian
history of Western Europe, since although at least as early as Duns Scotus
philosophers raised the possibility of what sort of natural law is defensible
“if God does not exist,” the problem only became acute when, for reasons
that need not be discussed here, Hugo Grotius famously tried to organise
an account of natural law that could command assent etsi Deus non daretur.
In the early modern period, a search was on for an account of natural
law that would not depend on “voluntarism,” that is, the claim that the
source of morality is the absolute will of God: a claim that by then had
apparently defused the challenge to God’s omnipotence presented by
“intellectualist” (and therefore – it was said – determinist) accounts of
obligation. Indeed, such accounts were seen not only to deprive God of
omnipotence but also to deprive man of responsibility, if he could only
will what was presented to his intellect.Yet “voluntarism,” whether in the
form attributed to Aquinas by Suarez or the more brazen versions readily
promoted by Luther and Calvin, seemed to imply that moral obligation,
viewed as mere obedience to the command of a superior, is ultimately
irrational, hence immoral. If that is how seeming “moral” obligation is to
be explained, it is better (because less servile, more worthy of the supposed
dignity of man) to find some other basis for human living, whether in the
thesis that morality arises by some sort of consent (Hobbesian or other) or
as the dictate of a kind of rationality that we share with God.The last stage

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USA.
 John Rist 215
of this philosophical journey is found in Kant for whom, instead of any
ultimately arbitrary decree of God, we ourselves, as rational agents, discern
the dictates of right reason and will that they apply to the whole of
humanity, not least to ourselves.We thus occupy the place once held by (a
voluntarist) God, with the improvement that our claims about obligation
are accessible and intelligible to all rational agents and are thus genuinely
moral.
Thus far a little philosophical history; now let me turn to the more
recent intellectual and social landscape where it is still often strenuously
urged from both within and beyond philosophy strictly so-called – and
famously, from very different standpoints, by both Nietzsche and Dos-
toievski – that without religious justification no moral claims, least of all
claims about moral obligation, are defensible. That might seem puzzling
since all sorts of apparently moral claims are made by people who claim
to have no religious beliefs. This potential puzzle needs to be separated
from the unthinking, but much repeated, observation that there are many
good people who have no religious beliefs and many bad people who
have. That thrust is less than devastating if we keep in mind that actions
may be a good deal better (or worse) than warranted by the various
justifications of behaviour that people (or others on their behalf ) may
offer from time to time. In any case, the question about the relationship
between religion and morality is not whether religious people (or some of
them) are (or should be) expected to be particularly moral, but whether
a non-religious defence of morality is possible. The answer to that, as I
have already implied, must depend in the first instance on what is to be
understood by words like “ethics,” “morality” and “moral obligation.” My
position on moral obligation will be basically that of Augustine, seen
not as a “voluntarist” (as historically he was often misread) but as having
reconstructed some insights of Plato about the metaphysics of morals –
and that not only because Augustine is a powerful thinker, well versed in
specifically Christian as well as much “pagan” morality, but because I
believe that the roughly Catholic form of Christianity he represents
provides the most coherent theistic system available.This claim entails that
if someone can convince me that his position is radically flawed, I have to
conclude that other currently available theistic alternatives – and hence
statements about the necessary relationship between religion and moral
obligation – are also indefensible.
I can assume that morality is concerned with what is good or with
what is good to do or with what we ought to do because it is “right” to
do it, or with all of these. There again, any interpretation of the implica-
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216 Philosophical Investigations
tions of such positions will depend on how “good” and “right” are
understood. Above all, it will depend on whether they are intended to
found claims in positive law or in some version of natural law: that is,
whether the first principles of obligation are to be discovered in the nature
of things – but perhaps only with reference to a transcendent or non-
natural factor – or whether they are the inventions of man – invented for
whatever reasons, good or bad.
Invented “moralities” will be either self-serving or group serving: that
is, they will claim to serve the interests either of an individual, or of a
group of individuals, or of the whole human race, including future
generations.They may envisage the preservation, more or less, of the social
status quo (as “social glue”), or of one’s own life, or of the greatest good
of the greatest number, or of human “rights” (whatever they may be held
from time to time to be). When we identify such goals as good and
desirable, we imply – perhaps problematically – that we ought to pursue
them (and perhaps ought to enforce them) wherever possible. So the
philosopher will ask for the grounds on which we have made our
decisions and assertions, and enquire how we justify the order of priorities
we have set among the various goods we have adopted. If we think, for
example, that all have a right to good health and that the establishment of
a health-care system is good for some group or other, we have “previ-
ously” determined that the preservation of human life itself (or at least of
some manifestations of human life) is a good, indeed a logically prior
good.
Next we shall need to ask whether in our “moral” determinations we
have been setting ourselves merely to determine priorities among desir-
able goals – as well as the means to secure those goals – or whether we
can justify the goals themselves as well as the means and priorities with
which we are “morally” concerned. And if our minds are not – as
instruments – merely the slaves of our passions and can be deployed to
determine or identify what our purposes are or should be and in what
logical and moral order of priority they should be pursued (presumably
taking our desires into account in such calculations – normally we do want
to remain alive), we have to ask whether our minds are capable (or capable
enough) of determining what is “right” or “good” or good for us and
what, if anything, it follows that we should do about our findings.And first
we shall have also to ask whether we really mean “determining” – or
whether it is a matter of “discovering” (so well as we can).The answer to
that will depend on the kind of beings we are and the nature of the
universe we inhabit, and that is where the relationship between religion
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 John Rist 217
and morality may come in – although not necessarily: if morality can be
determined apart from religion, we shall have to explain where moral
obligation – rather than personal or group convenience (real or imagined)
– is to be anchored, or more precisely, why any apparently moral obligation
can be explained in terms of such mere convenience. On the other hand,
if morality is to depend on religious truth or truths, we must explain how
we are able to discover such truths and why we have good reason to
believe that we have discovered them (or discovered them sufficiently).
Let us think a little more about determining. In the fifth century B.C.,
Protagoras promoted the idea of inventing morality – albeit his axiom
“Man is the measure of all things” is (and was seen to be, and perhaps was
intended to be) ambiguous. It could mean that each of us is the moral
measure, or that some of us are from time to time, or that all of us are (at
least in theory). Plato, who argued against Protagoras’s view, seems to have
assumed (perhaps rightly) that the ambiguity is rather unimportant: Pro-
tagoras’s opinion comes down to the claim that each of us is the moral
measure, and perhaps implicit is the further claim that if all of us thought
about it seriously, we all would agree on what that measure is. For Plato
and Protagoras did agree (like every other ancient moralist) that we all are
seeking “happiness” – which might or normally might mean not merely
pleasure or contentment but “flourishing”: we all want to do well (what-
ever that may mean). So although Plato disagreed with Protagoras’s claim
that man is the moral measure – arguing (specifically in the Laws) that
God (or the gods) is (are) the moral measure – he agreed that doing the
“right” thing would be doing what will make us “happy.” More recently,
however, it has been argued not just that the relationship between “hap-
piness” and doing what is right is problematic but that morality is not to
be connected with “flourishing” in this or any significant sense. That,
however, may be dependent on slipping into the account of morality
undefended and unjustifiable quasi-religious presuppositions; we will leave
it aside for the time being.
Returning to Protagoras (and his more recent followers): we seem to be
left with various options if we want to answer the question of how a man
(or men) may exercise his capacity as measure. Either (implausibly) we
follow our passions blindly, or we try to prioritise them, or we simply try
to find “the” rational course. But if we choose either of the latter options,
we are prone to assume that given the right circumstances there really is
a rational (or more rational) course to pursue and that everyone can
recognise that course as more rational – and we further assume that we
“ought” to follow that course if (and since) we want to be rational. Thus,
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218 Philosophical Investigations
we are inclined, if we go down that road, to neglect the question as to
whether it is logically incumbent on us (hence that we “ought”) to follow
what appears to be simply the rational course even if we can discover
what it is. Hence have arisen the various thought-experiments (wholly
detached from actual life) about what we would do behind a “veil of
ignorance” or in a “state of nature.” However, in engaging in such
experiments, we make a monstrous and unjustified assumption: namely
that we are a-historical beings and that thus we ever could enjoy such an
option and so logically derive our behaviour from it. Further, the error of
that sort of thinking reveals the deeper error that by an act of reason we
can “correct” the morally relevant historical circumstances in which we
find ourselves – and thus reduce ourselves experientially to homogeneous,
a-historical entities. For, although as human we are similarly moral beings,
we are born into very different moral circumstances. It is an unavoidable
inference from the unique character both of our genetic history and of
our moral nurture that we face very different moral tasks, and who is to
know how well or ill we variously succeed in performing them?
We have apparently reached the position in which we are able to say
that if Protagoras is right, morality is either some form of convention or
conventions – which differ according to historical circumstances – or that
the rational course is the moral course, and thus “ought” to be pursued;
if, that is, in our individual historical times and places, we are able to
determine what it is. Undoubtedly Kant was the philosopher who made
the most determined effort to pursue a version of Protagoras’s approach
without reducing morality to convention, although in this regard his more
recent “constructivist” descendents, lacking his residual theism, have been
less successful: they tacitly accept some of his unjustified (although not
necessarily untrue) premises about the worth of human beings while
adding others drawn from similarly unjustified assumptions of contempo-
rary culture. Their position is the more exposed in that they abandon
Kant’s resort to the Cartesian-sounding claim that our real nature is part
of a specifically designated “noumenal” realm, as well as his assertion that
God can eventually be invoked to resolve the tension between duty and
happiness.
Among Kant’s less well-defended premises is that persons have equal
“value” and that this entails that they have some sort of right all to be
treated equally – not to speak of his identification of what he understands
as a “rational” decision (even if that be regularly, indeed universally,
possible) as at the same time an indication of what we “ought” to do. For
although Kant argues that we can legislate for how it is right for humanity
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 John Rist 219
to act, he fails to show – since he believes that “ought” entails “can” – how
that “ought” is absolute unless it is true (inter alia) that all persons are
equally worthy and exist in similar moral space.That would be true (in his
view) if we were all capable of an equal “rationality,” but there is no reason
to believe that that is the case. Of course, to deny Kant’s claim that we are
all equally “rational” and therefore equally valuable is not to deny that we
are all equally valuable, only that if that is to be so, there must be another
explanation for it. And there remains the further option: that we are all
equal in value in being of no value at all.
A better version of Protagoras’s claim – and probably what he intended
– is that morality is not just rationality, but that it is conventional. That
implies that (Kantians aside) many contemporary ethical schemes would be
Protagorean. Such would be all forms of contractarianism, whether Hob-
besian or Rawlsian. All would depend on what we ourselves accept to be
“right,” such rightness depending (for example) on whether they are
deemed to promote the greatest good or safety of the greatest number, with
ourselves to determine what that greatest good happens to be.Yet all such
schemes find it impossible to account for why we ought to act rationally
(rather than why such actions might make a certain sense, or feel right, or
consoling or self-flattering, or whatever) or why we ought to promote the
greatest good of the greatest number – or indeed why we ought to do
anything at all: as distinct, that is, from claims that such and such a “moral”
scheme will benefit us most, be the more likely to preserve our lives in a
relatively happy condition, etc. Bentham seems to have said – the remark is
at least ben trovato – that he just liked doing good; others did not.
Of course, there are quite other varieties of “ethical” proposals too,
most of which may be dubbed ideological, as depending on claims that we
should (or ought to) do what the march of history, or progress, or
evolution “teaches” that we ought to do. (Perhaps we shall have to do so
anyway in some sort of determinist fashion, like dogs dragged along
behind the Stoic cart, all good compatibilists and “free” to follow our
destiny.) I leave such schemes aside, merely noting that they are all in
effect non-providential variations on Stoic or near-Stoic naturalism, to
which I shall eventually return. They have the advantage of identifying us
as animals rooted in history, but they invariably depend on some piece of
alleged (falsifiable) knowledge as to how the future will pan out and
therefore how we ought to “come to terms” with it or indeed also actively
promote it.
All such man-made “Protagorean” constructions have similar disadvan-
tages: firstly they offer no defence against nihilism in some form or another,
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220 Philosophical Investigations
whether the nihilist claims that all morality is “hidden” power-seeking that
can be exposed by the Nietzschean genealogist, or whether he merely
objects that he has no overriding reason to accept it. Perhaps he will cite
“carpe diem”: short-term advantages and pleasures are as attractive as
something more distant; we may just prefer them. That move might be
supported by pointing out to the conventionalist (as also to the Kantian)
that we are not just “reasonable” creatures; we are more complex than that.
And there is a second major objection to “Protagorean” ideas: whatever law
may be made by one man (or one group) and claimed as moral can be
unmade by the next man (or group) under some similar pretext.
Thus, if all man-made morality is conventional, there is no binding
“moral” reason to accept any of it – even if there may be reasons of
self-interest and comfort that make it preferable to do so. Moralists (and
their followers among the public) seem – if unreasonably – to ask for more.
For example, they may want to say that the Holocaust was simply “wrong,”
not that we have decided or think it helpful, or comforting, or necessary to
call it wrong.Yet if for such people all law is positive law, they have no valid
reason to say anything is simply wrong – even if it is. And it would follow
that, unless an international positive law exists and is accepted as binding
(which in any case could be for “non-moral” reasons of convenience, etc.),
no one is to be condemned on “moral” grounds outside his own country.
So Goering and his fellow defendants at Nuremburg should have been
acquitted. They were condemned not because they offended against any
duly established “positive” law but because it was thought to be fitting to
convict them for what they had done. But if I say that, I need to show that
I am doing more than appealing to my (or someone’s) preference or
prejudice, or to undefended theses about a “morally significant” common
humanity.We seem to have hit a brick wall.We can of course execute them,
but we cannot claim any absolute right to do so – unless as followers of
Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias in holding that might makes right. But those
who condemned the Nazi leaders claimed to be doing much more than
exercising the strong man’s “right” to kill – it may be for some “reason” he
has lit upon or because he does not like jackboots.
As I have shown elsewhere1 and noted already, Plato had already
recognised our problem in the fourth century B.C. – and challenging
Protagoras argued that not man but god is the measure of all things. How
did he come to such a conclusion and why is the version he arrived at still

1. Rist (2002). I am presently preparing a book-length study of Plato’s developing position.

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 John Rist 221
inadequate, although so magnificently on the right lines? A short diversion
is necessary to explain something of all this, but it is important to make
it since it will remind us of the origins of moral philosophy as we know
it – or knew it until recently.
In his early dialogues Plato presents Socrates as asking professionally
“good” men what they are good at and what they understand about what
they are good at.Thus, he asks the brave general Laches whether he knows
what courage is, and the religious Euthyphro whether he knows what
piety is. He then proceeds to show that such apparent past-masters quite
literally do not know what they are talking about when they discourse on
their own expertise. Socrates does not deny that Laches is brave; that is,
that he acts bravely – nor that he can recognise bravery in others – but he
shows that Laches, in recognising bravery, does not know what he is
recognising, only that somehow it is “bravery!” And since he does not
know what bravery is, he (or anyway others) can choose to give the word
“bravery” a very different connotation.
The first stage of Plato’s moral project is thus to show that we use
virtue terms but do not know what they refer to; or if we do, it is only
by luck or sentimentally, or by happy conventions. That, for Plato, is an
intolerable situation, for although the opinions of Laches (even perhaps
those of Euthyphro) might have been adequate before the arrival of
sophists like Protagoras, they are inadequate to the challenge of these.
Plato was not the only Athenian to recognise how moral terms were being
manipulated and their meanings changed; the historian Thucydides had
seen it in practice and recorded it in a famous passage, so:
Men changed the ordinary accreditation of words to things at their own
discretion. Mindless audacity was considered to be the courage of a true
party-man, thoughtful hesitation to be specious cowardice, restraint an
excuse for lack of virility . . . careful planning a plausible pretext for
failing in one’s responsibilities (History of the Peloponnesian War 3.82.4).
The comic poet Aristophanes noted it too – presenting characters who ask
what is wrong with adultery (After all Zeus is into it) or beating one’s
parents. So did Euripides, one of whose characters notoriously wondered,
“What is wrong except what the audience thinks to be wrong?”
Plato, Aristophanes and Euripides recognised that unless the sense of
moral terms can be pinned down, so that there is in fact a proper sense
(and also of course catachrestic senses) of such words as “brave,” “self-
controlled” and “just,” then morality is some form of convention or a
convenient code imposed either by the strong on the weak or by the weak
binding themselves together to protect themselves against the strong.Thus,
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222 Philosophical Investigations
all morality would be recognisable as a variation on positive law, whether
its rules are imposed by the government or by dominant opinion; in either
case, it will appear arbitrary and indefensible if challenged – except of
course by reference to brute force, however motivated. Certainly on
Plato’s account of morality there will be widely current true opinions as
well as false ones, but they will all have this same weakness: ultimately they
will be indefensible except by appeal to self-interest or self protection or
(in some) a feeling of pity or generosity. If nothing less culture bound than
that could be found, all the nice, kind moralists were doing was trying to
protect themselves and those they chose to protect in a de facto value-free
universe. Moral ideas, as Locke was to put it, would be little more than
“archetypes made by the mind” (Essay 2.30); and that is from a man who
claimed that morality is in fact the law of God!
There have been some – perhaps best known was Iris Murdoch – who
in our officially post-religious society have wanted to go back to Plato’s
position about transcendental goodness. But most “Platonists,” and to some
extent Plato himself, had already seen in that a serious problem: even if
there are Platonic Forms in an intelligible moral universe, why should we
take any notice of them? In more technical language that objection may
be expressed as: justice as a formal, or even as a final cause in no way
obligates anyone to be just or encourages them to want to be just; for that
some sort of efficient cause is also required. The world needs to be
arranged in such a way that we can understand that we “ought” to be just,
why we so “ought” and that we have motivation to be so, as also that we
are invariably capable at least of wanting to be just. Plato made various
attempts to fill this gap in the theory, including importing post-mortem
rewards and punishments, which introduces gods and religious belief.
Indeed, he tells us on no less than four occasions that we should strive to
be as like god as possible, by which he means much more than that we
shall be better treated in the afterlife; he is also claiming that we shall
“flourish” more in our present state. In a tongue-in-cheek passage of book
nine of the Republic he calculates that the philosopher-king is 729 times
happier than the tyrant. Even so, Plato’s religious scenario is insufficient to
motivate our search for an efficient cause of our feeling of obligation; the
weakness lies in the relationship between the Forms (and especially the
Form of the Good) and god or the gods (to whom we should seek
resemblance). For the gods, like ourselves, are just if and only if they know
and love justice – which they do and we (all too often) do not. As the
Phaedrus puts it, it is by knowledge – understood “platonically,” a distinc-
tion to which we shall return – of the Forms that the gods are divine.
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 John Rist 223
Plato’s fundamental difficulty is best explained in historical terms. He
derives his account of the gods as efficient causes, that is as maker or
makers of the universe, from popular religion: behind him stands a longish
line of philosophers who want to make the gods moral – not beyond
good and evil, as Homer and Hesiod (according to Herodotus) had more
or less created them. The Forms, on the other hand, are the result of a
metaphysical project designed to explain the fact (if it is a fact) that there
is a stable moral universe and that moral propositions are about truth and
falsehood, not just past practice or human preference. But now the gods
are to be envisaged as both moral exemplars, as beings that know and love
the good – for Plato an evil deity is a contradiction in terms – and as the
good’s enforcers. What seems thus far lacking is an account either of why
the gods love the forms – to say that thus they become divine is in itself
merely mystifying – or of why (apart from keeping out of trouble) we
“should” do the same.That they love the Forms (rather than merely create
them) is clear from the Euthyphro, which concludes that what is holy is
loved by the gods because it is holy, not holy because it is loved by the
gods. All in all the relationship between Forms and gods needs to be
clarified. Nor may we leave out of the present context that in Plato’s
world almost no one was an atheist in our sense of the word; in ancient
times the word “atheist” normally refers to someone who denies any sort
of providence, any sort of interest on the part of the gods in the doings of
men.
There is little point in going back with Murdoch to a confusion worse
confused by retaining the Forms and dropping the gods, which is what in
effect she does, being convinced in advance that although Christianity is
impossible, no other religion does any better. As already noted, ancient
Platonists – possibly Plato himself – recognised at least one of the weak-
nesses needing correction – while offering impossible “clarifications” on
another. What they realised is especially clear in Plotinus in the third
century A.D. that what we should call “God” – envisaged as some non-
normal sort of divine mind – is to be identified with the One or Good.
Some version of that identification satisfied most Christians of antiquity,
although not entirely. According to Augustine, such platonising moves,
while they get a good deal of the metaphysics right – fail to explain how
moral success is possible. The Platonists have discovered by the use of
reason many of the truths of metaphysics, but such truths are useless unless
they serve to motivate a good life.
Plato and his “pagan” successors proposed an answer to that objection:
virtue is possible, although difficult – and success extremely rare – by
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224 Philosophical Investigations
human effort alone, whereas an essential aspect of what Christians held,
and many still hold, to be both empirically and theologically verifiable –
is that without divine assistance virtue – the condition necessary for
heaven – is impossible. Plato taught in the Republic (although apparently
later withdrew) that successful education in virtue can be provided from
birth onwards: the claim depends on the belief that the soul is naturally
immortal and that the fallen state in which we still are yet allows part of
our soul to remain undamaged. Augustine denies both components of that
answer while also denying that we are totally corrupted: for if we were, we
would not need to be repaired or healed but rather rebuilt ab initio by
God. Although lame, even in this life we can walk haltingly with divine
assistance.Yet he also holds that we can eventually become sinless and that
the process of sanctification begins now: you will not find in him anything
about our sins not being “imputed” or counted against us – or some of us.
That we are not entirely corrupted is shown for Augustine not least by
the very fact that Platonists, by the use of reason, have been able to
recognise the need for some transcendental basis for morality, for the claim
that absolute goodness exists in and of itself. But the Platonists (not least
Porphyry) are constantly undercut by intellectual pride, vaunting them-
selves on their metaphysical successes – this the City of God especially
makes clear – and that leads them to bury their metaphysical discoveries
in superstition. It seems that Augustine sees the primary weakness in their
position as being at the emotional level, and this is confirmed by his
constant charge that they have not the strength of will – that is, of love for
the good – to consummate their intellectual labours with success in the
struggle for virtue. Such an objection, however, needs to be unpacked not
only because it reveals Plato’s own partial recognition of the very point
that Augustine makes but because it shows up some of the differences
between Plato’s account of “reason” and that of the moderns – and here
I refer to the dominant account of reason, with its “rationalist” – hence
unplatonic – overtones, current in most philosophy since Descartes.
Arguing against a Stoicising account of virtue, Augustine insists that the
virtues are not merely modes of right reason – although they are that –
but more basically modes of love (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 1.13.23).
That claim, he holds, is not only scripturally based but is supported by an
empirical analysis of human nature: we are not, as ancient Stoics and
modern Kantians (among others) would have it, primarily – even “really”
– minds, but both affective and rational beings. Hence, to accept moral
obligations it is not enough to know what is right; we must also be
capable of loving appropriately. Plato himself, especially by the ninth book
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 John Rist 225
of the Republic, had already grasped that knowing the truth is inseparable
from loving the truth, that the mind is a loving mind and that thus
weakness of will is impossible in a good man (the “guardian”). Thus,
Plato’s account of the mind is widely different there from that of Des-
cartes, living in a philosophical world that had lost the Platonic insight that
in the good man perfection of mind and perfection of love of the good
are inseparable: a world that had fallen back on the notion that our actions
must ultimately be explained either as driven by a “free” will (however
explained) or by an intellect determined by its objects. As we already
noticed, resolution of that disjunction was proposed in Kant’s view that
the rational will writes out its dictates as moral obligations. But where
then is the Platonic love of the good?
In the seventh book of the Republic, Socrates is challenged by Glaucon,
demanding to know why the good man has to return to the Cave and
instruct and lead his fellows; his query is treated rather brusquely. That
they return, Socrates remarks drily, is a just demand, and they, as just men,
will obey it because they both know what the Good is and love it
sufficiently to be willing to act in accordance with its implications,
without hesitation. And, indeed, that such is the motivation of the good
man is far from unreasonable: if I say I love someone and then add that I
would not do what I could for them, the reaction of my hearer will be
that I do not really love them (or love them enough). But Plato’s
Guardians both know the Form of the Good and love it; their knowledge
is a facet of their love, their love a facet of their knowledge. It is worth
observing that even when this Platonic insight had been generally lost and
“love” largely replaced by “will” – a story to which I alluded in com-
menting on Kant – “Platonisers” have sometimes found ways to reassert at
least part of Plato’s message.Thus, among the Cambridge Platonists in the
17th century, both More and Cudworth hold that any division of the
mind into faculties of knowing and willing is mistaken; rather, we must
refer our motivation for moral behaviour to what More, in his Encheiridion
Ethicum, called, rather oddly, our “boniform faculty.”2
Augustine, as we have seen, seems to accept that Plato (as he under-
stood him) was right about the transcendence of goodness but wrong in
supposing that by our own efforts (given the best possible society) we can
love the good with our whole hearts. For Augustine, such goodness, such
a loving rationality, is possible only in heaven where, like God, we shall not

2. I owe this reference to Schneewind (1998, 203, 213) who, however, seems to underplay
its importance.

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226 Philosophical Investigations
be able to sin (non posse peccare). Plato too, as I have noted, came to think
that perfection cannot be achieved in this life, albeit great progress can be
made towards it by our own efforts. In the Phaedrus he explains that
inability by a metaphor: it is impossible to turn the black horse of our
passions white, but only, at best, to restrain it. Be that as it may, Augustine’s
more realistic evaluation of the Platonists’ position is that without the
direct help of God’s grace we cannot live the good life to which they
aspired – and which Plotinus (in this perhaps the last full-blooded Pla-
tonist) was still convinced must be possible, explaining the possibility by
our always retaining part of our soul pure and wholly uncorrupted –
“undescended” – in our fallen, earthly life.
In sum, and in line with his reading of Plato, Augustine claims that if
we try to live without the true God, we are in effect trying to live in a
universe in which we can recognise a number of significant metaphysical
truths (if we like doing that sort of thing and are good at it) while still
being unable to follow their moral implications. In Augustine’s view, ought
does not imply can. Hence, his challenge is dual: if there are no transcen-
dent norms, then morality is impossible and must be replaced – at best and
for comfort’s sake – by some form of conventionalism, perhaps disguised
as morality (as Plato had earlier noted in the Laws [2.663d]). But even if
there are such norms, we cannot adequately access them and live accord-
ingly without some knowledge of the true God and the effects of his
grace. His own “restatement” of our moral situation is, of course, that God,
some of whose attributes are the Platonic moral Forms, exists – hence
there is a moral universe – and that we can indeed improve our lives with
his assistance.3 All attempts to deny this and substitute some “moral”
alternative are futile, being merely self-protective devices based on igno-
rance of the human condition or designed (he cites ancient Romans) to
protect ourselves against the fear of death.
If Plato’s metaphysic, given a more religious – that is, Christian – form
by Augustine, is possible, then a genuine – that is, non-conventional –
morality, not a mere code of practice, is possible. But let us ask more
precisely what – apart from a darker account of man’s present “fallen”
nature and a denial that Platonic eros has the power to reach its target –
Augustine’s position has to offer that Plato’s has not? Certainly both see
man as seeking the Good, but in Augustine’s view Platonic man cannot
find his way back to it. And his claim is stronger than that in that he also

3. I leave aside the complex question of Augustine’s view of the nature of pagan “virtue,”
which for him strictly speaking is not virtue at all.

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 John Rist 227
believes that Plato’s account of how we can justify notions of what we
ought to do needs to be strengthened considerably. His critique falls into
three parts: the first that God, to be the effective first principle of morality,
must be personal; the second that a personal God delivers the possibility
of recognising the nature of sin, as distinct from that of crime; and the
third that we exist not only in metaphysical but also in historical space and
time. I shall briefly consider these in turn.
A well-known, if curious, feature of Plato’s metaphysics, at least in its
normal version, is that neither gods nor men top the hierarchy of beings,
that place being held by the Forms. And since, as we have seen, love (as
desire for the good and the beautiful) drives the potentially perfect man
towards his goal, the relation between the soul and the Form of the Good
is curiously non-reciprocal: we are to love – indeed we exist or are made
so as to love – what is incapable of loving. That is the explanation of a
puzzling feature of the Symposium, namely that as the soul progresses up
the ladder of perfection, it moves from a love of beautiful souls to a love
of increasingly non-personal objects, culminating in the Beautiful itself.
The question that regularly occurs to modern readers, however, is how
love of the impersonal can replace love of the personal. Clearly love of the
impersonal is unproblematic in itself; we may love a beautiful landscape
and long to see it again. In that case the love of the impersonal does not
replace a love of the personal but sits alongside it. Indeed, the “pathetic
fallacy,” not to speak of the habit of naming beloved boats by usually
female names, indicates that we try in often facile or futile ways to
personalise our love of the impersonal. But in the Symposium Plato’s love
of the impersonal replaces that of the personal – and he himself seems to
have noticed, in a curiously oblique way, that something is missing: not
only in the Phaedrus (which in many other respects corrects the Sympo-
sium) does he introduce a “counter-eros,” a love in reply to eros, but in the
Sophist he emphasises that “real being” cannot be simply lifeless. Plotinus
too, when he switches between masculine and neuter genders for his first
principle (to the puzzlement of neo-Hegelian readers and editors in the
19th century) indicates that he feels a need for a first principle that is at
least semi-personal – although this is not the place to pursue that difficult
and only partly metaphorical theme further. Suffice it to say that therein
he is influenced by Plato’s remarking in the Timaeus that it is difficult to
find the “father” of the cosmos and still harder to expound his nature
(28c).
But for Christian (and other) theists, of whom I have taken Augustine
to be the most potent exemplar, that is not enough. For such, the morally
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228 Philosophical Investigations
relevant point about a divine person is that he (and therefore we) can
guarantee the unique importance of individual human beings.4 The Chris-
tian notion of a human person is logically generated from and serves as a
corollary to the notion of a divine person, in whose image and likeness we
are. Thus, only if God matters do we as individuals matter. Of course,
among contemporary non-believers too, the importance of the human
individual is regularly taken to be the cornerstone of “morality,” especially
but by no means only of a Kantian sort, since Kant insists that human
beings must always be treated as ends, never used merely as means to an
end, and tries to justify this claim philosophically and without reference to
religion or metaphysics. As noted above, however, his attempt depends
specifically on necessary but hidden Christian assumptions about the value
of persons and so fails dismally.5 And in general we should pay heed to
Anscombe’s contention that almost all modern and contemporary moral-
ity depends on (Christian) metaphysical and psychological theses to which
its proponents are not logically entitled and which many of them explic-
itly reject.6 As we shall see, a more cynical defence of such proceeding –
apparently unforeseen even by Anscombe – is now widely current among
professionals.
Being a person is important not only in that we usually assume (unless
we are honest utilitarians or other advocates of the greatest goods of large
numbers of people, which necessarily is often at the expense of those of
individuals) that individual persons matter uniquely and that this matter-
ing sums up what morality is about; it is also important in a broader sense
which may serve to introduce our second “Augustinian” thesis: that
relating to the difference between sin and crime. For Forms cannot give
commands, and even in the Euthyphro Plato makes only limited comment
on what has subsequently become known as divine command morality.
Plato denies that the holy is what God has (or happens to have) deter-
mined to be holy, insisting on the contrary that God loves the holy
because it is holy. He would thus reject any “voluntarist” claim that God

4. It is often argued that for Plato individuality is something to outgrow, a mark of inferior
representation of the class to which humans (and other items) belong. And in antiquity
Plotinus, by introducing Forms of individual men, seems to have recognised this problematic
feature of his master’s apparent position.Yet the Platonic Socrates, speaking of himself in the
Apology as sent providentially to the Athenians who needed to be woken up from their
ethical slumbers, seems to have supposed that each soul needs individual care (at least in the
present life).
5. See Rist (1998, 170–177). Some of this “Christianity” is doubtless mediated through
Crusius, more through Rousseau.
6. Anscombe (1958).

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 John Rist 229
invents morality (at least our morality), although since he had no ( Judaeo-
Christian) concept of divine omnipotence he felt no need to consider the
question in the form in which it presented itself in late medieval and early
modern times. Plato simply assumes, in the Euthyphro and elsewhere, that
the relationship between God and the Good is analogous to the relation-
ship between our own souls and the Good. Hence, although he dismisses
anything like later theistic voluntarism, he also says nothing in the Eut-
hyphro of its classical (for example,Thomist or Augustinian) alternative: that
God is to be identified as the Good, the object of love, and that therefore
to offend against the Good is to offend against offendable Persons who in
commandments call attention to their nature and creative relationship to
us, and not just to one or other of their own “moral” “inventions.” It
remains ironic that it was Augustine’s rather fumbling attempts to deal
with omnipotence that generated much of the “voluntarist” controversy in
the first place. And if we ask why we ought to be grateful, the answer is
that God has constructed us in such a way that we recognise that gratitude
is an aspect of goodness and that goodness is what we are made for and
what we want, however dimly.
The difference between a crime and a sin (which may or not legally be
a crime – of this a more recent example would be abortion) is that a sin
is an offence against a personal deity, not merely against an impersonal
Form, which – as only a formal and final cause – is ineffective, since
“abstract.” That is why a special kind of obedience is integral to a theistic
morality and why some different model of obedience is demanded by any
serious alternative. The secularist – in light of his inferior theory – may
recognise his behaviour (in some quasi-legal way) as “wrong”; what he
will obviously be prevented from recognising is that it also offends again
a Person who has, and claims, the right to be obeyed because of what He
is and what we are in relation to Him. Here is where one can recognise
that religious morality and non-religious “ethics” are very different
animals. The idea of sin not only points the way towards a Creator (or at
least fashioner) God but emphasises the serious nature of moral lapse and
the immoral – and unrealistic – character of the individual who lapses. It
has been said (by Peter Brown) that Augustine drove the problem of evil
– that is, its seriousness – into the heart of Christianity. One has only to
point out that Augustine did not invent the problem; his success was
further to develop a coherent and powerful intellectual doctrine to explain
it.The attempt to deny that doctrine, or pay it lip service, has been a mark
of much modern and contemporary philosophy (and yet more mindlessly
of theology), but such denial is flawed by its habitual blindness to the
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230 Philosophical Investigations
surely salient fact that in it we have a theological proposition claiming
strong empirical support and explaining a variety of otherwise baffling
human phenomena. Do not our papers regularly inform us of “sheer evil”
that is “simply inexplicable?”
This matter of sin and disobedience and the difference between “the-
istic” sin and “legal” and/or conventional crime needs to be pursued more
accurately. It is obvious that disobedience to a God will be more serious
than disobeying man-made conventions and rules; that has been clear at
least since the time of Sophocles whose drama Antigone centres on pre-
cisely this point: at whatever cost the laws of God must take precedence
over the laws of men. In so far as human laws are just laws they will
therefore approximate to the laws of God; if they do not, as Sir Thomas
More put it, “I die the king’s good servant but God’s first.” Such attitudes
do not depend on ideas of legal jurisdiction, universal or other (as of the
International Court of Justice which would have some overall legal validity
if every nation agreed to accept its authority) nor of a natural law that
exists “out there” in the cosmos but with no reference to a transcendent
Creator – I shall return to such a distinction among “natural laws” later;
they point rather to a source of authority who should be obeyed for two
reasons: first because what he commands (where we can identify it) is
necessarily just, and second because knowing that he is just we have
further special reasons to respect his demands for justice. In the Christian
tradition (and some others), these reasons are motivating because God has
created us and wants us to flourish, which we can do only if we recognise
that we are not gods and have no divine status as lawgivers; we are mere
humans given an inclination – even a love – towards God and his
goodness that (for whatever reason) we may choose to disregard. Con-
temporary history, in the figures of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin
and many others, gives us ample opportunity of recognising what happens
when this reality is radically neglected and idolatry prevails. Nor to see the
point do we even need to invoke “successful” tyrants: Jack the Ripper
would be a good enough example – if, that is, we need to look beyond
ourselves.
The distinction between ordinary crimes and sins that offend God
invites us to comment further on God’s nature. Many Greek philosophers,
from Xenophanes and Heraclitus on, were insistent that traditional
accounts of the gods were false because the gods were presented as beyond
morality or as morally offensive. With the Enlightenment, similar charges
were brought against the God of the Old Testament and his traditionally
admired servants such as Abraham and King David – and that not only by
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 John Rist 231
such as Voltaire but by concerned Christians.7 Both these older and the
more recent critics argue that if there is a God he must be a moral being:
which does not in fact imply, as Plato often supposed, that he must be
subordinate to other moral realities such as Goodness; he can, as Christians
should hold, be identical with them, making justice and beauty divine
attributes. God’s goodness is not ours (that much is granted to the
voluntarist), but our goodness partakes – to use Platonic language – in
His. Even in their caricatures, however, Voltaire and others do draw
attention to a genuine problem, for morality as merely obedience to God’s
will is indeed open to abuse and is abused in religious traditions where the
God to be obeyed is not understood as necessarily or primarily good, as
when his power is elevated above his goodness. Strictly “voluntarist”
accounts of God are of no use in the account of morality I want to
defend, harking back to the crude amoralism of the Olympians or to early
Hebrew accounts of Jahwe which can be interpreted similarly – that is, as
denoting a figure to whom good and evil are ultimately irrelevant. One
should obey God not simply because he commands us to do so but also
because we know – even if we do not always understand – that his
commands are good as reflecting the goodness of his nature and at the
same time that they are good for us: that is, they enable us to live as we
have been designed to live, and therefore happily. No account of morality
will be plausible if it fails to mention not simply God but God’s purposes.
History – this time the history of learning – must again be invoked at
this point. Many embarrassing difficulties in pre-Enlightenment Christian
theology (such as how to defend God’s commands to Abraham to sacrifice
his son, how to understand his instructions to the Israelites to rob the
Egyptians or to Hosea that he should marry a prostitute, how to justify the
massacres of Joshua) arose because of a literalist reading of the Old
Testament that could not readily be challenged on historical grounds, so
long as the Old Testament was taken to present a single portrait of God’s
nature rather than as a series of developing Jewish understandings of that
nature.
Thus, and setting “voluntarism” aside, whereas a theistic morality says
we must begin by recognising that we are not gods, a secular morality
wants us (in varying degrees) to act as if we are.Traditionally this antithesis
has been posed in the form that sin depends on pride (above all on trying
to be self-creators) and that virtue begins with the humble (but not

7. Note, for example, Pierre Bayle on King David in his Historical and Critical Dictionary
(1697); he dwells on the king’s lechery, treachery and terrorist tactics.

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232 Philosophical Investigations
humiliating) recognition that we are not gods and that we do not want to
idolise either ourselves or anything else (such as History or Progress or
Autonomy or Sex or Choice). And, as noted, idolatry and self-idolatry are
not limited to dictators; the contemporary Western social scene provides
countless examples of pop stars or soccer players dealing out pearls of
wisdom to their unthinking admirers and even boasting of being more
influential than Jesus. To reject such idolatry, to accept that we are mortal
and, if more, only by the grace of God, is not moralistic snivelling or
holier-than-thou hypocrisy, as it has often been portrayed by those who
confuse humility and truth telling with servility; it is an attempt to reject
obvious but attractive lies and propose possible and plausible truth.
Finally let us turn to Augustine’s insistence – to be found especially in
the City of God where he comments on the role of philosophy in the
good life – that we exist in historical as well as metaphysical space. How
this is important for morality is one of the implications of the remark of
Aristotle in Metaphysics Z (1036a) that there is no definition of the
individual, who can only be recognised by the senses or by the mind.That
means that the findings of metaphysics, being impersonal (we might see
them as analogous to those of departments of public health), can only
identify our existential situation in general terms. We can learn from
metaphysics (as from the other sciences) what we are as members of the
human race, not what we are as individual members (which may rather be
the subject matter of religion), as also what in general may be expected of
us morally but not what specific actions we ought to perform or are
capable of performing as individuals. Aristotle further recognised in the
Nicomachean Ethics (5.1137b) that a lawgiver can prescribe what is just in
general, not what is equitable in individual situations – hence discretionary
powers should be left in the hands of the magistrate. Such observations
give further substance to the (religious and realistic) view that what-
ever our theoretical or “ideal” situation (as behind a veil of ignorance,
or whatever) in the real world we are located in radically different
circumstances.
One practical effect of this is that although humanly and legally there
may be something we can do to remedy the situation of a particular
criminal offence (by, say, taking account of extenuating circumstances
when a “just” law is broken), we cannot be sure of the accuracy of the
moral understanding that underlies (or should underlie) the judgements
that we (or our representatives) have to make in individual instances. In
extreme cases that may mean that we do not know whether in God’s eyes
a “criminal” should be punished as responsible for what he has done, even
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 John Rist 233
though – to protect society or to deter himself and others from crimes in
the future – he will still have to be punished.There is a sense in which the
unerring justice of God is a warrant and a safeguard not only for the
apparently obvious villain but for all of us. That much at least is implied
in “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
We have now identified three clear advantages for a coherent account
of moral obligation if the first principle, the religious “source” of morality,
is no impersonal entity (such as a Platonic Form) but a personal divinity.
The personal divinity not only guarantees moral obligations but helps
explicate the peculiarly serious nature of moral offences – that is, of sins
rather than merely inconvenient crimes – as well as enabling us to ponder
their seriousness with due reference to the varying circumstances in which
people find themselves in their individual lives. For, as I have argued, the
old Enlightenment axiom that we are all, as presently situated, faced with
identical moral dangers must be denied, and Christianity has a theological
explanation of that apparently random and irrational situation – and why
it is so important that it be recognised – in its doctrine of original sin.
That teaching, widely ignored as much by Christians as by de facto pagans
like Hobbes, accounts both for why we have “moral” problems in the first
place and why they are so variegated – and (as noted above) it has both
biblical and empirical roots: biblical in the story of the fall (or failure) of
Adam and its consequences – and we are now being assured that we must
at least have an “Eve” as our common ancestor; empirical in that it offers
an explanation of obvious if too conveniently and easily forgotten facts
about human life: only consider the following citation on the impact of
the atrocities of the Second World War in the context of what was revealed
to those entering the concentration camp at Dachau:
It [World War Two] was a savage insensate affair, barely conceivable to
the well-conducted imagination . . . and hardly approachable without
some currently unfashionable theory of human mass insanity and inbuilt,
inherited corruption.8
These are words of an atheist, bearing witness to the empirical precision
of the Christian dogma, and less perhaps in that it offers to make stupen-
dous evil intelligible as that it makes it strangely unsurprising.Yet to infer
a fall is to usher in a human race intended for perfection; otherwise it
would be an account not of fall and corruption but merely of change. And
an intended perfection implies an intender.

8. Fussell (1989, 132, cf. 137).

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234 Philosophical Investigations
Thus, as logical alternative to religious morality we are left with the
nihilism of a Sartre or a Nietzsche – or some “Protagorean” construction
that lacks any morally (as distinct from legally or otherwise convention-
ally) binding force. Either moral values and moral obligations are a reality
or they are a human construct: convenient certainly, but not morally
compelling. Unless, of course, they are a fantasy whereby we may pretend
or be deluded into believing that they are “naturally” binding! And here is
where we must go beyond Elizabeth Anscombe’s account of the present
situation. Anscombe’s argument was that modern moral philosophers are
trying to base their moral language, and hence their moral claims, on
metaphysical or religious underpinnings that they in fact reject and to
which they are not therefore entitled; she also seemed to hope that after
a period of reflection, especially on philosophical psychology, we should
be able to restart ethical enquiry in a less disingenuous spirit. Indeed, one
or two philosophers have in effect taken up her challenge in trying to
construct an avowedly secularist ethic based on no hidden metaphysical or
religious foundations. Parfit’s (1986) Reasons and Persons (Oxford) is an
outstanding example of this sort of project: a genuine attempt in the
Benthamite tradition to avoid any talk of metaphysical entities such as
inalienable rights – which Bentham, properly from his point of view,
dismissed as “nonsense on stilts.” But more typical of the contemporary
scene is the world so lucidly described by MacIntyre in the opening pages
of After Virtue in which we are invited to reflect on “ethicists” shouting
past one another on every conceivable “moral” topic.
Now a way out of our difficulties, as yet apparently unforeseen by
Anscombe, is widely canvassed: “virtual” morality. And analogous ghosts
can be seen among our literary lions; their ancestors can be identified at
least as far back as the nostalgia of Matthew Arnold’s On Dover Beach. For
as the “tide of faith” has receded, the difficulties of sustaining a strong and
viable, non-religious morality, to which I pointed earlier in this paper
citing Nietzsche and Dostoievski, have washed up a “nostalgic” alternative.
Just as poetry can now “redeem” without a Redeemer, thus purporting to
fill the gap left by salvationist religions – in our case Christianity – so we
can in effect pretend that we live in a morally value-laden universe,
although our opinion formers and élites know we do not! Some, like
Richard Rorty or the Rawls of Political Liberalism, are more straightfor-
ward about the situation, almost avowing themselves social engineers
(Rorty even took the step of exchanging a Chair of Philosophy for one
in Comparative Literature). Others are more canny, sometimes preferring
to compare moral qualities to Lockean secondary qualities and always
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 John Rist 235
eager to retain that apparently “objective” sense of duty or moral obliga-
tion that no mere convention nor latter-day neo-Stoicism – to this I shall
return – can justify. There is, however, a curiously unphilosophical tone
about all such proceedings, reminding me of the undergraduates who
deny traditional sexual mores on the grounds that everything is subjective
or a matter of choice, but invited to go Paki bashing or Jew baiting insist
that this is “simply wrong,” the only explanation of that assertion being
that it “feels” or “just is” so. Gilbert Ryle once commented that someone
in court for theft would get short shrift if he said that he knew the
difference between right and wrong but that he had forgotten it. As I
implied at the beginning of this paper, it is indeed difficult to forget that
there is a difference between right and wrong, both for believers and for
non-believers (even if at times they want to): the difficulty is to justify it
philosophically and without recourse to religion.
At least since the 17th century – although with precursors as far back
as the 14th – some have reflected on “natural” behaviour in an apparently,
and sometimes explicitly, Stoic fashion: that is, without appealing to any
transcendental justification of such behaviour. For the Stoics themselves,
such justification was to be found in a pantheistic deity, of which our
minds are fragments, within the cosmos. Implausible as such an account of
natural law always was – the more so after Hume pointed to the diffi-
culties of deriving a moral “ought” from an “is” – it is even more
implausible in light of our present scientifically governed view of a
universe quite unlike that of the Stoics and long since de-mythologised.
Any contemporary attempt to find more-than-conventional values within
the cosmos looks even more implausible than its Stoic original. Yet such
high-flown “naturalism” – whether or not spiced up by the “virtual” and
desperate morality of nostalgia, or now at times by the notion that a
binding morality has “evolved” (which is merely another example of the
myth of Historical Progress) is regularly proposed as a serious defence of
such metaphysical entities as natural rights.The Age of Enlightenment and
the Age of Ideology have been succeeded by the Age of Self-Deception,
wilful or otherwise: that is, of ideologies arising no longer from bad
metaphysics that have been shown up for what it is but from mere whim
and wishful thinking. Such empty platitudes are of course grist to the
hedonists of the advertising industry, and it is at this squalid level, rather
than with the birth of the superman dreamed of by Nietzsche, that the
discovery of the “death of God” spawns its effects: as is, of course, only
what those who postulate original sin assume: man, they say, without
divine grace, is seriously injured and that injury takes effect at the level of
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236 Philosophical Investigations
not only the “great and the good” – nor only of the brutal – but equally
of the mean, the banal, the ugly, the trivial, and the hypocritical.
Summing up his confessed failure to reconcile the claims of duty and
happiness near the end of his Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick lamented
the appalling social consequences if such a failure became known to the
public at large. Rather than accept such a loss of “social glue,” he believed
it would be better to pretend that there had been no failure. By now that
pretence has been going on for so long that those who pretend – even
some of the smart among them – have long lost any sense that they are
pretending. Plato, with a transcendental metaphysic as yet only inad-
equately “personalised,” had foreseen the contemporary scene. Revisiting
in the Republic (560c ff.) Thucydides’ theme that sophists and demagogues
were manipulating moral terms to trick the public, he implies here and
elsewhere that the manipulators will come in the end to believe their own
lies (if indeed anything in their world can properly to be called a lie).
At this point I call attention to the fact that I have not attempted to
prove the existence of a personal God, only to argue that without such a
God morality (as distinct from conventionalism and nihilism) cannot be
justified. No theist, it must be added, should argue that God “invents”
goodness. Either God is good or he is not. And if God could not do it,
what possible reason could there be for supposing that it lies within
human capacity?
In conclusion, let me return to the relationship between happiness and
morality in the strong sense to which I limit the latter term. The rela-
tionship that stymied Sidgwick has caused difficulties within the Christian
theological and metaphysical tradition itself – unnecessarily and in the end
contributing to a serious weakening of that tradition and its replacement
(for those at least who want to play it safe: to be what the Italians aptly
call “buonisti” or alternatively “ben pensanti”) by the indefensible virtual
morality at which I have glanced. Ancient and most medieval morality –
to the horror of Kantians – is eudaimonistic, depending at least in part on
the claim that we all seek happiness and that “virtue” – whatever that be
– promotes that happiness. Hence arose the apparent problem of egoism:
if I do good because I believe that so doing will make me happy, am I not
“doing good” for a non-moral (even anti-moral) reason? We may find the
roots of such scruples in the Christian Middle Ages.
The matter, however, is not so simple as these revisionists supposed.
When at the beginning of the fourth book of the Republic Socrates is
asked whether the virtuous lifestyle to be imposed on the Guardians will
make them happy, he brushes the question aside, saying that he is legis-
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 John Rist 237
lating not for the benefit of a single class but for the good of the whole
city.Yet he does not deny that the Guardians will be made happy, and in
general what Plato wants to say is that if we do what is right for its own
sake and for the sake of the common good, we shall in fact be happy. Nor
does the fact that the Guardians, in their wisdom, will know that, mean
that they will act virtuously in order to be made happy, although they will
be made happy by acting virtuously. Similarly, as noted above, in book
seven of the Republic, when Glaucon questions Socrates’ assumption that
the good man will return to the Cave, he is told that returning would be
just and therefore the Guardians, being just, will act justly. What this all
amounts to is that ancient eudaimonism – and this is true of Aristotle and
the Stoics as well as of Plato – is an indirect eudaimonism. We are so
constituted as to flourish if we act virtuously. Contrariwise it would not
be virtuous to act “virtuously” in order to flourish, but only because it is
the right thing to do.
From the 12th century on we find scruples about “eudaimonism” –
strikingly for example in Anselm. We need to love God, it was argued, for
his own sake, not in order that we may “merit” salvation. In this debate
(into which I cannot enter here) the ancient notion of an indirect pursuit
of happiness was frequently lost sight of; hence arose a proto-Kantian
problem of the relationship between happiness and goodness. This was
essentially an unnecessary dispute, dependent on failure to understand the
version of “eudaimonism” that had been handed down especially in the
writings of Augustine, and eventually on losing sight (as in Duns Scotus)
of the natural, if weakened, inclinatio to God and the Good that the
platonising Catholic tradition had always maintained. For the very notion
of such an inclinatio derived from the belief that man had been created by
God for virtue and happiness, for the possibility of morality and spiritu-
ality; thus, its loss or obfuscation was an early step towards the eventual
secularisation of morality, or in the first instance towards the attempt to
construct a purely secular morality: in Grotius’s words, etsi Deus non
daretur. An early version of that “secular” morality was the neo-Stoic
“natural law” devastatingly rejected by Hume. Then came utilitarianism
and other varieties of consequentalism that (in the absence of any coher-
ent account of the goodness they were trying to maximise or of how the
comparative weighting of goods could be understood) tended to drift into
new formalisms, to be summed up as maximise the good whatever it may
be; or, alternatively to that, some version of conventional “morality” (much
later to be peddled as nostalgic or “virtual” morality) that Hume took to
be the only alternative to no morality at all. At least in seeing that, Hume
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238 Philosophical Investigations
was in step with Plato and Augustine among his predecessors, as well as
with Nietzsche – who wanted, however, to do away with the conventions
– among his successors.
My conclusion thus is that, although at a cursory glance it may not
look as though morality depends for its justification on some sorts of
religious belief, and although contemporary theophobes wish it otherwise
and try to pretend it is otherwise (if they think about it seriously at all),
morality and religion – philosophically at least – stand or fall together.
That is, unless we conspire to use words like “morality” and “moral
obligation” to indicate any code of behaviour we happen, for whatever
reason, to prefer. A contemporary, desirous of justifying his moral obliga-
tions, would have to update Thomas More’s last words, saying – with
Socrates before the court of Athenian society – “I die the public’s good
servant, because I am God’s first.”

14, St Luke’s Street

Cambridge CB4 3DA, UK
johnmrist@yahoo.co.uk

References

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33:

1–19.
Fussell, P. (1989). Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (1986). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rist, J. M. (1998). Real Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rist, J. M. (2002). Real Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneewind, J. B. (1998). The Invention of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.