BOOK STORES

A well-wishing reader suggests that I patronize bookstores instead of Amazon.com in order to help slow the seemingly unstoppable death of the old-fashioned bookstore.  I have a great fondness for the sort of bookstore he is referring to -- not the big flashy Barnes and Noble kind that seems to have more toys and coffee and tshachkes than real books, but the lovely little academic bookstore that could be counted on to carry all the latest serious works in a wide range of fields.

Now, as it happens, the copy of the GROUNDWORK I ordered was secondhand, so I was in fact patronizing one of the hundreds of bookstores whose stock is linked to Amazon's computers.  But that is not the nub of the problem.  I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home to the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina system.  UNC-Chapel Hill is a large and distinguished campus, with a great many faculty in residence and a large graduate student population.  And yet, there is not a decent book store in the entire town!  The closest bookstore that is even notionally like the sort of bookstore I remember is on 9th street in Durham, near Duke University, and it really is little more than a supplier of assigned texts in Duke courses.  The bookstore in the middle of Chapel Hill turns out to be almost entirely devoted to Tar Heel sports memoribilia.

Since I have only lived here for four years, I do not know whether there ever was a good bookstore in town, driven to the wall by the competition of Amazon.com, but as things are now, if I want an academic book, Amazon is really my only option.  The fact that it is incredibly convenient does not hurt.  [I mean, at two a.m., when I have arisen for a while, as most old guys do, I can with one click purchase any book Amazon and its network of second hand bookstores offers, and expect it to arrive by mail two or three days later.]

CHANGE OF PLANS

I have come down with a cold and sinus infection, and my doctor says I ought not to take long plane trips under those conditions, so our Paris trip has been postponed.  I have ordered a copy of the GROUNDWORK from Amazon.com [I think it is actually a book I edited many years ago], and when it arrives, I shall continue the tutorial on Kant's ethical theory from here.  Stay tuned.

I started to write a blog post on crowdfunding but I hit a key and it disappeared.  [rats]  I shall try to reconstruct it tomorrow.

THE THINGS YOU CAN LEARN ON TELEVISION

Contrary to what everyone says, it is actually possible to learn something by watching television.  Case in point:  I was watching Chuck Todd's hour long show on MSNBC this morning while I was making the bed [it comes on at nine a.m. after Morning Joe, which I enjoy on the rare occasions when Joe Scarborough is not there] and I listened to an interview with a rather dour individual who was a spokesperson for something called the National Popular Vote Bill.  This is a well-funded nation-wide effort to circumvent the Electoral College and institute the practice of choosing as president the person who gets the most votes in a national election.

The natural way to accomplish this is by a Constitutional Amendment, but that would be impossible to bring off, because there are enough small over-represented states in the nation to constitute a blocking one-third of the fifty states.  This is not exactly an accident.  The complicated political compromise that became our political system was originally designed explicitly to protect the institution of slavery -- the price the Southern states demanded for their participation in what today we call nation-building -- and to protect the smaller colonies from domination by the larger ones.  As time has passed and our politics have evolved, the Electoral College system has served quite well to magnify the power and influence of the relatively small numbers of people who live in the lightly populated states. 

Just to remind those of you who did not have the benefit of a Civics class in high school [mine was, as I recall, in my Freshman year, which is to say 1947], or who live abroad and find our curious political system too dense to penetrate, each state is assigned a number of Electors equal to the total number of its Members of the House of Representatives and Senate combined [hence a total of 535 in all].  The members of the House are allocated in a manner reasonably proportional to population, although the Constitution stipulates that each state must have at least one Representative, and there are actually several states so unpopulated that they do not even have 1/435th of the nation's population in their borders.  But each state has the same number of Senators, and this rather dramatically unbalances the relationship between population and Electoral Votes.

The strategy behind the National Popular Vote Bill campaign is to recruit state legislatures to make a provisional commitment to allocate their Electors in a presidential race to whichever candidate gets the most votes nationally, the commitment to take effect once states having in total 270 Electoral votes have signed on.  Once that happens, regardless of what the remaining states do, the states in the compact will be able to guarantee that the winner of the popular vote will get enough Electoral votes [i.e., 270] to win the election.  For those with short memories, the last time the loser of the popular vote won the presidency was in 2000. 

Because of the political complexion of the states with the most caches of Electoral votes, this effort is widely, and correctly, I think, seen as effectively an effort to push the country to the left, although of course nothing remotely like that is ever said by the proponents of the campaign.

Thus far, a dozen or more state legislatures have passed the bill [who knew?] representing about half of the 270 Electoral votes needed.  If the campaign manages to persuade enough additional state legislatures to enact the bill [and assuming that the Electors vote in the Electoral College as their state legislatures have instructed them to do, something they are not required to do by the U. S. Constitution], presidential elections will henceforward de facto be contests for popular votes alone, without a word of the Constitution having been altered.

The effect on presidential campaigns would be electric.  I think there is no doubt about that.  As things are now, campaigns virtually ignore safe states, even those having huge caches of Electoral votes.  No Democratic candidate is going to waste much time or money campaigning in New York or California, despite their size, because they are absolutely sure to vote Democratic, and a 55/45 victory yields exactly as many Electoral votes as a 60/40 or 65/35 victory.  But if it is total votes, and only total votes, that count, then it makes very good sense to spend scarce resources getting one's supporters to the polls in safe states, because there are likely to be large concentrations of such additional votes in safe districts.  If a ward or precinct regularly gives 85% of its votes to one party or the other, as happens in many places all over the country, the non-voters in that ward or precinct are likely to break in the same fashion.  Why labor to locate and persuade a so-called "independent" voter in a swing state when with much less effort and money, you can get a reliable supporter to the polls?

As a political junkie on the left, I find this campaign intriguing.  I can think of some powerful arguments against it, but I think I shan't mention them.  hem hem.

KANT'S ETHICAL THEORY A TUTORIAL PART TWO

Kant is one of a very small number of great thinkers whose investigations ranged over the entire spectrum of philosophical questions.  I can think of only three other thinkers of his caliber whose work was similarly all-encompassing:  Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.  Kant followed Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, and Hume [but not Leibniz or Spinoza, interestingly enough] in construing his philosophical investigations as a series of explorations of the powers and limits of the human mind.  [The titles of many of the major works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries express this organizing principle:  Rules for the Direction of the Mind, A Treatise of Human Nature, Principles of Human Knowledge, An Essay on the Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, and so forth.]  But none of these philosophers attempted so broad and at the same time so rigorously structured a philosophical system as Kant.

Kant conceived his three Critiques to be the core of his oeuvre, each work exploring a different power of the mind:  The Critique of Pure Reason setting forth the limits and capacities of the theoretical employment of Reason;  the Critique of Practical Reason examining the use of the power of reason in action; and the curious Critique of Judgment dealing both with the role of Judgment in the making of aesthetic judgments and its role in the offering of teleological explanations in science.

We might naturally suppose that the Second Critique, of Practical Reason, would be the locus classicus  for Kant's teachings in the field of Ethics.  In fact, as it turns out, that is not true.  Kant wrote three major works devoted to normative subjects:  The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1785;  the Critique of Practical Reason, published in 1790, and the Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1797.  It is actually the first of these works, the relatively brief Grundlegung [or "Groundwork"] that is  universally considered far and away the most important of Kant's writings on the subject of Ethics.

Fully to explicate the Groundwork would require a book -- which I have written.  [See The Autonomy of Reason, Harper Torchbooks, 1973.]  I can only hope in this tutorial to lay out the structure of the work, explain the most essential elements of the argument, discuss at the end of the tutorial certain very deep and intractable problems with Kant's account, and then spend a bit of time recounting how I think Kant has a possible answer to one of the major difficulties, not in the text before us, but in the last of his major writings on Ethics, the Metaphysics of Morals.  That will most certainly be more than enough to fill a tutorial of manageable length.

While I am marking time until I get to Paris and retrieve my copy of the Groundwork, perhaps I can say a few words about an important logical matter that Kant borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings had a very powerful effect on the great German philosopher.  [Kant led a very quiet life, unlike Rousseau, and only a handful of stories about him have survived.  One concerns his habit of taking a daily walk with his servant, Lampe, at precisely the same time each day -- a habit so regular that the townspeople of Kőnigsberg, it is said, set their clocks by him.  It seems that on the day when a copy of Rousseau's new book, Ḗmile, arrived, Kant became so engrossed in it that he missed his walk.  I am afraid that had he lived a century and a half later, Kant would have been classified as possessing an anal retentive obsessive compulsive personality.]

[One more irrelevant story, inasmuch as I am just vamping 'til ready, as they say in the jazz world.  When I arrived at Oxford University in early Fall, 1954, I went off to see T. D. Weldon, whose book on the First Critique I had read and admired greatly.  He turned out to be rather like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, sitting on a chair that looked rather like an overstuffed mushroom.  He was not smoking a Hookah, but was pretty clearly inebriated.  I told him, with the innocent enthusiasm of a twenty-year old, that I wanted to take the Critique and re-read it with Kemp Smith's commentary in one hand and Paton's in the other.  He looked rather bored and said that was very old hat.  -- he did not add, "old boy," as I recall, but he might have.  No, he told me, what I must do if I was interested in Kant was to read Rousseau's Ḗmile.  I rushed right out and bought a copy, but when I started to read it, I found that the first fifty pages were an impassioned defense of breast feeding and a diatribe against swaddling.  I gave it up, and I think never actually finished the book.]

In Of the Social Contract [the actual title -- du contrat social], Rousseau grounds his argument on a distinction between a General Will and a Particular Will.  All political willing, he says, is general in its logical structure, issuing in laws, not in commands.  But an individual elector may, in his willing [never a woman, of course], aim either at his individual and personal good, or at the General Good.  If an individual chooses dictates having the logical structure of laws and aimed at the General good, then he may be said to have a General Will.  If an entire society does this, with each person aiming at the General Good, then the society as a whole may be said to have a General Will.  [I go into this simple point at length in order to disabuse you of the incorrect idea that the General Will in Rousseau's writings is some sort of transcendent or non-natural thing.]

Kant, as we shall see, accepts Rousseau's claim that laws are by the nature general or universal in their logical structure.  Kant thinks that he can derive a powerful, albeit analytic, proposition about willing, namely that, roughly speaking, if a reason for the adoption of a law is a good reason for me, then it must be an equally good reason for any rational agent similarly circumstanced.  It is from this argument that he eventually derives the first formulation of the Highest Moral Law, viz. "I ought never to act except in such a way that I can will that my maxim should become a universal law."

But this, not surprisingly, turns out to be a merely negative or necessary condition for the objectivity or moral bindingness of a moral law.  There remains the question what the end, or goal, or -- in Kant's way of talking -- the matter of the proposed law is.  That is to say, at what end does this proposed law aim in its universally binding fashion?  And this is where all the trouble arises.  Kant has such difficulty answering this question that in the brief compass of the Groundwork he addresses it three separate times.  As we shall, see, well down the road in this tutorial, it is in his efforts to answer this crucial question of the objective and necessary end or goal of rational willing that Kant's theory comes into an interesting conjunction with the much later work of John Rawls.

But this is nothing more than a preview of coming attractions, so if you will all buy your popcorn or nachos or Goobers [my personal choice in movie theaters], we shall adjourn this tutorial until I get to Paris.

KANT'S ETHICAL THEORY -- A TUTORIAL PART ONE

Writing a tutorial on Kant's ethical theory is, in its way, as daunting as writing a tutorial on the Critique of Pure Reason, a task I have long since completed [follow the link to box.net if you are interested.]  The Critique is a good deal more complicated, to be sure -- it has more moving parts, as it were.  But the central claim of the Critique is hedged in an important way, and hence is less challenging for Kant to establish.  His ethical theory, in contrast, makes certain fundamental claims with absolute, unconditional universality and necessity.  From the outset, it is not at all clear that Kant can establish the universal validity of the Fundamental Moral Law [referred to in certain contexts as the Categorical Imperative], and we must delve very deeply into the heart of his philosophy to discover whether he has succeeded.

[From this point on, I am going to have to assume a certain degree of familiarity with Kant's theoretical philosophy on the part of my readers.  It took me an entire book to say what I needed to say about that subject -- Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, Harvard University Press, 1963 -- and there is no way that I can even summarize the central points here.]

Kant's goal in the Critique is to establish the validity of two of the four great bodies of theoretical knowledge with which he was familiar:  the mathematics of Euclid and the physics of Newton.  The logic of Aristotle, he believed, required no such justification, because its claims, although both universal and necessary, are empty, or as mathematicians are wont to say, trivial.  The fourth body of theoretical knowledge, the metaphysics of Leibniz, Kant argued, could not be established at all, and indeed, strictly speaking, is not true [although Kant himself vacillates on this point.]  The universality and necessity of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, Kant concluded, are purchased at the very heavy price of restricting the scope of their propositions to things as they appear to us in space and time, rather than as they are in themselves.  He was prepared to accept this limitation on their validity because he believed that nothing was lost thereby that was needed for the progress of science.

But when it came to the fundamental principles of Morality, Kant would consider no such limitation on the absolute universality of the scope of its claims.  To put the point in the technical jargon that he introduced or adapted to his purposes, mathematics and science assert claims that are both synthetic in their logical structure [unlike the claims of logic, which are analytic] and are known a priori, which is possible only because of their limitation to the realm of Appearance.  [Recall that the terms a priori and a posteriori are adverbial, and modify such verbs as "to know" or "to assert," whereas the terms synthetic and analytic are adjectival, and modify nouns such as "proposition" and "judgment.]  Morality also asserts claims that are synthetic and are yet knowable a priori, without however in any way being limited in their scope to the realm of Appearances.

We may wonder how Kant hopes to be able to establish so powerful and uncompromising a claim.  We may indeed!

Among the many schools of thought on matters ethical, there are two schools, or traditions, prominent in his day that Kant took as particular targets of his criticism:  Utilitarianism, and the Moral Sentiment School.  Both had very ancient progenitors, but in Kant's day -- which is to say in the middle and later eighteenth century -- both schools found their strongest proponents in the British Isles.  Utilitarianism, of course, had been given its canonical expression by Jeremy Bentham, whose Principles of Morals and Legislation appeared in 1781, the year in which Kant published the first edition o the Critique.  The Moral Sentiment school was the joint product of a number of Scottish and English philosophers, among them Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume. 

From Kant's point of view, the fatal flaw in both Utilitarianism and the Theory of Moral Sentiments is that they ground their arguments on facts of human nature that are accidental, so to speak.  It is a mere fact of the human constitution that we seek pleasure and shun pain.  It is equally a mere fact of our constitution that we feel certain sentiments of approbation when presented -- in Hume's felicitous phrasing -- with actions or traits of character that are "useful or agreeable to ourselves or others."  Were we constituted differently, as indeed we might have been, then our moral judgments, our approvals and disapprovals, would themselves differ, and this, Kant firmly believed, is utterly unacceptable.  To say that my obligation to tell the truth or to keep my promises is merely a consequence of the way in which I and other human beings happen to be, Kant insisted, is the death of morality.  Only principles of obligation that are completely independent of the facts of human nature can possibly ground morality. 

But the First Principles of Practical Reason, as Kant would call them, are not trivial tautologies.  It does not follow merely from the meaning of the verb "to lie" that it is everywhere and always wrong to lie.  Nor can we find, in the mere concept of a promise, my obligation to keep my promises.  When we turn to the central text of Kant's ethical writings, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, we shall find him struggling with the problem of devising a demonstration of the absolute, unconditioned, universal validity of the Fundamental Principle of Morality.

It will probably come as no surprise to you to learn that Kant was raised in an extremely rigoristic, individualistic form of Protestantism known as Pietism.  Although he would, in the latter part of the First Critique, put paid to the two thousand year old search for demonstrable knowledge of a divinity -- the branch of philosophy known as Rational Theology -- Kant remained true to the core moral teachings of his upbringing.  In the Grundlegung, we shall see how he attempts to provide as much of a demonstration as he thinks is philosophically possible for the principles of morality that he learned as a boy.

Now, with Kant, there is always a great deal more going on than even the most compressed summary can adumbrate.  Along with everything else he was concerned with, Kant engaged early with an ancient philosophical conundrum, the apparent conflict between Free Will and Determinism.  On the one hand, we believe ourselves to be capable of choosing freely among alternative actions presented to us by experience, and it is because of that freedom, we believe, that we are morally responsible for our actions and can be held accountable for what we have done.  On the other hand, our actions take place in the spatio-temporal world, in which -- or so science tells us -- everything that happens has a sufficient cause and hence is determined to take place as it does.  Since it is in this realm of Appearance that we speak truth or falsehood, make promises, or act so as to help or harm others, it would appear, contrary to any supposition of freedom, that what we do is determined to happen as it does.

In the First Critique, Kant lays out a particularly rigorous and unforgiving version of causal determinism.  As he argues in the Second Analogy, to be an event in the realm of Appearances just is to have objective time location, and to have objective time location just is to stand in a chain of causes and effects that stretches back to the beginning of time and forward to the end of time.  There would appear to be no wiggle room there for a freely acting and hence morally responsible self.

But very early in the development of his mature philosophy, Kant saw what he believed to be a way out of this thicket.  The very same limitation that he placed on the claims of science in the realm of Appearances, he believed, would open up a conceptual space in which he could demonstrate the existence of freedom and moral responsibility.  A good deal farther along in this tutorial, we shall see exactly how he proposes to demonstrate the compatibility of Free Will and Determinism.

That, I think, is enough to get us started.  Now we shall have to wait a week until I reclaim my personal copy of the Grundlegung in Paris.

PRE-LAUNCH

Faithful readers will have noticed that I have not been posting in the past few days.  The problem is that I am simply so bored and appalled by the doings of the Republicans that I cannot bring myself even to snark.  I promised to start a tutorial on Kant's ethical theory when I get to Paris next Friday, but I have decided to write some preliminary remarks, for which I do not need my copy of the Grundlegung, even before I arrive in Paris.  So -- either today or tomorrow, I will launch the tutorial.  When I have concluded my discussion of the philosophical background to Kant's ethics -- what folks these days call his "problematic" -- I will pause until I am in Paris, and then carry on.

I hope this tutorial will find some interested readers, and perhaps also provide a calm oasis of reflection in the midst of the frantic political speculations of the Commentariat. I mean, when Mitt Romney, who spent four years at Harvard earning an MBA and a JD, criticizes Barack Obama for having spent "too much time at Harvard" earning a JD, what can one say?

By the bye, if you have not read Linda Greenhouse's knowledgeable and careful analysis of the three days of Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, I recommend it as an antidote to Jeff Toobin's feverish remarks.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

I am home, after crossing the continent to see my grandchildren.  It will probably come as no surprise that I consider six year old Samuel and three year old Athena to be the most darling children the world has ever seen [although I feel compelled, distressing though it is to me, to report that Athena cheats at CandyLand -- she looks at the cards and picks the ones she wants, rather than taking what comes up randomly.  Sigh.  Despite that fact, I did succeed in winning one game of CandyLand, although I never did have much success with Chutes and Ladders.]

While I was away, Obama issued a strongly worded challenge to the Supreme Court.  I would dearly love to hear him echo Andrew Jackson's challenge to the court of his day.  ["John Marshall has made his ruling.  Now let him enforce it."]  We shall see.