A History of Philosophy | 55 Kant's Ethics

you we want today to take up Kant's ethics and let me start by reminding you that at the end of the critique of practical reason at the end of his first critique he points out that even though in terms of what he calls doctrinal belief what we could know metaphysically rationally we cannot demonstrate the existence of God yet it may be possible on the basis of ethics to affirm rationally the existence of God so there's a natural transition between the first critique pure reason and the second critique on practical reason it's sometimes said that the first critique is dealing with our Faculty of knowing the second critique with our Faculty of willing and the third critique critique of judgment with the Faculty of feeling all right maybe but in any case it's in the second critique that you get the notion of the moral will introduced and moral responsibility moral duty and so forth now a few preliminaries one is this comment that by by anybody's reading a Kant is a moral realist that is to say he insists that there are objective moral truths about objective moral qualities that there are objectively real moral distinctive between right and wrong between virtue and vice he's a moral realist in that sense an Objectivist and his famous categorical imperative which we'll be looking at tells us how we can know that difference between right and wrong now his moral realism is however very much in keeping with the concerns of others in the late 18th century there's a sense in which the 18th century could be described as an age of moral crisis because the aftermath of the Scientific Revolution the Copernican revolution in physics was of course a turn to a mechanistic science without tyrion urging therefore without the conception of the good as an all-inclusive ideal which everything in nature strives to imitate the result was that right after the Scientific Revolution and during it there was a a groping for some new way of addressing ethical questions and we saw in bacon and it's true in Descartes as well a kind of early version of utilitarianism in terms of what works there was a sophisticated development in Thomas Hobbes whom the 18th century saw as an unqualified hedonist a thoroughgoing determinist without recognizing a shred of human good we'll benevolence that was the 18th century reading of hops and when we were talking about him I think I pointed out that it doesn't all really come out that way there are notes of benevolence and his concern and so forth the 18th century also called him a thoroughgoing atheist and that's not the case clearly at all but in any case that reading of Hobbes precipitated a great deal of concern among 18th century philosophers for providing some objective grounding of morals a concern about moral realism one of the moves in that direction was the Cambridge Platonism he remember another you might say is John Locke's attempt to ground natural law human law in the rational nature of human beings some reading I was doing just this morning I discovered that Locke was very close to the daughter of ralph Cudworth who was really the leading Cambridge Platonist PLC and Locke's rejection of innate ideas may well have been a rejection as we mentioned before of the Cambridge Platonism but at the same time he shared their concern for an objective grounding of ethics the same was the concern of those moral sense philosophers people like Adam Smith Shaftesbury Hutchison that we noted more embarrassing than anything else and that Shaftesbury was the sir of family where Locke was hired as a tutor so he was the tutor to the Shaftesbury who later developed moral sense philosophy the vet shaft Murray rejected Locke's approach to ethics and wanted I had something are much more definite and so the development of that notion of a moral sense David Hume it said was very much influenced by the moral sense thinkers in fact there is an interpretation a fairly recent interpretation that's been developed in the last 10 years or so that David Hume was so much influenced by the moral sense philosophers that he too shared their concern about ethical realism now when we were talking about him I suggested that he was an ethical subjectivist that is to say to say something is right or wrong is simply to refer to how people feel about it but according to this newer interpretation those moral feelings Moral Sentiments are simply signs by which we recognize what is objectively the way it is the case for that interpretation of Hume really hinges on some statements that Hume seems to make about the difference between virtue and vice which sound as if he's talking about objective qualities of individuals of human beings so that if virtue advice our objective qualities then there is an objective difference between those qualities and you've got moral objectivity at least in the the status of the moral qualities so this matter of moral realism was very much a concern of 18th century thinkers likewise of a manual count very much moral realist trying to avoid some of the possible ethical implications of that mechanistic science with its causal determinism which of course would take away from individual moral responsibility and its implicit subjectivist implications so it's with that in mind then that that Kant writes about ethics no his approach to ethics is remarkably like his approach to metaphysics there in examining the Faculty of knowing what he looks for is the a priori structures the subjective structures that shape the way in which we think and understand as well as perceive the things in the critique of practical reason he's again looking for the mental structures the subjective structures or principles did we bring to a moral thinking and again the question is whether those structures of our thought are purely subjective is was the case with the forms and categories or whether they have any objective corylus so that when it turns out that the subjective structure involves some sense of duty of respect for moral law the question is whether there is any objective moral law musi and while he concludes that the forms and categories used in science and metaphysics a purely subjective it turns out that the categories used in ethics our object let us say there are objective currents there is such a thing as objective moral duty as an objective difference between right and wrong objective moral law so he is in those regards a moral realist now in order to to see the the way he he does that you have to recognize then that he is again seeing the synthetic a priori nature of ethical judgments so that the ethical judgment then involves the confluence of two kinds of input on the one hand empirical input and on the other hand some a priori principle so that when we say stealing is wrong you get an empirical description of an act that is known as stealing and you get the concept of wrong or lack of rightness as the a priori question so that what you get then is the introduction of an a priori principle in our moral reflection in our moral awareness an Avery or AI principle that is imply applied to factual situations applied to not implied in but applied to factual situations and this a priori principle is of course the categorical imperative now you have an initial selection about this in the anthology the last little piece of Kant in the anthology the last piece in the anthology period and that is taken not from the critique of practical reason but from his metaphysical foundations of morals some of you may have read that material in your introductory course and recall that what he does is to start by saying that there is only one thing that is unconditionally good that is to say a good will good will the focus is on intention unmotivated is position of the individual and it's only the goodness of that in a moral disposition that can be regarded as good without qualification after all our natural inclination this can be twisted divert pervert our desires may be self-indulgent you see so that our desire for happiness is not something that is in itself good and right it can be misdirected so he makes a clear distinction between on the one hand inclinations because inclination towards empirical objects okay a clear distinction between incarnations on the one hand and the sense of duty on the other hand the sense of duty is referring back to the a3 or I principle the inclinations are looking forward to empirical satisfactions and the moral quality is involved in the form he makes the distinction another way by talking about hypothetical imperatives as distinct from categorical imperatives well you know the difference between a hypothetical proposition and a categorical proposition a hypothetical one is iffy if you want this then do that it would be a sort of a hypothetical moral syllogism if you want this then do that so that hypothetical imperatives are oriented to ends outcomes consequences inclinations desires and they're not unqualifiedly good on the other hand categorical imperatives are not if he at all you think without qualification tell Agora chol imperative tells you what's right so while he starts by saying the the only unconditionally good thing is acting out of a sense of will he develops that that that notion of the the completely unconditional imperative it's good will yes to act out of respect for duty not just in accordance with dude Kahn's not saying do your duty well not saying just that because he knows perfectly well that you can do your duty for the wrong reason like you can observe the speed limit because there's a cop car call following no moral virtue in that about doing one's duty out of respect for duty is the sort of thing that he's after then he goes on to develop that more fully going that far alone he calls common sense morality because it is in effect the kind of common morality which many ordinary people in the street would immediately describe but he goes on to develop in in his more philosophical way in trying to articulate his categorical imperative which he presents in three forms one is some often referred to was the universalizability principle the second is referred to nowadays as the principle of respect for persons and the third as the autonomy of the will the autonomous well a word about each of these universalizability that you should always act according to a Maxim Maxim is a moral rule according to a maxim that you were you could will as universal moral law always act according to a maxim that you could will as a universal moral law and two interpretations of that have developed what it would it be something which you could get enacted and that is to say that all persons would recognize as morally banned Universal the other more usual interpretation is that is it logically possible to will that now something that's not logically possible to will would be a self-contradiction so if you cannot logically well it to be an aversive moral law it's because it would turn out to be yourself contradictory or a self-defeating thing if for instance you are trying to take a loan and promised to with a promise to repay it by a certain date knowing and intending fully well not to repay it you are enough yes with no intention to keep the promise now the maxim on which you are acting if universalized would be something like everybody could if they wished make peace with turian two sensors one you're really not making a promise you're making a promise which is not a promise a second you are just the whole institution of promising by the universal law there would be no such thing as promise so it will be a victory so the categorical imperative then stated in in that way the problem with that formulation is that it provides a negative criterion telling you what you cannot do rather than a positive criteria a negative criterion rather than a positive criteria no can't however goes on to a second formulation that nowadays gets known as respect for persons his way of putting it is that we should always there's the universalizability carried over we should always treat persons as ends in themselves rather than as knees only and never treat a person only as a means always as an end now he's not saying never treat persons of leaves we do that all the time you're using me right now to get some credit and I'm using you to yeah he's not saying that's wrong but he is saying that in the ways in which we use people treat those people is of value in themselves why that well because the rational people with moral will so it'sit's really universal are using what I asked for myself that I be respected as a rational being able to make moral decisions now that emphasis on respect for persons has been made a great deal of you solve in for instance contemporary medical ethics and business ethics it's been developed and said University of Chicago that what but still away principle like this when he says that if I ask respect for my life project then consistency requires that I respect your life project why do I ask respect for mine because I'm a rational self determining being yes a and so he argues for a principle of generic consistency as he calls it the principle of generic consistency Jesus no and this is really a so lies ability of us the universalization of respect for persons so that's the the second way of stating the categorical imperative and obviously it has much more positive application now seems seems to me that one of the difficulties with this is that what it means to respect a person really depends on how you define a person and if you're not satisfied with the sufficiency of defining a person simply as a rational being but if there is more to the notion of personhood then that needs to be spelled out and I'm inclined to argue there is more to it therefore this is an incomplete the third version of the categorical imperative involves his distinction between the autonomous will and on the other hand the heteronomous will now a heteronomous will is one that is ruled by another heteronomy governed by another autonomy means of or self-government the autonomous will is one that is self governed his point basically is that the categorical imperative requires that you act out of your own good well you see it's coming back to that notion that it be a free act self determined acting of your own will rather than being governed driven by other people's desires and expectations going along with the crowd conforming to social prescience following your own desires rather than acting out of free will enslaved by your own inclinations so that's the basic distinction non ties in what he's means he's been criticized here really this under degree of autonomy which could be governed and so Robert Adams for instance who teaches at UCLA introduces a third alternative alternative that he calls the Theon immerse will a will that is on on this yeah a will that is governed by God Theo nama swear whether can't really would allow that or intended it is a very good question was the Lord God so it may be a direction that we had have been happy with in any case his primary intention in talking of the autonomous will is to come back to the distinction between acting out of a voluntary respect for duty as distinct from simply following inclinations and giving in to extraneous influences so this is his categorical imperative he does speak in connection with the respectful persons of what he calls a kingdom of ends that is to say if you treat people as ends rather than means what you're doing is advocating that society should be a kingdom of ends yes a akun kingdom of people of equal worth value this is the basis for his emphasis on human rights in the light of that he proposed what he called a League of Nations that's where Woodrow Wilson got the idea straight from Immanuel Kant he has a book Kant does a little booklet called perpetual peace in which he proposes that the rational people yes a acting out of goodwill we should contract together a contractual arrangement contract Aryan approach so the Fiat the respect for persons leads to the notion of kingdom of ends and in his religion book that we'll be getting into he he talks of this kingdom of ends simply as the kingdom of God you see he sees this as the biblical notion of the kingdom of God all right any comment query that far that's pretty straight forward I think once you see what he's up to David he you see the the only thing that is good without qualification is goodwill it follows that the only thing that is really morally worthy is an act done out of a sense of duty not doing your duty because somebody's standing behind you with an arrest warrant not your duty because really you have an unthinking habit Yesi and certainly not avoiding the duty by being lured away by roommates who want to go out on the town for the night whatever no oh he'd be very happy if your desires were changed you see his point is that acting out of desire is something which is deterministic now let me let me go on to make that point what he is arguing here in his analysis of the moral self okay and the analysis of the moral experience what he's arguing is that the will is free when it acts rationally out of a sense of duty guided by reason out of a sensitivity on the other hand if the though if the will rather than know if the individual is not acting out of that kind of goodwill but is simply doing what it wants to do it's functioning at the empirical level where the cause-effect mechanisms of mechanistic science come into play so in simply doing what you wanna do eating without thought of whether this is what you ought to be eating for instance responding thoughtlessly and breaking off what's got to be done and just warming it up what you're doing is acting more like an animal and a rational human being so he's trying to to maintain that if you live at the sensual level they're pursuing desires inclinations emotions feelings only thing you're not free you're not acting as a human being while the desires may not be bad the activities may not be bad he's concerned about the moral quality of the person the only thing that is good without qualification is goodwill well you know he's been criticized here sure he was a Prussian I don't know why that would be a criticism but a lot of English writers talk about the Prussian in him he was a bachelor yeah you know the very disciplined bachelor the neighbors set their clocks in the morning by the time when he walked down the street to the university that sort of an individual underlying it I think is the the feeling that and I suspect this underlies your question David that there is something less than fully human about the notion of acting out of a sense of duty and ignoring desire god-given desire perhaps redemptive Lea transformed desire well I think the thing to say in his defense is that he recognizes that we have a natural desire for happiness he recognizes that this is a god-given desire for happiness the problem is that in this life those two don't come together Yesi there's too much going against us for them to come together both in US and outside us to automatically trust us eyes for her and that's what feeds into what you see coming later in terms of the corollaries okay good yeah he's not saying we always do he's very explicit that there are people who will fly in the face of their duty back to the contrary reject moral law he's trying to get into his thinking something of what theology talks about in terms of depravity whether he does so sufficiently is the question his background was Lutheran pietism and Kierkegaard is quite critical of him in this regard not for being a Lutheran partes time een but following what Cokely world regards is a too optimistic view what human nature somebody else back there yeah you see that question implies that he's simply saying do your duty and so what do you do if you have conflicting do this but he's not just saying do your duty he's saying act out of a sense of duty so his response to your question would be that in choosing between conflicting duties you choose out of a sense of duty you don't do the duty that you prefer to do you say that you're more inclined to do it's easier to do you do the duty which is a rational being you decide it is your duty to do now that does get him into some problems well you decide in terms of respect for persons so that hypothetically he might say that if do da conflicts with duty be and are both duties to persons which is more essential in respecting the person involved in that way I suppose he might argue in terms of lifeboat ethics know what I mean by lifeboat ethics extremities where there only where there are two people who can be lost and only one can be saved yeah he is in the sense well yeah he's often taken to be in the sense that he does not want to allow moral exceptions exceptions to moral rules in that sense he's an absolutist about lying you'll see there are no such things as justifiable lives my initial reaction to your question was to pull out that favorite illustration about what would you do if you were in Amsterdam in 1942 and the Gestapo come knocking at the door looking for the Jewish girl you're hiding in your attic and you see would you tell a lie or what would you do no I think at least according to that reading of card he would say no you must never tell a lie yes yeah precisely we had a Kant scholar here on campus on one of these visiting philosopher programs a few years ago Christine cause God who was then at University of Chicago is now at Harvard and she argued in one of her lectures that a Kant was not an absolutist in that sense that he would reconstruct the picture so that you are not lying what you're doing is respecting persons and treating those who have who violate persons in a way that keeps the truth from something about them I think the point is yeah you think that's a subtle one huh there are two or three classic ways in which ethicists respond to your kind of question what do you do when dude is complaint one you operate with a hierarchy of duties and you decide which one ranks higher now that's what I was implying when I said which is more essential in respect for persons the other is to introduce rules to govern exceptions tomorrow rules put that another way you are qualifying the moral rule so you mustn't lie is just a shorthand for a much longer moral rule with all sorts of qualifications defining what you mean by a lie just as some Old Testament scholars say about the commandment thou shalt not kill and then reading that context there are all sorts of qualifications that are built into it you just have to look in the context to see it's not a blanket rule to qualify so it's difficult exactly what Kant does and you know that's how some can't specialists earn their reputations is arguing about how to interpret yes sir knowing what your sense of duty is No well then you don't have to worry about knowing it if you're acting out of a sense of duty you must know you have a sense of duty no you mean how do you determine what is your duty by the categorical imperative that is the way in which you know what is your duty would you be acting on a maxim that could be universalized would you be acting out of respect for persons would you be acting out of an autonomous will that's the way you know it's the way you decide no it doesn't give you a whole list of rules well you don't want a rulebook for ethics you've got to make moral decisions in cases where there are no rules anyway that's what medical ethics today and bioethics is about using no moral thinking is about how most basic moral principles affect our decisions or if we're trying to formulate moral rules we should follow how do you formulate those moral rules the answer is on the basis of the categorical imperative say that again exactly on the basis of the categorical imperative this here J pre-or I principle is the categorical imperative come at that one other way some of you have seen me talk this way before but I find it helpful to distinguish between four levels of ethical discussion a particular case an area rule a rule that applies to an area of moral responsibility like a rule against line overall principles that is to say principles that apply to every kind of area of responsibility to the entire moral life and in the basis on which those principles rests which would be a theological basis or a philosophical basis of some sort metaphysical basis okay now in Kahn's case the principle is the categorical imperative the categorical imperative he might have a rule about truth-telling which is based on the categorical imperative to lie is not respecting persons I think I can fool it will deceive you manipulate you by lies it's not respecting persons so the rule is based on that and that's applied to the case so how do you know what's the right thing to do in a particular case well normally we check the rules yeah you have certain moral rules of thumb you have certain explicit biblical moral teachings and there are certain societal moral standards professional code of ethics whatever it might be but when you're trying to formulate such rules or try to handle conflicts between moral obligations and rules level you say then you go back to what the overall principle demands I think there is another feature that filth feeds into ethical discussion and that's what I call background beliefs BB's background beliefs you know if you're dealing with all questions in business ethics then your underlying belief about the meaning and purpose of work of economic activity comes into play if you're dealing with matters of medical ethics then your belief about the the purpose of medical care comes into play and there's literature for instance so that from a Christian point of view about the attitude of the medical profession that we have to extend human life at all costs to the patient not just economic cost the cost of suffering lingering yes a arguing that from a Christian point of view death is something to be accepted not endlessly denied and that the preservation of life is not the highest end it's not an argument for active euthanasia but it is an argument against extraordinary means of extending life when by all natural standards life is drawing to a close so background bollocks yeah you see I started today by talking of Kant as a moral realist you see the categorical imperatives don't call them categories there's one categorical imperative this is three ways of stating it the categorical imperative is his way of distinguishing right from wrong yes they and now is he making up the distinction no this is his way of recognizing a distinction that's already there is a moral right and moral wrong are two very different things how do we know which is which by means of the categorical imperative but he told you he was going to be at the end of the first pratik yeah now read that last section in the first critique you remember way he talks about belief moral belief as distinct from doctrine or belief now why well at this juncture all he's doing is talking about moral experience where does moral experience occur within the mind wrestling with moral obligation in relationship to desires and inclinations in other words moral experience as such is not experience of a space/time world at all you see and so your forms and categories of science and metaphysics don't impose themselves on our moral thinking so it is an a moral life in the inner life of the human spirit that you have an open door into the nature of reality that's why it is that idealism and romanticism as a result of can't you see the turn is a turn away from the observing the external world of science to the inner world of the South that was his Copernican revolution wasn't it so that Copernican revolution has very far-reaching implications remember when we talked about the implement the effects of current in 19th century idealism romanticism are one of them now you begin to see it here in terms of ethics a card is hardly or a man desist but he's often called an ethical idealist that is to say one who describes the ultimate reality in ethical terms in terms of right and wrong and ethical ideas so cants God is a moral no no the fact but the the fact that in examination and analysis of moral experience you uncover by the transcendental method this categorical imperative doesn't mean to say the river body has to follow the person if this freedom of will you can turn your back on the principle and that's precisely what some people do what was it mean Milton's Paradise Lost that the devil said evil be thou my good see that's the evil will that's not good will medieval now if he were not an indeterminate you see if he didn't emphasize freedom of will you'd be right it'll be a determinate but the principle is not a principle that determines your decisions the principle is a principle which Reason can observe in guiding the will Pina yeah well hold the phone on that one with you so far the the only part of the response that we can have is that this kind of moral experience is independent of the forms and categories that apply to metaphysics okay let's take however this this next step to the corollaries and you can see already how he handles the question of freedom the freedom of the will is a corollary of moral duty that is to say if we say that morality consists of acting out of a sense of duty then if Rowlett is to make any sense there must be the freedom to act out of a sense of duty which means freedom of the will so while he is not proving the freedom of the will it is a corollary of his account of moral experience of moral phenomenology if he's right about this matter of duty then it follows that we have freedom of will I call it a corollary it's not a proof there seems to be implied and what's gone before but he goes further than that and if the first is sort of a logical corollary the second are more postulates that we are led to in the light of the ethic additional postulates that is to say the achievement of God will the only thing that's intrinsically good the achievement of good will in this life is never completed you don't achieve moral perfection in this life moreover there is that natural god-given desire for happiness which is never fully achieved in this life while pursuing duty in the face of one's desires so for both these reasons there must be a continuation of this life in which your moral development continues and is rewarded with happiness the immortality of the soul is a practical necessity and what he means by practical is it's necessary to practical reason practical reason is moral thinking that is to say it moral thinking makes any sense you have to postulate in addition a life hereafter in which the moral quest the quests for the good the good will can be achieved moreover if there is be a future life in which that is possible then we have to postulate the existence of a moral being who would guarantee happiness that is proportioned to one's virtue so you have to morally necessary postulates of practical reason immortality for soul now what he does in his religion book is to spell that part of it out more fully he spells that part of it out more something and let me give a quick rundown in in in this way what he's doing is trying to see correlations between the things he has described in the moral consciousness and the concept of God and the traditional religious attitude the attitude towards God now in the moral consciousness what we're finding is the reason via the categorical imperative reason legislates tells us what is right tells us what to do reason legislates yes you see in the correlate there is the conception of God as the holy righteous law giver with the appropriate religious attitude of reverence that includes the pedia the moral consciousness also manifests a natural inclination to happiness of an intention with one reason legislates correlated with this is the recognition that God is the good provider who blesses our our beans and the religious attitude is one of course of grateful love in the moral conscience as well moral consciousness rather there is the experience of conscience that is to say of something which jogs you pricks when you have a bad conscience and the correlate here is the conception of a just judge who judges the moral worth of action and accordingly the religious attitude expect a feel service now it's difficult to know exactly what he means is he simply saying that the God that whose existence we have to postulate has to be this sort of a God and this is the way God really inst nothing and this is the way should respond to him somebody's safe or is he saying that the conception of God and the religious life is simply a psychological projection of our religious experience without moral experience now the latter route of course is taken by the ethical humanist naturalistic interpretations of religion and the former interpretation that this is the way God is the way that was taken by the more traditional religious approaches with qualifications and out of this approach to talking about God developed some of the early strains of 19th century liberal theology because if your theology is simply an extension of your ethics then you have a new theological method which doesn't go as far as the biblical revelation so one strain of 19th century liberal theology emerged out of Kahn's thinking of this juncture incidentally Kant vowed in letters that he did he wrote and accused of doing so you see and was forbidden to teach or to publish in defense he defended him now for a man said that lying is always wrong it would be hard to think when he said that but the debate goes on in in addition to that in the religion book what he does is to talk about the kingdom of God talk about the Christ Christ you see represents in Christian religion the ideal of moral perfection the great example the death of Christ is the supreme example of acting out of a sense of duty not my will but thine and so Kant in that context gave birth to what since became known as the example theory of the atonement the example theory the significance of the death of Christ is in providing a supreme moral example and if that is all that it said then obviously the Orthodox Christian traditions are going to object account that it at least is not enough now whether he intended that me more is difficult to know it's uncertainly clear that the topical of his book he's not pretending to say everything that there is about religion that can be saved but only what can be said within the limits of reason alone perhaps the significant thing is this juncture that whereas the Enlightenment wanted to demonstrate the basic truths of religion Kant doesn't try but that sort of metaphysical proof is impossible but he does maintain it is rationale to postulate the basic truths of religion and it's the overall rational coherence of the resultant scheme that involves a moral lawgiver and so forth which which makes it so plausible and so rational apostolate so in terms of justifying belief you'd have to say that that can't really is a coherent astern zuv the overall coherence of the thing well at times more than gone

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Published: Thu May 14 2015