The only moral obligation

"Is the Church right that there is such a thing as the structure of human existence, which can serve as a moral reference point? Or, do we human beings have no moral obligations except helping one another satisfy our desires, thus achieving the greatest possible amount of happiness? I agree with John Stuart Mill, the great utilitarian philosopher, that that is the only moral obligation we have. The Church, of course, holds that views such as Mill’s reduce human beings to the level of animals. But philosophers like me think that utilitarianism exalts us by offering us a challenging moral ideal. Utilitarianism leads to heroic and self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of social justice. Such efforts are entirely compatible with the claim that there is no such thing as the structure of human existence. The Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said that superstition is the confusion of an ideal with power. Superstition, he said is the belief that any legitimate ideal must somehow be grounded in something already actual, something transcendent that sets this ideal before us. What the pope calls the structure of human existence is an example of such a transcendent entity. Santayana said, and I agree, that the only source of moral ideals is the human imagination. Santayana hoped that human beings would eventually give up the idea that moral ideals must be grounded in something larger than ourselves. He hoped that we would come to think of all such ideals as human creations and none the worse for that. Santayana’s claim that imagination is a good enough source for the ideal led him to say that religion and poetry are identical in essence. He used the term “poetry” in an expansive sense to mean something like “product of the imagination.” He used the word “religion” in an equally large sense to include political idealism, aspirations to make the life of a community radically different, radically better than it had been before. Poetry, Santayana said, is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion when it merely supervenes upon life is seen to be nothing but poetry. Neither poetry nor religion, Santayana believed, should be thought of as telling us about something that is already real. We should stop asking about the claims made on us by an ideal, nor should we ask about the nature of our obligation to live up to the ideal. To give oneself over to a moral ideal is like giving oneself over to another human being. When we fall in love with another person, we do not ask about the source or the nature of our obligation to cherish that person’s welfare. It is equally pointless to do so when we have fallen in love with an ideal. Most of Western philosophy is, like Christian theology, an attempt to get in touch with something larger than ourselves. So to accept Santayana’s view, as I do, is to repudiate the tradition that Heidegger called ontotheology. That repudiation means ceasing to ask both metaphysical questions about the ground or the source of our ideals and epistemological questions about how one can be certain that one has chosen the correct ideal."

"An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion" by Richard Rorty..: https://a.co/0yxfx9t