Kant's Moral Philosophy

[Music] immanuel kant is arguably the most important figure in the philosophy of the enlightenment and as professor stalloff just showed you his treatment of epistemological and ontological problems is profound and synthesizes many trends that have been present in the history of continental rationalism and also in british empiricism and the remainder of its philosophy the moral philosophy and the political philosophy also deals with themes that had been developed in the previous history of moral thought particularly kant's moral philosophy is a reaction to the kind of skeptical reductive naturalistic approach to philosophy to morals to politics that was characteristic of david hume in professor stalloff's lecture yesterday on hume and morals i believe you found out that hume held the view that morally praiseworthy actions or actions which were agreeable to ourself or to others or useful to ourselves or to others now there's all kinds of difficulties attached to this sort of a view on one level it's immediately kind of attractive because it's common sensical it's more or less consistent with our experience of the world but there is a deep problem in it because to some extent it tends to subjectivize ethics it makes ethics a question of opinion or taste or sentiment because ultimately the foundation of our moral judgments in hume's view is our feelings of approbation that come from the utility or pleasure we derive from the behavior of ourselves or other people this bothered emmanuel kant enormously kant wrote that it was david hume who roused him out of his dogmatic slumbers who made him really understand the strength and the profundity of english empiricism and the skeptical approach to morals and to politics that's characteristic of it kant was a very religious thinker you it's hard to immediately discern when you read his work because it's so dry and technical and sophisticated in terms of its logical proceedings but khan came from a pietist family a family of german protestants who were extremely devoted to religion and to religious values kant is a strong religious believer in contrast to hume kant is a very pious almost solemn thinker and when he saw hume's moral theory at first he tried to refute it and was unable to and he spent 11 years reading hume trying to work through it one only engages in an 11-year reading project of the same philosopher if he bothers you a great deal and kant was most upset about the the implications in hume which were essentially that morals are a question of taste question of feeling a question of sentiment now it's a simple empirical fact that people's feelings or sentiments are different you go from one person to another and if you ask them what their favorite color is or what their favorite food is or what their favorite piece of music is you will find that these opinions vary from first from person to person and this bothered kant enormously it seems to imply that god's justice that the ultimate divine moral law is an illusion or a myth doesn't apply to human beings hume suggests to us that morality is really a branch of anthropology and this bothered count tremendously he said i cannot stand to see morals brought to the level of a wretched anthropology so we're going to get beyond wretched anthropology here to a universal system of moral judgment which is completely binding on all rational beings under all circumstances that's the sort of religious truth that kant wants to formulate in the language of german idealism let me cut to the conclusion early on so you understand what the gist of kant is he is trying to create a rapprochement between christian religious belief and the intellectual state of western culture once it had developed newtonian mechanics and its social and political and moral concomitants so kant is trying to reconcile his faith in the god of the bible his belief in heaven and ultimate moral justice and he's trying to do it in an intellectually serious and sophisticated way one that doesn't pound on the desk and demand the abdication of your rationality but rather is the high point in perfection of rationality so it's an enormously ambitious task that kant undertakes now in a book called the foundations of the metaphysics of morals which i think you ought to read if you're interested in finding out about kantian morality it's the most accessible of kant's books which is not saying a great deal right those of you who have read kant before can understand how forbidding his prose is one of the problems with german philosophy as a whole is that there's not much in the way of clarity or elegance of style the easy and directly accessible philosophers tend to write in english for better or worse the more difficult philosophy like that of kant you find among the german right the german-speaking authors now khan's book the foundations of the metaphysics of morals states that kant wishes to become the newton of the moral world again i've come back again and again to the theme of physical science the breakthrough of newtonian mechanics which has fundamental implications for the rest of our thinking about politics about society about right and wrong and about the individual psyche sukant wants to be the newton of the moral world a couple of things are built into that idea that aspiration first is a difference between the moral world and the everyday world of sense perception the newtonian world and in fact this is the case kant is a metaphysical thinker what i mean by a metaphysical thinker is a thinker that splits the cosmos splits the world into two parts this is somewhat analogous to the distinction plato makes in the divided line between the world of sense and the world of the form some extra some world outside of space and time kant believes that there's some similar distinction in in ontology there's a numeral world and a phenomenal world the numeral world is the world of sense perception the world's or the phenomenal world is the world of sense perception the world of space and time the world which is accounted for by newtonian mechanics and which is completely connected by the principle of causality one thing causes another there's a completely determinate relationship between all events in the physical world of space and time this is newton's great achievement to show us that f equals m a for all bodies everywhere or at least that's what was thought at the end of the 18th century now by splitting the world and giving if not the devil his due giving the physicists their due by allowing newton to run the world of space and time he has a separate realm in which he hopes to do something analogous to what isaac newton did to formulate the rules of the numeral world of the moral world the ultimate quasi-mathematical algorithm of moral justice of moral righteousness which applies to things that are numeral to human souls to rational agents to free entities so there's a distinction between the two halves of the world the the newtonian world is the world of space and time the world of causality uh each domino knocks down the other domino in the other world the numeral world that's the realm of freedom that's the realm of morality so there's a split in the world between the world of causality and the world of freedom and by rescuing the idea of freedom by allowing it to be intellectually serious by giving it a place in his ontology he has made possible the autonomous judgment of free moral acts in other words if the war if the newtonians and the humans are right and the world is simply the set of space-time events there is no freedom freedom is an impossibility if isaac newton is right and that each event in the world causes the next event that comes after it well then first of all what does it mean to praise or blame someone for what they did they're as determined they're as mechanical as anything else in an entirely mechanical newtonian universe human beings are essentially elaborate soft machines they're internal clockworks that do what they do because they have to since that's the nature of the universe as a whole once we adopt newtonian mechanics as an archetectonic perspective on the world this is what bothers kant he says if we live in an entirely determined world of of bodies and moving through space well then what does it mean to say that this is a good action or that's a bad action it me it simply says that i like this action or that i don't like that action it relativizes moral judgment it subjectivizes moral judgment it essentially says that there are no moral facts that there are only moral opinions and that the aggregate the rough generalizations about most moral opinions are what we call good and evil since these judgments these aggregate judgments of good and evil change across geography perhaps people's moral judgments in china are different from the ones made in england perhaps the ones made in england at the time of roman conquest were different from the ones made in the 18th century what it does is relativize and subjectivise ethics turn moral judgment into what khan called a wretched anthropology well kant proposes to offer a universal law that allows us to establish the good or evil of every action by every free rational moral agent under all circumstances independent of space and time this universal moral algorithm will be true in china and true in england true on the north pole true at the equator true today true tomorrow was true last year true a thousand years ago it's true forever in other words kant wants to wrap up moral truth in an armor of idealism and logic and present it to a way that he believes unassailable to anyone who really understands his argument kant is going to formulate the law of ultimate moral duty and this is called the categorical imperative kant says in the beginning of the foundations of the metaphysics of morals that the only good thing is a good will and that's a profound and important and essentially christian idea it's something that essentially comes in certainly with saint augustine the intention of your action is the standard by which we're going to judge it now here's an important departure from hume those of you who have read hume's treatise those of you who have read hume's inquiry concerning the principles of morals will find that he doesn't talk a great deal about intention as a matter of fact intention isn't a great concern to hume the internal operations of people's psyches that's not the problem if you want to know whether an action is good or evil you don't go back to the intention of the agent although that may be kind of interesting and deter in influencing your feelings about their action but the key thing for hume in judging an agent's good or evil behavior is how you feel about the consequences of what they did so it's your feeling for hume in kant's case it's not a question of feeling it's a question of finding out what the agent intended intended if they intended something good if they had no malice a forethought then their behavior is blameless on the other hand if they did have malice or a bad intent when they began an action even if they didn't carry the action out it's an evil thing let me give you an example to make this clear because it's not always immediately obvious imagine a workman working on the roof of a building he's standing up there and he notices a loose brick he sees somebody on the ground says i don't like that guy i've always hated that guy he throws the brick down and kills him now hume would say we don't like that because it makes us feel bad for the poor guy that got hit in the head with a brick kant would say the reason we disapprove of that behavior is because he intended to do ill to someone it's the intention that he had now let's go to an alternative situation we have the same workman on a roof and he accidentally in the process of work knocks a brick loose without intending it without looking down without knowing what's going on on the ground the brick falls and kills someone in hume's view well since it wasn't in hume's view it's pretty much the same action he may be inclined to say well if it wasn't intended i don't have as great a disapproval of it as i would if the person was being malicious but still i have a certain dislike of that because it makes me again feel bad i have sympathy for the person that was hurt in kant's view the man's action is morally blameless he didn't intend to hurt anyone he he performed what we call an accident right that's the distinction between intentionality and accidental behavior and we have this idea built right into our legal system there's not just murder but intend to commit murder conspiracy to commit murder if a man was working on this roof and threw the brick down intentionally we'd put him in jail if he accidentally knocked the brick off we would say it was an accident we wouldn't hold it against him we wouldn't say that he was morally blameworthy we might say that he ought to be more careful in the future that he more ought to be more prominent but we wouldn't say that that was a morally evil disposition that's the key distinction between kant and hume kant is concerned primarily with people's intentions with the state of their soul essentially now khan's formulation his universal for the determination of the good or evil of an action is called the categorical imperative and in order to understand what a categorical imperative is you have to understand what a hypothetical imperative is and in order to understand what a hypothetical imperative is i have to review briefly all of hume's moral theory so i'm going to do that real quickly all right hume has a belief in reason which states that reason is the slave of the passions he states that specifically in the treatise what he means by that is that reason is an instrument which allows us to get the things that we desire and the desires we happen to have are not rationally determined for example we might say that i have the desire for a cup of coffee now i don't sit down and do some math problems and then say aha thus it is proven i want coffee i don't have to consult any sort of rational element in my mind to find out that i'm hungry that i'm thirsty that the lights are hot that any of my physical desires immediate wants um come directly to me through some sort of instinct through my feelings through my sentiments my emotions wherever they come from they don't come from my reasoning capacity in hume's view reason be being a slave of the passions means that i'm exclusively going to use my reason in an instrumental fashion this is the instrumental conception of reason and what it means is that reason tells you how to satisfy your desires once you have them so if you want a cup of coffee reason can tell you that the right means by which to do that is to go out in the hall and pour yourself a cup right so reason tells you how to get what you want but it doesn't tell you what to want wants come from some other place so the ends of your actions come from your irrational arbitrary desires your feelings the means by which you achieve your actions are derived through reason what kant means by heteronomy is acting on the basis of your feelings your passions your emotions acting in such a way as to satisfy your desires rather than to satisfy the ends given to you by pure rationality now hume thinks that reason is exclusively instrumental he thinks that you need a passion to generate actions a feeling a desire and for that reason his entire moral theory is organized around the idea of heteronomy of satisfying your desires and reason exclusively tells you the best means by which to achieve the ends that come irrationally arbitrarily kant wants to formulate a new conception of rationality a consequently a new conception of the human psyche that corresponds to his new ethical ideas that makes possible the categorical imperative now the distinction between a categorical imperative and a hypothetical imperative which is hume's basis for morals is something like this a hypothetical imperative is an imperative that you yourself happen to want simply because you are the person you are doing the things that you're doing for example you happen to be thirsty you might say i want to go get a drink of water i want to go get a cup of coffee it's a hypothetical imperative if you want to get a drink of water go out to the water fountain if you want to get a cup of coffee go out to the coffee machine if you want a hamburger go to mcdonald's if you want an elephant go to africa if you want a volcano go to hawaii in other words it has the form of if you want something then do the following it's a hypothetical imperative it all depends upon that first part of the clause if you want x go do y what kant is trying to formulate is a categorical imperative that doesn't apply to you if you want something rather it just applies to you rather than if you want x go do y it just says go do y for everybody under all circumstances he wants to find some obligation that all rational agents have simply by virtue of being rational agents this is called the categorical imperative and what makes the imperative in this case categorical is the fact that it's not hypothetical and what we mean by being hypothetical is that if then clause if you want a hamburger go to burger king if you want an elephant go to africa it's not an if-then clause it just says do this now how is he going to pull a rabbit out of his metaphysical hat and find something that everybody ought to do under all circumstances today tomorrow last year in china in india on the north pole on the moon everywhere what obligations do all moral agents have simply by virtue of the fact that they are moral agents well the categorical imperative gets formulated several times in the course of the foundations of the metaphysics of morals and what it states is this that rational agents have an obligation to act such that the maxim that they could wish that the maxim of their action could become a universal law of nature now that's a very complicated formulation it's not easy or intuitive the way much of human morals is so let's unpack this idea kant says that we have an obligation to act such that we could wish that the maxim of our action the general rule under which we're behaving could be universalized could happen all the time and could happen to us as well as the other people were doing it very complicated to figure out at first you'll find it a very difficult book to read let's take some examples to make it a little easier what kant is saying is something like this we all implicitly recognize the existence of moral rules which we one way or another believe ought to be obeyed by everyone particularly by other people there's nothing easier to improve than other people's morals and when we when we approve or disapprove of other people's behavior we are doing it implicitly context on the basis of whether it follows the categorical imperative now here's the problem and here's the origin of all evil among human beings and of course that's the only evil there is or maybe among the angels or something like that lucifer but pretty much evil in this world is restricted to things like us well it works out something like this when we do something wrong let's say uh let's say a mafia hitman is going to murder someone for money this mafia hit man is going to do something that implicitly he recognizes as being evil he recognizes that there's a universal moral rule that says i couldn't wish that everybody should commit murder whenever they want to no i agree that i don't want everybody to murder everyone else i couldn't wish that that should become a universal law of nature that people should constantly be murdering each other i want to live in a world where everybody else is really good where they're all real nice to me and where none of them are going to murder me on the other hand although i recognize the universality of this moral law i want there to be one exception me i'm going to make an exception in this moral rule i'm going to go out and commit a murder for hire take the money back and go live a pleasant life have a good time at the same time on my way on my way back from this contract murder i don't want someone to murder me as a matter of fact i don't want to live in a world where people are constantly murdering each other i want an exception to the moral rule only from me now think about it this isn't just true of mafia hitmen it's true of all the evil acts that all of us and i mean all of us do when we know we're doing something wrong let's take the example i mean i could take an example like pickpocketing right but most of us don't turn out to be pickpockets let's take something like a i don't know double parking or these the small infractions that we make we recognize we don't want everyone to disobey these rules at the same time we kind of figure that we should be the exception right think about it all pickpockets in the world they want to be able to walk away with other people's wallets but they don't want their own wallet taken right do you get the idea all of the evils that we do come from acknowledging a certain universality and moral rules and then saying that i should be the only exception kant's point is that that's irrational that that is literally speaking heteronomous in the human sense when you make these arbitrary exceptions to the universal moral rule what you are really doing is succumbing to heteronomy succumbing to the lure of your passions succumbing to your desire to be an exception to the moral rules that you really deep down know apply to everybody think about how many people in america cheat on their income taxes do all these people want everybody to cheat on their income taxes because then the government wouldn't work and we all recognize it we ought to pay our taxes and yet many people will play with the numbers thinking that everybody else should be paying their full share but me i'm going to play with it a little bit what they're doing there is operating heteronomously they are not behaving freely and for kant free behavior and rational behavior are the same thing to be free is the same thing as being rational in the tradition of german idealism so what does this mean it means that when we behave heteronomously we're behaving passionately we're behaving irrationally and that means we're breaking the categorical imperative and we're doing what we know is wrong when we behave rationally that's the same thing as behaving freely when we behave freely and rationally that's the same thing as behaving autonomously when we're behaving autonomously freely rationally we're following the categorical imperative and that's the same thing as being virtuous it means that we're living up to the moral rules that we deep down know apply to everybody we're making no exceptions for ourselves and this freedom this autonomy remember autonomy comes from the greek words autonomous making laws for oneself that's kant's conception of freedom it's an idea derived from rousseau freedom is not the arbitrary liberties of the savage in the state of nature for kant freedom is free is regulated freedom under law freedom is the activity of making a moral law that you yourself obey this is what enlightenment is coming to our maturity taking responsibility for our actions realizing that there is one universal moral law which commands us to become free rational good virtuous moral agents now what is this this idea that there's one universal moral law that applies equally to me and to you and that i ought not to do anything to you that i don't want you to do to me well this is the golden rule dressed up in its logical sunday best right it's it dresses it up in a sort of armor of logic and strict rationality and it comes with an enormous apparatus i mean professor stalloff described for you the epistemological stuff that is connected to this there's an al an enormous ontological and epistemological system that connects with this the gist of it is and in some ways the capstone of this system is the possibility of creating free rational moral agents in other words kant is asking us to be something more than animals something more than meat he wants us to live up to the potentialities of having a soul there's something in us that makes us different from the animals that are entirely heteronomous we are able to curb our appetites we are able to make rational choices and rational decisions we are responsible moral agents kant's law then is the law of the good will formulated in the language of continental rationalism the whole point of his system is to create the possibility that there is moral knowledge moral facts independent of subjective moral feelings or opinions it makes possible freedom remember in hume system conscient freedom is an impossibility it's an absurdity right in a completely deterministic world or since hume wants to back away from that slightly in a completely physical world it doesn't make much sense to talk about freedom it doesn't make all that much sense to talk about intentions it's just one damn thing after another in khan's system we are elevated above the rest of nature and we share something in common with god and the angels an interesting sidelight to kant's ethical theory is that it's connected to kant's political theory khan has a political philosophy it's sort of an addendum to it but it also is one of the high points of the political theory of the enlightenment and it corresponds in some respects to the differences between the kantian and human system hume is essentially an empiricist and rather a conservative with regard to political philosophy he likes things more or less as they are and you can see how that would appeal to an empiricist empiricists being rational risk minimizers know what's happened in the past they know what we can anticipate if we don't make too many radical changes and they don't have any utopian ideals about changing the world there's no ultimate moral law that politics or ethics has to refer back to for kant that's not going to be the case for kant the categorical imperative is not only universal but it applies to every rational agent and that doesn't mean it applies just to human beings it applies for example to nations it applies to angels one assumes they're incorporeal beings but also free and rational doubtless the the categorical imperative applies to them as well maybe that's lucifer's greatest sin that's something along that because many of his writings try in a very arch way to connect the mythology of christianity and the bible with these discoveries that he's made in the realms in the realm of logic and pure ideas well khan's political theory is an extrapolation from his moral theory and it's in some respects a response to hume's moral theory and to hume's political theory his political theory holds something like this that first of all the categorical imperative demands that individual human beings leave the state of nature if there is any such thing and form what's called the social contract you'll find that most of the great political thinkers of the enlightenment are social contractarians they're interested in the state of nature of course because newtonian mechanics has moved the focus of intellectual life from theology to the study of nature so the state of nature comes up again and again in the more in the political theory of the enlightenment and what khan says is something like this the state of nature can be viewed metaphorically as the state of pure heteronomy of pure animality of pure passion pushing around human beings when they haven't discovered in some respects their own potential for rational free autonomous behavior this comes up in an essay called the origins of what's the name of it um the origins of human history or something like that it's in a collection of political essays and historical essays that kant wrote just about the time of the french revolution and he says at the origin of human history and here the emphasis on the word human as opposed to history in the sense of natural history the origin of human history is in quote the garden of eden when people decide when people got kicked out of the garden adam and eve had sinned and they decided to put the fig leaf on what that means metaphorically putting on the fig leaf is that human beings become human they become rational when they disto when they decide to start curbing their desires and curbing one's sexual impulses is what is what kind of um archetypically separates us from the animals we are distant from our immediate passionate demands from the demands of heteronomy and that's what makes us free that's what makes us human that's what makes us rational that's what the origin of human history is the subsequent development of human history progressively moves along until we come to the enlightenment the enlightenment disappear is a period in which free reason untrammeled human reason finally ascends to its rightful place in human thought and human life and it begins to dominate the old metaphorical mythical systems of religion and political legitimacy it starts to review and revise the earlier systems of ethical judgment and for kant the development of human rationality is what human history is all about you can see how in some senses he's going to be a precursor to hegel he's going to go for an idea which is going to be very important to hegel later later on the idea of collective subjects usually in in an everyday kind of practical way when we think of a moral subject when we think of an individual we're talking about an individual person bodies and minds this person and this person and this person kant wants to allow for the possibility that moral agency that moral personhood and by implication the obligation to obey the categorical imperative the universal moral duty that this obligation adheres not just in individuals like this person and this person and this person it adheres in god and the angels and also in nations nations are moral agents for kant and this is very important because this means that not only do individuals have an obligation to get rid of the dubious and contingent liberties of the savage in the state of nature and form lawful freedom by creating a government out of the state of nature this is also since it is demanded by the categorical imperative and nations are moral subjects who are obligated to obey the categorical imperative all the nations of the world is one of khan's great discoveries and arguments are obligated to eliminate the state of nature between nations in the same way and for the same reason that all individual human beings have that obligation what this means is that civil law the creation of civil law is an obligation for individual human beings and the creation of international law is an obligation for nation states once governments have been created in other words the universality and legal and legality lawfulness are the two key ideas for kant and since universality is a key idea for him it's an ultimate drive of his moral and political system it doesn't stop at the level of the nation-state the way hume's political theory does hume says that his politic his moral theory only applies to individual human beings because of things like scarcity and the fact that human beings are social animals kant says that there's one moral rule for all agents so there's really no discrepancy there's a sort of seamless movement from the theory of right as it applies to individuals and the theory of right as it applies to nations or collective subjects and what that means is that this categorical imperative demands that the nations of the world give up the dubious and contingent freedom characteristic of the state of nature that they give up the war of all against all that they give up the right of tooth and fang and that they create lawful rational and in this sense free relations between them kant is one of the first people to formulate the idea that rationality that freedom that moral virtue demand the creation of what he called the league of nations the league of nations ideas was formulated by woodrow wilson at the end of the first world war is a strictly kantian conception woodrow wilson before he became president was a professor of law and philosophy at princeton and he was very much into kant i was working on some of his papers recently and in fact the idea of a league of nations is taken by wilson to be a universal moral obligation and it actually had practical influence on the development of politics in the 20th century we are often inclined to suggest that mere moral theory that the mere cogitations of philosophers two and three hundred years ago have little or no influence on everyday life in fact that's not the case in some circumstances there are some philosophers whose influence has been not only profound but pervasive they have influenced the patterns of our thought and the everyday words that we use to formulate our thoughts and in the case of kant his ideas about political philosophy his ideas about the connection between morality and politics did in fact influence the highest reaches of practical politics in this century kant's ontology should be complete compared to that of plato he divides the world from the top of the divided line the realm of the forms and the realm of sense perception kant does a similar sort of move when he distinguishes between pneumonia and phenomena in addition to that what's built into that metaphysical perspective is a consistency between political theory and moral theory which we will find among the germans the metaphysicians and also the metaphysical elements in the greeks and we don't find that in the one world naturalistic philosophers like hume and other skeptical thinkers people who deal with the problems of politics and ethics for plato politics is ethic is ethics writ large the main metaphor of the republic is that the city is like the man and that the soul of the city is like the soul of the man that there is a rational a spirited and an emotive part in the human soul in the human psyche and that human virtue is the organization of the parts of the soul so that rationality dominates the other elements well there's a perfectly analogous consideration when he puts together the ideal city because for all metaphysicians politics and ethics dovetail together perfectly so if the city is like the man and the platonic virtue is organizing the individual soul ethically political virtue for a good city will be organizing the strata of society the gold people the guardians the silver spirited people and the craftsman the bronze class so that the gold class the rational class dominates in the same way that it dominates in the virtuous individual soul this is not just true for plato this is also going to be true for kant's moral theory and kant's political theory and the isomorphism here the connection between the structure is not accidental plato is one of khan's favorite philosophers and there's a considerable congeniality in not just their conclusions but in the approach they take to making a kind of seamless web in all of philosophy hume being an empiricist kind of a skeptical jolly fellow is willing to deal with the fact that there may be some disjunction between politics and ethics that there may be some circumstances if you want to be hard-headed and realistic about it where morally good behavior as machiavelli tells us may not be politically astute may not be politically appropriate the kantian the platonist and probably also the christian will say no that's not the case what's morally good what's righteous for the individual is always righteous collectively if we have real moral obligations that are universal that are not contingent that are not a question of our feelings or our sentiments or our whims then it has to be carried through consistently and universally one rule for everyone otherwise we end up with a problem of duplicity and hypocrisy we pay homage to the moral virtues in our speeches but then when we go back and actually make public policy we make it on some other basis that we don't we are afraid to say i believe it was machiavelli who developed this one world perspective when he said that it was appropriate it was better to seem good and be bad than to be good all the time khan says that that's always wrong it is best to be good because that's obligate obligatory upon all rational moral agents and not only is it is it necessary and morally appropriate to seem to be good but if you seem good that's okay if you don't seem good that's okay how you seem is entirely irrelevant because the only thing that is good is the good will if you are conscientiously following the one universal algorithm for moral judgment and for morally righteous behavior then how you seem doesn't make any difference how you fare in the this world makes no difference because there is only one root to moral blessedness as it says in scripture the truth shall make you free kant believes that he's shown us the one universal moral truth that applies to all rational beings as rational beings kant holds the belief that once you understand the nature of his argument you cannot be but be persuaded if you are rational and if you understand what he is saying and because this rationality is the sort of platonic ultimate rationality that doesn't change that doesn't undergo alteration that is independent of space and time that is absolute knowledge much more certain and foundational than anything we can derive from physics or mathematics he has given you the greatest benefit the greatest contribution that a philosopher can make he has told human beings for the first and perhaps even the last time it'll ever be necessary what they need to do in order to be morally virtuous what they need to do in order to meet their moral obligations and what the ultimate standard today and tomorrow for moral righteous behavior is going to be this standard can be extrapolated into a theory of politics and from that into a theory of human nature into a philosophical psychology into a kind of philosophical sociology into a philosophy of history in which human beings are judged and human cultures are judged by their contributions to the development of human rationality and self-consciousness it's extraordinary the amount of philosophical implications and the weight of philosophical entailments that are found in khan's treatment of morals and what's remarkable about this treatment of morals is a the fact that it is extremely difficult to grasp the first time you look at this when i teach this to my college class i say read it again nobody understands kant the first time it's not my fault i'm doing my best with you and then after they read it again i tell them now let me give you the big scoop on this you're being taught here a something you already know and everybody already knows it and b we teach it to six-year-olds all the time in other words this is not only a profoundly complex and rich intellectual system but it's also the kind of thing that any six-year-old can understand in fact we teach it in kindergarten every day let's take the hypothetical case of johnny and janie two six-year-olds johnny wants janie's toy and johnny being stronger than janie pulls the toy away from janie janie starts to cry and go to the teacher the teacher comes in and says johnny you just took that toy from janie johnny what if everyone did that would you like it if people took toys from you all the time and the answer oh and i always wondered when i was six years old what difference does it make everybody did i'm stronger than her i want the toy that's the humane response but every kindergarten teacher is implicitly a kantian when they say johnny what if everybody did that and johnny of course doesn't know what to say since he hasn't read kant so johnny gives the toy back and then if you do that enough time johnny gets the impression that there's some reason for him to believe that the moral judgments he makes apply to everyone even to him and that he is being wicked and vicious when he makes exceptions to universal moral rules that he wants for himself that he wants everyone else to obey if you can teach this to a six-year-old and in fact not only can we teach it to six year olds we teach you to six year olds every day of the week there is something there's a simple nugget of truth here that i don't know how to get around that in fact if i had a six-year-old i would probably say things like johnny what if everybody did that you don't want to take that toy from janie and johnny being a six-year-old and a human is saying yes i do i want the toy but if we explain to him the idea that look moral rules apply to everybody johnny not just to you and someday you're going to meet seven-year-olds that are bigger than you that are going to take your toys if you don't have a teacher who's a kantian so all of our universal moral rules all of our attempt to create moral order and moral knowledge that's independent of subjectivity that's independent of relativism that's independent of a kind of wretched anthropology is all homage to kant like it or not many times we find kant's the the kind of extreme cases of kant's moral theory and there are plenty of them unacceptable we don't like the immediate implications of them and oftentimes it seems a little bit too rigorous a little bit too bloodless a little bit too lifeless for us rather too rationalistic but in practical fact almost all of us every day of our lives not only acknowledges kanti and moral theory but we teach it to our kids and the reason we teach it to our kids i suspect is that we want them to behave that way and i think we want them to behave that way because one way or another we believe it as woodrow wilson said in his philosophy of education we must believe what we tell the children and i think that we tell the children essentially kantian moral theory because we do believe it and i think we do believe it a because kant's conception of right and wrong is profoundly built into our conception of rationality and freedom and virtue and also because he's one of the greatest interpreters one of the greatest athenian interpreters of the intellectual tradition that comes out of jerusalem and that one way or another our culture is saturated in the moral judgments that come from the judeo-christian tradition and in that respect telling johnny that he mustn't do that it makes janie unhappy and what if everybody did that is really our way of saying that our culture is saturated with these judgments of value and we don't always bring them to mind we don't we're not always entirely conscious of them but they're there whether we acknowledge it or not and perhaps coming to consciousness of it allows us to think about it to be certain of what it is we're teaching the children and i think even after we do that this is again my homage to kant that we're still going to tell him that johnny you mustn't do that to janie what if everyone did that so khan's theory is a profound provocative brilliant subtle insightful moral epistemological ontological theory that we teach to kids every day homage to kant all right the simplicity of it and the complexity of it is what makes it probably the greatest contribution to the moral theory of the enlightenment one of the high points in german idealism one of the great achievements of the human spirit

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 23,170

Rating: 4.9577279 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Kant, Moral Philosophy

Id: d-vcItYxM9U

Length: 43min 50sec (2630 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020