I have always been both intrigued with and puzzled by Kant’s moral philosophy. How reasonable is it? How does God figure into it? How, if Kant’s metaethical approach to laying a rational foundation for the construction of a Kingdom of Ends is applied to an actual moral conflict, does it fare? For example, can it be used such that each individual embraces a “prudential” judgment regarding the ethical parameters of aborting a human fetus? Suppose you have two highly intelligent Kantians using the methodology Kant suggests and coming to completely opposite moral conclusions about abortion? How is this any different from two highly intelligent advocates of existentialism doing the same thing? In other words, suppose on issue after issue after issue the overwhelming prepondernce of those who embrace Kant’s deontological moral philosophy all derived the very same ethical convictions. Kantians may claim that misses the point, of course, but if, in fact, almost all Kantians did derive the same ethcial conviction on almost all moral conflicts that would be a startling thing. And I’m sure Kantians would be the first to point it out. But they don’t do they? Instead, they are all over the moral map just like the rest of us.
This would seem to indicate all the more it is simply not possible to deduce an essential or universal moral perspective regarding the aborting of a human fetus----whether the circumstances ranged from a one week old embryo conceived as a result of a busted condom…to a 5 month olf fetus conceived as a result of a father raping his own daughter…to a fetus literally hours away from being born.
This is a crucial point for me. Whether you spend hour after agonizing hour in deep introspective reflection or merely flip a coin there is no way to differentiate the decison to obtain an actual abortion in an actual circumstantial context as a moral or an immoral choice. In the end you just say, “this is how it appears to me…this seems reasonable to me.” But of course others who come to very different conclusions then yours are saying the very same thing about their own conflicting vantage point. And this in effect is situational ethics. You try to embrace each moral context as intelligently as you are able, sure; but you are forced to acknowledge the inherent limitations we all face in pursuing this daunting task. No one, in other words, can know for certain if a fetus is a human being—not in the sense that, say, the Constitution affords certain inalienable rights to individuals. Nor can men know what it is like to endure the experience of being forced to give birth against their wishes. So, how would anyone be able to “transcend” the clearly existential nature of such factors [but two of many others] so as to come forward with a moral conviction they feel should be embraced as a universal law?
Kant, of course, got around this antinomy by depositing his “universal” moral philosophy into a transcendental contraption—God. Perhaps not the conventional rendition of God, but God none the less.
Here, for example, is how Christine M. Korsgaard encompassed this in, Creating the Kingdom of Ends:
[b]The threat posed by the impossibility of achieving the Highest Good is best understood by considering the way the moral motive functions. You view yourself as a member of the intelligble world and so as a possible legislator of the Kingdom of Ends. You are among the world’s first causes. But there are other first causes: other persons, and whatever else is responsible for the way things appear to us and so of the material content of the laws of nature. In the phenomonal world the results of our actions are determined not just by our intentions, but by the forces of nature and the actions of other persons. Our attempts to realize the good are often diverted by these other forces. It is this that gives rise to the antinomy. Kant’s description of the problem in Critique of Judgment is better:
‘He [a righteous man] desires no advantage to himself from following the moral law, either in this or in another world; he wishes, rather, disinterestedly to establish the good to which the holy law directs all of his powers. But his effort is bounded; and from nature…he can never expect a regular harmony…with the purpose which yet he feels himself obligated and impelled to accomplish. Deceit, violence and envy will always surround him, although he himself is honest, peaceable and kindly; and the righteous men with whom he meets will, notwithstanding their worthiness of happiness, be yet subjected by nature which regards not this, to all the evils of want, disease and ultimately death, just like the beast of the earth…The purpose then which this well-intentioned person has and ought to have before him in his pusuit of moral laws, he must certainly give up as impossible’[/b]
So, here we are, mere mortals cast out of the Garden…out of Paradise and forced to make our way through the days groping as best we can to understand what it means to “do good” and, in turn, incessantly bumping into all of these “phenomonological” obstacles that impede our progress. How are we to know Right from Wrong and, once having taken our leap, how are we to intertwine our choices with others in a “natural world” that brings us one calamity [man-made and otherwise] after the next? And why should we “do good” anyway when all paths lead to oblivion? It certainly does seem, as Kant suggests, it would be best to give up the task “as impossible”, right?
Watch, then, how Kant resolves this:
Korsgaard:
The solution to this and every antinomy is to appeal to the noumenal/phenomoenal distinction. In the world of the sense, there is no causual connection between a virtuous disposition and happiness, but there could be a connection between one’s noumenal disposition and one’s happiness in the world of sense. But this connection would be indirect: it would be mediated by an Author of Nature who had designed the laws of nature so that the connection holds [C2 114-15]. In order to play the role envisaged, this Author would have to be omnipotent [to design the laws of nature], omniscient [to look into the hearts ofrational beings and know their moral dispositions] and perfectly good.
But Kant has, as noted, already deconstructed this metaphysical font so we can’t fall back on the guy with the big white beard. Instead, we need a neo-metaphysical construct to take his place.
More Korsgaard:
The Author of Nature would have the attributes traditionally ascribed to God. If there were a God, then, the Highest Good would be possible, and morality would not direct us to impossible ends. Since we must obey the moral law, and therefore must adopt the Highest Good as our end, we need to believe that end is possible. So we need to believe in what will make it possible. This is not a contingent need, based on an arbitray desire, but ‘a need of pure reason’. this provides a pure practical reason for belief in God. [C2 142-43]
But what is this really? Isn’t it whatever Kant’s “rational mind” deduces it to be. It is, for all intents and purposes, merely human psychology at its most self-deceptive. We want to live in a world that is Good; and we want always to be able to Do Good in it. Yet we know that, out in the phenomonal world, this is often very, very, difficult to actualize. Not only because the incessantly slippery and sliding circumstantial contexts are bursting at the seams with complex and convoluted contingencies, ambiguites and, uncertainies…but also because we need some sort of “extra-phenomonological” incentive to Do Good when, in so doing, we get dumped on by reality over and over and over again.
More from Korsgaard:
[b]A faith in God and in immortality of the soul thus based on practical reason—our practical faith—is not just wishful thinking, because it springs from a rational demand. As Kant strikingly puts it:
‘Granted that the pure moral law inexorably binds every man as a command [not as a rule of prudence], the righteous man may say: I will that there be a God, that my existence in this world be also an existence in a pure world of the understanding, and finally that my duratiom be endless [C2 143]’[/b]
But isn’t this really just Christianty in another guise? It matters not how cleverly the Kantians manipulate the abstract words in the abstract metaethical concepts, it’s the same thing. Therefore, in my view, they are only deluding themselves when they suggest this a priori mental construction is establishing something really different.
Finally from Korsgaard:
Our beliefs in God, immortality and freedom…are ‘postulates of practical reason’. A postulate of practical reason is theorethical in form, asserting something about what is the case, yet it cannot be shown theoretically to be either true or false. But we have an interest springing from the needs of morality in believing it. Since practical reason supports belief in the postulates, its power is more extensive than that of theoretical reason. In establishing the postulates, practical reason takes up the metaphysical tasks that theoretical reason had to abandon. For if there is a God, who made the world in order to achieve the Highest Good, then the world does have an unconditionally good purpose. A teleological account of the sort that the metaphysian seeks—one according to which everything is made for the best in the Best of All Possible Worlds—would be true.
This is less philosophical speculation, in my view, than a human all too human psychological reaction to imagining a world without God. If God does not exist, in other words, we have to invent Him. A priori, as it were.