La ley es obligatoria porque dispone hacia un fin común que es el bien natural del hombre
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When we say that hypothetical ought-statements are optional, we have the first kind in mind. They apply to a particular individual, given his desires; if his desires change, then they no longer apply to him. The second kind of ought-statements are still hypothetical, in that they are derived from some end. Nevertheless, they are not hypothetical in the sense that worried Kant. They are based upon an end, but they are not based upon some individual’s desire.1
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The hypothetical necessity imposed upon the will by nature, then, is unlike the threat of the robber. Nature is simply restoring what belongs to it, and thereby removing the private good that the individual has taken for himself Indeed, the contrast between nature and the robber can be deepened. The very will of the individual is part of his nature and has an order to the common good. In other words, the will has an end of its own – independent of the desires of the individual – from which hypothetical ought-statements can be derived; the individual, for instance, should love the good of others.2 If he contradicts these ought-statements, then he takes his will away from nature, using it for his own private purposes.
This will must be restored to its true good, to the good of nature or to the common good; it must come under the use of nature rather than under the private use of this individual; it must be directed by those who have care of the common good, to the shared good rather than to the private good of the individual. This hypothetical necessity imposed upon the will is simply a matter of using the will for its true good.
The hypothetical necessities imposed by society (discussed above) can be given a firmer foundation if human beings are naturally social, that is, if by their nature they belong to society. The end of the Intellect, we have seen, is not simply knowing the truth; it is knowing the truth as a shared good. This sharing, however, is ultimately realized through cooperation with others. The natural inclination of the intellect, then, involves a natural inclination to civil society. The good of civil society is not a mere human convention but is part of nature.
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If an individual wishes to use the club facilities, then the threat of their removal imposes a kind of hypothetical necessity upon him. Likewise, if an individual wants to share in the goods of society, then the rules of society impose a hypothetical necessity upon him. Since everyone wants some of the basic goods of society, such as freedom, social intercourse, and his own life, the rules of society impose a universal hypothetical necessity. Likewise, since everyone wants some of the goods of nature, nature can impose a universal hypothetical necessity.
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Even the sinner wants some of the shared goods; he simply wants them as his own private good, and not as shared. It follows that the removal of the shared good will involve the removal of some of his private goods. The hypothetical necessity that threatens to remove a shared good, then, influences even the private goods of individuals. This universal application is to be expected, since the sinner takes a good that is not his own. He has opted for a personal good, but he has done so by taking a shared good.
Finally, because the will itself is naturally ordered to a shared good, those who opt out of the shared good ultimately opt out of a good that they naturally desire, a good that they can never fully cease to desire. The loss of this good, removed as a consequence of the hypothetical necessity, will inevitably leave an emptiness in the individual.
I do not claim that these hypothetical ought-statements are in fact the same as the moral ought, for Philippa Foot correctly observes that the moral ought has never been clearly defined. I claim only that these statements seem to correspond with much of what is expected from the moral ought. In the end, then, natural teleology is not the enemy of the moral ought, as is sometimes supposed, but rather its support and foundation. Attempts to base the moral ought simply upon command, without a foundation in nature, or upon some imaginary prescriptive reason, are ultimately inadequate. Only nature can rescue the moral ought.
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1 45- Foot (Natural Goodness, 53-80) abandons her view of ethics as a system of hypothetical imperatives only because she takes "hypothetical imperative" to be restricted to those conditional ought-statements that concern desire.. She allows for conditional ought-statements that do not arise from desires but from what she calls "reasons." She does not classify such conditional statements as hypothetical imperatives, but they seem to be similar to the hypothetical ought-statements we are here describing. In effect. Foot may be making a similar move as we are.
2 48. See Steven J. Jensen, Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D,C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 257-64.