ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most urgent philosophical question raised by voluntarist ethics is what to put in its place. That may seem an inappropriate judgement on a theory so long gone, but it is implied by the radical modern argument that the whole notion of ethics as a branch of objective knowledge, a notion firmly embedded in ordinary language, rests on assumptions no longer tenable, such as the assumption of a world ordered by its creator's intentions. According to this sceptical argument (which has been around at least since Nietzsche) the objective form of everyday moral reasoning and dispute is a relic, ripe for deconstruction, of a system of beliefs different from our own. As one commentator has pointed out, the argument is in effect the same as that advanced by Locke with considerable passion and emphasis, but in reverse. Unless right and wrong are the creation of God, we are left with principles of action invented by man and therefore utterly lacking the unconditional authority of the moral law as we ordinarily conceive of it, or have hitherto conceived of it. 139
More fundamental than the question which horn of this dilemma to embrace, of course, is the question whether the argument which sets it up is sound. Here it is relevant that the philosophical weak point of full-blooded voluntarism had been evident to its rationalist critics centuries before theism ceased to be in full health, through the recognition of the autonomy of moral judgement. Briefly, divine commands cannot be the source of moral distinctions since they and their author are themselves possible objects of moral evaluation. That is the reason for the traditional anti-voluntarist proposal that God is 'obliged' to act justly by his own knowledge and wisdom, a proposal designed to avoid both the paradox that the distinction between right and wrong is arbitrary (or that the judgement that God is good is a mere tautology) and the theologically unsavoury conclusion that God is constrained by something outside himself. Locke appears to have been unconcerned
with that issue, happily ascribing justice and goodness to God in their plain sense. Such insouciance is understandable if it is right that his voluntarism was sustained less by the theological preferences usually associated with it, of which there is little sign in his writings, than by his felt need to explain our human sense of the authority and obligation of morality - not to speak of its practical effect on beings for whom pleasure and pain constitute both the only motive and the only source of value. Yet Locke's voluntarism suffered from effectively the same flaw as the full-blooded theory, for his argument required him to step outside his own explanation even of human obligation. If the obligation to obey the divine lawgiver is itself a moral obligation (in virtue of a ius creationis), then it cannot be the case that the idea of moral obligation is explicable in terms of the constraints of divine law. No law can create a duty to obey it by including that duty in its own content.
