On The Basis of Morality - Morality's Foundation

Morality's Foundation

Religions have promised a reward after death if a person behaved well. Governmental laws are motives for good behavior because they promise earthly rewards and punishments. Kant's Categorical imperative claimed that a person's own behavior should be in accordance with a universal law. All of these, however, are ultimately founded on selfish egoism. "If an action has as its motive an egoistic aim," wrote Schopenhauer, "it cannot have any moral worth." Schopenhauer's doctrine was that morality is based on "the everyday phenomenon of compassion,…the immediate participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it…. Only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have moral value; and every action resulting from any other motives has none." Compassion is not egoistic because the compassionate person does not feel different from the suffering person or animal that is seen. Even though the sufferer is experienced as an external being, "I nevertheless feel it with him, feel it as my own, and not within me, but in another person… But this presupposes that to a certain extent I have identified myself with the other man, and in consequence the barrier between the ego and the non–ego is for the moment abolished…." Schopenhauer thus considered it to be true that "compassion, as the sole non–egoistic motive, is also the only genuinely moral one." Metaphysically, his explanation of morality is based on his monistic doctrine that all things are essentially the same. Everything is a manifestation of what is commonly called will, that is, urge, desire, striving, force, or energy.