Can anything ground a moral obligation that actually binds?

There is a gap in the middle of every moral argument, and it is always in the same place. One side establishes, often very well, what is good — what human beings are for, what maximises well-being, what God commands, what a life well-lived looks like. Then it takes a step, usually without noticing, from that is good to you are therefore obligated to pursue it. The step is where the argument is doing its real work, and it is almost never argued for.

This page is about that step. It works through the strongest attempts on several sides — Eastern Orthodox, naturalist, and Sunni Muslim — and reports the same finding each time, which is what makes the finding interesting rather than partisan.

The honest position at the end is unusual and worth stating up front. It is not that one side wins. It is that the demand itself may be the wrong demand, that a revised demand has been drafted which several accounts might actually meet, and that nobody has yet signed off on the revision. So the older, harder question stands: unanswered, by everyone.

The demand, stated exactly

What has to be shown is a categorical obligation: a reason binding on a rational agent that is not reducible to any of the following.

Two clarifications matter, because both are routinely lost.

Binding is not compulsion. An obligation that could not be refused would not be an obligation; it would be a mechanism. Every account discussed here allows that people do in fact refuse. The question is whether the refusal is a wrong or merely a deviation.

”Ought” here is moral, not merely epistemic. “You ought not contradict yourself if you want to be understood” is a rule of a game you are already playing. “You ought not torture the innocent” is claimed to hold whether or not you have signed up for anything. It is the second that is at issue.

Why the gap does not close by itself

The classic statement is Hume’s: from a set of claims about what is, no claim about what ought to be follows, unless an ought is already among the premises. The modern form of the objection, sharper for present purposes, comes from John McDowell and Matthias Haase, and it is best put as a move rather than a doctrine.

Grant any amount of teleology. Grant that human beings have a nature, that the nature has a proper functioning, and that some ways of living fulfil it while others wreck it. The agent can still step back and ask: why should I do what humans do? The question is not stupid, and it is not answered by repeating the facts about human nature more loudly. Every fact you add is another is.

This is what makes the problem hard for everyone. It is not a puzzle about whether there are moral truths. It is a puzzle about how any truth of any kind gets to bind someone who declines to be bound.

Naturalism hits it first

Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape is the most prominent recent attempt to get morality out of facts alone. The good, on his account, is the well-being of conscious creatures; well-being is a fact about brains and lives; so moral truths are ordinary empirical truths and science can in principle settle them.

The physicist Sean Carroll’s response to that argument is the cleanest available statement of the gap. Harris does not derive his starting point; he bootstraps it. Somewhere near the beginning an axiom is quietly installed — that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and to be avoided — and everything else is downstream of it. Once you have granted that axiom you certainly can do science about how to satisfy it. But the axiom is exactly the thing in dispute, and it is not itself a scientific finding. Harris’s argument establishes what follows if you already accept the goal. It does not establish the goal.

The reason to open with this is not to score a point against naturalism. It is that the identical structure shows up in every theological account examined below. Recognising the shape of the failure in a position one does not hold makes it much harder to miss in a position one does.

What Orthodoxy actually offers

The strongest Orthodox materials on this question are not modern apologetics but Maximus the Confessor, writing in the seventh century, and they are considerably richer than the popular summaries suggest. Three things in particular.

A teleology of motion. Created rational beings are not static things with purposes attached; they are things in motion toward an end.

If, then, rational creatures are created beings, then surely they are subject to motion, since they are moved from their natural beginning in being, toward a voluntary end in well-being. For the end of the motion of things that are moved is to rest within eternal well-being itself, just as their beginning was being itself, which is God, who is the giver of being and the bestower of the grace of well-being, for He is the beginning and the end.¹

A constitutive principle for each thing. Every creature exists according to a logos — an eternal principle of what it is and is for, contained in the divine Word. To live according to it is not to obey an external rule; it is to be oneself.

It follows, then, that each of the intellective and rational beings, whether angels or men, insofar as it has been created in accordance with the logos that exists in and with God, is and is called a “portion of God,” precisely because of that logos… If such a being moves according to its logos, it comes to be in God — in whom its logos of being preexists — as its Origin and Cause.²

A real and costly freedom to refuse. Maximus does not soften this. The deviation is described as a fall away from reality itself:

…he enters a condition of unstable deviations, suffering fearful disorders of soul and body… by freely choosing to turn in the direction of what is inferior… though such a person had it well within his power to direct the footsteps of his soul to God, he freely chose to exchange what is better and real for what is inferior and nonexistent.³

To this, later Orthodox theology adds theosis — deification — as the content of the end. The good a person is aimed at is not a pleasant state and not a legal acquittal. It is real participation in the uncreated life of God: becoming by grace what God is by nature, short of identity of essence. And because communion is personal, it cannot be coerced; free consent is part of what is being aimed at. Vladimir Lossky’s formulation is that God “becomes powerless before human freedom; he cannot violate it since it flows from his own omnipotence.”⁴

This matters, and it should be conceded fully before any criticism. Theosis is not a rebranding of “I like flourishing.” It is categorically distinct from a preference, because ascetic practice frequently hurts and is undertaken anyway. It is categorically distinct from a reward scheme, because the thing aimed at is union rather than payoff. It is richer than Aristotelian flourishing, because what is on offer is not the excellence proper to a kind of animal but participation in uncreated life. Whatever else is true, the objection “that is just preference with incense” fails.

Testing the strongest Orthodox reading

The question is whether that ontology yields the binding step. Three readings are worth building at full strength, because all three are genuinely motivated by the texts rather than invented for the purpose.

The constitutive reading. Because a rational creature is a being whose principle of well-being is virtuous motion toward God, “live according to your principle” is not an external command. It is the practical form of being that kind of creature at all.

The self-destruction reading. Deviation is not naughtiness. On Maximus’s own description, it exchanges “what is better and real for what is inferior and nonexistent.” No rational agent can coherently will its own unmaking.

The divine-will reading. Maximus, following Dionysius, identifies the constitutive principles of things with God’s own wills:

Saint Dionysios the Areopagite teaches us that Scripture calls these logoi “predeterminations” and “divine wills.”… we say that He knows beings as His own wills… In each case, the voluntary decision to move either in accord with the will and logos of God or against it prepared each person to hear the divine voice.⁵

And elsewhere Christ is named the author of natural law, of written law and of the law of grace alike, and the judge of those who live under them.⁶ If divine will obligates, then living against one’s own principle is living against God’s will, and the bridge is built.

Now run each against the step-back question.

The constitutive reading does not close it. Maximus describes what well-being is and what virtue is. He never argues that it therefore categorically obligates. The strongest normative language in the text — “honouring” the principles and “acting in accordance with” them — remains inside the teleological description.

The self-destruction reading yields real motivational force but not a closed bridge. Showing that deviation tends toward disorder gives a reason to anyone who already cares about their own flourishing. It does not answer the person asking why flourishing of this kind is obligatory rather than optional. And Maximus’s own emphasis cuts against the repair: the end in well-being is repeatedly called voluntary, precisely at the point where a binding necessity would be needed.

The divine-will reading relocates the question rather than answering it. “The principles are divine wills” plus “Christ is the lawgiver and judge” yields: if divine will obligates, then conformity obligates. That imports the very premise under dispute. Maximus deploys these claims for cosmology, providence and judgement — not as a derivation of obligation.

One attribution needs correcting here, because it is the point at which the literature over-claims. The Maximus specialist Torstein Tollefsen has said in interview that the constitutive principles are “not simply divine ideas, they’re also certain obligations.” A direct search of the relevant primary texts found no Maximian sentence supporting that stronger word. Maximus speaks of principles, virtue, free choice, well-being, divine wills and natural law. “Obligation” as a derived category is the modern gloss, not the ancient claim. The gloss may well be defensible; it is not yet Maximus.

Does the transcendental argument supply it?

Presuppositional apologetics — the school associated with Jay Dyer and Fr. Deacon Dr. Ananias Sorem — has a distinctive strategy that might get round the whole problem. Rather than deriving an obligation from facts, it argues that certain things must already be true for rational activity to be possible at all, so that denying them is self-defeating. If moral obligation were among those preconditions, then anyone arguing about morality would already be committed to it, and the derivation would be unnecessary.

Two separate questions get run together here, and keeping them apart is essential to reporting this fairly.

First question: is ethics part of what these arguments cover? Emphatically yes, and any summary suggesting otherwise misdescribes the position. Morality is routinely treated as one of the load-bearing domains a worldview must ground, alongside knowledge and metaphysics. Dyer’s opening in his debate with Alex Sezer puts it directly: within the Christian framework one has “a basis” for “objective morals, and ethics” and for “purpose and intentionality in our actions,” and he undertakes to argue “that in order to have a consistent, coherent ethical framework … one does need the existence of a specific type of God … [and] an ability to ground our moral claims in something transcendent.”⁷ Elsewhere he treats ethics as something a rival worldview cannot simply drop and keep debating.

Second question: does denying moral obligation defeat itself, the way denying logic does? This is the narrower and much stronger claim, and it is the one that would close the gap. On the sources examined, it has not been made.

Sorem’s published statements of the argument name their targets explicitly, and morality is not among them: what the argument demonstrates, he writes, is “that there is only one unique condition that will satisfy the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, rationality, logic, and arguments.”⁸ His ethics writing is classroom moral philosophy — consequentialism against Kantian autonomy — and never claims that a critic who denies all categorical obligation has thereby undercut his own critique.

Dyer comes closest, in the Sezer exchange: “we can get an ought from an is where within that is are rational animals who respond to normative reasons… I have a duty and an obligation to God.”⁹ That builds normative responsiveness into the description of what humans are and then asserts the duty. It is not a demonstration that denying moral obligation destroys the conditions of intelligible argument. Dyer also concedes, disarmingly, that if the move from is to ought fails in general then “the religious person is in the same boat.”

So the finding is a pair, and both halves have to be reported together. Ethics is squarely inside the transcendental project. And moral obligation has not been shown to be self-defeating to deny in the way logic is. The second does not imply the first is false, and it has previously been summarised as though it did, which was wrong.

The comparison that was expected to break the tie

A common shortcut in this area runs: Christianity can ground obligation because it has genuine free will, whereas Islam is deterministic and therefore cannot make sense of desert at all. Tested against the actual schools, the shortcut fails, and saying so is a requirement of applying one rubric to everyone.

“Islam” is not one position on human acts. Classical Sunni theology contains at least three live families, and the strongest of them is not the easiest.

Ashʿarī acquisition. God alone creates every act; the human being nonetheless acquires it through a created power concurrent with the act, and responsibility attaches to the acquisition. This is offered as a middle path between hard determinism and the view that humans create their own acts. It carries a real internal cost — the later theologian al-Juwaynī is reported to have dismissed the key term as “a mere word, without reference to any meaning” — but it is a theory of responsibility, not a denial of it.

Māturīdī free choice. This is the strongest rival, and it is structurally much closer to Orthodox synergy than the caricature allows. Al-Māturīdī develops a concurrentist rather than an occasionalist account: God creates the volitional power, and that power is a genuine cause of the act, with the human freely choosing obedience or its opposite. In Ramon Harvey’s translation, volitional power “is created for the action and it is the cause of it being freely chosen and not compelled,” and command and prohibition presuppose exactly that the same power could have gone the other way.¹⁰

Set that beside the Orthodox account — God creates real secondary causes; evil is privation and misuse rather than divine authorship; deification is synergistic and uncoerced — and the two are doing recognisably similar work at recognisably similar cost. Both affirm God-created powers, real free choice and genuine desert. Both leave the mechanics of sovereignty-plus-freedom partly mysterious.

The verdict on the comparison is therefore costs on both sides, not a win. And the claim that Orthodoxy uniquely closes the obligation gap by having libertarian freedom does not survive either: free will makes refusal possible, which is a precondition of obligation, not a source of it.

The other move: the question may be wrong

Everything above assumes the demand as originally stated. There is a serious case that the demand smuggles in a worldview of its own.

The argument runs like this. Asking a religious tradition to derive a binding ought in a metaphysically neutral frame — while every rival is permitted to underwrite its own norms from its own metaphysics — is not a neutral request. It is a request shaped by one particular meta-ethic, in which nothing counts as obligation unless it binds an agent who has stepped entirely outside every account of the good. If Orthodoxy is granted for the sake of argument, then refusing the order one is made for is not a coherent outsider stance calmly declining an optional extra. It is misuse of the rational creature — the practical equivalent of refusing to steer while driving. On that view, demanding a further binder after the constitutive end has been granted is asking why one should be practically rational about one’s own real good, which is not a missing premise but a confused question.

That is a real correction of the question’s shape and should not be waved away. But it is a revision of the standard, and a revision has obligations of its own. A replacement standard has been drafted: a worldview succeeds here if its account of the good, freedom and practical reason coheres without special pleading; if it describes reality as it is, including a constitutive human end, genuine freedom to refuse, and a real cost to refusing; and if rival accounts can be shown to fail the same three tests. Crucially, every rival must then be scored under that same revised standard, the older demand must stay visible as declined rather than quietly deleted, and the surviving residual must be disclosed rather than buried.

None of that has happened yet. No person has adopted the revision. And the residual is genuine: a critic can grant the metaphysics verbally and still deny that rationality consists in fidelity to a constitutive end. Under the original demand that objection is live. Under the revised one it would be scored as a failure of the critic’s own account — but only once the revision is actually adopted and applied to everyone.

This is why this page carries the status it does. It is not “we are still thinking.” It is: a specific, written proposal to change the standard is sitting on the desk, and until a human being signs it, the old standard governs and remains unmet.

What would close this

Two distinct routes, and it is worth being clear that they are different achievements.

Closing under the original demand requires showing that a rational agent who disowns the good is nonetheless bound — and doing so without smuggling a value ranking into the description of the facts, which is the move that sank the naturalist attempt, and without collapsing back into “fulfil your nature,” which the step-back question has already survived. The most promising unexplored route is the transcendental one: a worked demonstration that the practice of giving and demanding reasons presupposes binding obligation, so that denying it while arguing is self-defeating. That argument has not been made in the sources examined, and it is not obviously unmakeable.

Closing under a revised demand requires four things that cost nothing but discipline: writing the new standard down before applying it; showing the account meets it; scoring every rival against the identical standard; and never describing the result as having answered the original question. That last point is not pedantry. An audience told “the obligation problem is solved” will hear the original claim, and will be right to feel misled if what was actually done was change the subject.

Where this leaves the question

Open, and awaiting a human decision rather than more research.

What has been established is worth keeping. The Orthodox account of the good is substantially richer than its critics allow, and the standard dismissal — that it reduces to preference or to fear of punishment — is simply false; participation in uncreated life is neither. The transcendental tradition does treat ethics as load-bearing, and any summary claiming otherwise is wrong. The Islamic rival is far stronger than the popular version, and the free-will shortcut against it does not work.

What has not been established is the binding step, by anybody. Maximus supplies the ontology without the derivation. The transcendental argument supplies the self-defeat structure for knowledge and logic but has not been extended to obligation. Naturalism bootstraps. Islamic theology reaches the same wall from a different direction.

That the failure is so evenly distributed is itself the most useful result on this page. When four independent traditions with nothing in common fail at the same step in the same way, the reasonable inference is not that all four are careless. It is that the step may have been mis-specified — which is exactly what the revised standard proposes, and exactly why the revision needs a person to adjudicate it rather than an argument to settle it.

References

References

1. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7.10, in Maximos Constas, trans., On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. 1 (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library / Harvard University Press, 2014); Patrologia Graeca 91:1073C. ↩

2. Maximus, Ambiguum 7.17, Constas translation; PG 91:1080C. ↩

3. Maximus, Ambiguum 7.23, Constas translation; PG 91:1085A. ↩

4. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, as summarised by Donald Fairbairn in Themelios. Georges Florovsky’s parallel formulation is that God “has freely willed a synergistic path of redemption in which man must spiritually participate.” ↩

5. Maximus, Ambiguum 7.24, Constas translation; PG 91:1085A–C. ↩

6. Maximus, Questions to Thalassios 19.2, in Maximos Constas, trans., On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (Fathers of the Church 136, Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 137–139. Note that Maximus sometimes uses “natural law” for the fallen law of the flesh rather than the law inscribed in creation; the usage here is the creator-and-lawgiver sense. ↩

7. Jay Dyer, opening statement in debate with Alex Sezer, at approximately 00:10–00:19; quotations condensed from the transcript held in the underlying research file. ↩

8. Ananias Sorem, “An Orthodox Theory of Knowledge: The Epistemological and Apologetic Methods of the Church Fathers,” Patristic Faith. ↩

9. Dyer, in the same debate, at approximately 01:09–01:10. ↩

10. Ramon Harvey, “Al-Māturīdī on the Cause (sabab) and Human Action,” translating and discussing Kitāb al-tawḥīd. On the Ashʿarī side, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought,” §1.2, and Ayman Shihadeh’s work on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī; the al-Juwaynī remark is reported by Shihadeh (2006). ↩