Kant: Critique of Practical Reason
I
In any introductory class on ethical theory one always finds two philosophers in particular who are placed against each other as polar opposites: John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. They are portrayed as the archetypes of two great strains of thought in ethics. Mill’s utilitarianism represents a refined form of consequentialism. According to consequentialism, what decides the moral worth of an action rests solely in the consequences that result from the act (in Mill’s theory, good actions result in greater overall happiness, and bad actions result in more overall pain). In this broad sense, Mill can be grouped with people such as Ayn Rand or ethical pragmatists, all of whom look to what results in the world to determine if an action is ethically right or wrong.
Kant, on the other hand, is the perfect nonconsequentialist. Moral worth, according to the nonconsequentialist, comes not at all from consequences, but from something else (in Kant’s case, the intention of the doer and whether, in the doer’s act, everyone is “used never merely as a means but as at the same time an end.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 74)). In this broad sense Kant is grouped with those who hold that justice is something that exists in nature or metaphysically, such as Plato, and those who take their ethical doctrines from religions which gives them as something “holy” and beyond reproach based on worldly circumstances.
Kant and Mill are thus set up as the two sides of a championship bout, where those who argue that we need to focus on the consequences of our actions, and those who argue that we need to do what is right no matter the consequences, argue back and forth with no end. Certainly this conflict is often found in ethical debate. Further, for the most part I think this sort of depiction is faithful to Mill. He counts the ethical as defined solely by a certain type of circumstances, and what is ethical is what brings that about. He is not ambiguous about this point: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals ‘utility’ or the ‘greatest happiness principle’ holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” (Mill, Utilitarianism 7) What matters are the consequences, plain and simple.
But while a perfunctory reading of Mill works fine here, because he is rarely ambiguous and does not stray far beyond an ‘ordinary’ understanding of ethics (so that one can understand his discussion and arguments well enough without a philosophical background), the treatment of Kant typically found in this discussion is misleading at best and downright wrong at worst. Kantian ethics is made to be synonymous with “duty,” as though his view of ethics is simply based on the goodness of an action being that you do it because you have to. His terminology is understood in the ordinary sense, and so it appears as though Kant’s ethics can be detached from and addressed apart from the rest of his philosophy. Thus Mill and Kant become two generalized views, consequentialism versus inconsequentialism, and the two men are thought of as being the same as the respective views they represent.
In fact, this sort of discussion fundamentally misconstrues not only the goal of Kantian ethics but the entire place of ethics for Kant. Kant does not leave ethics in a separate domain from philosophical areas such as metaphysics and epistemology. For him it is all part of one philosophical system, and his particular ethical positions must be understood as necessary extensions of this system. Kant’s ethics, in other words, has a place in the whole, and so, if one wants to talk not simply about ‘duty ethics’ in some vague sense but about Kantian ethics, one must understand where he’s coming from.
This is not to say that Kant isn’t a nonconsequentialist; he most certainly is. “[P]ractical laws,” by which he means those laws which direct the will, thus moral laws, “refer only to the will, without regard to what is attained by its causality, and one may abstract from this latter (as belonging to the world of sense) so as to have them pure.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 19) In other words, moral laws are defined by being separate from the empirical (and thus consequential) world. Kant’s argument against the consequentialist position is that, ultimately, it refers to the senses and thus to experience, and that it is thus subject to individual discretion instead of what is ethical and just. In the essay on Mill’s Utilitarianism I asked what the happiness is that Mill seeks. Kant’s criticism of consequentialism differs from mine in that he does not dispute that, when it comes to consequences, people ultimately pursue happiness: “all material principles, which place the determining ground of choice in the pleasure or displeasure to be felt in the reality of some object, are wholly of the same kind insofar as they belong without exception to the principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.” (20) However, he follows a route similar to mine when he attacks Mill’s greatest-happiness principle (though, of course, before Mill was born) as being unfit to be a moral law, that is, a universal guideline to follow:
Even if everyone really does pursue happiness, Kant says (and according to him, they do), that does us no good in formulating an ethical theory that can we can actually apply as a law, because everyone’s idea of happiness is different, not only between different individuals but within individuals themselves over time. Consequentialism, in other words, is an empiricist ethics, based upon experience and experiment rather than reason and argument, following what is understood by the senses rather than the mind in its deduction.
Mill is in complete agreement with this claim of Kant’s; for him, ethics is a matter of what happens in reality, of experience in life, not what is understood through argumentation. There are no rationalistic laws, only the question of what we want and how we get it. It is for this reason that he refers to the collective vote of society as a way to figure out what is the best to choose: “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.” (Mill, Utilitarianism 8) But, as Kant argues, this seems to allow any widely-held opinion to become moral law; morality becomes mob rule. Thus Mill cannot refer to just anyone, but to competent judges who have a wide range of experience in order to solve ethical problems. Yet how can we guarantee the judgment of the judges? What if they are misguided, deceived, or, perhaps, immoral? “From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal.” (11) So we must give the opinions of men (even if they are experienced opinions) the power of ethical law?
Of course not. Ethics is not simply a matter of opinions. Ethics is about what is right, not what people feel like. Thus Kant is right when he criticizes consequentialism, saying that “here, if one wanted to give the maxim the universality of a law, the most extreme opposite of harmony would follow, the worst conflict, and the complete annihilation of the maxim itself and its purpose.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 25) If we allowed happiness to be the standard of morality, then right and justice would be ultimately determined by what people think will make them happy. As the times change, justice itself would change. The moral law becomes nothing but a widely-accepted subjective standard; majority rule becomes the center of ethics. Any feeling otherwise will just be the result of stubborn habits, as Mill himself pointed out: “Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit.” (Mill 60) Justice, in other words, is a desire that became habit and thus is no longer moral even on consequentialist grounds if it has outlasted its time. In a word, there is no justice.
II
This is the way Kant is usually read against Mill. And I suppose that, in a very general sense (so general, in fact, that it is no longer Kantian) it is correct. Certainly, as has been pointed out, Kant agreed with this line of reasoning and even used it himself. But to act as though Kant’s real argument operates at this level is to miss Kant’s fundamental point, his true nemesis in ethical theory, and thus the entire drive and purpose of his theory.
Let us start again with Kant. One of his treatises in moral theory is called “Critique of Practical Reason.” Practical reason is practical because it “is concerned with the determining grounds of the will, which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to effect such objects (whether physical power is sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality.” (12) That is, practical reason centers around the will in its capacity of causing a person’s actions. For this reason, it makes sense that Kant’s discussion of morality would fall under the critique of practical reason; the critique will focus on that which determines what actions we choose, and so the ethical options of “right” and “wrong” will fall under this form of reason.
So what are the determining grounds of the will? Certainly, physical phenomena can cause our actions. I see something that looks tasty, so I will to reach for it. In this sense, my desire has been affected by the presence of an object. Physical phenomena of the same sort (sensual) can also affect my desire in what choices it will make in a future decision; for example, the stimuli produced by a certain food item lead me to want to pursue it as often as I can, so that, when I see an object that appears to be the of the same sort as the one which caused the initial stimulus, I will want to reach for it. Thus the physical world determines what I will in the first place.
This chain can be continued, of course, going further and further back with older and older causes. In fact, in the first critique Kant designed his third antimony of pure reason around the problem of causality. In the empirical world, we not only do but must assume that everything has a cause. Without this necessary rule “the connection of phenomena reciprocally determining and determined according to general laws, which is termed nature, and along with it the criteria of empirical truth, which enable us to distinguish experience from mere visionary dreaming, would almost entirely disappear.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 255) If we include our own will in the empirical world, it must be no different; in other words, our wills must necessarily follow their own pre-determined empirical inclinations in the pursuit of happiness:
Yet there is another side to this problem, which forms the issue of the antimony. “If . . . everything happens solely in accordance with the laws of nature, there cannot be any real first beginning of things, but only a subaltern or comparative beginning. There cannot, therefore, be a completeness of series on the side of the causes which originate the one from the other. But the law of nature is, that nothing can happen without a sufficient a priori determined cause.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 252) The causal chain, in other words, can never be finished, and so nothing is explained. Despite this argument of reason, in experience the “fact” of causation remains and is something we always encounter. Everything that is experienced has a cause. That, of course, includes the will. The will, in other words, is experienced as something being determined by something other than itself. The will, in other words, is controlled by something else. In other words, the will is not free. Thus there is no choice. Thus morality is impossible.
Kant’s concern about consequentialism isn’t a simple matter happiness versus justice. It’s about the possibility of ethics itself. If consequentialism is the only possible path in ethics, if we really do everything only because of outside of inclinations as Mill argues (since, for him, we should pursue happiness, and happiness is empirical, that is, based upon what affects us in a certain way), then that means that we are controlled by those empirical circumstances that decide what good and bad consequences, pleasure and pain, are. Admitting that ethics only happens in the empirical world is admitting that there is no ethics, because it surrenders the absolute necessity for ethics, free will. “In fact, if a human being’s actions insofar as they belong to his determinations in time were not merely determinations of him as appearance but as thing in itself, freedom could not be saved . . . .” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 85) Kant doesn’t just want to push a theory; he wants to save ethics. Thus when he says that “only rationalism of judgment is suitable for the use of moral concepts . . . ,” (61) he is not just taking a shot against empiricism on the grounds of not being universal; he is attacking it on the grounds of assuming something which renders ethics impossible.
But if, as Kant believes, our own experience is necessarily subject to the laws of nature, and thus to causality, can the denial of consequentialism really save ethics? Kant admits that, since natural law
III
Kant’s best known work on ethics, and the one always compared against Mill’s Utilitarianism, is Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. It offers his earliest and most concise work on ethical theory. In it he follows a method that appears closer to Mill’s. Rather than high theory, he begins from the simpler and moves up to the more complex. Thus his first section is titled, “Transition from Common Sense Knowledge of Morals to the Philosophical.” The following sections transition from philosophy to metaphysics, and from metaphysics to practical reason. Yet even there he cautions that “metaphysics must lead the way, and without it there can be no moral philosophy.” (Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals 6) Only later, in the Critique of Practical Reason, is the importance of this statement realized. For, according to Kant, the possibility of moral philosophy depends upon whether we can prove the freedom of the will, and so we must look to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before we know if ethics is possible.
In short, in the Critique Kant divides the world of knowledge, and of metaphysics, in two. The phenomenal world is the world of experience. It depends upon intuitions (sense-data), but also follows necessary a priori rules of reason, such as time and space (which do not exist as objects do, but only in reason and with intuitions of objects) as well as causality. The noumenal world, the world of reason free of intuition, is the world where the rules themselves exist in abstracto. This form of reason is the one subjected to scrutiny in the Critique of Pure Reason.
In the world of experience, which is guided by the law of time and thus causality (“insofar as their existence in time is determinable . . . .”), ethics is impossible. If that is the only world, if the only laws are the laws of nature, than ethics is impossible. However, for Kant there still remains the noumenal world. The world of experience is only the world of appearance, of things as they appear to us after we add our own a priori intuitions onto them (and so not as they are in themselves), even if we do so necessarily The noumenal world, on the other hand, is free of intuition, and thus free of the necessary laws that regulate intuition and make it possible. Where there is no experience, there are no laws of experience; thus, time, space, and causality do not apply (“to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and so to its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself.”). If Kant, in other words, can ascribe the will’s nature, its driving force or ‘cause,’ to the noumenal world, the world free of natural law, then he can save ethics.
What is in this noumenal world, exactly? The noumenal world is free of intuition, thus of sense-objects. It is the world of pure reason, which “is found, when examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 393) These principles are the necessary preliminaries for experience and thus have the status of laws. Thus pure reason, free of intuition, contains universal laws and nothing else. Thus, if that which determines the will is to be found in the noumenal world, it must be a universal practical law. Such practical laws
Any morality that is a possible morality, that is, is premised upon the freedom of the will, must be free of empirical conditions, that is, must be nonconsequentialist. Not because good consequences aren’t morally good and bad consequences aren’t morally bad, but because basing ethics upon consequences is basing them upon empirical conditions, and so upon the world subject to the law of causality, and so upon a world where ethical choice of any kind is impossible. Only a universal law, found in pure reason and completely free of empirical determinants, can generate a possible ethical law. Only following that right can be of ethical import; any and all ‘real-world’ consequences must be completely immaterial to the ethical value of an action. “[T]he sole principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the law (namely, from a desired object) and at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of.” (26) Anything that can be called moral must be a universal law; thus, the rule of morality is this: “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.” (28) This is the moral principle from which the rest follows. The idea of treating everyone as ends is the necessary result of accepting only those principles that are universal, that is, that apply equally to every rational being capable of the use of reason. And “[a]n action that is objectively practical in accordance with this law, with the exclusion of every determining ground of inclination, is called duty . . . .” (68) The only sort of motivation that can be completely free of empirical determining grounds is that of duty. Duty follows the law simply because it is the law. Not because other people say it’s right, or because good things will happen to those who follow it, or because it makes one a good person. One follows the law because it is the only law worthy of the name.
IV
There is one question that remains. Kant shows in his critique that any ethics based in the phenomenal world, the world of experience, is impossible. Freedom, if it can be found, can only be found in the noumenal world. Yet anyone who’s read the Critique of Pure Reason knows that, if anything, the noumenal world was found sorely lacking in general. Does Kant solve this problem? Can he actually prove that we are, as he says, “transcendentally free?”
No. At least, not theoretically. “I could not realize this thought, that is, could not convert it into cognition of a being acting in this way, not even of its mere possibility.” (43) In the antimony of causality, the idea a cause at the beginning, a truly free cause, is comprehensible only in the sphere of pure reason free of experience. The moment intuition is brought in, the rules of nature, including causality, are necessarily dragged along. That means there can be no actual concrete cognition of free causality, because cognition requires intuition. Thus, if asked, I could not give you one ‘real-world’ example of something without a cause. Yet, Kant argues, reason requires this sort of cause, for otherwise we reach a logical impossibility in the lack of a completeness of series. Thus, while one cannot prove free will as something which really exists, one also cannot disprove it, for “such a causality must be presupposed, although we are quite incapable of comprehending how the being of one thing is possible through the being of another, but must for this information look entirely to experience.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 252) That is the nature of an antimony; both sides end in a philosophical draw. It appears, then, that if one can find another ground for assuming free will, one that gives it an edge in some other area, free will can then at least be assumed over the alternative.
It is here that pure speculative reason gives way to pure practical reason in order to push free will over the edge.
The idea of the moral law is a universal law which determines our conduct in all actions, having the force as a law guiding the will the same amount of power as the laws of space and time have as laws of theoretical reason. The moral law, which Kant labels “a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is apodictically certain,” (41) certain as such because a moral law must as law necessarily have the description it does, requires free will to be conceivable. That is, in the practical sphere (the sphere of the determination of the will) freedom of the will is just as necessary as space and time are in experience. In the speculative sphere, space and time do not in themselves exist but exist still as necessary parts of experience, and thus as completely universal and completely valid, being necessary for objects of experience to exist at all. For there to be thought of an object at all, there must be time and space. Likewise, in practical thought of the will, for there to even be a conception of right and wrong, of morality, there must be the possibility of actions that can act in conformity with right actions and with wrong actions. The mere concept of morality as law, free of intuition and following only the rule prescribed by reason, requires a will equally free of intuition and thus of causality, and therefore free in the transcendental sense. “In the concept of a will . . . the concept of causality is already contained, and thus in the concept of a pure will there is contained the concept of a causality with freedom, that is, a causality that is not determinable in accordance with laws of nature . . . .” (48) Freedom, in the practical sense, gains reality in our minds. “It is therefore the moral law . . . [which] leads directly to the concept of freedom.” (27)
It is easy to err and misunderstand Kant at this point. It must be remembered he is not claiming that we have actually proven that we have free will, that we can act independently of all intuition. Rather, we have argued for the practical (practical, as in, regarding the action of the will instead of actual knowledge) necessity of something that we find in the noumenal world. “[T]hese are without exception to be counted not as knowledge but only as a warrant (for practical purposes, however, a necessity) to admit and presuppose them . . . .” (49) We cannot prove that the will is free theoretically, for that would require an intuition, which necessarily assumes causality and thus the non-existence of free will. But if one follows Kant’s philosophical system, where the world is split into appearance and the “things in themselves,” one sees that the possibility is opened up of going beyond “appearance” to a world where, if something is not provable to us with certainty, the possibility is at least present, and with it the chance is given to create a place for ethics in a world where such a thing should be impossible. “One can therefore grant that if it were possible for us to have such deep insight into a human being’s cast of mind, as shown by inner as well as outer actions, that we would know every incentive to action . . . , [we] could nevertheless maintain that the human being’s conduct is free.” (83) If you are a Kantian, the world of unlimited causes need not stop all ethics; you just have to be willing to go to another world, one we (literally) never see, in order to preserve it.
In any introductory class on ethical theory one always finds two philosophers in particular who are placed against each other as polar opposites: John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. They are portrayed as the archetypes of two great strains of thought in ethics. Mill’s utilitarianism represents a refined form of consequentialism. According to consequentialism, what decides the moral worth of an action rests solely in the consequences that result from the act (in Mill’s theory, good actions result in greater overall happiness, and bad actions result in more overall pain). In this broad sense, Mill can be grouped with people such as Ayn Rand or ethical pragmatists, all of whom look to what results in the world to determine if an action is ethically right or wrong.
Kant, on the other hand, is the perfect nonconsequentialist. Moral worth, according to the nonconsequentialist, comes not at all from consequences, but from something else (in Kant’s case, the intention of the doer and whether, in the doer’s act, everyone is “used never merely as a means but as at the same time an end.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 74)). In this broad sense Kant is grouped with those who hold that justice is something that exists in nature or metaphysically, such as Plato, and those who take their ethical doctrines from religions which gives them as something “holy” and beyond reproach based on worldly circumstances.
Kant and Mill are thus set up as the two sides of a championship bout, where those who argue that we need to focus on the consequences of our actions, and those who argue that we need to do what is right no matter the consequences, argue back and forth with no end. Certainly this conflict is often found in ethical debate. Further, for the most part I think this sort of depiction is faithful to Mill. He counts the ethical as defined solely by a certain type of circumstances, and what is ethical is what brings that about. He is not ambiguous about this point: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals ‘utility’ or the ‘greatest happiness principle’ holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” (Mill, Utilitarianism 7) What matters are the consequences, plain and simple.
But while a perfunctory reading of Mill works fine here, because he is rarely ambiguous and does not stray far beyond an ‘ordinary’ understanding of ethics (so that one can understand his discussion and arguments well enough without a philosophical background), the treatment of Kant typically found in this discussion is misleading at best and downright wrong at worst. Kantian ethics is made to be synonymous with “duty,” as though his view of ethics is simply based on the goodness of an action being that you do it because you have to. His terminology is understood in the ordinary sense, and so it appears as though Kant’s ethics can be detached from and addressed apart from the rest of his philosophy. Thus Mill and Kant become two generalized views, consequentialism versus inconsequentialism, and the two men are thought of as being the same as the respective views they represent.
In fact, this sort of discussion fundamentally misconstrues not only the goal of Kantian ethics but the entire place of ethics for Kant. Kant does not leave ethics in a separate domain from philosophical areas such as metaphysics and epistemology. For him it is all part of one philosophical system, and his particular ethical positions must be understood as necessary extensions of this system. Kant’s ethics, in other words, has a place in the whole, and so, if one wants to talk not simply about ‘duty ethics’ in some vague sense but about Kantian ethics, one must understand where he’s coming from.
This is not to say that Kant isn’t a nonconsequentialist; he most certainly is. “[P]ractical laws,” by which he means those laws which direct the will, thus moral laws, “refer only to the will, without regard to what is attained by its causality, and one may abstract from this latter (as belonging to the world of sense) so as to have them pure.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 19) In other words, moral laws are defined by being separate from the empirical (and thus consequential) world. Kant’s argument against the consequentialist position is that, ultimately, it refers to the senses and thus to experience, and that it is thus subject to individual discretion instead of what is ethical and just. In the essay on Mill’s Utilitarianism I asked what the happiness is that Mill seeks. Kant’s criticism of consequentialism differs from mine in that he does not dispute that, when it comes to consequences, people ultimately pursue happiness: “all material principles, which place the determining ground of choice in the pleasure or displeasure to be felt in the reality of some object, are wholly of the same kind insofar as they belong without exception to the principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.” (20) However, he follows a route similar to mine when he attacks Mill’s greatest-happiness principle (though, of course, before Mill was born) as being unfit to be a moral law, that is, a universal guideline to follow:
where each has to put his happiness comes down to the particular feeling of pleasure and displeasure in each and, even within one and the same subject, to needs that differ as this feeling changes . . . and hence can never yield a law because, in the desire for happiness, it is not the form of lawfulness that counts but simply the matter, namely whether I am to expect satisfaction from following the law, and how much. (23)
Even if everyone really does pursue happiness, Kant says (and according to him, they do), that does us no good in formulating an ethical theory that can we can actually apply as a law, because everyone’s idea of happiness is different, not only between different individuals but within individuals themselves over time. Consequentialism, in other words, is an empiricist ethics, based upon experience and experiment rather than reason and argument, following what is understood by the senses rather than the mind in its deduction.
Mill is in complete agreement with this claim of Kant’s; for him, ethics is a matter of what happens in reality, of experience in life, not what is understood through argumentation. There are no rationalistic laws, only the question of what we want and how we get it. It is for this reason that he refers to the collective vote of society as a way to figure out what is the best to choose: “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.” (Mill, Utilitarianism 8) But, as Kant argues, this seems to allow any widely-held opinion to become moral law; morality becomes mob rule. Thus Mill cannot refer to just anyone, but to competent judges who have a wide range of experience in order to solve ethical problems. Yet how can we guarantee the judgment of the judges? What if they are misguided, deceived, or, perhaps, immoral? “From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal.” (11) So we must give the opinions of men (even if they are experienced opinions) the power of ethical law?
Of course not. Ethics is not simply a matter of opinions. Ethics is about what is right, not what people feel like. Thus Kant is right when he criticizes consequentialism, saying that “here, if one wanted to give the maxim the universality of a law, the most extreme opposite of harmony would follow, the worst conflict, and the complete annihilation of the maxim itself and its purpose.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 25) If we allowed happiness to be the standard of morality, then right and justice would be ultimately determined by what people think will make them happy. As the times change, justice itself would change. The moral law becomes nothing but a widely-accepted subjective standard; majority rule becomes the center of ethics. Any feeling otherwise will just be the result of stubborn habits, as Mill himself pointed out: “Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit.” (Mill 60) Justice, in other words, is a desire that became habit and thus is no longer moral even on consequentialist grounds if it has outlasted its time. In a word, there is no justice.
II
This is the way Kant is usually read against Mill. And I suppose that, in a very general sense (so general, in fact, that it is no longer Kantian) it is correct. Certainly, as has been pointed out, Kant agreed with this line of reasoning and even used it himself. But to act as though Kant’s real argument operates at this level is to miss Kant’s fundamental point, his true nemesis in ethical theory, and thus the entire drive and purpose of his theory.
Let us start again with Kant. One of his treatises in moral theory is called “Critique of Practical Reason.” Practical reason is practical because it “is concerned with the determining grounds of the will, which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to effect such objects (whether physical power is sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality.” (12) That is, practical reason centers around the will in its capacity of causing a person’s actions. For this reason, it makes sense that Kant’s discussion of morality would fall under the critique of practical reason; the critique will focus on that which determines what actions we choose, and so the ethical options of “right” and “wrong” will fall under this form of reason.
So what are the determining grounds of the will? Certainly, physical phenomena can cause our actions. I see something that looks tasty, so I will to reach for it. In this sense, my desire has been affected by the presence of an object. Physical phenomena of the same sort (sensual) can also affect my desire in what choices it will make in a future decision; for example, the stimuli produced by a certain food item lead me to want to pursue it as often as I can, so that, when I see an object that appears to be the of the same sort as the one which caused the initial stimulus, I will want to reach for it. Thus the physical world determines what I will in the first place.
This chain can be continued, of course, going further and further back with older and older causes. In fact, in the first critique Kant designed his third antimony of pure reason around the problem of causality. In the empirical world, we not only do but must assume that everything has a cause. Without this necessary rule “the connection of phenomena reciprocally determining and determined according to general laws, which is termed nature, and along with it the criteria of empirical truth, which enable us to distinguish experience from mere visionary dreaming, would almost entirely disappear.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 255) If we include our own will in the empirical world, it must be no different; in other words, our wills must necessarily follow their own pre-determined empirical inclinations in the pursuit of happiness:
in actual nature, insofar as it is an object of experience, the free will is not of itself determined to such maxims as could of themselves establish a nature in accordance with universal laws, or even to such maxims as could of themselves fit into a nature arranged in accordance with them; they are, instead, private inclinations which do constitute a natural whole in accordance with pathological (physical) laws but not a nature that would be possible only through our will in accordance with pure practical laws. (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 39)
Yet there is another side to this problem, which forms the issue of the antimony. “If . . . everything happens solely in accordance with the laws of nature, there cannot be any real first beginning of things, but only a subaltern or comparative beginning. There cannot, therefore, be a completeness of series on the side of the causes which originate the one from the other. But the law of nature is, that nothing can happen without a sufficient a priori determined cause.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 252) The causal chain, in other words, can never be finished, and so nothing is explained. Despite this argument of reason, in experience the “fact” of causation remains and is something we always encounter. Everything that is experienced has a cause. That, of course, includes the will. The will, in other words, is experienced as something being determined by something other than itself. The will, in other words, is controlled by something else. In other words, the will is not free. Thus there is no choice. Thus morality is impossible.
Kant’s concern about consequentialism isn’t a simple matter happiness versus justice. It’s about the possibility of ethics itself. If consequentialism is the only possible path in ethics, if we really do everything only because of outside of inclinations as Mill argues (since, for him, we should pursue happiness, and happiness is empirical, that is, based upon what affects us in a certain way), then that means that we are controlled by those empirical circumstances that decide what good and bad consequences, pleasure and pain, are. Admitting that ethics only happens in the empirical world is admitting that there is no ethics, because it surrenders the absolute necessity for ethics, free will. “In fact, if a human being’s actions insofar as they belong to his determinations in time were not merely determinations of him as appearance but as thing in itself, freedom could not be saved . . . .” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 85) Kant doesn’t just want to push a theory; he wants to save ethics. Thus when he says that “only rationalism of judgment is suitable for the use of moral concepts . . . ,” (61) he is not just taking a shot against empiricism on the grounds of not being universal; he is attacking it on the grounds of assuming something which renders ethics impossible.
But if, as Kant believes, our own experience is necessarily subject to the laws of nature, and thus to causality, can the denial of consequentialism really save ethics? Kant admits that, since natural law
unavoidably concerns all causality of things insofar as their existence in time is determinable, if this were the way in which one had to represent also the existence of these things in themselves then freedom would have to be rejected as a null and impossible concept. Consequently, if one still wants to save it, no other path remains than to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and so to its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself. (80)
III
Kant’s best known work on ethics, and the one always compared against Mill’s Utilitarianism, is Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. It offers his earliest and most concise work on ethical theory. In it he follows a method that appears closer to Mill’s. Rather than high theory, he begins from the simpler and moves up to the more complex. Thus his first section is titled, “Transition from Common Sense Knowledge of Morals to the Philosophical.” The following sections transition from philosophy to metaphysics, and from metaphysics to practical reason. Yet even there he cautions that “metaphysics must lead the way, and without it there can be no moral philosophy.” (Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals 6) Only later, in the Critique of Practical Reason, is the importance of this statement realized. For, according to Kant, the possibility of moral philosophy depends upon whether we can prove the freedom of the will, and so we must look to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before we know if ethics is possible.
In short, in the Critique Kant divides the world of knowledge, and of metaphysics, in two. The phenomenal world is the world of experience. It depends upon intuitions (sense-data), but also follows necessary a priori rules of reason, such as time and space (which do not exist as objects do, but only in reason and with intuitions of objects) as well as causality. The noumenal world, the world of reason free of intuition, is the world where the rules themselves exist in abstracto. This form of reason is the one subjected to scrutiny in the Critique of Pure Reason.
In the world of experience, which is guided by the law of time and thus causality (“insofar as their existence in time is determinable . . . .”), ethics is impossible. If that is the only world, if the only laws are the laws of nature, than ethics is impossible. However, for Kant there still remains the noumenal world. The world of experience is only the world of appearance, of things as they appear to us after we add our own a priori intuitions onto them (and so not as they are in themselves), even if we do so necessarily The noumenal world, on the other hand, is free of intuition, and thus free of the necessary laws that regulate intuition and make it possible. Where there is no experience, there are no laws of experience; thus, time, space, and causality do not apply (“to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, and so to its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself.”). If Kant, in other words, can ascribe the will’s nature, its driving force or ‘cause,’ to the noumenal world, the world free of natural law, then he can save ethics.
What is in this noumenal world, exactly? The noumenal world is free of intuition, thus of sense-objects. It is the world of pure reason, which “is found, when examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 393) These principles are the necessary preliminaries for experience and thus have the status of laws. Thus pure reason, free of intuition, contains universal laws and nothing else. Thus, if that which determines the will is to be found in the noumenal world, it must be a universal practical law. Such practical laws
must sufficiently determine the will as will even before I ask whether I have the ability required for a desired effect or what I am to do in order to produce it, and must thus be categorical; otherwise they are not laws because they lack the necessity which, if it is to be practical, must be independent of conditions that are pathological and therefore only contingently connected with the will. (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 18)
Any morality that is a possible morality, that is, is premised upon the freedom of the will, must be free of empirical conditions, that is, must be nonconsequentialist. Not because good consequences aren’t morally good and bad consequences aren’t morally bad, but because basing ethics upon consequences is basing them upon empirical conditions, and so upon the world subject to the law of causality, and so upon a world where ethical choice of any kind is impossible. Only a universal law, found in pure reason and completely free of empirical determinants, can generate a possible ethical law. Only following that right can be of ethical import; any and all ‘real-world’ consequences must be completely immaterial to the ethical value of an action. “[T]he sole principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the law (namely, from a desired object) and at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of.” (26) Anything that can be called moral must be a universal law; thus, the rule of morality is this: “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.” (28) This is the moral principle from which the rest follows. The idea of treating everyone as ends is the necessary result of accepting only those principles that are universal, that is, that apply equally to every rational being capable of the use of reason. And “[a]n action that is objectively practical in accordance with this law, with the exclusion of every determining ground of inclination, is called duty . . . .” (68) The only sort of motivation that can be completely free of empirical determining grounds is that of duty. Duty follows the law simply because it is the law. Not because other people say it’s right, or because good things will happen to those who follow it, or because it makes one a good person. One follows the law because it is the only law worthy of the name.
IV
There is one question that remains. Kant shows in his critique that any ethics based in the phenomenal world, the world of experience, is impossible. Freedom, if it can be found, can only be found in the noumenal world. Yet anyone who’s read the Critique of Pure Reason knows that, if anything, the noumenal world was found sorely lacking in general. Does Kant solve this problem? Can he actually prove that we are, as he says, “transcendentally free?”
No. At least, not theoretically. “I could not realize this thought, that is, could not convert it into cognition of a being acting in this way, not even of its mere possibility.” (43) In the antimony of causality, the idea a cause at the beginning, a truly free cause, is comprehensible only in the sphere of pure reason free of experience. The moment intuition is brought in, the rules of nature, including causality, are necessarily dragged along. That means there can be no actual concrete cognition of free causality, because cognition requires intuition. Thus, if asked, I could not give you one ‘real-world’ example of something without a cause. Yet, Kant argues, reason requires this sort of cause, for otherwise we reach a logical impossibility in the lack of a completeness of series. Thus, while one cannot prove free will as something which really exists, one also cannot disprove it, for “such a causality must be presupposed, although we are quite incapable of comprehending how the being of one thing is possible through the being of another, but must for this information look entirely to experience.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 252) That is the nature of an antimony; both sides end in a philosophical draw. It appears, then, that if one can find another ground for assuming free will, one that gives it an edge in some other area, free will can then at least be assumed over the alternative.
It is here that pure speculative reason gives way to pure practical reason in order to push free will over the edge.
it was also found in the Dialectic of pure speculative reason that . . . the same action which, belonging to the sensible world, is always sensibly conditioned – that is, mechanically necessary – can at the same time, as belonging to the causality of an acting being so far as it belongs to the intelligible world, have as its basis a sensibly unconditioned causality and so be thought as free. Then, the only point at issue was whether this can be changed into is, that is, whether one could show in an actual case, as it were by a fact, that certain actions presuppose such a causality (intellectual, sensibly unconditioned causality), whether such actions are actual or only commanded, that is, objectively practically necessary . . . . Now, this principle does not need to be searched for or devised; it has long been present in the reason of all human beings and incorporated in their being, and is the principle of morality. (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason 87-88)
The idea of the moral law is a universal law which determines our conduct in all actions, having the force as a law guiding the will the same amount of power as the laws of space and time have as laws of theoretical reason. The moral law, which Kant labels “a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is apodictically certain,” (41) certain as such because a moral law must as law necessarily have the description it does, requires free will to be conceivable. That is, in the practical sphere (the sphere of the determination of the will) freedom of the will is just as necessary as space and time are in experience. In the speculative sphere, space and time do not in themselves exist but exist still as necessary parts of experience, and thus as completely universal and completely valid, being necessary for objects of experience to exist at all. For there to be thought of an object at all, there must be time and space. Likewise, in practical thought of the will, for there to even be a conception of right and wrong, of morality, there must be the possibility of actions that can act in conformity with right actions and with wrong actions. The mere concept of morality as law, free of intuition and following only the rule prescribed by reason, requires a will equally free of intuition and thus of causality, and therefore free in the transcendental sense. “In the concept of a will . . . the concept of causality is already contained, and thus in the concept of a pure will there is contained the concept of a causality with freedom, that is, a causality that is not determinable in accordance with laws of nature . . . .” (48) Freedom, in the practical sense, gains reality in our minds. “It is therefore the moral law . . . [which] leads directly to the concept of freedom.” (27)
It is easy to err and misunderstand Kant at this point. It must be remembered he is not claiming that we have actually proven that we have free will, that we can act independently of all intuition. Rather, we have argued for the practical (practical, as in, regarding the action of the will instead of actual knowledge) necessity of something that we find in the noumenal world. “[T]hese are without exception to be counted not as knowledge but only as a warrant (for practical purposes, however, a necessity) to admit and presuppose them . . . .” (49) We cannot prove that the will is free theoretically, for that would require an intuition, which necessarily assumes causality and thus the non-existence of free will. But if one follows Kant’s philosophical system, where the world is split into appearance and the “things in themselves,” one sees that the possibility is opened up of going beyond “appearance” to a world where, if something is not provable to us with certainty, the possibility is at least present, and with it the chance is given to create a place for ethics in a world where such a thing should be impossible. “One can therefore grant that if it were possible for us to have such deep insight into a human being’s cast of mind, as shown by inner as well as outer actions, that we would know every incentive to action . . . , [we] could nevertheless maintain that the human being’s conduct is free.” (83) If you are a Kantian, the world of unlimited causes need not stop all ethics; you just have to be willing to go to another world, one we (literally) never see, in order to preserve it.
posted by Derek at 9:54 PM
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