The problem with moral obligation › What does the genealogy establish?

A possible objection is that concepts can acquire new uses. Even if a vocabulary once belonged to divine law, that history alone would not prove that no coherent secular use is possible. The objection separates the origin of a concept from the grounds of its present application.

A secular account might appeal to rational agency or to relations of accountability between people. These are possible directions for answering Anscombe, rather than positions established by naming them. The account would have to explain the authority of a requirement and whether it preserves or changes the sense she is criticizing.

Anscombe herself criticizes the idea of legislating for oneself in her discussion of Kant. She thinks the idea of legislation requires a relation that cannot simply be reproduced by an individual announcing a requirement to themselves. Assessing that criticism requires assessing her reading of Kant, not treating the label "self-legislation" as an obvious contradiction.

The general challenge is therefore substantive. What makes a requirement binding, and what are we claiming when we call it an obligation? Neither the persistence of a word nor the story of its origin automatically supplies the answer.

This discussion also does not establish that people without religious belief cannot act justly. A claim about the intelligibility of one philosophical vocabulary is different from a claim about the conduct of every person who uses it. The essay's argument should be tested at the level at which it is offered.