III/ The Impossibility of Founding Morality

The question of the foundation of morality raises the issue of its meaning before we can even 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 find that authors who appeared to share this common goal were in fact pursuing different questions without realising it—and that the questions they raised did not correspond to what founding morality genuinely requires.

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

Moore attributes much of the disagreement in ethics to precisely this 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 rational being not to kill others. Morality will be founded once we have demonstrated that all its putative precepts are unconditional duties. The question of the foundation of morality is thus to be posed and answered through the concept of duty. This approach may be summarised as: 'Be moral, because you must', or 'Be moral, because it is your duty'. This is how morality finds its foundation.

We might call this conception 'ethics of duty'.

I will not attempt here to determine whether an ethics of duty so defined can legitimately be attributed to the author who naturally comes to mind: Kant.
We can, however, examine the merits of an ethics of duty as defined above.

An ethics of duty seeks to establish morality solely through the concept of duty, without invoking the concept of value. This, however, appears impossible: an immoral person—the very one we are trying to refute—could argue, 'What has value is the violation of our duties'. An ethics of duty attempts to show that the concept of duty is genuinely meaningful. Yet one can conceive of a form of evil that would retort: 'Duty may be a meaningful concept, but it has no value'.

1. Ibid., preface 1st edition