Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa, Volume II
CHAPTER IV -- HAPPINESS AND MORALITY
(Q. 18-21)1. Comparison of physical and moral goodness and evil: (a) Roots of morality. (b) A definition of morality. (c) Rules of morality: (1) Proximate rule -- reason. (2) Ultimate rule -- the eternal law. 2. Sources of modern attack on morality: (a) The identification of the real and the tangible. (b) Rejection of a personal end of man. (c) Attack on authority -- graduated according to authority attacked: (1) Divine authority. (2) Ecclesiastical authority. (3) Civil authority. (4) Paternal or domestic authority. (d) Conclusion to a morality that is irrational or more logically though more rarely, to amorality. 3. Morality of human action in general: (a) Sources of morality: (1) Object of action. (2) End of action. (3) Circumstances of action. (b) Acts good, evil or indifferent in themselves. 4. Morality of human actions in particular: (a) Intrinsic acts -- meaning of "good will": (1) Dependence of this goodness: a. On the object; part played by intention. b. On the rules of morality. (2) Sole norm of bad will. (3) Conformity with the will of God. (b) Extrinsic or commanded acts: (1) A double standard of morality. (2) Interraction of these standards. (3) Moral significance: a. Of external acts. b. Of the result of an action. 5. Consequences of goodness and evil in human activity: (a) Sin and virtue. (b) Praise and blame. (c) Merit and demerit. Conclusion: 1. Place of morality: (a) In the order of nature. (b) In the nature of man. (c) With reference to religion. 2. Impossibility of escape from morality. 3. Morality and the pursuit of happiness.
CHAPTER IV
HAPPINESS AND MORALITY
(Q. 18-21)It is always disconcerting for human nature to discover reality where only the stuff of dreams was expected. A man who was dreaming that he was present at the Deluge, and wakes up expecting to stretch luxuriously in the enjoyment of a warm, comfortable bed, only to discover that the roof is leaking and he is being thoroughly drenched, is disconcerted. So is the man who dreamed about burglars, only to awake to a ransacked house. When we have nicely classified something among the intangible and unimportant material of dreams we like to have it stay that way. A little idiosyncrasy of ours, perhaps, but one that will make the subject-matter of this chapter decidedly disconcerting.
Comparison of physical and moral goodness and evil
It has been quite a fashion these last years to contrast the physical and moral much as we would the real and the unreal: the physical is the strong, undeniable, dependable order of the natural; while the moral is in the class of the fluttering subjective or the intangible supernatural.
Let us look honestly at the two. Physical goodness is not hard to understand A blind cat has not as much physical goodness as a cat with two good eyes, because it lacks something that a cat should have, that we can reasonably demand of a cat. So, in a very tense moment of a cat show, the decision of the judges must hinge on which of the contestants has all that a cat should have. The absence of wings will not affect that decision a bit; a cat just does not have wings, and the lack of them is no reflection on the cat. Our norm of physical goodness, then, is correspondence to the demands of a particular nature.
We can put this more profoundly by looking at what gives a cat, or anything else, what it should have, considering its nature. Hit fatally by an automobile, the cat in question ceases to have any of the perfections of a cat. So with a man, death robs him of the perfections due to human nature. He may make a wonderful corpse, astoundingly natural in appearance, but in appearance only. His soul, the principle bringing him his specific perfections, is gone. So the form or soul of a cat is the source of the physical goodness of the cat. When the cat has all the perfections its form can give, it is a perfect cat; it lacks goodness, or suffers evil, in so far as it lacks any of those perfections due to the form proper to cats. All this holds true of everything in the order of nature, indeed, in the order of reality. It is our knowledge of these natural forms, or essences, that enables us to judge between the physical good and evil.
If we apply all this to actions, we shall find an exact parallel. A horse's act of eating is good in so far as it has all we can expect of such an act, in so far as it measures up to that principle which gives it its perfection and makes it stand out as different from all other actions. Concretely, in so far as it does what eating is supposed to do, that is, nourish the animal, the act is good. The form of an act, the perfecting principle, which marks it as different from all others, is the object of that act; just as a motion is marked out as different from all other motions, by the goal or object of that motion. The goodness of an act, then, is judged in relation to its form. We are still in the physical, undeniably natural order; and, as is evident, the same principles that determine the physical goodness or evil of a thing as tangible as a cat or a mountain, determine the physical goodness or evil of an action in that same physical order.
Roots of morality
To step into the moral order means no more than to step into the order of human actions. The query concerning their moral goodness or evil is no more than a query as to the goodness or evil precisely as human. Just as all other actions are judged good or bad in the light of their form, specifying principle or object, so also human actions are similarly judged in the light of their form, or object. The difference lies in this: the human action, precisely as human, is a controlled action, an action that is aimed, an action put forth under the guiding hand of reason. So the object of human action is an object responding to that principle of reasonable control.
In other words, a human actions like all other actions, indeed like all other things, is good or bad according as it has all it should have, or lacks something that belongs to it. To say that its goodness is moral is merely to insist that its goodness is human. To speak of human action, free action, or moral action, is to speak of exactly the same thing. Whenever a man places an unreasonable action, he places an immoral action. Driving along a mountain road and deliberately turning off over a precipice instead of following the road, a man has placed a morally evil action, because that action did not measure up to the object of human action, the object understood and aimed at by reason, even though the quick turn off may have been a clever bit of manipulation of an automobile.
There is no distinction between the real and the moral order; things moral are just as real as things physical, in fact more so. Their roots are buried in the same metaphysical beginnings of thought and being which make the truth and goodness of each a matter of exact proportion to their existence or being. Morality is not the ghostly door through which the sleepwalker passes unhindered, but the solid barrier that will wake him up with a crash if he bumps into it.
A definition of morality
Morality, quite simply, is nothing more than the relation of a human action to its proper object, to its object as a human or moral object. One goat may butt into another, looking very much like one football player butting into another; but the acts are quite different, for one is human, the other is the act of a goat. One was placed in view of the end; the other was not. One has a moral object, the other has not.
Rules of morality: Proximate rule -- reason
The determination of the rule of morality is then ridiculously easy. The rule of goodness for a cat, a mountain, or a horse's dinner was the form of each of those things; the exemplar, the perfecting principle, which made them stand out from all others and to which they measured up. The same is true of the rule of human or moral actions: it will be their form, that which makes them stand out from all others as different. We have already seen that actions are human in so far as they are controlled; it is this which makes the difference between a man's hat being blown off and being thrown away at a football game. It is reason which aims human actions, which makes them human. The determining principle of goodness or evil then involves the principle of control; it is the end known and aimed at by reason. Reason is the immediate rule of morality.
Ultimate rule -- the eternal law
The human reason is not a magician at the wave of whose magic wand morality comes into existence. It is a decidedly workman-like faculty whose job is to know and command. To cast it in the role of creator, as principle author of morality, is a silly contradiction of facts. Rather, the realization of just what reason is and does, indicates immediately that behind it is the first cause of morality, as behind the howl of the tornado is the first cause of all physical things. Behind human reason stands divine reason. To measure up to the rule of morality which is human reason, means to measure up to that supreme rule of morality -- divine reason -- which is mirrored in our own created reason.
Going back to that poor cat before it was hit by an automobile, no one of us makes the mistake of thinking the form, the soul, of that cat created the cat, even though here and now it was the measuring rod of the cat's physical goodness. Behind it was the eternally enduring essence or form existing in the mind of the creator, the eternally true exemplar by imitation of which the created form or essence was set up as the norm of feline perfection. So behind every created thing is the divine architect's model of that thing, the ultimate criterion of its truth, its goodness, its perfection. Behind every action, behind every human action; is that same array of plans in the mind of the divine architect; for action, and human action, belong in the real order and demand the same explanation as everything else in that real order.
Morality, then, is not something of caprice, not even of divine caprice; but part of the essential truth of things. It is just as impossible for anyone to make an essentially bad action good as it is to make the essence of a cat the essence of a donkey. Morality has the same solid roots, the same inviolable nature as the earth on which we walk.
All this is disconcerting, for it puts our modern world in the position of the little boy stoutly denying he ate the jam in spite of the generous layer of jam on his face. Our modern attack on morality is an attack on fundamental facts that simply will not be denied; and it is only by the exercise of mental gymnastics worthy of a madhouse that we can even imagine we are denying those facts.
Sources of modern attack on morality: The identification of the real and the tangible
Because the attack is against fundamentals, the root of our modern scoffing at morality go back to fundamentals. One of the earliest roots, and one which is rapidly dying today through the advance of scientific discovery and consequently of scientific humility, was the identification of the real and the tangible or sensible. If the only real things were those which could be weighed, measured, cut up, used as subjects in a laboratory, then of course morality did not belong to the real order. For no one has as yet stumbled over morality in the dark or preserved it in alcohol. Unfortunately this also included loyalty, friendship, love, beauty, wetness and a host of other things that the world has always insisted were realities of no mean proportions.
Rejection of a personal end of man
Much more to the fore today is the rejection of a personal end of man. This rejection has taken various forms, subjecting the human individual variously to a mechanical, biological, or sociological process in which he is merely filling a gap. Whatever its form, it immediately does away with the necessity of morality by doing away with humanity. The precise mark of human action is control, the aiming of action; where there is nothing to aim at, it is silly to spend time correcting the sights of a rifle. Since human action and moral action are the same thing, the removal of humanity from an action is an effective squelching of morality in that action.
Attack on authority: Divine authority, ecclesiastical authority, civil authority, paternal or domestic authority.
An older, but still strongly enduring source of this modern attack on morality is the attack on authority. It really should not be an attack on morality at all; in fact it can be such only by misunderstanding what and where morality is. From what we have seen, the essential morality does not depend on authority, even on the authority of God; but on the same foundations from which the physical order has its stability. But the notion somehow got around that human beings were moral because they were told to be so, because they were little children ordered about by a somewhat tyrannical parent; a lessening of the authority of that parent, then, was understood as a loosening of the reins of morality. So step by step we staggered down the ladder of authority. First, divine authority and that of the Church which claimed divine authority was rejected; then the authority of churches which admitted they had no divine authority. The next reigning authority was that of the State; from there only two more steps were possible -- to the paternal or group authority of the family and to the completely subjectivistic authority of the individual himself. At every one of these steps some men and women have stopped. You will find those who trace their morality to themselves, to social approval or tradition, to civil law, to dictates of ecclesiastical authority; and you will find others who have rejected all of these one by one until their theoretical morals consist in the arduous task of pleating themselves.
Conclusion to a morality that is irrational or more logically though more rarely, to amorality *p This does not mean that the modern world has gone immoral. Not at all. Very often the proponents of these particular varieties of morality are themselves living up to a very high moral standard. What it does mean is that the modern world should have gone immoral. To propose a moral theory side by side with the contention that morality is not real, that man has no individual purpose or goal to his life, or that morality is mercy somebody else's dictum, is absurd. It is unreasonable; it will not stand any searching criticism; it simply does not measure up to the facts. Building on such fundamentals, or lack of fundamentals, the really reasonable thing, the really rational conclusion, would be amorality -- denial of morality. Or, briefly; we arc in the position of the boy with jam on his face; we are caught with morality in our very make-up no matter how loudly we may deny it. Our attack has been against a straw man; if we bend over closely enough to make sure the enemy is dead enough to justify a shout of victory, we cannot but discover he was stuffed with straw.
Morality of human action in general: Sources of morality, object of action.
To discover the immediate sources of morality it is necessary merely to look closely at any human action. Take such a very ordinary thing as eating a meal. If we analyse that action, we obtain an accurate idea of what contributes to the human or moral goodness of dining. We will find that this action, and every human action, has three parts and from each part some morality can flow. No matter who eats the dinner, what the diners capacity, or who pays the bill, the natural object of a dinner is to repair the tissue burnt up by the expenditure of energy during the day. That is what dinners are for, that is the reasonable object, the end known and aimed at by reason. It is something quite independent of the individual diner; something universally true of all dinners that justly claim the name.
End of action
The second part of the human action lies in the purpose or intention of the agent. Perhaps a man is dining merely for sociability's sake -- "he isn't a bit hungry"; perhaps because he wants just one more dinner before going to the electric chair so that the pangs of indigestion will mane him forget everything else; perhaps he is so stuffed with food that one more bite will fill him and he has chosen this novel form of suicide. Whatever his purpose, it can go beyond that which naturally and essentially belongs to the dinner as such.
Circumstances of action
The third part of the human action is made up of the circumstances -- the neighbourhood of a human act which must be letdown for the complex story of human goodness or evil. For instance, a man might carry his lunch to the opera and eat it between the acts; he might go at his dinner a little too ardently; he might eat it at midnight knowing it is going to keep him awake all night; and so on.
Acts good, evil or indifferent in themselves
At any rate, considering these three elements of a human action, we have considered all possibilities; there is nothing else that enters into a human action. What morality, what human goodness or evil there is in an act, must come from these three sources. The first of these, the reasonable object of the act itself, gives the essential, necessary goodness or evil which will always and under all circumstance cling to the act. So theft's object is to take unjustly what belongs to another; that distinguishes it from all other human actions, good or bad, makes it essentially in all times and under all circumstances an act which is essentially bad, or bad in itself. The object is an intrinsic form giving the act its moral nature; to compare this form, giving the action moral life, to reason, giving the action humanity, is like comparing the form constituting a house distinct from all others, to the architect's conception according to which the house is built. As these objects, these internal forms constituting the moral essence of human actions, are good, bad or indifferent so also are the acts. In more concrete terms, according as the objects of these acts lead to the end or goal set by reason, they are good; as they lead away from or impede the attaining of that goal, they are bad; if they contribute nothing one way or another in themselves, they are indifferent. A kind act is always good in itself; an unjust act is always bad in itself; taking a walk is in itself indifferent.
Over and above this essential goodness or evil of the human action in itself, there is the morality added by the end or intention of the one acting. I can give a poor man five dollars in order to enlist him in the ranks of crime; I can murder a dictator in vindication of my democratic principle or I can take a walk in order to induce a heart attack. And in all these cases some added morality has come through my immediate purpose, regardless of the natural end of the individual acts in themselves.
Something like the effect a neighbourhood has on the desirability of a home, of the effect clothes have on the appearance of a man, is the effect of circumstances on the morality of an act. They are accidents, adornments or disfigurements; they may play as vastly different roles as a drop of perfume or a misstep plays in the magnificent entrance of a society leader. They may make an act better or worse, more serious or less so; but they leave the act essentially intact. When they do not, when they actually change the moral species of an act, they have given up the secondary role of circumstance and stepped into the stellar role of object. The fact that the man who receives a blow is a bishop may be only an added circumstance in one sense, making only an accidental difference; but over and above the essentially unjust nature of this act, is the added affront to religious reverence that gives the act an entirely new nature.
Morality of human actions in particular
All this is very much like scattering the insides of an automobile over the floor of a garage and saying proudly to the owner: "Well that's what takes" you from New York to Los Angeles." The owner might reasonably reply: "Yes, and that's what's going to take you from automobile repairing to piano tuning if you don't get it together again." We have taken the human action apart to examine its goodness and evil. But we must now put it together again to see how it drives toward good or wanders off after evil.
In the process of reassembling the inner parts of the human action we come upon friends from a former chapter. Among others there are those acts of the will which precede actual external action, that enter intimately into the making up of our minds and always precede the execution of our purposes -- intention, consent, election or choice.
Intrinsic acts -- meaning of "good will"
All of these flow immediately from the will and are produced without the help of clever fingers or stumbling feet. They are elicited by the will in contrast to the outside acts that are executed under the force of command coming radically from the will. Where do they fit in the scheme of morality?
They should play a very important part. After all, good and evil are the direct business of the will. It is the job of the feet to walk, of the ears to hear, of the intellect to understand; but it is the will's exclusive task to be engaged with good and evil. This division of good and evil is the proper division of the actions of the will. Put in another way, the end or goal of activity is the proper object of the will; and a thing is good or bad precisely because of its relation to that goal or end of activity.
Dependence of this goodness: On the object; part played by intention
One phrase of that last sentence is particularly important: the proper object of the will is the end or goal of activity. It is important because it greatly simplifies the question of the morality of these intrinsic or elicited acts of our rational appetite. To determine whether my almsgiving was good or bad, it was necessary to consider not only the natural purpose of almsgiving but also my intention in giving the alms. But in determining the essential value of these intrinsic acts of the will that is not necessary. In these intrinsic acts, the purpose of the one acting and the purpose of the act itself always coincide -- the proper object of the will is precisely the end or goal intended. We give a person credit for his good intentions, and rightly so; not in the sense that such an intention justifies everything a man does, but it does at least justify the intention. The inner form, the specifying principle, that which marks this act of the will off from all others, is at the same time the object of this inner act and the end of the agent -- they are one and the same thing.
On the rules of morality
This does not mean that we are setting up the will as a swashbuckling king who can do no wrong. It can do wrong; in fact it is the fountain source of evil as well as good. It is not an independent creator of morality, making good whatever attracts it, as Midas made whatever he touched into gold. Its goodness or evil is to be judged by the same rules that determine the morality of every other human action, i.e., first and immediately by the rule of reason.
The inner form which gives the intrinsic acts of the will their morality must be set alongside the outer form, the exemplar, to see how it measures up. That outer form, that architect's conception, is reason's knowledge and judgment of the human object of this or any other act. I intend to help my neighbour and that intention is morally specified by its object or end; but that end is good because it measures up to the rule of reason declaring that such an object leads a man to the goal of human life. On the contrary I intend to injure my neighbour; again the morality is determined by the inner form and it is bad because it does not measure up to the rule of reason, because reason declares such an act leads a man away from the goal of human life.
Sole norm of bad will
The sole standard by which men of good will can be distinguished from men of bad will is the rule of morality, which is reason. Reason proposing a good end to the will does not make that will good or bad; but the will is good if its acts are in agreement with that reason, they are bad in so far as they violate that rule. It is in acting against an end proposed by reason as good, or intending an end proposed by reason as evil, that the will is bad.
Conformity with the will of God
A good grasp of this notion takes all the trickery out of the difficult task of conforming our will to the will of God. A special revelation of God's intentions is not necessary; it is not necessary that we have a blueprint of all the detailed devices of divine Providence; we do not have to spend agonizing hours on our knees trying to discover if this is or is not the will of God. We have only to follow our reason. The human reason does not make up the moral values. The unchangeable moral essences are not the product of human but of divine understanding, they are naturally known, accurate mirrorings of the divine plans ready to hand for every man and woman without the laborious pacing of the corridors of eternity. In this or that particular thing God and ourselves may be at odds without our realizing it -- we pray very earnestly, for example, for someone's health when as a matter of fact renewed health would be the means by which he would make a failure of the life he is now prepared to end so successfully. The difference, the disagreement with the will of God is merely material; formally, our ends are God's ends if our ends are the ends of reason.
All this will perhaps become more clear when we look at the acts intrinsic to and commanded by the will, walking down the highways of life arm in arm. Of course they always do take their strolls in just that fashion when the commanded act appears at all. And with astounding results. Former friends may snub the commanded act unmercifully when they see his companion; or on another day, the commanded act may receive salutations from the influential who would not notice him alone, or would pay him only the almost unconscious tributes given to creatures on a lower stratum.
Extrinsic or commanded acts: A double standard of morality.
The commanded act, by reason of its own proper object and so of its own moral essence, is good or bad in itself. No matter what the intention with which it promenades, this goodness or badness remains intact. If the commanded act is itself indifferent, it will be good or bad according to the intention, the end aimed at.
Recently, walking up Lexington Avenue, I came to Fifty-Ninth Street and, inevitably, met the "sandwich men" stooping under their enthusiastic placards. Usually these people are quite indifferent to the world surging past them: eyes blank, or vague with dreaming of a hot cup of coffee, hopeful with the approach of the end of their long vigil. But this particular night one stood out, a young Italian girl, perhaps eighteen years old with that madonna-like beauty that is almost an Italian heritage. She stood absolutely motionless, facing downtown, her eyes tightly closed and with an agony of unutterable shame stamped on her face. Realizing that her tightly locked eye alone prevented a flood of scalding tears, one could appreciate the sublime courage and desperate necessity that drove her through the long hours of her shame. And it was not hard to form an idea of how the virgin martyrs of early Christendom or the modern martyrs among the nuns of Spain must have looked enduring theirs martyrdom.
Interraction of these standards
The object and moral essence of almsgiving is good. The act is good in itself. But if from a strain of sadistic crudity a man approached that girl and offered her a coin, the almsgiving would have been horribly bad. Theft is bad; if, seeing this girl, a man thought how nicely she could use a thousand dollars and so went into the department store on the corner and somehow stole a thousand dollars with the best of intentions, the act would still be bad. Looking or not looking at a human being is a morally indifferent act; but to stop and stare at this girl to enjoy her misery would be bad; to tear one's eyes away in a rush of pity would be good.
Moral significance: Of external acts
As a matter of fact, all this can be morally complete without anything being done for the world to see. My intention to torment the girl, followed by my decision to give her a coin might stop right there; and morally the case is complete as I have just outlined it. Does the actual giving of the alms add anything to the sin already committed? Over and above the damage such external action might do (as in the case of theft) each external sin at least adds a note of intensity, fixing the will in its determination to go through with the act; the very doing of the act extends the whole activity of the will over a longer period; and sometimes it actually increases the number of these acts of the will. A timid burglar intends to humiliate his competitors by a huge theft and decides on a particular victim. Later he weakens and gives up the idea; but the next night his courage comes back and he enjoys a very successful evening. He has committed two sins of burglary, though getting only one bit of loot.
Of the result of an action
Looking back for a moment, we see the sources of morality as the object of the human act, the end of the man acting, the circumstances under which the act is placed and the external execution of the act; all play their part, and their success or failure is judged by the strict critic reason. But that is not quite the last act; we cannot ring down the curtain until the consequences of that external act have made their bow.
An aviator soaring over New York suddenly become bored with just riding around and decides to end the ride right there. If he jumps out depending on his parachute to land him safely, he has no right to indignation when a policeman arrests him for the murder of the people his crashing plane has killed. On the other hand, a joke told at a banquet with such success that a listener swallows his false teeth and dies does not mean that the wit has committed murder. Effects that naturally, necessarily or even usually follow from an action are intimately connected with it and cannot be disowned as so many illegitimate children. But effects that happen once in a lifetime, or that no one could foresee, have no claim on the heritage of good or evil left by the act itself.
Consequences of goodness and evil in human activity: Sin and virtue, Praise and blame, Merit and demerit P Our modern repugnance to the word "sin" is nothing short of absurd when taken in connection with our modern insistence on right and wrong, our judicial paraphernalia, our uplift societies and official reformers. A human act is humanly wrong when it is unreasonable, when it does not conform to the rule of reason; it is right when it does. Ant that is exactly what is meant by sin and acts of virtue. This or that is a sin precisely because it conflicts with reason; it is good and virtuous because it conforms to the rule of reason. To demand the substance and scruple at the name is just a little childish.
Of course we are blamed for sin and praised for virtue; just as we are blamed for wrong and praised for right. These acts, because they are human, have proceeded under our full control; they are wrong because we steered them deliberately in that direction, right became we chose to act in that fashion. There is room for remorse and satisfaction because human nature is in control of its activity. There is room for merit and demerit because there is room for success and failure, because there is room for justice to ourselves, to the world, to the divine architect whose plans we are working out.
Conclusion: Place of morality in the order of nature.
Perhaps one conclusion apparent by this time is that the question of morality is certainly a complex question. Of course it is; for human activity is a decidedly complex activity. But there are a few very simple, very fundamental conclusions which are evident from even this cursory glance at morality.
It should be clear first of all that morality is an integral part of the natural order. It is not something extrinsic, foreign, merely authoritative; but something that flows immediately and necessarily from the working out of natural laws. Like everything else in nature, man is governed by natural laws; and, like their operation in every other nature, those natural laws in man do not violate man's nature. Just as the fulfilment of those natural laws is different in a chemical and in a chimpanzee, so is it different in man, following the difference of his nature. With everything else, natural law uses the whip of physical necessity, driving to its ends without the possibility of mistake; but human activity cannot be subjected to physical necessity and remain human, for it cannot be necessarily produced and at the same time be under our control. The necessity induced by natural law in human activity is a moral necessity, one admitting of choice, of mistake and success, because man's nature is a moral nature enjoying the ability to choose in paths to the goal of nature.
In the nature of man
Our human nature not only submits to morality, it cries out for it, it cannot exist without it. In every smallest human act, in exact proportion to its humanity, there is morality; for morality is nothing more than the fulfilling or violation of the law that governs human nature. According as a man's acts are directed to his goal, they are good; and so far as they turn away from that goal, they are bad. And every human action, as human, must be either for or against that goal; it is under control, going somewhere, either to the right place or to the wrong place. If we discover a man whose actions have no morality, either good or bad, we promptly lock him up; for by the same token his actions have no humanity, he is insane; they have no liberty and he is not responsible for what he does. Human, free, moral action are one and the same thing.
With reference to religion
Evidently morality is not a mere adjunct of religion. It is not something reserved to pious people, to believers in religion, and forbidden to all others; rather it is something exclusively demanded of possessors of humanity. It is not religion which produces morality but rather morality that of itself will produce religion; for religion is but one of the commands of the natural law which governs man's actions -- it is not the root or source of that law.
Impossibility of escape from morality.
To escape from morality means to escape from humanity. The attempt to overthrow the moral order is an attempt to deny the authenticity of human nature, to fly from the order of liberty. Like a child in a Halloween game, it puts a false face on human nature and expects the world to he frightened. The world is not frightened, it is amused; and if only the inanimate and brute creation were capable of amusement and laughter, the roar of amusement at the antics of these solemnly learned opponents of morality would fill all the vast spaces of the universe. It is impossible to run away from morality because it is impossible to run away from nature, because it is impossible to run away from humanity. In a word, there is no escape from the truth of things as they are.
Morality and the pursuit of happiness.
Everything we have said in this chapter has an immediate bearing on happiness. Let us recall that we placed the essence of happiness in the possession of the goal of life; we said that what share we can have of happiness in this life comes in exact proportion to our approach to that goal of life; all our human activity is but the means to that goal, so many tools by which we carve out happiness. And morality? Morality is the exact measure of man's success in living. Man is happy in proportion as he approaches his end; man is morally good as he aims his acts at that end, morally bad as he aims his acts away from that end. Our morality here and now is a statement of our account in the bank of happiness. Virtue is its own reward in this sense; that every virtuous act is a definite step towards final happiness, every virtuous act is a pocketing of a share in that happiness towards which we are striding. We cannot speak of morality without holding forth on happiness.
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