ABSTRACT

Milton's Satan illustrates how the Devil can believe that laws inductive of moral wrongs should not be obeyed, whatever their contents. The obedience to moral rules is so paramount that the Devil takes for granted the idea according to which morality stands only if its rules are followed no matter what Goethe's Mephistopheles takes such a strong deontologist stand that he bases his entire strategy of oppression on this meta-ethical perspective. It is mostly a problem of choosing which values and authorities seem legitimate in their issuance of valid commands and laws. Satan fails to recognize God's power and refuses to accept the validity of God's laws, whether they are rational or not. Instead, Satan intends to establish his own criteria of validity, to make his own laws and to found his own government. If it were, Satan would have recognized them as valid laws and would simply break them.