Kant and the Criminal

 

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“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”-Immanuel Kant

The ethics of Aristotle taught young men his virtues as a moral code and as key to happiness until 529 B.C.E., when Byzantine Emperor Justinian I converted the empire to Christianity and forced the closing of non-Christian schools of philosophy. For nearly a millennium Christian and its dependency on interpretations of Biblical text ruled the western world.

The fourteenth century’s Renaissance broke from dependence on scripture and church authority of the medieval age for guidance in matters of morality to shift its focus to the classical Greek and Latin texts. The Renaissance found in the Greek philosophers a system of ethics handed down from Aristotle that provided an absolute morality without dependence on the commands of a divine being. Aristotle’s virtues combined with Christian theology to rule philosophical thinking for centuries, until Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica (1687) and demonstrated a universe ruled not by supernatural commands, but by mechanical forces. The Principia ushered in a new era, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment gave birth to Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 at Konigsberg, in what was at the time of his birth a part of East Prussia. He grew up under the rigid dogma of Pietism — an evangelical branch of the Lutheran Church — and was later influenced by the works of Christian Wolff and John Locke at the Albertina College at the University of Konigsberg.

A flurry of works in the 1780s included The Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787), Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790). At that time the Age of Enlightenment was coming to a close to make room for the Romantic age and the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment had come into existence as a result of Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe and the consequent belief that man did not need religious authorities to tell him how to live or what to believe. He now had reason to guide him. Inherent in that view was the belief that human, scientific, and industrial progress would support tradition and a belief in a god and in the compatibility of science and religion. But that tradition required freedom to choose what is right over what is wrong, and Newton’s science, created a crisis in philosophical circles with its insistence on a nature governed by mechanistic laws. If the universe operates on mechanical laws, then humans too are subject to those laws. If human behavior is mechanical, and therefore deterministic, man has no freedom to choose his actions. Newton’s science, the fountainhead of the Enlightenment, came to threaten the freedom essential to Reason. In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant sought to reconcile traditional morality and religion with Newtonian science.

With the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant laid the foundation for his deontological (duty-based) ethics. Duty, not the consequences of an action, he said, marks the distinction between a moral act and an immoral one. His views on morality are most interesting in that they focus on absolutes with only oblique reference to a god. God gave us reason, he said, so that we may know right from wrong. Until Kant, ethics were relative, meaning the ethics of a situation relied on the situation itself, or they were rules and commands from a supernatural being. Rules of morality were situational or God inspired with little wiggle room in between.

Central to Kant’s philosophy was the concept of good will. With good will, he rejected consequentialism, the belief that the outcome of an action dictated its morality. He maintained an action to be moral if the actor’s best wishes lay behind it. As long as we maintain good will toward others, our actions are moral, regardless of the consequences of the action.

Having rid of consequentialism and established duty as the basis for his philosophy, Kant moved on to the question: What commands will guide our good will and duties?

The answer: the Categorical Imperative.

He defined two types of imperatives, the Hypothetical and the Categorical. A hypothetical command is one we obey because we seek a specific outcome — a consequence. Those types of commands follow an “if, then” formula. If I desire a certain outcome, then I must do this. If I want to earn a degree, then I must go to school. If I want a cola, then I must have the correct amount of money or credit for the purchase. The hypothetical imperative must be obeyed only if and when we wish for an outcome.

The categorical imperative, though, is a command we must always obey. . .all the time and in every situation. This imperative tells us that any action we take must be one we grant to everyone else. If you tell your girlfriend the little white lie that those slacks do not make her look fat, you grant the world the right to tell the same kind of lie. On a more serious note, if you steal a box of tools from your neighbor’s garden shed, then you give permission to the entire world to steal. . . even to steal from you.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative and his insistence on good will could alone make his ethics a viable system for all of us, but he didn’t stop there. He devised two formulations of the Categorical Imperative. The first states, as above, that we must conduct ourselves in such manner that we give to everyone the right to act as we do. The second formulation informs us that we may use nature’s resources to our own end, but people possess free will and can think for themselves and are therefore a “kingdom of ends.” Individuals have their own ends, and should not be used by others for their ends only; doing so violates their autonomy and reduces them to mere objects. The modern meme states it as, “treat people as ends, not as means.”

Kant’s philosophy in the second formulation might come across as an ivory-tower academic’s musings, but Kant kept it bound to the real world with the acknowledgement that we may, in fact, use others if we take into our considerations that they are human, that they have their own ends and their own free will. When a waiter brings our meals, we use her to achieve our end — that of getting food into our bodies. But, Kant says, we must acknowledge to ourselves that she is serving her own ends by selling her labor for financial gain. Grant her respect and humanity, and the act of using her is not immoral.

In addressing the problem of what to do about the free rider — the unethical person who will violate Kant’s ethics for as long and as often as he supposes he can get away with it — Kant offers a solution: respect the criminal by holding him responsible for his actions. The criminal could have chosen a different path, but didn’t, and thus tacitly accepts and gives permission to his punishment. He did not ask himself, “If I do this, am I not giving everyone else the right to do the same?” Instead, he committed the criminal act because he received a gain from it and blocked from his thoughts that others will lose from his action — and he thought he could get away with it.

“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” say Kantian ethicists.

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Everyday Ethics

 

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

The writer of a paper on the subject of ethics will likely find that he can fill several pages on various philosophical and religious theories and many more on terms, and more again on a seemingly endless list of philosophers and theorists who have contributed to a maze of sub-categories under the main branches of the subject. That is an ambitious project for the scholar, but what of the man and woman on the street who wants only to do what is right? High-sounding theories and ten-dollar words offer interesting reading, but in the end do nothing to help the average person know how to behave in situations in which the “right” choice of action is unclear. For that reason, this essay does not dwell on those arguments that rely on supernatural authority.

A look into the study of ethics reveals a glaring question that the reader cannot ignore: do ethical rules of behavior exist outside the individual? Does the external world contain something called ethics? The question persists even without reliance on supernatural authority.

If the answer to those questions is “yes,” then the individual is naturally ethical, and unethical behavior is an aberration. If the answer is “no,” everyone must answer to a code of behavior imposed on him from the outside, whether he chooses to honor or violate that code. Society, in that event, decides what constitutes an unethical act.

Thrasymachus thought that “people believe in right and wrong only because they are taught to obey the rules of their society. Those rules, however, are mere human contrivances. Thrasymachus added that the ethical code of a society will reflect the interests of it ruling classes…” (Rachels, Problems from Philosophy, 2nd ed. p.149). But Thrasymachus did not have the benefit of our long view of history; a view in which we have seen that it is the ruling classes most in need of ethical codes. It is the reverse of Thrasymachus’ thesis that appears true — those morals or the lack of morals by rulers “trickles down” to their subjects. That is, we, the people.

So, in societies in which religious courts hand down draconian punishments, shouts of approval by the citizenry reflect the corrosive influence of the courts and of the corruptive power of the society’s religious influence. In societies such as ours, in which commerce and profit carry tremendous power, the citizenry is often quick to apologize for the crimes and atrocities of the ruling class.

The disagreement about objective moral values need not rely on dictates from a god or on the arbitrary rules of a society. Enter Evolutionary Ethics. Philosophers disagree about the existence of, and the nature of evolutionary ethics and many do not even take the subject seriously. Yet, morality as a factor of a psychology that has its roots in survival answers the question of whether ethics exist in the “real” world. In the sense that human and animal behavior is “real,” the answer is “yes.”

Philosophers like to nit-pick the details of any particular ethical theory, but such microscopic scrutiny does little to aid our average man and woman with day-to-day ethical choices. A woman seeking an abortion will (unless evolution has failed her) consider the consequences of her actions. She will look at her own beliefs and opinions as well as those of her society. She will short-cut some of those considerations, ponder over some, and eliminate others. But her final decision will come from a soup of her personal philosophy, her religion, her place in society, and the whisperings of her psychology, both genetic and learned.

A soldier might consider that killing is wrong, but his training and the survival merits of killing the enemy can outweigh any thought of philosophical absolutes. He knows it is wrong to kill his kin or a member of his group, but the killing of an enemy in combat contributes to the survival of the kin or group. After all, morality has survival value, and the fine-tuning of his moral code is every bit as important, and likely more so, than any absolute statement concerning moral behavior. Apes have been shown to practice reciprocity in lice-picking by other apes. If a fellow simian does not reciprocate in the practice, he will be shunned in future lice-picking sessions. If a human behaves ethically toward another, he will cease that behavior if the other does not in turn behave ethically toward him.

But humans have shown an amazing ability to rationalize their behavior in ways that are not beneficial to the group, and to believe their own rationalizations. When banking and business executives brought down the world economy through acts of unregulated greed, enhancing their own fortunes by vast amounts of money that drained retirement, pension, and investment accounts around the world, they continued to pay themselves and their cronies extravagant wages out of taxpayer bailout money. They justified their actions by stating (and believing) that ludicrous compensation was necessary to keep the best executives in place and not lose them to foreign markets. Their rationalization was so complete that they were unable to see that those “best” executives had displayed incompetence beyond comprehension.

If an objective morality exists, and if it exists in the evolved mind, then we can assume that the mental fountainhead of morality does not “think out” the fine tuning of an individual’s decisions nor does it offer perfect answers to the problems of lying and misinformation, larceny and greed, and murder. That is left to another part of the mind/brain. The evolved morality knows only that it is wrong to injure a member of the family or group or to engage in behavior that limits his survivability.

Dependence on supernatural authority for our morals is to rely on unicorns. The average person without formal education in philosophy must depend only on his and her own evolved mind to provide a moral code. We can only hope that when listening to that inner ethical voice, he and she will hold to or develop the understanding of rationalization in the role of violating both their own moral code and the ethics of their society.

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This essay also appears online at 
https://kenshel717.medium.com/everyday-ethics-5f48cbbda3dc

Analysis: Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”

     Garrett Hardin’s 1974 Psychology Today essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” plays fast and loose with the facts he presents to back up his argument, and comes across as a petulant diatribe against the poor rather than a coherent discussion. In short, Hardin is just another whack job who enjoys the public attention he gets from his proposal to starve the poor out of existence so that the rest of us can enjoy our luxuries.

     From the first paragraph, Hardin set out to define the terms of his case against the poor. It’s his essay, he can define terms any way he wants, he seemed to say. He took very seriously his metaphor of the lifeboat as the refuge of the wealthy, with hungry swimmers—his metaphor for the poor—trying to usurp his privileged place on the boat. Fortunately for his argument, he did not push the lifeboat image to its logical conclusion: the lifeboat passengers will deplete the boats resources and people will have to go overboard—the order of plank walkers would depend, of course, on the most able and not the wealthiest. Or Hardin will hope to be saved by a passing yacht, at which time he proves himself no better than the miserable swimmers for whom he expresses such contempt.

     Some of his arguments were just silly. He provided his own definition of “safety factor,” one that grants him the greatest amount of space for him and his dinner-party buddies. In fact, safety factors are built into engineered products. If his boat is designed to hold sixty people, any more would violate that margin for safety. But that’s nitpicking, and there are too many major errors in his thesis to dwell on the minor ones.

     He wrote that guilt is the motivating factor behind the urge to aid the poor. I can’t argue that, because I don’t have the statistics on the subject (and he doesn’t provide any). Those people I know who are willing to help, however, operate from an enthusiasm for life that they wish to extend to others, and consider themselves spread proportionately across the self-family-group-nation-humanity spectrum, and not stuck in the “it’s all about me” mode. Sorry, Garrett; we haven’t even turned the page yet, and you’ve been wrong on each point made. Let’s move on.

     On the disparity of population growth between rich and poor countries, he falls back on a Marxist quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” From that, he extrapolated the absurd idea that helping the poor amounts to a misinterpretation of the socialist ideal of economic equality. He confused “share” and “help” with “surrender,” as in his assumption that those who do not agree with him want him to give up all his worldly goods to the starving masses. He has not been asked to surrender all his worldly goods to the poor. St. Francis, we are not. A check to a relief agency does not amount to voluntary poverty.

     He introduced an equally ridiculous argument that he called “the tragedy of the commons,” a highly simplistic theory that the poor will ravage the world’s resources if allowed to reproduce at will. To that, I will introduce the “tragedy of the landed gentry.” In pre-Industrial Revolution England, the nobility often owned vast wooded estates. True to the “tragedy of the commons,” the English poor had all but denuded the countryside of woodlands in search of game and fuel, and were forced to poach the enclosed woods owned by the wealthy (and undeserving) nobility. For poaching, the hungry poor faced public torture, imprisonment, or hanging. The world had not run out of resources, but the wealthy and powerful had locked them up for their own use. Picnics in large groups, lavish outdoor parties, and game hunts were popular pastimes among the landed elite.

    Hardin abandons any pretense at reason in his “Tragedy of the Commons.” In those situations in which the “commons” face abuse, they are first abused by the privileged class for commodity resources. In that, the rich and the poor form a symbiotic relationship: the wealthy strip the land to provide products and services to the poor and middle class, who in turn form the source of wealth. Without labor and markets, there is no wealth.

     He confused the depletion of oceanic fisheries with an exhaustion of the commons by the poor, when in fact, the ocean is being over-fished by multi-national corporations owned and operated by… the wealthy elite.

     There’s more.

     His claim that Public Law 480, “Food for Peace” program, benefitted only wealthy U.S. business amounts to an argument against himself. Did he denounce the wealthy and well-fed along with the hungry poor? Maybe his complaint came from his statement that the U.S. taxpayer paid the cost of PL480. Not true. The middle-class taxpayer—not the wealthy elite—picked up the initial cost, but that cost was recovered in subsequent negotiations called for in the agreements with hungry nations and affluent partners. We gave away our surplus grain, he said. Not true. We entered into financial and foreign relations agreements in which we were to share a portion of our surplus in return for future markets. Tons of wheat sold to the former Soviet Union to help with an approaching famine, added to the tons shipped to markets and to starving masses around the world, still left us with enough surpluses that we risked the danger of spoilage. He wrote that “…international charity frequently inspires distrust and antagonism rather than gratitude….” Not true. Distrust and antagonism directed toward the U.S. comes from Washington’s insistence in propping up friendly foreign governments that are hostile to their own people. Food for Peace occasionally ended up in the hands of tyrants and their cronies who marketed it at pure profits. When it goes to the hungry citizens, it is almost always received with gratitude. I say “almost,” because of a famous incident in Africa, starving stick-figures broke down the barriers to a shipment to break open bags of wheat to consume them on the spot. The wheat needed processing but the people there had been reduced to desperation. The U.S. received a mild rebuke for sending unprocessed food to living skeletons.  We had seriously underestimated the severity of the problem.

     In his harangue against immigration, he blames some of the problem on the wealthy elite’s need for cheap labor; a position that, again, seems to argue against itself. Beyond that, his proposal to hermetically seal the borders amount to the same tired clichéd sloganeering that has haunted the immigration problem since the first European stepped ashore half-a-millennia ago. He craves a static America in which the status quo can be guaranteed. Is that even possible in an ethnically and politically diverse country? Or would Hardin deport all liberals and non-whites along with immigrants?

     I got the impression in reading his essay that Hardin would like for all nine billion of us to just get the hell out of his way so that he can have it all, the only survivor on the boat. “Lifeboat Ethics” is not a serious discussion about ethics, but a mere selfish, petulant, and ego-centered rant, and reads well as such.