Moral System
Section 3 - VI.
Religious sanction its necessity
214. Rousseau said: `Philosophers, your precepts are fine, but show me their sanction. It is a well known fact that morality does not find a sufficient sanction in nature, and that only the rewards and punishments of the future life can constitute such a sanction.(142) We have already noted that the only way to refute Carneades sophistry (by which he tried to show that a human being would have to be stupid in order to be just) is recourse to the punishments and rewards of the future life.(143) This would in fact be sufficient to demonstrate the immense importance of religion for human morality. Hence religious belief was correctly considered the sole condition capable of making morality universally real for humanity and the only sufficient guarantee of mutual rights.(144)
Notes
(142) The word `sanction', derived from [the Latin] `sanctum, sanctitas' [that which is holy, holiness] would seem to contain an ancient way of indicating a belief that the `sanction' of laws and rights properly speaking appertains to religion itself.
(143) Lactantius writes: `Those who reject the mystery of humanity and relate everything to this temporal life, cannot know how powerful justice is. They admit in their discussions that virtue is full of misery and trouble, but say it must be desired for its own sake, since they do not see any eternal rewards for it. Because everything is related to this present life, they reduce virtue to STUPIDITY. Virtue labours pointlessly and vainly in this life' (D. Institutionum, 5: 8).
(144) Some consider sanction as a constitutive element of right and refuse to recognise any right which lacks a corresponding sanction. I consider this opinion erroneous. However, we should note the strange, obvious incongruence of some writers who, after placing sanction among the constitutive elements of right, exclude all religion from the teaching on right. To be coherent they should have done the opposite. If their only sufficient sanction for rights lies in the punishments and rewards of the other life, it is clear that in their very way of thinking religious sanction has become a constitutive of human rights. Consequently no right can exist without religion.
In Italy, Romagnosi included sanction in the definition of right and, not satisfied with this, made the authority of natural right itself consist in sanction. He says: `We have already seen that the predominant, essential characteristic of any law consists in establishing the necessity for doing or omitting something. Whenever a natural law is affirmed for human beings, a higher order of causes and forces is considered to exist in nature. Through these causes and forces we are bound to do or omit certain free acts as indispensable means towards obtaining something better and avoiding something worse (§1 and 2). The strength of law consists in the power by which it establishes this necessity.
The authority of the natural law therefore consists in this higher force which is able to produce something good or evil as part of certain human acts in such a way that human power, wishing to obtain good and avoid evil, is constrained to obey this authority of nature' (Assunto Primo etc., §4). — Clearly Romagnosi did not have a correct idea of right and law. He turns to physical necessity to explain the obligation, and posits the authority of natural law in this necessity. He was totally unaware therefore of the nature of moral necessity, the real authority of law, by which law binds souls, not bodies, with a bond whose nature differs from that of physical force. Physical force, no matter how great we conceive it, could never bind in this way, nor release the intelligent soul it might have already bound.
Romagnosi's mind saw only real things. He vainly tried to rise to the world of ideas but always fell back on physical reality. We must not attribute this to mental debility but to the false school of the period in which he was educated. The sensism of Bonnet trapped him in material sensations from which his natural powers could not extricate him.