The Puzzle of Ethics

Unlike Aquinas, Kant did not believe that morality should be founded on natural theology. He shared with Aquinas a commitment to reason as a guide to right action, although unlike Aquinas he did not bring in any assumptions which depended on belief in God as part of his approach to morality (Aquinas, as we have seen, was strongly influenced by his belief that human beings survive death and their destiny lies in God). Kant did not consider that God’s existence could be proved – he rejected the cosmological and ontological arguments – however he thought that God’s existence was a postulate of practical reason. Effectively Kant thought that, on the basis of morality, God’s existence could be arrived at as a necessary postulate of a just universe, however this is not to say that Kant thought that God’s existence could be proved. Part of Kant’s approach to morality was that individuals should act as if there was a God – but this is not the same as saying that there is a God.

Kant’s theory is deontological – that is it stresses duty or obligation (this comes from the Greek deon meaning duty). The opening words of the Groundwork provide a ringing declaration of Kant’s fundamental position:

It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and any other talents of the mind we care to name, or courage, resolution, and constancy of purpose, as qualities of temperament, are without doubt good and desirable in many respects; but they can also be extremely bad and hurtful when the will is not good which has to make use of these gifts …

The goodness of a human being’s will does not depend on the results it produces since so many factors outside our control may determine the results:

A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes … it is good through its willing alone – that is, good in itself.

In fact, the more human reason ‘concerns itself with the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the farther does man get from true contentment’ (5). A good will is fostered by a human being acting rationally and eliminating those inclinations and desires which tend to undermine rational decision-making. This does not mean that inclinations are necessarily wrong – simpy that they are not a reliable guide to the rightness of moral conduct.

If the development of a ‘good will’ is the highest task for any human being, there is one essential precondition which Kant does not argue for but considers must be assumed even though it cannot be proved – that is that human beings are free. Without freedom, there can be no discussion of morality as morality necessarily presupposes the ability to choose right or wrong. If human choices are wholly determined – if we are not free – then we are not moral agents.

Kant’s method is to start by assuming that moral judgements are true. He then sets out to analyse the conditions which must be in force if these are to be true.

Kant distinguishes between two types of imperatives or commands under which human beings act:

 Hypothetical imperatives are imperatives that are based on an ‘if’, for instance: ‘If you want to stay healthy, take exercise’ or ‘If you want your wife to love you, remember her birthday’. We can reject the command (to take exercise or to remember birthdays) if we are willing to reject the ‘if’ on which the command rests. These imperatives bid us do things which are a means to some end. They are arrived at by the exercise of pure reason.

 Categorical imperatives, by contrast, are not based on any ‘if’, they do not depend on a particular end and, Kant considers, they would be followed by any fully rational agent. They are ends in themselves and not means to some other end. Moral duties are categorical because they should be followed for the sake of duty only, simply because they are duties and not for any other reason. Categorical imperatives are arrived at through practical reason and they are understood as a basis for action.

There is no answer to the question, ‘Why should I do my duty?’ except ‘Because it is your duty.’ If there was any answer it would represent a reason and would make the imperative hypothetical and not categorical.

Human beings, in Kant’s view, are not wholly rational – but they can strive to become so. Animals are dominated by desires and instincts and these are present in human beings as well. However Kant considers that humans also have the ability to reason and, through the exercise of reason, to act not in accordance with our inclinations but according to the demands that reason makes on us – in other words from a sense of duty. A categorical imperative is one that excludes self-interest and would be one that any fully rational agent (human or otherwise) would follow and if any command is held to be categorical, it is necessary to show that it fits under this heading.

It is not easy to separate actions done from an inclination and those done from a sense of duty – it is important to recognise that it is not the action which determines goodness but the intention, motive and reason lying behind the action. The businessman who is honest because it suits him or because he feels like being honest is not, according to Kant, acting morally because he is not acting rationally. The good person must act correctly, according to reason, no matter what the consequences and independent of his or her own feelings or inclinations. If a person wills to perform an act, and if this willing does not rest on a sense of duty, then it will not be a morally good action. An action which is not done from inclination at all but purely rationally, from a sense of duty, will be a morally good action. This does not mean that one has to act against one’s inclinations, but it does mean that one’s inclinations cannot determine one’s moral duty.

There are, of course, particular moral rules which are categorical and which everyone would agree to such as ‘Thou shalt not kill’, but Kant considers these to be derived from a more general principle and he seeks to determine what this is. He arrives at a number of different formulations of what he terms ‘The Categorical Imperative’ on which all moral commands are based. The best known are the three that Kant includes in his summary of the Groundwork (79–81) and which H. J. Paton (in The Moral Law, Hutchinson) translates as follows:

1 Act as if the maxim of your action was to become through your will a universal law of nature.

This is the Formula of the Law of Nature and is saying that we should act in such a way that we can will that the maxim (or general principle) under which we act should be a general law for everyone. Kant therefore aims to ensure that we eliminate self-interest in the particular situation in which we find ourselves. Kant considers that if we will to act wholly rationally according to such a principle, then we shall develop a good will. There are, however, other formulations, including what Kant terms the Practical Imperative –

2. Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.

This is the Formula of the End in Itself. Kant says that it can never be right to treat people just as a means to some end – human beings are always ‘ends in themselves’ and Kant describes human beings as ‘holy’ because of this. It can never be right, therefore, to use human beings as a means to the end of our own happiness or to treat any group of people as a minority that does not matter. This principle enshrines the idea of the equality of each and every human being irrespective of class, colour, race, sex, age or circumstance.

3. So act as if you were through your maxims a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.

This is the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends. Kant envisaged rational agents acting as if they were making laws for themselves based on the use of reason and, in so far as they do this, they will become ‘lawmaking members of a kingdom of ends’. The laws adopted by all members will coincide because they are all rational and if there are disagreements then rational arguments should be able to resolve these.

It is, perhaps, significant to note the similarities between Kant’s call to disinterested duty and Jesus’ call to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:39). The love that Jesus had in mind was not based on emotion but on a call to right action towards every other human being (Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, describes this as non-preferential love) and this could be seen as very similar to Kant’s basic position – although it should be added that Jesus’s first commandment was the call to love God before anything else and this Kant rejected. For Kant, the only service to God comes in acting morally to other human beings according to the dictates of reason.

Kant considers that the highest aspiration of a human being is the development of a good will and such a good will is developed by acting rationally according to the principles laid down by the Categorical Imperative. Humans can, if they wish, think of their moral duties as if they were Divine Commands, but morality is specifically not based on such commands. If it was, it would then be arbitrary (cf. the Euthyphro dilemma p. 7).

God is largely peripheral for Kant although God is needed to underwrite Kant’s trust in the fairness of the Universe – particularly the idea that, after death, the virtuous and vice-ridden will be treated appropriately. Kant has a tremendous faith in the metaphysical fairness of the Universe – which is strange as he wished to bar the door to metaphysics because he did not think it was possible to argue from the world of experience (phenomena) to anything beyond this. However, he had faith in the justice of the Universe and he considered that mortality was a postulate of practical reason. Kant’s view can be taken as implying that if the Universe is fair, it follows that human beings must survive death as clearly in this life the virtuous are often treated very badly and those who pursue the path of vice all too often have an apparently happy and contented life.

Kant largely reduces religion to ethics – to be holy is to be moral. Religion is only valuable as a way of helping people to lead a moral life. He considered that philosophy had supremacy over theology as philosophy was based on reason without unsupported faith claims. Kant considered that religion had to operate within the bounds of reason alone and he reinterpreted the claims of Christianity so that they expressed a call to moral righteousness. Jesus was the perfect exemplar of the morally good life. As we have seen, Kant considered human beings and human reason to be autonomous and he thus rejected heteronomy (for instance using God’s will as a guide to what is morally right or wrong).

Kant has a problem at the heart of his whole enterprise which is often not recognised and which he did not fully resolve. Kant considered that human beings should aim to act wholly in accordance with the Categorical Imperative – the maxim of their action would then be good. However, he recognised that many people would fail to do this and they would become corrupt as they acted from an evil, false or irrational maxim. Once a person’s life had become dominated by such general principles, they would then be in bondage. The difficulty Kant had was how to explain moral regeneration or a turn around from the evil to the good when he also considered that human beings could bind themselves by their corrupt maxims. The alternatives were to either:

1 say that human beings were not bound by their corrupt maxims and Kant was quite clear that they were, or

2 to say that human beings, once bound, could not turn round from the corrupt to the good and this would have meant that the position of corrupt human beings was hopeless.

As Michalson points out (Fallen Freedom, pp. 125ff.), Kant’s response to this was a most surprising one given the peripheral place allotted to God in most of Kant’s philosophy. He maintained that it was only through the incarnation in which God became man in Jesus Christ that human moral regeneration can take place. In this one area, at this particular point (but not elsewhere) God was central for Kant, yet he did not face up to the consequences of this. It was Kant’s successors, Kierkegaard and Hegel (and, following Hegel, Marx) who were to take seriously the alternatives that Kant failed to grapple with. As Michalson says:

Kierkegaard and Marx represent what happens when just one of the two aspects of Kant’s account of moral regeneration is taken up and emphasised in isolation from the other aspect. As such, their positions shed light on Kant’s own effort to have it both ways.

In Kierkegaard’s hands, the muted Kantian appeal to grace is transformed into a full-blown ‘project of thought’ in which a transcendent act alone is the only antidote to our willed ‘error’, or sin. Contrary to our usual view of these matters, it is in fact Kierkegaard and not Kant who has the more ‘rational’ position here … Kierkegaard shows the only way to offset a willed error is through a reconciling act coming from the ‘outside’, producing the ‘new creature’ … Alternatively, Kant’s more characteristic tendency to locate our moral recovery in our own efforts – however impossible he has made it for himself fully to do this – leads in some sense to Marxism (which) … expels the last remnants of otherworldliness remaining in the position of the philosopher … (Fallen Freedom, pp. 129–30).

Kant represents a divide in the road in the history of moral and philosophic thought. The road that Kierkegaard takes firmly embraces the central importance of a personal God and the action of this God both in history and in the lives of individual human beings. Hegel takes the opposing path and rejects such a view of transcendence – Marx then takes Hegel’s view further and morality becomes entirely a social construct. These issues are still very much alive and the divide is still present today.

Questions for discussion

1 Suggest two moral maxims which would give rise to contradictory actions. How might the differences between these be resolved?

2 Could it ever be morally right, according to Kant, to torture one person in order to get information which would save the lives of a large group?

3 Describe the difference between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative. On what grounds might someone reject an imperative that was claimed to be categorical?

4 On Kant’s view, should the moral principles of intelligent green spiders differ from the moral principles of human beings?

5 What place does God have in Kant’s moral philosophy?

6 In Kant’s view, is saving the life of a child a morally good action? What are the difficulties from his viewpoint in answering this question in the affirmative?

SIX

Bentham and Mill – Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is generally thought of as a moral theory which can best be summed up by the phrase: ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. However, in terms of its linguistic origins it may be more aptly described as a ‘theory of usefulness’, after the Latin root word utilis meaning useful. This, then, seems to imply that whatever is useful is moral. On a literal interpretation, therefore, my garden spade and fork are moral implements because they are useful. But clearly this is absurd. However, decisions and actions may be characterised as morally useful. Immoral decisions lead to useless or bad actions and amoral decisions are those which lead to no actions at all.

So, for example, the act of abortion is, in itself, neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. However, it becomes so when we consider to what end the procedure of abortion is being used. If abortion is being used to save the mother’s life and restrict an already large family in a household where the husband is unemployed, and if the abortion is conducted in a humane fashion, then its use may, on utilitarian grounds, be justified, and the act itself becomes a moral one. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, that is, of the family unit, counts over and above the future possible happiness of the single unborn child. If, however, abortion is being used by a young married woman because the pregnancy may interfere with a planned skiing trip, then clearly it is difficult to see how it could be justified, unless a cynical vision of utilitarianism were to be employed in which the maximisation of immediate happiness for the young woman and her skiing party were to count for more than the future possible happiness of the unborn child and the future long-term happiness of the prospective family. To use Singer’s Practical Ethics (1993) argument a minor interest (the pleasure derived from the skiing trip) is placed above a major interest (the life of the child and the future possibilities of family life). Hence, we may justifiably conclude that, in this instance, abortion becomes ‘immoral’.

As we have already maintained, utilitarianism has come to be largely associated with the ‘greatest good or the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Its links with majority rule in democratic politics is obvious. Here, it is assumed to be morally acceptable for there to be government by the majority without the consent of the minority. Unfortunately, all too often, particularly given the voting procedures in the democratic nations of the world, there is government by the minority without the consent of the majority!

It was David Hume (1711–76) the Scottish philosopher who first introduced the concept of utility into ethics but he is not regarded as a utilitarian. Similarly, the phrase ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ was first coined by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) in a work entitled An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, although again Hutcheson is not considered to be a utilitarian in the strict sense.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)

The theory of utilitarianism was first fully articulated by Jeremy Bentham who not only wrote about ethics but about politics as well, his most famous work being A Fragment on Government. Because of his interests in both ethics and politics coupled with his desire to improve the social conditions of the masses he founded a movement known as The Philosophical Radicals. Arguably many of the reforms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly those to do with the treatment of criminals, were the result of Bentham’s efforts. Shy but extremely able, Bentham apparently began studying Latin at the age of three and received his degree when only fifteen. However, his friend and follower, James Mill (1773–1836) fathered an even greater child prodigy, John Stuart Mill (1806–73). By all accounts John Stuart Mill began with Greek at the age of three, followed quickly with other languages by the age of eight and finally completed a rigorous classical education by the time he was fourteen. By this time he had become much influenced by Benthamite thinking as his father had been before him.

For Bentham, that which is good is that which equals the greatest sum of pleasure and the least sum of pain. Hence, a right moral decision followed by a truly ethical action would be one which produced the greatest pleasure. The way in which this was to be measured was through the application of the utility calculus, sometimes referred to as the hedonic calculus. Hedone is the Greek word for pleasure. Hence, Bentham’s version of the theory is occasionally called hedonic utilitarianism.

The hedonic or utility calculus

The utility calculus was supposed to measure the amounts of pleasure and pain according to seven criteria:

 intensity

 duration

 certainty

 extent

 remoteness

 richness

 purity.

The following example may help. Suppose you are a doctor driving to one of your patients, a young mother about to give birth. However, she is in great pain and difficulty and it looks as though she will need a Caesarian section. It is late at night and you come across a car accident down a country road. Two cars are involved and both drivers are injured and unconscious. You discover through trying to establish identities that one of them is the young pregnant woman’s husband. The other is an elderly man. You don’t quite know the extent of any internal injuries and are of the opinion that without immediate medical help one of them if not both may die. You are faced now with the moral decision of who to help first:

 the young mother about to give birth?

 the young woman’s husband?

 the elderly gentleman?

Any one of them may die if you do not attend to them immediately.

Leaving aside what we may actually feel or believe, the application of the utility calculus may go something like this:

 Attending to the young expectant mother first is the primary concern of the doctor. The death of both mother and child is almost a certainty if he does not act now, whereas the deaths of either of the two men is not certain. Moreover, the intensity of her pain is clearly greater at present than theirs. There is a greater richness and purity in saving the life of a young child who has, in all probability, a long and happy life ahead. Therefore, the duration and extent of the pleasures experienced by two people, the mother and child, is a clear likelihood.

 Attending to the young husband is the next priority. The pleasure of a new family, its intensity, duration, extent, richness and purity are all clear probabilities. If the doctor had attended to him first and neglected his expectant wife, she would probably have died, and the intensity, duration, extent etc. of the pain experienced by the widowed husband is likely to outstrip any pleasure to be gained from continued life without his loved ones.

 Attending to the elderly gentleman is the last priority. The duration and certainty of his future pleasure is under question owing to his age. He has all but lived his life; this is sometimes known as the ‘good innings argument’. According to this line, the value of his life is not now as great as the young married couple’s who have much of their lives ahead of them, nor of the young child who has yet to go in to bat, as it were.

Some problems:

One of the problems of Bentham’s theory and his hedonic calculus was that its results were based on a quantitative measure. That is, how much sheer quantity of pleasure can be gained from an action. Just by attending to one patient, the young mother, the decision has all but guaranteed that two people will be saved, and that the likely number of years in which they may experience pleasure is probably going to be a lot greater than the number of pleasurable years spent by the elderly gentleman. Moreover, the certainty of saving either the husband or the elderly gentleman is by no means guaranteed, whereas the death of the young mother and her child is almost guaranteed. So, although it may be a difficult decision, the doctor on strict utilitarian grounds would have to save the young mother and child because the quantity of pleasure is the important issue. But, can the quantity of pleasure actually be measured in numbers of years? Furthermore, who will do the measuring?

The second problem is that utilitarianism relies strictly on its predictive value. But who can predict that the child will grow up to be happy and productive, that the old man will soon die anyway, and that the sum total of pleasure to be gained by the young family is going to be greater than the old man’s? The child may grow up to be a mass-murderer, the family may then lead a collective life of guilt and misery, and the old man may, like Bertrand Russell, have been destined to make his major mark on political life in his eighties and nineties.

The third problem is to do with what counts as pleasure. Pure emotional and bodily pleasures are clearly quantifiable. But is it just pleasure that we wish to seek or increase and pain that we wish to avoid or minimise? I might be prepared to suffer a great deal of pain in order to gain a minimal amount of pleasure. The quick extraction of a painful tooth might, on the quantity of pleasure theory, be preferable to hours of painful dentistry involving excavating, filling and polishing the tooth, whilst simultaneously suffering the continuing pain of the tooth itself, all in order to satisfy some intangible desire to retain all my teeth. Or, supposing I wanted the pleasure of being thought slim, I could, like many slimming fanatics, put myself through continual painful exercises and diets in order to wear jeans one size smaller. Or, more importantly, I could forgo all obvious pleasures of the moment, practise continuously on the piano in order to lead a precarious existence as a second-rate concert pianist combined with the dubious pleasure of fame.