Christianity and Ethics: A Handbook of Christian EthicsAlexander, Archibald B. D. (Archibald Browning Drysdale)
Religion
Christianity and Ethics: A Handbook of Christian Ethics
Alexander, Archibald B. D. (Archibald Browning Drysdale)
Christian ethics
true for one is true for all. Each man is a member of a rational order,
and possesses the inalienable independence and the moral dignity of being
an end in himself. Hence the formula of all duty is, 'Act from a maxim
at all times fit to be a universal law.'
It is the merit of Kant that he has given clear expression to the majesty
of the moral law. No thinker has more strongly asserted man's spiritual
nature or done more to free the ideal of duty from all individual
narrowness and selfish interest. But Kant's principle of duty labours
under the defect, that while it determines the form, it tells us nothing
of the content of duty. We learn from him the grandeur of the moral law,
but not its essence or motive-power. He does not clearly explain what it
is in the inner nature of man that gives to obligation its universal
validity or even its dominating force. As a recent writer truly says,
'In order that morality may be possible at all, its law must be realised
_in_ me, but while the way in which it is realised is mine, the content
is not mine; otherwise the whole conception of obligation is
destroyed.'[13] If the soul's function is purely formal how can we
attain to a self-contained life? Moreover, if the freedom which Kant
assigns to man is really to achieve a higher ideal and bring forth a new
world, must there not be some spiritual power or energy, some dynamic
force, which, while it is within man, is also without, and independent
of, him? 'Duty for duty's sake' lacks lifting power, and is the essence
of legalism. Love, after all, is the fulfilling of the law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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