Abstract
According to official Kantian doctrine, genuine moral norms are “pure” or a priori—viz., nonempirical, and marked by “necessity and strict universality.” And Kant interprets “strict universality” to mean that such norms apply not merely to all human beings but to “all rational beings in general.” But Louden draws attention to a second kind of norm in Kant’s philosophy—“humans-only norms.” These norms are impure, a posteriori, and empirical. After giving several examples of humans-only norms found in Kant’s own writings, Louden attempt to show both that some of these norms are genuine moral norms (even though they are not pure), and that they play a necessary and important role in Kant’s ethical theory. Louden concludes with some (not-quite-strictly Kantian) arguments in favor of a humans-only morality.
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- 1.
Albeit not the kind of currently popular transhumanist ethics that declines to draw a clear, bright line between organic and inorganic human beings. Kant is not a fan of AI. In his view, all natural organisms possess a “formative power” that cannot be replicated in machines. As he remarks in the Critique of the Power of Judgment: “An organized being is … not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power, and indeed one that it communicates to the matter, which does not have it (it organizes the latter): thus it has a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is, mechanism)” (CPJ 5: 374). As a result, he believes that humans cannot be replicated (much less improved on) via inorganic means. As he declares at the conclusion of his essay, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?: “the human being … is … more than a machine” (Enl 8: 42). For discussion of non-Kantian transhumanism, see More and Vita-More (2013).
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At the same time, however, Kant also acknowledges that different species of rational beings will stand in different relationships to pure moral norms. For instance, humans, as terrestrial rational embodied beings that have irrational drives and inclinations, will stand in a different relationship to the moral law than will rational spiritual beings, such as angels. Because members of the latter group do not need to contend with recalcitrant desires and inclinations, “the ought is out of place here, because the volition is of itself already necessarily in harmony with the law” (GW 4: 414).
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By “official story” I mean, for the most part, Kant’s own position on the matter. But it should also be noted that many philosophers do not know the official story. For instance, Eva F. Kittay, in her Presidential Address delivered at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association on January 6, 2017, writes: “Kant maintains that only rational human [italics mine] nature supplies the ability to act benevolently on principle, and adds that nothing else in nature can supply this. This makes man alone in the natural world worthy of a special moral place and a special moral status” (Kittay 2017, 280). If the President of the Eastern Division of the APA harbors such a misguided view of Kant’s position on moral personhood, then how many other philosophers and philosophy students are likely to be in the same boat?
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He is more successful at doing so in his later works than in his earlier ones. For instance, in Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), he proclaims confidently that “most of the planets are certainly inhabited [gewiß gewohnt]” (UNH 1: 354); whereas in the Anthropology (1798), he admits that we have no knowledge of extraterrestrials (see Anth 7: 321). No knowledge—but faith of course extends further than knowledge (see CpR B xxx). Even the critical Kant is ready to bet everything he has on the contention … “that there are inhabitants of at least some of the planets that we see” (CpR A825/B 853). For related discussion, see Louden (2000, 188 n.30, 212 n. 89, 224, nn. 10, 13, 229 n. 9); and also Louden (2014).
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For a somewhat different (but, I think, ultimately complementary) account of how these two parts of ethics relate to one another, see Oliver Sensen’s contribution to this volume.
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For further discussion see Louden (Forthcoming-b); and also Frierson (2005).
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But does he mean “only terrestrial creature” here or “only creature in the universe”? I suspect the former, but for my present purposes the second reading is more interesting.
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For further discussion of Basedow, see Louden (2011), and Louden (Forthcoming-a).
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For related discussion, see my “Art as Preparation for Morality” and “Beauty as Symbol of Morality,” in Louden (2000, 109–118).
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It should be noted that there is also a less moralistic side to Kant’s aesthetic theory, viz., in his advocacy of formalism. If the aesthetic qualities of objects are exclusively concerned with inherent formal features such as structure, harmony, and proportion, then artworks should not be judged by any extraneous moral or political criteria—“art for art’s sake.” And this formalistic side of Kantian aesthetics does stand in tension with the moralistic side to which I have drawn attention in the present essay. However, I think Lucas Thorpe is correct when he remarks: “this [formalistic] aspect of his aesthetic theory, although perhaps the one that is most attributed to him by artists and art critics, is not central to his aesthetic theory” (“Art,” in Thorpe 2015, 31).
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However, these are empirical judgments, and Kant does not always get his facts straight. For instance, as regards politeness, there is no guarantee that a person who acts politely will become virtuous, and it is also possible that someone might become virtuous without first having acted politely. For further discussion, see my “‘An Illusion of Affability that Inspires Love’.” But the point I am making now does not hinge on the accuracy or inaccuracy of specific empirical judgments regarding means-ends relations.
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John Rawls, in his discussion of “Kantian Interpretation of Justice as Fairness,” argues that “the principles of justice are also categorical imperatives in Kant’s sense” (Rawls 1971, 253). But in his defense of this claim, he assumes a merely humans-only norm that is not strictly categorical in Kant’s sense. The validity of a hypothetical imperative presupposes that the agent has a specific desire that he wants to realize, whereas a categorical imperative does not rest on this assumption. And “the argument for the two principles of justice,” he states, “does not assume that the parties have particular ends, but only that they desire certain primary goods. … The preference for primary goods is derived, then, from only the most general assumptions about rationality and the conditions of human life” (Rawls 1971, 253). The veil of ignorance prevents people from knowing their particular ends when they are in the original position, whereas the desire for primary goods—“things that every rational man is presumed to want” (Rawls 1971, 62, cf. 92)—remains intact behind the veil. Primary goods “are things that it is rational to want whatever else one wants. Thus given human nature, wanting them is part of being rational” (253). “Given human nature,” yes. But as I demonstrated earlier, Kant does not believe that genuine moral norms should rest on human nature. Cf. n. 3, above.
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According to legend, when Washington was six years old he received a hatchet as a gift and damaged his father’s cherry tree. “George,” said his father, “do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden? … “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet” (Weems 1837, 14). See also www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth/
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In the second Critique he even raises the specter of nonmoral human beings—viz., creatures very similar to normal humans but to whom God has given “a capacity for that insight or that illumination [Erleuchtung] which we would like to possess or which some fancy that they actually do possess” (CPracR 5: 146). Such creatures would have a theoretical cognition of God and immortality, but, Kant argues, they would not be able to act “at all from duty [gar keine aus Pflicht]” (CPracR 5: 147). As Jens Timmermann notes, such illumination thus “would render virtue impossible” (Timmermann 2015, 232).
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Cobb (2016, 156). However, it is worth noting that Cobb is the only one of this anthology’s nineteen contributors to express skepticism about the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Kant, like many of today’s scientists, also believed in the infinity of possible worlds hypothesis, and he too thought that this alone makes it quite likely that nonhuman rational beings are out there somewhere. In his early work, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, he claims that humans inhabit a universe “in which worlds or systems are only specks of dust in the sunlight compared with the whole of creation” (UNH 1: 352; cf. CpR A668/B696).
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For related discussion, see Louden (Forthcoming-c, 2018a).
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- 20.
Many thanks to Chris Yeomans and Ansgar Lyssy for their invitation to present an earlier version of this essay at the conference on “Dimensions of Normativity: Kant on Morality, Legality, and Humanity,” held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in February 2018. My father (Robert K. Louden, 1930–2018) was a graduate student in Purdue’s School of Engineering, and I was born in West Lafayette in 1953. He died shortly after the conference took place; my mother (Anne Z. Louden, 1930–2017), shortly before. Although I only spent the first year of my life in West Lafayette and thus had no memories of the town, it was a thrill for me to visit my birthplace. A shorter version of the paper was also presented at the Boston Area Kant Colloquium, held at Brandeis University in December 2017. I would like to thank Jens Timmermann and Kate Moran for inviting me to the Colloquium, as well as audience members at both events, who raised a number of helpful points during the discussions following my presentations.
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Louden, R.B. (2021). Humans-Only Norms: An Unexpected Kantian Story. In: Lyssy, A., Yeomans, C. (eds) Kant on Morality, Humanity, and Legality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54050-0_7
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