Over 65 years ago Karol Wojtyła wrote on “The Significance of Obligation.” In that text, Wojtyła probed the universal human experience of obligation — “I ought to do X” — asking what it tells us about itself. That experience teaches us three things: about obligation itself, about responsibility, and about guilt.

About Obligation: We all have sensed the obligation “I ought to do X,” or “I ought not to do Y.” One of the most basic things experience teaches us is that obligation does not first and foremost come from me. If it did, I could waive it. But I know from experience that my efforts at self-dispensation are often futile and that the sense of obligation persists. So, if I cannot excuse the obligation, it means the obligation is not of my making. That skewers many “autonomy” and “make-your-own-morality” ideas.

About Responsibility: Having experienced the obligation “I ought to do X” and that despite my efforts at self-dispensation the sense of obligation persists, I have a responsibility towards it. In other words, a moral obligation not of my making which I cannot waive means that responsibility is first and foremost created by the obligation, not my moral maturity (or lack thereof).

About Guilt: Knowing “I ought to do X” and then don’t — or, more typically, “I ought not to do X” and then do — results in a sense of guilt for having failed in the obligation (not of my making) towards the obligation (also not of my making). Hence, obligation and responsibility also entail judgment. The fact that I cannot absolve myself from that failing — that the Furies of guilt continue pursuing me — means that our obligations also judge us. It also means guilt is not something to be evaded, because it comes from disturbing an objective order not of my making, to which I am called by something deeper — what Paul would have called “the law inscribed on our heart.”

As I noted in a recent essay in The Catholic Thing (Apr. 23; link here), all of this can be explained in the typical Catholic approach to conscience. What is new in Wojtyła is his treatment of the subject through human experience, something universally available which shows that at least some moral obligations are not merely the products of religious convictions. It grounds the universality of moral obligation in human nature as lived and experienced by normal human beings.

Thinking further on Wojtyła’s essay, let me add these observations:

Since this analysis of the human experience of moral obligation is in principle available to all, how do we explain the fact that there are still people who mouth platitudes about “my morality” and “your morality” and cheer the dictatorship of relativism, with all its works and pomps?

It seems to me there are two further problems that requires explication: the difference between moral responsibility and self-will and why that distinction matters.

Western man has collapsed the distinction between what “I want” and what “I should want,” in practice if not in theory. The experience of obligation tells us that there are things I should (or should not) do that I know I won’t (or will). The only way to explain that dissonance is to recognize that moral responsibility and self-will are two separate things, neither conflating them nor — worse — affording the latter primacy. But that is what our society does. It does through a false sense of freedom that equates “what is good” with “what is freely chosen.” The epitome of that ethic is, of course, the euphemism of “choice” to mean abortion. But it is an elision of “what is good” and “what is freely chosen” found nowhere else on the moral spectrum. One cannot evade responsibility for theft, perjury, or even post-natal murder by claiming one “chose” it and, therefore, the act became good (or at least immune to further moral judgment). That dissonance ought to force honest people to go back and ask whether making “the good” and “choice” synonymous is not one’s basic error.

It also ought to make people ask whether the deference to my (self-) will is not moral backsliding. Put most sophisticatedly, is this not the morality of the Nietzschean Übermensch, schizophrenically asserting himself over the obligation he himself experiences? We should not overlook how the loss of this distinction between obligation and my self-will smuggles an alien morality — Nietzsche’s paganism — into our culture, a cuckoo’s egg that pretends to be part of our “tradition” about “liberty” and “rights.” Contemporary Polish political philosopher Zbigniew Stawrowski has made clear that Western man’s basic problem is that the concepts and principles of the Occidental tradition have been swapped out for ersatz substitutes that steal the names while meaning the opposite of the concepts they leech.

Put most basically, is this moral backsliding not the exalted Nietzschean “Superman” as much as the bully of the sandbox that needs to be kicked out and made to grow up?

Why is this distinction important? Because the failure to make it undermines morality itself. As I’ve argued, Wojtyła’s understanding of obligation also grounds guilt, because the betrayal of obligation kindles the pangs of guilt. That means — contrary to modern sophisms — that guilt actually helps man by calling him back to moral obligations not of his making. But undermining moral obligation by reducing it to self-will destroys morality; it attempts to throttle the warning cries of guilt (which are never really throttled when the heart is alone with itself, but that’s another issue). The hypocrite who pays his compliment to virtue in the midst of his vice at least has hope as long as he recognizes, somewhere, that there is virtue and there is vice — even if he fails the former by the latter. But contemporary man is in a far worse state, because he has lost the difference between virtue and vice and would happily gag a conscience that does not “shout” approval of his “choice.” This idea is not new. St. Thomas Aquinas recognized it when he said that one of the punishments of sin is more sin (and the loss of its sense).

That, I propose, is the discussion contemporary man needs. He needs it because, in exalting unbridled human will, man has lost sight of key distinctions — like there is a real moral world outside his will — that ground reality. Human survival in a human world depends on that reality and recovering sight of it.