Is Kant's Moral Psychology Implausible? (I): A Reply to Leiter and Knobe

In a cursory examination of Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche blog, I stumbled upon a small exchange that involved Leiter insulting Kant scholars (perhaps justified, since it was in response to the claim that Allen Wood insulted Nietzscheans). I was going to let this go, but then Leiter also suggested that Nietzsche’s moral psychology is more plausible than Kant’s, and I couldn’t quite let this go. The result was that people started arguing with me and giving me reading suggestions, and it felt wrong to keep responding to them on Leiter’s thread, which was on a completely different, Obama-related topic. So instead I promised to blog about it here. What I mainly want to do here is defend Kant in response to the sources that were suggested to me—Leiter and Knobe’s [L&K] article, "The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology", and (briefly) Paul Katsafanas’s Nietzschean arguments against Kantians.

Let me start with a preliminary: In keeping with the theme raised on that thread, my question will be whether Kant’s moral psychology is any less plausible than Nietzsche’s. The plausibility is to be assessed (at least in part) in light of current empirical knowledge of human decision making. I don’t want to claim that Nietzsche’s moral psychology is less plausible than Kant’s; I am very fond of it, in fact (or at least the little I learned back in the day). What I want to argue is that there are no good grounds provided in L&K’s paper for thinking that Kant’s moral psychology is any less plausible. And the main reason for this is that I think empirical evidence largely leaves Kant’s important points untouched; the parts that seem to support Nietzsche, on the other hand, strike me as largely compatible with Kant. I will get to this point in the next post; first I want to question the assumptions made by L&K, specifically the assumption that they are somehow criticizing Kant’s views. This post, then, relates more to meta-considerations about the debate, and particularly to the role of moral philosophy, than to Kant’s moral psychology itself.

Now my response is, in part (but I hope only in part), something Leiter will no doubt consider a cop-out. And this is because my response (again, in part) does tend to follow the lines of a long-familiar argument that L & K start out by dismissing:

Certain Kantians might say: “Kant’s theory is not intended as a psychological hypothesis. It should be understood rather as a statement of the conditions of possibility of moral agency. Hence, if we find that no one actually meets the conditions set out by the theory, we should not conclude that the theory itself was mistaken. Instead, we should conclude that no one ever truly is a moral agent.” Let us call philosophers who adopt such a posture Above-the-Fray Moral Philosophers. [AFMPs] Such philosophers are indeed invulnerable to empirical results: they tell us how moral agents ought to be, and they are indifferent to how moral agents actually are or can be. We reject such an approach in this essay. We assume that ought implies can is a reasonable aspiration in moral psychology; indeed, that ought implies realistically can is an even better aspiration… We assume with most moral philosophers (including many Kantians) that there are agents who perform morally valuable acts, and thus the question for moral psychology is not merely a question about the possibility conditions for such psychology, but how this psychology actually works. (2-3)

So, let me comment on this. If L&K use such a claim to preface what they take to be an attack on Kant, then they are being intellectually dishonest. And this is (partly) because they are failing to distinguish Kantians from Kant. Their objections in the paper do, I think, pose challenges to many contemporary Kantians. They do not—as I will show—pose any challenge to Kant. One reason is that Kant is, to a large extent, what L&K call an AFMP. L&K may well disagree with such a position, but an attack on Kant that assumes this disagreement cannot reasonably be taken to be an attack on Kant. I do not, to repeat, disagree that the paper poses serious challenges to many contemporary Kantians; but I think Kant himself poses equally serious challenges. To be sure, attacking Kant by inaccurate proxy is a time-honored tradition in 20^th century Anglophone moral philosophy. But someone who works on a figure in the history of philosophy (Leiter) ought to know the difference between attacking Kantians and attacking Kant. (What would Leiter say to the people who attack Nietzsche based on a reading of Heidegger and Deleuze?)

Second, L&K’s characterization of AFMPs certainly makes such an approach sound like silly, outdated, armchair stargazing nonsense. But it is a lot more appetizing if we stop to think about what Kant was trying to do instead of setting up a straw man for the fire (or whatever one does with straw men). We can approach this, I think, by noticing that L&K seem to simply conflate (as they also do later in the paper) moral theory with moral psychology. The first (roughly) being that branch of philosophy that tells us what principles of action or character traits or goals are good (I am trying to be neutral here with regard to moral theories; Kant’s own formulation of the moral question is: “What ought I to do?”), the second being the study of how human beings actually comport themselves with regard to morally relevant concepts or principles. By conflating the two, L&K essentially assert that morality must be utterly subservient to moral psychology. There is certainly reason for a Nietzschean to take such a position, but again: it kind of prejudices the argument from the outset. We can, of course, with Hume affirm that one cannot derive an ought from an is, that philosophy can only study what is, and that we can therefore throw the ought out the window. But doing that involves taking a stance within moral theory, and an argument against Kant has to occur at this stage, not after the stance has already been taken. True, L&K's “ought implies can” reference may be intended to forestall just such a criticism, but their move there is so fast and unsupported, that it cannot justify using empirical moral psychology to question Kant’s moral theory.

Third, there are good reasons for Kant to be an AFMP. Because what Kant was trying to do was, precisely, to (1) figure out how we ought to act, and (2) give the conditions of possibility for so acting. And the problem with the “ought implies can” principle is that either you base your moral philosophy entirely on moral psychology (people want x & y, therefore they should do p & q; alternatively, people have the psychological traits a & b, therefore they should do or can be expected to do p & q), or you figure out your morality independently of empirical data. Only the second approach allows you to say what we ought to do, rather than just what we should do, or what it would be best for us to do given what we are like as natural beings. And, in fact, you can only figure out what we ought to do by refusing to start out with how we are by nature. And this position becomes more tenable still, I think, if you ask yourself why we should reject psychologism in mathematics and logic, but maintain it with regard to moral philosophy. (Imagine: “Some philosophers claim that the square root of 2 has a determine value, regardless of whether human beings can calculate it in their head. I maintain that to have a determinate value is to have a value determined by actual human capacities.”)

Fourth, “ought implies can” is obviously a principle Kant takes seriously. It is, in fact, an a priori truth for him. Kant explicitly uses the principle to argue from the fact of the moral law to the human ability to follow it. Since the ought, for Kant, is derived from reason and not from nature, unsurprisingly the question of whether or not human beings can follow it turns out to be a metaphysical, not an empirical question. I agree with Kant that this is a step that has to be taken by anyone who wants to differentiate what we ought to do from what we, on some description, happen to want to do. Of course the metaphysics must be such that it is not contradicted by empirical evidence. And it will turn out that the empirical facts, as Kant sees them, are in no way contradicted by L&K. And this is partly because Kant does his best to make his empirical psychology as neutral as possible on moral questions. What he rejects, however, is the approach that limits all human knowledge to the empirical, and this is what allows him to posit a moral law in the first place. Kant’s grounds for rejecting the limitation of all human knowledge to empirical knowledge may, of course, be questioned. Almost all contemporary Anglophone philosophers reject them. But—and this is a very different discussion—his challenge to naturalism has yet to be answered directly (to my knowledge). And, in any case, the notion that philosophy is just there to clarify empirical claims and not to make ought-statements largely went out the door with logical positivism. Or did it?

Fifth, we should, especially if we care about the ought question, take a second look at the conflation issue. The AFMP is characterized as saying that, “if we find that no one actually meets the conditions set out by the theory, we should not conclude that the theory itself was mistaken. Instead, we should conclude that no one ever truly is a moral agent.” And L&K reply that such philosophers “tell us how moral agents ought to be, and they are indifferent to how moral agents actually are or can be.” But L&K seem to be confusing three things here: (1) whether there actually are any agents that live up to the demands of moral theory, (2) whether actual human beings have the psychological capacities that might allow them to live up to those demands, (3) whether, given actual human capacities, human beings are capable of living up to the demands of morality. These are obviously distinct questions. If human beings really lacked the capacity to be moral, Kant tells us, there would be no morality. But this goes back to the previous point. In any case, the conflation is important because the point of the ought, once again, is to set an ideal above and beyond the goals we have by nature, so the moral psychology demanded by the moral theory will be at least in part non-empirical. At least one—though major—reason for this, is that the goal set by morality must be capable of overriding all other demands, and this means that it must transcend them. On this picture, the question is whether or not we are something more than merely natural beings; but it should be obvious that this is not an empirical question. Moreover, it would not be surprising, given such a picture of morality, if no one lived up to it; in fact, if anyone did live up to it, we could have no empirical evidence for this! Morality is, for Kant, very different from making a tasty pot of chowder or even getting a perfect score in a bowling match. Morality is something to strive for infinitely. But even if no one meets the conditions set out by Kant’s moral theory, this does not imply that no one meets the conditions set out by his moral psychology.

I know I seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill, and I certainly seem to be missing L&K’s point. The truth is, I am quite sympathetic to the project of bringing actual psychology to bear on issues of agency and ethics, and I find their paper very interesting. But if philosophy is to be something other than just psychology, or a tool for clarifying psychology (see my previous post, on Appiah and x-phi), then it is reasonable that it should have components that do no take their directives from the empirical evidence, but instead provide us with the directives for evaluating that evidence in the first place. Taking is questions to make important and valuable contributions is quite proper and healthy for philosophy. But taking is questions to provide counter-evidence to ought questions (and, really, taking ought questions to simply be varieties of is questions) often simply involves philosophical confusion. (See Michael's post criticizing the idea that moral psychology can replace moral theory.)

In the next post, I will address the actual issues of moral psychology in question, and argue that they do not cast doubt on the plausibility of Kant's moral psychology.