Justice & Law Quote by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur’s line carries the austere snap of a command, but its real ambition is quieter: to relocate ethics from private virtue to a horizon of shared meaning. “Moral law” sounds Kantian on purpose, evoking duty as something that claims us rather than something we invent. Yet Ricoeur immediately widens the frame. The demand is not merely to be good, but to make “the highest possible good” the “final object” of conduct. That phrase “highest possible” is doing heavy lifting: it acknowledges finitude, compromise, and historical messiness. The goal is maximal, not total; ethical life is measured by orientation and effort, not by purity.

The subtext is a rebuke to two temptations modernity loves. First, moral minimalism: the idea that ethics is just avoiding harm or staying on the right side of rules. Second, moral narcissism: goodness as self-image, private authenticity, or personal innocence. Ricoeur insists that the moral point of view has a teleology, a direction. If your “final object” is comfort, success, or even personal integrity, you’ve already demoted the moral law into a lifestyle choice.

Context matters. Ricoeur wrote in the long shadow of European catastrophe, where “obedience” had been weaponized and moral certainty had curdled into ideology. His move is to keep the rigor of obligation while tethering it to a vision of the good that remains corrigible, negotiated, and worldly. It’s an ethics that wants consequence without cynicism: act as if a better world is the end that judges your means, even when the best you can do is partial, provisional, and unfinished.