¹ My thanks in particular to Joseph Raz for discussion of this paper.

² Are people right to treat the fact of its legal obligatoriness as a reason for doing what is legally obligatory? And if at least sometimes they are, how more precisely is this reason generated: through sanctions connected with the law; or through the fact that doing what is legally obligatory facilitates coordination or the support of mutually advantageous institutions; or in some other way? These are questions for another time. In this discussion my interest is primarily in moral obligation, not legal. I mean merely to take legal obligatoriness as being, for the sake of argument, what, rightly or wrongly, many people treat it as being—a feature that can help give us reason to perform the actions and produce the outcomes that possess it. It is the correctness of conceiving of moral obligatoriness in a similar way that is my main concern here.

³ In fact, this account of the demandingness of obligation is one that the remainder of this paper will put into question.

⁴ For Anscombe, absent continued belief in God as divine lawgiver, all we are left with is a metaphorical use of the term ‘obligation’; we must give up belief in moral obligatoriness itself. Moral obligatoriness can no more exist without what would constitute it—the feature of being divinely commanded—than can criminality without the institution of criminal law:

‘But if a [divine command] conception is dominant for many centuries, and then is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of ‘obligation’, of being bound or required as by a law, should remain though they had lost their root… it is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten…’ Anscombe, Elizabeth ‘Modern moral philosophy’, Virtue Ethics, Crisp, Roger and Slote, Michael (eds.) p. 31 (Oxford University Press 1997).Google Scholar

⁵ Hence Hume supposes, rightly, that there are moral obligations or duties to benevolence, and to concern for one's children—see Treatise of Human Nature, Book 3, Part 2, Section 1, ‘Justice, whether a natural or artificial virtue?’

⁶ See St John's gospel, chapter 8.

⁷ The assumption that obligatoriness or rightness is a reason-giving feature, and wrongness correspondingly a feature that gives a reason against, is fundamental to Scanlon's contractualism. Scanlon thinks that a theory of right and wrong must show ‘how an act's being wrong’ provides ‘a reason not to do it’ (What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard, 1998) p. 153)Google Scholar. For Scanlon, this reason-giving character is explained by identifying wrongness with an action's being excluded by any reasonable social contract:

‘Contractualism offers such an account [of wrongness]. It holds that an act is wrong, if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement.’ ibid p. 153.

This paper is therefore directed at an essential foundation of Scanlon's contractualist theory of right and wrong. The consequences for moral theory of abandoning this foundation are considerable and ramifying. I explore these consequences and compare my views against Scanlon's at greater length in my forthcoming The Ethics of Action, volume 2 Action and Normativity.Google Scholar

⁸ Thus in his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham writes:

‘6. An action then may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it…

‘10. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility, one may always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that it is not one which ought not to be done. One may also say, that it is right that it should be done; or at least that it is not wrong it should be done: that it is a right action; at least that it is not a wrong action. When thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong, and others of that stamp, have a meaning; when otherwise, they have none.’ Pp. 12–13 J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (eds.) (London, 1970).

See also the consequentialist G. E. Moore:

‘Our “duty”, therefore, can only be defined as that action, which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative. And what is “right” or “morally permissible” only differs from this, as what will not cause less good than any possible alternative.’ Principia Ethica, p. 148 (Cambridge 1903).Google Scholar

⁹ For further historical discussion, see my, ‘Suarez Hobbes and the scholastic tradition in action theory’ in The Will and Human Action: from Antiquity to the Present Day, Pink, Thomas and Stone, Martin (eds.) (Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar, and especially my Action, will and law in late scholasticism’, in Moral Philosophy at the Threshold of Modernity, Kraye, Jill and Saarinen, Risto (eds.) (Kluwer, Dordrecht: Synthese Historical Library, 2004).Google Scholar

A systematic philosophical discussion of both the practical reasonbased and the voluntariness-based models, together with a defence of the practical reason-based model, is to be found in my forthcoming The Ethics of Action, volume 1, Action and Self-Determination (Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming). A popular account of the debate and its relation to the free will problem is to be found in my forthcoming Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

¹⁰ For a sophisticated and very interesting recent defence of a divine command theory of moral obligation in Feature model terms, see Adams's, Robert MerrihewFinite and Infinite Goods (Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

¹¹ Of course, if not merely the legitimacy, but the actual likelihood of punishment for its breach is made constitutive of moral obligation's very nature, the claim that it is always foolish to breach moral obligations becomes very much more plausible—but at the cost of greatly increased doubt about whether much of what we ordinarily suppose to be morally obligatory really is so.

¹² According to Suarez, for law and obligation is required

‘…aliquem actum efficacis voluntatis… haec autem voluntas non oportet, ut sit de ipsa observatione seu executione legis… Per se requiritur ut sit de obligatione subditorum, id est, ut sit voluntas obligandi subditos, quia sine tali voluntate non obligabit illos…’ De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, Book 1, cap 4 in Volume 5 of Suarez's Opera Vives, (ed.) 1856, p. 15.Google Scholar

¹³ In his commentary on Thomson's, Judith JarvisGoodness and Advice, (Princeton, 2001) (see pages 128–9)Google Scholar, Schneewind notes the distinction within the ‘modern’ or seventeenth century natural law tradition between demand and mere advice. But that distinction is not in itself remarkable. It is common property to any who wish to distinguish between moral obligations and ordinary reasons. What Schneewind does not do is distinguish between Force and Feature models of moral obligation— nor does he note the shift over time from medieval and renaissance natural law theory's reliance on a Force model to modern philosophy's characteristic reliance on a Feature model. Notice also that Schneewind sees the seventeenth century natural law tradition as tying the idea of demand to divine commands. That, especially if we include late scholastic thinkers, it did not exceptionlessly do—and anyway certainly not in the way that Anscombe does.

For a major late scholastic account of law and obligation which opposes any divine command theory, see the immensely important commentary on the Prima Secundae of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae by Suarez's contemporary and intellectual opponent in the sixteenth century Jesuit order, Gabriel Vasquez, which I discuss in detail in ‘Action, will and law in late scholasticism’. For an invaluable contemporary synopsis of the views of Suarez, Vasquez and many others in the scholastic tradition, see Poncius's supplement to the 1639 Lyon edition of Scotus's Quaestiones in Librum Tertium Sententiarum, Distinctio 37, Scotus, Opera Omnia Wadding, (ed.), vol. 7, pp. 857–77.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See again my forthcoming The Ethics of Action. While volume 1, Action and Self-Determination defends just such a practical reason-based theory of action, volume 2, Action and Normativity, provides a general theory of moral normativity in line with the argument of this paper.