Kant



Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of MoralsImmanuel Kant (1724-1804) rarely left his hometown of Konigsberg (which was bombed out of existence during WWII), yet by the time he died he was internationally famous and considered one of the giants of the Enlightenment. Kant created what has often been called a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Prior to Kant it was taken for granted that the world existed just as we experienced it. In other words, if all perceivers suddenly ceased to exist, the world would not be changed one bit – it would look just the same. Kant argued, however, that the appearance of the world when it is not being experienced is simply unknowable. (Recall the Cartesian principle that perceptions don’t exist outside a perceiver – if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, then there is no sound.)Kant expounds this idea in his monumental work Critique of Pure Reason. Fundamentally agreeing with Locke, Kant accepts the idea that our experience is representational – that is, for example, what we see, our image of the outside world, is created or constructed by our faculties of perception out of the raw material of ‘sense-data’. So light strikes our retinas and eventually our brains ‘construct’ shapes, colors, and all the rest – much the same way as a painter paints a picture. An artist ‘represents’ a landscape on his or her canvass. So too, our perceiving faculties ‘represent’ the outside world.However, Kant noted glaring deficiencies with this model, some of which were pointed out by David Hume (d. 1776) who famously awoke Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumber’. We begin by noting that if we follow Locke and Hume’s sense-data theory of knowledge then major components of scientific law as it stood at the time – for example Space, Time and Causality – cannot be ‘represented’ in our experience. The prevailing sense data or representationalist model of how we acquire ideas holds that ideas are constructed out of sense qualities. However with Space and Time there are no sense-data behind these ideas. Space itself is simply nothing and Time has no experiential content – no size, shape, color, etc. And while we do experience one event following another, we never actually see Causality. Hume had demonstrated that though one event can be observed to follow another, that same sequence does not have to be repeated in the future. That object A moves when object B strikes it does not guarantee that this same thing will happen always and everywhere in the future. Anything or nothing at all might happen the next time B hits A. Space, time, and Causality therefore, according to Hume, are merely handy assumptions from which you can never derive a LAW – something that universally and necessarily applies in the outside world. Thus in the wake of Hume it could seem as if the great edifice of Newtonian science, the Laws of Universal Mechanics – the crown jewel of the Enlightenment - was reduced to a set of probable (though admittedly very useful) assumptions. Kant wants to show that Hume’s skepticism regarding scientific law is the result of what he considers to be a na?ve realism regarding the workings of the mind.In general Kant wants to argue that the modern experiment beginning with Descartes has incorrectly assumed that we can use reason to uncover the workings of reason. Descartes seemed to think that by a kind of introspection – cutting himself off from sense-experience and examining his own ideas – he could arrive at an understanding of the inner workings of the mind. Kant points out that this procedure involves one in an inescapable circularity and is therefore fruitless.Understandably, many find Kant’s point here difficult to comprehend. If so, to make it clearer consider trying to figure out or explain the origins or foundations of arithmetic using only arithmetic – no words, diagrams, or signs. Sounds pretty silly, right? By doing math you can only get mathematical answers – not any insight into how or why math works. When mathematicians seek the foundations of math they look to something like logic or set theory. Imagine explaining music to someone using only musical notation. It couldn’t be done because we would have to use words – “this symbol is a whole note which gets 4 beats”, and so on. These examples help make the point, but let’s discuss the idea on a much broader and more fundamental level. Imagine trying to explain how language works or discussing the foundations of language. If you try to understand the foundations of language by observing language in operation then clearly you are not examining the foundations of language but simply how language is used. In order to discuss the foundations of language we must talk about what language is based on – ideas, logic grammar, etc. But any discussion of ideas, grammar, or logic must first be translated into a language. In so doing you have had to translate any of your observations into words according to the rules and structures required by language. Thus you cannot examined the foundations of language as they exist in themselves but only as filtered through the medium of language – sticking us in a vicious circle. Because we must communicate in a language we are forever barred from directly inquiring after its foundations. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) would make this same point about language – using language to talk about the foundations of language is circular. You can’t show that a book has a typographical error by pointing to a copy of the same book. Kant wants to make clear that trying to use reason to talk about the foundations of reason generates the same problem. You are trying to use a tool to examine itself. Presumably you are discussing the foundations of reason using reason. It is like using a magnifying glass to enlarge the magnifying glass. You can certainly think about thinking. But your object will then always be an active thought process not the foundation of thinking.Kant argues that while you cannot exactly see how reasons functions by rational introspection as Descartes supposed, you can ‘deduce’ what must be the case in order to produce the results of reason. In this way you can understand the limits of reason – ultimately an important goal for Kant. Once again, an example might help to make this clearer. The empiricist argues that a perception such as ‘snowball’ is built out of the experienced qualities of the object: hard, cold, round, white – etc. However it would be odd to say we experienced a snowball in isolation. It might be possible to isolate a snowball in a refrigerated lab, but our ordinary experience of a snowball incudes a myriad of objects that are joined together in one whole scene: the snowy afternoon, the children paying, the odd snowman, and so on. It is often overlooked that we perceive the scene or painting or photo not as a series of discreet units but as an organized whole – one thing, and it is this unity or synthesis in time that, for Kant, is key to our being conscious of the scene. No matter how many skaters are on the pond or how many children paying or how many snowflakes are falling the scene is perceived as happening in that particular moment. All of the elements of the scene are interrelated and connected. Since this essential now or unity is not an observable element in what we are looking at – it is not a skater, snowflake, or snowball or any other sense-quality, Kant says we may deduce that this unity is what the mind adds to the sense-data to turn it into a unified experience. In other words the mind makes all those unseen but necessary connections. Without this unity the experience would just be a jumbled up mess of disparate data – not an experience at all. So the very possibility of experience presupposes this mental process of adding a total unity or synthesis to the sense-data. We cannot introspectively ‘see’ the unifying process at work since it must already be at work for us to see anything at all. But we can deduce that the process must be taking place. Kant calls this particular type of deduction a ‘transcendental’ deduction – because it seeks the foundation of experience and ultimately the foundation of reason. Notice that this foundation is not perceived directly but its presence is inferred or deduced. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant uses this approach to try to answer Hume’s objection to the possibility of scientific law. Essentially Kant argues that Hume is correct – we will never get a scientific law from ‘pure’ experience. The necessary components of physical law such as Space and Time are not given in experience as we noted above. But Kant argues that Hume is wrong to insist that these ideas are mere assumptions. For Kant Space and Time are necessary pre-conditions that make experience possible in the first place. True we do not experience Space. But without spatial relationships experience is impossible. Unless our representations or sense-data are spatially related there would be nothing to experience. Take any image or picture and imagine that the space has been removed. The result would be exactly nothing. It is equally the case that all experience must take place in Time. For example reading this sentence takes Time and reading or understanding the sentence would be impossible without it. Without Time there is no experience. But if Space and Time are not part of the ‘sense-data’ - do not come to us from the outside world - then how do they become part of experience? Kant’s answer is that the perceiver must supply them. Spatial and temporal relationships are part of our faculties of perception. They are part of how we must perceive the world. Thus the regularity or law-like nature of our experience is our contribution to experience – not something we learned from experience. Scientific law is possible because experience is only possible if the perceptual forms of Space and Time govern it. In a way, science is possible because we make it so. However what the world is like other than or prior to our experience is forever beyond our grasp. Reason is forever barred from inquiring into anything other than world as we perceive it. Kant calls our experience Phenomena and the world as it is in itself without being experienced the Noumena. Noumena are unknowableThe second difficulty with the representational or sense-data model occurs when we consider ethics. Traditionally, ethical principles had been thought to be works of reason. However, Hume points out that once again they key components of most ethical systems: God, the soul, freedom, the good, and the like, are ideas with no sense data to support them. Hence, for Hume, since these ideas are without actual experiential content, then they are not realities or truths. Without the backing of experience these ideas cannot be considered matters of fact. Neither are they logical truths like ‘a triangle has three angles’, and so they can be denied without fear of contradiction. Therefore ethics cannot be considered a rational discipline. In response to this situation Hume and other empiricists offer Utilitarianism as a substitute for traditional ethics. Utilitarianism, in its basic form, states that we ought to adopt those principles which promote the greatest good (usually understood as pleasure) for the greatest number of people. This arrangement sounds very democratic, but presents a problem that Kant noted: anything can be done to the minority if it will benefit the majority. Thus people may be used as a means to an end. So, for example, slavery could theoretically be justified on Utilitarian grounds. Slavery is terrible for the slaves, but they represent a small minority. In a slave economy the majority benefit greatly. Kant found such an idea to be absolutely unacceptable.However regarding the relationship of reason to ethics, Kant argues that Hume is essentially correct. The key components of ethics such as God and Freedom are not part of our experience, and so reason can make no inquiry one way or another into these ideas. In Kantian terms there is no experience related to God or Freedom; so they remain noumenal objects, forever beyond the scope of reason. Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God or that persons are free. All our true representations are perfectly determined by the laws of experience. Hence if we, for example, try to prove we are free, we are trying to make freedom into a representation (or phenomena, to use Kant’s term), and since representations or phenomena must absolutely correspond to laws governing sense-experience, our task is impossible – we find ourselves in the midst of a contradiction. Phenomena are subject to objective laws and a free human being makes autonomous choices for which he or she bears sole responsibility. The two are incompatible, and so freedom remains outside the grasp of rational demonstration. However Kant does not think that Hume’s Utilitarianism provides an adequate ethics in response to this dilemma. Basically the utilitarian does the very thing that strict empiricism forbids – uses reason to make ethical judgments. To choose the greatest good for the greatest number requires calculation and a decision on what is good and a willingness to accept a rationale for depriving the minority of benefits granted to the majority. All of these results depend on many variables as well as the consequences of your actions – some of which cannot be foreseen and therefore impossible to judge. Certainly rational people may disagree on what benefits the majority – or even what constitutes a majority. The above idea certainly teeters very close to arbitrary action which most of Kant’s contemporaries and predecessors in philosophy would identify as immoral. For example both Locke and Rousseau argued that slavery is wrong because it places someone in the arbitrary control of another. As we will see for Kant an ethical action can never be arbitrary and must be autonomous. Therefore a truly ethical action must be independent of consequences and particular circumstances.Kant begins his Groundwork (sometimes Grounding) for the Metaphysics of Morals by stating that nothing can be good without qualification except a good will – doing something only because it is good or the right thing to do. If you do something for any other reason then it is not done because it is good. The shopkeeper that is honest because it is good for business acts in conformity with moral principles but not because of those principles. We cannot say that this particular shopkeeper is bad, but since his only rationale for honesty is based on business concerns, it is certainly possible that he would be dishonest if his dishonesty wasn’t bad for business. But being honest for honesty’s sake alone, regardless of the effect on business, is certainly good. Likewise giving to charity because of the tax write-off, or because it looks good, or makes you feel good is not bad – it’s just not good in itself. If there were absolutely no advantage in giving to charity and you did it because it is the right thing to do then the action has true moral worth for Kant.So for Kant the first requirement for a moral action is that it is unconditional. That is, the action must begin and end with the individual, and there can be no other conditions or limitations placed on that action. Only if the action is unconditional can it be solely the product of a good will. Ultimately Kant wants us to understand that any conditions or limitations placed on the action– such as I will do x only if someone else does y – means that the action is not the product of self-determination or is not autonomous. As we will see the idea of autonomy is a key component of Kant’s ethical ideas. So the first step towards determining which acts are moral is making sure that the principle that guides our action is unconditional. Thus the principles or maxims on which we act must be unconditional. This point is extremely important for Kant. Human beings are not merely material objects that are unconditionally subject to the laws of nature, nor are we animals ruled by instincts. Part of what makes us human is that we are ruled by laws that we ourselves create. A moral law is an unconditional rule that we adopt that guides our actions. This observation leads Kant to the statement of his famous Categorical Imperative: Act only on those maxims which we can will to be universal laws of nature. In other words our principles must be treated as akin to the law of gravity: operating without exception. Like inanimate objects we are subject to laws of nature, but as rational beings we are able to subject ourselves to the moral law. We can represent laws to ourselves, and unlike inanimate objects we can use reason to determine a course of action. In the moral sphere this reasoning is not the reason of experiment or calculation – we must only see that our maxims can be treated as universal. Hence we see immediately that the maxim: ‘it is O.K. to cheat someone if I have good reasons for doing so’ cannot be moral because we can’t will it to be universal as if it were a law of nature. We would understandably want to exempt ourselves from being cheated. Under no circumstances would we want to be the victim of cheating regardless of the reasons someone put forward for doing so. Kant regards the Categorical Imperative as a kind of litmus test for the morality of a maxim.Kant wants to argue that the moral individual is self-determining or autonomous because that person is operating under universal principles that are therefore unconditional. The moral person, then, is not subject to outside constraints. Further Kant argues that since these principles are universal and objective like the laws of science or mathematics they are therefore are binding on all rational beings. This statement may seem a contradictory at first. We were talking about freedom and self-determination, but now we are talking about being bound by rules or laws. Kant is arguing that moral truth is like mathematical truth in the sense that moral truth represents an objective truth. Previously we discovered that Don’t Cheat was a moral truth because under no circumstances would we want to be the victim of cheating. There were no circumstances or exceptions that would make me want to be a victim of cheating. Kant argues that what holds good for you holds good for everyone. That is, if someone considered the idea of whether cheating was ok under certain circumstances that person would come to the same conclusion: ‘if I allowed that I would likely end up being cheated – therefore I have to say cheating is wrong’. Of course there may be many people who don’t think about the morality of cheating or who don’t think very well about it. In the same way I might try to explain the Pythagorean Theorem to someone and they might not be able to grasp it. That doesn’t make it any less of an objective truth. When we consider moral truths, then we are looking to adopt a maxim that determines the future course of our actions. That is, we are self-determining or what Kant calls an end in itself. The rational being – a person that understands and represents laws to him or herself - then can only be considered as an end in itself and never a means to an end. This leads Kant to an important reformulation of the Categorical Imperative: Act so as to treat people as ends never means. Kant wants to make it clear that the two statements of the Categorical Imperative say the same thing. To say that our maxims must be universal means that no conditions or circumstances are relevant to the operation of our maxims. To say that no conditions are relevant to the operation of our maxims means that we are self-determining. To say that we are self-determining means that we are an end in itself – never a means. Again a means always represents a condition: a stepping stone to some other goal or end. Kant believes his last formulation of the Categorical Imperative is very fruitful. He thinks it shows that Utilitarianism is incorrect because Utilitarianism allows people to be treated as means. Kant also introduces what he thinks is the idea of the true moral community – The Kingdom of Ends. The Kingdom of Ends is like the Kingdom of Nature in which every element of the natural world is subject to the laws of physics without exception. However in the Kingdom of Ends each person is subject to and benefits by the moral law. Thus Kant argues that the moral individual is self-determining and free since he or she is free from external conditions and restraints as far as the will is concerned. However Kant is clear, as we said above, that we cannot prove that we are free. Hume is quite correct that freedom is only an assumption. Nevertheless for Kant it is a necessary assumption. Without freedom it makes no sense to say that we are rational. If I cannot claim my thoughts as my own – if I cannot say that “I think X” then claiming that “I am a rational being” makes no sense. Clearly without individual freedom my thoughts must be determined by something other than my own mind and therefore I can lay no claim to them, and the ‘I think’ make no sense. Hence without the assumption of freedom rationality is impossible. Freedom according to Kant is a necessary postulate. ................
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