Obligation that binds regardless of agreement must come from outside agreement

The argument

Proponents of this position start from the character of moral obligation rather than from its content. A moral requirement, as it is ordinarily understood, does not wait on anyone's consent. The person who sees nothing wrong with cruelty is not thereby excused from the prohibition; they are mistaken about it. A whole society that permits an atrocity has not thereby made it permissible. Obligation of this kind binds across refusal, which is precisely what distinguishes it from etiquette, from the rules of a game, and from any arrangement that loses its grip the moment enough people walk away. From that starting point they argue by elimination. If the source of such an obligation were agreement, it would dissolve when agreement was withdrawn, and it does not. If it were preference, it would be answerable to preference, and it is not. If it were the will of whoever holds power, then the tyrant could not be in the wrong, and nearly everyone insists that the tyrant can be. Each candidate source available within human arrangements turns out to be the wrong shape for the job, because each can be revised by the parties it is supposed to bind. What is needed, on this account, is an authority that is not one of the parties. That is what the position supplies. Morality is understood as law in the full sense, issued by a source that stands outside the community it governs and therefore cannot be amended by it. Defenders add that this account explains features of moral experience that otherwise sit oddly together: that we feel addressed rather than merely inclined, that conscience can speak against our own interest and our own culture at once, and that we take the wrongness of certain acts to be discovered rather than decided.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics grant the premise about obligation and dispute the inference. Mathematical truths bind without being anyone's decree, they point out, so unrevisable authority does not by itself require a lawgiver. Others argue that the felt externality of conscience is well explained as internalised social demand, which would feel like an outside voice precisely because it was installed from outside. And they press the old difficulty about the standard: if the content of the law is good because it is commanded, the account seems to make goodness arbitrary, while if it is commanded because it is good, the goodness is doing the work and does not depend on the command.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Not everything within human reach is revisable by it, since the standards governing good reasoning constrain us without having been agreed, and no lawgiver is usually posited for them. [Rejecting P3] An obligation can be unrevisable because of what it is about rather than because of who issued it, as with the requirements of consistency. [Rejecting C] Even granting an external source, a further argument is needed to show that its commanding is what makes an act wrong, rather than its wrongness being what the command tracks.