Many--but not all--moral imperatives can be discovered through reason alone.

Nature and God in Ethics

by Robert T. Miller

Just as an engineer can work out the purpose of a machine by examining its structure, reason can discover the proper end of human action by examining human nature. Yet there is also a supernatural morality that subsumes and exceeds natural moral standards.

In a fine essay in Public Discourse last month, Kenneth Kemp responded to two recent articles by Dennis Prager in National Review Online in which Prager argued that, without a theistic foundation, there can be no objective morality. I agree entirely with Kemp on this: we can know that certain actions are objectively right and others objectively wrong, totally apart from the issue of whether God exists. Although I thus agree with Kemp, I write today for two reasons. First, I want to expand on Kemp's explanation of how we attain moral knowledge. Second, I want to note some important qualifications to the assertion that our moral knowledge is logically independent of our belief in God.

Regarding the first point, Kemp rightly compares Prager's view to Hume's famous assertion that "Reason . . . is the slave of the passions." Hume meant that, given an end, reason can determine which means will be effective in attaining that end, but that reason is powerless to determine which ends we should pursue and which we should avoid. People who, like Kemp and me, adhere to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, and hold that human beings can rationally determine whether an action is right or wrong, must be able to explain exactly how reason determines which ends ought to be pursued and which ought to be avoided. Once we do this, the basic outline of morality is straightforward: morally right actions are the ones that reason determines are effective means to the proper end, and morally wrong actions are the ones that reason determines are in conflict with that end.

So how does reason identify the proper end or ends for human beings? The answer is that just as, given an end, reason can determine which means are effective means to attaining that end, so too, given a means, can reason determine the end or ends to which that means will be an effective means. 

Thus, confronted with an unfamiliar apparatus, an engineer can work out the purpose of the machine by examining its structure and seeing how it operates under different conditions. Similarly, a biologist who discovers a new protein in a living cell can, by examining its chemical structure and its interactions with other molecules in the cell, determine what its function is--that is, the end to which it is an effective means. In general, just as human reason is very good at means-ends reasoning (given the end, it can devise the means), so too is it very good at ends-means reasoning: given the means, it can work out what the end must be.

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