Intentionality and the Object of Moral Perception: Ricoeur's Challenge

Ricoeur tantalizingly challenges the Husserlian (and common sense) notion that the intentional object remains the same throughout various intentional acts. Consider, for example, the following: “that person with the heavy bags needs a seat” vs. “that person is standing with heavy bags.” On the common view, the intentional object, “the person standing with heavy bags,” is the same in both cases. This view, that the intentional object is given an identity through an act of understanding, is central to standard accounts of moral perception and is an important point for philosophy of mind and agency.

To work out the common view, let me take a version of the standard account from Angela Smith, who takes moral perception to be a case of “seeing under an aspect” (I do not mean to imply that this is Smith's own view; she suggests that it may be mistaken in the paragraph that follows):

A morally insensitive person may, in a literal perceptual sense, “see” exactly the same thing as a morally sensitive person—for example, that a person is standing on a crowded subway with two very full grocery bags. What differs is that the morally sensitive person sees this person as uncomfortable and in need of a place to sit down, while the morally insensitive person does not. (1, 259)

This point is taken to be independent of the further point about moral perception that a morally sensitive agent is more likely to notice features of her surroundings that call for a moral response (perceptual salience). Here, the issue is rather of how, or under what aspect, the morally sensitive or insensitive person perceives a situation provided that both have already noticed it. And this view—that intentional objects are somehow basic particular units of meaning that, already constituted, can enter into various intentional acts—has some obvious support: If, for example, I am to want to have chicken soup for dinner, then “having chicken soup for dinner” or something of the sort must have a meaning independently of my particular act of wanting it; after all, the very same object must be able to play a role in my epistemic judgments, or else I would never know how to satisfy my desires.

This is the sort of view Ricoeur has in mind. He calls on us to consider the following infinitive proposition: “I am to go on a trip.” This grammatical form

Is a neutral signification which could be incorporated in acts of different quality. It will occur some day that “I shall go on a trip”: here the meaning is at the same time called and held in suspension by its hypothetical modifier. In a decision the meaning is inserted into a positing of existence which is not stated but is affirmed as depending on me… (2, 43)

So what is the common meaning in these intentional acts? Ricoeur rejects the idea that the common meaning is given by a founding act of understanding, which allows it to enter into other intentional acts such as willing, hoping, predicting, etc. Nor “is it a primitive judgment of existence modified afterwards as a wish or a decision” (44).

Ricoeur's own view is that,

this meaning is distinguished only by abstraction from the concrete act of stating, wishing, ordering, or deciding… This proposition is not a judgment about that which I state, hope, command, or will, but a convergent product of abstraction, formed in the context of a reflection on acts and their objects (43-44)

Thus, the intentional object of a wish is not identical to the intentional object of the understanding; the identity of the two objects is not primary, but is established through a later act of abstraction. Similarly, the perception of a person standing with heavy bags will not be identical to the perception of a person with heavy bags in need of a seat: these intentional acts have a different quality, and are filled by different objects. (Ricoeur makes a similar point in “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology of the Will,” published in (3), though in similarly vague terms and also without any clear analysis of the implications. If anyone is familiar with further sources, please let me know.)

One way of bringing this out is by going back to the distinction I mentioned above, between seeing something under an aspect and noticing it at all. We can, of course, make this distinction in abstraction, but it is not at all clear that we can draw any fine line. For one thing, to take the example Smith uses, it seems a fact about the situation that the person with heavy bags needs a seat. So the morally sensitive observer is not adding something of his own to the situation; rather, he is simply seeing the situation for what it is. That the person with heavy bags needs a seat is part and parcel of the perceived situation, and it is a feature of the situation that the morally insensitive person simply does not notice. Similarly, an even less sensitive person might fail to notice that the bags are heavy, or might fail to notice a person standing with them at all. “Seeing under an aspect” is easily distinguishable from perceptual salience only if we assume that the “aspect” under which a perception might be seen is something added by the agent’s subjective attitudes, in opposition to what is objectively there to be perceived. But if we accept a moral realist picture, the “aspect” is really there, to be noticed by any sensitive observer in the way that the person with bags is really there.

So why does this matter? For one, if Ricoeur is right, we have to reexamine the standard classification of cognitive and conative acts in terms of directions of fit. For another, it suggests that valuation is integral to perception rather than projected on it, perhaps as some secondary quality. Of course the account would—to pose any serious challenge—still require a serious work-up of how a secondary act of abstraction, through which sameness of meaning is determined, could serve to unite our various judgments (say, judgments about what we want and judgments about how to get it; or judgments about moral responsibility and judgments about moral desirability). In any case, I suspect there is a way to pull off such an analysis by working out exactly how second-order acts govern first-order acts.

PS. What looks like a blue jay just pooped on my copy of Smith's paper. A spirited philosophical debate at last!

References:

(1) Angela Smith, “Responsibility for Attitudes,” Ethics 115 (January 2005): 236-271

(2) Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1966.

(3) Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Chicago: Northwestern, 2007.

Continue Reading...

Aristotle on Virtue: A Question About Circularity

I have a question about the Nicomachean Ethics that has been driving me nuts. I'm sure there is an obvious answer, but I still seem to be missing it after my third read. How do we determine the good in action?

Here's the issue I am having: The end of action is set by wish (boulesis). The means are decided on through deliberation (prohairesis). And prudence, it seems, is the virtue of deliberating well. The virtuous agent wishes for what is noble (kalos) and correctly deliberates about the best actions to attain the noble. So we have an account of the end of the virtuous agent, the faculty by which he pursues that end (deliberation) and the virtue of that faculty (prudence). We also have the faculty by which he chooses/recognizes the end: wish. But is there a virtue of wishing? In other words, it does not help us to have an account of how one attains the end if we have no account of how the end is to be found. (Of course Aristotle could just say that the noble is the end that the virtuous person chooses and leave it at that. But he does leave it at that in the case of deliberation, which he fills out at length with an account of prudence. So if this were his strategy, some account would be needed for the difference between deliberation and wish.)

Aristotle does say that the end is grasped through virtue (1151a), so I suppose the doctrine of the mean is supposed to give us the end. That is: someone who has reached the mean will also correctly grasp the end. But how do we figure out what the mean is? Aristotle repeatedly tells us that we find the mean through correct reason, and correct reasoning is the virtue of prudence. But this raises a further problem. Since deliberation is about means rather than ends, we cannot deliberate at all without some end in view. And it seems that we cannot deliberate prudently without having grasped the noble. That makes it seem like no one can be prudent—and thus find the mean—without already possessing the correct wish. But if the correct wish is grasped through virtue, this is circular.

Now circularity is not a huge problem for Aristotle, I think. Or, rather, I think it is a problem, but he does not see it that way. For example, his account of praise and blame in Book III.5 uses a similarly circular account. The problem there is this: We shape our character through our actions, and so we become virtuous by choosing and performing virtuous actions. But we can only choose for the good, and our apparent good is dependent on our state (virtuous or not). So while our character is (partly) up to us, since we choose the actions that shape it, our ability to choose the right actions hangs on our character. Aristotle thinks this resolves the problem of blame, but of course Galen Strawson uses a variant of this very argument (though without reference to ends) for the impossibility of moral responsibility. The circularity implies that no one can be ultimately responsible for their actions, and thus that no one can deserve praise or blame except in a very tempered sense.

But if we accept Aristotle's answer to my earlier question as similarly circular, then I cannot see any reason to insist that virtues are a matter of quality rather than degree. That is: for Aristotle, one cannot be kind of prudent, or sort of brave; one either has the virtue or one doesn't. And it seems like it is in response to something like my concern that Aristotle, in VI.13, brings up the thesis of the unity of the virtues. He argues there not that virtues cannot be partial or admit of degrees, but rather than one cannot have one virtue without having the others. The point is roughly the same, however. If we take Aristotle's argument there to be convincing, however, it doesn't seem like he has proven that the virtues are unified. If anything, by analogy to Strawson's reversal of the III.5 argument, he has proven that virtue is impossible. Here is why:

Aristotle's tendency to circularity can be justified by his constant insistence that he is giving a general rather than a universal account, since ethics does not allow of the same level of precision as mathematics. If so, then it makes sense to allow that someone is blameworthy insofar as his control of his character depends on his character: while he cannot be sui generis (which Strawson argues is necessary for moral responsibility), he can be jointly responsible for the creation of his character. And as he adjusts his ends to his virtues (the products of his choices) and his choices to his ends through something like an internal process of reflective equilibrium, his level of responsibility (and his deservingness of praise and blame) increases. Well and good. But this sort of account cannot allow for absolute judgments. It makes no sense to speak of someone being absolutely blameworthy or not at all blameworthy when the condition for blame is itself a matter of degree, as it must be if the circularity account is to work. But then Aristotle's insistence that virtue is an all-or-nothing affair must be inconsistent with his entire project in the Ethics.

I'm sure there is a massive field of Aristotle scholarship on all these issues, and I'll be happy to get to it eventually. But I am wondering if others have thoughts or references they could share.

Continue Reading...

Cheating, Belief in Determinism, and Rationality

A new study has just appeared, showing that students are more likely to cheat if they believe in determinism than if they believe in free will. You can read a good summary of the setup and results of the study here. These results are interesting on all sorts of levels, but of course they are generally likely to be taken as indicating a link between belief in free will and moral behavior. I want to question that link here. My question rests on the following worry: is cheating in this experiment actually immoral?

Those who know me might know that I am actually fairly obsessed with cheating—rules against cheating and lying tend to control my behavior. But there is nothing obviously moral about this: I may avoid cheating just because I am uncomfortable with it, or worried that I’ll get caught, or concerned that if I get caught, I won’t be able to account for my behavior. That is: I find it easier not to cheat. And since I’ve internalized this rule, I tend to get angry when other people cheat. In other words, and pretty obviously, one’s reasons for not cheating are not necessarily moral ones; they are probably likely to not be moral, at least in any strong sense. (Some consequentialists, of course, might not buy this distinction between moral and non-moral rejections of teaching; if so, that would just show that they don’t quite get morality.)

Significantly, also, “cheating” is not necessarily immoral. As with most other types of behavior, its morality or immorality is contextual. In most situations—like those involving classroom work—cheating seems to generally be unethical. But what about an experimental setting? You are in a setting—as the students in this experiment were—where you can quite easily cheat on a test and walk away with some extra cash. So there is—as is often the case—an immediately obvious benefit to cheating, and virtually no risk of negative consequences if you get caught. From the standpoint of instrumental rationality, then, you should cheat.

But are there moral considerations that militate against the instrumental ones? Are you somehow violating justice? Or causing someone harm, by cheating? Perhaps: you are walking away with money that those who didn’t cheat also didn’t get, so you are outearning them by dishonest means and you are also, perhaps, slightly ripping off the experimenters, whose money you are taking. But the most significant consideration, it might seem, is that you are messing up the experiment, since you’ve been led to think that your honest performance, not your cheating, is what’s necessary for the experiment’s success. And this is where questions arise:

First, would you really be messing up the experiment by cheating? The experimenter has said she must leave the room, and you are to score yourself. If you know anything about psychology experiments, you should then assume that this experiment is already fatally flawed, and its data will be useless in any case. Second, if you know a little more about psychology experiments, you might suspect that such blatant opportunities for cheating are somehow factored into the experiment. If you suspect this, it seems to cancel out your moral objections to cheating; and since you know that cheating will get you more money, your instrumental rationality gives you an overriding reason to cheat. In other words: cheating might well be the most rational course of action in this experiment, and most rational not just in the sense of instrumentally more rational, but instrumentally + normatively more rational, since the normative considerations have essentially been cancelled out. In this case, if you refuse to cheat, you are not actually sticking to moral principles. You are sticking to habits that you mistakenly take to be moral—mistakenly, because in this context there is nothing clearly moral about them.

Of course I could be wrong on this; maybe cheating in this case really is immoral. But it is at least not obviously so. And if you stick to your (normally) moral principles even in situations where they are not moral, then you are not acting morally. You are just acting irrationally. And this, then, is the upshot: belief in determinism might simply make people more rational.

Continue Reading...

Dignity and Death in the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court issued its opinion on Baze v. Rees yesterday, marking an uneasy victory for supporters of one of those remaining cultural deficiencies that keeps the U.S. from proudly marching among the ranks of civilized nations, i.e., the death penalty. It is uneasy because the Justices could agree on fairly little, and their disagreement is likely—according to analysts—to lead to increased and welcome wrangling with the issue; but nevertheless a victory because, following the moratorium, our State slaughterhouses are once again free to open for business. The decision, which ruled that lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment,” has been beautifully though too briefly analyzed by Jody Madeira at the Neuroethics and Law Blog. Madeira’s analysis brings to the foreground the Justices’ struggle with the central, though somewhat unlikely, role played in the deliberations by the concept of dignity. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about law.)

I must admit that I have trouble seeing how dignity has anything whatsoever to do with the decision; it is hard to abuse a word as badly as any sanction of the death penalty must. Its appearance, I think, has something to do with Justice Brennan’s 1972 opinion "that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity." And so anyone who wishes to uphold the status quo—that the death penalty or any particular means of carrying it out is constitutional—must struggle to fit the grand idea of dignity into the hangman’s noose. But does, or can, the word “dignity” possibly mean what the Justices want it to?

Dignity has different meanings, to be sure. Someone might have dignity merely by virtue of their awareness of the moral law within. Or someone might have a sort of inner dignity, a strength of character. Alternatively, we most commonly describe someone as having dignity based on their outward behavior. And in this regard one might think that the concept of dignity applies most naturally and correctly to external appearance: you lose dignity, for example, when you get ice cream all over your face (incidentally, this is why I prefer cups to cones), or when you trip down the stairs. Or one might go on to extend this use of word, pointing out that one also loses dignity when screaming in pain or expressing one’s fear of death. It is this latter sense that the Court seems most interested in. The problem, though, is that this notion of dignity seems derivative: we take one’s outward appearance to be a sign of their dignity, not to be mistaken for the real thing. The man who calmly faces a firing squad has dignity; the man who stands before the firing squad calmly because he has been injected with a paralytic agent, on the other hand, only appears to have dignity. Taking the appearance of dignity for the real thing shows the utmost disregard for dignity.

What Madeira’s treatment brings out, then, is that the Court’s views on dignity in allowing lethal injection (and the death penalty) do not merely use the word in an overly broad sense, losing the literal sense (i.e., the sense that makes dignity valuable in the first place) behind. Rather, the Court isn’t concerned with dignity as such at all, but uses the word as a smokescreen for something else: the comfort of the people who show up to see the execution. (Of course this is not a concurring view—concurring views were rare in this trial—and Justice Stevens rightly takes the others to task for this abuse.) That is, what the Court is concerned with is not the dignity of the condemned at all, and for good reason: it isn’t clear why they would be. After all, if you’ve already determined that someone ought to be killed, and even exposed to the excruciating pain one requires of retribution (Scalia), it would be rather odd to worry that the condemned might embarrass himself by flailing around in his death throes. Personally, I’d prefer humiliation to death as a mode of punishment, since only the latter clearly violates human dignity in the sense that has value. (C.f. House: “You can live with dignity. You can’t die with it.”)

So no, the Justices concerned about preserving dignity in lethal injection aren’t all that worried about the dignity of the condemned. They are worried, instead, that the audience, seeing what the suffering of violent death looks like, might be made uneasy by their complicity in and support of this ancient barbarism. It is the feelings of those who support State-sanctioned killing—not the subjects of their sentiments—that are paramount. The worry, then, is that those who support execution, by witnessing it in its bare, unaestheticized state, might feel uneasy. The horror! And, feeling uneasy, they might—even worse—reconsider their position. Historically, of course, this shouldn’t be much of a concern: people have spent a great deal of time in the past watching violent executions without a worry. But we are more sensitive today, and our sensitivities must be protected at all costs, even from the consequences of our own choices. And moreover, there may be a deeper fear: that we have reached a state of civilization that really is incompatible with the continuation of these ancient rituals; to hold on to those rituals, then, we must do all in our power to keep that disjunct from getting a visceral grasp on witnesses. Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I cannot keep from seeing the Court as saying, essentially, that we must preserve the death penalty, even at the cost of hiding its true nature from its supporters. (See Dahlia Lithwick’s “Barely Lethal” for an analysis along these lines.)

I want to single out Justice John Paul Stevens: “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contribution to any discernible social or public purposes.” In recognizing this, Stevens expresses not what he holds to be the sentiment of the population, but the sentiment that the population ought to have, the one compatible with our supposedly “evolving standards of decency,” about which there too has been much debate. Most commonly, at least from what I’ve seen, the Court in such debates is concerned about whether it ought to legislate on the basis of what best fits the currently prevalent attitude, or the direction in which the attitudes seem to be shifting.

What we come to in the end is a particularly American view of the State. The notion of a Republic—a State that serves the interest of the people—can be taken in two markedly different ways. It can serve the interests the people actually happen to have, or it can serve the interests they ought to have, as a people worthy of a civilized State, and thereby make them more worthy. Americans tend toward the former view, and there are, undoubtedly, things to be said in its favor: when Governments attempt to impose morality on their citizens, they rarely do it well, and so the greatest difficulty plaguing comprehensive liberalism is the difficulty of deciding whose standards should serve as the moral aim toward which the State seeks to bring its citizens. We should not, then, want the State to legislate morals except in the clearest of cases. So, for example, the requirement that every citizen have at least a basic education is not much contested (except, at least, on the grounds that real education might somehow conflict with religion). But what case could be simpler, more clear cut, than this one? The wrongness of murder is even less contested than the value of education. What is contested, of course, is the idea that all human beings deserve to live. It is here that the question of human dignity becomes central; the view that some human beings ought to be put to death and yet must be allowed their dignity is, then, one of the major intellectual stumbling blocks on the path to civilized decency.

Continue Reading...

Langton on von Herbert's Challenge to Kant (II)

Continuing from the previous post, I want to address three broad points on which I think Langton is at least partially misguided, or at least the situation is not as clear-cut as she makes it out to be. First, should we really think that Herbert’s letters represent a moral saint’s criticism of Kantian moral philosophy? Second, is there a feminist objection to that moral philosophy contained here, or only a criticism of the sexist prejudices of Kant’s time? Third, did Herbert really raise purely philosophical issues that Kant failed to address, or was she also raising psychological issues that Kant could not be expected, and was in no position to address?

I. Langton is wrong, I think, in taking Herbert’s claim to being a moral saint at face value. What Herbert describes is an apathy to worldly pleasures; having no desires, she finds the moral law too easy to follow, and she complains that in the absence of struggle, morality loses its worth. This is an important point. But one might wonder whether there is not a difference between the value of a virtuous disposition reached through struggle, and one reached through heartbreak. Langton describes Herbert as doing her duty from the motive of duty; but it is not clear that this is the case. Herbert does her duty because she has no temptations to avoid it. But does this show—should we take it to show—that Herbert really has no non-moral motives and so must be acting from the motive of respect for the moral law? Langton interprets respect as having the purely negative function of silencing non-moral motives; and she insists that respect is neither itself a motive for moral action, nor a feeling. While the second of these claims is slightly debatable, it is almost certainly wrong (see Andrews Reath and Daniel Guevara on this point). The first claim is simply false—respect has a positive aspect, namely self-esteem. That Herbert does not feel self-esteem, in turn, might cast some doubt on her moral sainthood. For one thing: apathy of this sort might well itself be a passion, a passion that blinds one to its true nature.

Langton is also wrong, I think, to interpret apathy (at least as Herbert describes it) and nihilism as either products or correlates of the virtuous disposition. I see no reason to think that Herbert’s letter indicates a freedom from pathological impulses. And in this connection, it is not entirely clear that Kant was wrong to accept his friend’s diagnosis of Herbert as having suffered a romantic shipwreck. Let me suggest a possible diagnosis, based on the evidence, though without claiming that it is accurate. Imagine that you have been raised to fulfill moral norms. You have read a great deal of Kant, and this has reinforced your sense that it is important to follow those moral norms. But something goes wrong in your life: your great love goes sour. (It is true that there are all sorts of other issues, issues of gender inequality and the de-personification of women, that are involved in Herbert’s love loss. That does not, however, change the psychological effect of it as a heartbreak.) And so you lose interest in life. The things that once you enjoyed, you no longer enjoy. Nothing holds any interest for you. By the time the possibility of love is rekindled, you no longer care—you have become dead to it. But you still go on living and moving in the world, and so you live and move based on those rules, those moral norms you have always followed. Now that you want nothing that tempts you away from them, they are easy to follow; but you follow them simply as learned responses, acting on auto-pilot. If this is a feasible picture—and I submit that it is more feasible than the idea that Herbert was a moral saint, as such are rare, if even existent—then the state she describes is pathological, it is feeling laden, and it is a derangement (though not in the patronizing sense Kant seemed to have in mind). This apathy is not the strength not to be tempted by one’s sensible inclinations that Kant describes; it is, rather, a complete surrender to them.

II. I suspect that Langton unhelpfully conflates two issues. First, Kant’s commitment to treating persons as ends in themselves. Second, Kant’s views of women. There is no doubt that Kant thought women were inferior, that patriarchy was the proper form of society, and that relations between the sexes are not pure relations between persons. It is true that these views likely influenced Kant’s behavior in this situation. (It goes without saying that Kant was not exactly unusual in this regard, which is obviously no excuse, but also not a condemnation of his philosophy.) It is true that, had Kant been committed to treating all persons, regardless of gender, as ends in themselves, he would have acted differently. But this means it is also true that, had Kant fully worked out the implications of his moral philosophy in opposition to his social prejudices, he would have been a better man. If anything, though, this is a point in favor of his moral philosophy, if a large point against his anthropology. (But admittedly, this seems tied to a deeper feminist criticism of Kantian-style ethics, which I never fully understood.)

Langton argues, in a deeply evocative manner, that Herbert was struggling with a society in which, as a woman, she faced the constant threat of losing her status as person in the eyes of others. I fully agree that this kind of society is not a good society; that all human beings deserve the chance to be judged on their acts regardless of gender. And so there is much to consider in Langton’s further argument: if Herbert had to lie in order to go on being treated as a person, then her lie may be justifiable. Perhaps this is so—I do not think Kant’s prohibition against lying should be taken as universal, and were he better attuned to the gender politics of the time, and their wrongness, he may have recognized this as a problem case. But this is also not so clear cut. The lying in question is lying about a former relationship to a person with whom Herbert has developed a deep mutual trust. Herbert is right to fear that telling the truth would undermine her status as person in the eyes of the other. But we might note also that she tells the truth, and does so because she cannot bear withholding it and violating the trust. And this is precisely as Kant says it should be: to withhold the truth would corrupt her soul. Her situation may be a lose-lose one, and one that is perhaps not best framed in terms of the negative consequences of the truth (loss of personhood before the other) versus the negative consequences of the lie (corruption of the soul). But for Herbert, certainly, the situation is already in those terms. And Kant is not entirely wrong to point out that, if her love does not finally come to respect her, then perhaps he never really loved her, or at least not enough.

III. Langton is wrong, I think, in the criticism that Kant’s failure to offer a compelling reason to live—Kant’s failure, in other words, to reply to Herbert’s initial question—is a failure of his philosophy. Herbert writes to Kant—a man whom she asks whether he never thought it “to be worth the bother to marry, or to give your whole heart to anyone, or to reproduce your likeness”—with a mix of request of moral guidance and relationship advice. That Kant had no idea how to deal with the latter—or how to deal with the former as applied to the latter—was to be expected.

I am aware of many students—perhaps some readers of this are or were such students—who, when encountering a particularly impressive professor, start to think of that professor as having the answers to all of life’s questions, as a person that they can come to with all their problems. In the student’s mind, the brilliant professor becomes sage, psychologist, counselor, friend, parental figure, etc., all rolled into one. Such a feeling appears in the background of Herbert’s letters. Kant failed to live up to this standard; most of us do. Perhaps it is not wrong to expect philosophers to have better thoughts about “the meaning of life” than others; but few really do, and it is certainly wrong to expect philosophers to be able to give answers with the proper degree of sensitivity and psychological insight. It is fairly apparent—especially from her second letter—that Herbert is hoping to learn something specific from Kant: how his philosophy, particularly his moral philosophy, can act as substitute for love and marriage. But certainly Kant never offered it as such a substitute. It is reasonable to assume that if Kant remained a loveless bachelor, this was not as a result of his moral views, nor was it seriously aided by them. What Herbert wants from Kant, Kant the man cannot give, and Kant the philosopher has no grounds for giving.

Let me note a brief analogy: Langton might reply that I, like Kant, am simply trivializing Herbert’s serious philosophical objection to his moral philosophy through a patronizing dismissal of her letters on psychological grounds. I hope that I am not doing that. But I am recognizing something fairly obvious—that there is a psychological level to Herbert’s letters that Langton simply leaves out. Keep in mind that today, philosophy professors are given clear instructions: if a student comes to you with suicidal tendencies, you should refer them to the Mental Health office; the people there are trained professionals (yeah, ok, universities also have legal concerns). I suspect that, had he had such an option, Kant would have taken it. But he did not have this option, and he failed to deal with the situation appropriately.

But it is also true that Kant did not offer psychoanalytic tools. And the moral law is not a complete prescription for living a full life. That it fails in this regard is hardly a good criticism; morality places limits on the interests we ought to pursue, and it imposes some positive duties on us, but it does nothing else. It does not tell us how to spend a Saturday afternoon any more than it tells us how we are to find pleasure in life, or a positive reason to go on living, after having lost it. Why should we expect this of Kant? If anything of this is to be found in his moral philosophy, it is only in the sense that morality offers self-esteem as its own reward. Herbert felt none of this. Should we conclude that Herbert’s apathy was pathological, and so blinded her to the proper feeling for the moral law? Or should we rather conclude that Kant was wrong in thinking that virtue does reward us? I leave the question open, but I do not find evidence in Herbert’s letters to support the latter interpretation.

Continue Reading...

A Feminist Critique of Kant? Langton on Maria von Herbert (I)

A few years ago I glimpsed Rae Langton’s “Maria von Herbert’s Challenge to Kant” in some ethics reader, but did not have time to read it then. Today I encountered a link to an online version of the paper. Here I want to throw out some of my initial responses. Mainly: while I agree with much of what Langton says, I wonder if she is not conflating the critique of Kant the man, one who failed to recognize women as equal partners in dialogue, with a critique of Kant the philosopher who demanded the treatment of all persons as ends. Certainly there is a deep tension here, but I am not convinced it is a threat to Kantian moral philosophy, as opposed to a (justified) criticism of Kant’s application of that philosophy. Second, in building her critique, Langton more or less canonizes Herbert as a saint, based entirely on Herbert’s word. Third, Langton seems to want from Kant something he never claimed to offer nor should have been expected to, something akin to existential psychoanalysis.

To save space, I’ll refrain from summarizing too much. I would certainly advise those interested in Kant’s ethics to read Langton’s paper (and I certainly would advise against taking my word on all this: I can only address so much here, and my reading is no doubt biased). Basically: Maria von Herbert wrote to Kant, whom she has read, studied, and deeply admired, asking for help. She had chosen to confess a lie to someone she loved, and this person had turned cold to her. She asked Kant why she should go on living. Instead of addressing this last point, Kant went into the moral importance of not lying, suggesting that the truth now told, the one Herbert loves will either return to her with greater respect or, if not, well: you can’t always get what you want, and such is the way of the world. Herbert wrote back, a year later, saying that indeed the man had offered her, after a period of coldness, his intimate friendship. But she no longer cared: she had turned cold to worldly pleasures. She lived now only for the moral law, but she found the moral law too easy—she could do everything it demanded, but she had no pleasure to live for. And again she inquired why such a life should be worth living.

Kant inquired with a mutual friend, and was told that Herbert “has capsized on the reef of romantic love”. She told her lover about a previous lover, and things did not go well. Kant’s response: instead of writing Herbert again (as far as we know), he passed on the correspondence to another female friend with a note that this should remind her to guard against “the wanderings of a sublimated fantasy.”

Langton is certainly right: Kant seems to base his final (to our knowledge) judgment not on Herbert’s second letter, but instead on the friend’s evaluation of Herbert as having suffered a romantic misfortunate. Langton interprets the friend’s letter as providing an evaluation of Herbert in the traditional terms of “feminine hysteria”, but this strikes me as wrong. It is rather Kant who refers to “the lady’s curious mental derangement.” The friend says nothing of this sort: he simply gives the background for Herbert’s letters. If Kant, in turn, takes the background as fully undermining Herbert’s own thoughts, this is an error. But Langton simply makes the reverse error: she seems to think that the romantic circumstances behind the letters should not even serve as explanatory material. This is clearly wrong. I myself have certainly written—under the influence of romantic disappointment—certain things that I firmly believed at the time were true and justified independently of my particular mental state. Obviously such judgments are mistaken. We need not resort to interpreting Herbert’s letters as signifying “feminine hysteria”; being driven to despair and apathy by a failure of a relationship is hardly unique to women, as the novelists of Kant’s time well knew. To be clear: I am not defending Kant’s “derangement” account; and I am fairly certain that this analysis itself was likely prompted by Kant’s awareness that his correspondent was a woman. Nor do I deny that there were extremely interesting points in Herbert’s letters—particularly concerning the apparent dependence of moral worth on the desires it battles—that Kant fails to take seriously. My point is merely that the other extreme—one on which Herbert’s mental state is to be evaluated independently of the situation that gave rise to it—is also untenable.

Thus I agree with many of Langton’s points: Kant certainly fails to address some of the pressing issues in Herbert’s letters. He does not deal with suicide; and he reduces the problem to a simple moral dilemma of whether honesty is morally required, and dishonesty morally reprehensible; a dilemma which, given the content of Herbert’s letter, is neither here nor there. And I agree with Langton that Kant absurdly and improperly ceases to treat Herbert as a person (in the moral sense), reprehensibly passing on her personal correspondence to a third party as a cautionary tale, a case study of a woman led astray by her imagination. All this I grant. But having set this up, let me address the other part, the part where I disagree with Langton, in my next post.

Continue Reading...

Actions, Consequences, and the Phenomenology of Responsibility

There is an all too common view according to which we can only be responsible for actions that we have chosen in some sense freely, or autonomously. If the consequences of our actions matter, it is because we were, or should have been, aware of those consequences. On this view, the consequences of our actions make a difference to our responsibility only insofar as we can or could have foreseen those consequences. This is the picture, then, on which free will or autonomy has primacy; responsibility, in turn, is grounded in it.* I want to argue for a different picture, one according to which the phenomenology of responsibility is intrinsically such that the autonomy or freedom of the agent with respect to an action depends in large part on her future estimation of the rightness or wrongness of its consequences. A deliberative decision—at the time it is made—is largely arbitrary; if it were not, deliberation would have been unnecessary. It ceases to look arbitrary only from the standpoint of one’s future self.

There are doubtless many questions to raise with regard to the condition that we must know or be able to know the consequences of our actions in advance. And there are questions, too, about the related issue of our conative attitudes—how deep must our desires go, how “wholeheartedly” need we accept them, to be held responsible for the execution of action on their basis? Something about this sort of approach certainly seems right. What I want to suggest is that what is right about it, however, is not that there is some unified entity, or even some coherent set of volitional attitudes and beliefs that constitutes the agency necessary for responsibility. That is, I want to question both the common libertarian premise about free will and the common compatibilist one. The libertarian often claims that to be responsible, an agent must directly (or indirectly) and indeterministically choose to perform an action. The compatibilist typically looks for something less demanding, namely, that the action be caused by agency-constituting features, such as rational deliberation, endorsement, cohering attitudes, or desires with which we are fully satisfied.

To say that the compatibilist approach is “less demanding”, of course, is not entirely right. It is only less demanding in the sense that it does not require us to rely on the idea that (1) some events can be caused indeterministically, (2) that the indeterminism in physical processes somehow corresponds to an indeterminism in our deliberations, and in such a way (3) that it is primarily the deliberation, and not the physical indetermistic causation that gives rise to the choice of action. This picture is likely too complicated to be true; and, moreover, it relies on assumptions about the physical world that are, given our current state of knowledge, probably false. In any case, the compatibilist has a further argument: that indeterministic decisions are necessarily arbitrary in such a way that agential responsibility is undermined.

To avoid this last problem, compatibilists typically try to fortify our choices with the aforementioned agency-constituting features. But this, too, ends up being a bit too demanding. I think psychology is slowly uncovering the unlikelihood of our actions being caused through such coherent dispositions; but here I want to pose a phenomenological challenge. It requires noticing that questions of responsibility for an action—and so the accompanying questions of whether the agent was free or autonomous in performing the action—come up only in contexts (sometimes, but not always, moral) where the rightness or wrongness of an action is at issue.

Here is an example: I am taking an exam. I am facing a particularly tough problem, where two answers strike me as possibly right, but I am not sure which one is right and don’t have the time to work it out further. I pick one on a hunch. If all goes well, and the answer is right, I may never think about it at all; or, in thinking about it, I might believe that due to my understanding of the material, my hunches tend to be good ones. But what if I end up getting the problem wrong? I will then blame myself for my stupidity, and for making a bad choice where I should have known better. Although my choice was, for all intents and purposes, arbitrary, whether I praise myself or feel guilt over the bad decision I made depends on the outcome. I would suggest that, in more or less complicated ways, the vast majority of our decisions are of exactly this kind.

A more complex example: I am largely set on graduate school. But the thought that it would be nice to have a decent life—one that has some redeeming features other than the occasional published paper—nags at me; law school becomes a competing option. We can sketch out such a conflict in any number of ways. Perhaps I have different beliefs about what would constitute a good life and different desires regarding my future. If I cannot adjudicate between these sets of beliefs and desires, then my resulting decision is—take your pick—as autonomous as it could be (given the circumstances, i.e., a lack of wholehearted identification with one of the options) and at the same time entirely arbitrary: it could have gone either way. To make this more of a challenge to compatibilist approaches: Let us say that I am wholehearted about going to graduate school; something nags at me, though, urging me to apply to law schools as well. This nagging feeling may appear to me as entirely external—as an affect that I do not identify with—but I humor it and apply anyway. If, in the end, I do not get into any decent graduate schools, but do get into a great law school, it is pretty easy to decide what to do.

So what of this situation? On what grounds can we reasonably say that the decision to go to law school was not autonomous? You will perhaps have guessed that I think there are no such grounds. Imagine that, ten years later, I am miserable with the legal world and wish I could go back and remake my decision to get into it in the first place. Why did I apply to those law schools? Why didn’t I do what my heart told me to do? Why didn’t I stick with the attitudes that defined my “real self”? On the other hand, imagine that, although I would have preferred graduate school, I quickly get into law school—I enjoy having definite problems to solve, clear rules to work with, easily demarcated rules of competition, and the high-paid lifestyle that results. And here I might be glad that I acted autonomously, followed my real self, and went to law school instead of indulging in a post-adolescent intellectualist fantasy of academia, however central that fantasy once seemed to who I am. In evaluating my responsibility for my choice, then, I now look at it not from the perspective of a conflicted self making a largely arbitrary decision, but from the standpoint of my current situation, one in which my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with my choice—its rightness or wrongness—has shaped my perception of what my real, autonomous self should have done.

I suggest, then, that the currently dominant structural theories of autonomy are largely false. There is no real self that is responsible for its decisions. The self responsible is, rather, the future self, the self that is a product of situations brought about as consequences of the initial decision. We cannot eliminate arbitrariness from our choices; we can make them autonomous only by looking back on them. One might, of course, object in the following way: this is a merely phenomenological critique. How we see or experience ourselves has, in the end, nothing to do with whether or not our choices are really the products of some coherent real self. To make this objection work, however, one would need to produce a notion of something like a real self, a coherence of our preferences, or identification with a desire that does not rest on an agent’s self-apprehension. It would be a notion of a choosing self that is understood independently of how this self experiences itself. And that such a picture could be coherent is dubious.

* Strawsonian accounts that base responsibility on our reactive attitudes are not immune from these considerations. Those reactive attitudes depend on our estimation of the agent’s intentions in performing the action for which we judge her. So even if we think that judgments of responsibility derive primarily from the framework of reactive attitudes we have toward others, these judgments still get their appropriateness from considerations about the agent's psychological profile.

Continue Reading...

Are We Post-Moral?

For a while now I've been claiming to anyone who cares to listen that we live in a more or less post-moral age. I don't really have a developed argument, and in fact, I'm not even exactly sure what a 'post-moral age' means, but here's a brief attempt to explain.

I don't mean anything too profound by 'post moral.' For instance, I don't think that moral obligations have floated away, or that they have ceased to matter. For all I know, that may indeed be the case, but it's irrelevant to the notion I'm getting at. I also don't mean to suggest that the moral world has been supplanted by something newer, fresher or more 'authentic.' Again, this might be case, but it doesn't matter for my purposes. Finally, I am also not denying that many of us (although a decreasing number, I suspect) ask ourselves moral questions from time to time, perhaps even daily. Should I cheat on my taxes? Is it okay to distort my colleagues record in order to gain an advantage over her? Is it wrong for me to skip my friend's wedding for a vacation in Vegas? As I intend the term, it is perfectly consistent to recognize that people ask themselves questions like these but maintain that our world is post-moral.

I think I can best describe what I mean by 'post moral' by pointing out that few of us (post-moral persons) take our moral character or standing as something important and overriding in our lives. Becoming a moral person is not a task that, when suggested, most people recognize for themselves. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe I'm projecting my own shoddy self-understanding on the world around me--but I don't think so. It seems to me rather that morality, to the extent that it is effective in the average person's life at all, operates as a constraint (however constructive) in the pursuit of goals. For example, Jones hopes to become a successful researcher, but believes that, morally, it is wrong to achieve this end by plagiarizing another colleagues work. It's not that Jones is just afraid that he might not get away with it; get away with it or not, he does not believe that it is right to plagiarize for the sake of self-advancement and to the injury of another person. But the point is that it never occurs to Jones that it is important to act this way because it is important to be a good person. Jones really has no interest in being a good person. He wants to be a successful researcher, but he recognizes that there are certain things one ought not do in the pursuit of that goal.

Now, I also realize that there are ends or projects that many of us work towards achieving, and to which some of us even dedicate our lives. Ending world hunger, helping displaced refugees, working to promote human and civil rights--these are all, in some sense, moral ends that lend purpose to many people's lives, and that many of us, to some extent at least, identify with. But again, it is completely compatible to work for such ends, even strenuously and with dedication, without concern for whether or not, in so doing, one is or is becoming a good person.

Alastair MacIntyre we know was all the rage for a while because he argued that some important moral knowledge--the importance of character and virtue, and habit--had been forgotten sometime on or about May, 1641. I'm not making this argument. I don't think that the desire to be a good person commits one to a virtue-theory of ethics. Kant is no virtue theorist, yet Kant certainly recognized that we ought, morally, try to be good persons. I'm just saying that while many of us worry about doing the right thing, few of us worry about being the right sort of person, and that this makes us 'post-moral.'

Continue Reading...

Is There an Ethics of Belief?

Recently I’ve been coming across some thinkers promoting an ethics of belief. Initially the idea sounded a little strange to me: ethics concerns actions—intentions to act, dispositions to act, consequences of action—and beliefs matter ethically only insofar as they are relevant or involved in action, right? As I said, this was my initial reaction, and after some reflection, I still hold to it, although with an important caveat. So let me say what I think this notion gets right, and what it misses.

Take for example Colin McGinn’s claim that his atheism results in part from an ethics of belief. I’ll let him say why in his own words:

“It is often forgotten that atheism of the kind shared by Jonathan [Miller] and me (and Dawkins and Hitchens et al) has an ethical motive. Or rather two ethical motives: one is ethical repugnance at the cruelty, tyranny and oppression of organized religion over the course of human history; the other concerns the ethics of rational belief—how we are obliged to form our beliefs about the world. The first motive is familiar and needs no commentary from me. The second is less widely appreciated, but for some of us it is crucial to the whole discussion. We believe, as an ethical principle, that beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument—so that “faith” is inherently an unethical way to form your beliefs.”

I will focus on the latter principle. McGinn asserts as a ethical principle of belief (formation and retention) that:

“beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument”

Let’s call this principle ‘MG’. I see some problems with MG as stated. For one thing, it is too vacuous for serious universal application. Most theists, after all, claim that their belief is informed by serious evidence and argument. Thus, in an empty way, their beliefs satisfy MG. Another problem concerns the concepts of ‘evidence’ and ‘rational argument.’ What are we to make of these? By ‘rational argument’ are we committed to making as many of our beliefs as possible consistent with one another? If so, MG is surely too strong. Is it irrational, and therefore, unethical, for someone to be a dualist? As stated by Descartes, for instance, I take it as a truth of reason that dualism simply cannot be correct. Was Descartes—worse than wrong—immoral? By MG, it would seem so. A similar problem emerges with the notion of evidence. I’m not sure exactly what McGinn means by this term, but presumably he means something like verification, demonstration or proof. But many of our beliefs, especially the most interesting and profound ones, nevermake it to the stage where evidence in that sense applies. I, for instance, don’t think that a belief in God is a false belief—it is a confused belief. Most of the new atheists with whom McGinn aligns himself spend way too much time going straight away to arguments about why the belief is false, and skip over the really hard work of unpacking the confusions involved in the concept of God itself. Let me get personal for a moment and say why I think that one argument for the existence of necessary being is very hard to get around—it is one of Aquinas’ five proofs.

From nothing, nothing is caused. Something must always have existed if anything exists. This universe exists (assumed). Thus, something must always have existed, ie something exists necessarily.

Now, of course this is only a proof that something must necessarily exist, not that a personal God with intentions and an interest in human affairs exists. But so what? It is a theological claim, and even though I don’t believe it, I have a hard time saying why. Am I unethical? Not for this reason, I think.

We should also consider that for many of our beliefs we simply lack any decisive evidence or demonstration either way. Is it consistent with MG to form a belief on such matters anyway? For instance, should I believe that quantum mechanics is a correct description of reality? After all, we have yet to solve the puzzling fact of apparent particle-wave duality, and we still haven’t unified gravity with the electromagnetic forces. More importantly, we have no really good idea how this might be possible. Is it wrong to have beliefs on these matters, then? Perhaps McGinn would suggest that we append a rider to MG, such that in cases where sufficient evidence is lacking decisively for or against the truth of a belief, one ought to withhold judgment. Let’s call this MG’. Well, ok, but how do we apply MG’ to cases like the axiom of choice? Doing set theory requires that one take a stance on the axiom of choice--a 'leap of faith,' as it were--without any rational justification. Is this an example of the intrinsic conflict of goods in the domain of belief? Maybe, but this conclusion seems way overwrought.

Finally, what are we to do about counterfactual beliefs? Maybe there are some counterfactuals that we could exclude from reality, but surely not all of them. So what about someone’s belief that, had Napoleon not been defeated, then Germany would have democratized much earlier than it did? It’s surely fun to consider counterfactuals like this, and we can consider them knowledgably, but of course we really have no decisive way of determining their truth value. Again, is it immoral to believe a claim like this?

The fact is that most of our beliefs have no obvious actionable consequences, and because of this, I have a hard time thinking of them as ethical at all, and this in turn is why I think that my initial reaction is basically the right one. As of now, I can think of no morally sensitive consequence of either the belief that the universe is bounded or that it is infinite, and thus, this belief simply has no moral import. Now, we might suggest one further reworking of MG, to something like the following (MG’’):

Beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument WHEN those beliefs potentially lead to morally sensitive consequences.

But this is just to say, again, and redundantly, that it is the actions or consequences that matter, not the belief per se. Suppose for instance that someone has a completely vacuous belief in a God—believing that some God exists, but who takes no interest whatsoever in human affairs and has prescribed no rules or norms. This belief, basically, is totally irrelevant to how one behaves and lives. It’s difficult for me to understand how such a belief could be moral or immoral at all--how one could be committing the 'sin of atheism' to believe it.

But let me conclude with my caveat. Despite all that I’ve said above, I do believe in a basically Kantian project of enlightenment, and this makes it requisite that I submit my moral and political beliefs to public, rational scrutiny and, when the public argument is persuasive, I ought, morally, to change my mind. So perhaps we could amend MG one final, less problematic way (MG’’’):

Beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument WHEN those beliefs are morally or politically salient.

I have no problem with MG’’’, but I’m not sure that it says anything except that, insofar as beliefs are relevant to moral action or consequences, we have an obligation to ensure as best we can that those beliefs are, morally, right. But that’s obvious. I think. And again, this means that there is no such thing as a distinct ethics of belief; there is just ethics.

Continue Reading...

Kant's Moral Psychology (III): Endorsement, Determinism, and Motives

In this series of posts I have been defending Kant’s moral psychology against Leiter and Knobe’s attack. Particularly, I have been contending that their target is not Kant at all: they are attacking the position of a naturalistic Kantian, but Kant himself was certainly no naturalist. In this post I want to wrap up the discussion by looking at three features important to Kant’s moral psychology: his view of determinism, the endorsement principle, and the role of the passions (or sensible motives) in moral action.

Let me review the main elements of L&K’s argument as it pertains to Kant. They first present findings that suggest a massive role for heredity in determining our moral behavior (p. 18), so already there is a big chunk of moral behavior that is not touched by our explicitly adopted moral principles. L&K then go on to cite studies that suggest in no uncertain terms that, first of all, the correlation between people’s beliefs and their behavior is fairly low. Second, in cases of correlation, it looks like usually the behavior determines the beliefs, and not the other way around (incidentally: I do think this is a fairly large problem for Velleman; I doubt it is a problem for Kant). And finally they take their parting shot: even though there may be a small number of people who act on the basis of consciously chosen principles, not all will be moral; conversely, there may be agents who look very moral, but don’t act on explicitly chosen beliefs. That is, there “may well be agents whose conduct otherwise manifests respect for the dignity and autonomy of other persons and comports with the categorical imperative,” but, if these agents do not act specifically on consciously chosen principles, they “lack the kind of motivation (e.g., respect for the moral law) Kant himself thought morally significant.” Consequently, a Kantian is “likely to have to treat as immoral a lot of apparently moral individuals because of the largely unrealistic demands of Kant’s moral psychology” (33). This is a web of tangles and poorly understood Kant.

And there is just a bit of distortion designed to make Nietzsche come out on top. Take, for example, the following: “Nietzsche puts forward the view that a person’s traits are determined, to a great extent, by factors (type-facts) that are fixed at birth” (15). (L&K slip immediately into showing how studies of heredity show Nietzsche to be right. But did Nietzsche talk about heredity and modern genetics? Or did he simply say that character is determined at birth?) If what Nietzsche says is just that our moral characters are determined at birth, then one might strangely enough discover that this notion is taken directly from Kant. Let us recall that Kant was a staunch determinist. Unlike contemporary determinists, Kant did not simply believe in the truth of determinism because the world just happens to look determined. Rather, Kant insisted that the world must look determined if there is to be a world at all: we can only perceive an event as the effect of some cause. So it is no wonder that Kant is heavily committed—and on stronger theoretical grounds than Nietzsche had—to the idea that our empirical character is determined by factors “that are fixed at birth.” So much for using heredity to make Nietzsche look more plausible than Kant.

What about the role of conscious beliefs? I have already indicated in the last post that Kant simply did not hold the view that the only moral action is action caused by consciously chosen principles—the principles involved (maxims) are rational, not psychological entities. But there is another confusion here to disentangle, namely, the confusion between that thesis and the idea (which, in keeping with contemporary convention, we might call “the endorsement thesis”) expressed in a clip from Paul Katsfanas that Rob Sica quoted to me in the original discussion at Leiter’s blog:

Contemporary philosophers often endorse a claim that has its origins in Locke and Kant: self-conscious agents are capable of reflecting on and thereby achieving a distance from their motives; therefore, these motives do not determine what the agent will do. Nietzsche’s drive psychology shows that the inference in the preceding sentence is illegitimate. The drive psychology articulates a way in which motives can determine the agent’s action by influencing the course of the agent’s reflective deliberations. An agent who reflects on a motive and decides whether to act on it may, all the while, be surreptitiously guided by the very motive upon which he is reflecting.

I don’t disagree with anything here (and I am very much looking forward to reading this paper). What I want to note, however, is that Kant would—in my view—agree with all of it (he probably would not have agreed with the part about Nietzsche, but mainly because he hadn’t read Nietzsche, the slacker!). Even though L&K seem to conflate the two issues, there is a difference between the idea that agents’ actions are determined by principles (which, as I’ve suggested, was not for Kant an empirical claim at all), and the very empirical claim that agents can achieve a distance from their motives and are thus not determined by them.

How are these two claims different? Well, simply put, the bit of empirical psychology that Kant employs in the second is just obvious: he does not say that we know our sensible motives don’t determine our actions, but only that they don’t directly determine our actions. And that seems hard to argue with. When your nose itches, you want to scratch it. But if you stop to think about it, you might, for whatever reason, decide not to scratch. Under some circumstances—for example, when you need both of your hands on the wheel in order to keep your car from spinning off the road into a deep ravine—you would even be very likely to resist the urge to scratch your nose if you thought about it at all. In other words, the thesis is just this: if I am aware of a motive, then I have a certain distance from it, and this means that the motive does not directly determine me to action. Of course some motives might determine us to action no matter how much we want to resist them; but insofar as we are thinking about what to do, the motives will do so surreptitiously, as Paul correctly notes. That is, our motives do not directly determine our actions, even though they might determine them indirectly. And certainly no research L&K cite speaks against this.

Actually, in keeping with the emphasis on determinism, it is worth remembering that Kant is explicit on the issue that only sensible motives can cause our actions. If the motives that caused our actions were not sensible ones, then actions would appear to us as uncaused. But then, for Kant, we could never experience them at all. There is a further issue here: are the motives that cause our actions moral ones? According to Kant, even at the level of empirical psychology we can never know our motives because we do not have perfect introspection. We can strive to be as moral as possible, and to always act on moral motives, but in the end we can never know whether in fact we have done so. Many think this is a failing in Kant; but it strikes me as a strength of his moral theory, one that too many contemporary moral philosophers overlook: agents who know that they are moral are likely to get complacent; agents who are striving to be moral but do not know whether they have ever succeeded are forced to retain moral humility.

But the issue of whether someone’s motivation is a properly moral one is thornier than this in Kant, and far thornier than L&K suggest. They use the example of a teacher who both cares about his students and believes that he ought to care about his students. And they take it as a given that, if the teacher’s inclination to care about his students causes his belief that he ought to (rather than vice versa), this is evidence that he is not a moral agent by Kant’s standards. But this is pure rubbish. What empirical test would L&K propose to determine whether the teacher’s inclination to care about his students is not itself the effect of the moral law working within him? At the empirical level, you would be insane to tell the teacher that he is an immoral agent. He may well be immoral if his motive is not a moral one, but that is not something you could possibly know. (Of course if it turned out that the teacher cares about his students a little too much, then you could be pretty sure that his motive isn’t driven by pure respect for the moral law. But in that case you probably wouldn’t be too likely to mistake the teacher for a moral agent in the first place.)

Of course there is another sense in which we could tell an apparently moral agent that he is actually immoral: if what we mean is that all human beings are immoral or, as the Christian doctrine goes, in Adam all have sinned. Something like this is indeed at work in Kant, for he does proclaim that (“due to the largely unrealistic demands of his moral psychology”) the human race is evil by nature. But nobody should go from that doctrine to going around telling people who hid Jews from the Nazis that, despite appearances, they are still evil. If this is what L&K are worried about, then their real worry is about the idea of a moral ideal that’s actually an ideal. That is: they’re really just seconding Bernard Williams’s rejection of the institution of morality. But that’s another argument, both for another time, and also not about the data on moral psychology.

Empirical moral psychology, in other words, is not the place at which one is likely to find effective tools against Kant or, at least, against Kant the philosopher as opposed to Kant the misinterpreted punching bag. It is also not the place where Nietzsche will likely come out on top without some editorial tweaking. Naturalists may be rightly (in their eyes) suspicious of Kant. But so long as there is any discipline of philosophy that is not fully reducible to psychology and physics, perhaps that had best be the domain where honest philosophers engage Kant’s ideas. Provided, that is, that honesty is a goal.

Continue Reading...

Kant's Moral Psychology (II): Consciously Choosing Principles

In my last post I addressed some preliminary issues on the question of whether the findings of empirical psychology can legitimately be used to refute Kant’s moral theory, as Leiter and Knobe try to do. My contention is that they cannot be. This is not to say, of course, that no normative principles can or should be informed by empirical facts. We are natural beings, with natural desires and psychological processes. The specific normative considerations that inform our actions must have something to do with the facts about the beings we are. But this need not imply that normativity is wholly dependent on these natural processes. In this post I will argue that Kant’s claim that we act on maxims that we adopt is not an empirical thesis, and that we cannot take it as such without lobotomizing his moral philosophy.

Let me then begin by summarizing a point I raised in the comments on the last post. L&K are right to say that for Kant, “reason is the source of moral motivation” (2). But what Kant means by this is literal: it is reason, not any actual psychological process of reasoning, that is the source of moral motivation. We can draw an analogy to logic. Given two propositions of a modus ponens, I can provide the right conclusion. There are, of course, psychological and neuro-physical processes involved in my production of the conclusion, and these processes are open to various modes of empirical study. But the story we get through such means will be incomplete: the processes involved can explain why I gave an answer, but they cannot explain why I gave the right answer. And it seems like the logical form of the modus ponens—the way in which a right answer is rationally determined by the premises—has some explanatory role. If many more people are open to the possibility of logical truths that are immune from empirical refutations than to the possibility of similar moral truths, this may show that there are more skeptics about morality than about logic. But skepticism is not a reason to jump ship.

Now, moving on to L&K’s argument, which is roughly that recent studies strongly suggest that the major factors involved in influencing human behavior are heredity and environment, while upbringing and active adoption of principles play extremely minor roles. This, they claim, is good news for Nietzsche, bad news for Aristotle and Kant. Why is this bad news for Kant? Well, briefly, here’s how L&K gloss Kant’s moral psychology:

In the Kantian tradition of moral psychology, moral obligations are grounded in principles that each agent consciously chooses (6)

(1) agents impose moral requirements on themselves, and (2) these self-imposed requirements are motivationally effective. In order for the self-imposition of moral requirements to be genuinely autonomous it must presumably be a conscious process of self-imposition. And for these consciously imposed principles to be motivationally effective it must be the case that conscious moral principles are motivationally effective. (7)

we must presume that these consciously imposed moral “laws” have a substantial impact on behavior… On the Nietzschean view, by contrast, conscious beliefs play no such role in moral (or immoral) agency. People’s behaviors are determined not so much by their conscious beliefs as by certain underlying type-facts. (27)

One reason that I think the research L&K present poses no challenge whatsoever to Kant is just that it poses a challenge only to the Kantian view described here. But Kant held no such view; in fact, this view is highly improbable even before a single study is cracked open. L&K take Kant to be laying out a theory according to which human beings consciously impose moral principles on themselves and then consciously act on them. But keep in mind that the “principles” involved are what Kant calls maxims, which have the form “I will do X in case/in order to Y.” Typical Kantian examples of maxims are: “I will end my life in order to avoid prolonged suffering” and “I will make false promises in cases where I can profit by this.” These examples are well known. I think we need very few studies to realize that we do not, under normal circumstances, formulate such principles consciously before acting. We do have intentions. But cases in which those intentions are preceded by explicit formulations of principles, which we then use to guide our intentions, are incredibly rare. One could, of course, read Kant uncharitably, and simply say: “yes, his moral psychology is just obviously flawed!” But now consider the fact that Kant was much smarter than you (yes, whoever you are reading this, there is a pretty high chance that this is true). So maybe we shouldn’t take Kant to be giving us an obviously flawed thesis about the psychological processes by which people actually make decisions, but rather a thesis about how our actions are to be understood rationally.

Let’s say that you see Freddie promising to pay back a loan when, in fact, you know, and you know that Freddie knows, that he is actually planning to take the money and flee to Mexico, never to be heard from again. Of all the things going on in Freddie’s head, it is unlikely that the explicit maxim stated above is one of them. More likely, he simply wants to get some money so he can make a comfortable getaway, and he thinks that this is a good way to achieve that—and even these thoughts don't need to be explicit for his action to be intentional. But if you—or Freddie—wanted to see his behavior as an action, i.e., not as a process of being entirely pushed around by his motivational states, but rather as somehow rationally structured, then the maxim above would be a good way of formulating it. The maxim is implicit in the action, and to hold Freddie responsible for the action, we need to take him as acting on some sort of rational principle. But this is not the same as saying that this principle was consciously formulated and adopted by Freddie, and that this conscious action on his part was the mechanism involved in producing his behavior.

In fact, it is clear that Kant cannot mean—at least in general—that maxims are consciously chosen principles. This is clear from the fact that Kant believes that human beings choose what Kant calls their disposition (Gesinnung), which is the maxim from which all other maxims are derived; we adopt this maxim through an act of freedom. Since this maxim grounds all our other maxims, its adoption must precede all our uses of agency. And so the grounding maxim must actually be chosen prior to any rational action we might undertake in our lives; as Kant notes, we may represent it as innate. But of course we cannot choose an innate disposition consciously; and Kant is explicit that this disposition is chosen first in the rational order, not in the order of time. It should be obvious by now that Kant is giving us a metaphysical, and not an empirical theory. A theory, then, that can be attacked on metaphysical grounds, or through a rejection of metaphysics (preferably not one that simply encourages us to stick to science), but that it makes no sense to attack empirically.

We can confirm that Kant is giving us a metaphysical, and not an empirical, theory by his constant use of the locution “as if” (als ob). That is, what he is discussing is not how we are, empirically, but how we must see ourselves: we must see ourselves as if we have adopted these principles. This, on Kant’s view, is how we must see ourselves if we are to see ourselves as persons, and not just as complex mechanisms. And yes, this marks Kant as clearly opposed to the naturalism so dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy, and of which Leiter is so fond. But it is question-begging to simply adopt a naturalist position and, from there, argue against Kant. One must first prove that a thoroughgoing naturalism is both superior and justifiable. Anything else is just bad philosophy.

I want to conclude by asking why, if Kant is so very obviously not giving us an empirical moral psychology, do contemporary philosophers (many Kantians included) so often interpret him precisely as suggesting a model on which we consciously choose principles and then act on them? One reason is that the thesis that we can endorse our action, and which in some form Kant really does hold, is easily confused with the thesis I am considering here (I will look at this in the next post). Another lies in the philosophical culture. Rawls, who made Kant respectable in analytic moral philosophy after decades of groundless slander and neglect, explicitly bracketed the issue of moral psychology: he was only looking for a decision procedure for ethics. But his students wanted a Kantian moral philosophy that, first, would give us concrete principles for action and, second, could do so without making any (to them) exorbitant metaphysical claims. Onora O’Neill for example, interpreted maxims as psychological states. Korsgaard, meanwhile, has advanced what many have praised as Kantian ethics without metaphysics. But these projects are much like riding a bicycle without the wheels. Kant’s moral philosophy is metaphysical; the validity of the moral law is intimately bound up with issues of transcendental freedom and noumenal causation. Without these features, one has a radically weakened Kantianism, and one that is not simply vulnerable to empirical refutation, but is almost self-evidently false.

In my next post I want to address a few other features of Kant’s moral psychology, and question L&K’s claim to have provided arguments against Kant. In particular, I will say something about the role of determinism in Kant, as well as his almost wholesale acceptance of Hume’s view that only the passions can determine us to action, two features that are too often overlooked. And I will address the issue of endorsement, which does involve an empirical claim, one that might look very similar to the view that agents consciously adopt principles.

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...