The moral laws are those rules of conduct which we feel ourselves under obligation to obey. Briefly put, the moral law is the code of duties. In this general formal definition all moralists would agree, I think. It is in regard to the source, end, scope, and content of the code of duties that the schools differ. According to the Hebraic or the theological conception of morality, these norms of conduct are laid upon man by the divine lawgiver. In this case the moral law is of precisely the same type as civil law. The three elements of this type are all present, — the prescribed uniformity of conduct, the legislative will, and the subject will. Or if with Hobbes we regard the state, or — with certain recent writers — society or humanity the source of the law, we find the same essential agreement with the jural form of the concept.
But, as Kant has so well shown, any command which is put upon us by an external will can have of itself only the force of legality. It acquires the force of morality, obedience to it becomes a duty and not merely a matter of prudence, only as we bind it upon ourselves and it is brought by self under the feeling of obligation. No imperatives of parents, the state, or even of divine revelation, could command anything but a prudential, legal conformity, unless at the same time they appealed to the inner sense of duty. Such externally imposed imperatives may well be the ratio cognoscendi, but never of themselves the ratio essendi, of the moral law. "It is the very essence of moral duty to be imposed by a man upon himself . . . what we primarily understand by 'law' is some sort of command given by a superior in power to one whom he is able to punish for disobedience; whereas it is the essence of moral 'law' that it is a rule which a man imposes on himself, and from another motive than the fear of punishment, . . . the spirit of man sets before him the ideal of a perfect life, and pronounces obedience to the positive law to be necessary to its realization."[1] Thus in morality the legislative will is one with the subject will. But the concept of law still remains of the same general type. We still have the three elements of law as in jurisprudence.
- ↑ T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 354.
