Philosophy 433
History of
Ethics
Darwall
Winter
2008
KANT
IV
I The
fact of
reason: consciousness of the moral law and the CI.
What Kant calls the “fact of reason” is the
“consciousness of this fundamental law,” i.e., the “fundamental law of
pure
practical reason” or the Categorical Imperative: “So act that the maxim
of your
will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving
[i.e., by
one’s will] of universal law.” (
II
Moral (transcendental) freedom and transcendental
idealism. In
this way we are
aware of our “transcendental freedom.”
Here we get Kant’s transcendental idealism.
The natural realm, which we learn about
through the empirical methods that extend what we get through sense, is
but a
world of “appearance.” It is “empirically
real,” but “transcendentally ideal.” In
addition to this realm of appearance, there is the intelligible or noumenal realm, “things in themselves.
In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant
argues that the
only knowledge we can have of objects is insofar as they are objects of
possible experience (i.e., as appearances), and that theoretical reason
can
have no knowledge of things in themselves.
And some of our knowledge of the realm of experience is a
priori, i.e.
it comes not through reason, but through rational conditions of the
very
possibility of experience. So Kant
argues that any experience would have to be structured through the
categories
of cause and effect, and so we can know a priori that the phenomenal or
empirical realm is a deterministic world.
Nonetheless, reason also seeks the
“unconditioned,” and so
seeks after transcendental knowledge of things as they really are, not
just
appearances. Left to its own, however,
reason
ends up in contradiction and paradox, with equally good arguments for
the conclusion
that everything is really determined (and there is no freedom) and that
there really
is freedom (and so things are uncaused).
So far, then, all we know is that freedom is
possible. Through reason’s practical use,
however, Kant
argues that we must conclude that we are actually free.
When we deliberate under practical laws
(“laws of freedom”) we are uncaused causes (outside of time). At the same time, however, insofar as we and
our actions exist as objects of experience or empirical knowledge, as
part of
the natural realm, everything we do is causally determined.
Chapter III (“On the incentives of pure practical
reason”)
discusses how it can simultaneously be true that, as we really are in
ourselves, as part of the noumenal,
intelligible realm, we
choose and
act freely, but that our actions and choices are phenomenally causally
determined. Indeed, Kant says, if “we
would know every
incentive to action,
even the
smallest, as well as all the external occasions affecting them, we
could
calculate a human being’s conduct for the future with as much certainty
as a lunar
or solar eclipse and could nevertheless maintain that the human being’s
conduct
is free.” (5:99)
III The feeling of respect
as
phenomenal cause of moral action.
How could this be? Prominent in
Kant’s explication is the feeling of respect.
When we are aware of the moral law (or think of someone being
guided by
the moral law), this fills us with a respect that “strikes down” or
“humiliates”
our self-conceit. Kant distinguishes
between self-love and self-conceit.
Self-love is “the propensity to make oneself as having
subjective
determining grounds of choice into the objective determining ground of
the will
in general.” (5:74) (Also: “a predominant benevolence toward oneself”
(5:73)) And
self-conceit is
when self-love “makes itself lawgiving and the unconditional practical
principle.” (5:74) (Also: “arrogantia” or “satisfaction with oneself”
(5:73) (What
exactly is
the difference here?)
In any case, whereas the moral law and pure
practical reason
only “infringes upon” and “restricts” self-love, it “strikes down”
self-conceit. (5:73)
We feel this self-humiliation as respect for the moral
law.
When we freely act on the moral law, the causal
determinant
of action in the phenomenal realm is this feeling of respect. But this feeling is not simply a contingent
feeling.
It is an a priori feeling, in the sense that
it is a feeling that any finite rational agent would have in being
aware of the
moral law. Moreover, respect for the law
is not really the incentive to moral action, rather it is the
phenomenal aspect
of freely following the moral law through pure practical reason:
“respect for
the law is not the incentive to morality; instead it is morality itself
subjectively considered as an incentive inasmuch as pure practical
reason, by
rejecting all the claims of self-love in opposition to its own,
supplies
authority to the law, which now alone has influence.” (5:76)
“The dissimilarity of determining grounds
(empirical and
rational) is made known by this resistance of a practically lawgiving
reason to
every meddling inclination, by a special kind of feeling, which,
however, does
not precede the lawgiving of practical reason but is indeed produced
only by it
. . . “ (5:92)
Determinism in the phenomenal realm is thus
compatible with
indeterminism and freedom in the noumenal
realm. “A rational being can now rightly
say of
every unlawful action he performed that he could have omitted it even
though as
appearance it is sufficiently determined in the past and, so far, is
inevitably
necessary.” (5:98)
IV
Self-conceit and the nature of respect. Self-conceit, on the other hand, assaults the
moral law directly, and so it must be “humiliated.”
It is a form of arrogance (arrogantia):
the presumption that one has a kind of worth
or dignity oneself, entirely independently of the moral law,
through
which self-love is made “lawgiving and the unconditional practical
principle.”
(5:73, 74) This is not just a naïve
tendency to mistake seeming normative relevance from one’s own
standpoint with
objective normative weight. It is the
radical idea that something has objective normative significance because
it is what one wills subjectively—first, that one has a unique
standing
to create reasons independently of and unconstrained by the moral law,
but
also, second, that one can address these reasons and expect
compliance. It is, Kant says, “lack of
modesty in one’s claims to be respected by others . . . (arrogantia).”
(emphasis added to ‘claims to be respected’
6:462)
Self-conceit is thus a fantasy about second-personal status. It is the conceit that one has a standing to make claims and demands on others that others do not have. The idea is not (or at least not simply) that one has a special wisdom, the epistemic authority of one who sees better than others reasons that are there anyway. It is rather the fantasy that one has a unique “lawgiving” authority that others don’t have (perhaps because a special wisdom, perhaps not), a capacity to create second-personal reasons by making demands and laying down laws that others are thereby accountable to one for following, with one being accountable to no one. It is as if one were God, the source of all law and accountability (though on most views not even God has that authority).
The moral law cannot therefore simply curtail self-conceit or keep it in its place; it must “strike it down.” It must declare “null and quite unwarranted” any “claims to esteem for oneself that precede accord with the moral law.” (5:73) We shouldn’t be thrown off by Kant’s use of ‘esteem’ here. The moral law must supplant self-conceit’s presumptuous authority to demand recognition of the claims and demands it purports to address. Kant uses ‘esteem’ in a similar way when he defines observantia or “respect in the practical sense” as “the maxim of limiting our self-esteem by the dignity of humanity in another person.” Obviously, in this context, ‘esteem’ must refer to recognition rather than to appraisal respect. Self-conceit is the fantasy that one has a claim to others’ recognition respect that they do not have against one.
The moral law substitutes the equal dignity of
persons—the
kingdom of ends, the community of mutually accountable free and
rational agents
—for the fantasized despotism of self-conceit.
The respect-creating encounter with a “humble common” person
gives rise
to a response to the common dignity that all persons have. This is no form of esteem that a person might
deserve through his character or conduct. It
is a form of respect that any individual
can demand simply by virtue of being a person. (6:434-35) Fully to recognize
another person’s
equal authority to make demands as a person is to hold oneself
accountable to
him for complying with these. It is to
place oneself in a second-personal relationship towards him,
rather than
simply to take account of any fact, norm, or value that involves him.