From my point of view, the rational faculty bestows upon thinking beings what might be termed a moral duty to follow, as Socrates famously said, “whatever direction the argument blows us,” for “that’s where we must go.” I find most persons agreed upon the following assumptions, at least in practice: Some acts are genuinely immoral and rational beings often feel an obligation to mitigate these (in a fashion that is surmised to accord with “right reason”). Certain acts possess a moral component as expressions of “intellectual states,” these encompassing intentionality and an ability to consider hypothetical scenarios, such as ethical dilemmas. Further, rational beings assume an obligation to exercise their rational faculties as much as possible to the extent that they partake of society; this obligation is a reasonable expectation of rational beings, including one’s self. From this duty to follow the argument wherever it leads has emerged the ideal of a standard to which all cooperative endeavors must assent, and of which every civilized society throughout history has recognized: a principle of reciprocity, or what Plato deemed the harmony of the soul, viz., justice. Others have understood this in terms of a “Golden Rule”; Immanuel Kant attempted to formalize it in the so-called “categorical imperative.” Of course it is the case that the extent to which I am judged by myself or by others to have acted wrongly, or to have failed to act wherein it was within my capacity as a rational being to do so, depends solely on consideration of the end or object of my act, viz., the rationale for my behavior, contrasted both with “right reason” and the reasons that I may or may not put forth to excuse my abrogation of “right reason.” How morality is properly judged for any given action, then, rests in an understanding of moral “Truths” (yes, with a capital “T”) that is essentially Platonic in this one aspect: Truth is “that which always is and has no becoming.” In other words, it is the peculiar relationship between the intellect and “eternal reasons,” as Augustine would call them, that bestows morality upon the actions of rational animals. Nor must it be perceived to be a sort of moral intellectualism that lies beneath the framework which I have outlined, though the shades of two additional Socratic principles, the former being one of Socrates’ well-known “paradoxes,” undoubtedly surface:
1. “Then if the pleasant is the good, no one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better. To give in to oneself is nothing other than ignorance, and to control oneself is nothing other than wisdom… neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good. And when he is forced to choose between one of two bad things, no one will choose the greater if he is able to choose the lesser.”
2. “There is, [Socrates] said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance.”
1. “Then if the pleasant is the good, no one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better. To give in to oneself is nothing other than ignorance, and to control oneself is nothing other than wisdom… neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good. And when he is forced to choose between one of two bad things, no one will choose the greater if he is able to choose the lesser.”
2. “There is, [Socrates] said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance.”
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza