¹ In this essay, the term “cardinal” is used in the first sense given in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2d ed., 1960)Google Scholar: “of basic importance; main; chief; as, cardinal principles.”

² Anscombe, G. E. M., “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (January 1958): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ For ease in identifying references to God, and following traditional usage, pronouns and other terms referring to God are capitalized.

⁴ In this essay, “prudence” is used to identify seeking one's own welfare and the welfare of those for whom one is most concerned. As Kant puts it, “Skill in the choice of means to one's own highest welfare can be called prudence in the narrowest sense.” Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 33 [Akademie edition, IV.416]Google Scholar.

⁵ Much has been written addressing the issue of moral pluralism. See, for example, Harman, Gilbert, Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wong, David B., Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Wong, David B., Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For my early arguments on this matter, see Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “Can Ethics Take Pluralism Seriously?” Hastings Center Report 19 (September 1989), 33–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁶ “And His righteousness is to children's children, to such as keep His covenant” (LXX Psalm 102:17–18).

⁷ For a recent defense of the rationality of affirming the existence of God, see Swinburne, Richard, Faith and Reason, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ The crowning of Charles the Great created a distinctively Western cultural domain set off against that which had previously constituted a united Christian empire and culture. The crowning was a historically momentous event. “The coronation of Charles is not only the central event of the Middle Ages, it is also one of those very few events of which, taking them singly, it may be said that if they had not happened, the history of the world would have been different.” Bryce, James, “The Coronation as a Revival of the Roman Empire in the West,” in The Coronation of Charlemagne, ed. Sullivan, Richard E. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1959), 41Google Scholar. The coronation was followed by the excommunication in a.d. 867 of Pope Nicholas I by St. Photios the Great of Constantinople. Subsequently, a stronger Western empire and a stronger papacy emerged when Pope John XII crowned Otto the Great. The “reforms” of Pope Gregory VII solidified a Western viewpoint nurturing cultural grounds for what became the Western European synthesis of Christian thought and philosophy.

⁹ Vattimo, Gianni, The End of Modernity, ed. Snyder, Jon (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 31Google Scholar.

¹⁰ “Four types of execution were given to the court: stoning, burning, decapitation with a sword, and strangulation.” Maimonides, Moses, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Sanhedrin V'Haonshin Hamesurim Lahem 14.1 (New York: Moznaim, 2001), 104Google Scholar.

¹¹ As an example of the salience of moral pluralism, one should note that the place of individually oriented consent in medical treatment is not unchallenged, even within “Western” bioethics. Indeed, within Western health care policy, a larger role for family authority exists than might at first blush have been expected, given the widespread surface endorsement of respect for individual autonomy and choice as a right-making condition. See, for example, Cherry, Mark and Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “Informed Consent in Texas: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29, no. 2 (2004): 237–52CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For an introduction to East Asian perspectives on such matters, see Cong, Yali, “Doctor-Family-Patient Relationship: The Chinese Paradigm of Informed Consent,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29, no. 2 (2004): 149–78CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Fan, Ruiping and Li, Benfu, “Truth Telling in Medicine: The Confucian View,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29, no. 2 (2004): 179–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Fan, Ruiping and Tao, Julia, “Consent to Medical Treatment: The Complex Interplay of Patients, Families, and Physicians,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29, no. 2 (2004): 139–48CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Fan, Ruiping, “Which Care? Whose Responsibility? And Why Family? A Confucian Account of Long-Term Care for the Elderly,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 32, no. 5 (September–October 2007): 495–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² A sampling of contemporary moral diversity at the level of both community life and philosophical reflection on morality is offered by East Asian moral reflections that differ among themselves and from dominant European and North American moral perspectives. See, for example, Alora, Angeles Tan and Lumitao, Josephine M., eds., Beyond a Western Bioethics: Voices from the Developing World (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Po-wah, Julia Tao Lai, ed., Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the (Im)Possibility of Global Bioethics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., and Rasmussen, L. M., eds., Bioethics and Moral Content: National Traditions of Health Care Morality (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Qiu, Ren-Zong, ed., Bioethics: Asian Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fan, Ruiping, Reconstructionist Confucianism: Morality after the West (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹³ of Alexandria, Clement, “The Stromata,” Book 2, chapter IV, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 2, p. 350Google Scholar.

¹⁴ For an overview of Agrippa's pente tropoi, his five ways of showing that controversies, such as those regarding the canonical content of morality, cannot be resolved by sound rational argument, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Pyrrho 9, 88–89. See also Sextus Empiricus, “Outlines of Pyrrhonism,” I.15.164–69.

¹⁵ A moral framework grounded in permission can, by default, function as a practice into which moral agents can enter independently of any particular content-full morality (i.e., without affirming or assuming a particular ordering of primary goods). Such a moral framework underlies the market. This moral framework, anchored in actual permission, functions as a transcendental framework. It provides the necessary conditions for a general human practice that allows participants to act with an authority derived from their common agreement. This practice will thus implicitly include the agreement only to use each other with permission. Permission, in the sense of authorization, creates a web of moral authority. But this perspective does not establish an obligation to enter this practice based on the goodness or the rightness of always acting morally in this way. Only “within” the practice is there a sense of rightness and wrongness. See Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., The Foundations of Bioethics, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For a classic overview of the biological basis of moral inclinations, see Wilson, Edward O., Sociobiology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1975), chap. 5Google Scholar.

¹⁷ The issue in the background is not just whether God approves of the good because it is good or whether the good is good because God approves of it (the issue that Plato raises in the Euthyphro). The matter is more complicated, because there is the further question as to whether the correct ranking of the good is the one endorsed by God because it is the correct ranking, or whether it is correct because God affirms it as correct. Then there is the more profound question as to whether, given an omnipotent Creator God, one can make adequate sense of the good, the right, and the virtuous without reference to this God. Is it possible, absent reference to the Holy (that is, to God) to make sense of a dependent, created universe, including the morality that should structure relationships within such a universe, without reference to the Creator? See Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “The Euthyphro's Dilemma Reconsidered: A Variation on a Theme from Brody on Halakhic Method,” in Pluralistic Casuistry, ed. Cherry, Mark and Iltis, Ana (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 109–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ A traditional interpretation of Confucian moral thought requires one to weigh one's obligations to the good of one's family, friends, close associates, and community higher than one's obligations to distant and especially anonymous others. See, for example, Ruiping Fan, “Which Care? Whose Responsibility? And Why Family?”

¹⁹ Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, Metaphysik (Stoughton, WI: Books on Demand, 2004)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 391–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also 3–4.

²¹ The critical works of Kant refer to those published beginning with the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, which critically bring into question what had been the taken-for-granted understanding of epistemology, metaphysics, and morality in Western European philosophy.

²² Kant, Immanuel, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp (London: Macmillan, 1964), 553, A672=B700Google Scholar. Emphasis is in the original unless otherwise noted.

²³ Ibid., A675=B703.

²⁴ Kant, The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Akademie ed., IV.414.

²⁵ Kant, , Opus Postumum, ed. Förster, Eckart, trans. Förster, Eckart and Rosen, Michael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 204, 22:122–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (The text breaks off after “law-giving.”)

²⁶ Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 6.

²⁷ Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Akademie ed., IV.433.

²⁸ Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 133–34, Akademie ed., V.129–30Google Scholar.

²⁹ Kant, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 639, A811–12=B838–39.

³⁰ Ibid., 640, A813=B841.

³¹ Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 119, Akademie ed., V.115.

³² Ibid., 137, Akademie ed., V.133.

³³ Hegel's reference to the death of God is not without controversy. For some further reflections on the matter, see Amengual, Gabriel, “Nihilismus und Gottesbegriff,” in Hegel-Jahrbuch (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 38–44Google Scholar; and Franke, William, “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-Secular Postmodernity,” Religion and the Arts 11, no. 2 (2007): 214–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, secs. 258–60. “Category” in this essay is used in the first sense given in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2d ed., 1960)Google Scholar: “an ultimate concept or form of thought; one of the primary fundamental conceptions to which all knowledge can be reduced.” Although the state is the highest category of Sittlichkeit, the highest category of the state is world history, that is, the transition to Absolute Spirit within which philosophy is the highest category.

³⁵ In his account of moral categories, Hegel begins with an abstract account of rights claims and then shows that this discourse is one-sided and incomplete without an account of the good that he addresses under the rubric Moralität. Hegel then creates a distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit, thus fashioning a new terminology for his moral philosophy. As Michael Inwood notes, “All three German words for ‘morality’ derive from a word for ‘custom’: Ethik is from the Greek ethos, Moralität from the Latin mos (plural: mores), and Sittlichkeit from the German Sitte. But only in the case of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’) does Hegel stress this genealogy: Ethik has little significance for him, but is occasionally used to cover both Sittlichkeit and Moralität. Moralität is regularly used for ‘individual morality’, especially as conceived by Kant.” Inwood, Michael, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The difficulty that Moralität poses and that Sittlichkeit solves is the problem of establishing canonical moral content. Moralität seeks but fails to establish particular content-full moral obligations as canonical. The content of morality, Hegel argues, is necessarily contingent, sociohistorically conditioned. As with all actuality, for Hegel there is a necessary dimension of contingency. Abstract right and Moralität must therefore be understood within the particularity and contingent content of Sittlichkeit, which takes shape within a family, a civil society, and a state.

³⁶ Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Wood, Allen W., trans. Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 157, sec. 130Google Scholar. The Latin derives from the famous phrase “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (“Let there be justice, though the world perish”).

³⁷ Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 162, sec. 135.

³⁸ Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 107f., sec. 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 279, sec. 258 Addition.

⁴⁰ Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, secs. 244, 247.

⁴¹ Hegel, G. W. F., Faith and Knowledge, trans. Cerf, Walter and Harris, H. S. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 190[414]Google Scholar. The number in square brackets refers to the critical edition of Hegel's work: Hegel, , Gesammelte Werke, ed. Buchner, Hartmut and Pöggeler, Otto (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968)Google Scholar.

⁴² The nonmetaphysical account of Hegel's project, which this essay embraces, understands Hegel's mature project as an attempt to appreciate categorial thought, to understand how one can think about thinking about being. Hegel's project is the examination and ordering of the ways that thought apprehends being and being is for thought. This account underlying this essay is deeply indebted to the work of Klaus Hartmann. See, for example, Hartmann, Klaus, “On Taking the Transcendental Turn,” Review of Metaphysics 20, no. 2 (1966): 223–49Google Scholar; Hartmann, Klaus, ed., Die Ontologische Option (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartmann, Klaus, “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel, ed. MacIntyre, Alasdair (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 101–24Google Scholar; and Pinkard, Terry, “What Is the Non-Metaphysical Reading of Hegel? A Reply to F. Beiser,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 34 (1996): 13–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., and Pinkard, Terry, eds., Hegel Reconsidered (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ For an introduction to some of the controversies regarding what Hegel really meant about God, see Brinkmann, Klaus, “Panthéisme, panlogisme et protestantisme dans la philosophie de Hegel,” in Les Philosophes et la question de Dieu, ed. Langlois, Luc (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 223–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, William, “Hegel's God, Transcendence, and the Counterfeit Double: A Figure of Dialectical Equivocity?” Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 91–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Desmond, William, Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)Google Scholar; Hodgson, Peter C., “Hegel's God: Counterfeit or Real?” Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 153–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Houlgate, Stephen, “Hegel, Desmond, and the Problem of God's Transcendence,” Owl of Minerva 36, no. 2 (2005): 131–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lauer, Quentin, Hegel's Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Kreines, James, “Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant's Epistemic Limits and Hegel's Ambitions,” Inquiry 50, no. 3 (June 2007): 306–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nichols, Craig M., “The Eschatological Theogony of the God Who May Be: Exploring the Concept of Divine Presence in Kearney, Hegel, and Heidegger,” Metaphilosophy 36, no. 5 (October 2005): 750–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Olson, Alan M., Hegel and the Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 109 [413].

⁴⁵ Hegel, G. W. F., “Glauben und Wissen,” Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, Band 2, no. 1 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1802) [325]Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ “Noetic” is used in the adjectival form of the second sense given in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2d ed., 1960)Google Scholar: “cognition, esp. through direct and self-evident knowledge.”

⁴⁷ See Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “Critical Reflections on Theology's Handmaid,” Philosophy and Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 53–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ At the close of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in the third part (“The Philosophy of Mind”) in the section on “Philosophy,” Hegel states: “This notion of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the truth aware of itself….” Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. Wallace, William (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 313, sec. 574Google Scholar. Hegel considers philosophy to be the esoteric study of God (ibid., sec. 573). Indeed, Hegel's point is that philosophers philosophizing are God. Here Hegel recasts, shorn of metaphysical foundation, Aristotle's account of the life of the unmoved Mover, God, which is the life of thought thinking itself: “And thought in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thought in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the substance, is thought.” Aristotle, , Metaphysics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes, Jonathan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2, 1695, 1072b18–22Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Kalkavage, Peter, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2008), 455Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Kaufmann, Walter, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966)Google Scholar; Althaus, Horst, Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Tarsh, Michael (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 254.

⁵¹ On this point, Kaufmann quotes Heinrich Heine's (1797–1856) report about an evening with Hegel:

For a slightly different translation of this passage, see Heine, Heinrich, Heinrich Heine's Memoirs from his Works, Letters, and Conversations, ed. Karpeles, Gustav, trans. Cannan, Gilbert (London: Heinemann, 1910), 114Google Scholar.

⁵² Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, 298, sec. 564.

⁵³ Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 191 [414].

⁵⁴ Western Christianity began its journey to Hegel's philosophical domestication and recasting of God when, from the early second millennium, it began to presuppose an analogy (i.e., an analogia entis) between what human moral rationality could know about created being and the being of God. This move allowed Western culture to assume that philosophical accounts of natural law and discursive accounts of philosophical rationality could substitute for the perspective of God. For an account of how different this Western position was from that of the original Christianity, see Bradshaw, David, Aristotle East and West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Philosophy was assumed to be able to discover and lay out a moral perspective that was the same as the perspective of God. In time, this led to recasting God in terms of philosophy's interests. For an account of the quite different original Christian epistemology, grounded in a noetic experience of God, see Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Salem, MA: Scrivener Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Engelhardt, , “Sin and Bioethics: Why a Liturgical Anthropology Is Foundational,” Christian Bioethics 11, no. 2 (August 2005): 221–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Engelhardt, , “What Is Christian about Christian Bioethics? Metaphysical, Epistemological, and Moral Differences,” Christian Bioethics 11, no. 3 (December 2005): 241–53CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Engelhardt, “Critical Reflections on Theology's Handmaid.”

⁵⁵ John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 3, “Of the Ultimate Sanction of the Principle of Utility.”

⁵⁶ Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, secs. 430–37. In his treatment of “Phenomenology of Mind” in the Encyclopedia (he also treats the issue in his book The Phenomenology of Mind), Hegel examines the struggle for recognition under an encounter that initially leads to a master and a slave, but that culminates in the emergence of a universal self-consciousness, a step on the way to morality.

⁵⁷ Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, sec. 130.

⁵⁸ Hegel put the matter of categorial change in this fashion: “All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.” Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. Petry, Michael John (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), 202, sec. 246 AdditionGoogle Scholar. For Hegel, when categories change, reality changes, because there is no independent perspective beyond our categories, save our categorial reflections on the categories (which thought about thought is Absolute Spirit), that could serve as an independent and objective standard. Hegel with malice aforethought has attempted to deflate any acknowledgment of the existence and perspective of the transcendent God, so as firmly to place reality within his categorial account.