Schopenhauer's Rejection of the Moral Ought

Kant’s statement expresses the still widely accepted view that morality takes a prescriptive form: it concerns what in some sense ought to happen, even if it never does happen. An ought, Kant tells us earlier in the Groundwork, is that through which an imperative is expressed, and an imperative is the formula of a command or law (of reason) (G 4:413). Morality is thus from this perspective a system of oughts, imperatives, commands, laws. And on the common view, as on Kant’s, these oughts or imperatives of morality are thought to bind us in a particularly strong fashion, that is, categorically or absolutely. In short, they tell us what we must do, or must not do, come what may. This conception of morality as a system of categorically binding oughts or imperatives has more recently come under fire, perhaps most notably at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) and Philippa Foot (1972). To my mind, however, the most forceful and most interesting critique of the prescriptive conception of morality, though one not so well known today, was advanced more than a century earlier by Arthur Schopenhauer, first in his The World as Will and Representation (1818) and more fully in his unsuccessful prize-essay On the Basis of Morality (1839). My aim here will be to reconstruct and sharpen his critique, and to argue that it does in fact cast serious doubt on the prescriptivist conception of morality. I understand Schopenhauer’s critique to consist of four main objections. According to the first, which I consider in Section 1, Kant begs the question by merely assuming that ethics has a prescriptive or legislative-imperative form, when a purely descriptive conception such as Schopenhauer’s also presents itself as a possibility. In Section 2, I set the stage for the remaining objections by elucidating, sharpening, and