One of two things. Either we found ethics on the will of God alone, and then the distinction between good and evil, just and unjust, is gratuitous, and moral obligation does not exist; or you give authority to the will of God by justice, which, in your hypothesis, must have received from the will of God its authority, which is a petitio principii.
Another petitio principii still more evident. In the first place, you are compelled, in order legitimately to draw justice from the will of God, to suppose that this will is just, or I defy any one to show that this will alone can ever form the basis of justice. Moreover, evidently you cannot comprehend what a just will of God is, if you do not already possess the idea of justice. This idea, then, does not come from that of the will of God.
On the one hand, you may have, and you do have, the idea of justice, without understanding the will of God; on the other, you cannot conceive the justice of the divine will, without having conceived justice elsewhere.
Are not these reasons sufficient, I pray you, to conclude that the sole will of God is not for us the principle of the idea of the good?
And now, behold the natural consummation of the ethical system that we are examining:—the just and the unjust are what it has pleased God to declare such, by attaching to them the rewards and punishments of another life. The divine will manifests itself here only by an arbitrary order; it adds to this order promises and threats.
But to what human faculty are addressed the promise and threat of the chastisements and the rewards of another life? To the same one that in this life fears pain and seeks pleasure, shuns unhappiness and desires happiness, that is to say, to sensibility animated by imagination, that is to say, again, to what is most changing in each of us and most different in the human species. The joys and sufferings of another life excite in us the two most vivid but most mobile passions, hope and fear. Every thing influences our fears and hopes,—aye, health, the passing cloud, a ray of the sun, a cup of coffee, a thousand causes of this kind. I have known men, even philosophers, who on certain days hoped more, and other days less. And such a basis some would give to ethics! Then it is doing nothing else than proposing for human conduct an interested motive. The calculation which I obey is purer, if you will; the happiness that one makes me hope for is greater; but I see in that no justice that obligates me, no virtue and no vice in me, who know or do not know how to make this calculation, not having a head as strong as that of Pascal,[214] who yield to or resist those fears and hopes according to the deposition of my sensibility and my imagination, over which I have no power. Finally, the pains and pleasures of the future life are instituted on the ground of punishments and rewards. Now, none but actions in themselves good or bad can be rewarded and punished. If already there is in itself no good, no law that in conscience we are obligated to follow, there is neither merit nor demerit; recompense is not then recompense, nor penalty penalty, since they are such only on the condition of being the complement and the sanction of the idea of the good. Where this idea does not pre-exist, there remain, instead of recompense and penalty, only the attraction of pleasure and the fear of suffering, added to a prescription deprived in itself of morality. In that we come back to the punishments of earth invented for the purpose of frightening popular imagination, and supported solely on the decrees of legislators, on an abstraction of good and evil, of justice and injustice, of merit and demerit. It is the worst human justice that is found thus transported into heaven. We shall see that the human soul has foundation somewhat solider.[215]
These different systems, false or incomplete, having been rejected, we arrive at the doctrine that is to our eyes perfect truth, because it admits only certain facts, neglects none, and maintains for all of them their character and rank.
LECTURE XIV.
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS.
Description of the different facts that compose the moral phenomena.—Analysis of each of these facts:—1st, Judgment and idea of the good. That this judgment is absolute. Relation between the true and the good.—2d, Obligation. Refutation of the doctrine of Kant that draws the idea of the good from obligation instead of founding obligation on the idea of the good.—3d, Liberty, and the moral notions attached to the notion of liberty.—4th, Principle of merit and demerit. Punishments and rewards.—5th, Moral sentiments.—Harmony of all these facts in nature and science.