Morality, or Schopenhauer

Modern science dethroned philosophy from answering the reality question; Enlightenment dethroned it from answering the meaning question. For Enlightenment declared the meaning question to exceed the powers of our reason. Morality or the norms of our behavior seemed to be left as the genuine subject of philosophy. Yet what is left of morality if we lack free will that makes us responsible? We must still take account of the empirical fact that we do recognize principles that people agree are moral. Such is the double imperative, pointed to by Schopenhauer, that we should not harm anyone and help everyone, as far as we can. We can also show that some animals obey similar moral norms. Such demonstrations, though, belong to empirical science. There is still the non-empirical question of why we should go on obeying principles that we seem to have inherited from our animal ancestors. When we look for norms to justify obeying morality, we must distinguish, I argue, between moral and metaphysical norms, or morality and practical metaphysics. For if the grounds for obeying moral norms are again moral norms, we can repeat the question for the reasons to obey moral norms. Unlike moral norms, metaphysical norms refer to ideas of the meaning of the world. Though moral norms can be justified only by metaphysical ones, metaphysical norms cannot override moral ones. Moral norms invalidate metaphysical norms that contradict them because if the latter were valid, following them would end up in destroying the life that morality commands us to protect and that metaphysics and religion want to find a meaning for. Thus, we can understand philosophy’s interest in morality as a consequence of its basic meaning question; philosophy’s interest proves to be that of setting limits to metaphysical norms.