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Kant and the Sincere Fanatic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
‘I see well enough what poor Kant would be at’ said James Mill on first looking into the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. No one would wish to say that the reception of Kant in England has remained at this level: abundance of sound scholarship, innumerable Kant seminars and the swell of interest in transcendental argument which has developed since the Second World War all exist to prove the contrary. But in spite of all that, Mill's response still touches a chord in English breasts. We are prone to think Kant a conjurer. If we are to accept, or even to work seriously with, any version of Kantianism it must be a demythologized, logically aseptic version. Strawson's Kant, for instance, is a Kant freed from the ‘strained analogy’ between the study of the conditions of sense, or intelligibility, and the study of the human cognitive system. And in moral philosophy too, the English Kantianism chiefly represented by the work of Professor R. M. Hare has scrupulously avoided those parts of Kant's ethics which have a suspiciously speculative flavour: the notion of an unqualified good, for example, or that of treating moral agents as Ends-in-Themselves; and more generally the whole notion, which permeates Kant's moral philosophy, that morality can only ultimately be understood in terms of a set of ideal relationships that entirely transcend all considerations of common-sense mutual accommodation or rational self-interest: transcend all such considerations so radically, in fact, as to point mutely towards the possibility of a life after death.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1978
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NOTES
1 During the academic year 1976–7, when this essay was written, I was a Leverhulme Research Fellow, and, for part of the time, a Visiting Fellow of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra. I wish to express my gratitude for the support of both institutes, and to the University of Sussex for granting me leave of absence during this period. In addition to forming part of the present Royal Institute lecture series, the paper was read to audiences at the universities of Bradford, Sheffield and Western Australia; the present version has, I hope, profited from the discussion at those meetings, and from detailed comments by Julius Kovesi, Benjamin Gibbs, David Angluin and Patrick Hutchings.
2 Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals (Oxford U.P., 1952)Google Scholar; Freedom and Reason (Oxford U.P., 1963)Google Scholar. All page references in what follows are to these editions. I am indebted to Julius Kovesi for pointing out certain inaccuracies and some clumsiness in this section in an earlier draft of this paper.
3 Hare, , Freedom and Reason, p. 31 Google Scholar - ‘The logical thesis (of universalizability) has, as we shall see, great potency in moral arguments; but for that very reason it is most important to make clear that it is no more than a logical thesis - for otherwise the objection will be made that a moral principle has been smuggled in disguised as a logical doctrine.…’
4 ‘Now it may be that there are people so fanatical as to be prepared for all these things in order to avoid miscegenation. But they are surely very few.’ ( FR, p. 220.)Google Scholar
5 Paton, H. J., The Moral Law, or Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Hutchinson (3rd edition, 1956), p. 89 f.Google Scholar All further references to Kant will be to this edition of the Groundwork (GMM).
6 Ibid. p. 89.
7 Ibid. p. 90.
8 Ibid. p. 91.
9 See, for example, Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, Everyman's Library edition, 1910, p. 49 Google Scholar: ‘To give any meaning to Kant's principle, the sense put upon it must be, that we ought to shape our conduct by a rule which all rational beings might adopt with benefit to their collective interest’ [Mill's italics].
10 GMM, p. 89 Google Scholar. The morality of suicide was a major crux of moral debate in the eighteenth century. Most of the philosophes denounced the laws on suicide, and defended suicide with, or without, reservation. Rousseau devoted two letters of the Nouvelle Heloise (part iii letters 21–2) to rehearsing the arguments for and against. A number of celebrated cases occurred of actual suicides who left reasoned defences of their actions, some along the lines of Kant's unfortunate's maxim. See, for example, Lecky, 's History of European Morals, ch. 4.Google Scholar
11 This is the intention ascribed to Kant by Paton, H. J. in his discussion of the example in The Categorical Imperative, Hutchinson, 1947, P. 154.Google Scholar
12 Kant, , Critique of Practical Reason, IV, tr. Beck, Lewis White, Library of Liberal Arts edition, 1958, pp. 27–8.Google Scholar
13 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, p. 113.Google Scholar
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid. p. 126.
16 Ibid. p. 127.
17 Ibid.
18 The only book on ethics written since the war which is wholly free from the influence of positivism is, so far as I am aware, Kovesi, Julius's Moral Notions, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967 Google Scholar. I have adapted some of Kovesi's ideas in Section V of the present paper, though I do not know whether he would agree with the use I have made of them.
19 Paton, H. J., The Categorical Imperative, Hutchinson, 1947, p. 139.Google Scholar