KANT'S ETHICAL THEORY A TUTORIAL PART FOUR

[As I begin this fourth part of my tutorial on Kant's ethical theory, I am forced to confront once more the fact that there is vastly more to be said than can be squeezed into even the most capacious tutorial.  I shall try not to make too great a shambles of it.]

The core idea underlying Kant's analysis, about which we must be very clear, is the distinction between what we may call behavior and action.  By behavior, I mean any physical movements [including speech, of course, as a physical movement of the larynx, etc.] that a human being exhibits.  This is a tricky matter, because to be completely clear, we would have to decide whether we mean to include as behavior physical movements whose proper description makes essential reference to social meanings -- a bit of behavior such as giving a command, for example, or playing a game.  But assuming that we can sort all that out, all behavior, on Kant's view, is causally determined.  This follows directly from the Second Analogy teaching that to be real in the Realm of Appearances just is to stand in thoroughgoing causal relationship to what has gone before and what comes after.  Because behavior is causally determined [and hence, Kant thinks, at least in theory totally predictable], it is morally neutral.  A bit of human behavior cannot be characterized as either virtuous or vicious, good or bad.  It simply is.

By action, on the other hand, I mean things done by agents [human or otherwise] in accordance with and because of reasons.  [There is a very useful discussion of this distinction in an old book by the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood.  See The Idea of History.]  To act, according to Kant, is to be guided by reasons.  Now, all reasons are in their logical structure general, not particular.  [This is, of course, totally independent of whether they are good or bad reasons.]  If I choose to do something for a reason, I implicitly commit myself to a subjectively general rule concerning all other cases that are like this one in the relevant ways.  Kant calls such subjective rules maxims.  It follows, on his view, that whenever we act, we do so in accordance with a maxim of action.  Maxims, as we shall see, have the syntactic form of imperatives.  Generally speaking, they are of the form:  "Having as your goal or purpose G, do A."

Kant has the reputation of being a rather rigid and rigoristic moralist, very much an old school Puritanical prig.  His teaching about maxims feeds into this stereotype.  We can just imagine him, in every situation, pausing to ask himself, "What is the maxim of my action?" before doing anything at all.  Not at all a swinger, let alone a Dionysian!  Now, leaving to one side the fact that as a young man Kant had something of a reputation as a billiards player and bon vivant [no kidding], this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Kant's position.  The point is that action, as opposed to behavior, is brought about by reasons rather than causes, and reasons, by their logical structure, are implicitly general, hence expressible in the form of maxims.  Whether we pause sententiously to reflect on our reasons or act seemingly spontaneously, it remains true that insofar as we are acting, we are determining ourselves by reasons.

The central question of the Grundlegung, and for Kant of all moral philosophy, is whether there are any subjective maxims that all rational agents as such necessarily adopt as the rules of their action, simply in virtue of being rational agents.  If there are, then those subjective maxims will be Objective Laws, binding on all rational agents regardless of their desires, sentiments, purposes, or other differentiating characteristics.  If there is one such objective maxim from which all other objective maxims can be derived, then it will be The Moral Law.  Its validity for us will be absolutely unconditional.  That, in a nutshell, is what Kant is looking for in his moral philosophy.  Anything less, in his view, does not deserve to be called moral philosophy at all.

If you are paying very close attention, it may occur to you that there is a really big problem here.  Action takes place in the Realm of Appearance just as much as behavior does.  Kant thinks, for example, that I am morally obligated to keep my promises, [more of this when we get to Section Two.]  Now, a promise is a commitment made by one person to another person in the Realm of Appearance.  The keeping [or breaking] of the promise also occurs in the Realm of Appearance.  But since both the making and the keeping [or breaking] of the promise occur in the Realm of Appearance, they must be bits of behavior standing in thoroughgoing causal relation to everything else that happens.  How on earth can the making of a promise be both a bit of behavior falling under universal causal laws and also an action undertaken in accordance with a maxim?

This is a simply huge problem, to which Kant devotes Section Three of the Grundlegung, and about which we shall have a very great deal to say.

A second point of information and clarification before we turn to the Three Propositions listed at the end of Part Three above.  Because Kant is searching for rules of action that are binding on all rational agents as such, he conceives these rules as equally valid for non-human rational agents as well, which to him meant angels.  [No snarky laughter please.  If it makes you more comfortable, substitute aliens for angels]  Our human condition -- our desire for pleasure, our aversion to pain, our mortality, our talents, sentiments, and predilections -- are all, from Kant's point of view, limitations or constraints on our nature as rational agents.  Because of them, we have difficulty obeying The Moral Law, and find ourselves tempted to ignore it.  Hence, we experience the Moral Law as an unconditional command, a Categorical Imperative.  But it is at least possible that there should be rational agents unconstrained in this fashion, who recognize the objective validity of the Moral Law and abide by it simply because it is dictated by the universal principles of rationality.  Such beings, Kant sometimes says, possess a Holy Will.  They do not experience the Moral Law as a command, because they are not tempted to disobey it.

I find it interesting to compare this to the rules of formal logic, such as the Law of Contradiction. Mathematicians do not find themselves tempted to break the Law of Contradiction, secretly asserting "p and not p" when no one is looking, or wondering whether they can get away with an argument cast in one of the invalid syllogistic forms [Some A are B; some B are C; therefore Some A are C, for example.]  If I may speak somewhat oddly, all of us, as mathematicians or logicians, have a holy will when it comes to reasoning in those disciplines.  That is what it would be like to have a Holy Will in general.

By the way, there are lovely echoes here of the New Testament teaching that those reborn in Christ act naturally and spontaneously in conformity with the Law, as laid down in the Old Testament.  Paul, of course, had some difficulty with several of the communities of followers of Jesus, who were doing some rather hinky things in the belief that, as reborn, they could do no wrong.  He put a stop to that nonsense, I am happy to say.  :)

Well, enough of throat clearing.  Next part, I will address the three propositions directly.

A CREDO FOR PROGRESSIVES

We human beings live in this world by thoughtfully, purposefully, intelligently transforming nature so that it will satisfy our needs and our desires. We call this activity of transforming nature "production," and it is always, everywhere, inescapably a collective human activity. Every moment that we are alive we are relying on what those before us have discovered or invented or devised. There is no technique, however primitive, that is the invention of one person alone. Like it or not, we are all in this life together. Even those giants of industry who think of themselves as self-made men are completely dependent for their empire building upon the collective knowledge and practice of the entire human species.

All of us eat grain we have not grown, fruit we have not planted, meat we have not killed or dressed. We wear clothes made of wool we have not combed and carded, spun or woven. We live in houses we have not built, take medicines we neither discovered nor produced, read books we have not written, sing songs we did not compose. Each of us is completely dependent on the inherited knowledge, skill, labor, and memory of all who have gone before us, and all who share the earth with us now.

We have a choice. We can acknowledge our interdependence, embracing it as the true human condition; or we can deny it, deluding ourselves into thinking that we are related to one another only as parties to a bargain entered into in a marketplace. We can recognize that we need one another, and owe to one another duties of generosity and loyalty. Or we can pretend to need no one save through the intermediation of the cash nexus.

I choose to embrace our interdependence. I choose to acknowledge that the food I eat, the clothes on my back, and the house in which I live are all collective human products, and that when any one of us has no food or clothing or shelter, I am diminished by that lack.

There are two images alive in America, competing for our allegiance. The first is the image of the lone horseman who rides across an empty plain, pausing only fleetingly when he comes to a settlement, a man apparently having no need of others, self-sufficient [so long as someone makes the shells he needs for his rifle or the cloth he needs for his blanket], refusing to acknowledge that he owes anything at all to the human race of which he is, nonetheless, a part.

The other is the image of the community that comes together for a barn-raising, working as a group on a task that no one man can do by himself, eating a communal meal when the day is done, returning to their homes knowing that the next time one of their number needs help, they will all turn out to provide it.

These images are simple, iconic, even primitive, but the choice they present us with remains today, when no one rides the plains any more, and only the Amish have barn-raisings. Today, as I write, there are tens of millions of Americans who cannot put a decent meal on the table in the evening for their families, scores of millions threatened with the loss of their homes. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands lavishing unneeded wealth on themselves, heedless of the suffering of their fellow Americans, on whose productivity, inventiveness, and labor they depend for the food they eat, the clothing they wear, the homes they live in, and also for the luxuries they clutch to their breasts.

The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.

KANT'S ETHICAL THEORY A TUTORIAL PART THREE

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.

THE FIRES ARE BANKED IN THE HOT STOVE

The comedy of errors called the Republican Primary is over, the actual major league baseball season has begun, and it is time to bank the fires and say farewell to the Hot Stove League for another year.  I am at the cusp of a possible major new gig, one that will, if it comes to pass, allow me once more to try to make a difference in the world, as opposed to merely offering opinions.  I cannot say more now, but quite possibly in the next two or three weeks I will be able to describe in some detail what I shall be doing.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Recently, I spoke with an old friend from Amherst, MA, whose occasional lunches with a circle of senior academics was, for me, a highlight of my rather low-key social life.  He reported that at a recent lunch, those present, several of whom, like my friend, are professional historians, expressed the opinion that not in a hundred years had an American political party moved so far and in so determined a fashion to the right.  That set me thinking, and I formulated two alternative and incompatible hypotheses to explain this movement, between which I am unable to choose.  I shall sketch them here, and invite any interested readers to offer their judgment.

One hypothesis is that the reality-denying conspiratorial crazies have always been a subordinate element in American politics, that there really are not more of them now than at previous times in the memory of those as old as myself, but that for a variety of structural reasons these types, of whom there are, after all, some scores of millions in this large country, have managed to take control of the Republican Party.  Their success is in part a consequence of a long stretch of redistricting exercises that has created unusually large numbers of safe seats, in which crazy views can survive;  in part a consequence of the election of a Black president, which has driven them wild; and in part a consequence of the rise of alternative communications media in which an "echo chamber" of reality-denying bizarreries flourishes.  In support of this hypothesis, one can cite Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which was first a lecture at Oxford, then a 1963 Harper's Magazine essay, and then the title essay of a collection of essays.

The alternative hypothesis is that something genuinely new is taking place, something unlike what has gone before in American politics.  A determined and deadly serious effort is under way to reverse three quarters of a century of social progress, to destroy the signature achievements of the New Deal, and to undo the successes of the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the LGBT Movement.  This effort is bankrolled by wealthy corporate types who seek to protect what they have already stolen from the American economy and to facilitate future thefts;  it is supported both by a large segment of the American population who have never accepted the consequences of the LIberation Movements;  and it derives its especial passion from participants in yet another of America's periodic Great Revivals, born again Evangelical Christians, many of whom genuinely expect the imminent arrival of the Rapture and the End Times.

So, same old same old. or something really new.  Which is it?

SPAM

Google has completely revamped its Blogger system, which I find massively irritating because things I used to be able to find are now hard to locate.  One thing that popped up is Spam.  I was totally unaware that Google was tagging some of the comments to my blog as Spam and segregating them.  When I took a look at what was in the Spam file, I found that almost all of the items are perfectly reasonable, intelligent comments.

Does anyone have any idea how I can turn off the Spam filter?

REVIEWING

This morning, after I had eaten my lemon poppy seed muffin at the Carolina Cafe and solved the NY TIMES crossword puzzle, I took a moment to read two reviews in the ARTS section where the puzzle appears.  The first was a review of a performance by a brilliant young pianist, Yuja Wang.  The second was a review of a new Memoir by the veteran actor Frank Langella.  Both were extremely positive and generous reviews.  The review of the Langella Memoir was particularly warm and supportive.  [Some of you may remember Langella from his performance as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.  My own favorite moment in Langella's work occurs in the Kevin Kline movie Dave.  Langella plays the President's chief of staff.  At one point, he says to his aide that he is going to kill Kline, who has been recruited as a look-alike stand-in for the President, but goes off the reservation by actually espousing progressive, positive legislation.  "You can't just kill him," his aide remonstrates.  "Of course I can," Langella replies.  "I am the Chief of Staff. I can kill someone if I want to."  The insouciance with which Langella delivered that line won my heart.]

The two reviews got me thinking again about something that I have often reflected on -- how difficult it is these days to be a reviewer of musical performances.  As I have observed before on this blog, in the old days [i.e., when I was young, which is to say in the '40s and '50s of the last century], there only were a handful of truly great violinists, pianists, or singers.  If a reviewer was fortunate enough to be assigned to one of their performances, all the superlatives could come out of hiding and one could simply gush over Milstein or Rubinstein or Callas.  But today, the level of performance has risen so dramatically in virtually every area of music that a reviewer runs the risk of sounding like a flack or a rube unless he or she can find some point to quibble with in what was truly a miraculous performance.

A somewhat different problem arises in the field of academic book reviewing, especially in a field like Philosophy.  Not infrequently, it happens that the author has written a fine book on an important problem.  The reviewer could, if he or she chose, perform a valuable service simply by making the reader of the review aware of the book's new and suggestive ideas.  How else are the rest of us to decide whether it is a book worth our time and effort?  But the conventions of the field demand that the reviewer find some point to disagree with, and then devote most of the review to doing his or her best to demolish the author.

The same convention rules at conferences.  How rarely one hears a commentator say: "Professor Finklebaum has offered us a truly fascinating discourse.  Rather than quibble with her third subordinate observation on page thirteen, I should like to try to restate what I understand to be her central thesis, and then spend a few moments reflecting on how we all might learn from it."

Even if one disagrees with the author of the paper, would it not be friendlier, and more useful to say:  "Here is how I think Dr. Quincebottom might strengthen his conclusion," rather than treating the unfortunate Quincebottom as having committed a mortal sin that requires ritual shaming and public humiliation as the only appropriate atonement?

The Academy is too often conceived as the arena for the expression of barely concealed and marginally sublimated aggression, despite all the fine talk about the search for truth and contributions to knowledge.

I have on the very rarest of occasions written a genuinely hostile review, but only when I considered the author to be morally reprehensible as well as wrong.  [The two cases that come to mind are my classic review of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and a review of a forgettable book by the egregious Harvey Mansfield.]

Perhaps these reflections are merely evidence that I am, in my dotage, becoming senile.  I hope not.

CROWDFUNDING

Most of you, I would imagine, have heard of something called "crowdfunding, a technique for using the web to raise investment capital for small start-up enterprises by soliciting very large numbers of quite small donations -- "investments" -- from interested parties, wherever they may be.  It is not really investing because the donors do not get any sort of ownership share in the companies their donations help to get launched, but there can be a variety of perks that give the feeling of a reward. 

Petridish.org, a crowdfunding site that is limited to scientific efforts, places a $5000 minimum limit on the amount a scientist or laboratory or research group can aim for, with the recipient of the "investment" paying a 4% fee to the web owner if the goal is reached and a 9% fee if it is not.  "The Wolves of Isle Royale" is currently 87% funded, and "Language of the Wild Bonobos" is 85% funded.  I assume that means each has raised that percentage of the minimum $5000.  Other projects currently listed include "Decoding Hyena Calls in the Maasai Mara" and "Fawns and their Hiding Places."

Indiegogo.com is a business-oriented crowdfunding site offering opportunities to toss in a few bucks for "Help Get Norfolk Donut Supply Co. Rolling" or "Proper Flops -- Anti-Microbial Arch Supports" among many others.

What fascinates me about these web-based enterprises is the evidence they provide of just how much can be done through the internet without any deep-pocket donors or fat cat investors.  These operations are the polar opposites of the Bain Capitals of the world.  The implications for politics, it seems to me, are explosive.  Since it costs virtually nothing to go up on the web, and since the rate at which information flows approches the speed of light, in a country of 310 million, there are always more than enough like-minded people who can afford 5$, 10$, 25$, or even 100$ to support an effort with which they are sympathetic.

We are really only in the first decade of this transformation in information and organization.  During the current presidential cycle, attention has been focused on billionaires and their ability to influence political races.  But think about it:  a million dollars is merely fifty dollars each for 20,000 people, and there really are many times that many progressively inclined people in this country who can be approached for donations of that magnitude. 

Perhaps bottom-up democracy has a future in this benighted land.