Repetition and Moral Law

Last episode we discovered that nothing in Nature repeats, except perhaps the experimental setup we create to extract and understand the laws themselves.  Does this mean that perhaps human thinking constitutes a sort of higher law not subject to the laws of Nature in the same way as everything else?

One place we definitely imagine ourselves as free of the laws of Nature is in the moral sphere.  In fact, you might say that if we didn't have this freedom, there really wouldn't even be such a thing as a moral sphere:

what good is moral law if it does not sanctify reiteration, above all if it does not make reiteration possible and give us a legislative power from which we are excluded by the law of nature?

And yet, strangely, we want even this moral sphere to follow certain laws.  We want there to be some moral principle that would dictate, universally, which action is the moral one given certain circumstances.  The idea of a moral law turns us into cogs in a machine if our own making.  

Conscience, however, suffers from the following ambiguity: it can be conceived only by supposing the moral law to be external, superior and indifferent to the natural law; but the application of the moral law can be conceived only by restoring to conscience itself the image and the model of the law of nature.

I find it interesting to rephrase this moral automatism as a question of repetition.  You want to be able to repeat your one-true-moral-action in the face of an ever changing world.  And if you subscribe to some version of the Golden Rule (or the Categorical Imperative) you want the repeated action to be exactly that action that everyone can and should repeat.  It's like an endless Kumbaya sung in the round by an infinity of Campfire Girls.

But just like our discussion of natural law, here again we run into the question of how we are supposed to uncover the law.  When we investigate that process, we discover that if anything is truly being repeated here it's our process of extracting the specific content of the law.  In other words, the form of the law is being repeated.  Each moral action is itself going to be individual and unique. We have to first decide exactly what constitutes a "right" action by comparing the resemblances between similar actions and classifying them according to which are close enough to our model moral action to pass muster.  And then we also have to figure out which situations are equivalent and should all equally trigger that morally correct action.  

This is exactly parallel to the discussion of whether repetition is possible in a world governed by natural law.  In both cases it seems at first like a law governed universe should lend itself to exact reproducibility.  But what we end up with in practice is just a classification scheme that says these two things are similar enough to be interchanged for one another in two "equivalent" circumstances.  There's no exact repetition, it's all just "good enough for government work"