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Summary Ethiek (Shafer-Landau) H12
- Vak
- Ethiek
- Instelling
- Universiteit Leiden (UL)
Summary of 6 pages for the course Ethiek at UL
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Ethics – Normative Ethics: Doing the Right Thing – Chapter 12 – The KantianPerspective – Autonomy and Respect
Is there anything wrong with slavery? This thought experiment (page 173) was put to
readers by an important twentieth century moral philosopher, Richard Hare. He presented
the story as a way to show that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with slavery. The
utilitarian says that the morality of slavery, like that of any other practice, depends
entirely on its results. In the picture Hare paints, slavery can be morally accepted. But
slavery allows people to be treated as mere things. This is precisely the Kantian objection
to slavery. Morality requires us always to treat a human being with the dignity they
deserve. We need to better understand why treating people as they deserve is so
important, and what it means, specifically, to say that we deserve dignity and respect.
The Principle of Humanity
In the course of his work, Kant identified a number of different candidates for the role of
ultimate moral principle. This formulation is widely known as the principle of humanity:
Always treat a human being (yourself included) as an end, and never as a mere
means.
When Kant spoke about humanity, he wasn’t thinking necessarily of Homo sapiens.
Rather, he was referring to all rational and autonomous beings, no matter their species.
Treating someone as an end is treating her with the respect she deserves. Treating
someone as a means is dealing with her so that she helps you achieve one of you goals.
While it often happens that people do treat one another both as an end and as a means,
one can’t treat people both as and end and as a mere means. Then a degree of respect is
missing. Kant claimed that we are each rational and autonomous, and that these traits
are what justify our special moral status. These two powers make us worthy of respect.
Humans are the only being on earth who can engage in such complex reasoning. Being
autonomous literally means being a self-legislator. You are not forced to act as you do, but
are free to choose your own path. Kant thought that our rationality and autonomy made
each of use literally priceless. No matter how valuable the object the value of a human
life exceeds it by an infinite amount.
The Importance of Rationality and Autonomy
Kant argues that rationality and autonomy support the dignity of each human being, and
that everyone is owed a level of respect because of these traits. This makes excellent
sense of a number of deeply held moral beliefs. Here are the most important of them.
1. It explains, in the first place, the immorality of a fanatic’s actions.
2. The importance of autonomy explains why slavery and rape are always immoral.
They are immoral because of their complete denial of the victim’s autonomy.
3. The principle of humanity easily explains our outrage at paternalism. It is treating
autonomous individuals as children.
4. Our autonomy is what justifies the attitude of never abandoning hope in people.
Because we are free to set our own course in life.
5. Many people believe in universal human rights. We have them because of our
rationality and autonomy. Human rights protect these powers at a very
fundamental level.
6. Our autonomy is what explains our practices of holding one another accountable
for our deeds and misdeeds.
7. Relatedly, most people believe that punishment, rather than conditioning, is the
appropriate response to serious wrongdoers. The importance of autonomy
explains why it is so objectionable to brainwash people, or to drug or torture them
into doing what we want.
,The Good Will and Moral Worth
Kant’s insistence on the importance of rationality and autonomy led him to a view of
intrinsic value that is very different from that of consequentialists. Kant rejected the idea
that happiness (or well-being in any form) is the ultimate value. Happiness has no value,
he said, if it comes as a result of wrongdoing. And the same goes for other possible
values. There is only one thing that is valuable and that is the good will.
The good will has two parts. It is the ability to reliably know what your duty is, and a
steady commitment to doing your duty for its own sake. Kant thought, first, that acting
from the good will is the only way that actions can be truly praiseworthy. Kant referred to
such actions as those that possessed moral worth. He also thought that acting from
such a motive is entirely and exercise of reason. Consider the first point on pages 178-
179). Kant’s second point, about the importance of reason in motivating worthy conduct,
is fairly complex. He thought that reason, operating alone and in the absence of any
desires or emotions, could do double duty. It could reveal your moral duty, and it could
motivate you to obey it. To have a good will is, first of all, to know where your duty lies.
Reason alone can tell you this. Indeed, for Kant, neither our wants nor our emotions play
any essential role in moral discovery. We must be able to determine what is right and
wrong by rational thinking alone, without the aid of desires or feelings. That’s because
Kant saw these as unreliable moral guides. Our emotions often lead us stray, says Kant.
They need to be guided by sound principles before we can trust them.
Further, and importantly, Kant thought that moral wisdom should be available to
everyone, regardless of his or her emotional makeup. All of us are rational. But our
emotions are not always under our control. Kant denied the claim, made famous by David
Hume, that our motivations always depend on our desires. Hume thought that beliefs
alone could never move us, and that we must want something before we will ever act. By
contrast, Kant thought that we could do things even if we didn’t want to do them, and
even if we didn’t think they’d get us anything we wanted. Anticipating Freud by a hundred
years, Kant argued that our motivations are hardly transparent. In fact, we can never be
sure that we have ever acted from a good will. Kant went so far as to write that dutiful
actions motivated by emotions or desires lack any moral worth. But those who overcome
a complete lack of interest and nonetheless offer help, not because they want to but just
because it is their duty to do so, will receive full moral credit.
There are two ways to interpret Kant’s message here. The first says that the presence of
emotions is enough to rob an action of moral worth. The second is more charitable. It
says that actions done solely from desire or emotion cannot possess moral worth, but
that some cases of mixed motives – cases in which the good will moves us to act, though
helped along by an emotional push – can yet have moral worth.
Five Problems with the Principle of Humanity
Despite its many attractions, the principle of humanity, with its emphasis on rationality
and autonomy, it not trouble free. There are five serious worries about the principle:
1. The notion of treating someone as an end is vague, and so the principle is difficult
to apply.
2. The principle fails to give us good advice about how to determine what people
deserve.
3. The principle assumes that we are genuinely autonomous, but that assumption
may be false.
4. The principle assumes that the morality of our actions depends only on what we
can autonomously control, but the existence of moral luck calls this into question.
5. The principle cannot explain why those who lack rationality and autonomy are
deserving of respect.
Let’s consider each of these problems in turn.
, Vagueness
There is no straightforward test that tells us how to apply the principle of humanity. But
the vagueness of the notion of treating someone as an end often makes it difficult to
know whether our actions are morally acceptable. Without a more precise test of when
we are respecting others and treating them as they deserve (i.e., as their rationality and
autonomy demands), the principle of humanity fails to give us the guidance that we
expect from an ultimate moral principle.
Determining Just Deserts
The second concern is about whether it is always appropriate to give people what they
deserve. Kant certainly thought so. Doing justice involves giving people their just deserts
– even if this is not going to benefit anyone. Sometimes this seems clearly right. Kant has
a partial reply to the problem of vagueness, mentioned just above. He offers us a test for
what wrongdoers deserve. But even in contexts of condemnation, Kant’s test – the
famous lex talionis, or eye-for-an-eye principle – is fraught with difficulties. In some
cases, we don’t know how to apply the principle of humanity, because it is unclear what
treating a person as an end really amounts to. A criminal’s rationality permits us to turn
his principles back on him, and do to him what he did to his victim. That is just what lex
talionis requires. These attractions account for lex’s broad appeal. However, lex talionis is
fatally flawed. Three reasons explain its failure:
1. First, lex cannot explain why criminals who intentionally hurt their victims should
be punished more than those who accidentally cause the same harm. Lex does not
allow for that, since the victims in both cases have suffered the same harm. We
could say that what criminals deserve is determined not only by the harm they
have done, but also by how blameworthy they are in bringing it about. But it
comes at the cost of abandoning lex. That’s because we are no longer required to
treat the criminal as he treated his victim. It also removes one of the great virtues
of lex talionis – that of offering precise guidance on how much criminals should be
punished.
2. A second problem with lex is that it cannot tell us what many criminals deserve.
Since sometimes there is no victim, lex offers no basis for punishment. Other
crimes may have victims, and yet lex offers no advice about their punishment. For
example, what to do with kidnappers?
3. Lastly, the guidance that lex provides, when it does prescribe a punishment, is
sometimes deeply immoral. Legal punishment is a state’s business, and we insist
that the state meet certain minimum moral standards. A state that rapes its rapist
is failing, miserably.
Yet these problems show that lex cannot be the whole story about justice, because lex
sometimes fails to give advice when it is needed, and sometimes gives bad advice. That
means that when lex gets it right, it does so because its recommendations agree with
those given by some more basic principle of justice. Homework: discover that principle.
Mercy is then a virtue and Kant’s position requires that we never indulge in merciful
treatment of criminals. Justice is very important, but these considerations should make us
wonder whether Kant was right to think that justice must always be done, no matter its
costs.
Are We Autonomous?
A third concern about the principle of humanity is that it is based largely on a
questionable assumption – namely, that we are autonomous. The Argument against
Autonomy explains why we could be wrong:
1. Either our choices are necessitated or they are not.
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