Kant considers that the highest aspiration of a human being is the development of a good will and such a good will is developed by acting rationally according to the principles laid down by the Categorical Imperative. Humans can, if they wish, think of their moral duties as if they were Divine Commands, but morality is specifically not based on such commands. If it was, it would then be arbitrary (cf. the Euthyphro dilemma p. 7).
God is largely peripheral for Kant although God is needed to underwrite Kant’s trust in the fairness of the Universe – particularly the idea that, after death, the virtuous and vice-ridden will be treated appropriately. Kant has a tremendous faith in the metaphysical fairness of the Universe – which is strange as he wished to bar the door to metaphysics because he did not think it was possible to argue from the world of experience (phenomena) to anything beyond this. However, he had faith in the justice of the Universe and he considered that mortality was a postulate of practical reason. Kant’s view can be taken as implying that if the Universe is fair, it follows that human beings must survive death as clearly in this life the virtuous are often treated very badly and those who pursue the path of vice all too often have an apparently happy and contented life.
Kant largely reduces religion to ethics – to be holy is to be moral. Religion is only valuable as a way of helping people to lead a moral life. He considered that philosophy had supremacy over theology as philosophy was based on reason without unsupported faith claims. Kant considered that religion had to operate within the bounds of reason alone and he reinterpreted the claims of Christianity so that they expressed a call to moral righteousness. Jesus was the perfect exemplar of the morally good life. As we have seen, Kant considered human beings and human reason to be autonomous and he thus rejected heteronomy (for instance using God’s will as a guide to what is morally right or wrong).
Kant has a problem at the heart of his whole enterprise which is often not recognised and which he did not fully resolve. Kant considered that human beings should aim to act wholly in accordance with the Categorical Imperative – the maxim of their action would then be good. However, he recognised that many people would fail to do this and they would become corrupt as they acted from an evil, false or irrational maxim. Once a person’s life had become dominated by such general principles, they would then be in bondage. The difficulty Kant had was how to explain moral regeneration or a turn around from the evil to the good when he also considered that human beings could bind themselves by their corrupt maxims. The alternatives were to either:
1 say that human beings were not bound by their corrupt maxims and Kant was quite clear that they were, or
2 to say that human beings, once bound, could not turn round from the corrupt to the good and this would have meant that the position of corrupt human beings was hopeless.
As Michalson points out (Fallen Freedom, pp. 125ff.), Kant’s response to this was a most surprising one given the peripheral place allotted to God in most of Kant’s philosophy. He maintained that it was only through the incarnation in which God became man in Jesus Christ that human moral regeneration can take place. In this one area, at this particular point (but not elsewhere) God was central for Kant, yet he did not face up to the consequences of this. It was Kant’s successors, Kierkegaard and Hegel (and, following Hegel, Marx) who were to take seriously the alternatives that Kant failed to grapple with. As Michalson says:
Kierkegaard and Marx represent what happens when just one of the two aspects of Kant’s account of moral regeneration is taken up and emphasised in isolation from the other aspect. As such, their positions shed light on Kant’s own effort to have it both ways.
In Kierkegaard’s hands, the muted Kantian appeal to grace is transformed into a full-blown ‘project of thought’ in which a transcendent act alone is the only antidote to our willed ‘error’, or sin. Contrary to our usual view of these matters, it is in fact Kierkegaard and not Kant who has the more ‘rational’ position here … Kierkegaard shows the only way to offset a willed error is through a reconciling act coming from the ‘outside’, producing the ‘new creature’ … Alternatively, Kant’s more characteristic tendency to locate our moral recovery in our own efforts – however impossible he has made it for himself fully to do this – leads in some sense to Marxism (which) … expels the last remnants of otherworldliness remaining in the position of the philosopher … (Fallen Freedom, pp. 129–30).
Kant represents a divide in the road in the history of moral and philosophic thought. The road that Kierkegaard takes firmly embraces the central importance of a personal God and the action of this God both in history and in the lives of individual human beings. Hegel takes the opposing path and rejects such a view of transcendence – Marx then takes Hegel’s view further and morality becomes entirely a social construct. These issues are still very much alive and the divide is still present today.
Questions for discussion
1 Suggest two moral maxims which would give rise to contradictory actions. How might the differences between these be resolved?
2 Could it ever be morally right, according to Kant, to torture one person in order to get information which would save the lives of a large group?
3 Describe the difference between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative. On what grounds might someone reject an imperative that was claimed to be categorical?
4 On Kant’s view, should the moral principles of intelligent green spiders differ from the moral principles of human beings?
5 What place does God have in Kant’s moral philosophy?
6 In Kant’s view, is saving the life of a child a morally good action? What are the difficulties from his viewpoint in answering this question in the affirmative?
Bentham and Mill – Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is generally thought of as a moral theory which can best be summed up by the phrase: ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. However, in terms of its linguistic origins it may be more aptly described as a ‘theory of usefulness’, after the Latin root word utilis meaning useful. This, then, seems to imply that whatever is useful is moral. On a literal interpretation, therefore, my garden spade and fork are moral implements because they are useful. But clearly this is absurd. However, decisions and actions may be characterised as morally useful. Immoral decisions lead to useless or bad actions and amoral decisions are those which lead to no actions at all.
So, for example, the act of abortion is, in itself, neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. However, it becomes so when we consider to what end the procedure of abortion is being used. If abortion is being used to save the mother’s life and restrict an already large family in a household where the husband is unemployed, and if the abortion is conducted in a humane fashion, then its use may, on utilitarian grounds, be justified, and the act itself becomes a moral one. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, that is, of the family unit, counts over and above the future possible happiness of the single unborn child. If, however, abortion is being used by a young married woman because the pregnancy may interfere with a planned skiing trip, then clearly it is difficult to see how it could be justified, unless a cynical vision of utilitarianism were to be employed in which the maximisation of immediate happiness for the young woman and her skiing party were to count for more than the future possible happiness of the unborn child and the future long-term happiness of the prospective family. To use Singer’s Practical Ethics (1993) argument a minor interest (the pleasure derived from the skiing trip) is placed above a major interest (the life of the child and the future possibilities of family life).