Well, I never did get to Paris. A sinus infection intervened. But with the assistance of Amazon.com, I
purchased a copy of the Lewis White Beck translation of the Grundlegung from a little bookshop in
Oregon, so I am ready to continue the tutorial.
If you approach the Grundlegung
knowing that it is widely considered one of the two or three most important
texts in the history of Western Ethical Theory, the first thing that will
strike you is how short it is: barely
eighty pages in the Beck translation [seventy-five in the original German
edition.] Now, I am myself given to
writing short books, so I do not disparage a work merely because it does not
spread itself over five or six hundred pages, but eighty pages does seem a bit
slight. Not to worry. We shall find that it has more than enough
powerful philosophy in it to keep the most dedicated student busy for quite
some time.
The structure of the work is somewhat unbalanced. After a six page Preface, there are three
Sections. The first runs a bit more than
thirteen pages, the second is fully forty-two pages long -- more than half of
the total book -- and the last section, the third, is seventeen pages.
The logical structure of the exposition is quite
straightforward. In Section One, Kant begins
with what he takes to be the ordinary moral beliefs of good, decent Prussian
peasants, and attempts to show that contained within those beliefs, if one
thinks about it carefully, is a form of the principle of action that he calls
variously The Moral Law and The Categorical Imperative [I shall explain the
distinction a bit later on.] Kant does
not for a moment imagine that he is putting forward a new principle of morality.
Indeed, he thinks that such a notion is absurd. But a good deal of over-intellectual
philosophizing has served to confuse good people about what they all know in
their bones, so he proposes to put our common understanding of morality on an
absolutely firm footing.
However well-argued Section One may be, its conclusions are
open to the objection that they are at all persuasive only to someone who happens
to share the common understanding of morality that Kant there assumes, so in
Section Two, Kant begins all over again with the concept of a Will, and undertakes
to demonstrate what he has in Section One assumed. This is quite obviously a daunting task, so
we ought not to be surprised that it consumes fully half of the little book. In Section Two, we find an explication of the
notion of a Categorical Imperative and a derivation of its several of its
alternative formulations, as well as the famous Four Examples of the Categorical
Imperative, and the equally famous discussions of Humanity as an End in Itself
and the Realm of Ends.
Section Two, I should note, contains a brief paragraph with
the heading "The Autonomy of the Will as the Supreme Principle of
Morality," in case anyone has ever wondered where I got the central, idea
for my little book, In Defense of
Anarchism. This is of course also the
source for the title of my Commentary on the Grundlegung, The Autonomy of
Reason.
Section Three is devoted to dealing with the extremely
tricky question of the precise logical status of the conclusions of Section
Two. Inasmuch as Kant has, he believes,
established in the First Critique
that we can never have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, and since
he believes that it is as a self-in-itself, and not as a phenomenon in the Realm
of Appearance, that my Reason can be practical, which is to say that I can in
the full sense act, it is incumbent
upon him to explain just what the status is of the propositions he purports to
have established about rational willing and the principles that guide us as
moral agents. It is in this Section that
Kant resolves the conflict between Free Will and Determinism, insofar as that
conflict can in fact be resolved.
Well, that is the big picture. Now we must descend into the weeds a bit. Let us consider these sections in sequence.
Section One
In the Western tradition, there are several very different
questions that seem to have motivated philosophers to write about what we can
recognize as Ethics. The first, historically,
is the question posed repeatedly by Plato in the Dialogues: What is the Good Life? Is it a life devoted to the enjoyment of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain? Is
it a life of contemplation and meditation?
Is it a life of virtuous action?
A second question is posed by the philosophers known as
Utilitarians: Is there a way of
calculating what I ought to do, especially when confronted by difficult choices
among competing claims upon my allegiance?
Ought I to weigh the pains and pleasures that my actions will cause
myself or others? Ought I to try to
formulate some general rules to which I can adhere when faced with hard
choices?
Neither of these questions seems to be what motivates Kant. Instead, we might put his question in this
way: Knowing as I do, indeed as all good,
decent people do, what I ought to do, how shall I understand and deal with the
inner struggle between this knowledge and the many temptations to be ignore
what I know to be my duty and to stray into a path of immorality? In short, what is it my duty to do?
"Nothing in the world -- indeed nothing even beyond the
world --can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification
except a good will." Thus Kant begins Section One. It is, when you think about it, a rather odd
place to start. Neither Plato nor
Aristotle nor Hobbes nor Hume nor Bentham would have recognized that statement
as an appropriate place to begin an investigation of ethical theory, or indeed
as an appropriate component of such an investigation at all.
It is worth quoting several passages from this opening
Section of the Grundlegung to convey
the flavor of Kant's ethical discourse.
Let me offer just two, from the first four pages:
"Intelligence, wit, judgment, and the other talents of
the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, and perseverance
as qualities of temperament,, are doubtless in many respects good and
desirable. But they can become very bad
and harmful if the will, which is to make use of these gifts of nature and
which in its special constitution is called character, is not good. (and so forth.)"
"[T]he more a cultivated reason deliberately devotes
itself to the enjoyment of life and happiness, the more the man falls short of
true contentment. [This at least
Aristotle would have agreed with... ed.]
From this fact, there arises in many persons, if only they be candid
enough to admit it, a certain degree of misology, hatred of reason."
It comes as a surprise to learn that in his youth, Kant
played billiards and was thought to be something of a man about town, although
to be sure that town was Königsberg.
The bulk of Section One is devoted to stating and arguing
for three propositions, each of which, Kant believes, is either acknowledged by
common moral opinion or else follows directly from propositions that are so
acknowledged. The three propositions
are:
First: To have moral
worth, an action must be done from duty [and not from inclination. ed.]
Second: An action
done from duty does not have its moral worth in the purpose which is to be
achieved through it but in the maxim by which it is determined.
Third: Duty is the
necessity of an action executed from respect for law.
In the next part, we shall explore these three propositions
a bit and see where they lead.
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