Or because...

Or because, if we do not, we shall be punished or otherwise harmed by those in power? At a practical level it may be unnecessary and irrelevant to decide between these alternatives.

For if the standards which are in the end held to be justified seem to be equally justified no matter what criteria we employ in judging them, then the argument about the appropriate way of justifying our standards will seem to be of purely theoretical import, matter for sharpening wits in the schools, but irrelevant in the field or the market place. Social change, however, may bring theory out of the schools and not only into the market place but even onto the battle field.

For consider what may happen in a social order where sacred and secular, church and state, king and parliament, or rich and poor fall apart. The criteria that used to return the same answers to the questions, What standards ought I to accept and, What ought I to do? now provide several answers derived from the new competition between rival criteria.

What God commands or is alleged to command, what has the sanctions of power behind it, what is endorsed by legitimate authority, and what appears to lead to the satisfaction of contemporary wants and needs are no longer the same.

That the argument is no longer the same as before may be concealed by the fact that the partisans of different criteria will naturally enough attempt to redefine their rivals out of the field by trying to show with Hobbes that legitimate authority just is victorious power, or with the puritans that what God commands is what we would recognize as satisfying our wants and needs if we were not so totally depraved by sin, or with the royalists that obedience to the king’s legitimate authority is what God commands.

Nonetheless, we can recognize that the criteria have fallen apart; and in recognizing this, we recognize the relevance of a class of question which is at once moral and philosophical. What kind of backing is logically appropriate to moral rules? What kind of warrant do they require? So far we have encountered in the history of ethics at least three main types of answer.