Kant II

·        A  worry is that if you allow too much fiddling with maxims, you can get out of just about anything.  Suppose the maxim is: Lie to get ahead if you are a very, very immoral person who does not care about the damage selfish lying does to one’s soul…  Or Lie to get ahead if you can get away with it…  Ditto for false promising, etc.

• However, you can't fiddle arbitrarily with maxims.  The maxim has to be the person's real reason for acting.  An Italian fascist's maxim that says to promote the superiority of boot-shaped countries over all others, while seemingly universalizable, is not his real maxim.  His real maxim is to promote the superiority of his country over all others, and this cannot be universalized (just as being a slave, or a master over all others, etc., cannot). 

2. A basic point in Aristotle’s ethics was that there were some things that are ultimate goods, things worth having in and of themselves.  According to Aristotle, the exercise of rationality was such.  According to Aquinas, this includes more generally things like existence, procreation, understanding and society.  They are innately good, independent of how anybody feels about them, but at the same time it is natural to have positive feelings towards them.  Natural, because the purpose of positive feelings is to point to things that are good, and natural means what is in accordance with the purpose of a thing. 

• On the view of Aquinas, at least, some of the things in nature are goods independently of us—thus, it is good that there be seals, whales and dolphins according to Aquinas, regardless of how anybody feels about it, because their existence involves the basic good of existence and the basic good of reproduction.  Kant disagrees here.  Kant looks at everything in nature.  According to Kant, seals, whales and dolphins only have a value because we value them.  It is our desire for there being seals, whales and dolphins that gives value to them.  If we didn’t desire them to be there, if they did not help us in any way, they would be of no value.  (Surely that is wrong!  Surely, seals, whales and dolphins were a good thing before human beings came on the scene and would have been good even if no humans had ever come on the scene.)
• Now, if something has a value because of our desires, it has what Kant calls “price.”  Things that have price can be traded off for other things of similar or greater value.  Thus, if it was necessary to kill off all the seals to save the dolphins and the whales (imagine an evil environment-hater who said that if we do not kill all the seals, he will kill all the dolphins), we might think it’s a fair trade because our desire for dolphins and whales being there is a stronger desire than our desire just for seals being there. 
• Things that have price are things that are valuable for other purposes than the things themselves.  They are valuable for fulfilling our desires or, as Kant sometimes calls them, our inclinations. 
• But the things that have price still have value.  Where did this value come from?  Well, consider a coin.  It has value because it can buy, e.g., food.  Food has value because we want to eat.  So what gives the value to the food, and hence to the coin, is we.  We who want to eat.  So Kant thinks that the value of the coin ultimately comes from us, from our will.  More generally, it comes from persons, that is from rational beings.  A rational being is the kind of being that can think, value things and act for rational reasons.  Kant’s ethics includes all rational beings.  If there are aliens, they are included.  If there are angels, they, too, are included.  (Kant will say that God is not quite included, because God necessarily does what is right, and ethics only applies to beings that are able to do wrong.) 
• Kant often uses the term “humanity” to mean “the rationality of rational beings.”
• So, Kant will say that all value comes from humanity (and any other rational beings there are).  It’s we who impose it.  But we can’t impose what we don’t have.  Thus, we, too, must have value.  But the kind of value we have is different.  The value of a coin or a walrus or a sunset is a value that depends on us.  But our value cannot depend on anything, since otherwise an endless regress ensues.  (Kant doesn’t want to say our value comes from God: in a way, a lot of Kantianism is an attempt to replace God with human beings.)  Thus, we—and all other rational beings—have ultimate value.  Kant calls this ultimate value “dignity” or "worth".  This is infinitely greater than price.
• Dignity is not the kind of thing we can exchange.  It’s a value independent of our likes and dislikes, of our purposes in life, etc.  It is wrong on Kant’s view to exchange something that has dignity for something that has mere price.  The reason we can exchange things that have price is that they have value because of our purposes, so that if our purposes allow us to exchange them, it’s all fine and good.  But we can’t exchange a thing with dignity for a thing with price—that would be forgetting that things with dignity are worth infinitely more.  Probably Kant thinks that you can’t even exchange a thing with dignity for another thing with dignity.
• If so, then if it turns out that dolphins are rational beings, then it will be wrong to kill them to save our lives, because that would be exchanging something with dignity for something.  And things with dignity are just not subject to this sort of haggling.  But if it turns out that dolphins are not rational beings, then it will be quite OK to kill them to save our lives.
• To be precise, what has dignity in us is not our arms and legs, but our humanity or our rationality, because it is this that assigns values to things.
• Kant observes that things with price are mere means: they are useful for various purposes.  But it is things with dignity, namely our rationality, our humanity, that set the goals.  Thus it is these things that are the ends or goals of the things with price—that is, of everything else.  The end of the things with price is to serve our rationality which is what gives them its value.  [The idea that value comes from our rationality and it alone is something Kant designates as autonomy: literally, self-law.]
• From this, we can deduce the following moral conclusion:
• Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.  
• This is the second form of the Categorical Imperative.  [This is something we have to obey if we are to recognize our autonomy, namely the fact that we are the beings that have basic value.]
• Note that says you can’t treat your own rationality as a mere means either.  For example, suppose you feel guilty about having betrayed a friend’s confidence.  Would it be right to brainwash yourself into thinking you never did it?  Well, if you brainwash yourself for your own comfort, you are taking something that has dignity, namely your rationality, and you are clouding it in order to further the goal of something that has only price, namely your comfort.  Your rationality is then a mere means to your comfort, and rationality should never be treated as a mere means.
• The most obvious way to treat humanity as a mere means is to treat it as something that can be exchanged for other goods—worst of all, for goods that have mere price.
• Kant’s four applications:
• 1. Suicide to avoid suffering.  There, one is sacrificing one’s humanity for the sake of one’s comfort.  Humanity has dignity;  comfort has price.  The person committing suicide is treating her humanity as something that can be a mere means to her lack of discomfort.  This is wrong.
• 2. Making a promise you never intend to keep.  Here, you are using another person “merely as a means to an end which the latter does not likewise hold.”  I want money, say.  If the other held the same end—namely, my having money—I would not need to deceive him.  The deceit only becomes necessary if I want to use the other person.  I am using the other person here as a mere tool. 
• When we use a tool, we do not ask what the tool wants.  We simply do to the tool whatever it takes to get the tool to do what we want it to do for us.  We input into the computer exactly those commands we need for it to produce the output we want.  We don’t worry about whether the computer really wants to do it or not.  This is fine because the computer has mere price—it lacks dignity—and thus is very properly a mere means.
• When I make a false promise, I simply think to myself: How can I get her to do what I want?  Ah, if I say to her that I will pay back the money, she will give it to me.  So I say it, just as I push buttons on a computer to get what I want.  But that is just treating the other person as a mere computer.  This is wrong.
• The right thing to do would be to explain the circumstances to the other person and hope that the other person would choose to help.
• This is why Kant thinks lying is always wrong, even to a murderer at the door, as in the little article of his.  One is failing to treat the murderer as a person.  It’s true that the murderer is failing to treat his victim as a person, too.  But that is irrelevant for Kant.  You can’t exchange the dignity of the murderer for the dignity of the victim.  You must do your duty, Kant says, thereby treating the murderer’s humanity with respect.  For he still has some humanity.  [Note that because the murderer’s humanity is the same humanity as your humanity, this is not respect for the murderer himself but for that which he has in common with you.]
• Discussion.
• There are two ways of violating the second form of the CI.  The first is by treating humanity as a mere means.  This is the worse way of violating the CI.  Kant says that by violating it in this way, we violate a perfect duty.  (Recall the ideas from Mill and how Mill thought perfect duties are the non-violation of rights.)
• There is a less evil way of violating the second form of the CI.  This is not by treating humanity as a means, but simply by failing to treat it as an end, as something of ultimate value.  Our actions need to reflect the fact that rationality or humanity is the goal of everything in life.  Kant gives two examples.
• 3. Failure to develop your talents.  Since your talents are needed to fully develop your humanity, to fail to develop the talents is to fail to see that your humanity has the dignity or value it does.
• 4. Failure to help other people be happy.  It is other people’s goal in life to be happy.  I need to recognize this in my actions.  If I recognize other people as ends, namely as the things that define what is of value, and if they define their happiness as having value, then respect for the other persons’ dignity should lead me to take their goals as my own goals to some extent, to help them achieve the happiness they want.
• Violations of these duties are violations of an imperfect duty.  We’re not told how much to help other people or how much to develop our talents.  But we must do it to some extent according to the second form of the CI.
• Kant’s four examples aren’t supposed to be exhaustive of course!