Reason and Obedience

At a given moment in time and space, what causes someone to contemplate a moral dilemma? She might not have studied for a test which takes up a significant percent of her final grade, while a test paper of her peer happens to be only a glance away. Yet the question I wish to ask is more fundamental than the description of those situational pieces that somehow come together in that exact moment to create such a self-conscious temptation. The question is this: what allows one to notice the dilemma in the first place? Would she have imagined the night before, procrastinating for that test, that she would have to, in the exam room, face her own temptation to cheat?

Certain truths are more visible to one in certain situations than others. Yet those truths do not claim authority over one’s life solely in such circumstances that make them visible. Facing one’s own temptation and its subsequent shame could have made her realize that in order to never be in a situation like that again she should study when she has the time to. Yet that realization itself is subject to the law of forgetfulness. She will forget soon after leaving the exam room: ordering a consolatory meal afterward slides her right back into the daily rhythms of life. And they do not usually contain the situational cues that had allowed her to see the significance of her actions and their consequences in those moments of intense moral contemplation—the regrets and the blame.

Moral standards do not require blind obedience. In fact, the reasons for following what is conventionally said to have the force of ought are sometimes all too clear. This is not to say that there can be two conflicting moral claims—that every directive of an action or inaction is self-evident to everyone. Yet what I wish to point out is that even the claims that seem to be self-evident to everyone are not self-evident every single moment of one’s life. It is more visible in times of regret, perhaps in ethical contemplation or in the process of theorizing about ethics. But the practical reality of such conclusions drawn in theoretical contemplation is their contingent visibility. 

Theoretical understanding that shapes actions cannot simply be summoned at will. Even if they can be summoned in small axiomatic fragments, still their action-shaping power cannot be. Yet whatever these conclusions are, they bind one regardless of their visibility. It is not to say that they bind one entirely—yet it is at least not on the grounds of subjective visibility that their authoritative claim upon an individual rests. (Even if one says that its justification rests on internal satisfaction of epistemic criteria, this is not to say that such epistemic criteria are met in every reasoning, action-guiding thinking at all times. Some actions cannot be justified by such standards—even individually imposed standards. Then the visibility question has to still plague the agent.)

So what to do of this forgetfulness that blinds one to those moments of clarity: the circumstances of self-blame and regret with which every individual has great familiarity. Moral standards may not require blind obedience; yet they require faithful obedience—a faith that need not be blind. The faith requires not a belief in the irrational but a belief that persists even when the reasons for believing in it are not at all clear—nor visible. What this faith recognizes is not the limitations of reason itself, as in its lack of explanatory power, but the limitations of human reason—its susceptibility to corruption, blindness, and distortion. The former contains the question of the sufficiency of reason entirely in the realm of the ideal; the latter brings it down to its everyday uses by a human being.