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• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
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• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
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• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
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• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
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• V: Planning
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• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
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• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

Why Be Moral?

Frank Snare

• Australian National University

“Dissolving the Moral Contract.” Philosophy 52 (1977): 301–312.

How can we best answer the assault on natural morality posed by the “immoralist's” question: “Why should I be just?” Snare argues that there is really nothing to say to the immoralist. The appropriate response is to consider him beyond the bounds of the moral community and outside the “moral contract.” We can have no understanding with the immoralist. In ordinary contracts, when one party does not honor his obligation, the other party is discharged from fulfilling his obligations through breach of contract. Analogously, morality is like a contract. We have no obligation to anyone who does not live up to the obligations of morality. People belonging to a community and legal system should not take the law into their own hands (this claim resembles Locke's assertion that joining political society requires everyone to surrender the right to judge or punish others).

If the immoralist asks what “interested” reasons he has for being moral, we might ask, just as rhetorically, what moral reasons we have for tolerating immoralists. Why must we entertain the immoralist and his question with politeness, for example? We do better to treat him “...as we do any natural threat such as a flood, or an earthquake, or fire. We avoid them, divert them, destroy them—when we are not ourselves destroyed. In the immoralist's case we can, in addition, employ argumentation, but only as a means of manipulation and control.”

Another approach to this same question “Why be moral?” appears in John Hosper's book Human Conduct: Problems of Ethics [Shorter edition, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961, 1972, pp. 174–198].