Introduction
One of the most interesting questions of history is ‘how ought man behave?’ Probably the most interesting part of that question, at least in this author’s opinion, is the word ought. If the word had been ‘does’ then we would have a whole different issue on our hands. We would begin to describe all the social habits of the curious creature known as man. If, on the other hand, the question had been ‘why does man behave as he does?’ then we would have yet another completely different discussion ensue. That discussion would probably take the form of evaluating the psychology of man and what things he does because of nature versus what things he does because of nurture and so on.
But our discussion for the purpose of this paper is oughtness. I propose to take a tour through some of the foundational works of social science and divide them between pre-modern and modern to see where there is agreement and disagreement. It is my supposition that what will be found is a distinct shift in thinking on oughtness (which is synonymous with objective moral truth) when the transition happens from pre-modern to modern. I will try to draw out, through the course of this paper, what it is that I believe has driven this shift in thinking.
For our pre-modern works I will consider Solomon’s Proverbs, Plato’s The Republic, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. For the works of modernity I will be considering Machiavelli’s The Prince, selections from Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and finally Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Certainly a great deal of other works could be considered but these works may be representative of a general way of thinking in the pre-modern versus modern of world. Exceptions are, of course, always available to the norm.
Solomon’s Proverbs
First I want consider the oughtness presented to us by Solomon. Of what kind is it and where does it originate? Let us consider the introduction of Solomon’s work:
The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel: To know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity; to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth— Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance, to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Here we Solomon’s purpose in writing. He is writing to instruct about the gaining of knowledge, wisdom, insight, wise dealings, righteousness, justice, equity, prudence and discretion. All of these words imply a sense of oughtness. Had we gone on to the next verse we would have found that Solomon is addressing his work to his son. These are things he wishes his son to know and apply to his life because Solomon believes he ought to. But why ought he to?
The answer comes, I think, at the end of the section I quoted. “The fear of the Lords is the beginning of knowledge.” All of the oughtness of Solomon’s work has this as its reference point, the Lord. A closely related term for moral is justice and likewise for immorality is injustice. Though they carry a more legal connotation we may argue successfully that all legislation hails back to a moral standard. If it is unjust to steal or to murder, and if there is legislation against such deeds, then the reason those things are ruled against is because they are recognized to be immoral deeds, deeds that should not be done at all. So there will be some going back and forth between words like good and bad (or good and evil), just and unjust, moral and immoral as we move forward. While there are some reasonable distinctions to be made between some of these words there is, at the core, a common sense of appeal to oughtness.
Solomon gives us several example of justice and injustice in his Proverbs which may help us clearly see his connection of the origin of moral objectivity to God. He writes,
“For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; he stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the way of his saints. Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path; for wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul; discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you, delivering you from the way of evil, from men of perverted speech, who forsake the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness, who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perverseness of evil, men whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways.”
Solomon connects justice with walking on the right path and with exercising wisdom which is received from the LORD (this is YHWH in Hebrew, the personal name of God for Jews and Christians). Furthermore, he puts these in juxtaposition with the ways of evil and darkness, perverse speech and being devious in action. Elsewhere Solomon connects injustice to accepting bribes (Proverbs 17:23) and showing partiality for the wicked and depriving the righteous of their due (Proverbs 18:5). Solomon does not blush at connecting Justice directly to God as the origin and source, “Many seek the face of a ruler, but it is from the Lord that a man gets justice.”
So it is not hard to discover that, for Solomon, there is absolutely a sense of objective moral truth that all should seek to know and live out. Furthermore he directly links this objective morality to the LORD, the Creator of the universe. Upon the ultimate being Solomon places the weight of justice, goodness and truth and he is confident that its weight can be held by him.
Plato’s The Republic
Plato’s great work, The Republic, is entirely about the subject of justice which we have already said is closely related to morality and is without a doubt about oughtness.
In this work many ideas are proposed such as the one given early on by Cephalus when he argues that justice is “speaking the truth and giving back what one takes.” It does not take Socrates long, however, to poke some holes in this offered definition when he gives a counterexample that clearly shows it would be unjust. At least in some specific situations it would actually be unjust to give back what one has taken from another. The specific example Socrates uses is that of giving back a weapon to someone who is not in their right state of mind when they ask for it back. What follows from this discussion is perhaps one of the greatest treatises on the matter of justice that has ever been written. That being said, the definition of Justice remains elusive in The Republic. It is easier to recognize justice and injustice in practice and to point to examples of just behavior than it is to define the concept itself.
This difficulty of giving a proper definition of justice might lead some to conclude that there is not one and that perhaps justice itself, and not just the definition, is what is elusive. But this would be a mistake because Plato does not have a hard time showing us examples of injustice and if we recognize what is unjust we must admit that their is such a thing as justice no matter how difficult it may be to define.
While the proper or perfect definition of justice may remain just outside of our graps, according to Plato, its origin and basis is not. It would appear that he sees justice as being in accord with virtue and imitating the gods. To this point he writes, “For, surely, gods at least will never neglect the man who is eagerly willing to become just and, practicing virtue, likens himself, so far as is possible for a human being, to a god.” So then, injustice is to be unvirtuous and out of step with the gods. Furthermore, Plato has already said earlier in The Republic that the laws they create must be in accordance with what is good and patterned after the god who is good. In fact, it is outlawed to suggest that any god did any unjust thing but, rather, “the god’s works were just and good.” So then what is lawful in The Republic is that which is virtuous and mimics the gods who only do that which is good and virtuous.
This means, although Solomon and Plato would make significant departures from one another’s understanding of the divine realm, they both agree that morality, our objective oughtness, squarely rest upon the shoulders of the divine. There is no doubt between them that there is a right way to behave and a wrong way and that God (or the gods) are the reason why these things are so. They cannot think of another place upon which to safely rest the weight of morality.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle continues down a line of similar thinking as Solomon and Plato when he gives us the example of the law abider and the law breaker and connects justice to that which is lawful when he writes:
he who is a lawbreaker is unjust and he who is lawful just, it is clear that all lawful things are somehow just…. The laws pronounce on all things, in their aiming at the common advantage, either for all persons or for the best or for those who have authority either in accord with virtue or some other such way. As a result, we say that those things apt to produce and preserve happiness and its parts for the political community are in a manner just.
Further, in Book 7 and Chapter 1 of Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle draws from Homer’s work where Priam spoke of Hector being “exceedingly good” and that “He did not seem to be a child of any mortal man but a god.” For Aristotle then (and Homer, although he is not currently under consideration, but certainly another pre-modern case) you have the connection of goodness or morality with the divine. Here we rest, once again, morality upon divine shoulders. This, then, places Aristotle in a camp agreeing with Plato (and essentially Solomon) that goodness and virtue lie ultimately with the gods.
As I said earlier, these are but a small sample of great thinkers from the pre-modern era but they are a good representation of the majority of thinking from that time on the present issue. But let us now turn our attention to some modern era thinkers and their view of oughtness and moral truth. I think what we will find is a definite and fundamental shift in the conception of oughtness and its origin.
Machiavelli’s The Prince
Machiavelli’s The Prince is an interesting work full of tongue in cheek statements but his aim is ultimately a serious one. He seeks to instruct towards what the ideal governmental system is and how to maintain control as a leader. One of the pivotal statements in his work is the following: “The principal foundations which all states have, whether new, old, or mixed, are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there needs must be good laws, I shall omit the reasoning on laws and speak of arms.”
Here Machiavelli cleverly tips his hat and reveals his priorities, namely, that of control by arms (force). Now Machiavelli is not suggesting that there be no laws, nor is he suggesting ruling purely by brute force alone, but he is talking priorities. He shows elsewhere in his book that his primary concern is that of maintaining power by whatever means are necessary and there is no objective moral ethic (merely a utilitarian one) to restrain what one should do while pursuing or maintaining power over a state. At one point he goes as far as saying, “Hence it is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to maintain himself, to learn to be able to be not good, and to use it according to the necessity.”
He must “learn to be able to be not good!” That is quite a statement indeed. For one it seems to recognize a notion of ‘good’ or perhaps ‘common decency’ but suggests that a prince ought (and there is that word again) to break with the good. It would seem in light of this and other comment made in The Prince that Machiavelli consider morality something like a social convention to be used when it is helpful and broken when it is more helpful. Of the references that Machiavelli makes to religion they are mostly utilitarian as well. Whether or not Machiavelli believed in God may be up for debate but what is very clear is that he did not fear him nor did he hold to an objective morality for all people (especially princes). Use religion when helpful, ignore when it hinders.
Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
Where Machiavelli championed the cause of Princes, Marx believed himself to be championing the cause of the people. In this way they sat on opposite sides of one another. But there is definitely room for agreement because they are both utilitarian in their approach to problem solving. Marx responded to the suffering of the masses in his day with an attempt to cure the problem as he saw it. Marx felt that capitalism was a disease that kept the rich in power and oppressed the majority and he proposed a kind of communism as the answer. He wrote, “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” Furthermore he asserted that, “Communism begins from the outset with atheism.” Whereas Machiavelli taught princes to live like opportunist atheists who used religion to their own gain when useful, Marx says atheism is a presupposition and not a hidden one at that.
Because of this assumption of atheism the only guiding principle for Marx is the proletariat cause. So Marx would not see morality as relative but as defined by the cause. Actions and deeds are good when they support the communist agenda and bad when they hinder it. The utilitarian principle may never be clearer than in the Manifesto of the Communist Party when Marx describes the ideal Communist state. He states:
Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries the following will be pretty generally applicable: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with the state capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state….
And the list goes on.
What is evident in Marx’s thinking is that the Communist agenda trumps all sense of individual rights. Anyone moving into his ideal state automatically loses all of their personal belongings or are labeled as a rebel (and then lose all their personal belongings). He is convinced that this approach, mutual state ownership, is the key to ending suffering and the class problem but anything that gets in the way will be annihilated with extreme prejudice. He concludes his Manifesto by saying, “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals
Nietzsche sets out to give an explanation of the origin and evolution of morality in his book On the Genealogy of Morals. In his thinking the origin of the concept of good began with elite or noble class. What they did, what they were, was good and what stood in contrast to them (i.e. the lowly) was bad. He wrote, “The judgment “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, the powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good…” He later argues that this concept becomes inverted by the religious, particularly the judeo-Christian tradition, to the point where what was once despised (e.g. weakness and low station) has become the ideal for moral goodness.
Regardless of who or what ‘the good’ is, it is clear that for Nietzsche that the concept originates with man and not with God. Nietzsche too is an atheist but he is not as optimistic of hopeful as Marx is in his Atheism. Nietzsche realizes that atheism equals no truth, moral compass whatsoever and that any principle for guidance we have is merely subjective and man made. He seems to agree that man will endure on by sheer act of will but he does so apart from any real meaning to life.
Conclusion
So much more could be and needs to be said to do each of these authors justice in representing their thoughts and stances. Nonetheless what I have hoped to draw out, and what I think should be clear from what we have seen, is that the shift in thinking about morality or oughtness that took place with the turn of modernism was a shift towards nihilism and subjectivity. The pre-moderns, while certainly having major disagreements about things, held a common presupposition that there was objective truth to be sought and found and that there was a real good and evil (justice and injustice) and that one ought to seek the good and turn form the bad. The common strand for the pre-moderns was the existence of the divine. God (or the gods) allowed a place outside of and above mankind upon which an objective morality could rest, a sufficient origin of morals and also a way to make them objective and equally obligatory for all people.
But when we arrive at the moderns we see that the oughtness begins to be a fuzzy idea. Machiavelli pays some lip service to the good, at least as a social convention that is normally expected to be upheld, but he says the Prince ought to ignore it as needed for maintaining control of the state. He does not out himself as an atheist but he encourages a practical atheism for princes. Marx assumes atheism and he adopts a utilitarian ethic which says all that helps communism is good and all that opposes it is bad. But this is not an objective reality, it is something to be imposed by force. Finally, Nietzsche presents himself as the honest one who embraces atheism and its logical outcome, nihilism. There is no meaning, there is no truth and there is no moral imperative.
Some of the greatest minds of social science bring us to this point of realization. If there is moral truth that is objective, equally true for all people in all places and at all times, then there is a divine being (or beings). If there is no divine reality then there is no basis for objective morality and ultimately there is only force, there is only the will to power. We now live in a confused society that needs to be honest about the options before them. If there is oughtness there is God. If there is no God, there is no oughtness.
