Laws are not commands; however, we need not go into their differences here. For both laws and commands presuppose a conception foreign to low morality: that of an external authority capable of imposing a sanction for noncompliance. Commands (from individuals) and laws (from legislatures) are speech acts that are infelicitous unless the utterer is a person (natural or corporate) invested with competent authority to initiate punishment for disobeidence. Further, commander and subordinate, lawgiver and subject, are distinct persons.
None of these features holds in the relation between morality and the moral person, unless metaphorically. The requirement of low morality is not experienced as imposed from without, much less as expressing the will of an external authority. It is more analogous to aesthetic judgment. Guilt or remorse does not feel like the consequence of having disobeyed an authority or of having failed to carry out a command; it is, rather, self-loathing for not living up to the model of humanity that one has put before oneself. This at any rate is how Aristotle and Spinoza looked at the matter, though not how Saint Paul and Saint Augustine did.
But not only does the concept of command involve these three notions—authority, penalty, and externality that are foreign to low morality; it is also the case that command lacks the basic moral character of normativity. Anything that is possible to do can be commanded, and its being good, bad, indifferent, virtuous, or wicked has no effect on its status as command. To equate moral rules to commands is therefore to remove their normative halo. It can then be put back only as Thomas Hobbes did, via the implausible and ad hoc doctrine of “might makes right.”
Wallace Matson, Grand Theories And Everyday Beliefs 188-189 (2011).
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