Written Case Analysis 3

Food Labeling

Consumer advocates argue that the food industry has the duty to disclose whether a food item is genetically modified. Disclosure through labeling has been the law for many years in the European Union.

 

Only since March 2013 has a major US retailer, Whole Foods, announced that it would voluntarily label food items it carries, beginning in 2018.

Opposition

The Grocery Manufacturers Association opposes the move, fearing that labels that identify genetically modified food items would lead consumers into thinking that these foods present a “special or potential risk.” The Grocery Manufacturers Association seems to be concerned about the consumer’s ability to make sound choices.

 

Do you agree that this is the intent behind the Association’s opposition to labeling?

More Opposition

In November 2012, Californians voted down Proposition 37, which would have required labeling genetically modified foods items. Opponents to the law successfully argued that labeling would have a negative impact on food prices and the livelihood of farmers.

 

If the food industry has the obligation to disclose information about whether food has been genetically modified, do you think it matters whether it will impact farmers in a negative way?

A Duty to Disclose

A Kantian duty theorist would take the position that the duty to disclose is a moral obligation that admits to no exception. Rational individuals are owed full disclosure. Saying that consumers need to be protected from making choices is denying the moral dignity they are owed. The consequences of full disclosures are not relevant to the moral quality of the decision to provide full disclosure. Let’s see how 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory provides the underlying support for this position.

Other sources:

Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

From:

“There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

 

To:

“…which we think unimportant and forced from us. “

 

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5682/pg5682-images.html

http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/kant_foundations.pdf

free will

If you believe in a purely self-determined free will, Kant’s theory of morality is for you. It articulates a conception of morally right action that highlights the importance of an undetermined free will, without appealing directly to the theological or religious background in which this doctrine originates. Kant’ s theory is very close to something like a common-sense Christian morality.

Free wiil in christianity

Indeed, one summary way of characterizing the Kantian analysis of morality is that it provides a secularized understanding of the Christian thinking about free will that we owe to Saint Augustine (5th-century). Saint Augustine had distinguished, among the kinds of acts that we can perform, the special category of acts that are grounded purely in free will (Saint Augustine, City of God).

 

In the Augustinian conception of action, desires aim at inferior goods which are variable and perishable. The will is a separate faculty of choice that is not determined by desires. It can aim at inferior goods or it can aim at what is superior and unchanging. Only rational objects are unchanging. The will that aims at superior, unchanging goods, is the Good Will (Saint Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will). It is the rational exercise of choice, undetermined by prior causes.

 

Do you believe human beings have free will?

Kant took the notion of a will that is not subjected to a chain of predetermining causes, but that is purely rational, and made it the lynchpin of his moral system. He also accepted that there is a faculty of choice by which our desires and beliefs, the things that we experience ourselves having and that are caused by prior events, shape and cause the choices we make.

 

Do you think we can view human action both as being free and caused, or are these things mutually exclusive?

 

According to Kant, human action can be viewed from two perspectives:

 

1. As part of a chain of causes and so, being determined by it

2. As standing outside a chain of causes

 

The first perspective is the one we adopt when we try to explain why people do what they do. The second is the perspective we adopt when we reflect on whether an act is justifiable.

For Kant, the assessment of an action as morally right concerns the justifiability of action, not the understanding of its causal history.

justifiable

Self-interest theory always stays within the realm of causal history. It does not achieve the function of justification. Kant thought the same thing is true of utilitarianism. The distinction between explanation and justification carries over to Kant’s distinction between acting in accordance to subjective maxims for action and acting in accordance with objective rules for action.

 

Subjective maxims for action are the kinds of things we take to be intentions for performing actions. They give us subjective factors that explain what we do. My desire for customers to come back and spend more money in my store is why I follow the maxim, “if you want repeat purchasers, you ought to label your products.” From this point of view, we are beings whose actions are caused by desires, which themselves are part of a causal chain of events. This is the perspective that is shared by the utilitarian moralist and those who believe in self-interest.

For Kant, rational beings can also examine the intentions with which they perform actions. They can examine whether they ought to follow maxims or subjective policies of action. This kind of rational examination belongs to beings whose rational will is not a link in a chain of causes. It belongs to beings who have free will. Acting from free will is owning what one does.

The rational examination of subjective intentions for acting, or maxims, requires us to bracket all reference to subjective intentions or desires, including the anticipation of consequences, which play a role in the explanation of what we do. Subjective intentions are variable and rely on particular connections with this or that individual desire or anticipated consequence. A rational examination of reasons for action, on the contrary, seeks to establish “oughts” that are not subject to changeable circumstances.

 

Thus, for Kant, the statement of objective reasons for acting should include only the action under examination, rather than any reference to a desire or intention or consequence: “I ought to tell the truth" rather than “I ought to tell the truth because I want people to like me.” Or to take an example in connection with the illustration at the beginning of this module, “I ought to provide full disclosure,” rather than, “I ought to provide full disclosure because I want consumers to spend more money at my store.”

Notice that, according to Kant, an objective statement of the action under examination is framed in a conditionless way: The conditions in our two examples in the previous page were “I want people to like me” and “I want consumers to spend more money at my store.”

 

Let’s take this step by step. Another way our two examples could have been expressed is:

 

“Assuming that I want people to like me, I ought to tell the truth.”

 

“Assuming that I want consumers to spend more money at my store, I ought to provide full disclosure.”

 

These statements express hypothetical oughts, meaning, the “ought” in each case holds up only under the condition that the hypothesized assumption holds. Generalizing the two statements to “anyone who wants people to like them ought to tell the truth” and ”anyone who wants consumers to spend more money at their store ought to provide full disclosure” does not, according to Kant, express an objective “ought.”

 

If an “ought” claim is dependent on a condition, even a general one, it does not express a free action.

A free act is an act that one undertakes for its own sake. If it depends on a condition, it cannot be free. Suppose I don’t care whether people like me or whether consumers spend more money at my store (I plan to pocket my profits, close shop, and move out of the country very soon.), I will not be inclined to tell the truth or provide full disclosure. So, according to Kant, to express an objective reason for acting, one must frame it as an unconditioned “ought” claim, “One ought to tell the truth” or “One ought to provide full disclosure.”

 

An unconditioned “ought” claim is a categorical imperative. An “ought” tells us what to do; that is, it is a command or an imperative. “Categorical” expresses the idea that the command is not subject to some condition that needs to be fulfilled.

 

Try to think of some other categorical imperatives.

Is “One ought to tell the truth” an objective moral law? As you have guessed, it is: “One ought to tell the truth” is such that any rational being can act and live by consistently. It is consistently universalizable. The same can be said of “One ought to provide full disclosure.”

 

The fundamental principle of pure practical reason, by which Kant meant a rational will, is “so act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle establishing a universal law" (Critique of Practical Reason)

The denial of “One ought to tell the truth” is not consistently universalizable. Suppose, with the best of intentions, I decide to tell a friend an untruth: He is a sensitive person and I think he can’t manage hearing the truth.

 

My maxim is: "To prevent someone from hearing information that I think they can’t handle, I ought to tell an untruth.”

 

This maxim, reformulated for assessment as an objective moral law would be:

 

“One ought to tell an untruth.”

Universalizability II

One ought to tell an untruth,” as a command of will grounded on reason alone and that purports to justify rather than explain action, is not universalizable. This is because it would defeat the very possibility of rational communication, which requires standards for truth. It is inimical to the institution and continuation of a society of rational agents to play fast and loose with these standards. It would be like sawing off the branch on which the very possibility of rational communication rests.

 

To what other rules of action could you apply this kind of reasoning?

Respect for Persons (the Principle of Ends

in the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, also known as the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant expresses the fundamental principle of pure practical reason in what he takes to be an equivalent way. Your textbook refers to this as the principle of ends.

 

“Act so that you treat humanity whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” (Kant).

 

This has also been called the principle of respect for persons.

Respect 1

Let’s illustrate this with the example of telling someone an untruth because you think they can’t deal with the truth. If that being is a rational agent, you cannot know better than they do what information they need to be able to make preparations for their own life. You may, with the best of intentions, tell that person a lie because you think their sensibility needs to be managed. But you could be depriving them of information that is vital to their ability to make rational decisions.

Respect 2

Your intent of protecting that person by not telling them the truth is a maxim, a subjective rule of action that explains the act you perform and that concerns you as a person who has desires that are caused by events in the world. Maybe something happened to you in the past that makes you overcautious today. Your act does not take into account the rational decision-making ability of the recipient of the untruth and, so, treats the other person's humanity as a means to making you feel better about yourself. Again, telling an untruth cannot be a moral law.

 

Think about how you would use a similar argument with the maxim: “Because I don’t want to confuse consumers with information on food labels they might not understand, my company ought not provide full disclosure about genetic modification.”

 

What other moral rules could you discuss using this idea of respect for the rationality in others?

 

What if other individuals are not rational? Can they be treated exclusively as means to an end?

Self-Rule and Reflective Morality

Beings who are capable of acting in accordance with a conception of the moral law are autonomous, meaning they rule themselves: They both give themselves the moral law and simultaneously obey it on no other grounds than that it is rational to obey it. The moral law is not something that is imposed on the outside; it is uncovered from within the very resources that a free, rational agent possesses.

Reason and Free Will; Distinctively Human?

We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Kant was a rule worshipper with no heart. In fact, he took it for granted that we have feelings of sympathy for others, and that it is important to cultivate them. He thought that our moral feelings are vital to who we are and explored them in The Metaphysics of Morals. But he did not view feelings as distinctively human. Feelings are part of our animal nature. It is reason and free will that are distinctively human.

 

Do you agree?