Reviewing Kant's Foundations ...

Rommel as 'good guy', July 13, 1942

Our lively discussion yesterday raised a number of issues where Kant's theory might be open to criticism.


1) One basic criticism is Kant's departure point - the notion of an entirely GOOD WILL. He says: Mental talents such as intelligence, wit, and judgement, and temperaments such as courage, resoluteness, and perseverance are doubtless in many ways good and desirable; but they can become extremely bad and harmful if the person’s character isn’t good—i.e. if the will that is to make use of these gifts of nature isn’t good. 


This is a bit like saying that anything can be misused, even a person's best and most admirable qualities. We might admire Field Marshal Rommel but think that he had the misfortune to be fighting in support of a rotten regime. His good qualitieswere subverted by the the regime's bad purposes. The basic criticism that might be relevant here is the simple one - How does one go from Average Joe to Holy Joe, from someone caught up in the toils of our human condition to being someone of exceptionally good character, someone with a  perfect disposition? If we don't know how we might change ourselves, there would seem to be little point in studying moral philosophy. Or does Kant believe that merely be becoming aware of this logic we might move ourselves towards being people of tougher and better character? Perhaps he does, but it seems unlikely that a few intellectual lights would make people better people. It doesn't seem to do a lot for Oxford dons, though no doubt they do make better dinner companions. 


A related criticism has already been made, at least implicitly. A person might have a GOOD WILL in Kant's sense, but be duped by a bad government or a rotten society. Kant does seem to allow for this possibility. His third test for the Categorical Imperative - the 'Kingdom of Ends' - points us towards a society of entirely rational persons, who would all agree about the sorts of things people should do and on the laws needed to regulate society, but once again this is a picture of an impossible perfection. Kant uses his rational model as an effective talisman against the corruption of the world. We may wonder if his faith is well-placed.


Kant leaves us with the problem of how to transform ourselves. He tells us what we would be like and how we would act if we were perfect, but not how we might make ourselves perfect. 


2) Kant's hypothetical imperative gives us a logical model of our ordinary everyday actions and decisions. We do things in order to achieve our desired ends. I make an effort to impress my new colleagues with my wit, charm and general friendliness, but perhaps I do so in order to be well-received by them as a first step towards establishing myself within the company. And people understand that - they are probably behaving in the same way towards me in an elaborate ritual display of good will - but this is good will in minuscule, not majuscule. These are not moral actions as Kant conceives them. 

All the ordinary business of our lives seems for Kant to fall outside the arena of actions that may properly in his view be called moral. They may be rational in a limited instrumental sense, but they do not deserve the ultimate accolade of 'moral' because they are not performed for entirely disinterested reasons. They do not spring from the perceptions and deliberations of the Categorical Imperative. The hypothetical imperative seems intended to model all those ordinary actions that make up the fabric of our lives. We have to say that this seems an extremely simplified version of the immense compexity of avaerage days with all their shortfalls, avoidances, deceptions and self-deceptions. Let me for the fun of it quote a poem by Philip Larkin: 

                            Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

                Lying together there goes back so far,
                An emblem of two people being honest.

                Yet more and more time passes silently.
                Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
                Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

                And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
                None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
                At this unique distance from isolation

                It becomes still more difficult to find
                Words at once true and kind,
                Or not untrue and not unkind.

Honesty is not something simple or easy. It is not something that can be put through a series of simple test-steps. No aspect of our lives has this clear simple quality. We cannot press the 'reset' button and put things back the way they were on some paradisal first day, not in our individual lives nor in our international lives - as America's recent attempted 'RESET' diplomacy with Russia demonstrated.

3) The complexity of our moral lives vanishes almost completely in Kant's account. It is as though Kant had reduced that complexity to a rational scaffold, but we have to live 'where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.' (Yeats) We still do not know where to find the ladder to climb up and out of our ordinary lives. 

St Paul

Kant's may be a simple rational picture, but it is one that owes a lot to traditional Christian theology. St Paul's distinction between the general condition of our lives - our condition humaine - contrasts with that higher transformed life of those who have accepted the Christian revelation as to how one ought to live as exemplified in the life and death of Jesus. This distinction is expressed by Paul as that between lives that are lived 'according to the flesh' - kata sarka - and a life that is lived 'in or in accordance to the spirit', kata pneuma. The term 'sarx' or ‘flesh’ translates Hebrew ‘basar’ and should not be taken literally – though that is what all too many people have done and continue to do – but is intended rather as a term to denote a a sphere or character of existence, one dominated by an attachment to transient, ultimately less worthwhile things. ‘Kata sarka denotes simply a life lived at the level of decaying materiality, where the satisfaction of human appetite and desire is the highest objective’ (James Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 2006, pp 67-8). In contrast, a life lived kata pneuma is one that discerns and attempts to follow those values that religious belief sees as revealed in the nature of the world – values that are God-ordained and intrinsic to the world and not chosen from a values-catalogue along with clothes and holidays. Kant's picture is very different in terms of its vocabulary but it retains the fundamental theological distinction between our ordinary lives, desires and actions and that more elevated perspective on life which Kant claims is discernible through reason alone. It is noticeable that Kant seems to think that everyone should inevitably, logically, agree with each other. This seems very close to being a secular version of revelation. In both values are somehow discovered, not chosen.

Some good guys from seventh century Coptic Egypt

3) Most people when they talk about Kant focus on the concept of the categorical imperative and particularly on its second formulation as the Maxim of Humanity. This formulation states that we should never act in such a way that we treat Humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. The three formulations of the categorical Imperative are said to be equivalent to one another, but this one does seem to be different from the other two. Unlike the other two, this one meshes with the world and gives us unmistakable guidance about how to comport ourselves vis à vis others. We should treat them always with respect, with a sense of their irreducible valuable in and for themselves. We should never see them as purely there as instruments or means for our own satisfactions. In practice of course we do treat people as useful instruments for our purposes. The waiter brings our café and croissant and our mother for so many years washes and irons and cooks meals for her unappreciative children, but, as we become a little more mature and perceptive, we learn to be always aware that the waiter is also a person in his own right and not merely a human automaton at our service and, growing older and with a little more more understanding, we come closer to appreciating our mother's unceasing love.

This second formula is very reminiscent of the New Testament's injunction to 'love your neighbour as yourself'. It is this formula more than anything else that gives Kant's moral philosophy its content, though without the religious context. What is not so clear is how Kant is able to claim that this content-rich second formula is equivalent to the other two, the Formula of Universal Law and the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends. Is respect for others the only maxim that can be universalized and the only maxim that can be the basis for a rational community? More particularly, does the humanity formula give us a complete guide for how we should act in the world? Let us take an example. In the New Testament Jesus is recorded as saying that we should not confront our enemies or return violence with violence. Can we universalize this as a maxim for our lives? Some might claim that it passes the tests but others might object that it conflicts with the second maxim which surely forbids all kinds of killing of others of one's kind. If we do believe that both approaches forbid killing, should we then not actively legislate for the outlawing of all violence, and perhaps, logically, we would then be forced to go further and forbid the killing of any animals or other living creatures, for surely this could be made into a universal maxim too? But would reason be a sufficiently strong motive for people to risk and sacrifice their lives in this way and to forego the slaughter of animals and the eating of meat? It seems that logic would not be a strong enough motive-force. For that one would need religious convictions of some sort.

W.H.Auden regretted advocating 'the necessary murder'