The Ideas of Kant and Mill - Essay Example

Kant and Mill Kant does not disregard practical anthropology in the Foundations because he believes it is unimportant. As we know, Kant did discuss practical anthropology in numerous works on ethics and education. However, in order to understand moral action in the empirical world, Kant contends that moral action as such has to be understood first. Thus Kant ventures into a study that tries to supply the principles of moral action as such, or tries to supply the principles for "rational beings in general," which we can interpret in this context as moral subjects. One can found the same tension in Kant's ethical writings. In fact, I would say the tension is more pronounced in Kant's ethical writings, because Kant never corrects the tension in this area by rewriting any of his ethical texts. Particularly, I have found the tension between what I could call a phenomenological approach and a strict transcendental approach in Kant's two main texts on morality, viz., the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. In order to perform the phenomenological reading, I want to look at Kant's text entitled the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.(Kant, 35) The purpose of the phenomenological reading is to see if it is possible to sight within moral phenomena the essence of morality as expressed by Kant. This reading constitutes a constructive interpretation of Kantian morality. What is important to note here is that both ethics and physics have their empirical and rational parts, or their posterior) and a priori parts. Kant's concern in the Foundations is with ethics, and particularly ethics in its a priori character. In other words, Kant is not concerned with moral actions as they occur in the everyday world. Instead, Kant is concerned with what constitutes moral action as such, which Kant refers to as pure moral philosophy, a mode of ethics freed from any social and practical anthropology that would only study ethical behavior as it manifested itself in specific human interactions. The basic idea then is that "the ground of obligation must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed" (Kant , 64). Instead, the ground for obligation must be sought within moral consciousness. This idea of seeking for the ground for obligation in moral consciousness has phenomenological overtones. Kant wants to bracket the natural standpoint, place it under suspension, to come to the structures of consciousness that constitute morality. Precisely what is bracketed is practical anthropology, which is the way of understanding morality in our everyday world. Once Kant has bracketed the natural attitude, he can then direct his attention to moral consciousness. The aspect of consciousness that presents itself for investigation in moral consciousness is the will. In the Foundations, Kant wants to understand what constitutes a good will, which I understand as moral consciousness. Moral consciousness is consciousness of what I ought to do, or, as Kant states, it is consciousness of what is good without qualification. Understood this way, moral consciousness is intentional; it is "consciousness of what is good." If Kant concerns himself with moral consciousness, then I could call Kant's investigation a study of moral intentionality. Within such a study, I am interested in looking at my actions in terms of the willing and the willed as such. The willing and the willed as such correspond to the noetic and noematic elements of moral consciousness. Within this structure of investigation, I am not concerned with an act as it is considered in the natural standpoint, which would consider the act in terms of its actual consequences or empirical manifestation. Both actual consequences and empirical manifestations are transcendent senses of a moral act, i.e., an act immersed in the world of facts and affairs". Instead I am looking both at the moral subject's act of willing and at what is willed in the how of its being willed. For Kant, an autonomous being is one that regards him/herself as an end, i.e., a being of absolute worth. As a being of absolute worth, I depend on nothing outside of me to bestow my worth on me. Thus I receive my worth from myself. Only a being who is an end can understand him/herself as a ground. Through the analysis, I become aware of who I am, viz., an autonomous being who exists as an end in himself. On the other hand, there is the distinction between normative theories which evaluate everything, whether it be a policy, an action, a law, or a trait of character, according to the value of the consequences it produces, and normative theories which at least sometimes evaluate some things according to features other than their consequences. If two actions have the same consequences, then a consequentialist theory doesn't care at all which action is performed. A non-consequentialist theory may distinguish between the rightness of two actions even if they would have exactly the same consequences. Mill, says that no proof of utilitarianism can be given, strictly speaking, but that some considerations can be proffered that may tend to determine the intellect. He only has one real stratagem against the egoist, though, and it is only half a stratagem, for it will only work if he can get the egoist to come half way. (Mill 110) If the Egoist strictly confines himself to stating his conviction that he ought to take his own happiness or pleasure as his ultimate end, there seems to be no opening for any line of reasoning to lead him to Universalistic Hedonism as a first principle; it cannot be proved that the difference between his own happiness and another's happiness is not for him all important. (McPherson, 82) Some of these complications are probably unavoidable in any theory that takes rights seriously. However, for public policy purposes, the evaluator-relativity that identifies is less likely to be a consideration than in personal morality, as the aim will be to appraise rights-systems from a suitably impersonal point of view. For this purpose, it may often prove adequate either to treat rights instrumentally or to embed their protection as an intrinsically valuable goal in an evaluator-neutral consequentialist moral framework. Consequentialism is the ethical theory that an action, rule, or policy is morally permissible or right if and only if there is no alternative with better consequences. Different varieties of consequentialism differ about what "better consequences" are. "Welfarist" moral theories take the view that only consequences for individual well-being ultimately matter, with other items such as rights or virtues viewed strictly as means to promoting welfare. Utilitarianism is, in turn, a subspecies of welfarism in which only the sum or average of individual welfare levels matter. The major 19th century utilitarians took utility to be happiness or pleasure. But one can also regard utility, as economists do, as an index of preference or desire satisfaction. ( Mill, 97) During the decades that preceded the 1980s, utilitarianism appeared to be almost dead. Systematic moral philosophy had fallen from favor with the rise of logical positivism and its subjectivist and noncognitive view of ethics, and utilitarianism had the additional stigma of George E. Moore's (1903) critique of the so-called "naturalist fallacy" (the claim that the good can be defined in "natural" or nonethical terms). Although utilitarianism continued to influence policy makers, most philosophers did not take it seriously as a moral philosophy. Even economists abandoned utilitarianism in the face of the difficulties posed by interpersonal utility comparisons. And to pound the final nails in the coffin, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971) offered not only systematic criticism, but an alternative theory that was suitable for guiding policy. The resurgence in practical moral philosophizing that was so prominent in the 1970s usually took for granted some sort of rights perspective rather than any sort of consequentialism. Of particular interest in this resurgence of consequentialism has been the development of consequentialist moral theories that are not utilitarian--of theories that take the good consequences to be maximized to be other things than happiness or the satisfaction of preferences. Although it is difficult to find empirical proxies for some of these good consequences, the more objective the goods to be maximized the more opportunity (other things being equal) for empirical application. If philosophers can specify a well-defined and clearly measurable good to be achieved, then the welfare economist can step in and discuss how best to achieve it. (Mill , 53) Traditionally, most consequentialist ethical theories have offered very limited construals of the goodness of consequences. They have also imposed, implicitly or explicitly, various kinds of neutrality constraints--for example, that the evaluation of a state of affairs should be independent of who is evaluating it or of who has brought the state of affairs about. Thus, Mills theory for example, a utilitarian should not care whether Desdemona was run over by an ox-cart or stabbed by Othello, except insofar as the causal consequences of these ways of dying differ. One reason this broadening of the notion of consequentialism is important is that some prominent nonutilitarian moral theories have large consequentialist components. Mills theory , for example, is concerned with selecting that set of institutions which will maximize the achievement of equal basic liberty and, subject to that constraint, maximize the primary goods of the least well-off group in society--both of which are perfectly well-defined consequentialist goals. It is important to distinguish the conceptual possibility of incorporating an extremely wide range of considerations in a consequentialist view from the moral question of what considerations belong in a moral evaluation. It is, for example, possible to define a consequentialist view in which murders that happen on Tuesdays are morally permissible, unlike murders on other days. But it is morally unacceptable to permit evaluations to be sensitive to such arbitrary matters Works Cited Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956); (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911). Immanuel Kant, The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959). Hereafter Foundations. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911). Mcpherson, Michael. "Mill's Moral Theory and the Problem of Preference Change," Ethics, Jan. 1982, 92(1), pp. 252-73. Mill, John Stuart. On liberty. 1859. Ed.: Currin V. Shields. NY: Macmillan, 1985. Read More