18. FREEDOM AND THE BOUNDARY OF MORALS Towards the end of the previous lecture I left you in a rather uncomfortable position. Do you remember? You were stuck in Lion Rock Tunnel, inside a bus being driven by a man who claimed that things just "happen", without being caused by anything. What should you do in such a situation? Instead of answering this question directly, I want to change the story a little bit. Let's imagine that when you ask the bus driver why he stopped the bus, instead of saying "I didn't ...", he pulls out a gun and asks you to give him all your money and leave the bus, or he will shoot. You would probably obey his demands. But after the bus drove away, as you walk through the tunnel, you would probably become rather upset at what that man had done to you. In fact, most of us would probably report his action to the police as soon as possible, accusing this man of doing something wrong. What would be the rational basis of our action in such a case? Why is it that we would judge that man's action to be a morally wrong action? These are special kinds of philosophical questions, called "ethical" questions. Ethical questions are questions about how we should and should not act. There are many, many ethical questions; so many that we cannot even begin in this class to explore the different kinds of ethical questions, to say nothing of specific questions about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts. Ethical questions are like the many small twigs on the end of a tree branch: they are very important, for on them grow the leaves and the fruit of the tree; yet there are so many that any one of them could be removed without significantly changing the appearance or the health of the tree. There is, however, a similar kind of philosophical question which is not so dispensable as ethical questions. All ethical questions are based on certain fundamental moral principles, just as all leafy twigs are held up by one of the main branches of the tree. And an awareness of the questions related to these principles is fundamental if we wish to understand the tree of philosophy. At one time the term "moral philosophy" was used to refer to this entire branch (including the twigs). But this term is not used very often nowadays. The entire branch of philosophy concerned with establishing the rational foundations for moral actions is now more often referred to simply as "ethics", with "applied ethics" referring to the twigs and "meta-ethics" referring to the main part of the branch. In order to avoid confusion, though, I think it is better to use "ethics" to refer to the whole "science" (in the loose sense of this word) of making moral decisions, and reserve the term "moral philosophy" for the basic underlying principles. As such, "moral philosophy" is the branch of the tree of philosophy which begins by asking the most basic questions about morality, such as: Are human beings free? How can we distinguish between good and evil? and How is ethics itself possible? Of course, the term "moral philosophy" does not refer to a "good way of doing philosophy", as opposed to a bad, "immoral philosophy". So- called "moral philosophers" can be just as immoral in their daily lives as anyone else! Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of moral philosophy is not just to understand what goodness is, but to use it to help us become better persons. And, just as Jonathan Seagull learned to fly much faster once he understood flying, so also understanding the moral foundations of ethical decisions should help us to make wiser choices in our daily lives. One of the most influential moral philosophies was proposed by Immanuel Kant. Since we used Kant's first Critique in Part One to reach some fundamental insights about the nature of metaphysics, I think it will be helpful to devote most of today's session to an examination of his second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, where he suggests a very interesting way of coping with our ignorance of ultimate reality. Whereas the first Critique uses a "theoretical" standpoint in order to demonstrate how space, time, and the categories form an absolutely necessary (i.e., synthetic a priori) boundary line for human experience (and therefore make possible our empirical knowledge of phenomenal objects), the second Critique, as we shall see, uses a "practical" standpoint in order to demonstrate how freedom and the moral law form an absolutely necessary boundary line for moral action (and therefore make possible our moral judgment of noumenal objects) (see Figures 7.1, 7.3, and 9.4). In simpler terms, we can describe this same distinction by saying Kant developed in these two books two distinctive ways of looking at the world (i.e., two "standpoints"): he adopts the standpoint of the head in the first Critique and that of the heart in the second Critique. Viewing two sets of opposing ideas as representatives of two standpoints can often help us to see how both can be true, even though they appear at first to be contradictory. A simple example will help to clarify this point. Most of you have probably seen at some point one of the many pictures used by psychologists to test the way our mind perceives complex objects. A picture is drawn which can be seen as representing two completely different objects, depending on how it is perceived. For example, the picture given in Figure 18.1, looks like a goblet if we focus on the dark area in the center. Yet if we look at the edges, we suddenly see it as two faces facing each other. Which answer is correct? Of course, they are both correct, each in their own way. The same can often be true in philosophy, whenever there are two apparently contradictory answers to the same question, if it turns out that each answer is approaching the question in a different way, or with a different end in view. [Figure 18.1: Two Perceptual Perspectives: A Goblet or Two Faces?] In Lecture 7 we saw how Kant argued that, in the process of gaining theoretical knowledge, various "ideas" naturally arise in the mind of anyone who thinks rationally about their own experience: among these the most important are the ideas of "God, freedom, and immortality" (see p.29 of the first Critique). But he posed a problem in regard to these ideas; for if Kant is right, we are necessarily ignorant of the true reality to which each of these ideas points. This "noumenal" reality, he claimed, is beyond the boundary of our possible knowledge. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to assume, as do some interpreters of Kant, that Kant had a skeptical view of these ideas. On the contrary, one of his reasons for denying the possibility of our having knowledge of the ideas was to insure that it would be impossible for anyone to disprove their reality. No one can prove that our ideas of God, freedom, and immortality are mere illusions, because in order to do so, a person would need to have knowledge of ultimate reality, which, according to Kant, is impossible. Hence, by denying "knowledge" in this way, Kant left open a space for "faith" in these ideas (p.29), though we still need to find good reasons for adopting such faith, in the face of our theoretical ignorance. By examining in the second Critique the necessary conditions used by the heart to bring about a moral world, Kant attempted to provide such reasons, on the grounds that the ideas themselves actually point us beyond the realm of theory, to the realm of practice. The first necessary condition for the possibility of moral action is, according to Kant, freedom. Freedom is the one and only "given fact" of practical reason. Hence, by adopting the practical standpoint, we can actually break through the boundaries of space and time (the limitations of our "sensibility") and replace them with freedom. But this freedom does not leave us lost in a boundless world of unlimited confusion; rather, freedom itself functions as a new kind of limitation. Whereas space and time are necessary limitations within which anything we can know must appear, freedom is the necessary limitation to which any moral action must conform. The former is the world-limitation imposed by our heads so we can know the truth, whereas the latter is the self-limitation imposed by our hearts so we can do the good. Though these two standpoints lead us in opposite directions, we need not view them as irreconcilably contradictory, provided we recognize that they refer to fundamentally different aspects of human life. Kant never claimed he could prove man is free; on the contrary, the first Critique demonstrates why such a proof is impossible. Instead, his argument is that human freedom must be presupposed in order to enter in to the realm of morality, just as space and time must be presupposed in order to enter in to the realm of knowledge. In both cases we are faced with a brute fact, which cannot even be questioned without radically changing (or perhaps even undermining) our human experience. Although Kant would not have put it in this way, we could therefore say these "facts" function like complementary myths for anyone in the modern world who wants to interpret their experience in terms of knowledge or moral action. If freedom in the second Critique corresponds to space and time in the first, what is it in the second Critique that corresponds to the categories? This logical aspect of the boundary of morals Kant referred to as the "moral law", or "categorical imperative", to which all maxims (i.e., subjective rules of action) must conform in order to qualify as being moral. By "categorical" Kant meant that this imperative makes an unconditional demand. A "hypothetical" imperative, by contrast, is one with an "if" attached to it. If I say to you "Please be quiet when I am in the room", then my command is hypothetical, because you are not required to be quiet if I am not in the room. A command such as "Do not tell lies", by contrast, is normally regarded as unconditional. I doubt if your mother ever said to you "Do not tell lies, unless it makes you feel good"! That is because commands such as telling the truth are usually regarded as duties. A "duty", according to Kant, is an action performed out of respect for the moral law (or conscience). Kant believed he could determine the formula of the categorical imperative. In the end he actually proposed three distinct criteria for (or formulations of) the categorical imperative. The first of these states that an action is moral only if its maxim is universalizable: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" (Foundations, p.421). This does not mean that everyone will actually agree with this maxim, but only that everyone ought to agree. The second requires us to respect human persons: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only" (p.429). The third requires that our maxim must be autonomous (i.e., self- legislated): since "every rational creature [makes] universal law", a moral maxim must be "consistent with the universal lawgiving of will" (p.431). Let's test these necessary criteria, especially the first, by applying them to an example. If I cheat on an exam and someone asks me "Did you cheat on that exam?", then I am faced with a moral choice. I can either lie, and hope nobody discovers the truth, or I can tell the truth and suffer the consequences. Although lying in such a case might make me happier, Kant thought this choice would be morally wrong, because the maxim on which such an action would be based could never become a universal law. In the former case my maxim would be "It is acceptable to tell a lie, if it will get me out of a difficult situation", whereas in the latter case my maxim would be "Never tell a lie". Kant freely admitted it is possible to will a particular lie, but he argued it would be irrational to will "a universal law to lie": in such a case "my maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law" (Foundations, p.403). In other words, if we imagine a world in which it would be acceptable for everyone to lie whenever it would make them happy, the primary function of language (i.e., its ability to convey truth) would be undermined. Moreover, a lie also breaks the second and third criteria: it uses another human being, neglecting their own rational capacity, solely in order to make oneself happy. Because lying requires us to break a universalizable law (and therefore also to disrespect human rationality), telling a lie is always morally wrong, no matter how happy a lie might make us feel. Kant gave other examples, relating to suicide, laziness, and apathy (see Foundations, pp.421-424); but for our purposes it will suffice to point out the function these criteria for moral actions are supposed to fulfill. According to Kant, we do not have to think consciously about these versions of the categorical imperative each time we are faced with a moral dilemma; rather, they function as means by which philosophers can locate truly moral issues and then define an objectively valid boundary line between morally good and evil actions. The boundary line is objective because it is true for everyone (i.e., universal) and because it uses an objectively existing reality (i.e., humanity) as a criterion for judgment. When the moral law tells us to do something, we are worthy of praise only if performing that action does not at the same time satisfy one of our "inclinations"--i.e., only if it is not an action that would in any case satisfy our own desires. Thus, Kant's moral philosophy can be restated as follows: an action can be morally good or bad only if it is done freely and out respect for the moral law rather than out of our inclination to fulfill our own desire for happiness. Kant devoted much attention to the contrast between following inclinations and following duty. Of course, sometimes a single action can both satisfy the moral law and fulfill our inclination to be happy. But whenever this is not possible, we must choose to say "No!" to our own happiness. Accordingly, we can express the basic command of the categorical imperative as: "Respect the moral law!" or "Follow your conscience as an objective principle!" or simply, "Do your duty!" This kind of moral theory is sometimes called "deontology", and is traditionally contrasted with "utilitarianism". The latter view was defended by J.S. Mill (1806-1873), an English philosopher who argued that an action is good only if it maximizes human happiness. Kant regarded the outcome of an action as less important than the inner motivation of the person who performs the action. This is why he said at one point that nothing can "be called good without qualification except a good will" (Foundations, p.392-392); this means there is no such thing as an absolutely good action, yet there is such a thing as an absolutely good will--namely, a will that bases its maxims on the moral law. For Kant, the proper order for viewing morality is from the inside to the outside. For Mill, by contrast, the outer result of an action is far more important than the motivation behind it: the best action is the one that makes the most people happy. This means, of course, that Mill would condone lying whenever it had sufficient "utility" (i.e., usefulness) to help more people than it harmed. Likewise, the bus driver's theft might turn out to be morally acceptable, if, for example, he needed the money to support a large family, whereas you were just going to use it to buy some philosophy books for your own use. However, if we are to believe Kant, such a world would be an irrational world--a world without any boundaries--and would ultimately destroy itself. Instead of examining more closely this long-standing debate between deontology and utilitarianism, let us continue our discussion of Kant's version of deontology by looking at some of its further implications. In order for morality to be truly rational, Kant thought moral action must be capable of fulfilling its purpose, which is to bring into being the highest possible good. Just how this "highest good" ought to be defined is, however, a question which has been debated among philosophers since ancient times. The Stoics believed the highest good is virtue, and that a virtuous life ought to be pursued without any regard for happiness. The Epicureans, by contrast, thought the highest good is to fulfill one's pleasures, and therefore pursue happiness. This difference can be traced back to the difference between Plato, with his focus on the ideal of goodness, and Aristotle, with his concern for the experience of real happiness. It may also appear at first to correspond to the distinction between Kant's deontology and Mill's utilitarianism. However, Kant rejected this interpretation of the implications of his own moral philosophy. Kant argued that the best conception of the highest good must include both virtue and happiness. Happiness without virtue would be unjust; virtue without happiness would not be worth the effort. Therefore Kant explained the highest good as the picture of an ideal world in which each person is rewarded for their virtue with a proportional level of happiness. In other words, if your level of virtue reaches eight on a scale of one to ten and mine only reaches seven, then you should be rewarded with 80% happiness, whereas I should be rewarded with 70% happiness. Any other conception of the ultimate purpose of moral action would make morality irrational, inasmuch as morality would then aim at something less than perfect goodness and justice. Kant has often been criticized for introducing happiness into his theory at this late stage: how could he include happiness in the highest good when he had already defined virtue in terms of obeying duty rather than happiness? But this criticism is based on a misunderstanding. By including happiness in the highest good Kant was not suddenly changing his mind and saying that happiness can be the motivation for our action after all. Rather, we must distinguish between happiness as an original motive and happiness as a rational hope. The reality of human life, according to Kant, is that right action often requires us to do something we know will make us less happy (such as resisting the temptation to steal someone else's money, to lie in order protect our reputation, etc.); yet at the same time our reason tells us that in the end the person who chooses to obey the moral law is more worthy to be happy than the person who chooses to pursue happiness as an end in itself. This presents a problem that must be solved if morality is to be rational: in the world as we know it, the virtuous person is often not rewarded with happiness; hence reason must make whatever assumption is necessary in order to conceive of how the highest good is possible. Kant argued that practical reason therefore requires us to "postulate" (i.e., put forward as a necessary assumption) the reality of life after death and the existence of God. Unlike freedom, these postulates play no role in making an action moral; instead, they help us understand the rational purpose of morality itself. Without believing in another life and in a holy God governing that life, we may well be able to act morally, but we will not be able to explain how the highest good could ever be realized. This is Kant's famous "moral argument" for the existence of God. He never claimed that it could give us real knowledge of God's existence; but he did argue that it provides the best practical reason for believing in God. Essentially, his argument is that anyone who acts morally and believes that such action is rational is acting as if God exists, whether or not they actually believe in God. In other words Kant claimed that a person must either believe in God or else reject one of the following propositions: (1) moral action is good; (2) morality is rational; (3) the highest good combines virtue with proportional happiness. Aside from providing this "practical proof" of God's existence, Kant's moral philosophy made several other important contributions. For instance, as we have seen, it established a clearly defined boundary line between moral and non-moral actions. An action is moral only if it is done freely (i.e., without considering our own happiness) and in accordance with the moral law (i.e., based on a universalizable maxim). These are necessary conditions that must be true for anyone who wishes to act morally, so they define an absolute set of guidelines for our inner motivation, just as space, time, and the categories define an absolute set of guidelines for understanding the outer world. We can picture the opposition between Kant's two fundamental standpoints as follows: (a) The boundary of knowledge (b) The boundary of action [Figure 18.2: Kant's Theoretical and Practical Standpoints] This challenges one of the most common themes in the insight papers written by my students over the past few years: many of them have argued that there is nothing absolute in the world. The reason typically cited is that actions can be right in one situation and wrong in another situation, or that propositions can be true in one context and false in another. Actually, Kant's theory need not be interpreted as disagreeing with this common belief. For, just as he regarded everything that appears in space and time (i.e., in the world) as contingent while only what our mind imposes on the world a priori (i.e., as the world's boundary) is necessary, so also he regarded the moral worth of an action as stemming not from its result in the world of outer objects, but from its source in the subject's world of inner motives. Hence, the same action can be right in one situation and wrong in another if the underlying motivation is different in each case. The presence of a moral absolute, even if it is in a sense outside the world of our actions, has important implications for the commonly held view known as "relativism". Relativism is the belief that, because nothing is absolute, anything could be true or right; hence we must always be tolerant of the views of others. The tolerance encouraged by relativism is, of course, a very good thing. It is a reaction against an older way of looking at the world, as full of absolute, black and white distinctions, which ought to be strictly enforced upon all other people. In the name of absolute truth and goodness many people down through history have been attacked, ostracized, beheaded, and burned at the stake, merely for holding opinions differing from those of the people with more political power. Nevertheless, the danger in relativism is that it ultimately leads to the destruction of both knowledge and morality. By blurring the distinction between true and false or between right and wrong, it convinces people nowadays to ignore the inner guidelines which reason provides for us to determine truth and goodness. Must we, so to speak, "throw out the baby with the bath water"? Kant would say "No!" Intolerance ought to be rejected, but not at the expense of two of the highest values in human life. Kant provided an alternative to relativism by arguing that there are rational absolutes, and that human reason itself teaches each of us its absolute guidelines, if only we will listen to its voice. Because goodness and truth have their absolute basis not in the actions and objects found in the world, but in the rational voice within each individual, tolerance can still be encouraged, but without destroying the possibility of knowledge and morality. There is a potential problem which arises out of Kant's moral philosophy when it is viewed together with his theoretical philosophy (as in Figure 18.2), for it sets up an apparently unresolvable tension between freedom and nature. How can we be free on the one hand (when considering the foundations of moral action), yet determined by laws such as the law of causality on the other hand (when considering the foundations of empirical knowledge)? Kant tried to answer such questions by showing how, in some aspects of human experience, the opposition between freedom and nature, between practical and theoretical reason, is actually resolved. In Part Four we shall see one of the ways in which he did this, by examining the theory of beauty in his third Critique. But his most effective way of resolving this opposition, and at the same time his best answer to the question "What may I hope?" (see Figure 7.3) comes in his philosophy of religion. For religion provides us with the only way of explaining how the highest good can be realized; hence it is the area of human experience which Kant believed best exemplifies the way nature and freedom can work together for the good of the human race. Unfortunately, we will not have time to examine Kant's theory of religion in this course. Although Kant did write several books in the attempt to demonstrate that there is a realm of human experience which synthesizes freedom and nature, the strict opposition between these two realms did not bother Kant as much as it has bothered many of his critics. For his own tendency was not to regard these two realms as posing an absolute contradiction that needs to be explained away, but to affirm the opposition as an essential characteristic of being human. He regarded it as an opposition between two human perspectives, two ways of looking at the same thing (see Figure 18.1), which necessarily arise together and to a large extent--like the opposition between "hot" and "cold", or "large" and "small"--depend on each other for their very existence. Only by keeping this in mind can we fully appreciate the respectful way in which he talks about this opposition in his well-known Conclusion to the second Critique (pp.161- 162): Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me [i.e., nature] and the moral law within me [i.e., freedom]. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence. QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT 1. Is morality rational? 2. Can a value judgment ever be false? 3. Can two genuine duties contradict each other? 4. Can a single action be both free and determined at the same time? RECOMMENDED READINGS 1. Immanuel Kant, Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), especially the Second Section, "Transition From the Popular Moral Philosophy to the Metaphysics of Morals", pp.405-445. (Page numbers refer to the original German pagination, given in brackets in Beck's text.) 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), especially Book II, "Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason", pp.106-148. (Page numbers refer to the German, as mentioned above.) 3. J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Oskar Piest (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). 4. G.E. Moore, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1965[1947]).