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Impressively, two people correctly guessed that the philosopher so harshly denounced by his translator was none other than Immanuel Kant, German thinker extraordinaire and possessor of a freakishly large head, if this painting is to be believed (maybe it was just an awkward angle). The translator was one J.M.D. Mieklejohn, not a man to mince his words. He was prepared to concede that there were some good reasons for Kant's failure to express himself clearly; after all:

He took twelve years to excogitate his work and only five months to write it. He was a German professor, a student of solitary habits, and had never, except on one occasion, been out of Konigsberg. He had, besides, to propound a new system of philosophy, and to enounce ideas that were entirely to revolutionise European thought.

And y'know, his writing's not all bad:

His expression is often as precise and forcible as his thought; and, in some of his notes especially, he sums up in two or three apt and powerful words, thoughts which, at other times, he employs pages to develop. His terminology, which has been so violently denounced, is really of great use in clearly determining his system, and in rendering its peculiarities more easy of comprehension.

Very charitable of Mr. Mieklejohn. He's less kind about Kant's previous translators:

A previous translation of the Kritik exists, which, had it been satisfactory, would have dispensed with the present. But the translator had, evidently, no very extensive acquaintance with the German language, and still less with his subject. A translator ought to be an interpreting intellect between the author and the reader; but, in the present case, the only interpreting medium has been the dictionary.

Ouch. It's not just the translators Mieklejohn lays into: he also points out that all the other English books about Kant

were written by men who either took no pains to understand Kant or were incapable of understanding him.

Mieklejohn also says that the reason he undertook his own translation was because he was asked to proof read another translation by 'a scholar of some repute', but

after having laboured through about eighty pages, I found, from the numerous errors and inaccuracies pervading it, that hardly one-fifth of the original MS remained. I, therefore, laid it entirely aside, and commenced de novo.

It must be nice to be so thoroughly superior to almost everyone else, though you wonder whether, at the end of it, Mieklejohn had any friends left. Still, definitely my favourite translator's introduction ever. I hope one day to attain such dizzying heights of cattiness, contempt and confidence in my own abilities. It's good to have goals, right?

Kant's categorical imperative

Remember when we talked about Kant ages and ages ago? We looked at his idea of duty, which is basically this that human beings should act in accordance with duty, and their actions shouldn't be in any way selfishly motivated; an idea so far removed from any our our experiences that even Kant admits there is not a single example of any human action which meets this criterion. Because we can't possibly get this ethical principle from our experience, we have to derive it solely from reason, which Kant seems to think can operate independently of our experience. We need a moral code that comes purely from rational deduction. What might that look like?

Kant thinks that if we want a moral code that's totally rational, it can't be bound up with messy ideas of what it means to be human, which inevitably brings in our experience (Why reason should be any less to do with our experience than emotions or motivation, Kant neglects to explain). So we need a moral code that would, in theory, apply to any rational being, human, angelic, alien, whatever. Now, everything in nature acts in accordance with laws, and what distinguishes rational beings is that they are aware of those laws and can choose to act in accordance with them (er, did you just derive a definition of rationality from experience?). So whereas stones always obey the law of gravity, we don't always obey the laws of morality. This means that moral laws are imperatives: they are all about what we ought to do, even if we don't always do it. Imperatives can be hypothetical, which means that they tell us we should do something so that we can achieve something else (You ought to go shopping so that you can buy the ingredients for baking biscuits) or categorical, which means that they tell us to do (or not do) something because it is good in itself (Eat biscuits). Because Kant thinks that what's really important is our motivation for our actions rather than the actions or their consequences, he doesn't really care about the hypothetical imperative: morality is all about the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative, by the way, is one of the ideas Kant is most famous for, so once I've finished explaining you can flaunt your new phrase to gain philosophical kudos, along with opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt.

Now, if you're trying to get something done (bake biscuits), you need skill (in baking) and prudence (good biscuit recipes and wisdom about which sort of biscuit is tastiest). It's all a bit vague and intangible (except the biscuits). But if morality is about laws, there's none of this fuzziness. Laws have to be universally applicable, so there is really only one categorical imperative: "act only in accordance with the maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." That is, as you're about to eat your tasty biscuit, think to yourself: would it be ok if everybody else in the world ate biscuits? This is, in a way, where the biscuit analogy breaks down (crumbles?) a little. An easier example is this: say that you want to tell a lie, either to get yourself out of trouble or for a less selfish motivation, say, to hide some Jews from the Nazis. Can you honestly desire that lying becomes a universal moral imperative? It might make your life (and other people's lives) better right now, but imagine the chaos if everyone lied all the time. Lying can't be ok, because a universe where lying was a universal law would be a big old mess.

It's not very intuitive, is it? What happens when, say, a categorical imperative to step in to prevent murder conflicts with a categorical imperative to tell the truth? What happens when the categorical imperative to protect human life conflicts with itself in the case of a mother whose life is endangered by a pregnancy? What happens when the categorical imperative to try to preserve our own life by eating (biscuits) conflicts with the categorical imperative to seek justice, but the only biscuits we can get our hands on are made by an evil multinational company who exploit their workforce? How do you even decide which categorical imperative you're acting on at any one point? If I eat a biscuit, do I imply that a) people should eat; b) people should eat biscuits; or c) people should eat chocolate digestives? Or is eating a biscuit an a-moral act, in which case, what about all the economical and political implications of my biscuit consumption? It's no wonder that Kant can't imagine even a single instance of a perfect moral act.

Photo credit: Kant finger puppet, for sale at the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild. Oh yes.

Milbank and the problem of evil

John Milbank’s Being Reconciled is all about forgiveness, and the restoration of God’s generous relationship with the world. In it, he discusses the problem of evil. Traditionally, Christian theology has refused to see evil as a power or a thing in itself, arguing instead that it's a distortion, a parasite on the goodness of God’s creation, a falling away from life and from existence.

For Augustine, that means that free will isn’t about being able to choose between good and evil; it’s about being free to pursue God and to become uniquely ourselves whilst living a life of love. Sin isn’t about people using their free will to choose evil, because evil isn’t a ‘thing’ you can choose: it’s about people missing the mark, and rejecting God’s freely given grace. Evil doesn’t make any sense, and so Adam’s sin - the first sin that delivered us all into slavery, and means that we’re all born in a world where our ability to see God and to freely love him is broken – is a paradox. It’s hardly even worth trying to answer the question ‘Why did Adam sin?’ because the first sin simply makes no sense.

A similar view is that of Hannah Arendt, who talks about ‘the banality of evil’, by which she means that most people who do terrible things don’t set out to do those terrible things: they slide into it by making a whole series of bad but often pretty small decisions.

Some modern philosophers have blamed these views of evil for the terrible tragedies of the 20^th century, particularly the Holocaust. They have argued it’s because Christian theology and the philosophy of people like Arendt made it impossible to see evil as a positive force, and to imagine that people would actively choose and pursue evil that Hitler wasn’t stopped. They advocate a view of ‘radical evil’: the idea that it’s possible to deliberately choose evil, to set out deliberately to commit genocide, and they say that without this sort of understanding of evil, the same terrible things will happen again because we won’t be able to stop them.

Milbank argues that they’re wrong: that it’s actually the idea of radical evil which made the Holocaust possible. He argues that what makes the horrors of the 20^th century – the Holocaust, the Soviet gulags, the terrible things done as a result of US foreign policy and ‘liberal democracy’ - so terrible is that the law itself has been on the side of the mass murderers, and the resources of the State have been used to commit atrocities on a legal, organised, and bureaucratic basis. For this, he blames Kant.

For Kant, the goal of any particular moral action is irrelevant: all that matters is that it’s done out of duty, and that the principle it’s based on could be turned into a universal law. Lying to protect the Jews you’re hiding in your house is wrong, because if everyone lied all the time, where would we be? In this case, the right thing to do is to tell the truth, even if you know that the people you hand over will be killed in the gas chambers.

Kant won’t acknowledge that our will is broken: if something is the right thing to do, he thinks, it is possible. ‘Ought’ implies ‘can.’ He thinks that we go wrong when we give credence to the desires which arrive from our physical nature: when we act because we want to survive, because we love someone, because we are hungry, which is in contrast to the traditional Christian view, which says that, although our desires are all mixed up, there is something of God’s goodness and truth in them. Kant says that nothing in our experience of the world can teach us what is right, but then struggles to say how we can tell the difference between right and wrong. Worse, he thinks that evil is an inherent possibility of freedom. To be able to do the right thing is to be able to do the wrong thing, and so human autonomy necessarily implies the possibility of evil. Freedom comes first, before good and evil, and so good and evil are set up as equal and opposite positive choices. Freedom comes first, and so the ultimate value isn’t good or evil, but power. This view of freedom is problematic, to say the least: if freedom implies evil, how can it be possible to say that God, the source of freedom, is good?

Kant also argues that moral evil arises out of human community. Left on our own, to exercise our freedom, we are fine: in the context of relationships with other people, we get dragged into bad choices and our judgment is clouded. Ethics is all about doing your duty; none of this messy stuff about emotions. And because of his categorical imperative, it becomes impossible to resist something like the Nazi government. Would assassinating your leader work as a universal ethical principle? Hell, no? How about obedience regardless of your untrustworthy emotions? Hell, yeah. And that’s pretty much where Kant takes you, according to Milbank: the hell of the gas chambers.

All this, says Milbank, is the logical consequence of valuing human freedom above all else, and of making free choice, rather than goodness and love, the ultimate value. It takes you to the gas chambers; it takes you to the gulags; it takes you to to global devastation wreaked by unfettered capitalism and the ‘free’ market. Freedom to choose between good and evil is not freedom. Freedom is being able to love God, being able to do the good that we want to do but, in our slavery to sin, cannot; freedom is being free to enjoy the riches of God’s grace.

Photo credit: airpark on Flickr

Kant on Duty

In the Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, Immanuel Kant sets out to find an understanding of morality that can be derived from first principles rather than from empirical experience. That is, he doesn’t think it’s enough to come up with ethics on the basis of statements like, ‘It makes me sad when people are mean to me’. Morality needs to be grounded in pure reason, i.e. not derived from our individual or human experience, but applicable to any and all rational beings. Groundwork is Kant’s attempt to come up with a purely rational ‘supreme principle of morality’, so that he can then go on to write a more detailed ethics. He starts out by discussing the idea of duty.

Kant says that the only quality which is unambiguously good is a good will. Any other quality is ambiguous: understanding, with, judgment, power, riches, honour, happiness, moderation, self-control: all can be bad when accompanied by a bad will.

A good will isn’t good because of anything it achieves or does: if I give someone a biscuit out of kindness or generosity, but accidentally make them fat, it doesn’t mean my original will was bad. Likewise, if I have kind or generous intentions, but no biscuits with which to express them, that doesn’t mean that my intentions were bad.

Kant says that if we look at human nature, it must be designed for whatever it is that human nature was intended for: just as biscuits are tasty because they’re meant to be eaten, so whatever makes humans particularly human must point us towards whatever the purpose of human nature is. Now, Kant says that if humans were meant primarily to stay alive or to be happy, it would make no sense that we were rational. Everything necessary to existence an happiness could be got by instinct, with a lot less angst. He points out that the more people use reason to try to enjoy life and be happy, the more miserable they are (How many happy philosophers can you name?), and they tend to envy ordinary people who don’t spend so much time thinking about life, and just do whatever they feel like doing. Thus, if reason’s meant to make us happy, it’s a pretty crappy tool to get us there, as if you decided to make biscuits but added a handful of cement to the mixture. Not tasty. It’s reasonable, therefore, to suggest that maybe reason has some other purpose in human nature than to keep us alive and make us happy.

Kant argues that reason must be meant to help us develop a good will. He argues that we don’t have a good will so that we can do good things, but because having a good will is good in itself (this is where the biscuit analogy breaks down, because what use is a biscuit if you can’t eat it?). But what does it mean for a will to be good? This is where the concept of duty comes in. Kant says that a person’s will is only good if they are motivated by duty and nothing else. A shopkeeper might decided to charge a reasonable price for her biscuits because it's the right, dutiful thing to do, but if her biscuits are reasonably priced only because she doesn't want her customers to go elsewhere for their biscuits, she doesn’t get any moral credit for it What matters isn’t the action, but a person’s reason for doing it.

Acting out of duty is acting in accordance with the demands of law, not for any particular goal. The will isn't good if it's motivated by any human desires and inclinations: the only principle it can act on whilst still being a good will is the universal law. Duty means that we should never act in any way that we wouldn’t want the principle we act on to be a universal law. We all have a basic grasp of what duty means, but because of the messy circumstances and tangles of desire and inclination we all find ourselves in, we need philosophy to help us understand the universal law so that we too can have good wills.

I'll go into Kant's idea of the universal law in a bit more detail another time, but for now I'd just like to point out that there are some pretty dodgy dualisms going on here. I get no credit for wanting the right thing if it's in any way contaminated by selfish reasons, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for the idea that what makes us happy might sometimes be the same thing as the right thing to do in a particular circumstance. It's also weird that Kant draws such a sharp distinction between empirical knowledge (ideas we get from our experience) and abstract rational principles, arguing that only rational principles can be the basis for working out morality, as if it's possible for us to have any ideas that aren't profoundly shaped by our individual experiences.

Photo credit: Sifu Renka on Flickr