In his time, D. Hume made an observation that essentially predetermined the nature of subsequent ethics research. “In every system of morality that I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked,” he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, “that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence... . A reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.”[1] The obvious meaning of this statement is that the imperative nature of moral language cannot be considered an adequate expression of the essence of morality; rather, it conceals the erroneousness of its epistemologized schemes of explanation. The accuracy of such an interpretation of the excerpt, even if it were questionable on the basis of its literal meaning, raises no doubt in the general context of Hume’s own ethics where morality is identified with a special moral sense - a sense of sympathy that can be revealed effectively without the compelling force of duty. By some strange logic, ethics after Hume turned his warning into a positive program and saw its task as laying bare the concept of the moral “ought” and trying to find a transition from “is” to “ought.” These persistent and multifaceted efforts, which enriched the theory of ethics in many ways, nevertheless did not achieve their immediate goal. The question arises, then, whether the negative result was not predetermined by an improper formulation of the problem itself that arose from the assumption that the specific nature of morality is connected with its imperativeness.

Aporias of moral duty

Rather than concern ourselves with special investigations of the transition from factual to normative judgments which belong to logic rather than to ethics and are important for the theory of moral duty primarily because of their negative result concerning the impossibility of such a transition, we will turn to the theory itself. The most significant and difficult questions for this theory concern (a) the basis of duty, (b) its specific nature (in contrast to other obligations) and (c) its feasibility. Attempts to answer each of them run into insurmountable contradictions.

The first obvious characteristic of a moral duty, which is fixed in the language of many ethico-normative documents, beginning with one of the earliest and still one of the most important of them, Moses’s Ten Commandments, is its unconditionality and categoricalness. The famous commandments “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal,” “thou shalt not bear false witness” and so on are formulated as though they did not require any further explanation or justification, as if they themselves were the ultimate foundation of human life. The questions “why?” and “what for?” make no sense in relation to them. If this apparent groundlessness of moral duty is taken seriously, then, since reason is governed by the law of sufficient reason, the only rational explanation for moral duty consists in the assumption that the desired grounds lie outside the competence of human reason. In essence, the idea of God marked the limits of reason.

In the history of culture, the basic moral principles have been interpreted, for the most part, as an expression of the will of God. As the Torah tells it, God proclaimed the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people and traced them with his own finger on the first tablets. The Sermon on the Mount was delivered by the divine Son of God; the norms of Muslim ethics were given by God through the prophet Mohammed. If moral codes were attributed to people, as in the case of Confucius and Buddha, then these people were deified after the fact. In his polemic with Kant’s ethics, A. Schopenhauer said in opposing it that the concept of unconditional duty “owes its origin to theological morality.”[2] But the theological approach, within the framework of which God becomes the condition for the unquestionable authority and categorical nature of moral demands, does not solve the problem. On the contrary, it follows from this approach that moral obligation ceases to be unconditional if, of course, one does not believe that God is bound in his volitions by moral laws. But even in the latter case, the problem of interest to us remains unanswered; only now it is God who is faced with it. Thus, in the opinion of Pelagius, God gave his commandments because they are moral. This assertion turns the problem into a vicious circle, for it is logical to ask, “On what grounds did God consider them to be moral?” Augustine, who argued with Pelagius on this question, was at least more consistent when he said that God cannot be bound by anything in his decisions and that the commandments are moral only because God gave them. But this means that they could have been different. For example, Ockham, a consistent proponent of theological voluntarism, claimed that God is not even constrained by the commandment of love and that it is not inconceivable that He could have ordered people not to love Him but the direct opposite. Such is the first aporia of moral duty, which is connected with its basis: moral duty cannot be unconditional; in becoming unconditional, it ceases to be moral.

Moral duty is not man’s sole duty. The word “duty” is often used in conjunction with a great many modifiers: “military duty,” “professional duty,” “filial duty,” and so on. The question arises, how is moral duty connected with other duties and what is it apart from them? More specifically, does moral duty exist as a set of independent obligations alongside other duties (obligations) or does it coincide with them? If it exists alongside them, then two more questions come up: what constitutes the proper object of moral duty and what theory, besides moral theory, studies the concept of duty itself? If moral duty coincides with other duties, then what justifies this proliferation of entities and, in that case, does not moral duty break with the world of action and become a sting that does not sting? The first theoretical framework within which the question of the relationship between moral duty and other human obligations was raised was Stoic ethics with its delineation of two levels of behavior.

According to the Stoics, virtue is good and vice is evil. All the rest, that is, everything that can be used for either good or evil, is the realm of the indifferent (adiaphora), the ethically neutral. Zeno believed that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness. However, the sphere of the indifferent has its own distinctions, on the strength of which some objects are advantageous and others are disadvantageous. Everything that promotes human life in its physical and social dimensions (health, strength, wealth, family, comeliness) is advantageous; everything opposite (sickness, weakness, poverty, loneliness, ugliness) is disadvantageous. These Stoic classifications of actions are carried out according to different criteria: in the first case, according to the ethical criterion of self-worth and self-sufficiency which enables us to define the level of morally obligatory behavior and, in the second case, according to the pragmatic criterion of conformity to nature or expediency, which allows us to distinguish the class of appropriate actions, the field of prudence. Appropriate actions are aimed at advantageous things that are expedient from the point of view of preserving and reproducing life and are entirely amenable to rational justification within the framework of their expediency. These actions are ethically neutral and cannot affect human virtue in any way. However, they are linked with moral virtue: the latter is found only in appropriate actions; that which is opposed to nature cannot be an object of moral aspiration. Accordingly, appropriate actions can be performed in different ways - in a morally obligatory or nonobligatory way.

They are performed in the morally obligatory way when the agent who performs them preserves an inner freedom and independence in relation to them that enables him to accept any outcome, since the outcome is not within his power. Here we are talking about two dimensions, two ways of looking at the same reality. A man’s morality is manifested not in some special set of actions that exists separately, alongside appropriate actions. In its object-directed expression, it coincides with appropriate actions and is expressed only in a special inner attitude toward them. The Stoic sage does not differ from an ordinary man in his external pattern. His moral greatness consists solely in the fact that he understands the relativity of all advantageous values and does not identify himself with them. Therefore, he does not break under the blows of fate, however crushing they may be and, like a dog tied to a cart (a comparison used by the Stoics), he willingly follows it wherever it goes. We can say that within the framework of Stoic theory appropriate actions are the material of the morally obligatory, and the morally obligatory is the principle of appropriate actions. This theoretical construction made it possible to supplement the rationalistic-pragmatic justification of actions with a rational-moral justification of them and to interpret them as duties or obligations. At the same time, it followed that the morally obligatory itself has no direct issue into the external sphere of actions. It is no coincidence, but on the contrary, quite natural and highly indicative that, in late-Stoic and post-Stoic theories of morality, ethically neutral appropriate behavior (katekon), rather than what was morally obligatory (katorthoma) in the classical Stoa,[3] began to be considered a duty. It turns out that moral duty is a superstructure, some kind of internal dimension of other types of duty, or a kind of obligation of obligations. In that case, morality appears as an additional motive in relation to obligations that are sufficiently motivated even without morality. In fact, is it not clear without morality that to be rich and healthy is better than to be poor and sick? And is not the obligation to defend one’s country, which is so prominent in social consciousness, secured by material incentives, reward, laws about military service, and many other stimuli that are by themselves quite sufficient to guarantee it? Then of what use is morality, all the more so as we do not known how the right attitude toward appropriate actions affects their quality? It must be especially noted that the Stoics (at least the early ones) did not talk about elevating any obligations within the framework of appropriate actions to the level of a moral duty. They clearly recognized and were the first to draw a distinction between what is moral and what is extramoral. In their case, we can only talk about a certain correspondence between the sphere of moral duty and the extramoral sphere of diverse human obligations. If one reads carefully the Stoic texts, which unfortunately survive only in fragments, then one comes to the conclusion, which seems strange at first glance, but upon closer consideration is the only logical and in its way reasonable conclusion, that the positive significance of the morally obligatory for the sphere of extramoral obligations was to make it possible to come to terms with those unnatural situations that could not be avoided in the process of fulfilling these obligations. Thus, we learn that the Stoic sage will do everything in his power to save the life of a friend, but he will not grieve if the latter’s life is not saved. If he finds himself in a situation in which he has to eat human flesh, he will consume this repugnant unusual food. Other people can also do so. However, the wisdom of a Stoic sage, which distinguishes him from other people and elevates him above them, consists in the fact that he does this calmly, since he cannot avoid the given circumstances. The Stoic does not flinch where ordinary people show weakness. Consequently, the function of the additional moral motivation of appropriate actions is to relieve the conscience of the burdens that are inevitably associated with such actions and thereby facilitate their consistent realization, to endure inner recriminations for failing to save a friend’s life, to find in oneself the strength to eat human flesh, and so forth.

This psychotherapeutic and opportunistic role of the moral motivation of behavior, which, undoubtedly, is already present in Stoic theory, where moral duty consists of consistent, morally unconstrained fulfillment of concrete human obligations, becomes especially evident in moral teachings that examine particular human obligations (such as serving the common good) as moral duties and, on this basis, sanction actions that obviously contradict morality. Thus we obtain conceptions of the “just” war, the “holy” lie, “humane” killing, and so on.

Since moral duty merges with concrete types of duty, the noted transformation of it into its opposite is not overcome by setting up a special independent sphere of specifically moral actions. The sphere of specifically moral actions inevitably turns out to be so problematic (ambiguous, artificial, indeterminate) and narrow in comparison with the basic mass of diverse life obligations that it is inevitably dependent on the latter, a supplement and cover for the latter. Charitable activity is a typical example of this. For all its usefulness and worthiness, it cannot fail to contain an inner fallacy. As far as I know, moral duty as a special sphere of actions, alongside of and in contrast to other actions, has not been conceptually or theoretically isolated. Even the Christian worldview, for which the delineation of the religious-moral and secular is of fundamental significance, had to reject, in one way or another, the separation of morality and its reduction to mere acts of charity.

Thus, the second aporia of moral duty can be formulated as follows: moral duty does not exist outside of and besides concrete obligations (family, social, professional, civic, etc.), nor does it exist in the form of concrete obligations, since, on the one hand, concrete obligations can exist without moral duty and, on the other hand, moral duty combined with concrete obligations loses its moral purity.

Moral duty as duty is a compulsion to act, while as moral it is a compulsion to act according to moral criteria. It is precisely as moral that duty cannot be limited to the external aspect of actions, cannot but extend also to feelings, desires, and intentions—everything that constitutes the subjective ground of actions. As we know, one of the essential points of Jesus Christ’s ethical revolution that predetermined the important difference between his Sermon on the Mount and Moses’s Ten Commandments was that he did not limit his moral prescriptions to the external aspect of actions, but extended them also to the sphere of desires and motives. It is not enough to not commit adultery in actual fact, as Moses commanded; Jesus requires that one not commit adultery even in thought, even in one’s heart.[4] But there is one essential point here to which the astute master of moral distinctions G.E. Moore drew attention. One cannot control one’s feelings and desires, at least not in the sense in which one can restrain oneself from certain actions. One can stop oneself from betraying one’s wife, but one cannot do anything to prevent such a desire from ever arising. It is within our power to block such desires from turning into actions, but it is not within our power to have or not to have certain desires. Therefore, if one proceeds from the principle that “ought implies can” and understands duty as an obligatory, categorical prescription of an action, then one has to admit that “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” are talking about duty in different senses. Fulfillment of the former requirement can be guaranteed, but not of the latter. Moore proposes to call “the first kind of rules - those that do assert that something actually is a duty - ‘rules of duty,’ and... . the second kind - those that recommend or condemn something not in the control of our wills - ‘ideal rules.’”[5] Of course, this distinction introduces a very important element of precision into the theory of duty. However, it does not dispose of the problem that the externally objectified, empirical aspect of actions is directly linked with the subjective emotive side of them and, therefore, it is impossible to regard any actions whatsoever to be obligatory with the required moral categoricalness without gaining control also of the desires that give rise to these actions. The temptation to steal can be externally curbed: both contemporary society and individuals have learned how to do this well, but that does not eliminate the temptation. However, stealing cannot be completely eliminated so long as the temptation itself remains, the feelings and emotions (envy, a sense of injustice, etc.) that feed it. Therefore, it is not enough to do what is possible, “not steal,” as the eighth commandment demands; we must also do what is impossible, “not covet thy neighbor’s house,” as the tenth commandment demands. Hence arises the third aporia of moral duty: duty cannot govern desires and it cannot be considered moral until it does just that.

Kant’s solution

The Kantian theory of duty, which constitutes the normative aspect of his ethics and identifies morality with its imperative form, can be interpreted as an attempt to resolve the aporias of moral duty that have been pointed out above.

Kant tries to solve the first aporia, the aporia of the basis, by identifying morality with the unconditional nature of moral duty so completely that only that which can be regarded as unconditionally and categorically obligatory is considered to be moral. Kant proceeds from the axiomatic assumption that only a law that possesses absolute necessity can be moral. This can only be a law of pure reason. The moral law is pure (i.e., cleansed of everything extraneous, empirical, of any objectness that inevitably fetters and limits thought) reason that has become practical. It would be the sole basis of the rational will, if rationality were an exhaustive characteristic of the will and we were talking about a perfectly rational being. But that is not what man is and his will is affected not only by reason, but also by inclinations. Therefore, the moral law appears to him in the form of an unconditional coercive power, a categorical imperative, that is, duty. The unconditional nature of duty is the only possible way to connect man with the moral law. In contrast to the preceding ethics in which, for all its characteristic theoretical distinctions, the ought is derived in one way or another from morality, Kant reverses this relationship and derives morality from the ought. There is a difference between saying that morality is what is unconditionally obligatory and, vice versa, that what is unconditionally obligatory is morality. In the first case it is necessary to present extramoral (supramoral) grounds on the basis of which morality becomes unconditionally obligatory. In the second case, the question does not arise, since morality is given together with unconditional duty and only in it. Against Kant’s argument for the imperative nature of morality, Schopenhauer raised the objection that it begs the question. This is true only to the extent to which it can be applied to any ethical teaching that unavoidably starts with an axiomatic statement, some self-evident trait of morality that is subject to later theoretical justification. This indicates only that morality as the subject of ethics is given prior to ethics itself. By the way, we should note that Schopenhauer himself clearly begs the question in his ethics of compassion when he begins with the statement that the absence of any egoistic motivation is the criterion of morally worthy action.[6] The problem lies not in begging the question, but in constructing a coherent theory within the framework of which the begged premise becomes a proved proposition. In examining the idea of the imperative nature of morality in Kant’s ethics from this point of view, we should note that the decisive point in its justification is the transition from pure reason to pure practical reason. It is precisely in the course of this transition that the will that considers itself obligated to be rational and to conform to the moral law appears. How and why is the transition of pure reason to practical accomplished? Or, if we translate this from Kantian to ordinary language, why does morality possess binding strength and why does it follow from the fact that a moral assertion is true that we must be guided by it? To this there is no answer. There is no answer in general, and there is no answer in Kant as he himself admits: “No human reason is capable of explaining how pure reason can become practical.”[7] In fact, to explain the unconditional imperative is to point out its condition and this would be an obvious contradiction of the definition.

The second aporia, which is connected with the relationship of moral duty with all other obligations - let us call it, provisionally, the aporia of scope - is resolved within the framework of Kant’s ethics by completely separating two spheres - the moral sphere of freedom and the natural sphere of necessity. According to Kant, the whole field of human actions in their material and object-oriented content lies outside the competence of moral duty. This is true, first of all and most obviously, of the external aspect of actions which is covered by the law. But not only by the law. Behavioral psychology also belongs to the world of necessity and human actions, in principle, lend themselves to the same precise calculation and prediction as lunar eclipses. The fact of morality, as we say, exists neither in the external world nor in human consciousness. According to Kant, morality does not exist at all as a fact. Morality does not have anything to do with the content of laws that govern human behavior; it is concerned exclusively with universality as the form of conformity to law. So it is not enough to say that the moral law is revealed to man in the form of unconditional obligatoriness. One has to add that unconditional obligatoriness itself does not extend beyond the bounds of the moral law. Unconditional duty has to do only with the maxims of the will as subjective principles of action and its only interest in the maxims of the will is what remains in them after everything conditional has been removed. In my view, Kant’s logic in relation to the “objectness” of moral duty could be reconstructed as follows. Moral duty can deal with actions only to the extent that they do not belong to the world of natural necessity and are not subject to the law of causality. The question arises what will remain of actions if all their causally determined content is expunged from them or, to put in another way, what will remain of nature itself if we abstract from its natural flesh that, as contemporary science shows, is given in laws of diverse content and, consequently, if we abstract from all the concrete laws that order the natural world? The answer is obvious: nothing except the very idea of law which cannot by any means be a fact of nature just as an individual cannot beget himself. Consequently, universality as the form of existence conforming to law, the very idea of law as such, is the only extranatural, supranatural element of action that can become the “object” of the regulative force of moral duty. Thus, duty is concerned with actions insofar as they are objective and universally valid. It is focused not on what distinguishes some actions from others, but only on what is common to all actions. If we generalize the maxims of the will as subjective principles of behavior in the concept of inclination, encompassing in it all the empirical motives that determine actions in their concrete object-defined expression, including the so-called altruistic feelings (sympathy, compassion, etc.), then we can say that moral duty begins where inclinations end. They, duty and inclinations, travel along different paths. In this question, Kant continues the line of Stoic ethics where morality and the pragmatics of life were at different levels of being and different levels of consciousness. But, while the Stoic still felt responsible for the pragmatics of life and was obligated to accept steadfastly the blows of fate, the Kantian lets the inclinations loose and emancipates them fully from moral custody. This way of dealing with the question is usually seen as discrediting inclinations and it is pointed out that for Kant there are no good inclinations. But, at the same time, it is forgotten that from Kant’s point of view there are also no bad inclinations. Kant’s point is different: inclinations are neither pro-moral nor anti-moral. They are extramoral, simply something other than morality, which is interpreted as unconditional obligatoriness.

But how can duty, which is completely isolated from inclinations, show its efficacy? How does it turn into action and does it turn into action at all? Here we move on to the third aporia, the aporia of feasibility. Kant proceeds from the idea that “the moral law directly determines the will.” It functions as a motive. In this sense, the moral motive is just as pure, just as independent of all extraneous incentives as the moral law itself - free of all material and substantive characteristics. The question of how law can be the determining basis of the will is beyond the bounds of human reason. It is the same question as how pure reason becomes practical. But nevertheless, we can understand how the moral law acts as a motive. The motive is duty. It is, moreover, the sole and exclusive motive: the only action that is moral is that which is done out of duty and, at the same time, no other action but a moral one can be done out of duty. Duty establishes two things: (a) whether the action conforms to the moral law and (b) whether it is done only for the sake of the law. An action conforms to the moral law when, according to the categorical imperative, its maxim can be elevated to a universal law. It is done for the sake of the law when its only motive is respect for the moral law. Respect is a special feeling (Kant even calls it a moral feeling) that occurs in a person in connection with the fact that the moral law reveals its omnipotence in him, conquers egoism, and shatters self-doubt. Respect arises on an intellectual basis; in a manner of speaking, it is an unfelt feeling. It is generated by the moral way of thinking and accompanies it. It cannot even be considered an incentive to morality; it is morality itself acting as a motive. It cannot take the form of voluntary inclination (that which ought to be done cannot be done with desire); it always appears as something achieved through struggle, against and by overcoming natural desire. Although it is not accompanied by any threat or fear, it is, at the same time, associated with humility and contains nothing that would flatter an individual or could generate moral fanaticism as the worst form of conceit in him. Only the presence of respect for the moral law as the operative motive allows us to say that an action is done not only in conformity with duty (in accordance with the moral law), but also in the name of, for the sake of duty (this happens when the moral law is consciously posited as the ground or maxim of an action). Thus, “duty is the necessity to act from respect for the law.”[8] By reducing all motives of a moral action to the moral motive of duty, Kant ostensibly resolves the aporia of feasibility, since duty does not depend on other empirical motives that are not under the control of reason. However, this independence is itself a form of dependence, since duty cannot reveal itself in any other way than through this independence. And since man, being a sensuous being, cannot free himself of his sensuous nature, the unconditional nature of duty expresses itself in his understanding and consciousness of the fact that no matter what he does, it is not what he ought to do, that is, in the understanding and consciousness that duty as unconditional duty is unrealizable.

Thus, the Kantian moral duty, when it is viewed in all its essential aspects - from the point of view of its basis, its scope (sphere of application), and its feasibility - is closed in on itself and constitutes a simple identity. This theoretical position, which, from a logical standpoint, tries to remove the contradictions inherent in moral imperativeness, from a normative standpoint, means that duty as “the moral stage attained by man”[9] is something valuable in itself and self-evident. In duty man is revealed as personality. Speaking of his own discovery in ethics, Kant writes that even before him, “everyone understood that man by his duty is bound with the law, but failed to realize that he is subject only to his own and yet universal legislation.”[10] Man gives himself the moral law and it is only in this capacity that he is a moral individual, a rational being, and a person. Since, in spite of and along with this, man is also a natural entity and his will, while experiencing the pressure of reason from above guiding it in the direction of the moral law, feels the pressure of inclinations from below pulling him in the opposite direction and, consequently, since his will is not only autonomous, but also dependent, morality appears in the form of duty, thanks to which “the person as a member of the sensible world is subject to his own personality insofar as he is also a member of the intelligible world.”[11]

The fundamental innovation of Kant’s ethical-normative program, which is concentrated on the understanding of morality as law in the form of the categorical imperative, is as follows. Instead of comparing various empirical motives of behavior and trying to find among them the ones that have a moral quality or are simply preferable from a moral point of view, his program is oriented toward duty as the sole moral motive that reveals itself independently, above, and, as a rule, against all other motives. On one side we have moral duty; on the other, all the rest of the real and conceivable human motives. Duty governs man as a rational, moral, and free being. All other motives (let us call them inclinations for short) govern him as a sensuous, natural, and dependent being. To be human, man cannot renounce either his duty or his inclinations. What is more, in his natural environment inclinations are just as organic and normal as duty is in the moral and rationalnoumenal sphere. Nor can they be arranged in a hierarchy. Duty can replace inclinations in him in the sense that duty itself can become a motive of behavior, but it cannot subordinate them to itself. And Kant sees the main moral problem that man faces in how to separate these spheres so as to preserve the purity of the moral motive and not permit any inclination to take the place that legitimately belongs to duty. However, such a solution of the problem does not come under the rule of duty; rather it can be called, using Moore’s term, an ideal rule. In order to understand this, we shall look at the nature and type of the interaction between moral and extramoral motives of behavior.

Dual motivation of behavior

One of the fundamental ideas of European culture that give it its ethical and anthropological perspective is the idea of the dual determination of human behavior. In its original paradigmatic form, it is incorporated in the heroic mythology of the Greeks. Heroes are descended from gods and people. This duality of origin determines their nature. They are divine, like the gods in every way but one - they are humanly mortal. To overcome this limitation and become immortal like the gods became their predestination and passion. And if they cannot become immortal in the physical sense, like their forefathers on Mt. Olympus, they want to acquire immortality through the greatness of their deeds and exploits. Divine sublimity is the goal and inspiring foundation of their life. The gods are also not indifferent to their progeny and participate in their fate. To a considerable extent the gods’ interrelations among themselves are displayed through their relationship to the heroes whose life becomes for the gods an arena of love, vengeance, cunning, and endless intrigue.

As a human, each hero has his own human fate. And at the same time, it is predetermined on Olympus, some of whose inhabitants protect him in certain situations, while others plot against him in other situations. The will of the gods is behind all of the decisive events of the heroes’ lives and, at the same time, all of these events could have happened without the gods’ participation in the sense that they have entirely sufficient human causes. The greatest event of human life, according to the Greeks - the Trojan war and its outcome - was the revenge of Athena and Hera who had been offended by the fact that the Trojan king’s son, Paris, preferred Aphrodite to them in a symbolic beauty contest. But at the same time the war originated and took place according to all the canons of human wars. Achilles refrained from participation in the battles with the Trojans and joined them again with the blessing of his mother, the goddess Thetis. But in both cases, he had entirely earthly reasons to act as he did. He withdrew in anger at Agamemnon for depriving him of his rightful spoils - his prisoner Briseis - and he took up the sword again to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. For many days Achilles despoiled the body of the fallen Hector and then decided to turn it over to Priam for burial. There were two kinds of reasons for that: the wrath of Apollo who had complained to Zeus about Achilles’s unworthy behavior and the very rich ransom that Priam brought Achilles. Ajax’s terrible rage in which he took up arms against the Greek leaders was provoked by Athena, but it can also be understood in terms of human psychology as a reaction to the court’s decision as to who should get Achilles’s armor - he who had borne the body of the fallen hero or Odysseus who had covered the bearer at the time. Agamemnon and Menelaus (also following Athena’s instructions, by the way) switched Ajax’s lot and miscounted the votes.

In short, the gods play a very lively and tangible part in the heroes’ fate. But at the same time, the heroes are not marionettes in the gods’ hands; they act in complete accord with their passions and ideas about honor and gain. The will of the gods is wrapped up in human motives, and the heroes’ desires correspond to what they are being prodded to do from Olympus. What the gods want coincides with what the heroes themselves want to a remarkable degree.

These two authorities - the properly human and the divine - became an important theme of philosophy (and not only of philosophy, of course). Starting at least with Socrates, divine determination of human behavior is identified with morality; divine (or demonic) force manifests itself as an internal voice that plays a role in behavior. The problem of how to combine morally elevating motives that lead into an unknown transcendent ideal world with the entirely earthly and very specific urges for corporeal and material wellbeing or, to put it in early mythological language, how to bring back the heroic past and with it the lost connection of earthly with divine predestination becomes one of the central philosophical-ethical and ethical-cultural problems. For all of their constantly increasing diversity, which allows us to construct various, including very long and complex, classification schemata, human motives and their corresponding actions can be divided generally into two large classes - moral and extramoral. The former are unconditional in the sense that they contain their goal within themselves; they mark the final, ultimate limit of human aspirations. The latter are conditioned in the sense that they are subordinate to other goals, which lie beyond their bounds; they are links in a continuing series. In spite of its extremely abstract nature, this division is exceptionally important not only for a philosophical understanding of man, but also for his self-understanding, because it lays out the most general coordinate axis by which man cannot fail to orient himself in his responsible efforts to structure his own life.

The most common (typical) solutions of the problem of the interrelationship of moral and extramoral motives to have been thought out in theory with varying degrees of consistency and tested in cultural experience can be summarized as follows: (a) extramoral motives are subordinate to moral ones as the lower to the higher (this is the most common and balanced position, starting with Socrates and Aristotle); (b) extramoral motives are opposed to moral ones as the false and illusory to the true and genuine (Neoplatonism, asceticism with a religious emphasis); (c) extramoral and moral motives are arranged side by side like weekdays and Sunday (theoretical and practical utilitarianism); (d) moral motives are subordinate to extramoral motives as means to ends (hedonist eudaemonism, Marxism); and (e) extramoral motives in and of themselves coincide with moral ones (rational egoism, probabilism). There is one more solution according to which extramoral and moral motives are two mutually independent views of human behavior, two different perspectives on it. We find its theoretical justification in the Stoics and Kant and can observe its practical embodiment in human and social situations that come under the rule, render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. In my opinion, this solution is closest to the mythological model of the dual motivation of human action and at the same time, however strange it may seem, closest to the truth. This position can be elaborated as follows.

Extramoral motives spring from human nature and the circumstances in which actions are performed. They are one of the elements determining behavior. However complex and distinctive this element may be, the essential point is that it is part of a causal chain of factors that gives rise to behavior. It does not break the chain but, on the contrary, like all the other elements of the chain, secures its unity. Two very important conclusions stem from this: extramoral motives can be exhaustively known and they are not only necessary but also sufficient subjective grounds for performing an action. Speaking of extramoral motives, we could drop the determination “extramoral” and talk simply of motives when we mean the subjective grounds of action. We are talking precisely about the subjective causes of actions, which are rooted in the individual’s pyschophysiological state and external circumstances. Among other things, the psychological factors may include feelings that are usually called moral, such as the feeling of shame or sympathy. Among the external circumstances may be role models considered worthy of imitation. Both are subject to calculation and reckoning, not to precise calculation as in mathematics to be sure, although it must be admitted (history and everyday life provide many examples of this) that there is a kind of mathematics of human affairs that can estimate human actions quite accurately and manipulate people successfully by taking into account, among other things, moral feelings and lofty models. It would be strange, of course, to deny the difference between shame and shamelessness or between worthy and contemptible role models in society. This difference is important in many respects. But at the level of philosophical-ethical generalization on which we are talking about the causes of behavior, about the limits of to which such causes are accessible to knowledge and control, the difference between them disappears. Shame and shamelessness are facts of human psychology and worthy and contemptible role models are facts of social and pedagogical life - all of them come completely under the conception of extramoral motives formulated above. Neither Kant nor Chernyshevskii did anything logically prohibited or ethically questionable when the former included not only egoism but also good behavior (charity, for example) among inclinations and the latter saw self-sacrifice as a form of rational egoism. The same can be said, for example, of specialists who talk about the altruism of animals or even find manifestations of it in inorganic nature.

Extramoral motives are necessary and sufficient for purposeful action. In this sense, morality could be considered superfluous. There is no place for it in the series of subjective principles that directly govern behavior in its concrete positive content. Morality lies behind them, above them; it sorts them, judges them according to the criterion of good and evil, and thereby examines behavior from a fundamentally different perspective. The moral motive is not shame in contrast to shamelessness, but that which enables us to distinguish one from the other in calling one thing shameful and another shameless. While extramoral motives have to do with an action as something real and concrete and are the result of the analysis of an action from the point of view of the possibility and effectiveness of its consequences, the reciprocal impact on the agent, the reaction of one’s associates, and so on, the moral motive translates an action into some ideal (conceived) sphere of direct opposition of good and evil. In order to think morally, an individual needs the purified milieu of the moral ideal just as a physicist needs an artificial experimental milieu for his research. Extramoral motives answer the question is a given action necessary and desirable for a given individual in a concrete situation? The moral motive answers the question is it necessary and desirable in and of itself? Extramoral motives are supposed to fit an action into the real, empirical world. Moral motives view the world as if it fully and entirely depended on the person himself. In the former case, the action is considered in the real atmosphere of relative burdens; in the latter case, in the artificial atmosphere of absolute burdens. Extramoral motives are a most complex calculation, since they require an answer to an unending number of questions. Moral motives are as simple as can be, for they must only answer yes or no; anything more is from the evil one.

Thus, moral motives are a special realm in relation to other motives. They are motives of a different level, a kind of supermotives. In human behavior they hold the same place as the will of the gods held in the behavior of the heroes of Greek mythology. The theoretical constructions of Stoicism and Kant, which give grounds for this dual motivation of behavior, were themselves, to a significant extent, the result of reflection on this phenomenon. In the Stoics’ opinion, extramoral motives, which divide actions into advantageous and disadvantageous, are an expression and result of the fact that these actions are weighed on the scales of human reason, while moral motives, which divide actions into virtuous and vicious, consider them from the point of view and perspective of cosmic reason. In the former case, the issue is the adequacy of actions to human nature; in the latter case, their adequacy to nature as a whole. According to Kant, extramoral motives connect actions with the phenomenal world, while the moral motive is a look at them from the viewpoint of the noumenal world.

The division we are talking about can also be observed, if we focus our attention, in the living process of motivating behavior, although not as clearly as in the philosophical schemata specially prepared for this purpose. In this connection, two characteristic features of moral judgment are interesting. It can take place regardless of the degree to which the judged individual action was predetermined by external circumstances completely beyond the agent’s control. In his time, Aristotle made the following observation and included it in his theory of ethical responsibility: in the case of actions done out of ignorance, when the individual’s intention is distorted because of particular circumstances that he had no way of foreseeing and everything happens independently of his will (when, for example, wishing to embrace someone, he knocks him down, or when he does something without being aware of it because he lost consciousness), a virtuous individual behaves as if he were to blame and everything depended on him. Only this subsequent reaction, Aristotle believes, indicates that the action really was involuntary, done completely out of ignorance. What is strange here is not that the individual’s admission of guilt (not feigned, of course, but sincere, genuine, as if he were in fact to blame) indicates his innocence. We are talking about the fact that the individual takes the blame for what he has not the slightest doubt he is not to be blamed in the sense that he could have prevented it from happening. He examines (replays) his involuntary action (an action the cause of which lies outside of the acting individual) as a voluntary one (an action the cause of which is the will of the agent) and thereby proves its involuntary nature. In this case, the virtuous individual (and this is what shows his virtuousness) mentally extricates the action from the real circumstances and transfers it into a different dimension where it would depend entirely on his will and there would be no circumstances capable of misrepresenting this will. His attitude toward the action seen in this light (an attitude not feigned, but genuine and psychologically and behaviorally authentic) declares in substance (not only and not primarily to others, but to himself ) that, were it his will, he would not have done this. As this example shows, moral judgment is so autonomous that it disregards the course of time and relates to past events as if they were yet to be done. We lose all power over what happened in the past, except moral power. Morality does not even take account of a hard fact of our existence such as the irreversibility of time. The pangs of conscience and remorse are evidence of this. I do not know if any other proof is needed to understand that to consider actions from the viewpoint of causes and from the viewpoint of their value are very different and mutually independent ways of looking at the same thing.

Moral judgment (and this is another of its characteristic features) has its own special subject that reveals itself through concrete empirical individuals, but does not coincide with them. In this sense at least two people reside without fail in each individual: one as the subject of moral judgment and the other as the subject of practical action. This is easy to see in very frequent examples in which the same person in assessing his own intentional actions can behave as if two different people did them. Kant’s example of a gambler who won by cheating and, pleased with his winning, still despises himself for cheating illustrates this quite clearly. “To have a reason for saying to oneself ‘I am a base fellow, although I have filled my purse’ one must have a different measure than to praise oneself and say ‘I am a smart man, for I have increased my account.’”[12]

Moral motivation as a thought experiment

The function of moral motives in relation to all other motives can be compared to the quality-control department at a plant. Its task is to check the finished product from the point of view of its conformity to a technical standard. Just as the quality-control department puts its mark on satisfactory products and signifies by this that they may be put on the market, so morality conducts the final test on all other motives and assesses them as satisfactory (good, right, imposable as duty), that is, it puts its mark of approval on the motives it sanctions. Moral motives accompany all other motives (supplement, reinforce, and cover them). Incidentally, this is illustrated and proven by the following fact, which is exceptionally important for understanding the special role and specific nature of moral motives. In their intentions and conscious designs, people always strive to do good (in this sense Socrates was right: intentional evil is impossible). Everyone, even the most inveterate criminal, tries to present his own evil as a good; as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In those rare and more favorable cases when a one looks at things with open eyes and admits that one has done evil, one finds justification in the thought that it is a lesser evil. This shows that one’s motives have gone through the moral-control “department” and also, by the way, that this “department” is not working well. How is the moral control of motives accomplished and what happens with those that do not pass the test?

Like any other control, moral control is implemented by bringing the object of control under some canon that is recognized as such by both parties - the one who carries out the control and the one who comes under it. In our case, it consists of examining concrete motives at the stage of a possible decision or, more precisely, even of the possible action that will follow the decision, from the viewpoint of their (the decision’s and the action’s) conformity to the moral criterion. What we are talking about is a moral examination[13] of concrete motives in their purely concrete application. And this examination is carried out only ideally, in the form of a thought experiment. It can be carried out ideally, since the question of trust in the controlling authority is a question of trust of the acting individual in himself: what we are talking about is a criterion that is set up by the individual himself in the sense that he recognizes it as the highest, ultimate criterion and voluntarily subjects himself to it. The examination has to be carried out ideally, since it pertains to concrete decisions and actions: to review them or experiment with them in reality would mean to carry them out, and then there would be nothing to review, check, and control.

We find excellent, methodologically well-thought-out examples of thought experiments in Kant’s ethical writings. Of these the following two are the most vivid and the most important for understanding the nature of a moral thought experiment.[14] The first one is meant to test whether a maxim of the will conforms with the moral law; the second, to identify the motive of moral duty.

The first is the famous example of the merchant who has to borrow money, although he knows that he will not be able to repay it. He can get the money on a false promise to repay it. He (precisely the merchant himself and no one else) is faced with a question (which he again must answer not before anyone else, not before the lender of the money, not before a notary, before no one but himself): is it permissible from a moral point of view to give a false promise? To students this question can look like an example of a logical fallacy: when we say “false promise” we already understand that we are dealing with a morally impermissible action, for “false” is one way of saying “morally impermissible.” But it is precisely this apparent error that shows that the purpose of a moral experiment is not to prove to someone that he has to be moral. Its purpose is different: to help an individual who wishes to be moral to remain such in the given concrete situation as well.[15] Seen in its purely intellectual aspect, the experiment appears to subsume a particular norm under a general law, that is, to formulate the minor premise of a practical syllogism. In order to answer his own generally rhetorical question, which, as we have seen, already contains its own answer, the Kantian merchant must decide whether the false promise, which would be very useful for him in the concrete difficult situation in which he finds himself, can become a universal law. To put it another way, what would happen if everyone were to give false promises, having decided that promises should be false? In that case, no one would believe any promises. Consequently, they would not believe the merchant’s promise. But, of course, he wants to be believed. Thus, the merchant’s false promise makes no sense, including or especially pragmatic sense, which would be based on someone believing him and taking his false promise for a genuine one. So, in this case, the maxim of the will, on being raised to a universal law (universally valid), negates itself. It is not subject to universalization and for this reason cannot receive moral approval.

The second example of an ethical thought experiment is connected with the motive of moral duty. Its task is to clarify whether a particular action could be performed on the strength of duty alone. The person asking this question must detach himself from all concrete motives by virtue of which he is interested in the given action and ask himself whether he would do it if it was of no advantage, in the broadest sense of the word, to him. And if, upon the excluding all motives except duty as respect for the moral law, the action can nonetheless take place as an action of that particular person, then it can be recognized as an action by virtue of duty. Of course, we are talking about an imagined detachment from all extramoral motives, since it is impossible to actually do this. Therefore, Kant believes, duty remains duty, even if we cannot give a single indisputable example of an action that would flow from the pure source of duty alone. This experiment has two versions. The first is a case in which the maxims of the will thanks to which an action is performed coincide with the motive of duty. This happens, for example, when a merchant who conducts his affairs honestly also makes a commercial profit. Although honest trade receives moral sanction and can be recognized as behavior out of duty, since in the given case it is associated with profit, it is hard to answer the question of whether it is performed by virtue of duty or of profit. Such behavior can be recognized only as conforming to duty. The second version concerns a situation in which the maxim of the will behind the action contradicts duty. This takes place, for example, when honest conduct in his business affairs leads to a loss for the merchant. Now if he remains honest even in the face of such an extremely unfavorable situation, then we can definitely say that he does this out of duty alone. He acts not simply in conformity with duty, but for the sake of duty. This version of the duty experiment is purer. We have a stronger ground for talking about the motive of duty when it asserts itself against inclinations.

The ideal experiment as a form of moral motivation for actions is not something discovered by philosophers. It is inherent in moral consciousness itself. In particular, it is incorporated in the Golden Rule of morality and is prescribed by this fundamental moral requirement as a mechanism of decision making. As formulated in the Gospel according to Matthew, the Golden Rule says, “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” It tells the agent to act according to the rules that he finds to be best and would make for people if he himself set the norms of interpersonal relations, that is, according to moral rules. The criterion for such rules, according to the logic and meaning of the Golden Rule, is the individual’s readiness to follow these rules himself. Here the individual makes the rules for himself, putting himself at risk as the guarantor of their truth. At the same time, the Golden Rule offers a procedure for identifying such rules: an imaginary reversal of the situation of action as a result of which the acting individual changes from the active principle, the subject of the action, into its object, the passive principle, and the object, the passive principle of the action, becomes its subject, the active principle.

In ethical writings, it is often argued against the Golden Rule that it does not bar egoistic desires and cannot be considered a formula for universality, that it does not prevent the sadist from remaining a sadist, the criminal from remaining a criminal, and so on. These arguments had already been stated in a concentrated form by Kant who certainly did not want his categorical imperative to be confused with the trivial Golden Rule. About the latter, he writes, “it can be no universal law because it contains the ground neither of duties to oneself nor of duties of love to others (for many a man would gladly consent that others should not benefit him if only he might be excused from showing them beneficence) and, finally, it does not contain the ground of duties owed to others; for a criminal would argue on this ground against the judge punishing him, and so on.”[16] As for the ground of duty to oneself, the Golden Rule after all does provide such a ground and sees it in an individual’s resolution to put the rule above himself, to subject himself to it, to sacrifice himself for the sake of the rule. By the way, this is very similar to, if not the same as, the ground of duty according to Kant, since in Kant the ground of duty is described as the readiness to act contrary to inclinations, that is, to sacrifice in the name of duty. The ground of duty to oneself is also the ground of duty in relation to others, since the Golden Rule directly requires us not to treat others worse than ourselves. No greater zeal in fulfilling his moral duty can be required of a moral individual, just as no greater integrity can be required of a doctor in fulfilling his professional obligations than to test a medicine on himself before he prescribes it for his patients. In regard to “many a man would gladly consent,” I should note that the Golden Rule does not examine the possibility of an individual being isolated from others, but the quality of the rules that link him with them. Moreover, it is not called upon to persuade a person to do good to other people, but only to clarify what is good in a concrete situation and whether the rule of an action fits his definition of the good (is that not what Kant himself is talking about when he states, “Whoever then holds morality to be anything real, and not a chimerical idea without any truth, must likewise admit the ground of it that is here assigned.”[17] Finally, the hardest point to understand is the reproach that the Golden Rule supposedly does not contain “the ground of duties owed to others” when in fact all it talks about is how individuals can mutually bind each other by a performed action. Thus it is very often called the rule of reciprocity. A criminal as a criminal can in fact present arguments against his judges, but not based on the Golden Rule, because it requires (precisely to bar the sophistry of the criminal’s moral consciousness) that the criminal, in revealing the rule of his relation to the judge, imagine himself to be in the judge’s place and the judge in his place and then reply whether he would also accept the rule to be applicable in this new situation; that is, would he want, being the judge and as a judge, to act as the criminal. The Golden Rule proposes to the criminal that he as it were play the judge. And just as an actor to whom the role of a prince is offered will try to behave like a prince on the stage, even if formerly he played only courtiers, because otherwise he would not be an actor, so our criminal, since he is honestly trying to find an ethically sanctioned norm of behavior in his interrelations with the judge, that is, to act within the logic of the Golden Rule, will strive to see the situation from the judge’s point of view. Kant himself reasons in essentially the same way, although in different terms, in the case of the individual who is tempted to get out of a difficult situation by making a false promise. In this case, the Golden Rule suggests that he mentally change places with the one to whom he must give the promise and then answer the question whether he would want to be deceived by the one whom he intends to deceive. If he thinks according to the Golden Rule, the answer undoubtedly will be no. Since he is pondering the permissibility of some action (in this case, his intention to give a promise, knowing beforehand that he cannot fulfill it), since he is aware of its moral doubtfulness (otherwise he would not be thinking about it) and, furthermore, since the man cannot wish himself evil (and the Golden Rule is based on precisely this premise), naturally he will not want to be deceived. Consequently, the Golden Rule prohibits a false promise. This is the very same logic by which the maxim of a false promise, considered as a universal law, destroys itself.

Thus, moral motivation presupposes the ideal experiment - ideal in the respect that it is carried out ideally, in thought, and in the respect that its essence consists in considering the action as a possibility in the realm of the ideal (the realm of ends, to use Kant’s words). The result is that some actions are ethically sanctioned and the consciousness of their moral value is added to all the other motives prompting them. Other actions are rejected and do not receive moral sanction; they can be performed only with the consciousness of their moral impermissibility, just as products can be put on the market without going through the quality-control department, without a certificate confirming their quality. We are not talking about singling out a special class of genuinely moral motives and actions, but about assessing the whole array of human motives and actions from the point of view of their conformity with the moral criterion. And the most that morality can do and what may be its purpose as a form of practice is to prohibit (reject) certain actions by putting its taboo on them.

The nonpurposiveness of moral action

Just as natural activity is governed by causes, human activity (actions) is governed by ends. An end is that for the sake of which the activity is undertaken. Activity is that which leads to an end, the means of realizing it. When we discuss causes and effects in natural categories, the end is the effect and the activity is the cause. In human activity, the effect precedes the cause and in this sense it follows a logic and proceeds in a direction directly opposite to natural activity. Keeping in mind precisely this difference between human and natural activity, that is, the specific nature of a human activity, its humanness, we will call it an action.

The unity of a natural process is secured by the proper order of the causeand- effect correlation when a certain cause inevitably gives rise to a certain effect and an effect cannot appear in any other way than as a consequence of the corresponding cause. All contemporary science rests on these simple truths. But how is the unity of active human existence achieved and guaranteed, how is the effect made to give rise to the cause, the means to correspond with its end? The problem is particularly difficult because of the fact that, although in action the effect precedes the cause, the action nevertheless is carried out in the natural medium, the one world in which this sequence of their correlation appears contrary to nature. So, the question we are interested in takes the following form: how can we, while acting in the natural medium and thus inevitably submitting to its iron law of cause and effect which appears as the irreversibility of time, break away from the tenacious grip of the natural process and make the effect precede the cause or reverse the direction of time? To put it figuratively, how can we learn to walk on earth upside down without breaking our neck? All of these are different ways of expressing the same question of how to make the means match the end so that it leads precisely to the end for the sake of which it was set in motion. Even more precisely, how can we secure a means-to-end correspondence that would guarantee the continuous unity of human existence in the form of purposive activity?

The usual, most common answer to this variously formulated question, an answer posited by theory and practiced by humanity, is that we must set attainable goals, that is, goals that we already have the means to achieve. And the question of whether we have such means or not is solved in the process of understanding nature: it is determined by the depth of our intellectual, anticipatory penetration into nature’s chain of cause and effect. In essence, this statement reduces the means-end type of relationship of human activity to the cause-effect type of relationship in nature. It prompts man who is standing on his head to move about by using his hands as he would use his legs if he were standing on them. The orientation toward realistic goals as the condition for matching the means to the end follows from the assumption that purposive human activity is a continuation of the natural process, an assumption that discredits and negates this activity. It discredits it, since on this interpretation human goal-positing can be inserted into the natural causal chain only as a break in it, as some kind of defect, error, or mutation. It negates human activity, since guaranteed feasibility is achieved when we move from means to end, that is, when we give up goal-positing as a special, purely human form of determination and fall back on the proper natural order of existence - from causes to effects.

The assertion that in order to achieve a goal we must set attainable (realistic) goals, which is true in itself simply because it is a tautology, nevertheless, cannot be considered an answer to the question of how to ensure that the means fits the end. Evidently, the proposed solution consists in the following: the means is guaranteed to correspond to the end when the end itself corresponds to the means, that is, when it remains that which it is according to the laws of nature - an effect - and does not claim to be a cause.

If we assume the viewpoint of goal-positing and interpret it as a breakthrough to the other side, a reversal of the natural chain of cause-and-effect relations, then we have to admit that in principle or, as they say in such cases, by definition, there cannot be a complete correspondence of the means to the end. It cannot be achieved even if we limit ourselves to realistic goals and make them as down-to-earth as possible. We cannot do so simply because of the limited nature of our cognitive and calculating capabilities, for no matter how much greater our knowledge and the number of precisely calculable steps in the game of life might be, it will be negligible in comparison to what we do not know and cannot calculate. It is all the more impossible to achieve this if we treat goal-positing seriously as a process the task of which is not to fit into the natural process but to leap out of it and, therefore, a process that cannot but set unrealistic, unattainable goals. Otherwise goal-positing, as such, makes no rational sense and is at best an empty illusion.

There is always a discrepancy between ends and means; a certain gap always remains. And this is such an important point in this type of relationship that we can say that if there is no such discrepancy, then there are no goals in the human sense of the concept. The ideal is ideal precisely because it goes beyond the bounds of the real. Therefore, action as an ends-means mode of activity is always unpredictable; it inevitably contains consequences that were not anticipated by the person performing it. Action is not only the sole possible mode of responsible existence for human beings, but also irrefutable evidence of the limited nature of such existence, a limitedness imposed on man by nature itself.

Complete, guaranteed correspondence of the means to the ends would be possible only if the selection of appropriate means depended on the ends themselves, if man’s power over the means were equivalent to his ability to set goals for himself, to put in another way, if he could create and rearrange real worlds as quickly and easily as he does so in thought and in dreams, as if he were God. Alas, man is not God and he has to solve his problems within the predetermined constraints of natural existence.

Another solution that secures the unity the ends-means relationship and even makes it possible lies in an end or ends that contain their means within them, what Aristotle called the highest good, some final, perfect, self-sufficient end that can never be reduced to the level of means. It follows from this that the correspondence of means to ends is possible only in actions that contain their end within them and for this reason do not lend themselves to an analysis into ends and means, actions that are valuable in themselves, not because of their consequences, that is, not because of the goals to which they lead. Actions of this kind are called moral. A moral action, like Spinoza’s truth, has an inner light. It is an action valuable in itself in the sense that the action itself and that for the sake of which it is performed are one and the same. If scientific knowledge and all the technologies associated with it provide the maximum possible correspondence of ends and means, including the dialectic by which ends find adequate means insofar as they are set when such means are already available, then morality is responsible for their disparity, for the inevitable gap that remains between them.

Scientific knowledge solves its problem by maximally objectifying human activity, by viewing it as included in the process of natural necessity and dependent on that process, by abstracting from the human capacity for goalpositing, and by excising any part of this capacity that goes beyond the framework of the laws of nature. Morality solves its problem in a directly opposite way. It concentrates activity in the inner, subjective I, which is called upon to secure the very capacity to set goals freely and its irreplaceable role in human life activity is connected with the fact that, in Kant’s words, it is causality from freedom.

The place of morality, whence it arises and where it rules, is in the gap between ends and means, which holds incredible possibilities and equally incredible dangers. This gap is the space of freedom and risk. Here the natural encasing breaks and the miracle of the transformation of man’s natural existence into historical development occurs. Only where man’s goals go far beyond his natural limits and thereby become unrealistic does the “adventure” of history begin and morality, the purpose of which is to be the insurance mechanism for the “adventure,” appear. Morality limits the historical space of the gap between ends and means in such a way as to prevent freedom from becoming so great that the goals lose all touch with reality and turn into an empty fantasy or a dangerous madness destructive of human nature, and the risk from becoming so small that the goals could dissolve in reality and lose their quality of forces that elevate man above the limitations of his natural existence. How does morality solve this problem?

Morality defines motives and actions that appear absolutely impermissible and thereby draws as it were a conventional circle within only which the “game” of history can be played and the artificial world of culture may be built. Morality does not tell us what must be done inside this circle or how it must be done, by what rules the “game” must be played (in that case, it would replace all other forms of culture or at least would keep them under surveillance, and, as we know, some theoretical moralists and even more practicing moralists have descended to this). It only tells us what must not be done so that the “game,” history, or culture does not come to an end. In contrast to the scientific, practically expedient viewpoint that examines human actions from the aspect of the conditions that give rise to them, their inevitable consequences, probable deviations, accompanying effects, and so on, securing thereby the correspondence of ends and means within the physical unity of the world, the moral viewpoint abstracts from the natural conditions of human actions as if nothing preceded them and nothing followed them and as if they were ends in themselves and views and accepts them as free actions. The existence of precisely such unprovable actions is proof of the precedence of ends over means, while man’s readiness to bear the risk associated with them is a guarantee that this precedence will not go beyond the limits of natural possibilities outside of which goal-positing makes no sense.

Ultimately, both scientific and moral analyses culminate in conclusions of an imperative nature. The imperative is a command to act, a sort of pass given to impulses of the will. Of course, the imperatives themselves are not the same and Kant pointed out this difference when he subdivided them into unconditional (categorical) and conditional (hypothetical). But it is precisely this division of imperatives under two different rubrics that shows that imperativeness is not the specifying trait of either one of them. The distinctive characteristic of the moral imperative is not that it is more imperative than other imperatives such as a doctor’s prescription, which is mentioned by Kant. Within the framework of their own hypotheses (teleological conditions), hypothetical imperatives are no less categorical than moral ones. The peculiarity of moral imperatives consists not in their imperative form, but in how it is substantiated. The hypothetical nature of imperatives is connected with the scientific-objective approach to activity, which, applied to each sphere of activity, solves the problem of matching the means to the ends as closely as possible. The categorical nature of imperatives is connected with the need to fill the vacuum that results from the fact that this match can never be maximal (complete). These two classes of imperatives appear within the framework of different approaches and can be reduced to them. In one case, we are talking about a rational-pragmatic approach aimed at bringing the goals themselves down to earth (formulating them in the light of the available means of their realization) and selecting the means necessary to accomplish them. In the other case, we are talking about a moral approach aimed at raising the goals without taking anything else into account and dealing with actions that are means to the same degree that they are ends. While the former approach keeps us in the sphere of the real world, deals with facts, uses descriptive language, and consistently prefers the indicative mood, the latter translates actions into the sphere of the ideal, deals with desires, and consistently prefers the subjunctive mood.

From the subjunctive to the imperative mood

In moral language ethicists notice mostly statements with the copulas “is” and “ought,” which relate morality in one case to science and in the other to law, but they do not pay enough attention to the connective “as if ” [kak esli by] which indicates the subjunctive mood and is more important than the other two for understanding the specific nature of morality. The fundamental judgment on this question, which, in my opinion, is valuable and capable of changing the direction of ethical research (although, unfortunately, this has not yet happened) just as radically as Hume’s famous comment did in his day and which was (as Hume’s comment was for Hume) not a key element of the author’s own theory, but just one of the proofs that the position he was criticizing (metaphysical ethics in this case) is wrong can be found in G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica: “We use the same words, when we assert an ethical preposition about a subject that is actually real, and when we assert it about a subject considered as merely possible. In this ambiguity of language we have, then, a possible source of error with regard to the bearing of truths that assert reality upon truths that assert goodness.”[18]

Moral judgments, which are connected with moral duty such that the one unquestionably implies the other (to say “this is good” is equivalent to saying “do this,” and vice versa, to say “do this” is equivalent to the statement “this is good”) and, therefore, are the sole possible basis of duty, are expressed in ordinary language in the indicative mood with the copula “is” just like factual judgments. But they are definitely not factual judgments. For example, when someone says about my action, “this is bad, base,” he is not saying anything about the content of the action. Even upon the most careful analysis no content of baseness can be found in the action, the more so as it may have no content at all (for example, when an action consists in something not being done) or it may have a content that might be judged in a directly opposite way in some other situation or by some other person. The chosen form of expression does not fit its essence. In order to justify this form we could propose that in one’s judgment one is simply expressing (describing, stating) one’s opinion or feelings (“I think that this is bad,” “I feel that this is bad”). As we know, there have been philosophers and even schools that favored such an interpretation. However, it is perfectly obvious that a moral judgment is something completely different, stronger, and more important than an opinion or feeling. To say “I think that you are mistaken” (you have chosen the wrong profession, for example) or “I do not like something” (your jokes, for example) is to say something entirely different from “you acted basely” (you betrayed a friend, for example). In the first two cases, what is said really does concern the speaker’s opinion and feelings. The third statement can by no means be categorized as subjective; it weighs the action on scales that separate good and evil with the same objectivity as the truth is separated from a lie. When someone says that you acted basely, what is meant in this case can be expressed as follows: you acted in a way in which (and now come the subjunctive clauses) “one would not act under any circumstances,” “anyone who acts morally would not act,” or “I would never act in your place,” and so on. Moral judgment is always a kind of experiment when that which is being judged is mentally weighed on the ideal scales of morality. To give a moral evaluation of something means to think about it as something that could take place in an ideal realm. Can this be accepted as something that could take place in an ideal world (according to the laws of morality as I myself would have done, if nothing stood in my way)? That is the structure of moral judgment. It coincides with the subjunctive mood and requires an appropriate linguistic form of expression.

The inadequate linguistic form of judgments that is predominant in moral practice is explained, on the whole, by the conviction (assumption), which is rooted in religion and philosophical idealism, that an ideal, morally perfect world possesses being, has a special, nonempirical existence (as a transcendent realm, a realm of thought, etc.). The relation to that world that is expressed in moral judgments is fixed in sentences with the copula “is” as if these were statements of fact. The indicative mood of moral judgment is predominant in ordinary language, but it is not the only one. There are also vivid and quite revealing examples of the subjunctive mood in the language of moral judgment. The most characteristic of these is the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule - do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you - comes from the world of ideal actions in the form in which it is stated by someone who faces the question of whether he has a moral right to do an action he is considering. This is a world in which the only actions performed are those to which the individual performing them gives his consent and none of which can be opposed to his will as a good will and thus to the good will in general.

It is important to emphasize that when the Golden Rule says “as you would wish” it is talking about the good will, the individual’s ideal aspirations, not his personal feelings that prompt him to a given action. This is confirmed by the words defining the object of desire: “them to do unto you.” There are formulations of the Golden Rule (for example, the Russian saying, “Don’t do what you dislike in others”) that oblige an individual to proceed from norms that he proposes to others without trying them back on himself, that is, norms that he finds best and would give to the world if it were up to him to set such norms. At the same time, the Golden Rule - and this is its key point - solves the problem of the moral examination of the situation in which the individual agent finds himself. It formulates a mechanism for such an examination, suggesting that the action be considered as a possible action in an ideal world in order to determine whether it fits under the definition of the good will, under the principle by which, from the agent’s point of view, people should be guided in their interrelations. What it is talking about is the thought experiment that I already discussed in which the acting individual abstracts from the fact that he is the author of the action thereby excluding from consideration his particular feelings that prompt the action and putting himself in the place of the person who will bear the weight of the action’s objective consequences. Every action pursues some goal. The pragmatic view obliges us to think an action through (calculate) so that it fits its goal as closely as possible. The Golden Rule proposes to tear the action out of the ends-means chain and to look at it on its own as if it were an end and a means simultaneously and this is achieved by interchanging the active and passive parties to the action so that an action that is acceptable as an end is tested in regard to whether it can also be acceptable as a means. Only after such an ideal testing of an action and only if it passes the test does the subjunctive mood change to the imperative and the action becomes an obligation through the categorical “do.”

From the example of the Golden Rule, we can see that it is not the imperative modality of the action but the subjunctive modality of the ground of its moral quality that is specific to moral language. This is all the more true as the action is an obligation even before it comes before the court of morality; that is, it has its own sufficient reasons for being done even apart from morality. And the task of the moral court is only to answer the question whether an action that is entirely ready to be performed can also receive a moral sanction? The court of morality is a court where the judge and the judged easily change places, because they are represented by the same person, where one judges oneself. And this court is held only in the ideal sphere (in thought, in the soul) and in the subjunctive form.

This is particularly clear if we compare the Golden Rule to other behavioral imperatives preceding and accompanying it: taboos, the law of talion, religious commandments, and legal norms. None of these imperatives is inferior to the Golden Rule in the strength of its categoricalness, if I may put it this way; each of them surpasses it according to this criterion. Taboos and the law of talion are so categorical that their observance and nonobservance coincide exactly with the line separating life and death. J. Frazer describes cases in which people who violated a taboo died from the subsequent profound psychophysiological trauma. It is also widely known that those who bear the obligation of blood vengeance set aside all other plans and live only to fulfill this obligation. A religious commandment is, by definition, so categorical that nothing can be compared to it. As we know from the Old Testament, God, having given his commandments, said that He offers life, which is equivalent to obeying them, and death, which is equivalent to turning away from them (Deut. 30:15), and that is exactly how true believers take them as it is evident from the numerous historical facts, past and present, of people dying for their faith. Nothing need be said about the categorical nature of legal norms, unless, of course, doing violence to the concepts, we try to pass off the punishment that guarantees their categoricalness as a hypothetical condition. In short, like its categorical nature, imperativeness is what makes the Golden Rule similar to these other ways of controlling behavior, for it also unequivocally demands “act” and “do.” What distinguishes it from them in the most obvious and radical way is the nature of the argumentation, the mode of justification, which constitutes a test for autonomy. To someone pondering whether his action is morally permissible the Golden Rule proposes that he answer the question, “is the norm of this action one that I would certainly establish myself, if it were my undivided, unlimited right to establish such norms?” Or, to put it another way, “would I leave this norm in place in an ideal world of ideal people, if I were to create such a world?”

However strange it may seem at first glance, the great distinction of comprehending the subjunctive mood of morality and rectifying moral language belongs to Kant.[19] Taking as his starting point evident ordinary moral knowledge contained in moral language, which amounts to the fact that moral necessity is of an absolute nature and remaining within the bounds of that knowledge, Kant came to conclusions that essentially destroyed the traditional image of moral absolutism and were openly opposed to the moral tyranny stemming from it. This can be proved sufficiently by referring to two circumstances that are well known, but nevertheless, as far as I know, have never been considered from this perspective. First of all, Kant saturated ethical reasoning with the subjunctive mood to such a degree that it differs, according to this criterion, from epistemological reasoning in an obvious way. I am talking not simply about the frequent use of the corresponding grammatical expression, the famous Kantian “als ob” (as if) in his ethical texts, although, of course, that is part of it. Subjunctiveness is an essential element of the very formula of the categorical imperative and Kant emphasizes and singles this out repeatedly. The “you can will” in the categorical imperative is equivalent to “as if you willed.” Having given his first and basic formula of the categorical imperative (“act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”), two sentence later he explains: “act as if . . . ” and a little further on, “Act only in accordance with that maxim that could serve as a universal law.” In connection with the concepts of the intelligible world and the kingdom of ends, membership in which makes the categorical imperative possible, there follows the explanation, “if I were only such a member, then all my actions would always be ...”[20]

Second, Kant identifies moral absolutism with autonomy of the will, which consists in the fact that the will does not recognize any higher law itself except its own. As Kant emphasizes, the categorical imperative “prescribes neither more nor less than this very autonomy.”[21] Accordingly, “ethical legislation ... is the kind of legislation that cannot be external”[22] and this makes it fundamentally different from juridical law. It is not a set of obligations that distinguishes morality from law, but the way in which they are binding. “In ethics the law is conceived as a law of thy own will, not of a will in general, which might be that of others and in that case we would have judicial duty.”[23] The absolute, categorical nature of morality is a purely internal, spiritual act, which concerns only the maxim of action, not the action itself. Therefore, Kant calls the obligatoriness of ethical duty duty in the broad, that is, relative sense of the word, in contrast to duty proper or duty in the narrow sense of the word, which is legal duty. The duty of virtue is an imperfect duty precisely because it concerns one’s maxim and is not univocal, as the duty of law is. Absoluteness, therefore, is the inner space of the individual, the way in which person and personality are linked in him. It acquires controlling force as his relationship to himself, but not to other individuals, or rather, as his relationship to others established exclusively through his relationship to himself. Kant not only drove morality inside, believing that the absolute good is possible only as the good will, he also made it clear that this, so to say, inner duty is not a perfect duty or duty in the narrow sense, that is, it does not have the univocal certainty that is characteristic of the imperative of law, since “it is not possible for man to see so far into the depth of his own heart that he could ever be thoroughly certain of the purity of his moral purpose and the sincerity of his mind even in one single action, although he has no doubt about the legality of it.”[24]

Thus, the subjunctive mood means that morality is, to put it figuratively, a sort of anchor of freedom, an ideal reference point that guides an individual in identifying himself as a person and becoming aware of his capacity for responsible behavior. This is a form of self-commitment and the categorical imperativeness of morality means nothing else. Without self-commitment, obligation would be impossible. Without moral duty we could not talk about duty in its concrete versions (professional, civic, family, etc.). Moral obligation (if we use this concept, which is similar, but not identical with the concept of duty)25 is an obligation that binds even and primarily and best when there are no other obligations. It is the very capacity to have obligations, to act not simply according to the law, but on the basis of the idea of law, that is, to act responsibly. The imperative form of morality does not express the specific nature of moral obligations proper. It is explained as the moral basis of obligatory behavior.

Within the framework of Kant’s theory, the imperativeness of morality is connected with the fact that law is its external supplement. The realm of morality consists of maxims of the will; the realm of law, of actions. Here law appears as applied ethics. It becomes that thanks to the fact that ethics delegates its own categorical authority to law. To express this thought in another way, we can say that ethics formulates the moral law so as to ground and justify the categorical imperativeness of law. The legal imperative is more categorical than a religious commandment or a customary norm. Strictly speaking, it is the only categorical imperative in the proper sense of the word. For law has no interest in the individual other than his accountability, his capability of being a person who performs actions, and it has no interest in action other than that it was done by some person. Law links the individual and the action only in one purely formal way, as abstract elements of a lawful relationship, and treats them as nothing more than a cause on the one hand and an action on the other. In short, the imperative form of morality is explained and justified as the validation of law which occupies the empty place of applied ethics. (Actually, it would be more correct to speak not of an “empty,” but of a “freed” place, considering that formerly, within the framework of Aristotelian ethics and the social practice summarized by it, politics figured as applied ethics.)

The task of morality (moral self-commitment) is not only to make responsible behavior possible, “to explain the capacity to obligate others.”26 Morality cannot be limited to explanation and ideal (thought) experimentation; in that case it would be a type of epistemology. Moral thinking is valuable only as moral action and thinking in general becomes moral only when it assumes self-obligating significance. The task of morality consists also and even primarily in serving as a limit, a restriction of the external sphere of obligation, restraining it from self-destructive extremes. Reduced to the form of maxims and to the good will merely, morality is unable to accomplishing this task. Actions can be restricted only by actions. We are facing a most difficult question for ethical theory: how is a moral action possible?

Why only prohibitions can be moral absolutes

Subjunctive clauses of the type that are appropriate for moral judgment (“it would be good”) talk of what is possible, hypothetical, conceivable and, at the same time, of what in fact does not exist. They presuppose a negative indicative sentence (when it is asserted, for example, that “you would lose” or “you would feel badly,” it is understood that you have not actually lost or do not actually feel badly).[27] If moral obligation itself can be neither substantiated nor even expressed other than in the subjunctive mood, then this implies that its factual meaning, which can be transmitted as a description of reality in an indicative clause, consists of a negation. Morality as a special (unreal) way of obligating only makes possible all the real obligations and is responsible precisely and solely for their possibility, but it determines the content of the possibility itself by pointing out that which contradicts it. Moral obligation is not only a condition for the possibility of real obligations, but also an actual restriction of them. Its reality (factuality, objectness) is negative. Morality does not talk about what is to be done (astronomy, biology, nutritional science, jurisprudence, political science, cosmetology, and many other forms of knowledge and practice talk about and teach people what is to be done), but about what is not to be done. According to the widely held opinion cultivated by ethics, morality is one of the highest manifestations of the free-historical life of man. But there is at least as much reason to suppose that it is also the lower threshold from which man’s free-historical life only begins. One of the constant and key objectives of ethics has been to mark these boundaries unambiguously in real terms.

There are theoretical attempts to attribute great significance to the difference between moral prohibition and moral permission, particularly to the difference between negative and positive formulations of the Golden Rule of morality. In fact, the difference is not as important as it seems at first glance. Moral permission (encouragement) for an action actually means nothing more than that it is not prohibited, since the point of morality in the structure of motivation is only to look at the motives of an action (to judge them) in the final stage, the stage of decision, when they have already been formed and are ready to be converted into action, and to look at them in a very simple, clear, and definite way that is encapsulated in only two words - “yes” or “no.” Since the grounds for “yes,” for a positive response in relation to the action, are already at hand and given in the concrete motives connected with the content of the action and prompting it, the real task of morality is, at least in some cases, to say “no” in spite of everything. Turning once again to Kant, it is worth noting that although the categorical imperative is an affirmative judgment from a formal-linguistic point of view, its real overriding sense, which is repeatedly emphasized by the author himself, consists in restricting the maxims with the condition of universal validity. In ethics, “maxims are regarded as those subjective principles that are merely fit for universal legislation and this is only a negative principle (not to contradict a law in general).” 28 The positive formulation (“act so ... ”), like the real meaning of a moral mark of approval accompanying concrete actions, only indicates that an action has passed the test of whether, so to say, the dose of poison contained in it is lethal and the formulation is justified as a requirement to submit all actions to such a test and a call to constant moral vigilance.

Of course, the positive and negative descriptions of any subject are usually interrelated in such a way that one turns into the other (according to Spinoza, any definition is a restriction). However, the case of moral sanction is a special one, since here negation is the sole positive affirmation. The moral approval of actions, as a result of which they can be considered moral, says absolutely nothing about the actions themselves or their motives except that they are not morally prohibited. We can say that in the case of morality negative definitions are so predominant over positive ones that it is they that should be recognized as adequate to the very nature of this phenomenon. This is analogous to the fact that we can say nothing about what we do not know except that it is unknown and designate it with the conventional symbol for such cases “X.” Of course, when it is said of motives that they are not morally prohibited, they are given some kind of moral characteristic. While admitting this, we should add, however, that the moral assessment of motives is extremely general and draws absolutely no internal distinction between them. It lumps together all morally approved (not prohibited) actions. There is probably a difference between “X” in sociology and “X” in astronomy, but insofar as they are both designated as “X” they are identical. The actions of a millionaire who drives a beggar from the sidewalk and a passerby who gives him change are different in many respects, but insofar as (if) they are not morally prohibited, from an ethical point of view there is no difference between them. When something more than the absence of moral prohibition is seen in the moral sanction of a particular action, then the door to moralizing demagoguery, to the idea and claim that within the circle outlined by moral prohibitions certain people and actions are more moral than others, is flung wide open. Then the person who gives the beggar some change has a reason and temptation to believe that he is better than the millionaire who drives the beggar away.

Among the arguments that explain why moral requirements take on the active form of concrete actions only as prohibitions, the following three, in my opinion, are the most significant.

First of all, on the strength of its ideal nature or, what is the same thing, its secondary controlling function, the moral motive in itself cannot become the maxim of an action, cannot give rise to an action; it can only prevent an action from being carried out. In the complex structure of behavior, there is only one point at which morality can become a ruling, effective force and that is the point of transition from motive to action. The power of morality lies only in this, that it can prohibit this transition. Any positive action, no matter what nobleness or even heroism it may demand of the agent, contains within it an element of moral doubt in the sense that attendant (extramoral) subjective grounds for the action can always be found. The only action that can be morally pure is one that has not been done, an action that a person has rejected, in spite of the pressure of internal and external circumstances.

Second, even if we assume that positive actions the subjective principle of which is the moral motive exclusively are possible, they cannot become universally valid, since an action is always associated with particular special circumstances. Universal validity (and, along with freedom, this is an indispensable characteristic of moral autonomy) can acquire object-oriented and behavioral specificity only in negative action.[29] It is inconceivable that everyone does the same thing (especially considering the changing, constantly increasing number of people). But the opposite is entirely plausible: all people can be united in not doing something that they could and would like to do. As history shows, positive forms of moral universally valid behavior inevitably assumed cultic status, thereby ceasing (at least partly) to be the responsibility of the individual. Moreover, the space of moral-cultic behavior, precisely because cultic behavior is closed in on something specific, singular, and particular (a person, place, thing, etc.), has always turned out to be narrower than mankind as a whole. Alas, all of mankind cannot worship one, albeit an abstract, god.

Third, it is not only the lower (starting) bound of human space that creates only the possibility of free development, but also its upper bound, which coincides with the endless possibilities of human perfection that can be drawn only in terms of negation. The ideal trajectory of morality is realized in man’s recognition of his imperfection (his incompatibility with the ideal, his distance from the ideal), an awareness that only grows deeper, sharper, and more important in the process of perfection and, paradoxically, serves as clear indicator of progress. Man’s real morality does not consist in where he is, farther from or closer to the ideal, for however close to it he may be, the distance from him to the ideal understood as infinite perfectibility is infinite. It consists only in traveling the narrow path of moral perfectibility, going faster and more boldly, falling, losing one’s way, getting up again and again, and returning to the narrow path just as the prodigal son returned to his father’s house in the well-known Gospel parable.

Prohibitions were and are the main form of moral demands. The code of Moses with its “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal,” and so on illustrates and demonstrates this. To this day it is the basis of the moral life of the cultural worlds of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And there are other examples. The ethical core of Buddha’s life teaching is ahimsa (nonharming, nonviolence). To a student’s question as to whether there was one rule that could guide him throughout life Confucius answered, “Do not do unto others what you do not wish them to do unto you.” Prohibitions are not only the primary, predominant form of moral life, they are also its most effective form. Prohibited actions are easier to identify and harder to cover up with the sophistry of moral hypocrisy than positive actions. A Benedictine monk would probably have an easier time answering whether he observes the rule “do not commit adultery” than making sure that he labors in the sweat of his brow.

In the history of culture, morality has also appeared in the form of positive prescriptions and, of course, they also have a measure of efficacy. They can be divided into two broad classes - general-local and general-general.

General-local requirements are those that give some local actions and forms of behavior a morally obligatory sense. They include, for example, the Confucian three-year mourning period for deceased parents, the Muslim obligatory prayers five times a day, puritanical thrift, communist work in the interest of the working class, national patriotism, and so on. In all of these cases, morality is confined to concrete forms of activity that are most important in a particular community or a certain sphere of activity. For example, patriotism is of decisive importance for the existence of independent nation-states, therefore, to stimulate patriotic behavior and reinforce it as much as possible patriotism is raised to the level of moral duty. That is the mechanism of all general-local standards: it consists in conferring absolute status on particular relative norms. Hence the internal tension in generallocal standards: being a kind of rallying point, they are at the same time a source of dissension. In uniting some people, they oppose these people to all those who are not covered by the relevant local standard. What to a bourgeois is a sign of high moral character to an aristocrat is a brand of moral baseness. What is holy for one state turns out to be indifferent or even worthy of contempt for another. What causes moral trepidation or horror in one era becomes commonplace in another. At one time, professional work was considered a not very prestigious occupation. Now it has become the main form of one’s social self-assertion. Changes in customs of this sort are well known. In our dynamic time, they happen (sometimes more than once) in the lifetime of a generation. But if the same object can receive opposed moral appraisals, then it follows that moral appraisal itself does not depend on the content of the object. In general-local moral requirements, the moral coincides with the general (the idea of universal validity, absoluteness), while the local (i.e., the content of the object) proves to be external and contingent in relation to the general. The actions corresponding to such requirements go hand-in-hand with morality as if in union with it and contain a trait that allows us to consider them moral, but in themselves they are not moral.

General–general positive moral standards are either different versions of the requirement to be moral (such as the requirements to love people, do good, and be humane), or they affirm moral autonomy and thus universality itself as a criterion of morality. In the former case, moral demands do not presuppose concrete, strictly delineated actions and cannot be considered instructions as to how to act; at best they can be a general principle of action. Thus, the demand to strive for good or to do good is not the conclusion of a practical syllogism, although outwardly it claims to be that; rather, it repeats the general premise without mediating it with a minor, particular premise and is a tautological assertion, for the good by definition is that for which man strives, that which he wants to do. In the latter case as well, no concrete actions are prescribed, but only a condition that limits them. That condition is universality (universal validity) in the form in which it is assigned by the acting individual himself. The Golden Rule in its positive formulation is a typical example of a universal-universal standard.

A moral act (action), as an act that is performed on the strength of moral motivation alone and for all the consequences of which, even the most remote ones, its author is fully responsible, is possible only in the negative version. A negative act can be formulated as “I want to, but cannot.” What is essential here is not that it cannot be done. The mechanism blocking the desire does not have a specifically moral origin. It is part of any calculating ability that is realized in a chain of actions, one following another, and as such is found also in animals. Without the ability to limit oneself, no purposeful action is possible. Morality encounters action at the very moment when it goes through the final weighing of all the pros and cons, when it could still be stopped, speaking abstractly, for also purely pragmatic motives that are no less external and alien to the given action than moral motives. What is essential in the moral choice is that this action cannot be done. Thus the basic burden connected with moral choice falls on determining whether a given action is one that cannot be performed under any circumstances. This involves the intellectual analysis of action from the point of view of its acceptability according to the moral criterion. In this case, the operation of universalization is decisive: to establish that the action cannot be universalized and could not be performed for moral reasons is to decide that it is impermissible.

A positive moral action follows a different formula: “I do not want to, but I must.” Here the moral decision is already given before the action, and the task is to make it the only positive reason for the action. To do so we must determine whether this can be considered the kind of action that is prompted by nothing but a moral motive, an action for which men not only lack any inclination but to which their inclinations are opposed. The analysis that is presupposed here is purely psychological and for that reason hopeless. The question - would an individual want to perform some action if he had no motive for it other than moral ones and if all other motives were against it - has no answer, if only because a moral choice in and of itself is associated with a special kind of emotional experience (even Kant talked of moral feeling) which, as we already noted, can be identified at best in hindsight. The imperative form (must) in which a positive action is prescribed remains its sole ground. To use moral terms, the ground is perhaps more categorical, but it does not become autonomous. By contrast, in a negative action, as we saw above, the imperative form is only a formulation of the individual’s autonomous decision.

In short, in the case of a morally negative action, the analysis proceeds from the action itself and talks about subsuming the particular under the general. In the case of a morally positive action, the analysis proceeds from principle and law and talks about deriving the particular from the general or, more precisely, about whether the general can exist as the particular, that is, can it be particular in itself? To the extent that the first procedure is justified from the logical, ontological, and psychological perspectives, to that extent the second is hopeless. In fact, we can pose and try to answer the question, for example, of whether a mushroom found in the woods is edible and it will be quite clear why people are interested in this question and are constantly answering it. But it would be completely senseless and futile to ask, can what is edible exist in and of itself as this mushroom in which we are interested? And it is absolutely incomprehensible how, in general, a person could be confronted by and concerned about such a question.

A wise man can be a contemplative thinker and a hermit but a good man cannot. The good is active and shows itself in the relations between people. Therefore, in order to be good a person must be active and needs other people. It is only in relation to them that he can reveal his virtue. That in the public mind good is associated with acts of mercy is no coincidence. At the same time, philosophers, moralists, and ordinary people all agree that good deeds must be done very quietly: they must not be put on display and one should not even acknowledge them to oneself. Jesus taught that they should be done secretly, so that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. This paradox - that the good should be simultaneously active and concealed - is resolved in the view on moral prohibitions and negative actions I have proposed.[30] An action that is prohibited is an action that does not occur. It is an action, for it is consciously, intentionally, because of a prohibition, not done and it differs from the practically infinite number of other undone potential actions of an individual in that it is distinguished and actualized as an action, but precisely as an action that must not or should not be done. We can say that it is done as an undone action, that its positive nature consists in negation and here we are dealing with the individual’s active relation to other people. As an action that does not occur, it is, of course, concealed from onlookers. At the same time, in its moral significance the action is concealed even from its author himself in the sense that it does not give him any reason for self-flattery. An action that is morally prohibited and does not occur for that reason is an unworthy action (that is why it was prohibited) and, following the logic of moral consciousness, the logic of the good, a person cannot be proud of not doing something bad for, although the fact that he did not do it clearly speaks in his favor, the very fact that he was tempted to do it is a mark against him.

* * *

Thus, the analysis of the specific nature of morality leads us to the following clarifications: (a) morality is distinguished from other normative-judgment systems by the subjunctive mood; (b) moral motives are not of the same order as all other content-loaded motives, but lie behind the latter and function as the final controlling authority in respect to them; (c) the absolute (unconditional) nature of morality acquires object-oriented reality in the form of a prohibition, a restriction of activity, a negative action. In sum, these traits make it possible to concretize the concept of morality and to decode it as the space of free or, what is the same thing, individually responsible behavior. As I understand it, this is behavior of which the agent is not only the proximate, but also the sole and ultimate cause and, therefore, for which he is irreversibly and fully responsible but only to himself. It is the kind of behavior with which the acting individual identifies himself as a person.

Notes

1. D. Ium [Hume], Sochineniia v 2 t. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1966), vol. 1, p. 618.

2. A. Shopengauer [Schopenhauer], “Ob osnove morali,” in Svoboda voli i nravstvennost’ (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), p. 138.

3. The corresponding Greek term was translated into Latin by Cicero as officium, which became the generally used designation for moral duty in Latin-language philosophy until philosophy changed over to national languages, each of which had its own words and traditions connected with this phenomenon. Before the Stoics, ancient authors expressed the idea of the ought by the word deon (literally, forced binding) which in ordinary language meant state and higher obligations, right and timely actions. According to historians of philosophy, the word was first used in its proper moral meaning in two statements by Democritus (frs. 117, 135). It is also found, though not very often, in the texts of Plato (Phaedo, 99c, Republic, 336d) and Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a, 1121b, 1123a). The Stoics introduced a new term, katekon, to mean duty.

4. However, this is already present in Moses’s tenth commandment, which says, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” in contrast to the seventh, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

5. Dzh. Mur [G.E. Moore], Priroda moral’noi filosofii, trans. L.V. Konovalova (Moscow: Respublika, 1999), p. 334.

6. See Shopengauer, “Ob osnove morali,” p. 202.

7. I. Kant, Osnovy metafiziki nravov, in Sochineniia v 6 t. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1965), vol. 4 (1), p. 308.

8. Ibid., p. 236.

9. Ibid., p. 411.

10. Ibid., p. 274.

11. Ibid., p. 414.

12. I. Kant, Kritika prakticheskogo razuma, in Sochineniia v 6 t. vol. 4 (1), p. 356.

13. The term “examination” may bring up associations with scientific, technical, and other reviews conducted by specialists. It is in precisely this sense that the literature often speaks of ethical examination. It is perceived as one of the social functions of moral theoreticians. In our case, examination is understood as something essentially different; namely, a procedure carried out by the decision maker for revealing the moral quality of a decision. The agent, of course, may make use of knowledge and advice derived from ethics, but, nevertheless, cannot shift responsibility to any specialist, not even to Aristotle or Kant.

14. See Kant, Osnovy metafiziki nravstvennosti, pp. 232–33, 262.

15. The description of a situation in which the moral motivation of an individual’s behavior becomes a reflexive act for himself is a separate question that is also exceptionally important for ethical theory and for defining the concept of morality. Kant himself characterized it as a situation of equivocal incentives. I shall leave this subject out of our discussion, restricting myself to the statement that such situations do exist. 16. Kant, Osnovy metafiziki nravstvennosti, pp. 271.

17. Ibid., p. 289.

18. Mur, Priroda moral’noi filosofii, p. 135.

19. Kant, of course, was not the first to appeal to the subjunctive modality and use the corresponding grammatical form in articulating what is distinctive about morality. Perhaps we should take a closer look at the classical texts on ethics from this perspective. Let me point out just two examples. In Nicomachean Ethics (1151a), Aristotle writes, “For actions, the principle is the final cause, as assumptions are in mathematics.” As we know, an assumption is a typical case of subjunctive modality. Cicero (see On Duties, III, 37) uses the subjunctive form in describing the thought experiment as a condition for identifying moral actions: “Even if we could conceal something from all the gods and people, we must not permit cupidity, injustice, arbitrariness, or immoderation in any action.”

20. Kant, Osnovy metafiziki nravstvennosti, pp. 260–61, 276, 299. Everywhere that the subjunctive is used in the quoted Russian translation, this corresponds to the linguistic form of the German original. But the opposite is not always true, unfortunately. In some cases, the German subjunctive drops out or is implicit in the Russian translation, as it is, for example, at the end of the first section (ibid., p. 238), where the corresponding formula is introduced for the first time, even before it is called the categorical imperative (in Kant: “Ich soll niemals anders verfahren als so, daβ ich auch wollen könne meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden,” and in translation: “I must always act only in such a way as to be able to will the transformation of my maxim into universal law”). In A.K. Sudakov’s new translation, this inaccuracy is corrected: “I must never act in any other way except according to the maxim that I could also wish to become a universal law” (Kant, Sochineniia v 4-kh tomakh na nemetskom i russkom iazykakh [Moscow: Moskovskii filosofskii fond, 1997], vol. 3, p. 85).

21. Kant, Metafizika nravstvennosti, in Sochineniia v 6 t., vol. 4 (2), p. 284.

22. Ibid., p. 128.

23. Ibid., p. 323.

24. Ibid., p. 327.

25. The concept of obligation talks about what (what specific action) is done, while the concept of duty talks about why it is done. To serve the fatherland or take care of one’s children is an obligation; to do so for moral reasons is a duty. 26. Ibid., p. 149.

27. See “Der Konjunktiv,” in Duden (Dudenverlag, 1995), vol. 4, §280, 281, pp. 157–58.

28. Kant, Metafizika nravstvennosti, p. 323.

29. A negative action is not the same as inaction. Without going into the question in detail, let me point out two obvious differences. Inaction can be a form of passive behavior (the result of confusion, doubt, indifference, etc.), while a negative action is a conscious, active rejection of that which is not done. Inaction is most often understood as a kind of moral ruse, a mitigated version of immoral behavior, when an individual does not do what, by his own moral criteria, he should do. A negative action is an action that is not done for the sole reason that it is morally unacceptable. Not to do what should be done and not to do what should not be done precisely because it should not be done are different types of inaction. 30. H. Arendt points out the relationship between this paradox and the negative nature of moral activity. “Although the manifestations of the good take place in the same world in which all other activities take place and remain dependent on its thisworldliness, the relation of the active good to the world is essentially negative in nature; namely, insofar as we are talking about an activity, it is an actively negative relation. Avoiding the world and hiding in it from its inhabitants, it rejects the space that the world has to offer people, primarily the space of world publicity in which everything is visible and audible” (Kh Arendt, Vita activa ili o deiatel’noi zhizni, trans. V.V. Bibikhin [St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2000], p. 100).