Inter Kant

Allison and Kant on Humanity

2012-01-28T12:45:00.003Z

In my last posting on Allison I looked at Chapter 7 of his commentary on the Groundwork that addressed Kant's formulas of universal law. In this posting I'm going to look at Chapter 8 where Allison moves on to a discussion of Kant's formula of humanity.

Allison opens the chapter by citing Kant's claim that "the will is a capacity to determine itself to act in conformity with [gemass] the representation of certain laws" and adds to it that what Kant here brings out is that rational beings set their own ends for themselves, a point that refers us forward to Kant's notion of autonomy although Allison, somewhat oddly, fails to draw this consequence. That the concept of moral obligation presupposes an end that is necessary in itself, is, however, something that Allison suggests Kant had a long commitment to, pre-dating even the composition of the Groundwork. However, the ends that are presupposed by the categorical imperative are taken by Allison to be ends only in a negative sense. What this means is that they are ends that are sources of constraint on the acts one can permissibly perform.

After opening with these claims about ends Allison moves on to more careful distinctions within the Kantian discussion of ends. Firstly, Allison looks at the difference between "objective" and "subjective" ends for Kant aligning objective ends with motives and subjective ends with inclinations. However Allison is also careful to point out that by "objective" ends Kant does not merely mean a source of reasons for action but also ends that are given by pure reason. Any end that is capable of grounding a categorical imperative must, on Allison's view, meet two conditions. It must, firstly, be objective in the sense of being given by pure reason, and, secondly, it must have a self-standing character.

Now the "end" that Kant takes to meet these conditions is that of "humanity" so the key question concerns what the notion of "humanity" consists in for Kant. This question is complicated by the fact that, in different texts, Kant contrasts "humanity" on some occasions with "animality" and on others with "personality". Christine Korsgaard appears to take the relationship between "humanity" and "animality" to be the central one but also to view the distinguishing feature of humanity to consist in a rather minimal capacity, namely, that of purely being able to set ends. By contrast, Allen Wood, who frames the distinction between "humanity" and "personality" as the central one, sees the capacity to set ends "through reason" as what holds together the capacities of humanity.

However Wood seems to take the reference to "reason" here to mean that Kant frames "humanity" in the Formula of Humanity in a way that involves no specific reference to morality (as fits his view that humanity is primarily a contrastive term with "personality" as the latter clearly does incorporate moral notions in itself). Wood's basic reason appears to be that the categorical imperative requires preserving and respecting rational nature in general, not just its moral function. However, as Allison rightly points out, this is beside the point since the issue is not what the categorical imperative requires but rather in virtue of what capacity "humanity" has the property of being an end in itself. Allison thinks that ambiguity on Kant's point might well have led Wood to adopt this view but it is not one that Allison can accept and his rejection of this view is one that I certainly endorse.

Another view of the "capacity" of humanity that Allison critically discusses is that of Richard Dean who identifies "humanity" with the good will. Dean's point is that Kant's argument leads to the conclusion that something is good in all circumstances only if its value is independent of inclination and that this is how Kant identifies the good will so the good will must be equivalent to the capacity of humanity. Allison regards this claim as based on a conflation of two distinct senses of end, namely "end" as something to be effected and "end" as something self-standing. The good will is an end to be effected (perhaps the ultimate such one) but it is not a self-standing end.

After canvassing these views, Allison takes instead the claim that Kant is making about humanity to consist in the view that it is the capacity to be moral that is identified by Kant with "humanity" and uses citations from the Critique of Practical Reason to help make this point. The mere capacity to set ends is described by Kant in the Metaphysics of Morals as having only "extrinsic value" (Ak. 6: 434) which appears to rule out Korsgaard's minimal view. However, what is problematic in Allison's identification of humanity with the capacity for morality is surely that it leaves Kant's view as a highly general one (and leaves out reference to what makes this capacity possible, namely, autonomy).

After going through the discussion concerning what the capacity for humanity consists in Allison moves on to looking at Kant's derivation of the formula of humanity which, he alleges, occupies only two paragraphs of the Groundwork. Allison views this derivation as having two steps. The first is that the possibility of a categorical imperative presupposes the existence of something as an end in itself and then gives an argument for elimination concerning what that something must be. The second step is to argue that we have good reasons to regard rational agents as ends in themselves.

The argument for elimination that accompanies the first step rules out objects of inclination, inclinations themselves and what Kant terms "things". Allison's account of the inclinations themselves indicates that we don't have to accept Kant's apparently more extreme views of inclinations to accept this claim. However whilst Allison appears to find Kant's argument by elimination convincing he does not uncover a specific argument for viewing rational beings as the appropriate "something" in the first stage of the argument which is why he turns to the second stage in order to uncover this.

There are three parts to the second stage of Kant's derivation according to Allison. The first part is the claim that human beings necessarily represent their own existence in this way so that it is a subjective principle of action (based on Ak. 4: 429). One of the points Allison stresses in presenting this claim is that when one sets an end, one makes it one's own end. Further, to take oneself as an end is to make the consequential claim that one cannot be regarded as nothing more than a means to some other end. So the unconditioned worth that Kant was after in the "something" lies in the end-setter rather than in any particular end that they set for themselves.

The second part of the argument for Allison moves beyond the "subjective" claim of the first part as it claims that every rational being necessarily represent their existence in this way so that it is an "objective" principle (Ak. 4: 429). Allison views this as making a claim for the objective validity of my conception of myself as an end in itself. Allison takes this to introduce a normative import to the discussion that he did not find present previously though it is unclear to me where he finds this import since he still does not uncover the source of the claim to reside in autonomy. The third part of the derivation for Allison is the translation into imperatival form of the principle that rational nature exists as an end in itself.

The final part of Allison's chapter turns to looking at Kant's uses of examples of application of the Formula of Humanity in the second part of the Groundwork. Since Allen Wood, amongst others, have argued that the Formula of Humanity has a status that is practically superior to that of the formulas of universal law, this is particularly interesting to do with regard to the Formula of Humanity. The same examples are treated with regard to this formula as were related to the formula of the universal law of nature previously and they are given in the same order.

Kant begins with the example of suicide and asks whether the maxim related to it could subsist together with the idea of humanity as an end in itself (Ak. 4: 429). In denying that these are compatible Kant points out that since human beings are not merely things they cannot be used merely as means, and this mere means requirement of the Formula of Humanity is here mentioned for the first time by Allison. Allison finds the application of this requirement in this case to be unclear since he is not sure what end humanity is here being used for. Further, Allison seems to think it is a reply to this argument of Kant's to say that if the self is the source of all value that it is also the source of its own value, a view that cuts against any serious understanding of autonomy and brings out again his failure in this chapter to consider it.

Allison's positive view is that Kant rules out the maxim underlying the case of suicide considered on the grounds that it involves an authorisation to withdraw from obligation, something that is the source of the "contradiction" Kant finds here and enables Allison to prescind from Kant's own reference to the mere means requirement. However the argument is not filled out by Allison and in leaving out the mere means requirement he seems not to support the positive sense of humanity very clearly here.

The case of false promising, by contrast, is one in which Allison can pull out the sense of the mere means requirement but only by conflating it with what Parfit has termed the "consent" requirement, namely by referring to the ability of the other to endorse the end embodied in the action. The discussion of neglecting one's talents appears not to refer to the mere means requirement to Allison but, given that he has seen the formula of humanity as giving only the basis for saying that certain ends should not be acted against and not a positive ground for any specific ends to be accomplished, he cannot see any basis for Kant's claim that reference to humanity should prevent neglect of talents. At least with regard to non-beneficence Allison's reading does partially work since the reference to ends one should not act against is here sufficient to strike down active non-beneficence but it is insufficient to produce a positive claim for beneficence.

In summary, then, Allison's chapter strikes me as problematic for two different reasons. Firstly, the identification of the capacity for humanity purely with a capacity for morality without identifying what this latter capacity consists in or what grounds it is insufficient. It ensures that the relationship between humanity and autonomy does not become clear. Secondly, and as a consequence of the first problem, Allison can give no persuasive account of the discussion of examples Kant gives in the second part of the Groundwork of the application of the Formula of Humanity. So whilst the discussion of the derivation of the Formula of Humanity is an intriguing addition to the secondary literature there are as many problems with Allison's account of humanity as he finds beset his predecessors views.

Philip Kitcher's review of Parfit

2012-01-24T15:37:00.001Z

Philip Kitcher has published a review of On What Matters in the New Republic and it is available here. The review is unusually long, as is fitting given the length of Parfit's book and it is divided into four parts. In the first part Kitcher responds to the popular conception of ethics as based, in some way, on religion which he uses to bring out the general reasons why philosophers tend to resist this assimilation. As Kitcher states, Plato was already suspicious of such a connection and posed some clear problems for anyone who wished to take religion as the basis of ethics. Not only is there such a rich tradition of philosophy seeking to set ethics apart from religion but, even given the reign of specialisation in contemporary intellectual life, ethics seems to be one area where philosophy contributes to the general cultural conversation.

Having opened with these general comments Kitcher introduces Parfit to New Republic's readers as the author of Reasons and Persons and points out that the new book will be intensively studied given the status that the earlier book gave Parfit. The second section of the review turns to some of the distinctive elements of On What Matters introducing, for example, Parfit's discussion of "reasons" and his search for a "supreme principle" of morality. After mentioning the formulation of the "supreme principle" that Parfit eventually reaches, Kitcher mentions that Parfit does not take this principle to be capable of deciding all ethical questions (which is hardly surprising). Parfit's search for the supreme principle takes place by means of assessing and bringing together the rival claims of consequentialism, contractualism and something called "Kantianism" though there would be rather a lot to say about the ways Parfit characterises the latter (and in this blog I have discussed in some detail a number of elements of Parfit's account).

Since the first volume seems to present the manner that Parfit sees the problem and already to invoke the tools by which he aims to resolve it, the question of the status of the second volume of his work is a pertinent one that Kitcher raises. It appears to have two central points, one of which is to state and respond to the views of a number of critics of the views espoused in the first volume, and the other of which is to explore the nature of Parfit's problem with naturalistic views of ethics.

The third section of Kitcher's review is where he begins to lay out reservations concerning the positions adopted in On What Matters. Whilst one central question concerns the success of Parfit's convergence between the three theories he takes seriously, Kitcher raises two other questions as ones he is more concerned with than this one. Kitcher's first question concerns the goal Parfit has adopted, in terms of assuming that the convergence between the three theories would have important practical consequences if established. The reason Kitcher appears to be sceptical about this does not strike me, however, as a good one. Kitcher's scepticism concerns whether the formulation of a successful theory of convergence with regard to the major traditions of ethical theory would really matter given that we would still have the messy task of making ethical judgments. But this seems to me to rest on a misunderstanding of the import of ethical theory. Surely no one would seriously contend that a successful ethical theory would remove the need for judgment? Anyone who thought this would have a very odd view not merely of ethics but of the relationship between general formulations and particular circumstances in relation to theoretical models. No theoretical model can "saturate" the terrain it describes which is why there are levels of generality within such models and one of the ways these levels are marked precisely concerns the need for judgments of application. So it strikes me as odd to think that the point of Parfit's endeavour would be the removal of the appeal to judgment (though if it is successful it should presumably guide the process by which we form judgments, it could not tell us exhaustively when and where we need to apply them).

The reason why Kitcher appears to think that this appeal to judgment is somehow an objection to Parfit concerns the way in which he understands the formulation of a "supreme principle". Kitcher, in appealing in a pluralist way, to the notion that many principles might be needed, appears to take the invocation of a "supreme principle" to be something that leaves behind diversity of considerations though this can hardly be held to be true of others, like Kant, who have searched for such supreme principles. Kant takes the "supreme principle" of morality to be the principle of autonomy but anyone reading about the categorical imperative would be aware that distinct formulations of it exist and that these formulations appear to pick out different ways in which action can be assessed. This point, like the one about judgment, appears to be based on an odd view of Kitcher's.

Kitcher's second objection concerns the nature of Parfit's appeal to thought experiments. Again Kitcher points to the need for readers, when reviewing Parfit's thought experiments to come to views about whether the experiments in question have been formulated well by Parfit and whether they support his conclusions. Kitcher argues that Parfit possesses "no standard of objectivity for provoking reliable responses" which appears again to mistake what Parfit is up to. The suggestion of a standard of objectivity that is separate or distinct from Parfit's conception of "reasons" strikes me as otiose but, further, the assessment of thought experiments, whilst difficult given how far they take us from our ordinary use of concepts, is very standard in a lot of contemporary ethical theory and it appears odd to strike at Parfit in particular for favouring it. Some of Parfit's critics on this score, such as Allen Wood, have resorted on occasion to such experiments themselves and it is hard to imagine moral theory proceeding without some version of them.

The real thrust of Kitcher's problem with thought experiments is, however, posed in a sharper way when he suggests that the experiments are "rigged" and that questions of life and death appear to rest upon them. In fact it is not obvious to me that Parfit's theories rest as solidly upon the appeal to thought experiments as this suggests as he usually uses them in order not to decide an issue but rather to sharpen the precision of a formula. Secondly, in taking them to be "rigged" Kitcher appears to have recourse to a distinct way of describing ethical dilemmas that does not involve important presuppositions and I find this hard to comprehend.

In his response to Parfit's criticism of naturalism Kitcher fastens on an apparent admission of the role of intuition by Parfit and appears to take Parfit to view intuition in an especially mysterious way, something again that seems to require us to think that the appeal Parfit makes to intuition is different in kind or more suspect than the appeal others have made to it. Again, this is difficult to comprehend. The sum of the problems raised in the third part of Kitcher's review is meant to lead one to the conclusion that Parfit's work lacks the potential to contribute to the broader cultural discussion of ethics with which Kitcher began but it is hard for me to see that he has succeeded in making this point.

The fourth and final part of Kitcher's review presents an alternative to the conception of ethical theory that Kitcher views Parfit as having presented. This alternative is presented initially on epistemic grounds with Kitcher again picturing Parfit's method in question-begging terms as apparently being an heroic attempt to generate ethical obligations ab initio (a view for which I find no support in my reading of On What Matters). In response Kitcher appeals to a kind of Aristotelian picture of beginning in the middle of things, by which he means not in the middle of common sense morality but rather from the morass of detail provided about human beings within the human, natural and social sciences. In other words, Kitcher, like Blackburn, adopts an essentially Humean picture of moral theory that sees philosophy as offering no more than a generalization of the results of investigations into "human nature".

Ethics is thus seen on Kitcher's picture as a form of social technology that developed by trial and error in humanity's natural history, an approach that he fails to see as having substantial problems in accounting for the apparently necessarily binding character of ethical obligation. This appears to be the basis of Kitcher's rather misguided resistance to searches for the "supreme principle of morality". Kitcher's review strikes me as misguided in the types of objections and problems it poses to Parfit and the way in which it is so misguided reflects a real divide within ethical theory, a divide between those who take the point of such theory to have a distinctive philosophical basis and those, instead, who would follow Hume in advocating a drastic diminution of the role of philosophy in intellectual life. Whilst I have voiced, and will continue to voice, many criticisms of Parfit's work, it seems to me that in relation to this divide, Parfit is on the right side.

Rawls on Natural Duty and Fairness

2012-01-23T17:38:00.000Z

My last posting on Rawls looked at the concluding part of Chapter V of A Theory of Justice. In this posting I am going to begin reading Chapter VI of Theory, a chapter that is focused on the twin topics of duty and obligation. The first two sections of this chapter return to a topic that was previously raised in sections 18 and 19 of Chapter I, namely the question of principles for individuals, a topic that I treated in relation to the earlier discussion in Chapter I, here.

The opening section of Chapter VI immediately refers back to Rawls' earlier discussion in Chapter I where principles of fairness and natural duty were outlined but differentiates the treatment now being offered by stating that the purpose of the present discussion is to show the basis of the claim that these principles would be chosen by individuals in the original position. Rawls begins with the question of natural duty (reversing the order of exposition adopted in Chapter I). The key "natural duty" from the standpoint of the theory of justice is supporting and furthering just institutions. There are two parts to this duty. The first part is showing that we comply with and do our share "within" just institutions assuming they exist and have reference to us. The second part is to establish such institutions where they do not exist though Rawls adds the rider "at least when this can be done with little cost to ourselves" which appears to be a kind of prudential limitation on the second part of the duty, one that Rawls does not assume requires justification.

The alternative to this principle of natural duty that Rawls considers is the principle of utility but adoption of this by individuals after the basic structure has been regulated by the two principles of justice is assumed by him to lead to an "incoherent" conception of right. The actions that would be mandated by the principle of utility would not cohere with that demanded by the two principles of justice and should there be an accidental convergence it would lack stability. Hence given that the two principles of justice are regulative of the basic structure it appears that principles for individuals should be congruent with them. This is the reason why Rawls describes natural duty in the way he does. There is still the question of whether the natural duty could not be sensibly qualified by individuals in accord with some general idea of costs and benefits but Rawls rules this out on the basis that the full complement of equal liberties have been guaranteed by the two principles so that there could be nothing further for individuals to bargain for.

In the previous chapter Rawls stressed the importance of public knowledge that an effective sense of justice applied across a well-ordered society. Such a public knowledge produces greater stability and undermines the temptation of free-riding. At this point Rawls differentiates between two kinds of threats to the stability of a system of justice. On the one hand there are self-interested reasons for free-riding that accrue from taking the share of general social goods to be available without requisite effort being needed for all agents. However, in addition to the self-interested way in which free-riding can be articulated, there is also a second type of threat to the stability of systems of justice. This second threat is what arises when people have reason to believe that others will not do their part in relation to the obligations that the system generates. This second kind of instability has a particular urgency when there appear dangers with complying with the demands of institutions. It is a general problem of assurance and is analytically distinct from the tendencies of self-interest as it can create problems even for those committed to principles of a just sort.

How does the assurance problem get responded to in a just system thus enabling it to substantially generate stability of the second sort? There has to be something voluntary about adherence to the institutions in question and this is best achieved by the propagation of natural duty as the key principle for individuals. One of the advantages of such a principle, by comparison with the principle of utility, is that it is simple and clear. However natural duty is not exhausted by the general commitment to just institutions as there are other natural duties in addition. For example, there is the duty to show a person the respect which is due to them as moral beings. In developing this natural duty we need to understand the aims and interests of others in relation to the standpoint of these others and, separately but related, we need to develop a general willingness of persons to do each other small favours and courtesies. The development of mutual respect has mutually beneficial consequences though Rawls neglects here an obvious chance to develop a more extensive account of respect such as appears in Kant due to this discussion (a discussion that really belongs to his theory of "rightness as fairness") being only of a very general character.

Other natural duties include the duty of beneficence that Kant, again, develops a more extended account of and which Rawls does here refer to. What is built in to Rawls' discussion of beneficence, however, is the general public quality of it as a natural duty that is required of us in terms of the assurance it gives us of the character of our fellow citizens. This reference to publicity is part of the general case Rawls makes that whilst the natural duties are not taken by him to be individual cases of a general principle that they are nonetheless all adopted for similar reasons.

Having made these remarks about natural duty, however, Rawls returns to what, following the remarks of section 8 of Chapter I, we can term the "priority problem" with regard to the relationship between distinct principles of natural duty. Rawls shows no evident path through this problem referring only to "certain procedures of aggregation" that are meant to enable us to take a larger view but only illustrating this (and not in this section) by reference to the problems of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal to which I will return in a later posting.

The remaining parts of section 51 are concerned with the relationship between a duty other things being equal (taken by Rawls to be equivalent to W.D. Ross' notion of prima facie duties) and a duty all things considered. A principle does not express a universal statement which always suffices to establish how we should act on Rawls' account but, rather, singles out relevant features of moral situations such that these features lend support to a certain ethical judgment. By contrast, when prima facie duties are invoked, we are, according to Rawls, deliberately restricting our range to only a certain part of a larger scheme of reasons. These general remarks are, to say the least, hardly helpful in resolving the questions raised by Ross and whilst Rawls concludes section 51 with an agreement with Ross that the Kantian distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is inadequate, this agreement on Rawls' part is not based on any kind of careful assessment of the Kantian distinction and nor is it obviously related to the overall question of the connection between prima facie duties and duties all things considered. This concluding part of section 51 is a disappointing discussion, particularly after the general account of natural duties.

Section 52 turns to an examination of the principle of fairness and Rawls opens the section with the bold claim that "all obligations arise" from this principle. Fairness is what mandates that cooperative ventures should involve similar acquiescences with regard to restrictions on conduct. Hence obligations arise only given that the right background conditions are secured. By contrast, unjust arrangements are a form of extortion so that consent to them is not of a form that can be said to really be binding on conduct.

However, it might be argued that assuming that the natural duties hold then it follows that there is no requirement for an additional principle of fairness. Whilst this has some merit with regard to the basic structure, however, it has none in regard to voluntary conduct of citizens in relation to each other. Rawls also distinguishes between obligations and duties on the grounds that they arise in different ways. So the better-placed members of societies are more likely to emerge as its rulers and this binds them more tightly than others to the scheme of justice. This form of being bound is what we can view as the imposition of "obligations" upon these citizens whilst "duties" refer to the more general and varied considerations that were adduced in section 51. Viewed this way it is in relation to the general principle of fairness that obligations are best understood as generated and regulated whilst duties are preferably understood as governed by the reference to natural duty.

Rawls fills out this distinction by describing promising as a form of conduct that is governed by the principle of fairness. Promising expresses a general intent to perform an action as an obligation voluntarily undertaken on the basis that when others give one promises there is a similar expectation that they will be fulfilled. This assumes certain general conditions of "normal" promising are met. When the practice of promising is just it assumes voluntary and stable conditions apply and these conditions are what make the practice a just one. But the rule of promising is not itself expressive of a commitment to fidelity since it simply, on Rawls' view, states a convention whereas the moral principle in question is that of fidelity, a principle that is based upon the principle of fairness.

Promising is, however, something that is done with a public intention of incurring an obligation and this is integral to it being governed by the principle of fidelity. We both want the practice that expresses such an obligation to exist and we expect others to be aware of our willingness to be governed by the obligation in question. So the practice requires mutual confidence to make sense. Such confidence and trust allow for mutually advantageous schemes of cooperation to develop. This is why the principle of fairness can be seen to be one that would be agreed to in the original position.

However it is interesting to bring out that it is an important consequence of Rawls' view of fairness that institutions do not, in themselves, mandate moral requirements. We have seen this in the case of promising as the rules of it are not equivalent for Rawls to the principle of fidelity. It is only by assumption of the principle of fairness that the latter arises, it cannot be assumed simply on the basis of the rules of promises alone but is rather what regulates these rules and gives them moral sense. So moral reasons are those which enable a judgment to be made that refers us to generic principles as governing our practices.

Parfit and Kant on the Greatest Good

2012-01-22T18:16:00.000Z

In my last posting on Parfit I looked at Chapter 6 of Climbing the Mountain, a chapter that still corresponded to part of the second of his 2002 lectures. In this posting I am moving on to Chapter 7 of Climbing the Mountain, a chapter that offers material that is not found in the second of the 2002 lectures.

Chapter 7 is concerned with the notion of the "greatest good" and enlists Kant in order to discuss it. Following Kant's discussions in the Critique of Practical Reason Parfit pulls out what he terms the "formula of the greatest good" which, in Parfit's formulation, reads: "everyone ought always to strive to promote a world of universal virtue and deserved happiness". The relation between virtue and happiness was explicitly set forth in the dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason as a way of seeing that "the good" is not homogeneous since it encompasses matters of real normative import and a demand of inclination. In the Critique of Practical Reason this leads to Kant formulating what he terms there an "antinomy" and which is resolved only by means of utilising the practical postulates.

Parfit's discussion abstracts from the account of practical postulates and the dialectic between the two elements of "the good" in order to present the "formula" as stating a goal we should aim to achieve. However this aim is one that it is necessary that Parfit distinguish from the classic one attributed to hedonistic act utilitarianism (HAU). The view of HAU concerns the maximisation of happiness and is understood by Parfit as "wholly telic" in concentrating entirely on promotion of a common end or aim. Some telic theories are also described by Parfit as "value-based" in the sense that they appeal to claims about the reason-involving goodness of what they tell us to achieve. This reference to an impartial reason-involving sense is built into Parfit's conception of "consequentialism".

Parfit also discusses the relationship between claims about what is good and what we ought morally to do distinguishing between theories that take "the good" to be fundamental and define what ought to be done in terms of it on the one hand from those that take the conception of moral obligatoriness to be fundamental and derive the sense of the good from it. Parfit affirms, however, a different view according to which neither of these terms is taken to be fundamental and takes them to be independent of each other. In taking such a stance, however, Parfit is departing from Kant as he goes on to acknowledge, since Kant views the notion of the "good" as determined by the moral law as he clearly states in the Critique of Practical Reason. This commitment of Kant to the priority of the right over the good is central to his resistance to consequentialism and is of no small importance.

Rather than addressing this point immediately Parfit prefers instead to look at some of Kant's other claims concerning goodness. So, for example, Kant makes the statement, at the very beginning of the Groundwork, to the effect that good wills have a form of goodness that is higher than all other kinds. Parfit converts this claim, following the logic of the argument of the first part of the Groundwork, into the classic formulation that we ought to try to have wills that are dutiful.

After presenting these two opening moves Parfit goes on to look at the claim with which he opened the chapter, to wit, that everyone ought to strive to promote the greatest good, a view based on the conception of the summum bonum. The point of reintroducing reference to this claim is to compare it now with the act consequentialist view that everyone ought always to try to produce the greatest amount of good. As Parfit states, it may seem that the act consequentialist view is close to what Kant is after when Kant discusses the greatest good. However since Kant's claim concerning the greatest good is one that can be translated back into the apparently more sober point concerning a world of universal virtue and deserved happiness, then it follows that Kant's conception, unlike that of the act consequentialist, is not a value-based view. Kant's view is ought-based, not value-based, and so has a different foundation to the act consequentialist view despite surface similarities of formulation.

Having distinguished Kant's view from that of the act consequentialists Parfit goes on to look at the relationship between Kant's claims about the greatest good and the formulas of universal law and humanity. It is clear from the pre-eminent status of the appeals to the other formulas that it is by following the moral law, understood as formulated in them, that the promotion of the greatest good will be best followed according to Kant. This seems an unexceptionable claim but Parfit conjoins to it the view that Kant is committed also to the suggestion that following the moral law is sufficient to give the happiness that their virtue would make them deserve and this is a clear error on Parfit's part. Kant makes no such assumption as this but only presents the much weaker claim that following the moral law would make one worthy of happiness, not that it will be sufficient to enable this happiness.

The reason why Parfit makes this mistake is due to the kind of concentration he has on happiness. Parfit is on sounder ground when he reports Sidgwick's remark that happiness is best taken as a second-order rather than a first-order end since taking it as a first-order end will often be self-defeating. This suggestion is mixed up by Parfit with an understanding of Kant's claim concerning worthiness to be happy but Kant is making no suggestion here of taking happiness to be an end in adopting the moral law (even a second-order end). Rather Kant is making the quite different point that it is only in making the moral law our chief guide in action that we become worthy of receipt of happiness, a point quite different to Sidgwick's.

Parfit is much more concerned with Sidgwick's claim than with Kant's quite different one and relates Sidgwick's claim to the need to follow the precepts of common sense morality (at least for the most part). Having made this point concerning the sense in which adopting happiness is not a first end requirement Parfit turns to assessing the claim bound up with this one concerning common sense morality. One way of understanding the connection between common sense morality and the promotion of happiness is by means of what Parfit terms the "marginalist" view. On this view we decide how much good an act would do by determining what difference it would make. So: "the good that some act would do is the amount by which, if this act were done, things would go better than they would have gone if this act had not been done".

This "marginalist" view can, however, imply some very implausible things. So if, for example, the actions of four people coordinated together are sufficient to save a group of others then five people undertaking this action is superfluous and if five people do join it would appear to follow that none of the five saved the lives in question. In order to avoid this consequence, we can appeal to the claim that it is what people do in conjunction that produces the right outcomes, a claim that Parfit terms the "share of the total view" so that "when some group of people together produce some good effect, the good that each person does is this person's share of the total good".

The "share of the total view" avoids the implausible consequence of the "marginalist" view and leads to ignoring the specific effects of particular actions in focusing instead on the way that actions accumulate to produce results. As Parfit mentions Hume shared a similar view, though Hume's conception is even wider in scope. Hume's view is termed by Parfit the "whole scheme view" and asks us to look beyond the specific acts that may, considered alone, have bad effects to the set of acts that are done at different times or by different people in order to assess the best effects. The acts that, considered in this set manner, have such effects are then the ones that we should regard as doing the most good. The appeal of referring to a view such as Hume's for Parfit is that it leads away from act consequentialism towards grounds for accepting general rules in accordance with their overall effects.

After making these claims, claims that require a more general notion of consequentialism than is involved in act consequentialism, Parfit makes a parallel move with regard to Kant. In considering Kant's writings concerning lying Parfit emphasises the point that Kant views lying as undermining humanity in making the source of right "unusable". This point, which would require sustained attention to the role of the discussion of lying (and promising) in Kant's philosophy of right, is used by Parfit to make the more minimal point that it appears that Kant's response to lying is part of a commitment on Kant's part to rejecting things that cause "harm" (a claim that can only be sustained with an unusually broad sense of "harm" being given here).

Subsequently to producing this reading of Kant's view of lying Parfit goes on to suggest a further way of aligning Kant's view with that of a form of consequentialism when he cites some fragments of Kant's in a rather tendentious way. In a lecture of 1778 Kant speaks of worthiness to be happy as consisting in the practical agreement of our actions with the idea of universal happiness (Ak. 28: 377). This is viewed by Parfit as equivalent to a form of hedonistic act utilitarianism but what is missed by Parfit when he makes this claim is any account of the status of "ideas" in Kant's practical philosophy. Absent this the parallel with utilitarianism is plausible but once it is present it shows that Kant is far from taking as an actual consequence of virtuous action an increase in overall happiness.

Parfit is concentrated on viewing the ideal world that Kant understands through the summum bonum as stating a single ultimate end rather than aligning two distinct forms of good and also being placed in a dialectical situation precisely due to the lack of congruence between these two forms of good. Parfit does, in conclusion, understand that the reference to the summum bonum includes a conception of desert that is distinct from the formulas of the categorical imperative. Parfit's chapter unexpectedly breaks off however, just after he has stated he will show Kant's view of desert to be mistaken.

This chapter introduces new material and the account of the greatest good in Kant provides Parfit with opportunities to attempt a form of assimilation of Kant's view to consequentialist ones but only due to failing to refer back again to the centrality of the priority of the right over the good that Parfit cited earlier in the chapter.

Allison and Kant on Universal Law

2012-01-21T21:52:00.000Z

Due to being away traveling in the earlier part of this month it is a little while since I last blogged. My last posting on Allison's book on the Groundwork was about a month previous to this one and concerned chapter 6 where Allison discussed rational agency and the general notion of imperatives. In this posting I will comment on the seventh chapter where Allison gives his account of the two formulas of universal law as they appear in the second part of the Groundwork, and which includes an account of the examples Kant gives there.

The first issue Allison raises in this chapter concerns the claim Kant makes at Ak. 4: 421 that all "imperatives of his duty" can be "derived" from the "single imperative" of universal law that Kant unequivocally identifies with the categorical imperative formula of universal law. The word translated as "derived" is abgeleitet and Allison asks whether Kant here means that the test of the categorical imperative concerns whether all generally recognised duties can be derived from it or whether he has something weaker in mind. Allison also raises a second immediate question concerning Kant's use of the notion of "nature" in the formula of the law of nature and asks what function this reference serves for Kant.

In addressing this second question Allison turns, unsurprisingly, to the account in the Critique of Practical Reason, of the "typic" of pure practical judgment where Kant gives a general discussion of the notion of practical schematism. Here the notion of natural law is described as serving as a "type" or schema of the general notion of law in the process of formulating imperatives. In the second Critique this leads to the formulation: "Ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to take place by a law of nature of which you were yourself a part, you could indeed regard it as possible through your will" (Ak. 5: 69). This is indicated to be substantially the same as the formula of the law of nature in the Groundwork by Allison though he does little to use the "typic" to make clear the means by which the formula of the law of nature is justified.

The point that comes out by use of the typic is that actions that cannot meet it are, by virtue of this, morally impossible. However, rather than focus on this point, Allison chooses instead to return to the question of what is meant by the claim that imperatives of duty are "derived" from the reference to the law of nature. This question leads Allison to think of the reference to the law of nature as one that is intended to be "fertile" in the sense that it enables a discussion of how lists of duty are supposedly meant to arise. Despite formulating the alleged task of the reference to the law of nature in this way, however, Allison reaches the conclusion that the most that it can do is indicate the impermissibility of a course of action under a given maxim. In other words, it provides a test of moral permissibility rather than providing for specific determination of duties.

Allison also defends this reading of what can be accomplished by the reference to the law of nature against other views, principally against the claim of Stephen Engstrom that fundamental duties of justice and beneficence can be directly derived from this reference. Essentially the reason why Allison disagrees with Engstrom appears to be that Allison does not think that the reference to universal laws of nature is sufficient to arrive at a generally acceptable conception of what is rationally universally required.

In turning to Kant's use of examples, which appear after the formulation of the reference to universal laws of nature, Allison notes some points about Kant's procedure. Amongst other things, it is important on Allison's view to see that the examples include courses of action that run against generally accepted duties. Also the examples are meant to bring out a form of contradiction that will arise in willing the course of action in question.

The first example is that of suicide but important in considering it is the understanding that the maxim here is one of taking shortening one's life to be acceptable if its longer duration promises more ill than agreeableness. So the maxim is one that rests upon an appeal to inclinations. However Allison takes it that the contradiction that arises from this maxim is a teleological one but also views Kant's argument here as unsuccessful. One of the points that Allison makes here is that there is no way of formulating the argument concerning suicide in terms of a simple reference to universal law simplicter. This seems to entail that Allison views the incorporation of reference to universal laws of nature as requiring some sense of teleology though it is far from clear why this should be so. Indeed, Allison himself accepts that taking a strongly teleological view of nature seems a rather large step in order to show a problem with reference to inclinations in a maxim concerning suicide and yet still thinks that Kant requires this. It appears to me that Allison's treatment of this example is marred in failing to justify the necessity of seeing Kant's treatment of it as having to involve assumptions that are far from evidently required.

Moving on to the example of false promises Kant invokes specific circumstances to make this example a strong one. In the case in question there is a reason why the false promise has a real attraction for the agent which is that they are in clear difficulties. Given these difficulties there is a need for something like the appeal to the device of the typic to test the maxim in question. The maxim then emerges as one in which a promise is to be made that I do not intend to fulfil. It is only within the device of the thought experiment that the problem that such a maxim involves can be clearly stated. It is within the device that a contradiction emerges, not within the maxim simply as such.

Allison considers the type of contradiction that is meant to emerge from the false promising case, discussing whether it is a strict logical contradiction or, as Christine Korsgaard has suggested, a "practical" contradiction. Whilst the former is suggested to show that the contradiction would render the institution of promising impossible, the latter is rather supposed to show that there is a problem with the end of the agent. Allison favours the latter view though he does not think there is a single form of contradiction underlying all of Kant's examples. In this case, however, Allison's reading leads to the view that it is the "intention qua universal law" that generates a contradiction.

The third example concerning the development of talents is treated by Allison as including two different lines of argument, one that concerns a teleological contradiction and the other a practical contradiction. The former, however, if it is involved at all, is one that runs into difficulties of the same sort that would apply to reading the suicide example in this way. The latter, by contrast, has the difficulty that it could simply amount to a case concerning prudential rather than moral reasoning. The way that Allison avoids the latter is by reference to a conception of "true needs" that are essential to finite rational agency and that would be compromised if talents were not developed. However this leads Allison to reading the third example in a way that is weaker than is standard since it produces the outcome not that we are required to cultivate our talents but only that we not adopt a maxim of completely neglecting them. The fourth example concerning non-beneficence is ruled out by Kant in terms of universal laws of nature but this is again viewed by Allison in terms of "true needs" of finite rational agents. This is again thought to produce a form of practical contradiction in the maxim in question.

After treating Kant's four examples Allison moves on to the decidedly tricky ground of the counter-examples that have been stated in the literature to Kant's account. There are two types of such counter-examples: false positives and false negatives. False positives come in two versions, those based on attributing to an agent a highly specific maxim, on the basis of which a proposed course of action could pass the universalisability test and a second set that don't involve such specific reference. The first type of examples are used in particular by Allen Wood. In these cases the high specificity of the examples is meant to evade the reference to universality. In response to these examples Allison stresses the point that increasing the specificity of the maxim has the consequence of narrowing the scope of universalization without evading the universalizability requirement. The more general problem that such a procedure of false positives is meant to reveal is, however, that actions can be presented under a variety of descriptions and not all of such descriptions exclude universalisation. In response Allison stresses the point that use of such false positives depends on a very specific conception of what "maxims" are, namely, identifying them with intentions or actions rather than general determinations of the basis of conduct.

The second type of false positives, by contrast to the ones based on very specific formulations of maxims, tend to concern what Korsgaard has termed "natural" as opposed to "conventional" actions. Such "natural" actions don't require reference to institutions (such as "promising") and, in not requiring this, are allegedly more open to response by invocation of false positives. So the example of killing babies who disturb one's sleep does not appear to run into an immediate contradiction of either logical or practical type once universalised. The strategies of dealing with these types of example that Allison mentions are not entirely successful as responses. Korsgaard, for example, responds to them by stating that they involve reference to some further end than that immediately suggested by the maxim and that this further end is one that cannot be secured consistently with willing the maxim itself (a kind of "practical" contradiction suggestion). However that requires clear assumptions concerning these further ends and is thus open to the kinds of objections that Allison has mentioned when treating the example of cultivation of talents.

The second strategy in responding to these types of false positives is to invoke the contradiction in the will test rather than the contradiction in conception test. Barbara Herman, for example, favours this response. However, this has the peculiar consequence that the maxim concerning the killing of babies appears now to only violate an imperfect rather than a perfect duty, which is surely false. The third strategy, promoted by Onora O'Neill, is to say that the examples in question presuppose practices that would undercut the agency of those they victimise (which appears to imply some kind of reference to humanity and/or autonomy). Allison takes this strategy to be the best on offer but to be implausible as a reading of the requirements of reference to universal law alone. In making this point Allison argues that the formulas of universal law are only intra-subjective and not inter-subjective. What is meant by this is that the formulas of universal law, on Allison's reading, test only the compatibility of an agent's maxim with the same maxim considered as a universal law whilst an inter-subjective test relates the maxim to its possibility of endorsement by other rational agents. Since Allison views the reference to universal law to only involve the former and not the latter form of universalizability he is correct to see the strategy of O'Neill as not persuasive though the case for seeing the formulas of universal law in this restrictive way is not seriously made in this chapter.

After treating false positives, Allison moves on to false negatives that are used against Kant. These are cases of maxims that would be generally agreed not to be morally objectionable but which, it is argued, would fail Kant's test. They include what Herman terms "timing" problems where we state maxims that include references to doing things at given times (such as playing tennis on occasions when the courts aren't widely used). Again, Allen Wood has invoked many of these cases. As with the false positives the real question being raised by these examples concerns the nature of the description of the maxims that is appropriate. Again, Allison responds by distinguishing maxims from intentions. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant describes maxims as "propositions that contain a general determination of the will having under it several practical rules" though Allison indicates that the nature of the claim that practical rules fall under a maxim is ambiguous. It is ambiguous as the rules could be seen as deduced from the maxim or that the maxim could be seen as providing the normative criterion for the rules but Allison sees the second as correct.

On this ground Allison revisits the alleged problem with the tennis example and points out that the real question concerns the end for the sake of which the agent is engaging in the activity in question. This accords with his point that we should be focusing not on specific intentions when we consider maxims but instead on general determinations of the will. Maxims are thus viewed as containing grounds that are found in agent's practical interests not in their specific intentions.

However, even on Allison's account there are still some problems left unaccounted for. Assuming with him that maxims are best tested by practical contradiction tests and that universal law formulas are seen in terms of intra-subjective validity, it follows that the example of the killing of the baby that disturbs one's sleep, appears not to be ruled out by reference to universal law. Since this is so it follows that Allison will need a stronger account of Kant's other formulas than he gives for the formulas of universal law if Kant's procedure is to be robust enough to rule out maxims that it would appear clearly counter-intuitive to leave undisturbed.

The 12 Key Postings on this Blog in 2011

2012-01-01T13:49:00.001Z

I opened last year with a summary of the best postings from each month of the year that had just closed and have decided to open this year's postings the same way. Amongst other things it enables a sense to emerge of how the blog develops over 12 months, in terms of trends of interest at different times of year and an indication of which topics have attracted or should have attracted wider engagement.

January:

A month that lacked any clear focus in postings last year but which did include a report on the Netroots conference I attended and which attracted some considerable interest from others who were present so I'd like to recommend this posting to anyone who wasn't there who might like an indication of what the conference concerned.

February:

A quiet month in terms of postings but included a detailed description and response to the announcement of the philosophy panel in the so-called "research excellence framework". This posting provides important details on those involved in the panel and is worth consulting by anyone in the UK who is likely to have their work judged in due course.

March:

This was the busiest month of the year in terms of postings, which ranged in focus from discussions of the original version of John Rawls' notion of the "original position" to reports on campaigns to keep philosophy alive at Greenwich and Keele universities. Perhaps the most philosophically interesting posting, however, was the first of two that responded to an early Rawls paper on distributive justice.

April:

A fall-off in quantity of postings followed the height of March, partly due to a difficult personal situation during this period. During the course of this month I began blogging my way through Rawls' Theory of Justice, something far from finished by year-end! One of the early postings on this topic that emerged this month is the first one on Rawls' view of utilitarianism which I would recommend.

May:

A small number of postings, mainly focused again on Rawls but, towards the end of the month, I also laid out a sustained defence of the notion of open access publishing and journals which, I think, merits perusal.

June:

A month with a large number of postings on a variety of topics from a response to the New College of Humanities to the beginning of a series of postings on Derek Parfit's new book On What Matters, responses which are on-going on this blog. However, despite the beginning of the responses to Parfit occurring during the course of this month, I think the more important posting during the month concerned Rawls again with a piece on what is involved in constructing the original position that is, I think, one of the best of the year by far.

July:

Postings during this month divided between responses to Rawls and Parfit with, however, the opening of some on Kant's Groundwork. One of the postings of this month succeeded however in attracting a fair amount of attention and this was my response to Simon Blackburn's review of Parfit's book which you can find here.

August:

This was a month with a lot of postings on a very varied range of subjects ranging from a reply to Nelson Potter's reading of the first part of Kant's Groundwork to some opening discussion of John Skorupski's book The Domain of Reasons. The most visited posting of the year was posted this month on the topic of the wrongness of prostitution but I would prefer it if readers looked instead at the first of two postings that respond to Skorupski and his conception of "Critical philosophy".

September:

A slight fall-off in the number of postings after the output of August. Postings again focused on topics as disparate as the annual report on the UK Kant Society conference and a response to the exhibition on Ford Madox Brown held in Manchester. However the response I set out to a profile of Derek Parfit in the New Yorker both served to informed readers of what that profile says and to indicate some additional sides to Parfit himself.

October:

Postings during the course of this month included further replies to Nelson Potter's reading of Kant's Groundwork and a posting on a conference I attended in Romania on cosmopolitics. The month ended with a posting on the account Derek Parfit gives to treating persons as ends during his 2002 Tanner lectures.

November:

A month in which the number of postings increased significantly again and ranged from the beginning of a series of postings on Henry Allison's new book on Kant's Groundwork to some new postings on Rawls. Perhaps the highlight of the month though was a report on Barbara Herman's account of moral worth in Kant.

December:

Final month of the year involved responses to Allison's book on the Groundwork and Parfit's work. Of the Parfit postings the second on his account of treating persons as ends looks at how this developed in his early version of On What Matters which he called Climbing the Mountain.

Parfit and Kant on Respect and Value

2011-12-31T20:36:00.000Z

In a recent posting on Parfit I looked at his treatment of respect in his 2002 lectures. In Chapter 6 of Climbing the Mountain Parfit returns to this topic and, in the process, extends his discussion. As in the 2002 lecture the chapter opens by pointing out that the Formula of Humanity has been read by some primarily in terms of treating persons with respect but Parfit indicates that such a requirement is not action-guiding. Further, Parfit dissents from Allen Wood's focus on "expression" of respect since no given "expression" of respect is required in terms of treating persons with respect. Parfit does concede that Kant specifically describes some vices as indicative of disrespect but, as he points out, the Formula of Humanity is not meant to cover only some wrong acts and not all wrong acts involve disrespect in the manner that the vices Kant discusses do.

When moving on to the specific notion of respect "for humanity", Wood is on stronger ground against Parfit since the requirement for such respect is somehow related by Kant to the notion of what "humanity" itself consists in. Parfit's objections to this turn principally on indicating that Kant often makes remarks (about lying for example) that we may well find it difficult to accept but this is hardly conclusive evidence against the need to count the respect requirement as part of the meaning of the Formula of Humanity.

In assessing the claim Kant makes concerning the "dignity" of humanity in the Formula of Humanity Parfit arrives at the question of the relationship between the right and the good and mentions Rawls' famous claim that the former has priority over the latter. In responding to this point Parfit mentions the idea of things being good in what he terms a reason-involving sense. Something is "good" in this way if it has a property or feature that would, in some situations, give reasons to respond to these things in certain ways. In tying the notion of the "goodness" of this sort to properties or features of situations Parfit ensures that the goodness in question is not what Christine Korsgaard would term a "final" good since its relationship to situations makes it dependent upon them. Further Parfit adds the claim that many such forms of good have a "value" and adds, somewhat confusingly, that the things, and not the "value" they possess, can be promoted.

This claim about "value" turns into a discussion about events since it is the events that can, apparently, be promoted. Parfit also indicates that he is committed to an "actualist" view of such events which means that possible acts/events are good as ends when they possess intrinsic features that give us reasons to want them to be actual. Such a view does not claim to account for goodness of types that do not belong to events. Since Parfit appears to follow Scanlon in taking a teleological theory of ethics to be one according to which only acts and events have intrinsic value he does not assume that an actualist view is equivalent to a teleological one.

After making these claims Parfit now arrives at a different account of respect to that involved in the requirements of the Formula of Humanity. This is in terms of respect that applies to things we value in a way that merits the appellation of "respect" but in which it is, again, the things themselves and not the respect attached to them that is the basis of the value the things possess. As examples here Parfit indicates the attitudes that are displayed towards the nation's flag or the oldest tree in a region since these things cannot be used in ways that would tarnish the value attached to them. Respect, in this sense, is a manifestation of a right kind of attitude to a thing but is not intended by Parfit as a form of goodness though the acts that are mandated here can be seen as having an instrumental kind of value.

Parfit next turns to the "value" of human life, a value that Scanlon sees in terms of a kind of respect but which Parfit refuses to view as involving a respect that is distinct from a kind of "promotion". The reason why this move is made is not entirely clear though it has something to do with Parfit's rejection of an absolutist attitude towards suicide since Scanlon views the question about suicide as having to do with a respect for the autonomous decision of the person contemplating such an act. The reason why Parfit tends towards a similar conclusion here as Scanlon is due to the claim on Parfit's part that the kind of value that human life has is to do with a relationship to the requirement of rational consent, which Parfit earlier derived from the first part of the Formula of Humanity.

After mentioning these matters Parfit returns to considering Kantian claims about dignity and mentions how Kant has consideration for three different kinds of ends. Ends that are to be effected are instrumental ends and relate to the hypothetical imperative and these types of end are distinct from "existent" ends which latter are represented by persons. However the notion of such an "existent" end is something distinct from an end-in-itself for Parfit.

The analysis of Kant that Parfit offers involves the claim that a good will is an end we ought to achieve so he tends to assimilate it to the general claim about ends to be effected without, in so doing, making clear how the good will is distinct from a merely instrumental end. Similarly Parfit talks of the realm of ends as a good to be effected, again without making clear how it is nonetheless distinct from an instrumental end. Finally, Parfit describes Kant's notion of the summum bonum as a good we should promote (without distinguishing such a claim from one concerning maximisation).

Turning from these claims back to the status of persons as possessed of dignity Parfit claims that such a status applies to all persons but, since it does, it does not demarcate a kind of goodness. So the treatment of them in certain ways is something that has to be recognised but not on account of any evident value they possess.

The next stage in Parfit's discussion is to look at the relationship between rationality and value for Kant and Parfit views rationality as partly an end-to-be-effected since we can develop our rationality. However Parfit shows little understanding of what Kant might mean by rationality since Parfit equates rationality quite simply with problem-solving capacities. Since, on such a construal, Parfit can find little merit in claims about rationality per se, he instead focuses on a conception of moral rationality.

Having made all these distinctions Parfit then returns to the question about the relationship between the right and the good and denies that Kant affirms the Rawlsian view since it turns out that Kant thinks that some "goods" should be promoted. Since, however, Rawls also takes it to be the case that there are "primary goods" and yet affirms the idea of the priority of the right over the good, I think it can be clearly seen that Parfit's discussion is not a reply to Rawls. Further, since Parfit systematically conflates different kinds of ways ends might be thought of as to be effected and says remarkably little about the notion of the hypothetical imperative, his discussion in this chapter is seriously incomplete.

Allison and Kant on Rational Agency

2011-12-23T12:21:00.000Z

In my last posting on Allison's commentary on the Groundwork I looked at Chapter 5 which was a loose collection of material roughly relating to the concluding sections of Groundwork I. In this posting I am going to look at Chapter 6 which, conversely, is more tightly focused but is somewhat preparatory to a serious focus on the argument of Groundwork II.

In this chapter Allison is looking at Kant's account of rational agency and how it relates to his description of imperatives. One of the problems that Allison has posed insistently since the opening of his commentary concerns why Kant's argument did not move simply from the discussion of common moral cognition in Groundwork I to the "deduction" of the categorical imperative in Groundwork III? The basic reason that this chapter opens with is that Kant needs to establish the absolute necessity of the supreme principle of morality and that this is the central task of Groundwork II. However there is also a second question about Groundwork II that concerns its internal structure and the apparent multiplicity of formulas of law that it gives. Like Paul Guyer, with whom he otherwise differs, Allison takes the view that the formulas are parts of a progressive description that Kant is giving in Groundwork II, the description, according to Allison, of the concept of finite rational agency.

The account of rational agency opens, according to Allison, at Ak. 4: 412 where Kant speaks of how only rational beings have the capacity to act according to the representation of laws as opposed to simply acting on these laws themselves. What kind of law is this? Allison considers the argument that it is a moral law and adduces two factors in support of such a view: firstly, Kant describes only the categorical imperative (among practical principles) as a law and, secondly, since maxims are freely adopted by agents this has the virtue of placing freedom at the heart of Kant's account. However Allison decides against this reading and prefers the view that what is meant by "law" here is, rather, objective practical principles (both moral and instrumental).

The key point about the reference to laws in rational agency is, however, that it introduces the notion of the "will". Objective principles as necessitating for wills are commands of reason and the formula of their commands is an imperative (Ak. 4: 413). Once we have this notion of an imperative we can divide the genus of this idea into its sub-species of hypothetical and categorical. To command categorically is to command independently of any given end.

Allison reviews the contrast Kant draws between two forms of hypothetical imperative in the Groundwork, distinguishing, as he does there, between imperatives of skill and pragmatic imperatives. Further Allison states that hypothetical imperatives are all grounded in an analytic principle with regard to willing, a principle stated by Kant at Ak. 4: 417: "Whoever wills the end, also wills (insofar as reason has decisive influence on his action) the means that are indispensably necessary to it that are in his power". This statement is described by Allison as the "grounding principle" (GP) of hypothetical imperatives but it is notable that it does not contain any sense of inclusion of an "ought".

Two conditions are introduced on the apparently analytic statement GP by Kant which are that the agent must have knowledge that the end in question could not be attained apart from a given course of action and that the agent must fully or completely will the end in question. As Allison points out, the second of these conditions is important given that it is all too common for agents not to fully will to attain a given end. On the basis of these further conditions Allison fills out the "grounding principle" of hypothetical imperatives further than Kant explicitly did and arrives at what he terms GP1. This has the form: "If A fully wills E and knows that M is indispensably necessary for E and M is in its power, then A will M".

However there is still a problem with how we move from GP1 to the statement of the hypothetical imperative given that the latter contains an ought-operator and the former does not. Normativity will require some form of prescription which has yet to be stated. As Allison indicates, however, this element of prescription is often not explicitly stated in a law as when a simple traffic law states what one must do, it does not also say that you ought to do what you must do. Ought-propositions are addressed to finite rational agents and such agents also require an understanding of how ends relate to means. If an agent simply thinks an end in relation to means they have a hypothetical connection between the two that stands under the assumption of desiring the end in question. It is the importation of this that brings in the ought-operator.

What Kant takes to be analytic is thus not hypothetical imperatives themselves according to Allison but rather the practical propositions that correspond to them. Since the volition of an agent is presupposed in the statement of a hypothetical imperative and GP1 describes the means of attaining them then this is sufficient to account for the possibility of such imperatives. However, in addition to the generic description of such imperatives Thomas Hill has further argued that there is a general form for all hypothetical imperatives that can be expressed as the Hypothetical Imperative, of which specific imperatives are given examples. It could be taken to abstract from given specific ends in favour of the general way in which instrumental end-setting can be given. Allison rejects this idea though he does so very swiftly without examining the details of Hill's argument and the swiftness of this makes his rejection unconvincing.

Key to the notion of an imperative is constraint so that accounting for an imperative is to describe the grounds of constraint it imposes. With hypothetical imperatives the constraint is comprehended in relation to the end set but categorical imperatives are ones that command, in their unconditionality, move beyond this type of constraint. The necessitation of such categorical imperatives is not grounded in any given volition. However the generic possibility of categorical imperatives is not the province of the argument of Groundwork II but, instead, of Groundwork III.

Given this point Allison moves instead to looking at the derivation of the categorical imperative that is carried out in Groundwork II which culminates in the statement of its formula at Ak. 4: 420-21 and which is glossed in terms of an ought-operator that refers to consistency of maxims in relation to universal law. In the Groundwork I argument the universal law formula was grounded on the relation of imperatives to the good will and the conformity of imperatives to the good will was a sufficient reason for rejecting anything that failed to conform to universal law. The content of the law was filled by reference to the pre-given maxim's of the agent.

In Groundwork II, by contrast, the derivation of the categorical imperative is argued by Allison to follow from analysis of the concept of an imperative with the law being the source of the constraint on volition that must be operative in an imperative. The necessity that is built into the imperative is also assumed to be grounded on the reference to law in general and determinate content to be removed from the law. This leaves us with the simple conception of conformity to law as such. However, the general worry with this argument can be said to have the form that, whilst apparently stating something purely formal, it arrives at a principle with content and that the means by which this is done is unclear. Allison's response refers to the unconditionality of the statement of the law as that which provides us with a general possibility of content. Or, it does so "just in case" the agent takes their maxims to be willed also as universal laws. Key to the whole chapter has been the simple statement that rational agents act according to their representation of laws and the demand that an unconditional imperative provide prescriptive force independently of reference to ends.

Allison, Kant and the Conclusion of Groundwork III

2011-12-22T20:58:00.000Z

In my last posting on Allison I described the argument of his fourth chapter and in this one I am moving on to his fifth chapter. Whereas the fourth chapter had a relatively tight focus on two topics, the nature of maxims, and the characterisation of moral worth, the fifth chapter, by contrast, takes on a range of topics that are really only united in being all addressed in the final sections of the first part of the Groundwork.

The first part of Allison's discussion concerns three propositions that are stated in Groundwork I and the difficulty that the first of these propositions, whilst required, is not directly indicated by Kant with the result that a hermeneutic problem has arisen with regard to it. The "standard" view of it is that this first proposition amounts to the assertion that an action has moral worth if and only if it is performed from duty alone. However, some have called this reading into question since Kant indicates that the third proposition follows from the first two and it is not obvious, if the standard reading is accepted, how this takes place. Allison mentions three different interpretations of what this first proposition consists in prior to giving his own view concerning it.

On the first view, identified with Freudiger, Kant's first proposition states that duty presupposes subjective motivation but this requires that supplementary material also be added in order to make the third proposition follow from the first two so Allison rejects this contention. The second view, identified with Dieter Schonecker, is instead that the first proposition should be read as stating that an action from duty is an action from respect for the moral law. However, Allison rejects this claim on the grounds that it requires reading material into the text at this point that is not introduced until later. Finally Jens Timmermann's proposal is mentioned to the effect that the third proposition should be read as saying that an action that coincides with duty has moral worth if and only if its maxim produces this by necessity. However Allison thinks that this reading requires reference to a principle of non-contingence and that this is far from obviously equivalent to Kant's sense of "necessary".

In contrast to these views Allison argues that Kant's first proposition should be read as stating that a good will under human conditions is one whose maxims have moral content. One of the reasons for adopting this view is that the claim about possession of moral content would give some sense to the questions about non-contingency with which Timmermann was concerned.

Kant's other two propositions are explicitly stated in Groundwork I and the second is to the effect that actions from duty have their moral worth not in the purpose they aim to achieve but in the maxim according to which they are decided upon. So the moral worth of actions is based on the principle of volition that was at work in willing them, not on the object of their action. This proposition relates back to Kant's earlier argument that the goodness of a good will does not reside in what it accomplishes.

Kant's third proposition states that duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law and here Allison takes some trouble unravelling the nature of Kant's appeal to the notion of "respect" arguing that effectively two different notions of "respect" are stated by Kant and occasionally conflated in his treatment. On the one hand, there is the notion of "spectator-respect", a third-person pro-attitude towards persons, whilst, on the other hand, there is "agent-respect", a notion that involves consciousness of standing under the moral law. The long note Kant adds concerning respect at Ak. 4: 401 is also set out by Allison as containing eleven distinct claims. Kant here opens with acknowledgement that the reference to respect might appear obscure but undertakes to indicate reasons for its introduction including the contention that respect is a specific feeling that is not based on sensuous nature but instead on rationality in some sense. What is immediately recognised as a law for oneself is recognised with respect but the normative force of the law is not grounded on sensuous feelings. The feeling of respect is taken, by contrast, to trump all feelings of mere self-love though the argument of the Critique of Practical Reason that it involves direct humiliation is not here stated. The sense of the law as something self-imposed is here intimated in Kant's argument for the first time. Spectator-respect involves marvelling at how someone else is capable of incarnating the law in their conduct.

After outlining the account of respect Allison moves next to Kant's derivation of the moral law in Groundwork I. The representation of the law determines the will in the sense of providing it with a sufficient reason to act apart from any regard for a result. One of the reasons for this is that the will has had removed from its analysis any impulses that could arise from obedience to any particular law. All laws that are based on impulse have specific content that presuppose an end as the basis of their normativity so in excluding them Kant is left with a law that has its normative ground solely in itself.

Allison takes the derivation of the universal law in Groundwork I to be closely connected to the earlier discussion of the concept of a good will. Conformity to the law is a necessary characteristic of such a will. However the law that is stated now specifically builds in a requirement that maxims be willed as universal laws. Bruce Aune has famously objected to the derivation of the universal law on the grounds that Kant simply moves from a general argument for universal law to the specific one involving maxims which Allison presents as a move from a descriptive to a prescriptive principle. Maxims provide content to an otherwise empty notion of conformity to universal law and this is how prescriptivity is introduced into the law according to Allison. This principle enables one to test the permissibility of maxims rather than being, as is often thought, a self-standing generator of duties.

In conclusion Allison looks at Kant's final paragraphs of Groundwork I which concern the apparent "natural dialectic" which common human reason is said to be drawn into when it considers moral questions. This leads Kant to refer to the need for philosophy, a point that contrasts rather vividly with his treatment of dialectical questions in the Critique of Pure Reason which were thought to arise from philosophy. However Allison is unconvinced that a genuine dialectic is introduced here by Kant and, if there is one, it would have to be between empirical and pure practical reason though Kant seems not to take the conflict between these as dialectical.

Joe Saunders Reviews Allison in KSO

2011-12-19T18:17:00.003Z

The latest piece in Kant Studies Online is a review of Henry Allison's book on David Hume, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise and it can be found here.

Parfit and Kant on Treating Persons as Ends (II)

2011-12-13T22:12:00.000Z

In a recent posting I looked at how Parfit discusses the Formula of Humanity's declarations against treating persons merely as a means in his 2002 lectures. Now I want to turn to looking, by contrast, at how Parfit's account of this topic is set out in Climbing the Mountain, the first book-length form of the work that eventually became On What Matters. The material from the 2002 lectures that I have been looking at in recent postings on Parfit is developed in Climbing the Mountain into three chapters, two of which expand on the discussions given first in the first of the 2002 lectures, and the last of which introduces topics that were not part of the first of the 2002 lectures at all. So it will require 3 postings to look in full at the way the treatment of the Formula of Humanity is presented in Climbing the Mountain.

Chapter 5 of Climbing the Mountain replicates and expands the discussion of the element of the Formula of Humanity that concerns treating people merely as a means and opens with material that is essentially the same as in the first 2002 lecture. This includes distinguishing between treating people as a means (meaning just using someone's abilities, activities or body) and treating them "merely" as a means (viewing them purely as an instrument or tool). However, an objection is mentioned from Frances Kamm who took this understanding of treating someone merely as a means to be too weak since, on this account, it would appear sufficient for a slave-holder not to be said to be treating someone merely as a means if he allowed the slaves to rest during the hottest part of the day. Parfit takes this objection seriously though it is far from clear to me why he does since, after all, treating someone as a slave is prima facie to treat them merely as a tool (as Aristotle recognised clearly). After all, if a tool is essential for a task one wants to perform then you don't act in such a way as to break it so the slave-holder in the example is merely a prudent tool-owner, not someone who is failing to treat his slaves merely as a means.

Parfit, however, affects to take Kamm's objection seriously and re-formulates the mere means principle so that it states not just that it is wrong to treat anyone merely as a means but, in his second formulation of the principle, that is wrong to treat anyone merely as a means "or to come close to that" (apparently as a way of responding to Kamm). So the slave-holder only "comes close" to treating someone merely as a means if they are sufficiently considerate to allow them to take time off work during the hottest part of the day. As already indicated I find this concession utterly unnecessary.

After beginning in this confusing way Parfit moves on to a negative claim involving what kinds of concerns would rule out the idea that our treatment of someone was not to be correctly viewed as treating them merely as a means. This restrictive negative construal indicates that we are not treating someone merely as a means if our treatment of them is either a) governed or guided in "sufficiently important ways" by a relevant moral belief or concern or b) we do or would relevantly choose to bear some great burden for this person's sake.

The first of these ways of preventing some treatment of someone as not being subject to the charge that we are viewing them merely as a means is treated with some care by Parfit. So, for example, if a slave-holder doesn't whip his slaves merely because he is aware that this would give him a sadistic pleasure then this does not show that he is not treating the slaves merely as a means, an odd point given Parfit's apparent earlier allowance of Kamm's flawed objection. Part of the point of raising this odd case is, however, to suggest that it is not always obvious if we have a case of the first type at hand (since, apparently, if the slave-holder wasn't whipping the slaves due to some "belief" in their worth that would exculpate him!).

The second way of preventing something being viewed as treating a persons merely as a means does not only involve taking on great burdens for someone else as these burdens also have to have sufficient moral relevance to the acts being considered. The introduction of these qualifiers is meant to sharpen the way Parfit has distinguished between treating a person simply as a means and treating them merely as a means. Treating someone as a means is viewed by him as only referring to our intentions whereas, by contrast, treating someone merely as a means depends not only on this but also on underlying attitudes and policies (akin to how some have viewed the Kantian idea of a "maxim").

After reinforcing this distinction Parfit next points to an ambiguity in the notion of treating someone merely as a means since it could refer either to attitudes or to actions and he views the application of the notion to actions as something that is more difficult. In making this point Parfit introduces the example of the egoist who saves a child from drowning but only with the aim of being rewarded. The point of introducing this example is to state that whilst the attitude here is a wrong one, the action is not. However, understanding the principled basis of this distinction proves complex as becomes clear when Parfit discusses ways of incorporating reference to it in one's general account of the mere means principle. So, incorporating the distinction, in reference to the case of the egoist just considered, might lead us to introducing a third restrictive condition on evaluation of what kinds of things would not merit the charge of treating someone merely as a means.

The way that would go would be to give the formulation that we don't treat someone merely as a means if we know our acts won't harm the person in question. However, as Parfit uses an imaginary case to show, this way of framing an exemption from treating someone as a mere means is pretty problematic since it would seem to allow conduct short of actual harm even though it was motivated entirely by egoistic considerations and included no reference to benefiting someone and that appears odd. So it might well be safer, rather than trying to add this third restrictive condition on the evaluation of the action of the egoist saving the child, to instead regard this action only as one that lacks moral worth.

This leads Parfit next to a third formulation of the mere means principle so it now states that it is wrong to treat anyone merely as a means or to come close to that, if our act will also be likely to cause harm to the person. This is another puzzling feature of Parfit's argumentation, however, since stating that the act of the egoist is one that lacks moral worth is to state something quite different from saying that their action is wrong and yet this amendment is introduced as a way to indicate that treating someone merely as a means is not a distinctively wrong-making manner of treating them and this simply does not follow from his argument.

Parfit next moves to the stage of trying to give a unified treatment of the Formula of Humanity by tying together the mere means principle with the Consent Principle that he earlier located as expressed in the first part of Kant's formula. The restrictions on the application of the mere means principle included reference to conduct governed by a relevant moral belief or principle and the Consent Principle is now taken to be such a principle and hence to play the role of the first way of restricting the application of the Mere Means principle to evaluation.

Parfit next introduces the same "trolley" examples that were given in the 2002 lecture and which I discussed here. As in the 2002 lecture the point of introducing these trolley examples is to argue that the sense of "consent" in the Consent Principle is not actual consent. However, after making this argument, Parfit now adds some additional considerations that were not present in the 2002 lecture. These involve a potential objection to his argument that trades on a different understanding of the mere means principle to that which Parfit himself has given. This different understanding is expressed in what Parfit terms "the standard view" which states: "if we harm people, without their consent, as a means of achieving some aim, we thereby treat these people merely as a means, in a way that makes our act wrong".

Parfit objects to this "standard view" not least because it misidentifies what may be happening in harming people as a means since we may not be treating these particular people as a means and, even if we are, we may not be treating them merely as a means. But, most importantly for Parfit's own discussion, even if we are so treating them, this may not be sufficient for it to be said that we have acted wrongly. So you might harm someone (as in self-defence) without treating them as a means. Secondly, we might treat someone merely as a means on the standard view without evidently having done something wrong as when you cause harm to someone to save someone else (who is not yourself).

Parfit next considers some typical claims that have been made about treating people merely as means as when Onora O'Neill and Christine Korsgaard highlight coercion and deception as treating others merely as a means. However, in response, Parfit points out that if I prevent someone from killing me by giving them a false impression of what I have done or am going to do this seems insufficient for the act in question to be viewed as wrong. Korsgaard also makes a point about free-riding pointing out that wrong actions are often such in that they only work due to the assumption that they won't form a general pattern of behaviour. However, as Parfit points out in a Bad Samaritan case I am not treating someone merely as a means if I walk on by ignoring the injured party so the wrong-making characteristic of this action has not been pulled out by application of the mere means principle (which, thus, cannot be identified simply with the generalised injunction against free-riding).

The point about the Bad Samaritan example, on Parfit's construal, is that the person responded to in the way indicated is treated not as a mere means but rather as a thing (hence not as a person at all). This may well indicate a different kind of wrongness to that of treating someone merely as a means and a much more serious moral failing thus may be involved here (although Parfit does not, having made this point, return to Korsgaard's point about free-riding).

In the conclusion of this chapter of Climbing the Mountain Parfit returns to the distinction between regarding people merely as a means and treating them in this way. Treating someone merely as a means is viewed by Parfit in a very restrictive sense, however, since he regards a gangster who buys a cup of coffee merely because it would be too much trouble to steal it as treating the vendor merely as a means. This is a case, however, of acting in a way that lacks moral worth but it is far from obvious that it means treating someone merely as a means (it may just involve treating them simply as a means). The introduction of this flawed example is meant to pave the way to a further consideration of the third way Parfit formulated the mere means principle and includes a further treatment of harmful means in which harm is regarded as something that ought not to be caused except if it is the least harmful way to achieve an aim and, given the goodness of the aim, the harm caused is not disproportionate.

In considering this amendment to the third mere means principle Parfit points out that we have no obvious guidance for how to consider disproportionate harm. However, whilst this is a fair point, Parfit over-plays it since he takes it that the amendment proposed would rule out even mild forms of harm, something hard to square with the point about proportionality.

Parfit's general aim in the chapter is surprisingly negative. It consists in a general claim to the effect that the mere means principle is insufficient to characterise an action as wrong (though it can define an attitude as wrong). This is in accord with the treatment of the principle that was given in his 2002 lecture but the chapter of Climbing the Mountain works harder to establish this conclusion without, however, being obviously persuasive.

Parfit and Kant on respect

2011-12-12T15:27:00.000Z

In my last posting on Parfit I looked closely at how he uses thought experiments in the first of his 2002 lectures, the lectures that present the core origin of his book On What Matters. In this piece I'm going to address the remainder of that first 2002 lecture where Parfit looks at the topic of respect.

Up until this point Parfit has concentrated on dividing the Formula of Humanity into two sub-parts, one of which relates to consent and the other of which concerns the reference to not treating others as "mere means". However, as Parfit points out, others have looked at the Formula of Humanity instead in terms of respect for the worth of humanity and this reference to dignity or worth appears particularly important in the Doctrine of Virtue. This leads Parfit to formulate a "respect principle" that simply formulates this demand for action in relation to respect for the dignity or worth or rational beings. However, after so formulating this principle, Parfit differs from Allen Wood's treatment of it as Wood appears to believe that respect is not a state of mind and hence does not relate to attitudes. Parfit, by contrast, takes the respect principle to cover both attitudes and acts.

The major question concerning the respect principle, however, is what application of it would involve. Here Parfit differs from Kant's own sense of what appears to be involved in respecting humanity given that Kant indicates that such an attitude would indicate that suicide is generally wrong. Part of Parfit's disagreement with Kant is only an indication of the refinement which Kant showed in practice in discussing cases of consideration of suicide since Kant did indicate that the Stoic attitude towards suicide might not be blameworthy. However Parfit also broadly suggests that Kant's understanding of what an attitude of respect might involve is not necessarily reliable. This latter, stronger, point, is, however, not articulated very clearly in terms of how Kant's "going wrong" is itself theoretically grounded and what other grounds might be adopted in preference.

Similarly, when Parfit disagrees with other views of respect he is somewhat cavalier in his treatment. Citing Thomas Hill's view that respect is most indicative of the value of rationality Parfit just assumes that the type of rationality Hill here means is something purely theoretical and thus easy to reject, a rather questionable and unlikely assumption.

The final section of the first lecture turns, by contrast, to Parfit's generic contrast between types of theories of practical reason reiterating the by now familiar contrast between desire-based and value-based theories and affirming the latter against the former. Unlike monistic theorists, however, Parfit affirms a plurality of goods including the sense that some things are good for their own sakes which is what enables him to say that his value-based theory is a "wide" and not a "narrow" one. Having drawn this contrast Parfit returns to some of the examples discussed in my previous posting in order to argue that desire-based theories have more problems with them than his favoured value-based theory would have.

However a second aspect of Parfit's review of the cases in question is a suggestion that Kant's "consent principle" may conflict too strongly with common sense morality and that other principles than consent surely matter to us. Finally, Parfit indicates that the Formula of Humanity is not the best principle to appeal to in order to determine what is wrong but that the Formula of Universal Law is to be preferred to it, a conclusion that, whilst at odds with much contemporary Kantian writing, does conform to Kant's own strong statements with regard to universality. This is where the first 2002 lecture ends and, in subsequent postings on Parfit, I'll look at how the concluding considerations of this first lecture are refined in the subsequent texts leading up to the publication of On What Matters and, indeed, in On What Matters itself.

Allison and Kant on Maxims and Moral Worth

2011-12-11T15:22:00.001Z

In my last posting on Allison I discussed his initial account of the "good will" in Chapter 3 of his commentary on the Groundwork. In this posting I am moving on to an account of Chapter 4 of the commentary where Allison talks about 2 topics, the Kantian account of maxims on the one hand, and the dispute over the meaning Kant gives to "moral worth", on the other. The latter discussion expands upon some of the remarks about duty with which Chapter 3 closed.

The first part of the discussion in Chapter 4 on maxims opens with an examination of the two definitions Kant gives of the term "maxim" in the Groundwork. Key to these definitions is the view that "maxims" are "subjective" principles. Allison subsequently points that, in the Critique of Practical Reason (Ak. 5: 79), Kant also states that maxims presuppose interests and that interests rest on incentives. Further, in the Critique of Practical Reason, "incentives" are presented as subjective determining grounds of the will whilst an interest is defined there as "an incentive of the will insofar as it is represented by reason" (Ak. 5: 79).

Maxims are ways of thinking and there can be a general orientation of the will that indicates its disposition to adopt maxims of certain sorts. They are the proper objects of moral deliberation and assessment and are related by Allison to a view of how deliberation takes place on a Kantian view. The generic account of deliberation includes a distinction between different forms of consciousness and self-consciousness but the key thing about these is that, in terms of practical deliberation, maxims are part of the spontaneity of an agent. When there is reflexive awareness of maxims then they become taken as guides for action.

Allison distinguishes three functions of maxims. Their first function is in moral deliberation where we examine maxims which requires their explicit formulation. By contrast, in moral assessment, we have to respond to the problem of Kant's account of the opacity of motivation. Allison argues, however, that Kant highlights such opacity only at the level of determination of the purity of motivation. Even spur of the moment decisions are choices made by agents and involve rational commitments. This point leads to the third level of discussion of maxims, which concerns their relationship to rational agency. What is crucial, on Allison's account, is that Kant's theory of rational agency requires that intentional action refer to some maxim even without requiring that there always be complete certainty about the nature of the maxim in question.

After going through the account of maxims, Allison turns to the objections that have been made to Kant's view of moral worth. One of the objections has concerned the relationship between duty and sentiment, in the name of more sentiment-based views. More radically, some argue that emphasis on duty is alienating (as Bernard Williams appears to have thought), a view that refers back to the traditional Schiller objection to the argument of Groundwork I. Allison mentions a number of possible responses to these objections, and, in particular, the more radical of them. The first response referred to is the one that was made by Paton and emphasised the view that Kant is practicing a "method of isolation" in the argument of Groundwork I. This argument has been taken further by Barbara Herman who takes Kant to be making not a general point about inclination but only a specific point concerning the alteration of the attitude of one person (as in the case about the sympathetic person who acts eventually only from duty). However, as Allison states, it is far from obvious that this is a sufficient reply to the Schillerian objection.

The second reply to objections given is the one formulated by Richard Henson and discussed in some detail here. Henson argues for a view he terms the "fitness report" model of moral worth in which the enjoyment of duty does not lessen its moral worth as long as the sense of duty is also present but this view is taken by Henson not to be the representative one given in the Groundwork where, instead, he found there to be a 'battle citation' model given which is essentially close to the argument that Schiller objected to. Not only is this so but, Allison argues, Henson's positive model reflects an empiricist view of agency.

By contrast to these two responses, Allison gives a third one in considerably more detail. This is the view argued for by Allen Wood which distinguishes acting from duty from possession of a "good will". Allison objects to the suggestion that someone with aversion or apathy to moral demands could be said to have a good will though this is in accord with Wood's own statements. However, unlike Wood, Allison stresses the need for self-constraint in following one's duty as there is always some temptation to act contrary to duty. Wood is also accused by Allison of failing to note the difference between taking duty to be a direct motivating factor and seeing it instead as an underlying commitment to do what morality requires. For Allison a maxim's moral content is evidently part of the maxim which leads him to the view that adoption of a good maxim is a reflection of possession of a good character.

Allison's positive view of moral worth appeals to his conception of the "incorporation thesis", a thesis he famously located in a passage from Kant's Religion (Ak. 6: 24). On this view it is not the case that an incentive or desire can of itself provide us with a reason for action as such a reason is only given if the incentive or desire is incorporated into our maxim. Unlike with Henson's conception of overdetermination, Allison's view of the incorporation thesis does not take the will to be determined but it does involve seeing it as having determining grounds. When one adopts a maxim one also incorporates an incentive into one's reasons on this view. So you can act with inclination but from duty. However, as the previous chapter ended without a full enough view of moral worth emerging so this chapter ends without a full enough view of the incorporation thesis emerging and Allison promises to return to giving a fuller account of the latter later in the work.

Allison, Kant, and the Good Will

2011-12-09T11:59:00.001Z

It's been a little while since my last posting on Henry Allison's book on the Groundwork. In that posting I addressed some of Allison's remarks on Kant's relationship to the previous traditions of moral philosophy. The discussion of that relationship closed the first part of Allison's book and the second part is concentrated entirely on the interpretation of the first part of the Groundwork. The second part consists of three chapters, looking at different aspects of the argument of Groundwork I and in this posting I'm going to look at the first of these, Chapter 3, in which Allison concentrates in particular on Kant's discussion of the good will.

Chapter 3 of Allison's book is devoted entirely to the first thirteen paragraphs of Groundwork I which deal with the topics of the good will, Kant's "teleological" argument and a discussion of acting from duty. Allison's chapter is divided between these topics, beginning with the account of the good will. Kant's account of the good will involves the specific claim that it is the only thing that is good "without limitation" (Ak. 4: 393). Partly this argument is negative, in terms of showing the limitations of other things that might be deemed "good". However, Kant also makes the positive point that the good will possesses the characteristic of having "absolute worth" and Allison follows Allen Wood in taking the "higher worth thesis" to be logically independent of the "good without limitation thesis". To claim that the good will has absolute worth tells one something about the degree of its goodness whilst claiming that it is good without limitation, by contrast, tells one about the kind of goodness it has.

The claim about the good will's absolute character, however, does commit Kant to the view that it is the condition of value of all other goods, according to Allison. This is part of the way Allison makes sense of the distinction Kant makes between what has a "price" and what possesses "dignity" (where the latter is "beyond" all price). In many cases, particularly with regard to pleasure, the claim here is not difficult to see since pleasure is evidently possible with regard to almost anything so in itself it is too indeterminate to hold as a measure of value. This is why Kant talks about being "worthy" of happiness.

However, Allison is careful to point out that despite claiming that the good will is what is good without limitation that this does not entail that the good will is equivalent to the "complete" good. Allison rather identifies the latter with the "highest good" (though, in so doing, he is failing to note some of the distinctions involved in the discussion of the latter in the Critique of Practical Reason). This argument is not, in any case, made explicit in the discussion of the good will in the Groundwork. It is, though, clear enough that a world in which the good will was capable of having effect would be a morally preferable one to one in which it was not so capable.

The possibility of the good will having an effect is also at work in how Allison understands the goodness of the good will since he determines this to consist not in an occurrent condition but rather in possession of a dispositional trait. In making this claim he follows the hints Kant drops that the good will is to be understood in terms of the possession of a certain kind of character. The character involved would be one of a general orientation towards the moral, based on principles rather than sentiment.

Allison's opening account of the good will is followed by an investigation of the four paragraphs of Groundwork I where Kant refers to teleology and which many commentaries have failed to address. Kant's discussion of this is prefaced by the mention that there could be sceptical doubt about the very possibility of the "good will". In addressing these doubts, on Allison's construal, Kant develops a kind of polemical reply to the views of Christian Garve, to the effect that there is some sense in which nature has provided reason to human beings as part of a superior means of self-preservation. On this view there is something prudentially (and, ultimately, eudaemonistically) good in human possession of reason.

Kant replies to this suggestion with some indications of why reason is far from being able to meet this requirement of also providing those possessed with it the advantages suggested. Not only does reason not make it easier to attain ends of self-preservation, it also complicates matters by multiplying the types of ends we strive after. Allison also mentions a relationship of the discussion in Groundwork I to the account of historical teleology Kant gives in his Idea of Universal History. Both the earlier essay and the Groundwork agree that reason is not something that makes mechanical possession of happiness easier but rather something that replaces the ends of instinct with other types of end.

The final part of Allison's account concerns Kant's analysis of acting in accordance with duty. Having a good will is not, on Allison's argument, sufficient for one to act from duty. The discussion of the relationship between acting from duty and moral worth is a controversial matter, however, as some of the recent postings on this blog attest to. Allison analyses five paragraphs of Groundwork I in terms of how they relate to these questions.

Here are included some of Kant's famous examples, including that of the shopkeeper who does the right thing, not because it is right, but purely from prudential interests. Kant also here considers cases of doing the right thing from inclination rather than from duty and Allison points out that there is an important similarity between acting in such a way and acting purely prudentially since, in both cases, the action that accords with duty is not undertaken for its own sake. The difference between them, however, is that those who have a sympathetic disposition that leads them, in some almost immediate sense, to do the right thing, do deserve a kind of moral praise that the merely prudential behaviour does not merit. This does not, however, mean that such behaviour is equivalent to that which has true moral worth, not least because the inclination is quite capable of simply leading to beneficent actions that in fact could even conflict with morality. Kant does, though, still mark an important difference between such attitudes given that he is capable of arguing, as he does in the Doctrine of Virtue, that there is an indirect duty to cultivate sympathetic feelings.

The case of the person who loses their sympathetic inclination and yet nonetheless does the right thing is, by contrast, meant to draw out the true source of moral worth is not resident in the immediacy of sympathetic inclination but rather in a relation to duty. Whilst Allison's view of these examples has a character that is more sympathetic towards them than some others it is also clear that his account is foreshortened and fails to address some of the problems others have raised. Further, the discussion in Chapter 3 is essentially introductory of Allison's response to the argument of Groundwork I and there are two more chapters devoted to its argument. Subsequent postings on Allison's book will look at these later chapters, which will enable a more considered view of Allison's account of moral worth to be evaluated.

CFP on Global Taxation

2011-11-24T16:21:00.001Z

The Journal of Applied Philosophy has a call for papers for a special issue on global taxation that is due to be co-edited by three important writers in the area of global justice. They are Thomas Pogge, Tom Campbell and Gillian Brock, the last of whom I also reported had a special issue of Global Justice devoted to her textbook on the same topic. The call for papers is reproduced below:

Concerns over climate change, global recessions, financial volatility,
health deficits in poor countries, world poverty, and economic injustice
have all resulted in global taxation policy proposals. These include
proposals of carbon taxes, currency transaction taxes, air-ticket taxes,
and of reforms governing tax havens and disclosure requirements. Such
initiatives are currently enjoying serious analysis, attention and, in
some cases, implementation success.

While issues concerning national taxation have long concerned
philosophers — invoking core questions about the legitimacy of governments
and their appropriate functions and about the nature of freedom, coercion,
and property rights — the issue of global taxation has not received
anything like the same attention. Through a special issue of this journal,
we aim to remedy such neglect.

Some of the questions that the issue may address include:

1)       What moral justifications can be offered for global taxation?

2)       Who should be taxed? Should some individuals or countries be
exempt? Should there be global taxes on businesses and multinational
corporations?

3)       What should be taxed? What arguments favour taxing consumption,
wealth, income, speculation, trade, sales, natural resources, or a host of
other potential tax bases?

4)       It seems important to ensure that governance arrangements
concerning taxation (including matters of collection, disbursement of
revenue, and other decision-making) be accountable. Is there a special
problem of accountability at the global level?

5)       What entity(ies) should implement or enforce global taxation
policies? If these are to be transnational entities, what would be the
source of legitimate authority for them to do so? Would this authority
conflict with state sovereignty?

6)       How (if at all) do implementation or feasibility issues affect
the desirability of various tax proposals?

7)       Do arguments about global taxation shed light on some of the core
concerns in political philosophy, such as the nature of property rights,
freedom, coercion, interpersonal obligations, the legitimacy of authority,
or appropriate governance of collective affairs?

We especially welcome papers that move discussion of global taxation
topics in new directions.

The guest co-editors of the proposed volume will be Gillian Brock
(Auckland), Tom Campbell (CAPPE, Australia), and Thomas Pogge (Yale).

The Journal now invites submissions of papers for this special issue.
Submissions should be sent as an email attachment to jap@hull.ac.uk in a
form suitable for blind review. The maximum length of submissions to the
Journal is 8000 words. Please mark the email subject heading: ‘For Global
Taxation Special issue’.

The deadline for submissions for this special issue is 15 January 2013.

Any queries about the proposed special issue can be directed to Gillian
Brock: g.brock@auckland.ac.nz

Rawls and Alternative Views of Justice

2011-11-21T19:49:00.001Z

In my last posting on Rawls I looked at his response to "common sense" precepts of justice. There we discovered some reasons why "common sense" precepts are at the wrong level of generality to serve as primary principles of justice. However, Rawls concludes Chapter V of A Theory of Justice by considering two other alternatives to his argument for the two principles as the right ones to be adopted in the original position. In section 49 he addresses "mixed" conceptions of justice and in section 50 concludes with a response to the arguments that have been presented for a principle of political perfectionism. In this posting I will look at these arguments in turn.

At the opening of section 49 Rawls makes clear that the "mixed" conceptions considered are ones that require the adoption of the first principle of justice and, concomitantly with this, also agree to its lexical priority over the preferred second principle where this second principle is thought to have replaced the complicated conjunction of fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle that Rawls has advocated as required. So essentially the "mixed" conceptions supplement the liberty principle with something different than the directly egalitarian concerns Rawls has presented them with. An obvious example of a "mixed" conception would be a combination of the liberty principle with the principle of utility where, however, given lexical priority, the principle of utility would be subordinate to the liberty principle.

Such "mixed" conceptions would be in the classic position of intuitionist positions generally on Rawls' view which is that they would lack precision in application. You could, for example, view the second principle as a combination of "average" utility with some chosen minimum level of agreed income but it would still be an open question how to govern the relations between these elements. Effectively it might well be the case, Rawls suggests, that the difference principle would be being covertly appealed to in such a case. The difficulty here is much as with the appeal to "common sense" precepts which is that the intuitive nature of the combination in question leaves much undecided and without evident mechanisms available for decisions to be made. The difference principle, by contrast, allows for a direct form of appeal to be made in evaluation of decisions and this is a clear advantage of it.

Appeal to utility, even in a combined or "mixed" conception, constantly creates the problem of how the utility functions are to be measured. Maximisation has to include some measurement function and perhaps the most obvious one is the zero-one claim (everyone's preferences to count for one and no more than one). However this leaves a lot undecided between positive and negative outcomes and could lead, for example, to a preference for a large population that was relatively uneducated on the grounds that greater net utility was more easily achieved given greater numbers and fewer wants, an outcome that is, to say the least about it, not intuitive. (To see that Rawls' argument here is far from implausible it suffices only to consider what Parfit, in Reasons and Persons, termed the Repugnant Conclusion.) Generally speaking "mixed" conceptions that involve the principle of utility can be objected to both on grounds that they involve unacceptable uncertainty given their intuitionist basis and unacceptable risks given their utilitarian element.

In section 50 Rawls gives the principle of political perfectionism his attention and distinguishes between an absolute and a moderate variant of the principle. The "absolute" variant places a premium on the production of excellence above all else whilst the moderate version is a "mixed" conception that places the weight of excellence alongside other considerations. Essentially principles of perfection involve selection of certain types of lives as those which are given preference over others given their greater intrinsic value. Rawls terms this an "ideal-regarding" principle rather than a "want-regarding" principle. In one sense such a principle as that of perfection is close to Rawls' own endeavour since the principles of justice themselves are taken to have ideal requirements and to encourage certain types of character. But the principles of justice do not require reference to standards of excellence.

Principles of perfection would not be adopted in the original position on Rawls' view as there is no shared standard of perfection given in the original position. There is only an index of primary goods, which are assumed to be something all would want, not a standard of excellence which only some would aspire to incarnating or aiming towards. Only if a natural duty was assumed in the original position that was accepted as culturally viable could there be space within it for the choice of the principle of perfection. This does not mean that all activities will be taken to be of equal value but that there is not an assumption that the attainment of particular types of excellence will shape the basic structure.

The principle of perfection, if combined with another in the moderate "mixed" version, faces the familiar problems Rawls always poses to intuitionist views. Generally Rawls also considers the appeal to "excellence" to involve considerations that are distinct from those of justice. So, for example, appeals for certain kinds of prohibitions on behaviour (as with sodomy statutes) often require that particular ways of life be given special privilege but this consideration, given as such, has no obvious claim to be a just one. As Rawls puts it, "subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety" shape standards of excellence and these types of preference are not obvious bases for just evaluations.

With the rejection of the principle of perfection in both absolute and moderate forms Rawls concludes Chapter V, a conclusion that effectively closes his consideration of how the principles of justice relate to institutions in a general sense although, as we shall see, in due course, one very important question of institutional type is left for discussion in Chapter VI.

Korsgaard and Kant on Valuing Humanity

2011-11-21T18:06:00.001Z

I should open this posting with thanks to a member of the Facebook group that supports this blog who brought to my attention the recent piece Christine Korsgaard has added to her website and which up-dates her view on valuing humanity as to it is to this piece that this posting is devoted. Essentially the point of the piece is to present some reflections that respond to the ways that others have viewed her original article on the formula of humanity that is available in Creating the Kingdom of Ends. In that original piece Korsgaard argued that there is a fundamental kind of value involved in our capacity to confer values on things and that the value involved in this capacity is what is at stake in the Formula of Humanity. However, some critics have responded to this argument by claiming that it is not apparent from it why it should follow that each of us should be led to value the capacity as present in others as well as in themselves.

In responding to this objection Korsgaard looks at the question of what the value of morality itself is meant to be. As Kant argues in the Groundwork that morality is the condition under which a rational being can be an end in itself (Ak. 4: 435) there is the clear suggestion that we realise our own value in some way by choosing morally. Since this whole point is made whilst articulating the Formula of Humanity it also appears that this discussion of rational beings involves a type of elevation of humans above "mere" animals and this appears to raise a further question about the type of valuation that the formula invites us to make. As Korsgaard takes this second point seriously she wanders somewhat away from concentration on the first point for quite sometime in the article.

The first stage of Korsgaard's reply to the second question involves a consideration of moral realism as moral realists appear to see the claim that human beings respond to morality as a kind of "superior" capacity that we possess. And in looking at this claim Korsgaard is led initially away from considerations of morality in a sense since the question about animals becomes one of what types of "reason" they possess to respond to considerations. For example, Korsgaard speaks about the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" reasons and points to an example of the former being that the possession of certain properties of an object give us "reasons" to act in certain ways towards this object although we might not be aware of the fact that the object possesses these characteristics (hence have no "subjective" reason to act in this way). The point of mentioning this characteristic would be that, on a moral realists view, moral properties are "objective" reasons to act in certain ways that animals "subjectively" lack. "Subjective" reasons, on this construal, would be reasons relative to one's beliefs about things (and to one's other "reasons"). If animals thus fail to respond subjectively to these objective properties then there is a sense in which they might be thought to be "inferior" to those creatures (such as ourselves) who can respond to these properties.

Some "moral realists" might well try to deny this consequence of their view by denying that there is any normative situation present to animals in the moral sense so no "deficiency" exists in failing to respond to it. This leads to a distinction between practical and theoretical beliefs however since, in this case, practical reality would be constituted by reasons for acting rather than reasons for believing. Or, as Korsgaard thinks follows on Scanlon's view, animals have "interests" but not moral reasons. This kind of defensive move on the part of moral realists is meant to deflate the challenge that it appears, on their view, that animals "have" certain kinds of reasons that they are unaware of. However it is still true that such moral realists take the normativity of reasons to be something objective in its nature.

But it is possible, says Korsgaard, to deny the notion that possession of moral characteristics gives humans some "superiority" over animals without having to endorse a conception of moral reasons as having "objective" standing. One of the reasons why the suggestion of "superiority" here appears so odd, says Korsgaard, is that it is not clear for whom it is "better" to have the conception of "moral reasons". Is it better for those who possess such reasons that they have them or would it better for "animals" to possess them (which latter view seems to be required for the superiority thesis to be held). The latter view is, however, an odd one as Korsgaard illustrates by reference to John Stuart Mill's claim concerning it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. This claim is odd in the sense that it is not clear here what status the "being better" statement has. Would it be better for the pig if it were dissatisfied in the way Socrates is? It is unclear how this could be true. But this does not mean that we have to deny there is clear value, all the same, in being Socrates!

This takes Korsgaard back to her original claim about valuing the capacity to be able to claim something has value. When you act on reasons you affirm the value of so acting and when you act on moral reasons you take these to have a particular importance. And these claims have to be distinguished from ones that lead to the superiority claim. Korsgaard makes this distinction by separating two types of claims to value something. On the first sense of valuing, we value something by placing it within a domain to which evaluative standards apply. This is different from valuing something within an evaluable domain as meeting standards internal to that domain. So placing something within the domain of moral standards need not entail that lives that are outside such a domain in the way animal lives appear to be are thereby denigrated. An analogy that is made to support this involves the sense that being a parent is taken to be a moral status of a certain sort and within its status domain claims can be made that distinguish between performing this function well or badly. It doesn't follow from such claims that parenting as an activity has to be taken as a preferable form of life to a life that does not include it.

Returning now to the sense in which humanity is valued in the Formula of Humanity, Korsgaard indicates that the power to determine ends is a property that confers a sort of normative standing and that viewing it in this way enables one to respond to the critic who argues that it is possible simply to value their own humanity without taking account of the humanity of others. But to see whether this argument goes any way to understanding Kant's position Korsgaard looks at some of Kant's specific casuistical arguments. In the case of beneficence there is a positive obligation to others that appears to require recognition that these others possess normative standing and this supports the conception that humanity itself is the source of such a standing. However, at other times, there do appear grounds for the notion that there are "valuable properties" at issue such as when Kant talks about development of talents. Korsgaard, however, does not think we need give up the latter arguments simply due to having adopted her preferred conception of humanity. The reason why she takes this to be the case, however, is that she moves to conflate the two conceptions of humanity by stating that it is the possession of normative standing itself that is the valuable property in question. Whether that is a sufficient response to the question she has set would require a different type of posting to this one.

Barbara Herman and Kant on Moral Worth

2011-11-20T16:27:00.001Z

In my previous posting I looked at Richard Henson's article on Kant and moral worth and reported the basis of his conclusion that we may not have a duty to perform actions that have moral worth. The point of Henson's argument was to take the sting out of the view, as reported in part of the Groundwork, that there is a sense in which the presence of inclination is apparently sufficient to undermine the moral worth of an action. Henson's argument, whilst ingenious in its way, and certainly influential, has not gone without opposition. In this posting I am going to look at the reply to Henson made by Barbara Herman.

Herman opens her piece by indicating that her sense of Henson's achievement consists in the notion that he has managed to salvage Kant's view by indicating two distinct views of moral worth in Kant's texts and that only one of these requires the view that the presence of inclinations undermines the moral worth of an action. The view that cuts against this conception, on Herman's account, is the fitness-report model of moral worth but this view is not, on Henson's report, the model of moral worth that Kant adopts in the Groundwork. Henson appears to view the Groundwork account as requiring that respect for duty be present if an act is to have moral worth (and this is what he terms a "battle-citation" view). In responding to Henson, Herman's first move is to return to the text of the Groundwork to see if it supports the account that Henson has given.

Henson's interpretation of the Groundwork is based largely on the account of the sympathetic man (or "friend of mankind") mentioned in the first part of the work. This person normally does what is right due to finding an inner satisfaction in doing so. However, in extremis, when overcome by sorrow, he finds a ground for doing the right thing despite no longer having any inclination to do so and now for the first time, as Kant puts it, "his action has its genuine moral worth" (Ak. 4: 398). Henson generalises from this case to the position that there is a basic problem with inclination in the Groundwork which produces his "battle-citation" conception of moral worth.

Herman, however, in returning to the text of the Groundwork, goes back prior to the invocation of this example by Kant in order to look at the wider context of the discussion in the first section of the work within which this example occurs. The first part of the Groundwork is evidently concerned with the conception of the good will and after the concept of duty has introduced "certain subjective limitations" on the good will we arrive at the discussion of moral worth and the examples of acting for the sake of duty. This suggests, says Herman, that moral worth is part of an account of what it is that is involved in the good will. Now, the key to the good will, as appears from its connection to duty, concerns the motive involved in performing a dutiful act. The important thing, however, is that the motivation here considered is one in which acting dutifully means acting for the sake of duty rather than for the sake of something else.

This limitation on dutiful acts is undertaken in order to contrast such a form of motivation from ones in which dutiful acts are undertaken for some other end with the example of a dutiful act undertaken for self-seeking ends (as in the case of the shopkeeper) and due to immediate inclination (in the case of the "friend of man") brought in as contrastive to the action undertaken for the sake of duty alone. In the shopkeeper example it is evident that acting honestly is undertaken instrumentally and hence need not apply in all circumstances. Now this problem with the maxim of the shopkeeper does not obviously apply to the philanthropist who is generally disposed to act in ways that do accord with duty. Whilst the philanthropist has not adopted the right maxim instrumentally, however, it is still true, Kant suggests, that there is only a contingent connection between the ground of their maxims and right action and it lacks, he says, "moral content". In other words, the philanthropist is essentially indifferent to morality.

Looked at in general terms, Herman argues, Kant's discussion of the examples is not intended to give an overall account of moral worth. But what it does do is show us a problem with dutiful actions being performed for motives that are not themselves dutiful. The key point then would not concern inclination ultimately (as it does for Henson) but, instead, an understanding of what is involved in moral motivation which is, for Herman, the claim that a moral motive, to be truly said to exist, has to give the agent adopting it an interest in the rightness of their actions. So the problem with Henson's account of "overdetermination" of motives really concerns whether such motives involve attention being directed to such rightness as, if they do not, their connection to the rightness of actions remains only contingent. To be sure that an action has moral worth we thus need a non-contingent (or necessary) relation between the motive of the agent and the duty that the action would manifest.

Once things are put in this way Herman can move to complicate the details of Henson's original picture which she does by considering two models of her own of moral worth. On the first account the fitness-report model of moral worth that Henson argues is articulated in the Groundwork requires to be understood through a notion of "greater strength". What this involves is that an action would be judged only to have moral worth if the moral motive was sufficiently strong to prevail over other inclinations regardless of whether they cooperation or conflicted with the moral motive. The battle-citation model is only different in the sense that it has here been specified that the moral motive has won out. In other words, on Herman's account, it becomes implausible to view Kant as having adopted different models of moral worth in the Groundwork and the Doctrine of Virtue as Henson argued. However the problem with this first account is that since it really collapses the two views of moral worth into one by upholding the battle-citation model that it seems to require that moral worth be understood as the same as moral virtue.

On the alternative reading Herman requires that the moral motive be the one on which the agent acted and that the configuration of motives be one that is reliable in its outcome. The reliability of outcome seems to be guaranteed not by an appeal to "strength" (which perhaps was still a contingent measure) but by the direct invocation of the moral motive as the ground of the action so that an action with moral worth was produced. The stress here seems to fall on the action rather than the agent as the general structure of the agent's character is what is meant by virtue. The disambiguation that Herman has carried out in distinguishing this second alternative from the first thus consisted in seeing the appeal to the ground of the maxim as crucial to the given action rather than taking it to represent a permanent alteration in the structure of the agent's willing.

Herman's account of dutiful actions thus indicates the nature of the appeal to the moral motive as the assessment of the moral worth of the action undertaken. The motives provide what she calls "limiting conditions" on what we can do for other motives than the moral one. The key is that the moral motive be the effective ground of the action undertaken regardless of the presence or otherwise of other elements. It limits the effective presence of other motivations but is also a ground of appeal when we do act in its own right.

However Herman's picture becomes more complicated when we note that she speaks of duty being a motive in a primary sense in dutiful actions whilst it is only limitative of the presence of other motives in, for example, merely permissible (but not mandatory) actions. So the role of duty is not always expressive in the primary sense as it can simply act as a means of filtering out immoral temptations.

Going back to the "friend of humanity" who was important for Henson's original argument, Herman now presents this person in terms of a change of temperament and the point concerns not the kind of view that Schiller endorsed (and towards which Henson's interpretation inevitably drifts) but rather that this case has broken the person in question from having only a contingent connection between their willing and an action that can be said to be right. In support of this Herman also cites Kant's discussion of suicide in Groundwork I in which it becomes clear that it is not normally morally worthy that we avoid it but it becomes so when we are robbed of the normal reasons inclination provides us with not to wish for it. Inclination alone provides us with nothing that has moral worth as it gives no reason to act morally. So the appeal to being free of inclination in order for an act to have moral worth concerns, as Herman concludes by arguing, a situation of independence from circumstances and it is that which we have when inclination ceases to be the ground on which we act.

Richard Henson and Kant on Moral Worth

2011-11-20T11:38:00.001Z

I have posted a number of pieces recently concerned with how different commentators have responded to the argument of the first part of the Groundwork, including, most recently, Christine Korsgaard's account of its argument. However, what I have not addressed thus far in the postings given over to this topic, have been the contributions in the secondary literature that have focused specific attention to the topic of "moral worth", something that is worth some detailed attention as the literature on this topic has, in recent years, rather grown. As one of the first pieces devoted specifically to discussing moral worth was by Richard Henson I will, in this piece, seek to retrace the main points of Henson's argument in order that the subsequent responses to it can be given separate consideration in later postings.

Henson's article is meant to focus on the question of what is involved in attribution of "moral worth" to an action given Kant's statements and the statement analysed in particular in Henson's article is in the first section of the Groundwork. It is worth adding, however, that Henson also emphasises the notion that moral motivation can be "overdetermined" as it may involve a mixture of inclinations and determining reasons. In relation to the maxim being taken to be a moral one Henson also points out that it is not sufficient that it pass the universalisation test (although it is necessary that it does so) but failure to carry out the action should also be wrong. However, the key point for Henson doesn't concern duty itself but rather "moral worth" and the suggestion that an act "only" has such worth if it is done from duty. Finally, for the purposes of introduction of Henson's argument, the suggestion that moral worth attaches only to actions done from duty, is taken by him only to feature as an argument in the Groundwork and not to be part of the argument of the Doctrine of Virtue, not least because, in the latter work, we have a distinct class of "duties of virtue" which are simply not performed at all unless done from duty.

The key passage from the Groundwork on which Henson builds so much is the one concerning the "friend to mankind" who has been overcome by some sorrow such that they are no longer capable of possessing an inclination to do a good act but manage to tear themselves "out of this dead insensibility" and perform the required act "without any inclination" and then have performed an act which has "genuine moral worth" (Ak. 4: 398). Having cited this passage Henson questions its import on two levels, asking both (A) what it means to ascribe moral worth to an act and (B) under what circumstances we are to say that someone has acted from duty. The first question concerning the ascription of moral worth is one that is presented as having two possible answers, either (a) that the person at the time of performing the action was in a "fit moral condition" or (b) that the person at the time acted in such a way that we feel they won a significant battle against evil.

The second question (B), by contrast, concerns overdetermination of acts given that it is often the case that one may well have many distinct motives for performing a given act. Henson argues that Kant gives no direct answer to this second question but that he could have given one of three possible answers to it: 1) reverence for duty was present and would be enough without anything further; 2) other inclinations were present and show the act was not done from duty; 3) both could be present but this does not show, in any given case, on which motive the agent was acting. Henson effectively rules out 3) (despite giving it some supporting grounds) in order to argue between 1) and 2) and argues that the example given at Ak 4: 398 tells in favour of 2) and thus to support the view that it is only when one acts without any supporting inclination that one is acting from duty.

Henson does concede, however, that many would be tempted to deny that Kant adopts 2) as the right answer to B) simply because it seems to leave him open to the view of Schiller to the effect that he is endorsing the suggestion that having pleasure in doing duty is itself "wrong", an odd and counter-intuitive result and one that most Kantians have always been concerned to reject.

In order to respond to this putative objection to his account Henson rolls together his responses to A) and B) now in order to articulate what he takes the full Kantian reply to be to the question of what it means to say that a dutiful act has moral worth and he states that the choice is between one of two answers: i) provided respect for duty was present then it doesn't matter whether or not there were other motives; ii) only if respect for duty was the sole motive was there moral worth in the act performed. Now this full response also relates back to the alternative answers given to question A) since the fitness report model (a) would coincide with i) whereas the battle model would require ii).

Now, having stated these points Henson returns to the putative objection from Schiller and points out that it counts as such only if Kant agrees c) that the presence of inclinations defeats the attribution of moral worth and d) it is a moral defect not to perform actions which require moral worth. Both conditions are required for Schiller's response to the Kantian account to be the right one since the failure of c) would ensure that the presence of inclinations had no effect on the award of moral worth to an action whereas the failure of d) would show that it was not necessary to put oneself in positions where it is was required to act from duty. (So there would not be a duty to act from duty.)

Assuming that Henson's earlier argument was accepted it would follow that part of Schiller's condition was fulfilled since c) would hold and the presence of inclinations would have an effect on the award of moral worth to an action but this does not, by itself, entail that d) also has to hold. This means that the battle that could be won in overcoming evil is not one that we would necessarily encourage people to undertake. A reason for adopting this view, according to Henson, is that the argument of the Groundwork does not lead to the conclusion that we have to perform acts that have moral worth (or even, he says, that we "ought" to). The reason for this is that the situation that requires moral worth is not one that we should wish to be placed in and nor is it one that we have a duty to find ourselves in. A supporting argument for this view is the suggestion made at Ak. 4: 428 concerning the wish to be free from inclinations which Henson takes merely to require that we be free of inclinations which would hinder us from performing our duties not of inclinations per se (which takes part of the sting out of Schiller's attack).

The final part of Henson's argument turns on his view of the case in the Doctrine of Virtue since the duties of virtue require, he states, that we adopt the end in question and if we lacked it we would not have performed the said duties at all. On this model it does become the case that it is a moral defect to fail to perform acts having moral worth (d) on Schiller's account but not evidently a problem that there be cooperating inclinations. So neither the Doctrine of Virtue account nor that of the Groundwork satisfies both conditions of Schiller's gibe though each work possesses one of the conditions of meeting it. This does suggest that the works are inconsistent with each other on Henson's view but he argues the reason for this inconsistency is that Kant failed to pay sufficient attention to the question of overdetermination of actions.

Having set Henson's argument out in detail I will, in future postings on moral worth, review some of the responses to it that have appeared in the secondary literature but will link back to this posting when I do so in order that the replies can be evaluated in terms of how well they have depicted Henson's original argument.

Parfit's Thought Experiments Concerning Persons

2011-11-19T19:41:00.001Z

In my last posting on Parfit I began to discuss how he responds to the Kantian injunction concerning treating persons as ends in his 2002 lectures. Today I want to look further at these lectures in terms of how he utilises thought-experiment arguments to prosecute his understanding of how the Formula of Humanity's injunction should be understood. I am not in this posting going to address the question of whether the use of thought-experiments in the manner that Parfit does is plausible from a Kantian viewpoint though this question, as raised by Allen Wood's response to these lectures, will be discussed sometime in the future since that response is one of the ones Parfit includes in volume 2 of On What Matters.

In the last posting we had reached Parfit's understanding of how to comprehend the two parts of the Formula of Humanity and the introduction of examples that occurs next is part of his way of testing the understanding of the formula at this point. Essentially Parfit produces now some classic "trolley problem" arguments of the type that Judith Jarvis Thompson initially introduced into moral philosophy. As originally formulated by Thompson these problems literally refer to potential outcomes when faced with runaway trains. Parfit introduces three examples that fairly closely parallel Thompson's originals. Firstly he refers to the "Lifeboat" example in which one person (termed "White") is stuck on a rock somewhere whilst five others are elsewhere and our lifeboat can either rescue White or the five others but not both. Secondly, Parfit invokes "tunnel" in which a runaway train is heading towards five people but could be redirected away from them, at, however, the cost of hitting and killing poor old White. Finally, in "Bridge" the train is again aiming at the five but there isn't a parallel track but we could, using a trap-door, get White off a Bridge above the track into the path of the on-coming train thus saving the five. (The second two are pretty transparent replicas of two of Thompson's originals.)

In terms of "outcomes" alone all three examples have the same structure of enabling us to act in such a way that we save the five at the expense of the one. However, the manner in which this outcome is produced is different in each case as, in "Lifeboat", it's simply the case that, given the constraints of time, there's no way to save the five and the one and so a trade-off between them seems plausible in which we justify our action through a classic commissions/omissions defence. In "Tunnel" the saving of the five happens more directly through a fore-seen harm being produced to the one which we have directly brought about (so that the commissions/omissions defence we could give in "Lifeboat" isn't here available). Finally, in "Bridge" we, even more directly, aim at harming White in order to save the five and often it is with this example that intuition rings an alarm bell leading many to reject this action despite plausibly having sacrificed White in the two previous cases.

If "Bridge" is a case where many object, some draw a line earlier and rule out the action even in "Tunnel" on the grounds that we have an over-riding duty not to directly harm so that White can't be made the victim there either. If you don't draw the line at "Tunnel", however, there are less obvious reasons than might be thought why you should do so in the case of "Bridge". Now, Parfit's point in bringing in these thought-experiments is not to repeat the arguments that have swirled ever since Thompson set out the originals of these cases but rather to see what difference application of the two sub-principles he takes the Formula of Humanity to comprise of, make to the cases under consideration.

Recall that Parfit divided the Formula of Humanity into two sub-parts that he described as incarnating a Rational Consent notion and a Mere Means principle. Rational Consent taken alone implies treating people in ways to which they could, in principle, give rational consent even if, in the actual cases under consideration, they don't manifest the tendency to give such consent (or perhaps wouldn't if we were in a position to ask them). With regard to this principle Parfit assumes that White could give Rational Consent to sacrificing themselves with the proviso that this sacrifice would (or would at least tend) to save the other five. So the Rational Consent principle alone, on Parfit's construal, would not rule out taking action that produced this outcome.

It might next be asked whether the addition of the Mere Means principle would make any difference to Parfit's verdict here but he takes it to be the case that it wouldn't affect the verdict since, if we treat people in accord with the Rational Consent principle, then we wouldn't be violating the Mere Means principle. Taking the examples in turn, "Lifeboat" doesn't seem problematic since here we can see what would be meant by "Rational Consent" in terms of how White might, assuming a Rawslian veil of ignorance, adopt the position of thinking that the five should here be saved were they to be asked about the example without knowing whether they were a member of the five or the one left, unfortunately, to the fate of the waves.

Given this argument Parfit also takes it to be true that there would be no relevant difference between the case of "Lifeboat" and "Tunnel". Viewed in relation to "Rational Consent" alone Parfit also thinks that there is no relevant difference again between "Lifeboat" and "Bridge" though this is, as indicated above, certainly a counter-intuitive result. However, at this point we may still be unconvinced that the application of the Mere Means principle could validate the same outcome in the case of "Bridge" at least as Parfit's suggestion about Rational Consent has done.

In considering this objection Parfit mentions one understanding of the Mere Means principle that runs counter to the one he has adopted and that is the view of Robert Nozick who, in Anarchy, State & Utopia, presents the Mere Means principle as a basis for appeal to deontological side-constraints that overcome the consequentialist reasoning that Parfit has adopted up to this point. On Nozick's view the side-constraint in question enables one to deny that it is right to sacrifice someone in order to achieve an end they have not consented to the adoption of. Noticeably, Nozick's reading requires not just that the Mere Means principle is understood differently from how Parfit has presented but also alters the understanding of what is involved in reference to consent as here actual consent makes an appearance rather than Parfit's ideas of "rational" consent.

Parfit states that the Nozickian view requires us to view the Mere Means principle in such a way that it it becomes sufficient for someone to be treated as a mere means if we act towards them in a way that they have not actually consented to (and subsequently harm them in the process). If this is the implication of Nozick's understanding of Mere Means then Parfit has a reply ready to hand as it may be necessary (as he gives an additional example to show) that someone be injured (in ways to which they have not actually consented) in a relatively minor way in order that someone else be saved from a much worse fate and yet we wouldn't generally regard that as sufficient to say that the injured person had been treated merely as a means. This riposte to Nozick's case is, however, surely insufficient since, in the examples under consideration the level of harm involved is life-threatening and not only does that undermine actual consent being available but it destroys all conditions of agency as such.

Parfit considers this riposte but not, I think, in its full sense since he views it only in terms of limitation of harm, not in terms of protecting the conditions of agency as such. Later Parfit does arrive at consideration of such a case which is considered in a very classic consequentialist way. This is the case he dubs "Catastrophe" where we can prevent some awful event occurring only at the cost of killing some innocent person. This does directly involve consideration of undercutting of the conditions of agency and it is treated in traditional way through maximisation of the good.

If Parfit's pattern of reasoning is here somewhat predictable he does use it to modify Nozick's objection through formulation of a "harm principle" that states that it is plausible to harm people without their consent in order to achieve a good aim so long as the harm in question is not "disproportionate" with regard to the aim. Parfit does give a final consideration to the objection from agency I have mentioned stating that Thompson assumes that there is some absolute value attaching to it such that it cannot be over-ridden whatever the supposed good outcome in question. Assuming that someone maintains this view Parfit proposes a modified version of his 'harm principle' that allows lesser harms to be inflicted on people without their consent assuming the good end is the basis of this.

Part of the point of this whole "trolley" discussion on Parfit's part has been to bolster his argument that we cannot apply the Mere Means principle directly to our evaluation of actions. Rather than applying it to the evaluation of actions it should apply, on Parfit's conception, only to the evaluation of attitudes. This produces the outcome that the second half of the Formula of Humanity is now understood in one way when it applies to evaluation of attitudes (where the Mere Means principle applies) and another at the level of evaluation of actions (where it is replaced by the Harm principle). However there is another element to the Formula of Humanity which has yet to be considered and that is its reference to "respect" for rational nature and the way in which this is treated in the first of Parfit's 2002 lectures will be the subject of my next posting on Parfit.

Allison on Kant's Ethical Predecessors

2011-11-18T11:31:00.001Z

In my last posting on Henry Allison's commentary on the Groundwork I expressed some disappointment over the coverage given in its first chapter to historical questions. The first chapter laid out, in somewhat rudimentary form, some of the background to Kant's writing of the Groundwork. The second chapter, by contrast, looks at the two approaches to moral philosophy that were likely to be foremost in Kant's mind as alternatives to his own approach when he composed the Groundwork. These are the Wolffian notion of "universal practical philosophy" and the approach, associated by Allison here with Christian Garve, of "popular moral philosophy". Whilst the discussion of these approaches in Allison's second chapter does not aim to compete with the more extensive discussions on offer elsewhere this second chapter is certainly more useful in giving the reader of the Groundwork historical background than anything Allison provided in the first chapter.

The second chapter is intended only to give, as Allison explicitly states, a "sketch" of the relevant features of the approaches discussed and a brief analysis of some of Kant's reactions (though the latter is provided only really with regard to the Wolffian system). Kant's use of Baumgarten's textbook is well recorded in the lecture notes that have come down to us from Kant's teaching practice and the textbook by Baumgarten that Kant used was published as late as 1760 so was certainly current material, even at the time of the publication of the Groundwork. Allison chooses, however, to base most of his reportage of the approach of the Wolffian school not on Baumgarten's textbook but on one by Georg Meier who, though not referred to by Kant in his lectures on ethics, produced what Allison regards as "the most accessible and comprehensive treatment" of the approach.

As Allison points out, one of the features of "universal practical philosophy" that would have appealed to Kant was that it does give a kind of metaphysics of morals as it aims to provide the only viable foundation for a system of human duties. It also focuses on general rules governing free actions which, due to their normative necessity, are taken to be laws. However, the metaphysics in this approach involves a compatibilist conception of freedom that ultimately derives from Leibniz's conception that free actions are necessary in the sense that they are derived from the principle of sufficient reason. So, on this view, the morally possible and the morally necessary become extensionally equivalent.

Wolff's general idea of obligation, by contrast, focused on an idea of perfection which, in a practical sense, viewed it as requiring the harmony of all volitions with each other so that none ran counter to the others. This produced his moral imperative: "Do what makes you and your condition more perfect and omit what makes you and your condition less perfect", modified slightly by Baumgarten to read "seek perfection as much as you can". This perfectionism was also linked, at least by Baumgarten, to a Stoic principle of living according to nature in order to attain the perfection in question (thus providing an interpretation of perfectionism that bends in the direction of a kind of naturalism).

Allison provides Kant's response to the standpoint of universal practical philosophy in two phases, looking first at Kant's lectures on ethics as transcribed by Collins (1780s lectures) and, secondly, and more briefly, at the remarks Kant makes on it in the "Preface" to the Groundwork. In relation to the analysis of obligation by Baumgarten, Kant is recorded in the lectures as stating that not all imperatives yield obligations (which is part of his distinction of hypothetical from categorical imperatives). Similarly, being necessitated has to be distinguished from being obligated since natural necessitation is not the basis of moral obligation. Kant does here show himself more favourably disposed towards the principle of perfection than to many other moral principles since he took it to state something that does have a certain use as it can be understood to refer to the "completeness of man" (thus to a kind of idea of totality). This can also be seen to be lasting given Kant's remarks on perfection in the Metaphysics of Morals.

By contrast, Kant's discussions of freedom in the Collins lectures are obviously at odds with Leibnizian compatibilism but share something different with a Leibnizian approach (though it has to be said Allison does not discuss this as a connection between Kant and Leibniz), namely, a sense that moral action is more "free" than immoral action. Kant's remark on universal practical philosophy in the "Preface" to the Groundwork explicitly states that the approach of this work is not to be confused with that of the "universal practical philosophy", not least because the latter has not isolated the conception of a will determined fully from a priori principles. Starting from this notion of a possible pure will (as Kant does in Groundwork I) differentiates the approach adopted from one that refers to a conception of volition derived largely from psychology. Allison stresses the point made here by Kant about "purity" in order to underline the distinctive method of the Groundwork by contrast to that of "universal practical philosophy". Kant also suggests in the "Preface" that the treatment of obligation in "universal practical philosophy" is insufficient for an ethics to arise.

The second part of Allison's discussion concerns the work of Christian Garve, which is taken to be illustrative of the approach of "popular moral philosophy" and Garve is specifically looked at due to the fact that he provided a translation, with commentary, of Cicero's De Officiis in 1783, a point significant given that Kant apparently had a long-standing interest in Cicero. Further, the importance of the "Garve-Feder" review of the Critique of Pure Reason, a review that led Kant to write the Prolegomena (and, arguably, was important in the revisions of the Critique itself in its second edition) give additional weighty reasons for the focus on Garve. The original version of this review, by Garve alone, also contained some paragraphs responding to the account of morality Kant gave in the Canon section of the Critique. Allison points out that in the Canon Kant assumes that there really are moral laws a priori and that they command absolutely although in this work Kant also excluded moral philosophy from the scope of transcendental philosophy so did not proceed to an investigation of these claims.

Further, the account in the Canon does refer to the notion of the summum bonum that will recur in the Critique of Practical Reason. However, Allison claims that at the time of the composition of the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant was not in possession of the notion of autonomy of the will so that the location of happiness would not have been an evident problem to Kant at the time this work was published. By contrast, in Garve's brief comment on the Canon, the question of the basis in nature for a view of the correlation between happiness and morality is raised as an explicit problem (thus foreshadowing the argument of the Dialectic of the Second Critique). Allison takes the ground for Kant's views about this connection in the Critique of Pure Reason to be quite different from what they became in the Second Critique and suggests Garve's criticism may have been a spur to the development of Kant's thought here.

A second line of thought taken from Garve by Allison concerns the emphasis placed on popularity in his alleged "popular moral philosophy". Kant himself rejected this emphasis as a proper way to approach the beginning of moral philosophy in the Groundwork and as a false way of responding to the critique of metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason but the writing of the Prolegomena does suggest a sense of a need for a response to popular criticism of his work. However, it remained Kant's view that scholastic precision and throughness of argumentation could not be replicated in "popular" treatises.

Garve's approach to moral philosophy as illustrated in his translation of Cicero shows a decided emphasis on the importance to him of popularity since he did not assume familiarity on the part of his readers with the Latin text. However, it was not purely such matters that were part of Garve's "popular" approach but also his understanding of philosophical method. The decision to translate De Officiis at all, rather than Cicero's De Finibus, occurs because of a view that the former work is easier in form and that this "popularity" of it is a distinct virtue. Over and above these points, however, Garve approved of the way in which Cicero identified moral goodness with happiness in terms of his analysis of human nature. Indeed, Garve essentially simplifies Cicero's account of virtue since, on Garve's account, there is really only one essential virtue which turns out to be "prudence".

Garve, unlike the advocates of the Wolffian approach, does not advocate a compatibilist view of freedom but essentially gives up on the problems connected to freedom indicating that we should just "live" the aporias felt here. Part of the lesson derived from this is that it would be arrogant to assume we are in possession of virtue since we are not even properly speaking responsible for its production. These points indicate some of the basis for Kant's dismissive view of "popular moral philosophy" as a form of eclecticism and the requirement, by contrast, to develop a clearer moral philosophy that is built more firmly on concepts of rational agents rather than empirical concepts.

Rawls and Common Sense Precepts of Justice

2011-11-17T12:18:00.000Z

In my last posting on Rawls I discussed the form the two principles of justice reach in Chapter V of A Theory of Justice. Having stated this form I then wondered what justified the rest of the work, or at least, the rest of Chapter V. Chapter V is, in fact, subsequently, an argument concerning different views of justice to that articulated in the notion of justice as fairness. Two sections concern "common sense" precepts, one the notion of "mixed conceptions" of justice and a final one, the principle of perfection. In this posting I'm simply going to fix on the discussion of "common sense" precepts which is the main subject of sections 47 and 48 of Chapter V.

Section 47 opens with a reiteration of the point that the sketch of the system of institutions that satisfies the two principles of justice is now complete. Assuming the basic structure has this form the distribution that results will be just (or, minimally, not unjust) and the analogy here, as is typical of much of the argument of Theory, is with the outcome of a fair game. However, at this point, Rawls turns to consider the question of how the conception of justice as fairness relates to our common sense precepts of justice.

Common sense precepts have within them the problem of priority that Rawls articulated back in Chapter I as arising for intuitionist conceptions and which the various arguments for priority of principles that he gave in the previous sections of Chapter V show a basis for having overcome on the conception of justice as fairness. The two principles of justice are taken to define the basic criterion of how we will understand justice but are themselves arranged in an hierarchical order and contain (in the case of the second principle) sub-parts that themselves need articulating in order.

Rawls now considers various types of "common sense" precept and how they arise. However, he is less interested in these precepts themselves than with how different conceptions of justice lead to different ways of weighing them. The difference between different conceptions of justice is not understood by Rawls to reside in different types of common sense precepts but, instead, in different types of attention to them. A society that provides for fair equality of opportunity (the first part of the second principle of justice) responds differently to common sense precepts once this principle is part of its basic structure than does another society that does not provide for fair equality of opportunity in this way.

For one thing the provision of opportunities according to this principle tends to produce greater levelling of incomes with the result that the precept of rewarding each according to training is given less weight in this society than in alternative ones that have not built the principle of fair equality of opportunity into their basic structure. What this example is meant to show is that the type of generality that common sense precepts possess is the wrong sort for the articulation of principles of justice. This is despite the fact that some common sense precepts do initially appear general enough, such as ones that stress the natural right of property in the fruits of our labour (a kind of Lockean view). However, for this view to really be generally applicable it must be the case that the distribution it refers to is part of a generally just order, it cannot simply define one. It is, after all, just one of many precepts with another, also often appealed to and clearly off-setting this, referring to distribution according to need.

In market situations the general problem, at work in the kind of Lockean conception, is one in which contributions are expected to be rewarded. But what matters for any given kind of contribution is the relation of it to the whole system of norms in question. In this respect the questions of choice of occupation and free association are parts of a system of justice but the overall principle of fair equality of opportunity is one that determines the rewards that would arise in relation to them.

If section 47 articulates the problem that common sense precepts lack sufficient generality to stand in for principles of justice at the level of the basic structure, section 48, by contrast, tackles one specific type of principle that would threaten to reduce questions of justice to questions of virtue. This would be the adoption of a general principle that rewards should be adjusted by connection to virtue or moral worth shown (a kind of "republic of virtue"). Justice as fairness is in opposition to such a notion despite recognising the place of legitimate expectations within systems of justice.

The extent of a contribution someone has made at a given time is often determined impersonally by mechanisms such as markets that price the reward of a given effort in ways that may have little connection to the individual effort involved. This is a problem with viewing the conception of just distributive shares as a process of maximising returns by reference to conscientious effort. It also shows the difficulty of adopting such a principle as a public one. Moral worth, whether defined through conscientious effort or in some other way, is not a principle of distributive justice. Indeed, so little is this the case according to Rawls that there would be something grossly offensive about thinking of justice in this way as he suggests in the following striking comparison: "For a society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral desert as a first principle would be like having the institution of property in order to punish thieves".

The reason for this striking analogy concerns the distinction Rawls draws between a conception of reward determined by virtue and one that draws on the correct notion of legitimate expectations. In the latter case the expectations are what arise from doing things encouraged by existing arrangements and these would be best defined, on Rawls' view, by reference to the principle of fairness and the natural duty of justice. Institutions are bound to realise legitimate expectations they have encouraged in relation to these superordinate principles of justice. However, even when we have a system of justice that is governed by such principles there is no way of ensuring that conscientious effort or any other such type of moral worth would lead to higher rewards.

In this respect distributive justice is quite unlike retributive justice. If the purpose of the latter is to uphold basic natural duties through the provision of penalties attached to their violation, the purpose of distributive justice is only to ensure a generally just order and to reward individuals for carrying out generally valued social functions, so the variations in rewards should only be concerned with promoting the general ends of the basic structure, not the elevation of particular individuals in a parallel to the degradation suffered by those who have violated natural duties.

In sum then, Rawls concludes that most common sense precepts of justice are insufficiently general to be possible candidates in the original position for the status of general principles of justice and he specifically rules out views that would conceive of social justice as a wide form of reward for virtue since the latter view conflates the purposes of distributive justice with those of retributive justice.

Jacco Verburgt in Kant Studies Online

2011-11-16T17:52:00.001Z

The latest issue of Kant Studies Online is out and includes a review article by Jacco Verburgt responding to a collection of pieces on Kant's metaphysics edited by Norbert Fischer. It can be freely accessed and downloaded here.

Analytic and Continental Philosophy

2011-11-15T21:43:00.001Z

I spent part of yesterday listening to the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time that was devoted to discussing the relationship between "continental" and analytical philosophy and thought it was worth offering some comments on it. The show, chaired as always by Lord Melvyn Bragg, has a number of problems generally since it forces into 45 minutes discussions that are hardly fitted to such a compressed format. On the panel were Stephen Mulhall (best known for his work on Wittgenstein), Hans Glock (who has worked on the nature of analytic philosophy) and Beatrice Han-Pile (best known for her work on Foucault).

The basic problem at the heart of the show concerned the inability of the guests to really deal with "Continental philosophy", perhaps because, as was indicated more than once, it is less a philosophical category than a get-out clause that has been used often by Anglo-American thinkers to describe whatever it is that they don't do themselves. However, somewhat parallel to this, and less investigated than it should have been, is the demise of traditional "analytic" philosophy. Mulhall, who had the opening shot on the show, described the arrival of "analytic" philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, through the work of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (though he oddly neglected to refer to G.E. Moore). Subsequently, and perhaps because it has been popularly heard of, came the "logical positivists" after which it became somewhat unclear how the "analytic" tradition developed or what it is now. Glock did indicate at one point the view that the distinctive character of "analytic philosophy" was being increasingly lost though he didn't say either why this was so or what it meant for it to be the case.

The general point that the demise of the early twentieth century belief that philosophy had a sound logical method that could sweep all before it (oddly later revived in terms of a turn to language in ordinary language philosophy) meant that Anglo-American philosophers essentially had to return to the grand themes of philosophy (as noted in the general revival now of "metaphysics") went missing. However, without some understanding of the way in which the early mission of analytic philosophy was dissipated it becomes hard to understand either how it got cut off from "Continental philosophy" or the ways in which it is now re-engaging with the latter. The conventional argument that the analytic tradition began in revolt against idealism tells us little about how it is that idealism can now be found throughout Anglo-American philosophy all over again (and not just because of the influence of the Pittsburg school).

Similarly, the "Continental" tradition was presented by Han-Pile in terms of a concern with existential questions and a concentration on hermeneutic approaches. This emphasis naturally leaves aside the origins of phenomenology or the emphasis on rigid mathematical thought in the contemporary work of Badiou. In presenting "Continental" thought through the prism of existential questions something is caught about the use of literary methods but this again is something also important for such an evident Anglo-American thinker as Martha Nussbaum.

The generic reflections attempted focused on the way in which the Idealist response to Kant marked a rupture of sorts that was not followed in Anglo-American thinking but runs into the inconvenient fact of the British Idealist school which precisely was concerned with a relation to the classic Idealists. What comes out of thinking through these questions is the immense difficulty of finding anything obvious to say about a division which clearly does matter institutionally and yet is very difficult to capture either historically or conceptually.

A different story I would tell would concern the way in which the formation of contemporary institutions arises from late nineteenth century developments. It was in the 1870s that we saw the arrival of philosophy journals and around this time we also have the Neo-Kantian school in Germany. The latter school devised many of the divisions in philosophy that became determinative for it in universities. Curricula that moved away from concentration on Greek philosophy and looked instead to modern philosophy finding its founding in the work of Descartes is a product of historical and conceptual work during the 19th century and with it arrived the distinctions between logic, epistemology, ethics and the "lesser disciplines" that became central to the manner in which analytic philosophy was institutionally disseminated. The questions of pedagogy that both played into this and also gave it a particular impetus have rarely been studied.

By contrast, French and German universities underwent different processes of formation, processes that themselves would require study. However what remained important here was a constant historical reference in philosophy that prevented the response to philosophy as merely a set of "problems". America, by contrast to both the UK and to the French and German situations, took longer to arrive at a determinate sense of philosophy and when it did it owed a lot to the efforts of Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars, himself, unlike many British examples, looked always back to historical examples and the arrival of new forms of idealism in American philosophy refer back to his influence.

By contrast to these reflections, the general emphasis of the guests on In Our Time focused only on the "great" thinkers and on reactions to them. I think, however, the institutional ways in which thinkers become canonised and the selection of questions from them requires understanding by means of how divisions in a subject become seminal. This requires a different type of approach to the conventional but don't expect to see it soon!

Joshua Cohen, Rawls and Occupying Philosophy

2011-11-09T17:21:00.000Z

I listened to this podcast the other day. In it Professor Joshua Cohen a leading Rawlsian philosopher aligns the general outlook of A Theory of Justice to the "occupy" movement that has been significant recently both in the US and the UK. Whilst Cohen's remarks are rather slanted towards the US situation and also signally fail to address the question of whether the later Rawlsian conception of "political liberalism" fits as comfortably with the "occupy" movement as he suggests, it is, nonetheless, a very good, clear interview that outlines the general conception of "justice as fairness" very well.

Korsgaard, Obligation and Groundwork I

2011-11-05T21:40:00.000Z

Christine Korsgaard analyses the argument of Groundwork I in an article she originally published in 1989 and subsequently re-published both in her own collection of essays, Creating the Kingdom of Ends and also in a collection of essays on the Groundwork edited by Paul Guyer. Unlike the essay by Nelson Potter also published in Guyer's collection and which I responded to in a couple of previous postings, Korsgaard's account is less a step-by-step analysis of Kant's argument and more a reconstruction of its overall point set against an historico-philosophical view of certain tensions in moral philosophy.

Korsgaard sets the response to the argument of Groundwork I against the background of the dispute between internalists and externalists in contemporary moral philosophy though she promises to illuminate this argument by connecting it to an historical pre-decessor. The historical counterpart of this contemporary argument is presented as the conflict between sentimentalists and rationalists. In both cases there is a conflict concerning how to view what it is to be morally obligated. On Korsgaard's account obligation includes 2 elements: both the sense that we are motivated to act morally and that this motivation is one that is binding upon us. Essentially the argument between the sentimentalists and the rationalists concerned, on her view, a stress on one of these to the exclusion of the other. So the sentimentalists give an account of motivation that renders it non-necessary and hence insufficiently binding whilst the rationalists show it to be clearly binding but provide no serious view of its motivating power.

The point of focusing on this debate about obligation is that Kant identified obligation, as early as the "Prize Essay" as the "primary concept" of ethics. Further, on Korsgaard's account, the argument of Groundwork I is best seen as a description of what the concept of obligation involves. It requires seeing that a morally good action is done from the motive of duty or because it is understood to be right. However, for this analysis to be informative philosophically it is necessary to see it as a response to the previous debate between rationalists and sentimentalists.

This previous debate is characterised by Korsgaard through a description that primarily rests on Hume. Korsgaard sees Hume as giving a basis for the view that there is a split between moral obligation and moral binding force. Hume's argument is taken here from the Treatise on Human Nature where he suggests that it would be, to use an anachronistic phrase, a form of "empty formalism" to identify right action with action that has the right motive. The basis for Hume's claim is that we need first some information about what kind of thing is virtuous before we have regard to the virtue of right acts. This requires that we appeal to a moral sense that has to approve something other than the motive of duty in order to reach moral content. This creates a dilemma that Korsgaard traces through the early modern debate and that she states as follows: "If we retain the thesis that it is motives that essentially make actions right, it apparently must be motives other than a regard for rightness itself. On the other hand, if we are to retain the thesis that the primary motive of virtuous action is the motive of duty, we must have some way of identifying or defining right actions which does not depend on their motives".

Essentially the first solution is the one adopted by sentimentalists and leads them to appeal to natural affections such as sympathy. This kind of account can also be seen to underpin utilitarian views of motivation and to have reappeared in another form in the work of Amartya Sen. However it leads to two problems since the motives it appeals to appear only contingently connected to right action and thus to lack a binding character. Further, since the natural affections are the prime source of moral obligation the motive of obligation itself appears to be something only secondary (perhaps a kind of "back-up"). This conception of moral motivation also appears to view the motivation in question not only as extrinsically related to the moral obligation generated but also in terms of a spectator's conception of how it operates (thus taking it to be essentially passive in form).

By contrast, the rationalist view emphasises a sense of the active force of obligation and in this way retains the view that the motive of duty really does move us. However the rationalist views the motive of duty as one we are led to adopt by the terms of how things themselves are and requires us to see moral significance as actually in the things themselves, something that leads naturally to moral realism and intuitionism. Further it does little to provide an adequate account of how motivation itself operates.

By contrast to these pictures Kant's view in Groundwork I starts with the idea of the good will and then proceeds to analyse the notion of duty by which such a good will would be moved. This analysis articulates a distinction between motivations that refer to two types of inclination (direct as when we are moved by enjoyment and indirect by the hypothetical relation to something beyond the inclination itself) and contrasts these with motivation that is based on duty. Having set these points out Korsgaard reveals what is innovative in her account of the motive of duty which is to take this motive as having its worth in terms of the grounds on which a purpose gets adopted. This leads to her effectively identifying Kant's notion of "maxim" as a process whereby something is taken to be a normative reason. There are then distinct reasons why a purpose is regarded as worth having and it is the difference between them that determines distinct types of worth. As Korsgaard puts it: "Duty is not a different purpose, but a different ground for the adoption of a purpose".

The ground for adoption of a purpose that is specific to duty is that in its case a maxim is adopted because it possesses an intrinsic and not an extrinsic legal character (hence the sentimentalist stress on motivation is linked to the rationalist argument for binding force). The binding force of the maxim in this case turns on the universality of the form of the maxim relating to the grounds on which one can will a purpose. Korsgaard, in articulating this point by means of an example, refers to the case of the lying promise (Ak. 4: 402-3) which is used already in Groundwork I (something often forgotten). The argument here is presented as turning on the impossibility of willing a universal law of lying as such a law would "destroy itself". The point being, as Korsgaard puts it, that "he cannot rationally will to act on this maxim at the same time as he wills it as a law".

This claim that it is the will of the person themselves as reflected in the maxim adopted that requires them to see the impossibility of the world that such a will apparently aims for demonstrates the nature of the law in the universal law. This points already for Korsgaard to the emphasis on autonomy that is arguably only made explicit in Groundwork II.

Interestingly, Korsgaard's reconstruction of the point of the argument of Groundwork I says nothing about Kant's introduction of the notion of respect in this part of the work. For some thoughts on that see my previous posting on Nelson Potter.

Allison and the Argument of the Preface to Kant's Groundwork

2011-11-02T17:42:00.000Z

As I mentioned in my last posting on Allison's commentary, the work is intended to respond to Kant's Groundwork in both historical and philosophical respects. The first chapter of the commentary is ostensibly concerned to analyse the "Preface" to the Groundwork but it begins with remarks about the historical development of Kant's ethical views, going back as far as a letter Kant sent to Herder in 1767 where Kant appears to have first mentioned the very idea of a "metaphysics of morals" though here he is not, as Allison admits, very informative concerning how this area of study should be understood.

Allison dates Kant's "critical" turn in ethics to the same publication sometimes argued to be Kant's first "critical" work, namely the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 though little is really said here about moral philosophy other than it should contain no empirical principles. Similarly, letters during the 1770s, when mention is made in them of moral philosophy, are not very expansive concerning Kant's positive approach to the area. Allison indicates a general belief that Kant may have been led to a kind of critical confrontation with moral thinking by means of the stimulus of Hume, as he was in theoretical philosophy, but little is advanced to make this point substantive. Allison also presents an extremely truncated conception of the ethical elements of the Critique of Pure Reason as only giving the basis for a view of what it is to be worthy of the "highest good", a view that is hardly adequate to the understanding of how this work connects to Kant's general ethics.

The historical section of Allison's first chapter has to thus be said to be rather thin and disappointing. By contrast, the philosophical analysis of the argument of the "Preface" perhaps produces more than one might have expected from Kant's text. As in the Inaugural Dissertation Kant here opens by indicating that principles of morality cannot be empirically derived or grounded although this does not mean they cannot be empirically applied. Later, in the Metaphysics of Morals, this latter comment is expanded to indicate that the conditions for fulfilling the laws of the "metaphysics of morals" is an important part of the latter's scope.

In the "Preface" Kant understands what is meant by a "metaphysics of morals" in a specific way, namely, that which belongs to pure or a priori moral philosophy. The claim to this effect is made at Ak. 4: 389 and analysis of this passage essentially provides Allison with his general view of the argument of the "Preface". Here Kant is argued to make three claims. The first is that a moral principle involves "absolute necessity", which is an expression Allison understands in a modalized rather than prescriptive sense. Viewing the claim in this way entails that the moral principle in question must be capable of holding in all possible worlds rather than being a principle without exceptions (as it would be on a prescriptive reading). Not only does Allison view the "absolute necessity thesis" in this modalized way, he also claims that it does not refer primarily to specific duties but to the underlying principle on which such duties would be based.

The second claim Allison indicates is made at Ak. 4: 389 is what he terms the "scope thesis" to the effect that a valid moral principle has to apply to all rational beings and not merely to human beings. Finally, the third claim in this passage is termed by Allison the "apriority thesis", a complicated multi-pronged claim. According to this last thesis the ground of moral obligation is found solely in a priori concepts of pure reason. This amounts to the view that the grounding of the principle that is the basis of all first-order moral principles is itself a priori and that searching for it must require a method that is akin to its object (and thus be itself a priori).

The "apriority thesis" has been subjected to some criticism, not least due to the point that finding the origin of a concept is not necessarily equivalent to finding its "seat". The "origin" of a concept would here refer to the ground of something's validity whereas its "seat" would refer to the place where the concept in question is located. So, you could hold, for example, that the "seat" of morality resides in innate ideas whilst its origin is in God's ends and hence have quite an important distinction here which, it could be argued, Kant's "apriority thesis" dogmatically neglects.

Allison considers this possible objection and suggests that its sharpest formulation could be found in the claim that the "Preface" offered insufficient reasons for thinking that the "origin" of the moral claim fits the apriority thesis. However, Allison indicates that he takes both the scope thesis and the absolute necessity thesis in a modalized form and that they reciprocally imply each other, not least because prescriptive versions of these theses could not justify the necessity of the principles that would be prescribed by the absolute necessity and scope theses. As this is so the question of the "origin" of the moral principle that meets the absolute necessity and scope theses becomes central to seeing the justification of the application to the moral principle of these theses. As Allison puts this point: "if we consider Kant's initial argument in the Preface for the necessity for moral theory of a pure, that is, a priori, moral philosophy, together with its extension in GMS 2, we find a two-part argument for the Sitz and Ursprung in pure reason of whatever could serve as the supreme principle of morality" (28).

The first part of this argument, which is given in the Preface, yields the conclusion that the "seat" of any moral principle must reside in concepts of pure reason. And the premises of this part of the argument are the absolute necessity and scope theses where these are understood without reference to modalization. The second part of the argument, by contrast, given later (in Groundwork II) presupposes that these principles have been modalized and argues from this presupposition to the view that the "origin" of any supreme principle of morality would lie in the universal concept of a rational being.

Allison also views the absolute necessity and scope theses to be found, albeit in unarticulated form, in the common or pre-philosophical, conception of morality. This claim, which requires careful consideration of the argument of the first part of the Groundwork on Allison's view, indicates how philosophically substantive he understands this first section to be.

The argument of the "Preface", however, after arguing for the view that moral theory needs a metaphysics of morals as a matter of necessity, advances next the claim that the metaphysics of morals is also important for moral practice. The basic reason for this claim (also made at Ak. 4: 389) is that without a metaphysics of morals conformity to the moral law is only contingent and fragile. So the claim here concerns the need for moral conduct to have a secure basis and is related to the further point that acting morally should involve acting for the sake of the moral law. In a sense, then, the question of how to ensure that one does act for the sake of the moral law is related to the question of how we show that the moral law is one that we necessarily should follow.

Allison's analysis of the "Preface" next discusses the reasons Kant gives for not having provided us in the Groundwork with a "critique", one of the reasons of which appears, however, to undercut the argument suggesting that a metaphysics of morals is important for moral practice. After all, Kant suggests that a critique in the practical domain is less important than in the speculative since in the practical area even the common understanding can be brought to a correct and complete view, a claim Allison traces back to Kant's Rousseauean conception of the "common man". The second reason Kant gives in this preface is to the effect that providing a practical critique would require articulating in addition the unity of theoretical and practical reason whereas the Groundwork has a more modest aim. This more modest aim is the third specific reason for failing to provide a critique since Kant gives the aim of the Groundwork as only being to provide a preliminary foundation for morals and not a system of morality itself. Interestingly, this indicates that the Groundwork is modest in two respects since it neither shows the unity of theoretical and practical reason or articulates a system of morality.

Finally, the distinction between analytic and synthetic procedures in the Groundwork is argued by Allison to be quite different from how the distinction is understood in the Prolegomena. The Groundwork is argued to practice a regressive argument that is also a form of conceptual analysis, a view that will be discussed in more detail later.

Lillehammer reviews Skorupski

2011-11-02T13:45:00.000Z

Over at the Notre Dame Philosophical Review there has appeared a response to John Skorupski's The Domain of Reasons, a book about which I posted a few comments myself, the most recent of which is here. The review, by Hallvard Lillehammer, is well worth consulting.

Parfit and Kant On Treating Persons As Ends

2011-10-31T22:21:00.000Z

In my recent postings on Parfit I have concentrated on how he looks at the first part of Kant's formula of humanity, the part that he believes involves discussion of the notion of "rational consent". The first place where Parfit formulated this view was in his 2002 Tanner Lectures and I broke off from consideration of these lectures after this posting in order to track the development of the views first expressed there in subsequent drafts preparatory to the publication of On What Matters and, finally, in the chapter length-discussion in On What Matters that was the subject of my last posting on Parfit.

I want now to open a series of postings that focuses both on how Parfit responds to the second part of Kant's formulation of humanity and how he sets out a general reading of the overall formula of humanity. This will require, firstly, a lengthier analysis of the first of Parfit's 2002 Tanner Lectures and subsequently an account of the further preparatory drafts leading up to On What Matters before we can return to the analysis of the next chapter of On What Matters. As previously, therefore, the next element of discussion of Parfit's encounter with Kant will be lengthy and textually complicated.

The second section of the first 2002 lecture opens with a report of the general complaint that using people is wrong. As Parfit explains, however, it is far from clear that, when the complaint is so simply made, that it is right since there appears nothing wrong in principle with using a friend as a dictionary or a loved one as a pillow. This is why, in Kant's formula, it is not treating people as a means that is condemned but treating them merely as a means and not also as ends in themselves. So it is not using people that is wrong as such but just using them.

The way to avoid just using someone is to act with regard to them in such a way that one's actions can reasonably be said to be constrained by some form of consideration for them or, put otherwise, if one can be said to be acting under some moral principle that constrains one's conduct with regard to them. Parfit construes the reference to "maxims" in Kant's formulations as an expression of what he calls "underlying policies and attitudes" and considers actions that are constrained in the appropriate way as expressions of such "policies and attitudes".

However, although Parfit appears to present action as expressive of such policies and attitudes and to take the Formula of Humanity to govern the way in which attitudes and policies can be appropriately formulated such that they are constrained in the right way he nonetheless is not thereby convinced that actions that treat someone as a mere means are thereby necessarily wrong. In other words, Parfit's first move appears to be one of viewing the Formula of Humanity as providing us, in its reference to not treating others merely as means, as giving us an appropriate guideline for the attitudes that underlie actions without thereby providing us with a means of assessing the right actions to perform.

The reason for the appearance of this split in Parfit's account is that the attitude expressed by someone in a situation may be wrong without the action that follows from the expressed attitude also being wrong. Since, however, it appeared that Parfit was presenting the reference to maxims as indicative of how to understand the policy that Kant was recommending it follows from his construal that this policy is not sufficiently comprehensive to determine the attitude we should have to the conduct that is produced by the adoption of the "wrong" attitude.

To make this point clearer Parfit refers to the example of someone who treats a coffee seller as a mere means. Such a person pays the coffee seller rather than stealing from them only because in many cases it would be too much trouble to steal from them. The person in question thus has an attitude towards the coffee seller that is worthy of moral condemnation but, unless they proceed to steal from the coffee seller, their action is not appropriately one that should be taken to worthy of moral condemnation (even if it is also not one that is worthy of moral praise as follows from Kant's examples in Groundwork I).

Generally we could say of the person with this bad attitude that they are acting in accordance with duty but not from duty just as is the case with the shopkeeper who only gives everyone the right change because this is generally in accord with their best interest and not because this is the right thing to do. So Parfit now formulates a "mere means principle" as indicating that there two ways in which treating someone as a "mere means" can be said to be wrong, either by "regarding" them merely as a means or by also harming them, without their consent, and thus acting in such a way that one treats them merely as a means.

After having arrived at this formulation of the second part of the Formula of Humanity Parfit now combines it with his view of the first half of the Formula to produce the overall account of it as stating that we do not treat someone as a mere means if we adopt the Rational Consent principle as an appropriate constraint on our means of acting with regard to them. What this entails is subsequently set out by consideration of a set of thought experiments that bear close comparison to classic "trolley" problems but I will leave consideration of these to the next posting I do on Parfit.

Cosmopolitics and Globalisation

2011-10-31T12:48:00.000Z

I've recently returned from a conference that was held in Bucharest on the theme of "Cosmopolitanism and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense" that was held at the New Europe College there and which Aron Zsolt Telegdi-Csetri and I co-organised. I normally try, subsequently to attending conferences, to offer outlines of the main papers given so that those who were not able to attend have some sense of what the conference covered. However, on this occasion, I think it is better to think through a central issue that was raised by the event and how this connects to some of the papers that were given.

The question I have in mind was raised by someone in a round table that was held towards the conclusion of the event and concerned the relationship between cosmopolitics and globalisation. Whilst I gave at the round table my own response to this question and will likely conclude this posting by repeating it, I also wanted to indicate how some of the speeches given here touched on this matter as the relationship between these terms strikes me as an important one.

The opening speech at this event was given by Garry Robson (Jagiellonian University Krakow) whose talk was a sociological analysis of the manifestations of globalisation here in the UK during the period of the last New Labour government. Robson's analysis revealed the growth of new forms of speech in London due to the presence there of an extremely large number of discrete language groups and also mentioned how, in 2006, there had been record levels of both immigration and emigration from the UK. Robson's analysis suggested that the New Labour government had been engaged in a kind of "top-down" process of social change of the country, something that could be thought of as supported by recent comments of ex-Premier Tony Blair. Robson's own view of the changes that apparent large movements of population have produced was less clear though the focus on the riots in the UK this summer suggested a view to the effect that these changes have some elements that are less than positive though little in Robson's paper indicated focus on the distinction between the contribution of migrants to the labour market (particularly migrants from Eastern Europe) by comparison with the flourishing of youth subcultures that may well be tapping into social discontent without necessarily themselves being causal agents of it.

Robson's paper was the first of the conference and focused clearly on a conception of "globalisation" though it also implied that questions of multi-culturalism and concerns around migration were in some way related to elite presentations of a notion of "cosmopolitics". A paper that was cast in similar vein to Robson's was that of Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg) who focused on a similar kind of argument concerning the Russian Federation. Trubina's contribution appeared to fall into two parts, the first of which outlined a view of cosmopolitics derived from Martha Nussbaum and indicated some general problems it could be argued to have prior to moving into what appeared to be her real target, an analysis of social changes in Russia that she presented as forms of "neo-liberalism". Trubina spoke of how "zones" of prosperity and focused investment were being undertaken and how, within the privileged zones, a kind of rhetoric of "cosmopolitics" was used that enabled the elevation of some at the expense of others (with these others dubbed, by contrast, "parochial"). As with Robson, but, in a way, more strikingly, there appeared an easy conflation in Trubina's paper of concerns about effects of globalisation and responses to normative cosmopolitan notions.

Quite in contrast to these presentations was the one given by Garrett Brown (University of Sheffield). Brown's speech was a contribution from international political theory rather than the more sociological or socio-philosophical tones of Trubina and Robson. Brown summarised the ways in which the cosmopolitan model of reasoning within IR theory has come under pressure from a revival of realism and certain internal tensions of the theory itself. Reporting on joint research undertaken with David Held Brown articulated the case for the continuing relevance of cosmopolitan models of analysis to IR theory and suggested that there remain no real viable alternative models to it. If the contributions of Trubina and Robson raised problems about conflation of cosmopolitics and globalisation it remained somewhat unclear, at least to me, how the various sources of cosmopolitical thinking within the terms of IR theory come together and whether the combinations they produce are sufficient for a stable synthetic approach to the subject area. Nonetheless this contribution, quite unlike those of Trubina and Robson, took seriously the sense that there is a distinct space for normative contributions to political analysis.

Similar in this respect to Brown's paper was the contribution of Speranta Dumitru (Universite Paris Descartes) who suggested a basic problem with viewing global equality of opportunity as reasonably curtailed by focus on entitlements granted to national citizens. Tilting forcefully against the tendencies of the sociological contributions earlier Dumitru suggested that viewing it as correct that social entitlements should be grounded on national citizenship entailed that we viewed distinct persons as "separate but equal". Dumitru argued that such a view endorsed an unreflective bias for what she termed a "sederantist" view of persons in which those who remained in one place where granted privilege over those who moved around. In articulating a case for a global view of equality of opportunity Dumitru strikingly advanced a particular conception of cosmopolitical theory.

A specific session devoted to Kant's cosmopolitical ideal was the place where my own contribution to the conference was made. I gave a paper that focused specifically on Kant's conception of "cosmopolitan right" articulating a place for this notion within his overall theory of right. I disagreed with the view of Elizabeth Ellis that the conception of cosmopolitan right could be justified just by reference to the idea of provisional right that Kant mentions in the Doctrine of Right though I also suggested that provisional right is best understood in relation to the standard provided by the universal principle of right. The main point of my paper was to indicate, however, that the notion of cosmopolitan right is best seen as an alternative way of addressing international problems to those that arise within the province of international right and that it does this by means of a double-edged right to hospitality, a right that imposes serious constraints both on visitors to other lands and on the reception of such visitors. The paper concluded by articulating the view that it is the standard of enlightened reason that enables a Kantian riposte to colonialism.

By contrast Sorin Baiasu (Keele University) looked at a very specific question in Kant's treatment of cosmopolitan themes, namely his presentation of perpetual peace as the "highest political good". Baiasu advanced the importance of the distinction between two conceptions of the highest good, a view of it founded on the notion of the "complete" good by contrast to one founded only on the "supreme" good and suggested that many commentators by taking perpetual peace to be a "complete" good fundamentally misunderstood its place in Kant's theory. If viewed only as a "supreme" good it fitted better with the general intention of Kant's contribution and argued for a more modest understanding of Kant's teleological argument concerning nature than would arise from viewing it as a "complete" good.

In addition to these plenary contributions there were a number of shorter papers that addressed a range of themes from an account of aesthetic questions of assimilating different types of musical taste to analysis of the place of port cities as centres of cosmopolitan endeavour and papers that opened questions about the extent to which state sovereignty can be defended.

The recurrence of the contrast between cosmopolitics and globalisation in the round table session with which the conference concluded indicated an unresolved tension that was wider than a simple contrast between philosophical and non-philosophical contributions advanced. The analysis of "globalisation", I suggested in the round table discussion, is part of a socio-historical understanding that requires tools derived from economics, history, sociology and political theory. The processes that we name under its heading I would want to argue, are quite distinct from those that we should categorise under the heading of "cosmopolitics" and the reason I think this is that the latter names a distinctive notion of normative theory. It is true that there are many projects that pass themselves off as cosmopolitical and there is much to argue about concerning the relationship between these. However, what is common to them is that they are distinctly theoretical events, not, at least not in the first instance, descriptions of on-going empirical social processes. In this respect cosmopolitical theories are intended to guide events and articulate how they should develop according to the notions of the kinds of normative considerations they advance. By contrast, theories of globalisation describe empirical social events, often critically, but without necessarily having new normative guide-lines by which they can advance views of what should take place. The distinction between these notions is important and, in many respects, the tensions between the different contributions to this event, helped to focus on its importance.

Henry Allison and Kant's Groundwork

2011-10-30T17:33:00.000Z

Henry E. Allison has recently added to his already extensive collection of works on Kant a new work, Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2011). Given the importance of Allison generally as an interpreter of Kant and the significance of the Groundwork for the understanding of Kant's contribution to moral philosophy the publication of this work must count as a signal moment in Kantian studies. Since this work is so significant I intend to treat it as a matter of serious import for this blog and will be responding to it with the same kind of detailed reactions I have developed in previous postings in regard to both Derek Parfit and John Rawls.

In this posting I will confine my attention to the "Introduction" to Allison's commentary. Allison here instantly makes the claim that the "main reason" why the Groundwork is particularly crucial for both understanding Kant's contribution to moral philosophy and for a view of modern moral philosophy as a whole, consists in the articulation in this work of a distinction between ethics that is based on "autonomy" and that which, by contrast, has a grounding in something heteronomous. In making this claim Allison is self-consciously following in the wake of J.B. Schneewind's historical work on modern moral philosophy but complementing the latter by seeing the emphasis on autonomy as a practical complement to Kant's alleged "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. However, Allison does acknowledge the point that emphasis on "autonomy" in Kant is connected to Rousseau's political conception that freedom involves obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself. Despite mentioning this point, however, Allison does not connect this either to Kant's later characterisation of enlightened reason or to Kant's articulation of the supreme principle of right in the Doctrine of Right preferring only to see a shift from Rousseau's political vocabulary to Kant's moral one, something that is not comprehensively accurate however appropriate it might be to the context of the Groundwork alone.

Unlike Rawls, however, Allison does not think that the effect of the emphasis on autonomy in Kant's ethics can be well described by means of a view that the right has priority over the good. In eschewing this presentation Allison prefers instead the formulation that the Kantian view involves the priority of the moral law over the good. However, again, the main reason for this apparent change in formulation is due to a distrust of Rawls' own conception of justice as fairness whereas Allison wants to emphasise the Kantian contribution to moral philosophy, something that suggests there is little substantive of importance in the altered formulation.

Allison admits to the fact that serious study of the Groundwork has led to an alteration of views on his own part though he says little initially to indicate in what ways this has taken place. Similarly, whilst conceding that the days are, in my view thankfully, long past, when it could be held that the Groundwork could be regarded as constituting the main fabric of Kant's contribution to moral theory, Allison only modifies this old view by addressing the Groundwork as the place where Kantian meta-ethics is formulated whereas even this claim is perhaps more sweeping than is warranted. However, Allison is surely on safer ground when he reports, as a generally accepted view, that the categorical imperative is no longer treated as a kind of algorithm for morality by means of which considerations of moral judgment can be swept aside.

If this general point about the categorical imperative is taken to be significant however, it is only negatively so and would still leave almost everything left unsaid concerning it. Amongst other questions, in interpreting the Groundwork it is clearly important to arrive at a view of how it presents, as Allison puts it, "the nature and function of the categorical imperative" as well as treatments of the various alleged "derivations" it is subjected to in the text of the work and the supposed "problems" connected to its "deduction" in the third part of the work and Allison promises that his book will offer his own views on these key topics.

In addition to these promises Allison also makes clear that, for him, it is important to come to a view on the development of Kant's views from the statements in the Critique of Pure Reason on ethical topics, statements often not sufficiently treated. The point in particular on which Allison lays emphasis is that the Critique of Pure Reason appears to suggest that it has provided all that is needed in order for the ground to be laid for a metaphysics of morals so that there must have been some kind of change of view on this topic between 1781 and 1784.

Similarly, Allison indicates that amongst other historical considerations that his commentary will treat are responses to some of the key external influences on Kant, notably, the Wolffian "practical philosophy" to which Kant refers at one point in the Groundwork and Christian Garve's notion of "popular moral philosophy". The second section of the Groundwork is one he will be particularly treating as a riposte to Garve's views.

Allison's general account of the structure of the Groundwork is in terms of the work's focus on two objectives, firstly, searching for and, secondly, establishing, the supreme principle of morality. Essentially Groundwork I and II are taken to be concerned with the first of these tasks (what are conventionally described as the "derivation" of the categorical imperative) whilst Groundwork III, by contrast, treats of the third (generally termed the "deduction" of the categorical imperative). Allison also anticipates his general argument by indicating that on the latter, his overall verdict has not changed since the publication of his seminal work Kant's Theory of Freedom since he continues, apparently, to adopt the view argued for there, to the effect that the argument of Groundwork III is a failure though it remains to be seen if the nature of his treatment of the reasons for this alleged "failure" have remained the same.

An aspect of the treatment offered that is certainly surprising is that Allison also aspires to take seriously an objection that could be made to the structure of the Groundwork but that has not often been pressed in recent years. This is to the effect that the argument of the second section of the work is "redundant" given that Kant has already arrived at a statement of the categorical imperative by the close of the first part of the Groundwork (hence completing the first task of the work) whilst the third part tackles the task of "establishing" the categorical imperative (thus dealing with the work's second objective). Once put like this the argument as to why Kant introduces what is perhaps the most complex and sustained argument, the argument of Groundwork II, can appear perplexing. Further, whilst, as I said, the argument to this effect has been little advanced in recent years, it is articulated in a work by A.R.C. Duncan (a work of broadly intuitionist persuasion from the late 1950's) and has not been provided, as Allison suggests, with any kind of comprehensive response. Providing such a response is part of the rationale for Allison's commentary which ensures that addressing how well it succeeds in responding to this "redundancy argument" is part of seeing whether the work generally succeeds in adding something substantive to the great volume of works that already exist on the Groundwork.

It is within Groundwork II that Kant presents a number of different formulas of the categorical imperative though it has been a subject of sustained dispute exactly how many are there given and what the relationship between them consists in. Allison indicates that it will be part of his argument that the formulas represent "successive stages in the complete construction of the concept of the categorical imperative" and that they correlate with a progressive analysis of the concept of rational agency. Since the conception of the relationship of the categorical imperative to a picture of rational agency surely is central to the viability of the offering of the categorical imperative as truly being the supreme principle of morality this point is certainly one that is centrally important.

Allison's conception of Groundwork III is to the effect that within it Kant aims to demonstrate that our wills possess a specific property, namely that of autonomy. Unlike the Groundwork, however, Allison's books is divided into four parts, not three. The first part concerns "preliminaries", namely an analysis of the "preface" to the Groundwork and a treatment of Kant's responses to the projects of Garve and Wolff. The second part is a reading of Groundwork I, carried out over three chapters, addressing the understanding of the good will, maxims and the three "propositions" of this first part. The third part treats Groundwork II, looking at rational agency, the universal law formulas, the formula of humanity and an account of autonomy. Finally, the fourth part is a reading of Groundwork III, looking at the moral law, the presupposition of freedom and the "deduction" of the categorical imperative. All told the commentary promises to be perhaps the most comprehensive provided in English to date and to set a standard that will require response from all others addressing Kant's moral philosophy.

Graham Bird Review Article in Kant Studies Online

2011-10-30T15:45:00.001Z

There is now a review article by Graham Bird in Kant Studies Online which is in response to Leslie Stevenson's book Inspirations from Kant. You can read and freely download the piece here.

Rawls, Just Savings and Priority Principles

2011-10-26T22:28:00.000+01:00

It is sometime now since I last blogged about Rawls.I left the discussion of Theory at that point where Rawls discussed properties of social systems. In this posting, by contrast, still following the logic of tracing the sections of Chapter V of the work (concerned with "distributive shares") I will look at sections 44-46. The first of these sections concerns the principle of "just savings", a principle that, in the last of the sections mentioned, is revealed to put in play a further principle of priority of the principle of equality of opportunity over the difference principle. The middle one of these sections, by contrast, has a more supplementary function in terms of giving reasons why considerations of which generation one belongs to should not be determinative for selection of principles and how this is not a point that violates democratic concern.

Section 44 is ostensibly concerned with "justice between generations" though anyone who has grappled with the questions that attach to this in works at least from Reasons and Persons onwards is highly unlikely to be satisfied with Rawls' treatment. However, if we look at what Rawls actually treats in this section we can see that, whilst much more limited in scope than much work concerned with "future generations", it does provide the basic outlines for a further clarification of one of the principles of justice in an illuminating fashion.

The real question set in the section is described well by Rawls as a concern with the "social system"'s capacity to meet the two principles of justice and this concerns, as he puts it here, an understanding of how the social minimum is set. After mentioning the "common sense" proposal that it be set so as to reach customary expectations, Rawls points out that this provides no guideline concerning when and where such expectations can be accepted as reasonable. By contrast, adoption of the difference principle indicates a means by which distribution can be governed. However, this applies not merely within a generation but also between them. This requires each generation to put aside "a suitable amount of real capital accumulation". And this is the means by which the question of justice between generations arises within the theory of justice.

Having set it out in this way Rawls proceeds to make a series of concessions concerning the need for intuitive guidance when thinking through these questions. So, as is almost instantly admitted, there are "no precise limits" on what the rate of savings should be. But this does not prevent there from being, as Rawls puts it here, "significant ethical constraints" governing the means by which savings are accumulated (note that he does not write of these as "political constraints"). Amongst these constraints are a number of reasons for not governing the mechanism of appropriation of savings by means of the principle of utility, not least because this principle tends to be excessively demanding on present generations.

By contrast to the principle of utility, the theory of justice as understood by Rawls is grounded on seeing the original position as the basis of an appropriate savings principle. Contrary to his earlier remarks in this section, however, Rawls appears not to take the basis of the savings principle to really be the difference principle after all, not least because there is no way to apply it retrospectively to previous generations and since the standing of each generation has to be somehow given place in the theory it might well seem that there has to be a different principle than the difference principle governing justice between generations.

Looked at from the standpoint of the original position there are two ways in which we can imagine the veil of ignorance applying to the question of generations. It is possible to view it from the perspective of present time entry which would favour present generations relative to previous ones or from a standpoint which adopts a principle we could wish any and every generation could have followed. Since, in principle, the veil of ignorance can be sufficiently thick for us not, in any case, to know which generation we belong to, the latter conception of the original position has the advantage for Rawls. And it is on this basis that the question of just savings is approached.

So when the question of savings is broached the means by which it is addressed are in terms of how much savings would be undertaken if we assumed that all other generations had followed the same criterion (a kind of universalisation procedure). Given this formulation the right principle of just savings would thus ensure a schedule was adopted that determined rates. This would affect the degree to which rates could be reasonably set as a wealthier society would have more to spare for savings than a poorer one. However, as noted earlier, the general conception of the level of such savings is left generally intuitive and the "strains of commitment" are invoked as one of the reasons why it would be correct to leave them intuitive. The general rationale for the savings in question also has to be constantly kept in view as one of ensuring that a material base "sufficient to establish effective just institutions within which the basic liberties can be realized".

The features of the contract approach that are specific with regard to just savings are best captured by saying that it addresses from a standpoint of justice a problem that democratic theory generally has great difficulty comprehending. Given a view that democratic decisions are grounded on reference to present parties there appears no way of ensuring that demands of future generations have any way of being represented at all (and this partly underlines the fascinating difficulties Parfit encountered in Reasons and Persons final part). But the original position does have a way of representing them, as all parties to this position are equally virtual so that differences of generation should not be considered distinct in principle from other differences.

The reason why this equal representation of distinct generations meets a "democratic" demand according to Rawls is that the basic democratic demand is that "what touches all concerns all". Each generation passes on to the next a fair equivalent in real capital by means of just savings. Having pointed out this first element of the contract position Rawls goes on to indicate that the second element concerns the definition of the aim of accumulation that it has adopted which is that such accumulation should be concerned with the attainment and maintenance of just social arrangements. So the just savings principle is a kind of coordination between generations of the means by which these aims can be met. "The savings principle represents an interpretation, arrived at in the original position, of the previously accepted natural duty to uphold and to further just institutions." Finally, given the contract conception there is no special value placed on attaining great abundance since the good society is not now viewed primarily as one with a high material standard of living.

The just savings principle is next related by Rawls to his two principles of justice by means of the reference to the standpoint of the least advantaged in each generation. This requires that the difference principle is constrained by reference to the just savings principle. Once the veil of ignorance has been understood in the appropriately thick manner it has become possible to again see the relationship of the just savings principle to the difference principle but also to comprehend that the application of the difference principle at any given point of time is constrained by reference to the continuing operation of the general coordination between generations that the just savings principle represents.

It is this striking restraint that the just savings principle operates upon the difference principle that leads Rawls to consider in section 45 the introduction of some further remarks concerning "time preference" in order to further make clear the reasonableness of this restraint upon the difference principle. We should not prefer a lesser present to a greater future good simply because of the former's nearer temporal position (again, echoes here are clear of Reasons and Persons though the latter work does, of course, post-date Theory). The just savings principle cannot be distorted in application by loose preference for a given generation. This does not prevent us from assuming interest rates are an appropriate means by which just savings can be measured. But there are no grounds for giving the living a simple preference over those as yet unborn. Collective saving for the future is a public good.

However the questions of "democracy" are again here considered by reference to the actual preferences of a given public at a given present. It is often the case that the demands of such a public are taken to be constitutive of the demos. But Rawls articulates the claim of future generations as a restraint on this preference and indicates that a judiciary informed by principles of justice would reflect this. Further, the first sustained mention of civil disobedience in Theory concerns the appropriateness of resistance to a democratic legislature that overlooked its fiduciary care for future generations.

Section 46 turns next to other cases of the priority of justice now that the priorities that arise from a consideration of just savings have been elucidated. At this point Rawls considers the general conservative case that inequalities of wealth and authority that appear to violate the second principle of justice may be justified if they provide sufficiently large economic and social benefits. Keynes' suggestion that it is an argument of this sort that justifies capitalism is mentioned with the point made that this does not justify the condition of the poorest in the circumstances in question as right but only as preferable to the alternatives. The basic point about the inequalities mentioned by Keynes is that they violate the principle of fair equality of opportunity and more conservative positions such as those of Burke and Hegel are referred to here as indicating rationales for violation of this principle. However it has to be pointed out that this conservative case has to meet a very strong condition, namely, that of showing that elimination of inequalities would limit the opportunities of the disadvantaged in a more serious way than they are presently.

The consideration of these conservative positions is not mentioned here by Rawls in order to reply to them in a systematic sense but to indicate that some recognition of inequality of opportunity may well be built into a basic structure if failure to recognise it would have greater costs and in making this point Rawls refers, as he often does, to the social costs that arise from the simple existence of the structure of family arrangements. Further, recognition of the difference principle and the priority rules that follow from it do not require attainment of perfect equality of opportunity.

Section 46 concludes with the important "final" statement of the two principles of justice for institutions which includes the formulations not just of the two principles but of their accompanying priority rules. The first principle is now stated in the following way: "Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all". This principle has altered little from earlier formulations and still bears important comparison with the supreme principle of right as stated by Kant in the Doctrine of Right. The second principle is stated, by contrast, in a more extensive manner than previous formulations allowed as follows:
"Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity." Notably the difference principle is now explicitly constrained by the just savings principles whilst the principle of fair equality of opportunity, by contrast, is left much as it was in previous formulations.

Finally Rawls states the two priority rules. The first priority rule concerns the priority of liberty or the priority of the first principle of justice over the second. Basic liberties can be restricted, according to the first priority rule, only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases which allow this: "(a) a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberties shared by all; (b) a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with the lesser liberty". The second priority rule concerns the priority of justice over efficiency and welfare but this also mandates that the principle of fair opportunity has priority over the difference principle. There are two cases in which these priorities are expressed: "(a) an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunities of those with the lesser opportunity; (b) an excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing the hardship".

With the attainment of the final form of the principles of justice and their accompanying priority rules Rawls reaches a key turning point in Theory. It remains to be seen to what extent and in what way the structure of the rest of the work really belongs to the theory of justice and how it helps us to formulate a political reasoning that contributes to the aims of this theory.

Parfit, Humanity and Consent (IV)

2011-10-17T21:58:00.001+01:00

After perusing the various drafts that went into the making of Parfit's account of consent in On What Matters, most recently in the pre-publication version, I want, in this posting, to simply lay out the structure and general content of Chapter 8 of volume 1, ostensibly concerned with the topic of "possible consent". When you look at the chapter as a whole and break down the movement of its argument there are some straightforwardly surprising characteristics of it.

So, for example, the Chapter opens, as the earlier drafts did, with a description of Kant's formula of humanity and, in particular, with the way that this formula is related to the discussion of false promising. It is by means of this connection that Parfit is enabled to focus less on the sense of Kant's formula itself as on the apparent reference to treating people in ways to which they could not possibly consent though the latter reference appears only in connection with this example of false promising and not when the three other examples to which the formula is related are discussed.

It is by means of this account of consent in the treatment of false promising that Parfit describes and criticises views of Christine Korsgaard and Onora O'Neill who, in being treated in such a concise manner, certainly have cause for complaint of Parfit's compressed conception of their readings. The point of Parfit's first section in this chapter is, however, not primarily one that arises from exegetical concerns. It is rather to stress problems with viewing the wrongness of coercion to lie mainly in the claim that it makes consent impossible since, as he correctly points out, certain types of coercion are precisely not generally regarded as wrong despite clearly being seen as examples of coercion. Hence when we object to coercion, it would seem, there is a ground for this objection that does not rest simply on its being coercion that is being exercised.

The second section of the chapter moves to clarify this point by focusing on what it is about consent that matters to moral claims on its behalf. Here Parfit repeats the claim of his earlier drafts that the wrong-making character of appeals to consent cannot reside, as some remarks of Korsgaard and O'Neill might lead us to think, on appeal to the "Choice-giving principle" that states simply that it is wrong not to give other people the power to choose how we shall treat them. Such a naive principle is, indeed, one that it would be hoped should not arise from any kind of careful Kantian thought since it would appear that, on its ground, we should simply, for example, buy anything that someone wants to sell to us. By contrast to this principle Parfit instead emphasises what he terms the "Consent principle" which states that it is wrong to treat people in ways to which they could not "rationally consent". This emphasis on "rational consent" does have the potential problem that it appears to build quite a bit of normativity into the general notion of reason but Parfit does not appear to follow Kant in understanding this to be a reference to the "end of acts".

Parfit presents Kant's point in the following way: "Kant must mean that, when we are choosing how we shall treat other people, we ought always to act with some aim that these people would be able to share" (181). But this "being able to share" that Parfit refers to here is not simply a way of stating the conceivability of a shared end as it rather requires the rationality of this end to be acceptable to others. However, this rationality is not understood here by reference simply to the "end of acts" because this would not in itself include discussion of the means by which ends can be achieved. That Kant's account does, however, include some constraint on this is clear enough when we remember that the Formula of Humanity involves reference to treating others as ends in themselves but this part of the Formula is not included in the chapter in question as Parfit has, for the purposes of the argument of this chapter, deliberately foreshortened the formula.

The third section of the chapter concerns reasons to give consent and here Parfit dismisses Rawls' attempt to view the "Consent Principle" in terms derived from Kant's Formula of Universal Law. Oddly enough, however, one of Parfit's reasons for dismissing this view of Rawls appears to consist in the simple assertion that Kant was inconsistent! It is usual, in interpreting philosophers, not to adopt this view unless it is absolutely necessary to make the best of their positions but here Parfit seems to assume it rather breathtakingly easily. More importantly, in this section, Parfit fills out his understanding of consent by suggesting that it is consent in the act-affecting sense that Kant means and, further, this consent has to be understood as "informed". These additions lead Parfit to refine the "Consent Principle" and he then adds some conditions on its acceptability as he takes it to be the case that it should not require us to act in ways we normally condemn and nor should it rule out too many acts we usually assume to be required.

The fourth section of the chapter then proceeds to defend the "Consent Principle" from the charge that it is superfluous. In replying to this objection Parfit argues that there are two general aims a moral principle can have, firstly, that they provide a reliable criterion of wrongness by showing that acts of a certain kind are wrong and, secondly, they can be explanatory, describing one of the reasons why wrong acts can be said to be wrong. After enumerating these points Parfit goes on to claim that the Consent Principle, if correct, offers more than a reliable criterion of wrongness (and is thus explanatory).

The fifth section of the chapter moves on to discussing "actual" consent pointing out, by using the example of rape, that reference to it is often crucial for us in determining the wrongness of acts. This section is surprisingly long and after agreeing with the need to include reference, in some sense, to "actual" consent, Parfit moves on to look at the objection that it is possible that the Consent Principle concedes too much to actual consent. In considering this objection Parfit is, in a sense, reprising the objections to Korsgaard and O'Neill with which he began his argument in the chapter except that now he saddles them with what he terms a "Veto Principle" as opposed to the absolute objection to coercion and deception he opened by presenting them as having. Just as the "Choice-giving" principle that led to such absolute positions was earlier exposed as false so now is this "veto principle" similarly rejected and it is argued that the Consent Principle need not imply the Veto principle which would give others the automatic right to object to anything to which they either do not or would in fact refuse consent.

It is useful, despite the repetition it involves, that Parfit does discuss the "Veto Principle". It is useful because, until this point, he has not clarified sufficiently his earlier statement to the effect that coercion is not, despite appearances to the contrary, necessarily wrong. In amplifying now Parfit discusses the notion of "irreversible" consent. It is frequently not possible to give irreversible consent but we can give such consent to things that we might later regret having consented to without it being irrational that we have nonetheless given this "irreversible" consent. So, for example, the inevitable pain that might come from certain kinds of operation might well, during the experience of its being undergone, lead us to regret having consented to the operation without this making it irrational that we in fact gave "irreversible" consent earlier.

Parfit's next move is to replace the "Veto Principle" with appeal to what he terms the "Rights Principle" which instead claims that everyone has rights not to be treated in certain ways without their actual consent. So there are certain kinds of act that would be veto-covered as the earlier principle intended but which kinds of act might well be difficult to determine given the rebuttability of many claims. However Parfit does argue that the opportunity to refuse consent does arise from the Rights Principle. But there is a restriction on the application of this Rights Principle since the opportunity to refuse consent "must be given by people who have sufficient understanding of the relevant facts". So it does not apply to infants, the mentally ill or those under the influence of seriously distorting drugs (including being drunk, a rather problematic exclusion I think). Further Parfit also attenuates the application of the principle by stating that influences distort judgments in various degrees with the result that decisions made under some types of influence may not be entirely over-ruled but can be given less weight (a provision that would require much care).

These points also lead to Parfit bringing in temporal considerations for the first time since he argues that present consent matters more than past consent which, in its turn, matter more than retroactive endorsement. The basis of this present bias is, however, simply grounded on the reference of present beliefs to acceptance of truth since we act on the assumption at present that the beliefs we have now are true.

The penultimate section of the chapter concerns deontic beliefs which are introduced in order to discuss the sense that wrong-making characteristics do not only arise from reference to consent. Some acts, in principle, could be wrong even though there was general rational consent to them suggests Parfit (which partly defuses the earlier sense that quite a bit of normativity was built in to his sense of "reason"). Included here, for Parfit, would be voluntary euthanasia, cruelty to animals, and, potentially, suicide (interestingly, the last of these is the first example Kant gives of application of the Formula of Humanity). So we have beliefs about wrong-making characteristics being involved with certain types of act regardless of reference to consent in relation to them. The beliefs that are so held are described by Parfit as 'deontic' reasons. Having said this, it is less than obvious that this section provides a way of dealing with such claims seriously.

The final section of the chapter looks at extreme demands that might be thought to arise from the Consent Principle which repeats the problem about the intuitive acceptability of principles that Parfit made earlier in the chapter. Here Parfit considers a revision to the Consent Principle that might be thought to be needed to prevent it from demanding too much of us which brings in reference to not requiring that we bear too great a burden (though Parfit does not specify clearly enough how to understand what "too great" would be). Finally, Parfit is aware of the fact that the Formula of Humanity has only been partially treated in this chapter and indicates the need to treat, in the following chapter, the reference to not treating others merely as a means. However, whilst this recognition is good, it is odd to have Kant named again at the end of the chapter when he has been missing from it for a considerable number of sections and when the focus on consent in general has not been systematically justified as a correct response to his general argument in terms of the discussion of humanity. It is, after all, only with regard to one example out of four when discussing the formula of humanity that Kant even refers to consent. So the suggestion that "half" the sense of the formula has been caught in the chapter is certainly peculiar.

Nelson Potter, Kant and Respect

2011-10-15T18:15:00.000+01:00

A little while ago I wrote about Nelson Potter's response to the argument of Groundwork I. However, one part of Potter's response to the argument that was not treated in this earlier posting concerns his "appendix" that addresses the role of "respect" in the discussion of Groundwork I. The "third proposition" of the argument of Groundwork I is that "duty is the necessity of an action from respect for the law" (Ak. 4: 400). Kant states that this proposition is "the conclusion" from the first two propositions of his argument.

Potter presents the third proposition as a subjective account of the nature of action from duty. The key to it, however, is that it treats "respect", putatively something that could be regarded as a "feeling", as worthy of inclusion in a rational determination of moral action. In order to demonstrate this point it is necessary for Kant to provide an account of how the "feeling" of respect is something distinct from feelings generally considered since the latter have been treated, under the heading of "pathology", as unworthy of being part of a purely rational account of morality.

Now the argument of Kant here is one that distinguishes between "inclination" and "respect" and in doing so he views the former as attached to objects as the effects of actions. In doing so Kant is placing inclination in relation to passivity whereas respect, by contrast, is viewed as part of spontaneous willing. Similarly, Kant views inclination as something towards which I cannot have the "feeling" of respect. By contrast to the object related to as an effect to which inclination is tied, Kant emphasises the "ground" of my will as something that can be an object of respect. This "ground", however, is none other than "the mere law by itself". In other words respect attaches to the law as the third proposition stated.

Potter analyses the claim in this argument and divides it into three parts. Firstly, he argues that taking the object of respect to be the ground of the determination of the will is equivalent to viewing its object as purely formal in nature. This is a point worth making, not least since Kant does not make it explicit in his compressed argument. Secondly, Potter argues that respect is an effect and not a cause of the law. This point is not stated by Kant here but Potter supports it on the ground that viewing respect as a cause of the law would entail that acting from the law was acting in response to a feeling. However, since Kant is indicating the special quality of the feeling of respect, as a feeling that is not a product of receptivity, it is less obvious than Potter suggests that Kant could not have viewed respect as part of what allows the law to act upon us (though seeing respect like this does require eschewing reference to causal vocabulary at all). Thirdly, Potter points out that the feeling of respect is "self-produced", precisely the point I have just used to put his second point into question.

What Kant specifically writes about respect in the footnote introduced into the argument of Groundwork I that concerns respect is that if we recognise something immediately as a law for us then we recognise it "with respect" and this latter recognition "signifies merely the consciousness of the subordination of my will to a law" (Ak. 4: 401n). So respect is a kind of recognition whereby a law is taken to have validity for us. This recognition involves the sense that the validity of the law requires our will's conformity to its command. So respect shows us the requirement that we act in accordance with that which we respect. It thus appears, from this statement that the action of respect is part of the means by which the law has efficacy for us, just as I suggested above.

Potter summarises the unique character of the "feeling" of respect in claiming that it is unique in "its cause, its object, and its effects in action". The cause of the appearance of the feeling is not due to the stimulus of sense and this marks out respect as a special feeling. The object of respect is the ground of the will, not the effect of the will. Finally, however, the relation of respect to the effect of the action of the will is mentioned by Potter though this appears merely to be his odd way of referring to the spontaneity of respect's appearance.

Potter indicates, however, that he is unsure what role the feeling of respect has in the determination of "moral value" or in Kant's moral philosophy generally. The reason why Potter is puzzled about these points is that respect is not something that is part of the content of the maxims of duty although it is, as he admits, part of our awareness of the moral law. Since Potter views respect as only derivative of the law, he also takes it to arise only after the formation of maxims. But this is not required to make sense of Kant's view as I have suggested. Rather, the formation of the law seems to require recognition of the need for the will to be subordinated to its command, that is, to recognise the validity of its demand upon us. Unless this validity is granted the command of the law will have no efficacy and respect is the means by which this validity is given. Potter effectively has to recognise this and states it as our awareness of being put under obligation. So another way of putting the point would be to say that the recognition that the law has put us under obligation in a certain way is to operate with respect with regard to the law.

Essentially despite raising difficulties concerning the formulations of Kant's view Potter does accept the necessity of respect and does so in terms of its belonging to the "subjective" side of morality's pull. What is missing from his analysis however is the development of this point in terms of the means by which the recognition that respect effects us concerns the way the law commands us, not merely the recognition that it command us.

Kantian Enlightenment in Twin Cities

2011-10-03T11:19:00.000+01:00

A new e-journal has been launched, the Twin Cities Review of Political Philosophy and I was invited to contribute a piece on Kant's view of enlightenment. It is included as part of a response to the general view of enlightenment and is contrasted with a piece on Foucault's view of the topic. My piece is available here. The journal is a bold new venture which focuses primarily on publication of undergraduate pieces in philosophy and the supplementary pieces otherwise included have a primarily pedagogic intent. Check out the whole first issue and seriously think of following!

Ford Madox Brown: "Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer"?

2011-09-29T20:52:00.001+01:00

It's a while since I last blogged about art works and it is perhaps not surprising that the occasion of my again doing so is an exhibition I recently visited at Manchester Art Gallery.The exhibition is the first full-scale display of the work of Ford Madox Brown in the UK since 1965 which was itself the centenary of Madox Brown's own retrospective of his work in 1865. I approached the exhibition with some excitement which I found difficult to explain to myself since, on the whole, my general view of Pre-Raphaelite art has not been favourable. This exhibition succeeded, however, both in altering my general view of this movement and in decisively introducing me to an artist who I now do not doubt was one of the most important of the 19th century.

The exhibition's title stakes out a kind of claim that is, in some respects, insufficiently ambitious with regard to Madox Brown. The suggestion that he was a "pioneer" of the Pre-Raphaelites is true in a sense since he began producing serious paintings prior to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and yet, after the Brotherhood was formed did find himself, to a certain degree, in alignment with it. However, one of the oddities of the presentation of him as a "pioneer" of the Pre-Raphaelite style is all that it does not address concerning the general comprehension of this style and the way in which this exhibition demonstrates how far away in many respects Madox Brown was from what that general comprehension would suggest. Putting it bluntly, and to quote Henry James (himself, unfortunately, no friend of the art of Madox Brown), Pre-Raphaelite art generally gets seen through the vein of its representations of young women who conform to a languishing type "with a strictness that savours of monotony". Alongside this representation of long, languid women with flowing curly hair we generally represent mythic, Arthurian images, occasional religious subjects and an idealised conception of the past age (as reflected in the very name "Pre-Raphaelite"). Perhaps it is time this whole image was, however, vigorously questioned.

This exhibition in presenting Madox Brown as perhaps the "original" Pre-Raphaelite certainly goes some way to showing a quite different side to their art than this popular image suggests. Madox Brown was unlike the figures who formed the Brotherhood in a number of respects. Firstly, he came from a different generation being older than they (which is where the "pioneer" notion comes from). Secondly, he was born and educated abroad which gave him a different type of induction into art than was given to the "classic" figures of the Brotherhood. Amongst other things it ensured that Madox Brown was imbued with some academic values that remained important for his artistic practice even though that practice belied in many respects his original training. Amongst other things this training culminated in the production of history paintings on a large scale and both the scale and this conception remained important for his later work. Thirdly and finally, Madox Brown presents rather more varied subjects than the classic figures of the Brotherhood and is most importantly more focused on reacting to the present around him, particularly in his key works.

The exhibition brings together 140 works divided between 11 themes and is curated by Julian Treuherz, a former curator of Manchester Art Gallery and author of the exhibition catalogue. The initial sight on beginning to view the exhibition is a set of paintings that are devoted to the artist himself and his family with the striking original impression coming from his painting of the family of his first wife, The Bromley Family. This picture produces an immediate feel of immersion in a remote and perhaps somewhat quaint historical period and is an example of a kind of Biedermeyer portraiture. Madox Brown's wife is in the centre of the composition holding a set of flowers whilst behind her two men are engaged in conversation and in front of her two women sit in dark clothing, one of whom appears distant. Whilst it is in many respects a conventional portrait the immediate feeling of historicisation it accompanies does induct the viewer into the sense of a strange world that will require accommodations of a sort that may be unexpected.

The second subject area is what is classed as Madox Brown's "early period" and includes the striking Manfred on the Jungfrau that I have often walked past on previous visits to the gallery. Whilst this composition shows a scene of Romantic agony the colouration is confusing given that Madox Brown (or FMB for short) altered it some decades after it was first exhibited. A more important indication of the early style is The Execution of Mary Stuart which, dating from the very early 1840's already shows an accomplished style and is, unsurprisingly, a form of history painting. The figure of the fallen Queen is presented with large hips. She looks down on a servant who has fainted and is being held up by another who is weeping. The Queen's finger is lifted to her lips, with a stern indication of the need to hush. This picture, whilst not striking in itself, is indicative of a formed talent which is surprising given the comparative youth of FMB at this point. The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror, by contrast, suggests an inclination to adopt the "Norman yoke" view of English history whilst, in its colour combinations, already appearing to point forwards in his career.

The second area of the exhibition signals FMB's alleged "change of direction" that emerges from his first visit to Rome and the death of his first wife and it is here that one gets one's first set of surprises since the alignment with the Pre-Raphaelite vision one is expecting to now emerge goes in a different direction than one would have anticipated relying on the stereotype one possesses of the notion of their style. For example Oure Ladye of Saturday Night belies its archaic title by showing the Christ child as modern English and as FMB himself put "powdered, combed and begowned" so that whilst it is apparently Mary who tends him she appears to be doing no more (as the title states) than giving her child his weekly bath! The child captivates with his frank and quite un-God-like stare and the angel who brings the bowl to wash the child in appears bored. The lack of fit between expectation and execution is matched by the elaborate frame the picture is presented in which includes the inscription "Our Ladye of Good Children". Next to this striking and unexpected work is the portrait of the industrialist James Bamford subtitled by FMB A Holbein of the 19th Century and which shows an unidealised figure staring straight at the viewer as he holds a recently unsealed letter. The portrait of a basic typical figure of the 19th century already shows a commitment to the present that ensures this painting fits well with the homely mother and child engaged in 19th century bathing.

The section "the draughtsman" exhibits a series of sketches, mainly in chalk, intended to convey some sense of the ability of FMB to simply draw. Most striking to me here was the simple Life Study of Male Nude that captures a frontal view of a standing figure from the waist up and demonstrates an attention to muscular structure that we will see brought out in fuller detail in later works. The subsequent section on landscape painting contains a number of important surprises. The Pretty Baa-Lambs exceeds its somewhat fey title not just in its compositional success but also in being, at least partly, an example of a very early plein-air painting capturing, as it does, bright sunshine and having been executed, at least with regard to the landscape, in the open air. The mother and child figures central to the picture demonstrate a relation to the environment whereby education is enacted. The somewhat fearful and oddly proportioned child is being shown the lambs while a servant behind collects grass for some unknown purpose. The mother is, surprisingly, dressed in 18th century clothing but FMB himself claimed the main point was simply capturing the sunlight.

By contrast to The Pretty Baa-Lambs, the slightly later painting An English Autumn Afternoon is presented in an oval and was apparently painted, at least initially, as a view from a window. At the front of the work are two figures, a man and a woman who look out on scenery from Hampstead in late October. Their view, and ours, takes in roofs, back gardens, sheds and orchards and culminates in a country horizon. As with The Pretty Baa-Lambs the major effect is the conveying of an impression of what was there then, under those conditions of light and reinforces the sense of FMB's pioneer status beyond that of any relation to the Pre-Raphaelites.

The centre of the exhibition is taken up with the theme of the "painter of modern life", the phrase Treuherz borrows from Baudelaire and includes some of the most striking pictures in the exhibition. The Last of England is chosen to illustrate the cover of the catalogue and dates from the mid-1850s. It captures an emigration scene as two central figures prepare to leave England for other shores taking with them (wrapped in the woman's coat) a child. Behind them there are rowdy exchanges between other passengers and a strong presentation of a rather green sea. Dominating the visual field though is the magenta head-scarf of the female half of the couple, caught, as it appears, in the wind and which leads one back to the plain and yet central face of the woman in question. The man beside her is distinct in colouration, wearing brown to her grey but his lips echo the colour of her scarf as his expression contrasts with hers suggesting a more bitter experience or perhaps one less centred on the future generation. This very fine picture again concentrates on the present and the central woman in the work lacks all the idealised qualities of Pre-Raphaelite women.

Stages of Cruelty is similarly unexpected in giving us an image of a form of femme fatale but one whose sinister figuration lacks compensatory beauty and who is accompanied by a small girl intent on hitting a dog with a red flower. The woman is shown turned away from a somewhat crazed male lover who looks up at her from behind a wall. The whole effect conveys a different side of Baudelaire to that which gives its name to this part of the exhibition.

The culmination both of this part of the exhibition and of the whole exhibition has to be given in the monumental Work, a piece on which FMB laboured for the best part of a decade. Any quick description of the work fails to do justice to its conception or its amazing success. The conventional comparisons attached to it connect it to either Courbet's realist works or to William Powell Firth's The Derby Day but neither of these works. The connection to Firth is obvious in terms of the scale of the composition and its crowded character. Work is also similar to The Derby Day in having no obvious central figure though there is one in Work who FMB picked out as its "hero", a position that could only be occupied by a small child performer in The Derby Day. The relation to Courbet is also clear if we take The Painter's Studio as our comparison. Unlike The Painter's Studio, however, the focus of Work is not the work of the artist but rather that of manual labourers and this central focus in Work also gives the latter a general focus that is much more inclusive in its account of present day life than is captured in Courbet.

The general idea of Work is to capture a day in Hampstead on which some manual labourers work in a trench whilst a representative sample of the life of the society passes by and around them. If there is a centre in the painting it is the figure of the workman downing a draught of beer in the midst of his labour and from him the eye travels either downwards to the trench in which the "hero" of the painting is shown standing or upwards to a rich couple on horseback in the shade whose journey has been interrupted by the work being undertaken. At the left side of the work-men are a number of figures, a lady who drops a pamphlet that is being ignored into the trench, another who walks shaded by a parasol and a peculiar male figure who is dressed in rags and carrying weeds in a basket. On the right of the workmen the eye travels from a beer-seller wearing a sumptuous jacket and sporting a black eye to a ragamuffin set of children, the eldest girl of which is busy scolding her mischief-making younger brother. At the far end of the right side stand two spectators engaged in conversation who are none other than Thomas Carlyle and the Reverend Maurice (a leader of the Christian Socialist movement). On the road below these two an election campaign is in progress, some sleep on a hillside and, pictured briefly, a policeman moves on an orange-seller.

The total effect of this painting is very difficult to convey. It requires close and repeated viewing to capture half of the figures in the work and even after giving it this it is further helpful to read deeply the literature that exists on the painting to capture further the number of motifs it conveys. The work is displayed with preparatory drawings, including of the navvy's arm which show well the study of musculature already apparent in the earlier male nude. The painting as a whole is an astonishing commentary on the society it captured and is a major piece of work which, presented as the centre of this exhibition receives an attention it is worthy of being given rather more often. Alone it shows the major quality of FMB's art and gives a feeling of the waste that his lack of recognition in his time and since represents. It also demonstrates at one fell swoop how much more important an artist he was than the reference to the Pre-Raphaelites alone would suggest.

The next section on FMB, the "story-teller", presents a set of narrative paintings, some of which, such as Jesus Washing Peter's Feet, appear conventional enough. However, as the works up to this point should have taught us, FMB is consistently surprising. So, for example, Elijah and the Widow's Son, in presenting a resurrection scene suggests some subversions both in its treatment and in its subject. The subject overturns the concentration on the resurrection of Lazarus as Elijah has here brought a boy back to life. The treatment shows vivid and odd combinations. The prophet is shown in a very colourful cloak, the boy's beauty conveyed through a careful concentration in his face and the mother's acceptance of his return demonstrated through a posture that points upwards to the shadow of a dove. The combinations in the picture suggest allegorical sense without much clue given as to how to take them and yet in the far front corner of the painting a farm-yard combination of hen and chick suggest something everyday in the miraculous occurrence. Whatever the story here is FMB has left much open to conjecture.

Cromwell on His Farm reminds one of The Pretty Baa-Lambs in its scale and does also include quite a few farm animals including a horse that appears to have a concentration quite different to its rider. The picture captures Cromwell in 1630, at a time of doubt, prior to the commencement of his life's mission and engrossed in reflection. This is to be interrupted, however, by the appearance at the gate beside him, of a servant calling him to dinner. The great man is also flanked by common labourers whose place both in the picture and the economy of the farm is given some prominence. Whilst the picture fore-fronts a kind of grand claim for Cromwell it is also urging a perspective on greatness surrounded as it is by an everyday life that it depends on and which it is required to pay attention to (as Carlyle and Maurice are shown doing in Work).

The section on portrait painting includes a number of vivid subjects. Perhaps most striking is the pair of pictures The English Boy and The Irish Girl, both dating from 1860. The portrait of the boy shows a contented figure who has a whip in one hand and a top in the other. He stares directly and disarmingly out at the viewer and has long locks that suggest a kind of archaic look particularly given his smock. By contrast the girl has her head to one side, is wearing strong lip-stick and holds a flower whilst draped in a red shawl. She appears distant and possibly troubled and also older than her years unlike the boy who rests easily in childhood. Another picture of a girl Mauvais Sujet shows again disturbance. This girl is caught in the midst of a lesson but is concentrating on biting an apple so that her teeth are on display and her face suggests, as in The Irish Girl, a far-away look that indicates unhappiness with her situation. If The Irish Girl has at least the compensation of her red shawl, this girl, by contrast, dressed in a spotty green top, can boast only an ear-ring and has a much more unkempt hair-style.

So many of the portraits are spectacular that it is almost unfair to select from amongst them but perhaps the finest is Iza Hardy, a friend of the family who is captured here in browns that are simply exquisite. Her head to one side, she again appears ill at ease and her seated posture in an arm-chair blends her into her surroundings visually in a way that her expression distances her person from. Almost everything in this picture is perfect and it would be worth visiting the exhibition simply to see it.

The final part of the exhibition proper features designs of FMB, including plate glass windows, cabinets and furniture, the latter a testimony to his failed attempt at engaging with William Morris and Burne-Jones. But perhaps the final surprise is that, round the corner from the gallery, in the Victorian Manchester Town Hall, there are a series of murals that FMB was commissioned to add to the central room of the place. These works are, again, unexpected as they are not simple exercises in medievalism at all but indicate a very playful side to FMB. Included here are The Expulsion of the Danes From Manchester which contrives to make the Danes in question very comical, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, which shows the inventor being bundled out of the room to rescue him from Luddites and The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal at which the Duke opening it is up-staged by a passing barge that contains two very large babies. The feel of these works, like much else in FMB's oeuvre, is of an unclassifiable talent who was certainly much more than a "minor" adjunct of the Pre-Raphaelites and whose major works exceed almost any presentation of the latter's style.

Parfit, Humanity and Consent (III)

2011-09-28T22:27:00.000+01:00

In my last posting I looked at the additions Parfit made to his 2002 analysis of the implied reference to "consent" in the Formula of Humanity in his first draft of On What Matters which was entitled Climbing the Mountain. In his subsequent 2008 draft of On What Matters, the last full version before the publication of the work earlier this year, Parfit returns to the topic in Chapter 8 of his manuscript.

The Chapter opens again with the usual discussion of the problem with how Korsgaard and O'Neill are said to take the Formula of Humanity. However, when he reaches the account of "rational consent" Parfit this time refers to a point not included in either of the two previous treatments. This concerns a problem with thinking that referring to shared ends will suffice to make rational consent sufficiently inclusive. Here Parfit points out that whilst there can be an agreement on ends this does not necessarily translate into an agreement concerning the appropriate means for attaining these ends.

Subsequently a reference to Rawls appears which cites him as interpreting the consent principle as meaning that we consent rationally to some act if and only if or "just when" we could will it to be true that the agent's maxim is a universal law. This requires invocation of the Formula of Universal Law. The reason why Rawls refers to this is due to Kant's general claim that all the formulas mean the same thing or are "statements of the same law". Rawls assumes that this means that Kant cannot have added something to the content of the law when he states one formula rather than another. But Parfit does not accept this view and assumes, rather, that there is something in the Formula of Humanity that is not included in the Formula of Universal Law. In making this assumption Parfit is following the precedent of, for example, Allen Wood, who, likewise, assumes that the Formula of Humanity has importantly different implications than the Formula of Universal Law. This point is not a small one since the discussion of the relationship between formulas of the categorical imperative has been a major source of disputes between interpreters of Kant. Unfortunately, whilst Rawls' reason for assuming that the Formula of Humanity is not significantly different to that of Universal Law, seems rather simplistic, it is hardly helpful of Parfit to simply stipulate that he does not accept this view without arguing on both philosophical and textual grounds for taking the formulas to be different. Such an argument does require, further, some discussion of what Kant means by claiming that there is no new "content" added in any of the formulas.

Parfit also adds in this draft a claim to the effect that rational consent has to be "informed" consent, a proviso not previously made clear. The Consent Principle now becomes:

"It is wrong to treat people in any way to which they could not rationally consent in the act-affecting sense, if these people knew the relevant facts, and we gave them the power to choose how we treat them."

The notion of "treating" is also to be understood in a sufficiently broad way so as to include, for example, breaking promises to the dead. The notion that is really involved for the consent to which the principle refers is "sufficient reason" in the sense that we consent to that which we do not have sufficient reason to refuse to consent. This implies a shorter formula of the Consent Principle which Parfit also gives but which I'll leave aside here.

There are clear constraints upon the Consent Principle since it should be both plausible in itself and have plausible implications. These constraints are clear concessions on Parfit's part to intuitive or common-sense conceptions of what morality requires and forbids and echo the concession made in Climbing the Mountain to the point that beneficence that makes oneself in need of beneficence is misdirected. These points are subsequently mobilised by Parfit to suggest that the Consent Principle cannot be integrated with either egoistic or "subjective" (desire-based) views of the good.

The appeal to "sufficient reason" is later finessed by Parfit into a view about "facts" that pertain in situations such that they are what make the beliefs concerning the rationality of consent plausible or otherwise. However, Parfit's subsequent consideration of examples leads to the same view as in Climbing the Mountain, namely that the Consent Principle may be too demanding (and hence fail to meet the constraint of having plausible implications). Further, it is not alone sufficient to describe what it is for something to be morally right since it turns out that it is possible to rationally consent (on Parfit's view) to things that are morally wrong. And, as in Climbing the Mountain, this turns out to be the ground on which Parfit moves to the discussion in the Formula of Humanity concerning treating others in such a way that they are not "merely used as means".