Moral imperatives

Nietzsche, Kant, and many others before and since have spoken of morality as a matter of precepts, laws, commands, imperatives, or rules.

For some philosophers this is not a mere common manner of speaking, as common as moral declarations such as "stealing is wrong" or "parents and their children have duties toward one another."

Instead, in their view, declarations that something or other is right, wrong, or whatever are secondary, mere reports of the more fundamental moral phenomenon that such things are forbidden by moral rules.

Hence the view, for instance, that “murder is wrong” means the same thing as “murder is forbidden,” and that the latter asserts the existence of an authoritative, moral prohibition equivalent to the rule, “Do not murder.”

But which, then, are the moral rules?

Which are the ones that are authoritative?

Why, the ones it is wrong to disobey, of course.

And so we are back again with a morality founded, not in commands or rules, but in illusory declarations of what is right, wrong, or a duty.

Illusory, I say, in the way I have described in other posts labeled "amoralism."