becoming more human by becoming more godlike 351
or the disinterested universality of duty to others, as the solution. Such
a view amounts to a threefold mistake.
It is a mistake, fi rst, because the constraint of universality never suf-
fi ces to single out one course of action against others. It is always com-
patible with many. It gains content only if this content is in de pen dently
chosen for other reasons and motives, and then expressed retrospec-
tively in the language of universality. Consider, by comparison, the
Marxist idea of ideology: the interests of a class must be represented as
universal interests of humanity to acquire the force of legitimation. It is
true that to win the authority that comes with universality, they must
allow themselves to be constrained in some way. We may have hoped to
infer our truest interests (without knowing anything about them) only
from the idea of universality itself. We are in fact, however, able to infer
from this idea only what we fi rst secretly placed in it. Th is secret place-
ment is the chief operational signifi cance of the moral meta- theories.
It is a mistake, second, because the choice of altruism as the or ga niz ing
principle of the moral life, although a common move among the world
religions, is a belief that the struggle with the world rejected— rightly, as I
earlier argued. It rejected this belief in the sacred voice of its theological
teachings as well as in the profane voice of romanticism. In the dialectic
between the idea of man as the infi nite imprisoned within the fi nite and
the notion of the primacy of love over altruism as the or ga niz ing principle
of the moral life, this approach to existence established a deeper vision of
humanity. Th is view acquired substance and infl uence by helping inform
the revolutionary projects of po liti cal and personal emancipation that
have shaken the whole world over the last several centuries. Th e return to
the idea of the predominance of the problem of altruism, affi rmed in the
roughly equivalent languages of Benthamite and Kantian doctrines,
represents an attempt to step back from this revolution and to dilute its
message. Rather than arguing for this pietistic reaction, the counter-
revolutionaries of moral theory disguise reaction as rationality.
It is a mistake, third, because our ideas of obligation work in fact—
that is to say, they acquire meaning and direction— only by being em-
bedded fi rst in latent, inarticulate, undeveloped, and undefended but
nevertheless comprehensive views of who we are and of how we fi t into
the world and then in conceptions of society, together with the institu-
tional programs enacting them.