Kantian Commitments [ PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE ]
Barbara Herman, UCLA
When I was asked to be on this panel, the idea for it was described as emerging from a discussion point raised last year about the fact that Kantians and utilitarians never talk to one another about the foundations of morality. I think that’s pretty much true: they don’t. Each side takes itself to know the other well enough, and keeps a pet version in the backyard to be brought out when a show seems necessary. Despite this, they sometimes learn from one another:
Kantians acknowledge some pressure to deal with issues about numbers; utilitarians work to find room for such values as autonomy and respect. I am a ptolemeist about such adjustments. Most any plausible theory can accommodate itself by way of epicycles to the facts on the ground and to the best claims of the competitors. Best in its own sense of best, of course. And what makes a fact “ground level”? That’s harder to say than it should be. In any case, once the epicycles are in place, there’s not much for the two theories to talk about… to each other .
As I said to the organizers, I’m not sure there’s much more to say. In older vocabulary, we might point to competing paradigms, different conceptions of agency, or of the fit of agency and norms, different understandings of value – different core cases. Then there’s the question about foundations: I have a deflationary Kantian view about that. If the question is, can we, apart from human beliefs and practices, find a metaphysical basis for morality, or for some particular story about morality – I doubt we can. We can describe, we can identify presuppositions, we can investigate lateral consistency with other things we know or believe.
The posture is one Kant describes as “defense”: we recognize limits on explanation and repel objections that ask for what can’t be had. In that spirit, I will talk about the different and competing commitments at work of the two sides. My own commitments are Kantian, and I can speak most authoritatively about them. I am less resourceful when it comes to utilitarianism.
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As I see it, much of current moral theorizing is not exactly utilitarian, but it is firmly consequentialist, even when it tries not to be. (Utilitarianism is a welfare-centered instance of consequentialism. Some recent contractualist accounts, while not welfarist, are no less consequentialist.) The explanation lies in the way we think about reasons. One starts with a view of reasons, or some reasons, as normatively basic, a data set, whether as the last and untheorized element in the chain of rationalizing explanation, or as a kind of fact (though not necessarily a natural fact). Morality is then cast in the form of reasons-responsive principles.
While moral theories have been criticized for being realist about reasons (thereby leaving normativity in the lurch), or for locating reasons in the output of a special faculty (thereby undermining the objectivity of moral standards), they are rarely challenged for their claims about what reasons there are, at least not the basic ones. Other things equal, of course, there is a reason to relieve suffering, just as there is a reason to eat when you’re hungry, or to play with your children. One can offer explanations, but nothing one says is more obvious than the reasons claim itself. And the reasons we look to first are about what happens to us, brutely, or as the result of actions that effect a change in how well or poorly we fare. There are other sorts of reasons, of course – autonomy, reciprocity, friendship – but they tend to come later, after the first level of moral orientation takes place. As a matter of fact, not of necessity, the first level of reasons we encounter in a “reasons at the bottom” way of thinking already push towards consequentialism.
So let me mark a first difference. Although Kant doesn’t use the language of reasons, if he did, reasons would not be primitive for him, not a place to begin; not data. Considerations rise to the status of reasons when they satisfy certain normative of value conditions. It’s part of the job of moral theory to determine which considerations matter for morality and to explain why they do. Much of this work is invisible to the agent, informing the duties and obligations she recognizes and in terms of which she acts. It is not invisible in foundational matters. And it
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shows up again in casuistry. I’ll return to both points later.
Consequentialists can, but need not, see all reasons as of one kind. They might think that there are, at bottom, two general classes of reasons, self-regarding reasons and impartial reasons.
We need no argument for either kind of reason; there might be a meta-argument that there is no rationally defensible position for rejecting one kind of reason for the sake of the other.
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They can also embrace a plurality of basic reasons. Morality is then either an all-things-considered function over all the reasons, or a partial one, leaving some questions open about the claims that can be made in the face of conflicting reasons of self-interest. Balancing or ranking of some sort is necessary. We will need to be able to say with confidence that an annoyance is less significant than a broken leg, a bent fender on my car is less serious than loss of life, and so I should tolerate the annoyance and steer my car into the railing so as to save the leg or avoid hitting a pedestrian.
No doubt there is a point where I can’t be asked to sacrifice what matters to me despite the fact that if I do not, another will be hurt. It’s all very reasonable.
What all the reasons talk does, though, is put morality, and even rationality, in the business of assessing actions as they produce reasons-sensitive states of affairs; and that makes some form of consequentialism practically unavoidable.
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The classical consequentialisms are maximizing theories that range over such values as pleasure, pain, or preference satisfaction. A theory can be consequentialist even if it is not maximizing; whether it is depends on the reasons or values it countenances, whether more is always better: having friends is good, and pace Facebook, having more friends is not always best. Most abstractly: for a theory to be consequentialist, the values it looks to are ones instantiated in states of the world; and mostly, though not inevitably, they speak to benefits and burdens that can be summed or at least compared.
Some consequentialisms sum evenly across all reason-giving considerations and equally across persons. Not all do. There is room for side-constraints as well as for dimensions of
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relative importance; Scheffler’s personal prerogative, for example, checks the force of impartial reasons to leave privileged room for (some) reasons of self concern. However, in all of the variants, whether act or rule, whether straight or weighted summing, wrongness tracks reasons, and reasons track the effects of actions.
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I tend to think of all such theories as reasons consequentialist , not because they consider reasons, but because of the separate and contingent fact that most of what are taken to be morally relevant reasons concern outcomes of action. They give rise to familiar patterns of deliberation.
Suppose we were considering whether to tell a beneficial lie (one that was to our considerable but not vital advantage). We know that, depending on circumstances, a lie can be either overall beneficial or harmful (over a wide array of reasons that might be involved). When considered directly, the balance of reasons will not always be against lying. But when, either because of epistemic worries or because morality is about justified rules of action, the question is whether advantage-lying should be permitted, the answers can be different. One might then argue: were advantage-lying permitted, the conditions necessary for trust and cooperation would be undermined (and they are a greater good than the cumulative advantages from individual lies).
Therefore, a principle of general permissiveness about lying won’t do. However, a principle that permitted lying when necessary to save wrongfully threatened lives would not have bad effects on trust or cooperation (or render the convention about lies confusing). So advantage-lying is in general wrong, but not all lying is wrong; and the rationale for the both turns on the effects of lying on social cooperation, a benefit.
What reasons consequentialism does not answer (nor purport to answer) is why the things that count as reasons in the moral argument count. It is not questioned that all or most morally relevant reasons point to burdens and benefits, that right and wrong are a function of their distribution, and not much question about what the relevant benefits and burdens are (or how to compare them, apart from some easy and some extreme cases). Kantian theory resists this
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neutrality: what counts as a reason is not a given; something’s status as a reason is to be explained within moral theory. Why and how something counts as a reason – the explanation of its practical import – in turn affects what we can say about moral requirements (both what they require of us and what the requirements are about).
Kant holds the object of moral assessment to be an agent’s maxim, the principle by which she reasons to action. An agent reasons from ends to actions (or intentions); from ends she judges to be good. Ends thus play a double role. They represent the effects one would produce, our success condition in acting (if it is my end to bring you home safely, I succeed if I do). They also justify the actions taken under their authority. Whether an end in fact justifies an action is determined this way. (I simplify hugely.) To start: correctness of reasoning cannot depend on who reasons. If a principle of action that I propose is correct, then it should be one that all can reason with (that is, correctly). Suppose I would act to promote some private end of mine – that is, something that is an end for me because I care about it. The question of correctness is then whether the proposed way of reasoning from private ends to some action is one that all who can reason from private ends to action can use.
Canonical bad reasoning goes like this. Suppose we have the practice of promising or of holding things on deposit. And I want to make use of it for my ends. In particular, I want to free-ride in some way or other, taking advantage of the benefit of the practice without accepting its terms. I propose to keep a deposit I have in trust if can do so safely (thereby increasing my wealth); or I would make a deceitful promise to get needed resources. If these were instances of correct reasoning, all could use such reasoning to promote their ends. But if all who held deposits viewed themselves as free to betray them, or all promisors were free to use or abuse the practice as suited their private ends, then the practices of deposit and promise wouldn’t survive.
So the reasoning, while instrumentally fine for me, isn’t correct in the defined sense.
I’m not interested right now in defending the Formula of Universal Law. The point I’m
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after is that the idea of wrongdoing that emerges is not about the bad effects of an action, but about the failure of certain ends – typically of self-interest – to be able to successfully anchor an agent’s plan of action. Suppose that on grounds of self-interest, an agent judges her case to be an exception to a general moral rule of promising. If she discovers, using the FUL, that promising couldn’t survive if it were as a practice under the authority of self-interest, that shows that selfinterest is not an end that can support reasoning to deceptive promising.
It’s important in understanding Kant’s ethics to recognize that the FUL does not exhaust the morality of speech and communication. Each formulation of the CI tells us more. We don’t need to know everything to know that if a maxim is rejected at any stage, one may not act on it.
Later stages give a fuller account of the reasons for rejecting a particular way of acting; sometimes they make it clearer what the scope of moral regulation is – e.g., that misleading truth -speaking shares the wrongfulness of the deceptive lie. We may not see this until we see the connection between the principle of the FUL and the value of rational nature as an end in itself.
As an end in herself, a rational being regards herself and is to be regarded as the final source of authoritative practical judgment for her actions. She also (thereby) regards herself and is to be regarded as giving (or capable of giving) universal law through all of her maxims. When we intentionally mislead, by partial truth or lie, we block the possibility of fully reciprocal practical reasoning, and so fail to treat the other an equal source of correct willing.
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Additional content is introduced as the notions of autonomy and co-deliberation are elicited in the next moments of the argument, each captured in a different formulas of the categorical imperative.
Now if wrongdoing can be a matter of defeating the independence of another’s reasoning , then a condition on the adequacy of an agent’s maxim, her way of acting, can be that it reflect and respect the value of the other as an independent reasoner. Indeed, some variant of
“rational nature as an end in itself” must be or be included in the premise from which an agent reasons to her action. When reasoning from self-interest, deception may be an effective means.
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But if one reasons from an end that marks the other as an independent and equally authoritative reasoner, inducing faulty reasoning is excluded as a possible means.
If wrongness in moral reasoning makes reference to the value content of the premises, correctness in reasoning does so as well. In order for the agent to get it right about deposits and trust, for example, she must grasp the value of holding a deposit (namely, trust, not an opportunity to increase one’s wealth). She might not run afoul of third parties if she does as she ought because she’s afraid of being caught – they won’t know why she does what she does – but she will have failed to do as she ought. It is a moral accident that a concern with safety gets her to the correct conclusion.
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(This becomes clearer as circumstances change: an agent acting on an avoid-getting-caught value reasons probabilistically; on a desert island, she may see no reason at all to respect the trust.)
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In head-to-head contrast, then, reasons consequentialism will often find no fault in an action because of its outcome that Kantian theory will judge wrong because of its source in an agent’s reasoning. There’s no conflation of judgment of agent and judgment of action; what makes an action right or wrong is a function of its origins in reasoning, not its effects.
One of the attractive features of most reasons consequentialisms is that they speak the language of a self’s interests as easily as any other. One might wonder whether Kantian moral theory can do that too. The answer is: yes and no. No, if morality must take in the interests of a self on their own terms. That’s a large theoretical concession, and one Kantian theory resists. It does not see the moral task as one of adjudication between interests, where interests are simply given, but rather, with respect to interests, morality has the task of setting the terms of their standing in moral judgment. So yes, if it can do that.
I think Kant responds to a real problem. Either the idea of self-interest is empty – anything that a self wants belongs to the self-interest of a person; or it is a normatively laden notion – some things that selves want are not in the self’s interest, and some things a self wants it
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ought not to want, for other reasons. If self-interest is to put pressure on moral judgment, it can’t be empty. We might take a minimal normative sense of self-interest to be a set of survival and agency interests: it’s in a self’s interest, if anything is, to stay alive, not to suffer, to be at liberty to act for some array of self-chosen ends. There may be other items on such a list. But how would they get there? Even staying alive is not necessarily in a self’s interests, not in all conditions (e.g., when the condition for being alive is doing something awful). And pain and suffering, while rarely welcomed for themselves, are sufficiently integrated into valuable forms of human activity that that their per se badness may seem in need of an account.
For Kant, some of the interests assigned to our selves have the standing of obligations.
This is because, as rational beings, we have final authority in judgment, and with that, ultimate responsibility for judging correctly. We may share that responsibility with others (purveyors of information, co-deliberators, designers of laws and other social institutions), but we cannot forego or relinquish it. This puts us under moral requirement to develop some and not neglect other abilities and capacities that are needed for satisfying this responsibility. Persons have obligations to one another that derive from the same value – that we support and not undermine each other’s correct deliberations, both in the instant and with respect to developing and sustaining rational abilities.
These values enter reasoning to action through norms of practical inference (the CI procedure) and moral premises – what Kant calls obligatory ends (ends that instance rational nature as an end in itself). An instrumentally satisfactory maxim is proposed and then we ask, as if for validity and soundness, can the argument/maxim be willed a universal law without contradiction, and does the maxim – end and means – cohere with obligatory ends as premises?
The validity norm is familiar; it rejects maxims that cannot be universal principles for human rational agents (and so not for all rational agents). Obligatory ends express the interests of a rational agent in reasoning well. Our actions and discretionary ends should support the
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conditions of human reasoning: we are to be attentive to such facts as that our reasoning is discursive, fact- and testimony-dependent, that we are embodied and sensibly affected, desiderative and finite, and although metaphysically individual, not isolated in either our sensible or our rational activities. We are under constraint to develop and refine our rational abilities (as well as the nonrational perceptual and imaginative skills on which they depend), discipline our desires so that they become reason-responsive, and pursue projects and activities, work and relationships, in ways that enhance rather than detract from realizing sound practical judgment.
It is equally in each human being’s interest as a reasoning being that others not reason badly. Defective reasoning in another can be to our advantage, narrowly understood, but that is no more an interest of reason than bad science can be of interest to a scientist, though it too may be to the scientist’s advantage, narrowly understood.
Human reasoning is immediately located in individuals, but qua human reason it is not; the reasoning of each depends on the reasoning of others, and might even, in an extended sense, be thought as a possession of the species. We sometimes reason together; when something is shown by reason it is demonstrated by this or that reasoning person, but it is a result of reason for all persons.
Together the obligatory ends set a framework within which we are to adopt discretionary ends and activities, delimiting the rational form for a human life. The effect is not a requirement that all lives look the same; it is a requirement that all choices reflect the value of our rational natures. It is a demanding standard in one sense – morality would enmesh itself in our everyday as well as our overtly moral decisions. What is not clear is whether its is demanding in the more familiar way, interfering with what we might reasonably want for ourselves.
To sharpen the contrast between the two types of theory, I thought I would turn the discussion to a kind of case that consequentialisms seem to handle readily, and that has been oddly hard for Kantians to say something distinctive about.
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Many reasons consequentialists, and probably all utilitarians, take it to be near obvious that in circumstances like our own where there is great poverty in some places and great wealth in others, morality requires some redistribution. The relative costs to the wealthy and the benefits to the needy make the calculation easy. Who would dispute that extreme poverty is much worse than deprivation of a fancy dinner, even of many such dinners?
Of course things quickly get complicated. Other things equal, we rank the loss of a life as much worse than the loss of leg and yet resist the idea of morality requiring the sacrifice of limb for a life (but not its directing third parties to save a life rather than a limb).
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Now suppose that in order to avert starvation elsewhere, we had to forego resources that increased our life span in some significant way. More like a limb? Or a dinner? Or perhaps a little well-placed tyranny or rights violations would serve the terribly needy best – maybe if women or some minority would take a back seat just a little longer…. There are all sorts of good responses. Perhaps these are not empirical possibilities. Perhaps rights cannot be compromised for needs. Perhaps the point is just that there is, here and now, one clear case: only a little dent to self-interest and a huge pay-off on world hunger. Still, if some but not all of these cases trigger a no-sacrifice proviso, or are otherwise blocked, we need an account of why they do. Lacking such an account, we lack a key explanatory element of a moral theory, and that might make us wonder whether the grounds for resolving the clearest cases are the right ones.
Different problems arise on the delivery side. The easy case is for the rich to feed the hungry. But modern famines are not wholly natural phenomena; they often occur in regions where there is adequate food supply, but the resources are not under the control of or available to local inhabitants (either because exported or marketed at exorbitant prices – the situation in
Niger is a good example 8 ). Given the way the market is working, or the pervasiveness of local corruption, transfer of wealth (or of food) is not a solution. The intervention has to go deeper; the costs, greater on all sides. Where there is a bias towards remediating outcomes by adjusting
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the balance of good and bads as they are now, things will look better if the rich have less and the poor more. But things might also be better if we moved the poor (or just opened borders). They might not be better right now , but it’s not clear that better now is the mandatory parameter.
Now, nothing prevents a reasons consequentialist from addressing such problems. But to resolve them, it requires independent arguments about what matters – about, for example, the values of self-governance and self-sufficiency; the difference between ex ante and ex post problem solving. Openness to other values may be a strength; it is in any case a fact, and the resolutions inevitably a little ad hoc (though not for that wrong).
Kantian ethics, by contrast, contains its own account of what matters. The point of morality is not just to manage an independent sphere of value, or while managing things, add some other concerns, such as equality or fairness. It is a framework within which needs and wants and interests are given standing (or not) and subordinate values are introduced through regulatory rules, specific obligations or obligatory ends. But it seems to give no clear guidance when it comes to the sacrifices we should make for the good of others. Its imperfect duties are a weak bit of moral architecture. A more promising place to start is with something many kinds of sacrifice have in common: pain.
It is a natural fact that living things that feel pain don’t like it, and normally avoid it if they can. It’s also a fact that most living things can manage their dislike and tolerate fair amounts of pain in order to accomplish their ends. Pain is a central example in reasons consequentialisms of something that matters primitively: “Because it hurts” is at least prima facie a reason not to do it.
In Kantian theory, given its focus on correctness and independence of deliberation and judgment, pain matters morally as it impedes or undermines the work of the rational (or reasoninvolving) capacities. Pain burdens activity, making it harder to think clearly and act effectively.
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Pleasure prompts us to go on; pain warns us not to.
In the extreme, pleasure can
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make it difficult not to go on and pain makes us stop. It is because of their impact on activity that pleasure and pain belong to the realm that morality manages. Were it the case that rational activity was not itself enjoyable, the prospects for us as rational beings might be even dimmer than they are.
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The problem on the table is about sacrifices for those in need, and we have a question about the moral difference between sacrifice of wealth or goods and the sacrifice of body parts.
To the usual array of considerations about value and use, we now see that Kantian moral theory adds a question about the bearing of the loss on the person qua rational agent. A loss of a leg is not per se a threat to rational agency; what is a threat is the belief that one’s body, and so oneself, is viewed as an available means for the greater good. We have a moral interest in the integrity of our body that is different from our interest in maintaining our wealth (which is why Kant thinks the selling of body parts should not be among our liberties), even if, subjectively, we might prefer giving up a limb to giving up a significant portion of our material resources – perhaps because we view material wealth as all-purpose means, whereas a limb’s usefulness is quite restricted. Since the body is the medium of both our receptivity and our activity, and so an essential component of our agency, the integrity of the body is a moral concern. The human body survives some losses – and it’s not impermissible to take physical risks – but the losses are not available for a moral cap and trade scheme.
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So in reasoning about the use of our body (or others’ bodies) we may not ignore what the body is for us as human rational agents just because the body also is and contains useful material stuff. We can’t sum over impairments.
Wealth is different. For Kant, the basis of wealth is property, and the moral basis of property is the rights over material things that we must have in order to be active in the world.
Starting with an idea of the world/earth as a common possession, the material arena of action,
Kant argues that we withdraw material from the commons because that’s necessary to secure use
(and we withdraw it into a juridical condition because that’s necessary to make ownership
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intelligible). But common possession remains part of the moral background story. So if the point of ownership is to enable effective human agency, when the effect of some regime or pattern of ownership is to disable the agency of some while enhancing the opportunities of others, then the entitlements of those who are in possession are altered so that the value of possession for human beings in general can be re-established. As a matter of casuistry, this is not a redistributive scheme. From the beginning, property is a conditional entitlement.
By contrast, bodily integrity is an innate right. There is no common ownership in the background; the rights each of us have with respect to our bodies are not rights we have so that we may act effectively, but a right that each of us has separately. Therefore no condition of need of some, even need for protection of their bodily rights, puts any moral pressure on the rights that anyone has with respect to his or her body. It is not a conditional entitlement. A third party’s choice to save a life rather than a leg respects the innate right of both parties (assuming a choice has to be made); but it cannot be morally demanded of a person that he give his leg for a life, just as a third party cannot offer the limb of another in order to save a life.
Although this asymmetry does not exist with respect to the entitlements over material goods, both the moral point and the conditions of ownership of material goods constrain what may be done to re-establish the value of common possession. Rights over goods and wealth belong to a political scheme. Therefore, the real material needs of others cannot be met without their being in an effective scheme that gives them rights over what they get; nor can the resources to sustain political order – the condition of the possibility of legitimate rights – be compromised for the sake of meeting need. Distributing food in a refugee camp is an act of charity. It is not an adequate response to the moral deficits of global poverty, or to the moral interests of the refugees. To meet those needs may require the reassignment of land; appropriation of now privately owned natural resources; the creation of a polity; the provision of health and educational resources. It’s hard to say whether the Kantian view is more or less
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demanding than a redistributive scheme; but what it demands is different.
On some consequentialist views, when the needs of others are very great, the space left for living one’s own life can seem to have to shrink – we begin talking about luxuries, caviar and crystal, and soon move on to music lessons for the kids, museums and opera, even the access to the some of extravagance of higher education (do we really need to read Shakespeare when others are starving?). It’s too easy to exaggerate. One of the points of some of the redistributors is that the amount of wealth available is so vast that a very small percent of it is sufficient to meet the extreme problem, leaving a lot of inequality and freedom to live a nice life for the likes of us. But it is hard to resist pressure on what we have, once we open ourselves to the scope of need beyond food for survival (and how can we justifiably not do that?) and beyond the present of the global crisis. Looking into a dystopian future, it can seem hard to resist the claim that we may not now use much more than is necessary to meet our basic needs for the sake of those to come. Either real sacrifice or real hypocrisy looms.
Kantian theory starts out looking at the needs of persons differently – not in terms of well-being, but in terms of the objective requirements of effective moral agency. The object of morality is to secure the material, institutional, and interpersonal conditions such that persons can act and reason correctly – globally and locally.
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Morality is not a self-activating system; it depends on the rational activity of individual subjects, and so must have a reflexive concern for the well-functioning of human moral agents. Since human beings are not like dandelions, robustly making it through their life cycle without nurturing attention, to make agents who can reason correctly could require a lot: nurturing upbringing and decent physical health; education, a wide range of complex practical experiences, culture, the absence of war, and a state with a republican constitution, to name a few that are on Kant’s list. Competent moral agents are expensive.
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It’s interesting that in the leveling-down consequential calculus, the costs of making or sustaining good people is not typically included. Perhaps the thought is that virtue belongs to individual responsibility, or that people can behave well or well enough on the cheap, we just need to get rid of the bad guys (which is not so cheap, really, since it seems to require a lot in the way of regulation and penalty and prisons; the state of California seems to be going broke trying to protect its good citizens by putting the bad ones away). Some people behave spectacularly well for free, flinging themselves into fires and onto hand grenades to save strangers. Of course that’s not behavior we can expect from people generally.
But suppose it is true that we have damaged the planet and diminished its carrying capacity. Is leveling down the only option to consider? If we follow Kant, we recognize duties to self and others that require a pretty high level of culture (or civilization).
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Morality’s needs are way up there with the other human needs; they are not luxury items. If we bring people into the world, we are responsible for them. So perhaps the question we should pose is not, can we afford morality (and the culture that would sustain it), but can we afford the future? The question is Swiftian in spirit, but that’s not a reason to avoid it.
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In the legal world it’s said that hard cases make bad law. I think something similar is true when moral theory builds from extreme cases and doomsday scenarios. Focus on the extremes can short- circuit our intuitions, and that can make more complicated theorizing seem indulgent.
Here’s another way to put the point. It’s not morality’s primary task to clean up messes. Messes need attention when they occur, but like diseases and termites, we need an account of how things ought to be in order to know what kinds of remedy to use and when, perhaps, there’s nothing that should or can be done. If a modest tax on global GNP is sufficient to eliminate global poverty, there’s an easy moral case for doing it or something comparable (assuming that in eliminating global poverty this way we don’t make a greater moral mess). Where the issues divide is after that, about the kind of responsibility we have towards the future that we make.
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Kant holds that as rational beings we have an obligation and an entitlement to the development of moral character. It is something we need for ourselves and in others. We are morally enjoined adopt a project of self-development, but we are also obligated, both negatively and positively, to act so that others be reliable moral agents as well. The conditions for producing autonomous deliberators are largely social. Education, culture, freedom to choose careers and partners, reasonable social institutions and material well-being are background conditions needed for a general level of ordinary, non-heroic, moral competence. The enlightenment project of which Kant was a part held that morality and equal citizenship under the rule of law were the routes to giving rational form to human life, and to dissolving the destructive potential of human activity regulated on different terms. Republics were less likely to go to war with each other. Free states with extensive public education advance the project of civilization (and hold back the alternative, always a kind of barbarism). It was and is an optimistic project, if to some extent naïve about the nature of the forces that lead to barbaric outcomes.
Morally speaking, the present is given. We find ourselves in a position where there is unmet need, promises to be kept, injustice to correct, and so on. But the future is not a given; it will be to a large extent a human creation, a consequence of human choices or passive inaction.
We don’t have to sustain population growth; we do have to have a positive impact on the rational well-being of those who exist now and those who come to be in the future – on their capacity to deliberate well and to act effectively. In the past, tasks of global scope could not reasonably be conceived (though of course such projects were nonetheless entertained – think of the Crusades).
The present in this way may not resemble the past, and there are projects we can and do imagine that have global import. And if that’s right, the scope of the moral project is indeed now enlarged. It’s no longer enough that we act well locally, minding our virtue, or act well domestically, securing just relations among citizens. Morality, having all persons in its scope,
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demands more when more is possible. Where many consequentialists and Kantians divide is about the nature of the demand. For the Kantian theorist it is not directly about satisfying welfare needs or equalizing wealth; we are morally required to extend to all we effect the conditions for the development and exercise of their moral powers. If the response you are tempted to is something like: “You can’t be serious!” – then you see why Kantians and utilitarians don’t much talk to one another.
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1 Sidgwick is the prototype here.
2 It is the moral (as opposed to the personal or technical) dimension of instrumentalism.
3 The function over reasons may be complex. When a Scanlonian contractualist compares a principle that would permit the infliction of suffering on one or some for trivial benefits to others with one that permits causing comparable suffering as a side-effect of a seriously beneficial social activity (the typical construction accidents inevitable in the building of a large hospital), he reasons as a consequentialist. One of the issues with rule utilitarianism was that since both the rule and the action were valued in the same terms, the badness of the actual outcome permitted by a rule created tension with the rule. For the contractualist, since the moral point lies in a certain sort of justification to others, the tension doesn’t arise.
4 Once we know that, we have reason to cast such maxims of truth-speaking as deceptive, and they will then fail the first round of moral assessment.
5 Almost a moral accident. That there are safety concerns around the violation of trust commonly indicates the existence of background moral practices.
6 Of course standards of reasoning, though they apply to all intentional actions, do not require that agents reason step-by-step as they make choices. As with ordinary logical inferences, it’s assumed that a normal person simply knows the results of wide range of reasonings (some she will have reasoned out before; many, even most, she encounters as conclusions of moral reasoning done elsewhere by others; the social world plays a big role here, giving the agent routine confidence, on the one hand, and some disturbing vulnerability when faced with hard questions or a challenge to her received beliefs, on the other). When asked why she is returning the funds, she may quite reasonably say, “I promised to return them” and feel flummoxed if pressed to defend her action by an interlocutor who offers the challenge of a “no harm no foul” principle.
7 There is more than one account that explains this. We’ll return to this.
8 Drought in the area has led to high prices; Niger-producers ship their food to wealthier Nigeria. Because of corruption, food aid also enters the market and leaves the country.
9 If it wasn’t a burden we might not mind it. But then, if we didn’t mind it, pain wouldn’t perform its warning role about the condition of the body under stress. The injunction to “play through the pain” can be an intelligent response to pains that we have learned are not dangerous, or a signal of indifference to the well-being of the active person. Both acknowledge pain’s impeding effect.
10 There are complicated issues here having to do with sensible pleasure and pain and the possibility of enjoyments that belong to the exercise of our rational faculties. Kant had doubts that reason was the superior route to the former; there are interesting arguments in Kant (as well as Mill) about the existence and place of the latter.
11 There’s a great deal to be discussed about the giving or selling of blood and organs – whether their redundancy or natural replacement makes their alienation less a moral issue. Perhaps giving blood is more like giving time, something one has to ration, but one has more than enough. Still, giving blood or giving a kidney is not like giving food or a car. There’s no market (though sometimes payment for blood); no tax deductions.
12 Kant regards morality as the necessary condition for giving the natural world a rational form.
13 This is hardly a new or an especially Kantian thought: from Aristotle to Mill it has been clear that morality and a fairly high degree of cultural wealth were noncontingently related.
14 After all, there is no natural right to indefinite reproduction. It’s a bit like my investments. Had I invested wisely when I was young, I could have had a family of four children, all of whom I could have sent to the college of their choice. But I didn’t invest wisely; I squandered resources; things I regret now. So I decide to have just two children, or, I have four and lower their educational expectations – public colleges are just fine. I could decide to have four children and reduce my own quality of life to the level that leave greater resources for four. It’s not clear why that should be the obvious outcome. The Swiftian idea is of course impractical; but so is radical redistribution.
Other options – opening borders, female literacy, wide access to cheap medicine – are not. Practicality matters; but if it enters the equation too soon, the moral imagination is bound to what we already know we can do.
KantCom3NYU ~ 4.13.2020 18