One of my favorite Kantian commentators (and moral philosophers in general) is Christine Korsgaard, and I’ve been turning to her work on Kant (as well as others) as I thoroughly read through the Groundwork. The article I’m quoting from below is her “Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I”, from Paul Guyer’s anthology.
A little while back, Chris had noted in a comment, that Kant’s ethics seemed to deal with other people in a particularly cold manner. The essence of his objection (I hope I get this right) was that what Kant believes is the proper moral motivation (respect for the law) is quite cold, especially compared to motives that involve actual people and/or one’s affection for them. I tried to answer him at the time by questioning what is really responsible for our inclinations. But it’s worth noting that Korsgaard has a different take:
> …the person who acts from duty is envisioned as someone who does not really have the happiness of others as his end. This is simply a mistake. Duty is not a different purpose, but a different ground for the adoption of a purpose. So Kant’s idea here is captured better by saying that the sympathetic person’s motive is *shallower* than the morally worthy person’s: both want to help, but there is a available a *further* stretch of motivating thought about helping which the merely sympathetic person has not engaged in. This further stretch of thought concerns the sort of world this would be if no one helped–or better–if no one perceived the need for help as a *reason* to help, or a *claim* on help. Such a world would be unacceptable because we regard our own needs as reasons why *we* should be helped. Regarding my needs as normative for others, or, as Kant puts it, making myself an end for others, I must regard the needs of others as normative for me… So the morally worthy person helps because she believes that the needs of others make a claim on her and so that there is a normative demand, or a law, that she ought to help.
More below the break.
What Korsgaard is suggesting here, I think, is that there is a tradeoff to basing moral motivation on our emotional states. That tradeoff is that someone’s needs won’t be a reason for everyone to help them. Rather, it will only be a reason for those who are sympathetically inclined to help them. You either have the emotional disposition to help them or you don’t, and of course plenty of people in a large, modern, liberal society are fairly good at guarding how much they feel for other people (see Kitty Genovese. Thus, someone’s being in need of help (in itself) is not enough to make moral claims on people. Rather, it needs to be met halfway with sympathy of some kind.
Kant’s ethics, by basing moral motivation on something all rational people share (reason, and hence duty), makes the case that someone’s being in need is a reason (felt normatively) for all people to help out. Now this does require that helping those in need is part of the categorical imperative for Kant, but that’s another post. Thus there’s a sense in which being needy is all Kant requires for morality to take hold. And, of course, we see that for non-rational beings (like animals, babies, etc) there is no pull to help those who are plainly in need. We also do not blame them for it.
Finally, the response to this that I’m sure fans of emotional motivation are thinking of is that these theories *do* require you to cultivate these emotional states towards other beings. That may very well be, but it then passes the question up to a higher level. What is our obligation to cultivate these states based on? If it is based on a Humean kind of fondness for feeling good for others, then again we have the problem of this fondness not being found in all rational beings. Perhaps then it is based on a type of perfectionism, then. If it’s a personal form of perfectionism, though, then we’re back to the coldness objection, for one is really cultivating one’s sympathy towards others as a form of perfecting oneself. The other option would seem to be that it is a kind of societal, cultural, global, or group perfectionism of some kind. I’m not terribly fond of that response because I’m attached to a more individualistic moral theory, but I can’t say that I see too much wrong with it (other than that with any option but global perfectionism, you have people outside of your group whose neediness isn’t reason-generating). I can’t think of every other response, but they would seem to me to run the risk of being exactly what Kant is trying to ground morality in: duty.
I don’t think Kant and Korsgaard have the whole answer here, since it seems to me that it’s also possible for us to decide, from a rational perspective, that we have a duty to cultivate certain emotions. These then become emotional states which are “filtered” through rationality rather than simply given us by the world. I don’t think we need to reason through every moral situation in order to be doing the morally right thing. But this post has gone on long enough and I have this paragraph’s topic as a future post.
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