The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Laciani - La legge morale
The moral law differs from natural law, the latter consisting only of the constant mode of occurrence of observed phenomena, whereas the moral law includes the notion of a command and implies a valuation. The subject may be considered historically and theoretically. In ancient times the moral law was conceived as an external command to be blindly obeyed. To the Greek the source of the command was nature, to the mediæval Christian it was God. Modern thought finds the source of morality in human reason. Kant's system of ethics make morality only formal and gives no account of the psychological origin of the notion of goodness. Mill derives moral acts from the original tendency of man to actions which promote his own pleasure. Actions that have this result may in time acquire value for their own sake, which leads to the idea that such actions ought to be done. Hence the idea of duty appears. Spencer claims that making pleasure the end of action does not signify that such pleasure must be directly sought. Moral actions, however, do produce happiness in the agent. Duty, which grows out of the feeling of coercion, will in time give way to the consciousness of the pleasurableness of right conduct. The author's own view is that the primitive man had the tendency to perform acts, not only for his own advantage, but for that of others. Reflection on the results of such acts transformed the habit into a duty. Duties are of two sorts, — negative, the respecting of the rights of others, and positive, the performing of beneficent acts; the former may originate in external sanctions, but the latter have only internal sanctions, and these are developed by civilization and moral culture. The general consensus of approval of right acts is what renders the principles on which they rest objective and universal and transforms them into moral laws. This is the pure, or a priori, element in morality; it is the result not of the experience of the individual but of that of many generations. The end of moral action is not, as Kant taught, the will alone, nor, as Aristotle believed, happiness alone, but the union of both in the intellectual and moral improvement of society. Morality seeks to realize the ideal which we ourselves have formed; and in obeying the moral law we are following the principles of our own reason.