Daily Inspiration Quote by Benjamin Whichcote

Moral relativism tends to sound urbane until you ask it to do any actual work. Whichcote’s line is a brisk preemptive strike: if nothing is good “in itself,” then “good” becomes just a costume draped over preference, power, or habit. His claim isn’t sentimental; it’s infrastructural. He’s arguing that moral judgment requires a fixed point the way measurement requires a standard. No yardstick, no yards.

The rhetoric is deceptively plain, but the subtext is combative. “Must be” carries the force of necessity, not taste; he’s not proposing a comforting belief, he’s laying down a condition for moral language to mean anything at all. And by framing goodness as a “measure,” he shifts ethics from pious exhortation to epistemology: how do we know what we’re doing when we call something evil? If the answer is “by comparing it to something,” then something has to hold still.

Context sharpens the stakes. Whichcote, a Cambridge Platonist writing in the churn of post-Reformation England and civil conflict, is defending a moral realism often tied to reason and divine order against both authoritarian decree (“good is what the church/state says”) and skeptical fragmentation (“good is whatever wins”). The line also quietly flatters the rational conscience: it implies humans can, at least partially, recognize intrinsic goods rather than merely obey commands.

The sentence works because it doesn’t argue for a particular good; it argues for the possibility of arguing about good at all. It’s a philosophical tripwire: deny it, and you risk losing the very vocabulary you need to condemn cruelty or praise justice.