ABSTRACT
More than a century before Anscombe counselled us to jettison concepts such as that of the moral ought, or moral law, Schopenhauer mounted a vigorous attack on such prescriptive moral concepts, particularly as found in Kant. In this chapter I consider what I take to be his four arguments for this stance. According to the first, Kant begs the question by merely assuming that ethics has a prescriptive or legislative-imperative form, when a purely descriptive-explanatory conception such as Schopenhauer's also presents itself as a possibility. According to the second, Kant's purportedly philosophical ethics is in fact a theological ethics in disguise, because prescriptive notions such as that of the moral ought presuppose a divine lawgiver. According to the third, Kant's conceptions of the moral law as a law of freedom, and of moral imperatives as categorical or unconditioned, involve him in contradictions. Finally, Schopenhauer argues that there can be no such thing as a moral ought because a binding ought or law must be understood to operate through appeals to self-interest, which stands in opposition to morality. I contend that these last three arguments are sound and that the final one in particular succeeds in refuting the prescriptivist conception of morality.
