Over at Perverse Egalitarianism, Mikhail has written an interesting post outlining some of his ethical concerns with respect to realist ontology. A nice discussion has ensued that is well worth reading. Mikhail’s worry is that realist ontologies exclude the possibility of the moral “ought”, leaving us without any moral purchase on the world. I confess that I don’t really see the connection here as one can be a metaphysical and epistemological realist while still remaining an ethical correlationist, and one could also adopt the stance of moral realism.
It appears that Mikhail’s ethical position is primarily that of Kantian deontological ethics. That is, it is an ethical position based on the universality of the moral ought. For some reason I have always had a distaste for the branch of philosophical ethics. Perhaps this is a carry over from having religious fundamentalists screaming at me. Perhaps it’s because moralists have often struck me as the cruelest of human beings. I suppose that, paradoxically, I’ve never seen much good coming out of ethics and have seen a lot that is very ugly. I find it very difficult, in particular, to understand the allure of Kantian ethical universalism. It is difficult for me to conceive of any possible value to ethics unless it be to promote our happiness and flourishing, yet this is precisely what Kant excludes from the domain of the ethical (yes I’m aware he claims we have a duty to pursue happiness). Off of the top of my head, I can immediately think of three arguments as to why Kantian ethical thought is both psychologically unhealthy and a social menace.
read on!
The first argument, of course, comes from Paul’s Romans. As Paul observed so long ago, the moral law creates a morbid and unhealthy psychological disposition that is effectively our death. In seeking to obey the moral law, the more I try to conform to the moral law the more I become obsessed with that which the moral law prohibits. Thus, as Paul puts it, I would never have thought to covet my neighbor’s wife had the law not told me not to. The law creates the very desire for the very thing that it prohibits. Psychologically this pervades the subject with an overwhelming and inescapable guilt that consumes the subject in proportion to the person’s attempt to obey the law. All of us have heard our Jewish and Catholic friends joke about being pervaded by guilt. This is what Paul was talking about.
Socially this dynamic between law, desire, and guilt has horrific consequences. In becoming pervaded by this inescapable guilt, we project the sin outward on to other persons and then seek to destroy these persons. Thus, if the law forbids me from being homosexual, the more I obey this law the more obsessed I become with homosexuality. However, in seeking to escape this I experience my obsession in another person. I now look to eradicate homosexuals from the social sphere as a way of trying to destroy my own guilt. This sort of horrific dialectic seems especially manifested in matters pertaining to sexual desire, where our attempt to eradicate sexual thoughts from our own mind leads to an morbid obsession with the sexual sins of others. It is not by mistake that again and again we see ultra-religious conservative figures fall to these desires even as, in the public space, they’ve spent a lifetime denouncing the sinfulness of our society and others and causing great suffering for thousands of people.
Paul had already put his finger on these psychological dynamics two thousand years ago. I perpetually find myself amazed that Christian fundamentalists, in their obsession with the law, do not notice this or see its real daily effects in our country. It is a shame that all of the good words are taken… Words like “Christian”. When I read the Paul of Romans, or the red script in my Bible (i.e., Jesus’ words), what I discern is an ethical philosophy trying to navigate these sorts of sickly psychological deadlocks and social conflicts. Thus when Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, not to pray in public, not to judge others, to love our neighbors, and when he abolishes the law, everything seems geared towards overcoming these deadlocks and promoting social harmony. All of the things Jesus denounces– praying in public, judging others, hitting back, etc –are things generative of conflict and strife. How is it that a cult of death arose around a man who said such things? How is it that so many of his followers are obsessed with the moral law? How is it that so many of these followers are convinced that what is important, what is central, is having an absolute faith that makes you a “Christian”, rather than creating a kingdom where Jew and Gentile, Jew, and Roman, and Greek, and Chinese, and Indian, and, and, and… where all are welcome and included while nonetheless remaining what they are? How is it that this revolutionary, emanicipatory ethical vision based on difference comes to be clothed in the most hateful and brutal superstition and cruelty? In short, where all of these ethnic and religious differences become indiscerned, irrelevant? I find it deeply mysterious. I mean, damn it, Luke directly says cites the kingdom of heaven as being here.
Second, there is the Hegelian argument. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows how the truth of Kant’s categorical imperative or moral law is the French Reign of Terror. If the French Reign of Terror is the truth of the categorical imperative or the universal moral law, then this is because the universality of the law, as Kierkegaard observed, degrades all that is particular, or, more properly, all that is singular. We are thus warranted in overstepping the particular– individual people –because what is important is the universal to come and no particulars can ever live up to the moral law. In striving to actualize the ideal man, those behind the Reign of Terror find that every actual human falls short and therefore must be killed. Do we not find this dialectic again and again wherever the universal comes to trump the singular?
Finally, third, there is the Nietzschean argument. Far from being a universal moral law grounded in a Good Will, the moral law, the categorical imperative, is in reality a disguised will to power that seeks to subordinate the other, to divide them from what they can do, and take revenge upon the other through their moral judgment. Do we not sense this sickly spirit of revenge in every moralist obsessed with the moral law? Do we not sense, again and again, that the cruel Nun from our childhood school, that the strict teacher who acts according to principle, that the fundamentalist evangelist secretly takes pleasure in their judgment and punishment?
For my part, I simply cannot see what good the moral law does. Rather, instead, I advocate an ethics based on aleatory encounters, where my engagement with the other is tailored to the specific singularity of what is required by this circumstance here and now, with that other, premised on love. The ultimate aim of such an ethics is happiness, human flourishing, or eudaimonia for both myself and the others. If, in this ethics, I must be concerned with their happiness and flourishing as well, then this is because, being a relational being rather than a being that lives in a solipsistic void, my happiness is bound up with their happiness. If I drive like an asshole I’m likely to get the finger and honked at a lot. This ethic could thus be described as an ecological ethic. It requires me to think about how I am related to the rest of the world, both other people and natural ecosystems, and the feedback loops between my actions and that world. It requires me to discover those things that most promote my peace of mind, fourishing, and satisfaction. Since the lion share of my happiness is bound up in living in a world that has stability as well as meaningful social relationships, it means that I must be concerned with the sort of social institutions that best promote these ends, that best help to cultivate and foster fellows that can live well with one another, and that attends to the health of the planet. It means that I must attend not simply to base appetites like sex, drink, and eating well, but intellectual values like beauty, wonder, fascination, and fulfilling relationships.
As Kant rightly recognized, we do not know a priori what will make us happy. But this does not mean that happiness and flourishing cannot function as an adequate ground for an ethics. All this lack of knowledge entails is that ethics must be a science, an experimentalism, where we seek to discover those things that produce our flourishing. Just as our medical science helps us to discover those ways of life, those diets, those activities, that promote our health, we need to investigate those things that promote psychological and sociological health. We need to study ethnography, sociology, and history to discover those social institutions that have led to horror and profound human suffering, and those social institutions and forms of life that have produced flourishing, harmony, sustainability, and happiness. If such an ethics is superior to a law based or judgment based ethics– regardless of how facile this ethic might sound –then this is because this ethics is for something, rather than against something. Rather than telling us what is prohibited or forbidden, thereby creating sickly desires for the prohibited and social conflict, this ethic strives for all that is excellent in life, striving to find happiness for ourselves and others.
Larval Subjects . 
April 4, 2009 at 10:01 pm
[…] 4, 2009 by Mikhail Emelianov UPDATE: While I was writing the post below, Levi posted his own take, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so if some issues are already addressed, I […]
April 4, 2009 at 10:16 pm
For my part, I simply cannot see what good the moral law does. Rather, instead, I advocate an ethics based on aleatory encounters, where my engagement with the other is tailored to the specific singularity of what is required by this circumstance here and now, with that other, premised on love
As a good antinomian, I of course agree with the first part of this. The second I’m not so sure about. Specific singularities are conditioned by systemic factors. “Charity” requires “prophecy”, and vice versa. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of well-meaning anarchists going “peace, peace”, when there is no peace.
Blake is one of my primary resources in this matter; and the antinomian voice in Blake is always in dialogue with the prophetic voice…
April 4, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Interesting. I’d never come across the word “antinomian” before. Thanks!
April 5, 2009 at 1:40 am
How does prophesy require law? I think the Bible is the beginning and end of all prophesy in the Christian tradition. The Biblical prophets prophesied the “fulfillment” of the Law in the “Messiah” as its abolishment.
Beyond that I have no idea what anarchists have to do with Christian Law, or what that statement even means, since there are very few anarchists in the world and none of them have ever said the world is at “peace.” Nor do they really, from what I’ve gathered, believe in “peace”, or Christian moral imperatives, but in the benefits of state-less societies (of which there are and have been plenty–just not many ‘powerful’ ones).
April 5, 2009 at 4:07 am
Insisting that “singularities are conditioned by systemic factors”, without recognizing that systemic factors are in turn conditioned by singularities, is, I think, I huge mistake.
Without this recognition, you haven’t completed the feedback loop; cultural/ political/social production is not a one-way street. The system is produced by a bunch of singularities, which are in turn reliant on the system as the means by which they are produced, and through which they take shape, make a difference, signify, and achieve significance. Singularities are produced within a system, which is in turn reliant on singularities to fill out its social/cultural/political realm with differences, signs, acts, utterances, relationships, etc. (No use making “chicken-egg” arguments here.) This is analogous to the way in which a human body is at once a whole system unto itself, but at the same time comprised of smaller organs and cells that form systems within the system. (E.g. the endocrine system, the central nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, etc.)
All of this assumes, of course, that the “systemic” and the “singular” form a closed system, which is a debatable proposition in its own right. I think Levi makes excellent arguments against this point using ANT.
April 5, 2009 at 4:19 am
Anondyne,
Were you addressing me with these points? In case there’s any confusion, I certainly don’t think that singularities are at the whim of systems or are overdetermined by systems. I just think that we need to recognize the very powerful force of feedback loops that, in many instances, make changes very difficult despite one’s intentions or desires. I think you made a similar point here or elsewhere where you used the term “vortex”. For me the issue is one of how you can form collectives intensive enough to push back on these feedback loops producing trajectories of change producing positive feedback loops in their own right.
April 5, 2009 at 6:24 am
Dr Sinthome, in the version of Christianity that I buy, which is its Eastern variant, sin is something the sinner inflicts upon themselves out of his or her blindness for the love of God that is to say abundance and acceptance for everyone. This in fact is quite in tune with what you propose by way of ecological ethics, because the point of the ”commandments” is to allow you to live a happy and harmonious life. But as I mentioned before, in Catholicism and its sub-variations, the gap between the body and the soul always causes excess guilt, since the premise is loss-lack rather than absolute positivity.
However I don’t see how what you wrote contrasts or challenges the need for an universal morality? Even if sin is not premised as punishment, its consequences still have to be the same for everyone?
April 5, 2009 at 7:57 am
“How does prophecy require law?”
*…searches in vain for the bit where he said that it did…*
There is certainly a historical connection between antinomianism and anarchism. For the latter, the badness of the state has a lot to do with its legalistic (territorialising, warlike) regulation of social life. It’s not altogether clear how this badness is supposed to have arisen out of the spontaneous auto-poetic self-organisation of a bunch of free singularities (or whatever cipher for the bourgeois individual is currently teh hipness), although various lapsarian theories have been proposed (we were happy and good, until…).
Blake was more straightforwardly metaphysical about it: he called existing society, with its commercialism and usury, “the Antichrist”.
April 5, 2009 at 11:46 am
Hello LS,
I haven’t ever posted here before, but come here often. I hope you don’t mind me contributing to this, as it’s a particular interest of mine.
From a Lacanian point of view, you might be seen as failing to distinguish between the ethical act proper and the superego. From this perspective (as I’m certain you know!)it’s the superego that acts as a kind of ‘practical guide’, feeding us determinate commands, thus allowing us to make excuses for cruelty in the name of our ‘duty’, whilst the properly ethical act has no practical guide, and therefore gives no grounds for excuses.
Related to this, I’m concerned about what would follow from a happiness or good that was put under a microscope and dissected, analysed. Would the findings be taught, commanded, turned into a set of legislation? And isn’t this already beginning to sound a little like the superego responsible for the cruelty you so deplore?
April 5, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I really don’t see how anything Paul wrote about (lot of it being straight up bullshit, if you ask me) law has to do with Kant’s law. Kant’s idea of freedom is that of giving oneself a law, including moral law, and only following one’s law, period.
I know Paul is all the rage these days and it’s sexy to bring up Romans, but I don’t think there’s much validity to his guilting me into loving Jesus and his escapist fantasies.
April 5, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hi Mikhail,
I think Paul’s moral psychology is valuable in revealing something about the structure of thought that emerges in relation to the moral law. Kant, not surprisingly, describes something similar in his ethical writings. On the one hand, In the Critique of Practical Reason he talks about how we must presuppose our immortality in order to render the moral law intelligible. His reasons here are surprising. One might think that we must postulate our immortality so as to posit reward for being good, but for Kant it has nothing to do with this. Rather, we must posit our immortality because moral existence requires infinite time. Why? Because we perpetually fall short of the moral law a priori. Because the moral law is universal and because we are particular/singular, it is a priori impossible for us to live up to the moral law. In close connection to this, Kant describes the overwhelming guilt that accompanies the moral law. Indeed, Kant directly says that the more we follow the moral law the more demanding (i.e., persecutory) it becomes. Paul outlined this psychological logic nearly 2000 years before Kant. My point was not that we should all become Christians, but that moralities such as Kant’s have very adverse psychological and social effects. We could just as easily situate these problems in terms of Kierkegaard’s analysis in Fear and Trembling or Kafka’s analysis in The Trial. Where we get these psychological insights is a matter of indifference. Freud also outlines this logic in Civilization and its Discontents. Take your pick. I think this is yet another example of why transcendental analysis is so problematic. Just as Meillassoux argues that the correlationist approach forgets how its dependent on the body and therefore a being that precedes givenness or prior to givenness in that we had to evolve, in adopting a formalist approach to ethics that strives to separate the moral from the empirical, it overlooks all these psychological issues that lead to a variety of phenomena that intuitively we would call unethical.
April 5, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Thanks for the comment, Ghost. I agree with respect to the distinction you’re drawing. The ethical act, of course, is beyond the law or outside of the law and any sort of symbolic codification, and therefore outside of this set of problems.
April 5, 2009 at 5:37 pm
[…] Ethics and the Moral Law, Part I: Anscombe April 5, 2009 Larval Subjects has a good post up on deontological ethics. I am sympathetic to some of his antinomian sentiments, though I often […]
April 5, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I’ve said this already, here, so I won’t press the point too hard again, but I think your criticisms of Kant along psychoanalytic and Pauline lines rests on a misunderstanding of ‘law’ in Kant. Mikhail has mentioned this in his comment above. To sharpen our criticism: you totally flatten out the ‘as if,’ counterfactual, character of moral law. Put slightly differently, there is no actual law, and hence there’s no Lacanian big Other, no Divine commandment to rail against, etc.
All there is to Kant’s ethical reflection is an attempt to make what is implicit in our actions explicit, and hence subject to competing reasons/rational discourse.
As for the infinite time/immortal soul/imperfection argument, I’m tempted to say that it’s upshot is simply that you can’t exhaust potentiality/normativity. One can never transform an ought into an is (which is sorta the point of Mikhail’s original posts).
If one is Paul, of course, Christ was precisely this kind of incarnation of the ought in an is, which manifests itself in love, and calls for the transformation of judaic law through its transgression etc etc. But to be Paul, you need to fall off of your horse and get a concussion — i.e. it involves a whole different, eschatological/doomsday/Millenarian ontology that’s not much more helpful than Kant’s claim that we’re essentially thrown, finite and imperfect creatures.
So, honestly, if I’m forced to pick either apocalypse or necessary imperfection as my ontological commitment, I think I’m going to pick the latter. Ultimately, so does Kierkegaard — with him, one is always in the wrong in relation to god; the question is what to do about it once we come to this realization!
April 5, 2009 at 9:03 pm
This is an odd and rather dishonest argument, Alexei. The choice isn’t between siding with Paul or siding with Kant. You really believe my reference to Paul lies in saying we should become Pauline Christians? C’mon, you read better than that. Rather, Paul makes a certain highly cogent observation of moral psychology in relation to the law. It is odd to suggest that Kant is somehow immune to this when he himself points out the manner in which the law becomes more demanding and produces more guilt the more we obey it. Kant, of course, understands himself as making explicit what is implicit in our moral actions, but whether or not that’s what he accomplishes is highly open to doubt. The fact that most readers of Kant, upon first encountering his moral thought, find it to be absurd is indicative of just how far off the mark he is from our moral intuitions.
April 5, 2009 at 9:12 pm
There’s nothing dishonest about the argument, Levi. Nor am I claiming that one needs to be either Pauline or Kantian. My point is, however, that if you buy the Pauline critique of Kantian Law, you are committed to some kind of Millenarianism/Judgment Day/Absolute Knowing.
So the either/or remains: Apocalypse — with its ‘secular’ cognate of revolution (hence why Badiou, Zizek, etc etc, are all talking about Paul) — or finitude and imperfection and infinite history.
I can explain how this follows from Paul’s criticisms, if you would like, but I take it that the whole typological strain of argument that Paul employs, and which is more or less what Hegel’s shapes of consciousness amount to (type/anti-type) is pretty clear.
April 5, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Alexei,
This conclusion doesn’t follow at all:
One can accept Paul’s psychological observation about the law and how it is productive of certain transgressive and painful desires without having to endorse his particular ethical vision or solution to that deadlock. After all, Freud and Lacan’s analysis of the law and desire is identical but certainly neither of those thinkers come to millenarian, judgment day/absolute knowing conclusions about ethics. Pre-Christian ethical systems (Greek eudaimonistic and hedonistic ethics) would be immune to this sort of problem as they’re not premised on duty or obedience to the law (with the possible exception of stoicism) and therefore don’t fall into this psychological deadlock or impasse. It’s very strange to suggest that only one particular ethical form follows from conceding a particular psychological phenomena, which is why I took your argument to be dishonest.
April 5, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Thanks LS,
Is it really outside this discussion? You define your ethics in part in relation to a certain conception of Kant.
‘…we perpetually fall short of the moral law a priori. Because the moral law is universal and because we are particular/singular, it is a priori impossible for us to live up to the moral law. In close connection to this, Kant describes the overwhelming guilt that accompanies the moral law. Indeed, Kant directly says that the more we follow the moral law the more demanding (i.e., persecutory) it becomes…’
I was questioning whether this is the only way to understand the moral law. The sense of failure and guilt you describe may arise to the extent that we imagine that the emptiness of the categorical imperative masks a determinate command, which we are then certain to (fail to) divine. This, it could be argued, would describe one version of the superegoic law.
But doesn’t Kant also describe the law as empty, as an empty injunction the ethical subject must provide a content for? And isn’t the superego (the law of determinate commands) a way to avoid the responsibility inherent to this law – that is, the responsibility for determining the content of the law?
April 5, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Ghost,
I thought you were referring to the Lacanian act, not the empty form of the law. The empty form of the law, of course, is relevant to this discussion. I take it that this conception of ethics suffers all the problems I’ve been outlining in this discussion, is a form of psychological and social sickness, and is therefore something best dispensed with altogether.
April 5, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Larval, forgive me if I’m mistaken, but your ‘experimental ethics’ here, being a semi-grounded (speculative realism with correlationist spectacles?)’agape’, being an interesting attempt to resolve the tensions between the Law (absolutist moral, paternal superegoic, phallic, in short, The Big Other) and the antinomian (each situation as Event [haecceity?), as conjunctural singularity requiring (if not the Lacanian death/destitution of the Names of The Father) a specific reasoned ‘truth procedure’, though often confused with, variously, unbridled hedonism, anarchism, etc … reminds me of what became very popular in the 1960s/1970s: Situational Ethics, particularly as expounded in Episcopalian priest Joseph Fletcher’s The Classic Treatment and Situation Ethics (and its ironically ‘axiomatic’ conclusion that the end – love, agape, eudaimonia, human flourishing – justifies the means).
While the extent to which Situation Ethics contributed to the development of neo-liberal ideology in the 1970s remains unclear, I can’t help noticing that the move from ‘avant garde art’ to ‘experimental art’ during the same era was crystal clear.
[But I’m still waiting for someone to credibly convince me that Kant’s Categorical Imperative is incompatible with the Communist one :-) …].
April 5, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I would also add that the superego cannot be equated with determinate commands. It is precisely because the law has an empty form and doesn’t tell you what to do that the superego emerges as the sadistic obverse of the law. Kafka does a marvelous job outlining precisely this logic in “Before the Law” in the famous section of The Trial.
April 5, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Levi,
good to see we’re making some progress. But just a few clarifications.
First, I don’t know why you keep insisting that I’m constantly trying to shunt thought into an either/or that refuses certain possibilities. I don’t take myself to be doing that. I do think, however, that constantly widening the scope of our discussion so as to force me to countenance ever more ethical theories isn’t a fair request to make. We were discussing Kant, and the various critiques of Kant. Now you’re introducing Stoicism, etc, which was never part of this particular debate. And it strikes me as a sleight of hand: instead of discussing the Kant stuff, you’re asking me to discuss stoicism, etc. I’d rather stick with Kant.
Now, about Paul: My point is simply that to endorse Paul’s psychological description of the law, and reject everything else means not actually dealing with Paul’s criticisms of the law. In fact, it means there’s no reason to bring him up, since what is specific to Paul’s criticism has been excised anyway.
My point may not hold for psychological criticism of law, but it does hold for Pauline criticisms of it.
About Psychoanalysis. I don’t know enough to say anything intelligent about its emancipatory/curative goals and potentials, so I’ll leave off on it.
April 5, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Beckett,
Perhaps you could explain to me how Kant’s categorical imperative is compatible with the communist one. We could, of course, talk of the third formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative, always treat humans as ends in themselves, never as means, but is that what Marxist thought claims and does it base itself on a normative argument of this sort? It seems to me that Marxist thought, far from being deontological, is eudaimonistic at its core and is a political philosophy based on self-interest. In other words, one is not a Marxist because they are altruistic or wish to do their “duty”, but because they think that such a form of economics is in their best interests. That would be exactly the opposite of Kant’s position. Moreover, wouldn’t the Marxist see the sort of ahistorical nature of Kant’s ethics as a sort of spiritualized mystification of ethics and one of the ultimate avatars of bourgeois thought?
Finally, it is difficult for me to see the connection between experimental ethics and neo-liberal ideology. If anything, neo-liberal ideology arises out of a sort of Protestant world vision very similar to Kant’s. Experimental ethics doesn’t mean something analogous to “experimental art”, but refers more to the scientific end of the spectrum. What I have in mind when I refer to experimentalism is our need to have knowledge of our psychology, our biology, our neurology, history, and various social arrangements that have been tried throughout history in order to properly evaluate how we should live our lives. In short, I am beginning from the premise that we cannot begin from set moral or ethical principles in our ethical deliberations, that we can’t treat ethical knowledge as “a priori”, because we don’t begin with a knowledge of our nature and a knowledge of what social arrangements work. Contrary to Kant, ethical principles, in my view, are not categorical imperatives but are one and all hypothetical imperatives. As hypothetical imperatives they require empirical inquiry to discover those relations that work and those that do not. Hence the reference to “experimentalism”. This is what ethical thinkers like Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Aristotle, and Mill understood so well about our ethical nature. In this respect, ethics is not that different from medicine. We don’t begin with the knowledge of what we should eat, how often we should exercise, how much we should sleep, how much we should drink, etc., in becoming healthy. These are things that we must discover. Likewise, there are no originary principles that tell us how we should relate to others, what sorts of institutions we should form, what our goals and desires should be, etc., in living a life characterized by harmony with others, satisfaction, and flourishing. These are things we have to discover. Consequently, in referring to “experimentalism” the accent shouldn’t be on the “avant garde” but rather on the very practical engagement with investigation to discover what might produce eudaimonia.
I am also unclear as to how this model of thought is either “axiomatic” or an “ends justifies the means” rationality. If anything, it is Kant’s thought that is axiomatic in that he can only appeal to the good will and the categorical imperative as a fact of reason that cannot itself be grounded in anything else. I think we can readily see that people desire eudaimonia or happiness and flourishing, that they want love and fulfilling relationships with friends, without having to posit this as an “axiom”. Just ask people what they want, they’ll tell you. The problem is that we don’t know what these things are or how to achieve them. Hence the need for inquiry both on a personal level and more collectively. Secondly, this sort of an ethic clearly can’t be an “ends justify the means” sort of ethic insofar as the means by which these things are attained can themselves destroy the possibility of attaining those ends by producing profound personal and social suffering. Consequently, the question of means itself becomes a question of such an ethical “system”.
April 5, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Alright Alexei, fair enough. I evoked Paul because I think he outlines this logic and its psychological structure very clearly. But if you want to exclude Paul that’s fine. What counts for me is that psychological structure: The law, in any form, whether given from the outside or through reason, 1) creates a desire for what it prohibits, 2) produces guilt in proportion to the degree to which it is followed (as Kant himself observed, i.e., the more you follow the law the greater the guilt you feel), 3) becomes more demanding the more it is obeyed, and 4) generates a psychological temperament towards others that perpetually sees them as violating the law (by virtue of psychological principles governing projective identification wherein we project painful affects at work in our own being on to other persons as a psychological mechanism wherein we try to escape these things). As such, the moral law produces a psychology that is 1) not psychologically healthy, and 2) that tends towards the conflictual and persecutory in the social sphere.
It is not unfair of me to evoke alternative ethical systems that do not run into this problem by virtue of not being structured around the law or a concept of duty as the ground level of ethics. I did not, however, evoke Stoicism in this way. I said that epicureanism and virtue ethics do not run into these very destructive problems because they are organized positively around a set of claims about what we should strive for, not what should be prohibited or what we are commanded to do. This generates an entirely different moral psychology that is much less ugly and conflictual than the sort we see coming out of Kant. I evoked Stoicism as an example of a pre-Christian ethics that does run into the psychological impasses law based ethics fall into by virtue of it’s fixation on duty. I was under the impression we were having a discussion about ethics, not Kant. Kant, of course, has figured very heavily into this discussion, but what is at issue here is deontological ethics versus various consequentialist ethics, so all ethical systems are fair game.
April 5, 2009 at 10:15 pm
And you can’t just shunt aside things like psychoanalysis in these discussions. If you’re really serious about your commitment to ethics then you need to examine these sorts of critiques and analyses of the psychology relating to the law. Adorno understood this which is why he wasn’t just a Kantian but spent a lot of time doing research over psychoanalysis and sociology. It’s as if you want to be able to say “this is just what Kant is doing” and ignore all this other stuff that goes straight to the heart of these ethical questions. I can’t conceive of how someone can seriously engage in questions of ethics without believing it crucial to educate themselves about our psychology and how it functions in relation to morality, about ethnography, etc. In the absence of these sorts of researches and awareness one’s ethical deliberations and theorizations just become prejudices and ethnocentricism garbed in fancy lingo. This, above all, might be the central problem and sin of transcendental philosophies… That they think they can compartmentalize various aspects of our thought and nature– the problem with faculty psychology anyway –and ignore these other aspects of our being (consign them to the Anthropology) because they’re localizing the transcendental where all this dirty empirical stuff is secondary. In doing so the transcendental philosopher fails to see that there’s merely enshrining their own prejudices, uninformed assumptions about how our minds work based on folk psychology, and a particular ethnographic set of assumptions of which they’re not even aware.
April 5, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Thanks LS for taking the time to respond,
I think this is where we disagree. For me there IS a difference between emptinesses – in Lacanian terms we could distinguish between the desire of the Other that exists and that does not exist. On the one hand we have the enigma of the Other’s desire interpreted as a determinate content, something the Other ‘really wants’ but is concealing from us, such that we fall into a series of humiliating failures to ‘measure up’ to what the Other wants from us.
On the other hand, we have the desire of the Other that does not exist, both in the sense of there being no Other of the Other, and in the related sense that there is no determinate thing that matches the Other’s desire. The realisation that the Other(‘s desire) does not exist corresponds to the deanimation of the superego and the opening of the truly ethical space.
I am arguing that the first corresponds to a categorical imperative that is not empty enough (in this version we pretend that the Other exists, that the Law corresponds to a series of determinate commands which we can simply obey without having to take responsibility for their status as Law).
April 5, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Yeah, I understand the distinction you’re making. However, as I understand it, the end of analysis lies not in the discovery of an emptied moral law, but of a detachment from the moral law altogether. This was Lacan’s shift from traversing the fantasy and identifying with the symptom that still left us locked in the sickliness of desire, to a separation altogether and an identification with the sinthome which is not the empty form of the law but rather a singular form of jouissance that’s detached from the Other altogether. In either events, this is one of the major reasons I’m not a Lacanian. While I certainly think there’s much of value in Lacan, I think he’s just mistaken in this whole logic and what we should aim for. Moreover, I think Lacan suffers from a number of problems by not being better acquainted with neurology and the biological, all of which lead to a very distorted understanding of what treatment should be about and the etiology of symptoms. I am not suggesting that there aren’t symptoms in the properly psychoanalytic sense (as formations of the signifier), but I think these symptoms are an increasingly rare subset of the psychological symptoms that plague people. It is fun, though, to engage in the harmless past-time of interpreting culture and politics through a Lacanian lens.
April 5, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Ok. I’m not sure desire is always sickly! There is the desire of failure, of ‘no, this isn’t it either’ (this is the sickly sort I think you’re referring to), and there is perhaps something else as well – I think Lacan said somewhere that for some, object a gets behind and pushes! (rather than being something we are constantly striving for).
I’d be more inclined to think it is the biological bias of the hegemonic contemporary psychology that is doing most of the damage, rather than psychoanalysis. I know you have some concerns about psychoanalysis, but you actually surprise me with this comment.
April 5, 2009 at 11:27 pm
A few thoughts, Levi, since we’re verging on mutual understanding, if not agreement.
first off, I’m not simply disregarding psychoanalysis in either my responses to your criticisms of ‘law,’ or in relations to ethics in general. I happen to think that the 4-point structure you outline simply doesn’t apply to Kant. In particular I don’t think (1) and (3) apply at all, since, in the first instance, the universalization test doesn’t propose negative restrictions — and it certainly doesn’t create laws of the sort, ‘Thou shalt not…’. It’s not no-saying, and hence doesn’t create a taboo, etc. And I have no idea why the CI would become more demanding the more one followed it. What on earth would that even mean?
As I said, I think the psychoanalytic responses to the law may very well apply to empirically instantiated mores, or customs, but it has no purchase on Kant’s ‘moral law’ (regardless of what Lacan himself might think, and appealing to him, isn’t any better than me saying ‘my Dad says so’).
I also tend to think that appealing to psychoanalysis in a discussion of ethics is akin to appealing to epistemology when discussing ontology. There are doubtless cases where that helps (moral psychology for instance), but it has nothing to do with the necessary and sufficient conditions for ethics itself — which is the basic topic here. The distinction is important to maintain if only to avoid confusion. In a different situation it may be helpful to blend ethics and psychoanalysis, but i don’t think that we are in such a situation.
About the Stoicism example: Maybe you’re right; I jumped too quickly there. I suppose, though, that I don’t see how Stoicism is any less disciplined, law-based than Kant’s Ethics (both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius espouse a very disciplined, rule bound code of conduct, which acknowledge, like Kant, situations where one is compelled to act. The only difference, so far as I can tell, is what they do next with this discipline). But Ok. I don’t know enough about Stoicism to say either way.
Now about this,
I don’t think that’s accurate. If anything, I’m trying to engage in preparatory, definitional work with you. Analysis. You can’t combine things — even experimentally — until you have some idea of what you’re combining. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea what’s producing what in relation to what. It would be just a mess of half-thought through, half-digested ideas. I back off of the empirical work, simply because we don’t even have a conceptual framework in which to place or discuss our ideas; We still don’t know what the necessary and sufficient conditions for applying the label ‘ethical’ are!
One can’t diagnose something until you have a diagnostic system. You can’t have a diagnostic system until you’ve delineated a problem space, and separated (and related) it from cognate spheres. etc.
My sense is you’re so eager to go out and fix things, or critique them, that sometimes the hard analytical work gets left out entirely. I don’t think, for instance, that it’s dry ethnocentric lingo to propose a conceptual space in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. It’s a necessary first step in understanding, without which we might as well forget about philosophically/theoretically oriented social change, and just start throwing rocks, flying around the world to participate in demonstrations, and perpetuate the same, sad status quo.
April 6, 2009 at 12:18 am
LS: “Perhaps you could explain to me how Kant’s categorical imperative is compatible with the communist one.”
Kvond: Unless I am completely misreading him, Badiou, a Communist, exercises strong Kantian, imperative thinking is his demand that loyalty to the event and then a subsequent pursuit of the generic, and universalization of the truth.
April 6, 2009 at 12:45 am
Kvond,
Fair point. I guess I find it difficult to see how any Marxist could adopt such a position given the nature of historical materialism.
April 6, 2009 at 12:50 am
Ghost,
As I understand it, desire is always a sort of sickness in Lacanian thought because of the way that it’s necessarily bound up in a dialectic with the law. It’s notable that Lacan undergoes a significant mutation following seminar 7 because the ultimate conclusion of that text is that all we can do is submit ourselves to the law (even in the purified empty form you describe). By the time we get to seminars 9, 10, and 11 Lacan has largely abandoned the concept of desire altogether. For example, in Seminar 11 desire does not figure as one of the “fundamental concepts” of psychoanalysis, but rather drive, unconscious, repetition, and transference are the fundamental concepts. For the remainder of his career Lacan looks for a beyond to our attachment to the Other which is, in effect, a beyond to desire.
It is difficult to evaluate culpability and damage when talking about something like clinical practices. I’ll probably write a post on this soon explaining how I came to feel this way about psychoanalysis, while still, obviously, admiring it deeply. I do think the biological bias of contemporary psychology needs to be balanced against a subject-oriented therapy, but I don’t think it should be outrightly rejected in the way it is by psychoanalysis, and do think that there are a number of symptoms that aren’t effectively treatable by talk methods.
April 6, 2009 at 12:55 am
Alexei, my appeals to things like psychoanalysis and other social sciences has to do with the ethical stance that I adopt. Insofar as I adopt an ethics that aims at human flourishing it follows logically that we cannot ignore the psychological and sociological effects that certain forms of life possess. You are, of course, right that the legalism of Kant is not of the “thou shalt” form. However, this really isn’t relevant. The letter of Kant’s very own text outlines exactly the psychological structures I’m talking about, discussing the manner in which the more we follow the CI the greater our sense of guilt and the more demanding it becomes. It is not by mistake that, when seeking to understand the nature of unconscious desire, guilt, and self-punishment Lacan uses Kant’s second critique as a model.
With regard to Stoicism, right! That was my point. Kant himself cites Stoicism as a forerunner of his own position. My point was just that Stoicism, as a result of being a duty based ethic, runs into the same psychological impasses.
April 6, 2009 at 1:12 am
Dolmance: “I’ve told you a thousand times over that Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires; hence, we do no kind of evil in surrendering ourselves to these impulses, of whatever sort you may suppose them to be. With what regards heaven, my dear Chevalier, I beg of you, let us no more dread its effects: one single motor is operative in this universe, and that motor is Nature.”
– de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom
Those who see de Sade as a hedonist actually have him quite wrong. At several points he directs his libertines to not have too much pleasure, or not to make pleasure the goal. The goal is merely serving as best as possible the motor of the Universe, Nature. This requires acting in what custom qualifies as both vice and virtue. One’s pleasure is not the motivation.
There was a reason why Lacan wrote “Kant avec Sade”
April 6, 2009 at 2:08 am
Not making pleasure your ultimate goal (like Kant) does not make one a Kantian
April 6, 2009 at 2:25 am
Thanks for your considered response above, Larvel/Sinthome/Levi. But I think we’re talking at cross purposes (understandable in light of other comments here).
I was simply asking, suggesting whether your ‘experimental ethics’ might have any connection to Situational Ethics, not condemning you as some disavowed neo-liberal apologist. Apologies for the confusion.
Perhaps you could explain to me how Kant’s categorical imperative is compatible with the communist one.
This was a footnote to my comment and isn’t what I actually stated: I was appealing to (possible, convincing) critiques of incompatibility, not for a response that deflects such an appeal on to a demand that I explain any compatibility. I was alluding, among other writers (more anon), to such as Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique which very effectively reconsiders Marx vis Kant.
Finally, it is difficult for me to see the connection between experimental ethics and neo-liberal ideology
The connection was being posited between ‘experimental art’ and neo-liberalism, as a non-antagonistic connection, ‘experimental’ being a move to remove art from the ‘situation’, art and art practice as not immanent, as not a part of the polity – to de-politicize art. But I realize you are using it more directly in the scientific sense (also the origin of the term ‘experimental art’ incidentally); my criticism is that doing so in relation to ethics is an attempt to place ethics outside itself, outside of the pproperly ethical. The ethical is permanently suspended, forever pending.
Marxist thought, far from being deontological, is eudaimonistic at its core and is a political philosophy based on self-interest
A philosophy of self-interest based on the collective interest, anything else being socially destructive and not in one’s self-interest. Is such an ‘imperative’ really incompatible with the Kantian conception of duty?
Just ask people what they want, they’ll tell you.
They’re always telling me!! And it’s never what they want ….
Mmmmm, I’m interested in discerning your apparently recent (sudden) abandonment of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, now just a ‘harmless past-time’ of superfluous interpretosis?
April 6, 2009 at 2:49 am
Who said anything about making pleasure their ultimate goal, Mikhail. Human flourishing and happiness are not synonyms of pleasure.
April 6, 2009 at 4:32 am
I’m not sure where you found Kant saying something like this. Could I have a reference? I flipped through both the Groundwork and the 2nd Critique and couldn’t find anything approximating what you’re claiming.
The only thing that hints at something along these lines are the first few pages of 2nd Critique, Part 1, Ch 3 (5:71-79), but the point of this discussion seems to be to distinguish the moral law from mere legality. Within this context, Kant argues that pathological states like humiliation, arrogance, etc. stem from paying attention only to the letter of the law, to legality, rather than to the moral law and our respect for it.
I also checked Lacan’s Sade text, which quotes the opening of Ch. 3 I mentioned. But he doesn’t really say anything about guilt there either, or about Kant’s moral law becoming more demanding. So I’m at a loss to know what to do with the Lacan reference. Are you thinking of one of his lectures?
April 6, 2009 at 4:34 am
I’ll have to dig it up, Alexei.
April 7, 2009 at 10:41 pm
You: “Those who see de Sade as a hedonist actually have him quite wrong. At several points he directs his libertines to not have too much pleasure, or not to make pleasure the goal… There was a reason why Lacan wrote “Kant avec Sade”
ME: “Not making pleasure your ultimate goal (like Kant) does not make one a Kantian.”
You: “Who said anything about making pleasure their ultimate goal, Mikhail.”
ME: No one said anything about making pleasure an ultimate goal – your implication was that since de Sade was not making pleasure his ultimate goal somehow it must make him “Kantian” – or maybe it was I who wasn’t reading carefully…
April 7, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Levi: “The letter of Kant’s very own text outlines exactly the psychological structures I’m talking about…”
Alexei: “I’m not sure where you found Kant saying something like this. Could I have a reference? I flipped through both the Groundwork and the 2nd Critique and couldn’t find anything approximating what you’re claiming.”
Levi: “I’ll have to dig it up, Alexei.”
ME: I don’t think it’s worth your time, Levi, I don’t believe I’ve ever come across any text where Kant says anything even remotely like your meaning. I know it sounds pretentious – like I’ve read Kant so many times etc etc, but I’m just saying, digging up in this case might take valuable time from your project… However, if you do find the text, I would like to know about it as well.
April 7, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Mikhail,
No Kant does say something like what I’m talking about. He talks about how the moral law becomes more demanding the more we follow it. On the one hand, the dimension of prohibition at work in Kant’s more law can be found in the first part of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant discusses the shopkeeper among other things. He remarks that while we’re happy that the shopkeeper sets fair and consistent prices, and while this follows from the categorical imperative, it is like that this action lacks moral merit because he has an interest in doing so. By contrast, the man that continues to live in abject misery rather than committing suicide, according to Kant, does have moral merit because his action is borne of pure duty. Kant devotes a lot of ink to emphasizing that we are never entirely sure whether our actions are done for the sake of the moral law or for the sake of some pathological interest. The conclusion to be reached is that we are, to the best of our ability, to eradicate (repress) any enjoyment or pleasure we take in our acts. Even paradoxically in the case of our duty to pursue happiness. What we have here then is the psychological logic of prohibition that produces the very desire it prohibits as we strive to prohibit or eradicate any interest in our following the law so we act for the sake of respect for the moral law alone.
You will find Kant’s rejection of anything empirical in the formulation of the moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason in the Cambridge Practical Philosophy under the heading of “problem II” and what follows, pgs. 162 – 164. This eradication of anything empirical comes as no surprise as the law must be a priori to be universally binding and therefore context can’t be taken into account in applying the law.
My observation about the infinitely demanding nature of the moral law comes from Kant’s analysis of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. I’m sure examples could be multiplied– it’s not without reason that Lacan, Zizek, and Copjec have spent so much time on these particular texts in their analysis of the superego –but for the moment I have to get back to grading.
April 8, 2009 at 12:31 am
The conclusion to be reached is that we are, to the best of our ability, to eradicate (repress) any enjoyment or pleasure we take in our acts.
I don’t think so, that’s precisely why I was pretty sure you would not be able to support your claim with a citation from Kant as opposed to your very peculiar interpretations. Acting for the sake of duty is what makes an action moral, acting for the sake of profit, pleasure, advantage, fun etc etc is totally and absolutely fine, as long as it is not illegal, it’s just that they are not moral actions (which does not mean, of course, that they are immoral).
Kant devotes a lot of ink to emphasizing that we are never entirely sure whether our actions are done for the sake of the moral law or for the sake of some pathological interest.
If you are reading this as suggesting that we never really know whether our action is moral, then you are slightly off. To begin with, we never really know if our actions are free, but that does not prevent us from acting freely, does it? As long as we act for the sake of duty, we act morally (“it is always in everyone’s power to satisfy the categorical commands of morality” [5:36]- uncertainty about one’s motivations and inability to say what is for the sake of duty and for is not would lead to total lack of any morality, and Kant’s argument would be in vain.
What we have here then is the psychological logic of prohibition that produces the very desire it prohibits as we strive to prohibit or eradicate any interest in our following the law so we act for the sake of respect for the moral law alone.
What we have here is a failure to communicate – you’re playing fast and loose with Kant’s texts. You started by saying that “the letter of Kant’s very own text outlines exactly the psychological structures” and now you’re just giving a whole lot of nonspecific allusions – where is the “exact outline of the psychological structures”?
You will find Kant’s rejection of anything empirical in the formulation of the moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason in the Cambridge Practical Philosophy under the heading of “problem II” and what follows, pgs. 162 – 164. This eradication of anything empirical comes as no surprise as the law must be a priori to be universally binding and therefore context can’t be taken into account in applying the law.
You are confused again – “empirical in formulation” is not the same as “empirical in application” – acting on a maxim is contextual, you are making a concrete decision in a concrete situation. Principle – abstract (otherwise it’s not a principle), application – concrete.
As for “duty to pursue happiness” – I have to say, I am completely at loss here – where in the world does Kant talks about duty to pursue happiness? Do we have a duty to be happy or just to pursue happiness? I must be reading a different Kant. The law of furthering one’s happiness is an indirect duty [4:399] Or “to further one’s happiness can never be a direct duty” [5:93] Or “one’s own happiness is an end which… can never without contradiction be regarded as a duty” [6:386] Or “happiness is not an end which is at the same time a duty [6:387]
Seriously, it took me 10 mins to look up all these quotes, it’s not making me very happy to be pointing out that your interpretations of Kant are so off, because I feel like I’m lecturing you here and I know you know your shit…
April 8, 2009 at 12:56 am
Mikhail,
Where did I say otherwise? I said it was without moral merit. I even point out in the clause that we are happy people behave this way. Being without moral merit is not a synonym for “immoral”. Rather, the point is that insofar as our life is to be governed by the categorical imperative and insofar as we are to eradicate so far as possible all interests and pathological (bodily motivations) from our following of the categorical imperative, this initiates a sort of moral psychology such as the one I have described in this discussion.
We’ll have to agree to disagree here. I do not think that this is an accurate reading of Kant.
Kant speaks of the duty to pursue happiness among our duties in the Groundwork. You are right that on the surface it appears to be a contradiction. However, the reason it appears to be a contradiction is because you are confusing motives and duties. You are right to point out that happiness is not the motive for which moral action should be undertaken. Kant carefully outlines why this is an insufficient ground for moral action. He goes on to argue, however, that we nonetheless have a duty to pursue happiness. Part of the reason this is a duty has to do with the categorical imperative. Were we simply to mechanically follow the categorical imperative we would become means of that imperative rather than ends, thereby violating the third formulation of the imperative. Kant also seems to think that action becomes contradictory when following happiness is not universalized.
April 8, 2009 at 1:02 am
Now that I think about it, there might be way to read Kant as suggesting that unless one acts for the sake of the duty and therefore morally, all other actions are immoral, evil, wrong – this would indeed be a horrible theory as it would automatically condemn all actions not done for the sake of the duty. I would argue though that this would be a gross misreading of Kant…
April 8, 2009 at 1:04 am
Sorry, I wrote my last comment before I saw that you’ve responded – it’s a reaction to your comment, it’s a follow up to my comment.
April 8, 2009 at 1:18 am
Uh, I just read the pages you referred me to, Levi, and they don’t say anything about the increasing difficulty of following the CI or about the CI creating a desire for what has been ‘banned’ or made taboo. Are you mistaking Kant’s response to the counter-example/thought experiment (involving the gallows), for something more substantive?
In any case, I think this is the problem:
See, we don’t have to eliminate any affective component to act morally. We can desire out of sheer good nature to do something and know that the thing we desire is the ethical course. there’s nothing problematic here. We can also desire to do something unethical, but not do it because of a competing desire and know that this second course of action is ethicaal. Ascertaining the ethical course of action and being affected, or desireing something, don’t preculde one another. It’s simply the case that the affective/desiring strata of subjectivity doesn’t delineate the necessary and sufficient conditions for giving a rational ground for a course of action (as anyone with a kid will tell you)
I can multiply examples, but I don’t think it would be helpful. For to put it simply, I think you’re conflating a number of very different conceptions of law in an unproductive way. And again, I don’t think Kant’s understanding of the moral law is susceptible to the psychological critique you put forward; this critique pertains to a very, very different form of law — and identify the two with one another not only fails to acknowledge Kant’s own discussion between duty and obligation, spirit and letter, legality and moral law, but it oversimplifies both the psychological criticism and Kant’s argument.
April 8, 2009 at 1:31 am
We’ll have to agree to disagree here. I do not think that this is an accurate reading of Kant.
My point was that you were confusing “empirical in formulation” with “empirical in application” in general, not Kant – how can you actually act in a specific situation, once you figured out what the action you are about to take is? How can you apply a principle without context?
However, the reason it appears to be a contradiction is because you are confusing motives and duties… He goes on to argue, however, that we nonetheless have a duty to pursue happiness.
Where did I say anything about motives? I cited actual texts from Kant where Kant specifically states that to pursue happiness is not a duty yet you say that it is and that he says so – where? We’re not here talking about my views or your views, this is a basic matter of textual support. Are you saying that when Kant writes that happiness cannot be a direct duty he is actually not saying it at all?
Were we simply to mechanically follow the categorical imperative we would become means of that imperative rather than ends, thereby violating the third formulation of the imperative. Kant also seems to think that action becomes contradictory when following happiness is not universalized.
I’m sorry this is just nonsensical – how can I (me, one person) by following the categorical imperative “mechanically” (as opposed to organically?) violate the third formulation which deals with treating others (other people, not me) and the kingdom of ends. Again, using others as mean to an end is not immoral in itself – I use a dentist to pull out my tooth as means to an end…
Where does Kant talk about “contradictory action”? Forget Kant, how can an action be contradictory to being with?
April 8, 2009 at 1:44 am
Well I suppose we’ll all just have to agree to disagree on these matters. I don’t think it’s an inaccurate portrayal of Kant or the psychological effects of the law. I am glad that the two of you are concerned with ethics, but find it impossible to accept any ethical philosophy that isn’t grounded in naturalism in some way. I think that when you begin looking into the functioning of our brains you really become aware of just how insufficient this characterization of moral thought is, and how often this way of understanding moral deliberation leads to absurdity and outright cruelty. For example, recent research on rats suggests that hormone leptin plays a key role in regulating appetite. When the rats are deprived of leptin they eat and eat and eat. It is not difficult to imagine what the categorical imperative would say about gluttony. Moreover, the imperative tells us “you can because you ought!” Well, when encountering a person suffering from an eating disorder such as this, can they? Certainly they could form the imperative. Very likely they would experience a tremendous amount of guilt because of their “lack of will”. Understanding these dynamics, levels of development (for instance, decision making capacities don’t fully develop until the twenties), etc., has a significant impact on how we understand particular issues and questions. I believe in freedom because of the self-reflexivity of the brain, but I also believe that freedom comes in degrees, where, for example, fatigue and hunger, can significantly diminish our neuronal functioning and ability to deliberate. The problem with transcendental approaches is, on the one hand, they complete ignore all of these things which can only be found empirically. On the other hand, transcendental thought works with an extremely crude understanding of mind similar to using a butter knife to do neurosurgery (keep in mind that neurons are between 4 and 100 microns in diameter). What the transcendental philosopher consequently ends up doing is enshrining folk-psychology in a transcendental apparatus, even though they believe they’ve freed themselves from this.
Mikhail, I think your point about context and empirical application is exactly what Kvond and I have been arguing. The answer is that you can’t act in a specific situation without context. But Kant says what he says on these matters. There are no short cuts for Kants and the fact that someone is your mother rather than a stranger is to be entirely ignored.
April 8, 2009 at 2:31 am
Honestly, Levi, I think I find a lot of stuff you said about Kant in this post/comments to be unsubstantiated by any textual evidence, you almost never provide evidence that Kant is saying what you say he is saying – it’s fine with me if you have a view of these issues that is different from mine, but to claim that Kant says so and so while he either says exactly the opposite or does not say anything remotely similar to what you claim he says is just irresponsible. I know you don’t like the textualism of the Continental tradition, but that does not mean you can just make things up as you go and claim to be criticizing Kant. I’m honestly surprised because I do know that you are not like this in your other posts…
If I didn’t know better, I would say that you either do not understand Kant’s ethics at all or you somehow managed to come up with a rather peculiar reading that does not conform to any sensible reading of Kant I have ever encountered. I don’t think there’s any sense in continuing this conversation about our respective interpretations of Kant as we are clearly speaking different languages.
April 8, 2009 at 2:50 am
It’s entirely possible that I am completely misinterpreting Kant. I did refer you to the section of the second critique, however, where he discusses these issues. I think the operative word in your second paragraph is “sensible”. I take it that a “sensible” reading is a bit like a “sensible” reading of the Bible that just projects its own historically situated common sense on what it’s reading and ignores the rest. Kant, I believe is very clear on the points about empiricism and the pathological in both the Groundwork and the Second Critique. You need only read part one of the Groundwork. Moreover, the logic of Kant’s own understanding of morality requires these sorts of conclusions. Kant stipulates that morality must be universal and a priori. This is a fairly sensible claim for it hardly makes sense to punish someone for something that they could not have known. That would be the height of injustice where morality (not governmental laws) are concerned. This requires that we must be capable of formulating moral truths on our own, without having to be taught. This is one basic reason that the empirical/contextual and pathological must be, for Kant, separated from the moral law. Likewise, the law would become immoral (by Kant’s standards) were there one set of rules for situations dealing with one person and another set of rules in situations dealing with another person. I gave the example of behaving differently towards my mother than a stranger in my last post. This, for example, would be one way of reasoning that oligarchies and monarchies are immoral systems of government. Similarly, let’s go back to Kant’s example of the shopkeeper. If he gave one price to say his friend and another price to a stranger he would, according to Kant, be acting immorally. These are all either empirical and contextual dimensions of our action or pathological motivations. All of that has to be fed out when applying the categorical imperative. All that is relevant is whether the action becomes contradictory or impossible when universalized.
As I said over at your own blog, I just don’t think you’re really a Kantian. When I listen to your explanations of Kant and why you think Kant is so important, they are all contextual, common sense based, empirical, and based on ends that aren’t dictated by reason or respect for the moral law alone. I think you find in Kant what you want to see, not what’s actually there. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all as I believe Kant gives us a horrible ethical philosophy that is both psychologically damaging and socially unsound.
April 8, 2009 at 3:34 am
I have been reading Kant for many years, I am not saying this to preface an argument from authority or present myself in any role of an expert, but only to suggest that if all these years I was clearly misunderstanding Kant, twisting him around to accommodate my own views and so on, then I am in deep deep shit here, because honestly in the last 10 years or so, I was basically wasting my time as I came up with apparently with very little.
I think what you will hopefully discover, if you ever consider giving Kant another serious look, is that he is much more interesting than you think he is – I never said that I was a Kantian, actually, despite having some knowledge of Kant. I know a bit about Hegel but I am not Hegelian either. In many cases here and over at PE I defended Kant from various misreadings, because I think it is important to at least try to get the thinker right (and I know it’s a difficult, if not impossible task sometimes), it rarely ever came to proposing any sort of an innovating interpretation, yet I continuously engaged you and others because if I was interested in some sort of a closed Kantian circle jerk, I would keep to my own kind – I only wish you were as open to hearing my interpretations as I am trying to be when it comes to your ideas and interests…
April 8, 2009 at 3:54 am
I’ve been reading Kant intensively for about ten or fifteen years myself, it appears I just interpret him differently. I agree that Kant is interesting, but time in life is finite and I really think the Kantian approach to philosophy and its descendants is just fundamentally mistaken. Aristotle is really interesting too, but it doesn’t make much sense for the physicist to spend hours of his time over the course of his entire life grappling with Aristotle’s conception of reality. It could be that at some point in time I come around and see the error of my ways. Certainly that’s happened often with me. But I just don’t see Kant as providing a position that’s very productive in either epistemology or ethics. It is entirely possible that I could be mistaken in my interpretation as I said, but I think I have plenty to keep myself occupied philosophically.