21 On Ethics (Part 4): The ”Nature” of the Ought

The Christian Atheist

In traditional ethical theory we have two broad systems of thought, deontology, which bases ethics in obligation to follow an ethical standard, and consequentialism, which tries to ground ethics in the value of the consequences of our actions.

Ethics, I argue, is sui generis, unique. It is its own discrete field of value, standing outside the already unique human understanding of value discussed in a previous edition of the Christian Atheist. The ought of obligation is the coextensive demand of human reason to do the right thing. We find this obligation in the very heart of our own self-consciousness; we do not create it. This is THE basic fact of human morality. We can of course explain it away, at the level of metaphysics, as a human creation, but we do not know it as such. We know ethics as a self-evident truth, as an axiom of our rational nature - we should do what is right. When we ask why this is the case, the only answer we get at the ontological level is, because it is right.

It seems, then, that human rationality points radically outside itself to a transcendent reality in two ways: 1) we are the only beings that can produce the UNnatural, the "artificial," and 2) we look constantly to a transcendent ideal in our hierarchical value systems. This is not meant as a new "proof" of God's existence, but it is a curious fact for which an account must rationally be offered, and one plausible, indeed eminently rational account, is to accept the possibility of such a transcendent reality.

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