Abstract

Some centuries ago most moral philosophy was written by theologians, almost none of it by professional philosophers in our sense, and one of the questions most debated was whether morality could or could not be founded on “an independent bottom”, that is, on a basis other than that provided by revealed religion. This was a many-sided question and would be interesting to discuss in the sense or senses in which it was then taken. In a way, I assumed an affirmative answer to part of it when I began with a definition of morality that makes no reference to the will of God as a ground for its normative judgments. Now I wish to say something more about it in terms rather different from those used by the theologians. I must do so because of what transpired in the previous lectures. In the first I began by assuming a material or nonformalist definition of morality as stated in Clauses 1 and 2, argued that such a definition does not entail either a teleological or a poietic view of morality, and put in a plug for a nonpoietic view such as was held by at least some Mainliners. In the second I contended that the Main Line in moral philosophy is essentially correct - that the Oughts or normative judgments of morality are not hypothetical or otherwise agent-referential, even if they are not institutional, thus confirming a nonpoietic theory of morality. What this points to on my present question is the position I should like to hold: that morality is bottomed on autonomous substantive normative judgments that are moral and noninstrumental, that is, that it rests on nonordinary and non-institutional normative judgments made from the moral point of view, or on moral grounds as defined by Clause 2.