Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher
Kant is the great spokesperson for the value of autonomy. Kant takes autonomy (moral self-determination, political sovereignty, personal freedom and intellectual independence) to be the highest result of the Enlightenment maxim - “dare to know!” - and the founding value of bourgeois ethics. In opposition to English empiricism, Kant declares that reason is not the slave of the passions in the enlightened, autonomous thinker, but that, on the contrary, the very meaning of autonomy lies in the independence of the will from all contamination by irrational desires, social conformity and imposed political constraint. In opposition to continental rationalism, Kant declares that the Supreme Good detected by rational thought does not come ready-made from God but is itself the product of human rationality. Kant’s ethical revolution consists in the liberation of human moral conduct from all prior determinations of the Supreme Good and all justifications for the conformity of morals to socially imposed norms.
For Kant, the human will is autonomous only when we perform our duty for the sake of duty alone. Any motivation other than duty (for instance, economic self-interest or to win respect and therefore recognition) represents a contamination of the will, that is, “heteronomy” and not autonomy. Kant goes so far as to describe the moral conduct of everyday life, regulated by the narcissistic desire for satisfaction and the quest for mutual recognition, as “pathological”. Kant is trying to respond to the anxious question posed immediately before the French Revolution - “isn’t a society of autonomous individuals precisely the anarchy of opposed wills, that is, the war of each against all? Do we not therefore actually need the absolute state or an authoritarian religion to reign in the struggle to the death in this state of nature?” - by arguing that only with the advent of this free society can human existence really lay claim to moral conduct. Kant’s theory is not a political philosophy - he has nothing to say about the institutional forms of authority or the rational justifications for this framework of government - and it is not a moral theory - it does not advocate any particular form of the supreme good, but rather claims to arbitrate on the claims of the multiplicity of moral stances to be rationally justified. Kant’s ethical theory proposes that a society where the individual - thanks to the voice of the moral conscience - does their duty for its sake alone will be a harmonious and just society that upholds the supreme good.
Kant’s position encounters two, significant difficulties. The first is Kant’s insistence that the human being - as a natural object and as a psychological reality - is subject to the mechanical laws of the Newtonian universe. This implies the existence of a “postulate of psychological determinism,” namely, that for any act it is always possible to trace a causal sequence of “pathological” determinants of the will. It therefore seems that everybody is doomed to their pathology, incapable of freedom and subject to an implacable quasi-natural determinism. The second is that the stern injunction of the moral conscience, “do your duty!” forgets to add exactly what this duty actually is. It is not enough to obey the law - this might be done for all the wrong reasons. The act is only ethical when obedience to some law (which the subject legislates for themselves, as an autonomous being) coincides with the motivation of pure duty. To see just how severe Kantian ethics is, consider that a prime instance of heteronomy is when the person fleshes out the form of the supreme good with some image of human happiness or human suffering and allows this to act as a determinant of their moral conduct. The supreme good is supposed to be the object of the autonomous will, but fleshing out the supreme good with an image of the good, or permitting one’s own or others’ happiness to determine the will, is precisely “pathological”. The moral injunction - or categorical imperative - “do your duty!” is therefore as enigmatic as any oracle in Greek tragedy. Virtue and happiness seem to be antinomies and humanity seems to be condemned to an alienated dialectic between “beautiful souls” whose virtue consists in doing nothing (from consideration that all acts are pathological) and the wicked “way of the world,” which lives happily in its everyday pathology and does splendidly without any virtues whatsoever.
Kant arguably tried to smuggle happiness back into virtue with the postulate of the immortality of the soul - human moral improvement as a continuous progress towards the holy (non-pathological) will as the gradual increase in autonomy - and God - the impossible perspective from which the series of failed (pathological) efforts by the subject to do their duty might spring into relief as a gradual moral improvement. The rewards of virtue lie in the happiness provided by the kingdom of heaven, and the supreme good turns out (after some tricky philosophical “re-normalisation” and rationalising voodoo) to coincide with the Christian revelation. Yet this “solution” is not only pathological in Kant’s own terms (an image of human happiness as the content of the supreme good), but nonsensical (the postulate that Kant really requires is the immortality of the body, not the soul, as the spiritual beyond belongs to the noumenal realm and not the phenomenal realm dominated by natural causality, and therefore there can be no pathology of the will in the spiritual kingdom).
One modern solution is to rely upon Kant’s famous distinction between the phenomenon world of natural causality and the unknowable noumenal beyond of “things themselves” and human freedom. According to this solution, all human acts are both (phenomenally) pathological and (noumenally) free. This, however, seems unsatisfactory, since Kant insists that freedom must have determinate effects in the real world and that some actions are pathological and some are not (what else is the meaning of the categorical imperative as an enigmatic call to duty other than the fact that freedom implies the possibility of not doing one’s duty?).
Indeed, Kant’s most interesting example of a free act is not a realization of the supreme good, but an instance of Diabolical Evil, namely, the execution of “citizen Louis Capet” by the Jacobins in the French Revolution. According to Alenka Zupancic, in her Ethics of the Real (2000), “Kant is so “shaken” by this act of “diabolical evil” because he is “compelled by his argument to describe it in exactly the same words he used to describe an ethical act” (85).
“We can see the principle reason for the terror which seizes Kant before this act of ‘diabolical evil’ is its uncanny resemblance to the pure ethical act” (85).
The critical part of this discussion is that the free act “sticks out” as superfluous and inexplicable - that is precisely what differentiates the ethical act from all pathological conduct. Hence the “two perspectives” explanation of human conduct as both determined and free fails.
Contemporary interpreters of Kant have tended instead to stress his “pluralism,” that is, that the very indeterminacy of the supreme good in Kant is what is most modern about his ethics. Kant suggests that there exist two guides to moral conduct: the universalisability test and the consideration to treat persons always as ends and not as means. According to the test of the categorical imperative, I propose to myself a moral maxim (for instance, “always defend liberty”) and then test it according to the formula:
“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Section II)
and subject this maim to the practical imperative:
“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” (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Section II).
The maxims that will fail these tests include all non-universal frameworks (racism, sexism, nationalism) and all forms of conduct that discriminate between my conduct and the presupposed conduct of others (lying, cheating, deception and so forth, which presuppose the honesty of others to function effectively). Therefore it is impossible to agree with commentators who conclude that any suitably formulated maxim passes the universality test. Nonetheless - and this is the pluralist point - a great many different moral frameworks can be regarded from the Kantian perspective as ethically sound. Whether - as Kant claimed, and as most modern liberals believe - this makes Kantian ethics into a defense of the family, private property and the nation state, or whether this actually means that only opposition to these institutions is anything other than sheer heteronomy, is, I think, an open question.
This interpretation relies on what is called the “incorporation thesis,” namely, that the subject freely chooses to make some determinant in the causal chain of their existence into the foundation of their moral conduct. According to the influential commentary by Henry B. Allison, for instance, Kantian morality supposes an “incorporation thesis” whereby the drives are incorporated into the maxims of the will: if happiness, self-interest, self-preservation or whatever determines my will, this is because I (not nature) give it this authority. “Through reflection,” claims Allison, “we find that we have been committed all along to such a maxim, understood as a fundamental orientation of the will towards moral requirements”. Likewise, it is only by taking one’s duty seriously - by cleaving to the Cause right to the end - that one discovers precisely what this element in the natural chain of causality was and becomes able to decide upon another, different foundational “moral disposition”. Sartre’s concept of an “original choice” drew upon exactly this interpretation of Kant, and in Sartre’s hands we can see that it is very far from conservative (partly due to Sartre’s voluntarism). Whether this interpretation ultimately lapses into voluntarism is really a question for the psychoanalytic interpretation of the “incorporation thesis,” whereby this “original choice” is actually unconscious. This takes us too far from the question of the basic coordinates of the bourgeois ethical field to pursue any further, although Zupancic’s work offers encouraging signs that autonomy and the unconscious might be compatible without the crippling burden of ethico-political voluntarism.