Ethics

Why Study Kant’s Ethics?

J. B. SCHNEEWIND

Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is a very hard book to understand. Those of us who have put this volume together plainly think it’s worth trying to do so. Why? There are three reasons. First, Kant created a dramatically new way of thinking about morality and about ourselves as moral beings. He held that all previous attempts to spell out the principles of ethics had been mistaken. In the Groundwork he presented the fundamentals of a different vision of morality. And in later writings he showed how to work out the details of morality using his new formulation of its basis. To understand Kant’s ethics historically is to come to see the emergence of a major new option in Western thought. Second, Kant’s ethical thought has been profoundly influential. It is one of the two or three most important contributions that modern moral philosophers have made to our culture. The Groundwork has always been the main text used to learn about Kant’s ethics. Anyone who wants to understand the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century moral philosophy and its importance for society has to understand this book. Third, the positions Kant took in the Groundwork are very much alive in moral philosophy today. A renewal of scholarship, commentary, and philosophical discussion concerning the book began around the middle of the last century.∞ Many misunderstandings have been cleared away, and Kant’s other writings on ethics have been brought in to illuminate this one. New philosophical insights from recent work are being used to show the depth and importance of what Kant said. Kantian views of morality are a central topic of contemporary moral philosophy. In developing Kant’s positions to bring out their pertinence today, advocates of Kantian views depart more or less from what he himself actually said. But an understanding of the Groundwork is indispensable for anyone who wants to take part in current discussions of ethics. These are strong claims about the importance of a short book. It would 84 Jerome B. Schneewind take another book, and a longer one, to support them all. Here I will try first to sketch Kant’s epoch-making break with the past and then to indicate some of the developments underlying his importance for contemporary moral philosophy. I. Kant’s Historical Revolution Two quotations will get us going. The first comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century synthesizer of Roman Catholic doctrine. The second is from Kant. Law directs the actions of those that are subject to the government of someone. Hence, properly speaking, none imposes a law on his own actions. (Summa Theologiae IaIIae 93.5) The rational being must always consider itself as giving law in a realm of ends . . . Morality thus consists in the reference of all action to that legislation through which alone a realm of ends is possible. But the legislation must be encountered in every rational being itself, and be able to arise from its will. (G 4:434) Aquinas and Kant agree that morality centrally involves law and obedience to law. Both could agree with an important passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (2:14–15): ‘‘when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, which have not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the works of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.’’ The gentiles do not have the written Jewish law, but they find an unwritten law in their hearts or consciences. For Aquinas, the law is put there by God. He finds it unthinkable that human beings might legislate the moral law that we are all to obey. Kant thinks that our own reason gives us the law. Morality can be understood only if we see that each of us is equally a lawgiving member of the group of those who must also obey the moral law. He holds that each of us is both to legislate the law and to obey it. Kant’s remark comes from a part of the Groundwork in which he introduces the term ‘autonomy’ to indicate what is distinctive about his own view. The word had long been current in political discussions. An autonomous state was one that ruled itself. It could make its own laws without asking permission from rulers of other states. Kant took the term from political discourse and changed its meaning. He applied it to individuals Why Study Kant’s Ethics 85 and to the morality that ought to govern the relations of persons to themselves and to one another, regardless of the political laws under which they lived. He said that morality is a human creation. It is the legislation that comes from our own rational will. We can see what a radical innovation this was by looking briefly at the history of moral philosophy. Ancient thought about ethics from Socrates to the time of St. Augustine centered on the question of human flourishing (a translation of the Greek eudaimonia). What is the best life for a human? Classical philosophers all thought that having good relations with others constituted a major part of the kind of life anyone would want to live. Consequently they held that in pursuing a good life for ourselves we would not only have to control our own passions and desires; we would also have to act thoughtfully and justly toward others. On this view virtue and happiness are inseparable. Christianity gave a new twist to the search for a good life. Our ultimate good, theologians held, is to be found in a loving union with God. God made us so that we all seek such a union. We may not realize that that is what we want. But we are always dissatisfied with earthly goods. And this dissatisfaction shows that the pagans were wrong to think that we might find happiness in the present life. Moreover we are deeply flawed and sinful beings. We ought to live in loving friendship with other people. But we are dominated by selfish desires. Morality teaches us what we ought to do, but we find in ourselves a stubborn resistance to doing it. Instead we seek what we misguidedly think is our own individual good. We must be made to obey God’s laws by threats of punishment. Morality thus becomes something external to our own nature—at least to our fallen nature. It does not come from within us, emerging as our own concern in the course of our natural development. It has to be imposed on us. What is God’s relation to the laws he imposes on all human beings—the laws of nature, as they came to be called? Aquinas held that God’s intellect is the source of these laws. God commands us to obey them because he knows that they contain the core of justice and virtue. Two other medieval thinkers, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, proposed an alternative. God is inscrutable and beyond human understanding, and he imposes on us whatever laws he chooses. The laws of nature contain the core of justice and virtue simply because God wills that we obey them. Later historians labeled these positions ‘‘intellectualism’’ and ‘‘voluntarism.’’ Both positions were very much a part of arguments about morality with which Kant was familiar. Martin Luther’s teaching derived from the thought of the medieval voluntarists, and Kant was raised a Lutheran. The German philosopher 86 Jerome B. Schneewind Leibniz and his follower Christian Wolff were strongly opposed to voluntarism, and Kant learned Wolff’s views from his first philosophy teachers. Luther puts his view bluntly and forcefully: ‘‘God is he for whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard; for nothing is on a level with it or above it . . . What God wills is not right because he ought or was bound so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because he so wills.’’≤ This side of Lutheran teaching has a prominent place in the thought of Samuel Pufendorf, whose work on natural law was studied throughout Europe for over a century after its publication in 1672. His central point is simple. Christianity, as St. Paul shows, teaches that morality is obedience to law. Law is the command of a superior, and only God’s commands can establish a morality for all humans. But then there cannot be moral requirements binding God, because—obviously—God can have no superior. It follows that there can be no morality common to God and humans. Pufendorf ridicules the very idea. ‘‘For who,’’ he asks, ‘‘dare reason thus? Pay your debts, because God pays his. Be grateful, because God is kind to them that serve him . . . Honor your parents, because God honors his. Are not these reasonings manifestly absurd?’’≥ Pufendorf expresses what was then a widespread Christian feeling: we should humbly adore and obey God even if we do not understand him. Morality is simply obedience. There were many other Christians who found this position deeply disturbing. It puts God in the position of a tyrant and makes us into servile subjects. But Christ taught that the essence of the law is love: we are to love God above all and our neighbor as ourselves. And a Pufendorfian God, who lays down arbitrary laws and gives no rationale for them, is not, the critics said, a God who can be loved. If we are to love God we must understand his moral commands as expressions of his love for us. It must be possible for us to understand morality as common to God and ourselves, however mysterious other aspects of God’s activity may be. If we govern ourselves by following laws that we see are just and right, we will be acting as nearly in God’s way as we can. This is what it means to say that we are made in God’s image. It seemed impossible for the voluntarists to explain how this could be so. In Kant’s time there were very few atheists. Most people not only believed in God but also agreed that he was somehow indispensable for morality. The Scots philosopher David Hume was an exception. He developed a view of morality in which God played no role. He saw human feelings as the source of morality. Purely natural explanations could be given of those feelings. And there is nothing about us that takes us out of the Why Study Kant’s Ethics 87 realm of nature. We must see ourselves and our morality as causally determined parts of a causally determined nature. Hume’s view avoided the problems of the relation of God to morality, but it seemed to many people to deprive humans of any special dignity or worth. For Hume, we are only a kind of animal—cleverer than the rest, but otherwise not very different from them. Religious believers could not see morality in this way. They could not accept the idea that the natural world is the only world there is. We must belong to a supernatural spiritual world, they held, in which God is supreme. They therefore had to face the problem of how to preserve human dignity in a universe governed by the kind ofGod they could not give up. The intellectualists thought that the voluntarists could not solve the problem but that they themselves could. If we can know the eternal truth about morality and are able to bring ourselves to follow its directives just from concern for righteousness, then we are self-governed. We have a special relation to God. We are the only part of his creation that can obey his laws just because we know what they are. It is because of our knowledge— especially our moral knowledge—that we are entitled to think that we are made in God’s image. Some intellectualists held that there are eternal self-evident principles governing morality. They compared such principles to the axioms of geometry. God knows the moral axioms and so do we. God necessarily governs himself by them. When we have an intuitive grasp of the moral axioms and work out how they apply to the case at hand, we are self-governed when we act as they direct. Other intellectualists made no appeal to such intuitively evident axioms. They held that God always acts for the best. He created the most perfect possible universe, and we are to be like him. We are to bring about the most perfect results we can. To do so we need to know which of the options before us will bring about the greatest increase in perfection. We are self-governed when we know what is best and decide to bring it into existence. Both sorts of intellectualists rejected purely naturalistic theories of the world and used their moral philosophies as part of their defense of a religious outlook. Kant rejected Hume’s naturalism and insisted that we are not merely natural beings, like the animals. Morality itself shows us that we have free will. Kant shared the intellectualists’ aim of defending human dignity and argued that free will gives it to us. But he feared that the intellectualists were all too likely to think that only people with superior minds could be morally good. The moral feelings that Hume saw as central could be shared 88 Jerome B. Schneewind equally by everyone, but plainly some people are much smarter than others. Does it follow that moral knowledge is not equally available to everyone alike? It is hard to understand geometry; it may be equally hard for many to understand morality. It would also be difficult for most people to calculate which among the choices before them will bring about the greatest increase in perfection. In either case not everyone can be self-governed. Most people will have to obey the few who knew the truth about morality. This was a view that Christian Wolff held. Kant found it abhorrent. Hume’s reliance on sentiment was part of a naturalistic view that Kant rejected. A purely intellectualist morality apparently led to an elitism that he also found unacceptable. He thus seemed to be forced into a voluntarist view. But Kant rejected the servile attitude that seemed to go with that theory. His new idea of the autonomy of the will gave him a way to resolve this complex problem. He accepted the voluntarist claim that morality stems from will, but he transformed the conception of will by making it into a special form of rationality —practical rationality. He could then say that because the will is itself rational it contains a law within it, governing all its activities. We do not need to grasp eternal truths or to calculate complex consequences. A simple formula governs our legislative activity. It enables us to test our plans for action and to reject some and accept others. And just as we can think out for ourselves what we ought to do, so we can motivate ourselves to do it. We do not need rewards or threats from others to make us act morally. God’s will and ours are alike in these respects. What God necessarily wills is what we ought to will. We and God are fellow legislators of a single moral community. We are equal to God, not merely his servile subjects, because of our moral autonomy. II. Kant’s Current Importance The conception of morality as autonomy was Kant’s fundamental innovation in moral philosophy. In working out his vision of humans as autonomous agents Kant developed new ideas about freedom and the nature of action that are still being discussed. His view also had important implications for longstanding positions about the structure and content of morality. One of these implications accounts for much of the significance of Kantianism in current discussions. It is that no principle of human happiness can be the foundation of morality or show its point. Utilitarianism is the label most commonly applied to views that make happiness central to morality. Kantianism is opposed to all such views. Why Study Kant’s Ethics 89 Kant never denied the importance of happiness. He criticized the Stoics for thinking that the pleasure of self-approval arising from awareness of living a virtuous life was happiness enough for human beings. Happiness is the satisfaction of desire, he held, and he insisted that finite beings such as we are need to have our desires satisfied. He held it to be an important duty for each of us to help others achieve happiness as they understood it. But he denied that morality is simply the set of virtues or directives that lead to happiness, either our own or that of everyone affected. He held that morality has a different role in our lives. Morality’s function is to set the limits within which it is permissible for us to seek our own happiness and to help others pursue theirs. Kant had several reasons for rejecting a morality of happiness. One of them is this. We have little if any control over what desires we have. To say that what we ought to do is determined by what people want is to subordinate ourselves to our causally determined nature. It is, in other words, to abandon our autonomy. But the moral law forbids us to do so. More generally, Kant thinks that we cannot accept any morality holding that the goods relevant to deciding what to do are made good, and can be known to be good, without any appeal to what is morally right or obligatory. Kant holds, against this, that only pleasures and pains that are allowed by the moral law are morally relevant. In order for a pleasure to count as relevant in deciding what to do, it must be one that can be obtained by a morally permissible act. So there must be a way of determining what acts are permissible or impermissible prior to knowing what goods in the situation are morally relevant. And Kant thought, of course, that there is such a way. The categorical imperative tells us whether or not we may act on any plan of action, and from this we can learn what acts we may or may not do. Kantianism is thus an alternative to utilitarianism. It is not the only one. Various forms of intuitionism hold that we can grasp a number of selfevident moral truths by which to guide our actions. One of these truths tells us to be benevolent, or to help others attain happiness, but that is not the only principle. We are also to tell the truth, keep promises, and be just. Principles like these may come into conflict with the principle that tells us to increase the happiness of others. And it is far from self-evident that in cases of such conflict benevolence ought always to win out. Intuitionism often seems to be the best account available of the commonsense morality that most of us share. We don’t come to philosophy with some single universal principle that we use to get answers to all our moral questions. And we do seem to think that it’s just obvious that we should keep promises, tell the truth, help others in need, be just, and so on. Yet 90 Jerome B. Schneewind intuitionism has defects. It doesn’t suggest any mode of reasoning for settling controversies with other people about what to do. And it doesn’t give us any way of criticizing our pretheoretical moral convictions. Yet we know that people in the past have thought it ‘‘just obvious’’ that women should obey men, that people of color were inferior to white people, and that gay and lesbian practices were abhorrent and unnatural. It’s hard to escape the thought that some of our ‘‘obvious’’ beliefs might be as benighted as these. But how can we tell? One appeal of utilitarianism and of Kantianism is that each promises a way of arguing about moral disagreements and of criticizing socially accepted moral beliefs. During much of the nineteenth century British and American philosophers took utilitarianism and intuitionism to be the major alternatives in moral theory. Kant played little if any role in English-language ethics. And during much of the twentieth century English-language moral philosophers did not discuss the substantive issues of morality. They were concerned rather with whether moral beliefs were susceptible of rational proof. Was morality, as Hume held, simply a matter of sentiment? If it was rational, in what way? Was moral language used to express thought that could be true or false, or was it, rather, used just to express emotions? These debates took place against the background of a widely shared assumption that utilitarianism captured the content or substance of morality, whether morality rested on reason or on feeling. Many philosophers were convinced, however, that utilitarianism led to morally unacceptable conclusions. But to oppose it they had little but intuitions or strong convictions. The first major effort to go beyond intuitionism and provide a systematic alternative to utilitarianism was John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls presented a way of arguing in support of principles of justice that did not derive them from the good consequences that would follow from obeying them. Instead his principles could be used to determine the relevance of alleged goods and harms to moral decisions. He asserted what is now called ‘‘the priority of the right to the good,’’ and he linked this strongly with Kant’s moral views. Rawls’s work led to a great deal of constructive philosophical interest in Kant’s ethics. Building on the scholarly work that had been published since the 1940s, American and British philosophers produced a substantial body of work influenced strongly by Kant’s moral thought. New interpretations of almost every aspect of Kant’s ethics were soon followed by important works applying Kant’s insights to contemporary problems, such as world hunger. The English-language moral philosophy of the past decades has revolved to a large extent around controversies concerning Kantian moral Why Study Kant’s Ethics 91 philosophy. Kant’s views continue to vitalize discussions. And their source is largely in the text of this volume. notes 1. H. J. Paton’s Tbe Categorical Imperative (London: Hutchinson, 1947) is a landmark in the modern revitalization of Kant scholarship. It was preceded by a few German contributions. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) showed how much some Kantian ideas could be used to help with current issues. Much of the current discussion of Kantian ethics reflects developments of Rawls’s ideas. 2. Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 195–96. 3. Quoted in J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 140.