III/ The Impossibility of Founding Morality

The question of the foundation of morality brings up the issue of its meaning even before we attempt to resolve it. To determine whether it is possible to establish a foundation for morality, we must first ask what it truly means to 'found morality'. We may then realise that, while authors who sought such a foundation appeared to share a common goal, they were, in fact, pursuing different questions without recognising it. We might even find that the questions they raised did not align with the true meaning of founding morality.

The failure of any attempt to establish a foundation for morality may be attributed not to the lack of answers, but to our inability to properly formulate the question.

Moore attributes much of the disagreement in morality to this very phenomenon: It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.

He observes that philosophers are constantly endeavouring to prove that Yes or No will answer questions, to which neither answer is correct, owing to the fact that what they have before their minds is not one question, but several, to some of which the true answer is No, to others Yes ¹.
Let us first consider what such a question might mean before attempting to answer it.

1/ It Is Not a Question of Finding Out What Our Duty Is

Common sense suggests that establishing a moral rule means demonstrating that it is a duty. To prove that we must not kill, we would have to establish that it is a duty for any reasonable being not to kill others. Morality will be founded once we have demonstrated that all its supposed precepts are unconditional duties. It is therefore through the concept of duty that the question of the foundation of morality will be posed and answered. We can summarise this approach by saying: 'Be moral, because you have to', or 'Be moral, because it is your duty'. This is how morality finds its foundation.

We could call this conception of morality 'ethics of duty'.

I will not attempt here to determine whether the ethics of duty thus defined legitimately refer to the author we naturally think of: Kant.
Nevertheless, we can examine the value of an ethics of duty defined in this way.

Ethics of duty aim to establish morality solely on the concept of duty, without invoking the concept of value. However, this appears impossible, as an immoral person—the one we are trying to refute—could argue, 'What has value is violating our duties'. The ethics of duty tries to prove that the concept of duty does indeed have a meaning. Yet, we can imagine a form of evil that would claim, 'Duty may be a meaningful concept, but it has no value'.

1. Ibid., preface 1st edition