Kant and Applied Ethics

The Uses and Limits of Kant's Practical Philosophy

Matthew C. Altman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118114131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

Kant and Applied Ethics makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates.

• Offers a critical analysis of Kant's ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses
• Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage
• Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant's philosophy in new and interesting directions
• Clarifies Kant's legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them

Part I: Applying Kant’s Ethics

Kant’s practical philosophy continues to speak to us for a number of reasons. His emphasis on autonomy in ethics and personal freedom under the law resonates with modern liberalism. The absolute worth of humanity restricts how we can be treated by others and how we can treat ourselves, and employing this idea avoids some of the pitfalls of rival ethical theories such as utilitarianism. Kant also gives a compelling argument for why moral constraints must apply to everyone equally in similar circumstances.

One of the purposes of this book is to demonstrate the usefulness of Kant’s moral and political theories, and to show that they do not yield only empty tautologies. A moral concern for autonomy and the value of persons has important implications for environmental ethics and medical ethics. As we will see in chapters 1 and 2, Kant does not believe that animals and the environment are morally considerable in their own right, but he does justify their protection by appealing to the value of humanity. Despite his anthropocentrism, or even because of it, Kant is an ally in the defense of animal welfare and environmental conservation.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus specifically on personal autonomy in an effort to address some issues in bioethics from a Kantian perspective. First, I claim that Kant’s practical philosophy warrants our commitment to universal health care. We must support others’ existence as rational beings and preserve civil society, so we are obligated, morally and legally, to support their health by providing a basic level of care. Then, in chapter 4, I apply Kant’s theory to physician-assisted suicide, the refusal of life-saving medical treatment, and the procedures for consenting to donate organs. Valuing patient autonomy does not mean that patients can do whatever they want as long as it only affects them. For Kant, there are constraints on the actions we take as rational beings. By addressing these three issues in medical ethics, chapter 4 illuminates what we are ethically required to do and what we ought to be allowed to do under the law. Kant’s conception of rational autonomy becomes clearer, and we begin to see what is implied by our own commitment to patient self-determination.

1

Animal Suffering and Moral Character

Kant has had little impact on the field of environmental ethics. When his work is not simply ignored, it is often dismissed as a paradigm of morally corrupt anthropocentrism. Like many other Western philosophical and religious traditions, Kant places human beings at the center of the moral universe and does not directly consider the well-being of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Instead, they are only indirectly morally relevant, to the extent that they advance rational beings’ capacity to set and pursue ends; nonrational things can be used merely as means for the satisfaction of human needs. Because of this, many philosophers – Holmes Rolston III, J. Baird Callicott, Peter Singer, and others – conclude that Kant’s intellectual legacy is partly responsible for the environmental crises that we now face.

Kant’s theory has often been misconstrued as implying that animals and nature are valuable only as resources to satisfy unreflective human wants. For Kant, however, properly relating to the environment is an important part of a fully moral life. Our treatment of animals affects who we are, so we are obligated to treat them well even when we use them to accomplish our ends; and, as we will see in chapter 2, the appreciation of natural beauty prepares us to act rightly, without a concern for our personal interests. Although we are distinguished from animals and plants by our rationality, we must understand ourselves to be the products of nature’s teleological development, and so we should not view nature merely as a thing to be used and discarded. This change in our intellectual orientation, as well as the recognition that our treatment of the environment and nonhuman animals affects our moral character, have the combined effect of justifying a number of animal and environmental protections. Thus the conclusions of Kant’s moral philosophy converge in many ways with those who believe in advancing animal welfare or preserving the environment due to their intrinsic worth.

Because of this convergence, environmental ethicists have been wrong to exclude Kantian anthropocentrism from the debate over how and why we ought to protect animals and the environment. Our legal and moral traditions are steeped in anthropocentrism, and typically restrictions on our behavior are justified by noting the effect that animal cruelty and environmental degradation have on human flourishing. Given our intellectual heritage – the fact that in general people are anthropocentric – and in the absence of convincing evidence for the intrinsic worth of animals and nature, we should accept Kant’s moral philosophy not as the correct environmental ethic (although it may be), but strategically, as a discursive resource to achieve the practical aims of environmentalism.

Kant’s Logocentrism

Kant claims that human beings, by virtue of their capacity to reason about and decide what to do, have an incomparable worth and dignity. They choose the subjective principles upon which they act, and because of this, they are distinguished from nonrational things that are moved to act by gravity or by their own instincts: “Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws, that is, in accordance with principles, or has a will” (G 412; see also MM 392). Christine Korsgaard describes this as a kind of “reflective distance” between what one is naturally inclined to and what one decides to do.¹ Animals follow their strongest desire – to eat, to avoid harm, to reproduce, etc. – and heliotropic plants respond to the position of the sun, but neither animals nor plants are capable of acting on the basis of reasons.

What Kant means by humanity – what gives us dignity and makes us worthy of respect – is the capacity to act autonomously, the ability to do what is right simply because it is right. Because of this, we sometimes hold people morally and legally responsible for their actions. Although animals’ actions are attributable to them – dogs and horses do things, after all – animals are not held accountable for what they do. To be sure, some animals act in ways that may initially look like they are motivated by an ethical concern for their fellow animals. For example, chimpanzees help one another, have complex social structures, and ostracize members of the group that engage in antisocial behavior. However, reactive social formations do not indicate moral deliberation and judgment about the wrongness of an action. The needs of the group members are valued (in some broad sense of valuing), but they are at best evolutionary precursors of what becomes in human beings a thoughtful concern for other people’s rights and dignity. Even Frans de Waal, who has spent his career showing how closely humans and primates are related, stops short of attributing moral agency to them. He claims that, although some animals (such as chimpanzees) have the building blocks of a moral life – sympathy, cooperation, the ability to follow social rules – they do not engage in what could properly be described as autonomous moral reasoning:

Even if animals other than ourselves act in ways tantamount to moral behavior, their behavior does not necessarily rest on deliberations of the kind we engage in. It is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a vision of the greater good of society, or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done.²

For Kant, following or not following social norms is not “tantamount to moral behavior.” Only rational beings are capable of the reflective deliberation that is necessary for moral agency, and because of this only human beings are directly morally considerable. Kant equates the class of moral patients, those to whom we have direct obligations, with the class of moral agents, and he limits moral agency to human beings.³ Nonrational animals are not persons in the morally relevant sense of the term.

Moral agency is also different from a being’s capacity merely to think or to reason more generally. Although some animals have more intellectual capabilities than human infants – for example, chimpanzees form mental representations of themselves, have rudimentary languages, can empathize with others, and can discern cause-and-effect relationships⁴ – Kant does not claim that intelligence makes someone worthy of moral consideration. Being able to think in this sense is not the same thing as the reflective distance by which one is capable of acting for the sake of duty.⁵ For Kant, it is the latter capacity that makes someone worthy of respect.

When rational beings are responsible for what they do, they decide which ends to pursue. For something to be good for me, it is not enough that I want it. I have to decide that it is something that I ought to try to get. As Kant puts it, I am the sort of being who sets my ends. Because I must decide that I ought to pursue something in order for it to be good for me, the capacity to decide things and determine what is good is a condition of all other goods, and therefore has absolute value. This leads to the version of the categorical imperative known as the formula of humanity: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (G 429).⁶ Persons have intrinsic worth because they are rational, whereas the worth of nonrational things is relative to human needs and tastes, insofar as they can be used to advance human purposes (G 434–6, 427–8). Apart from humanity, nothing in nature is good in itself; all nonrational beings are (or may be) only instrumentally good.

By claiming that only humanity has intrinsic worth, Kant seems to be advancing a form of anthropocentrism, which values human beings over all other species. However, Kant is not privileging human beings per se, but the capacity to reason that many human beings have. Therefore, Kant’s view is better characterized as what Allen Wood calls “logocentrism,” a position “based on the idea that rational nature, and it alone, has absolute and unconditional value.”⁷ Of course, the implications of logocentrism are (for the most part) the same as those of anthropocentrism: human beings are included but plants, animals, and ecosystems are excluded from direct moral considerability. For Kant, rainforests and chimpanzees are morally equivalent to bricks and chairs, in the sense that all of them are in the same class, nonrational things, “with which one can do as one likes” (A 127). Kant echoes the biblical idea that animals are “gifts of nature” given to human beings by God:

The first time [the human being] said to the sheep: Nature has given you the skin you wear not for you but for me, then took it off the sheep and put it on himself (Genesis 3:21), he became aware of a prerogative that he had by his nature over all animals, which he now no longer regarded as his fellow creatures, but rather as means and instruments given over to his will for the attainment of his discretionary aims [beliebigen Absichten]. (CB 114)

According to Kant, we have obligations only to ourselves and other rational agents, so we can use plants, animals, and whole ecosystems as resources to accomplish any human purposes and satisfy any human desires – our “beliebigen Absichten” – without restriction. Environmental ethics is an oxymoron.

Kant’s Justification for Our Duties (with Regard) to Nonrational Animals

Because of the absolute value of humanity, a rational being has moral duties toward himself, such as developing his talents and not committing suicide, and toward others, such as acting beneficently and not lying (G 421–3, 429–30). Although we have direct duties only to rational beings, Kant also claims that we have a number of indirect duties, and it is here where we see how Kant restricts our behavior in ways that are consistent with nonanthropocentric positions in environmental ethics.

With regard to animals in particular, Kant begins by noting that our treatment of them has an impact on our character. To use Kant’s more technical terminology, how a person behaves toward animals affects his disposition (Gesinnung), “the first subjective ground of the adoption of the maxims,” which orders his given incentives according to adopted standards of practical self-determination (Rel 25). Because our moral choices are the result of our character, and because our character is shaped (among other things) by how we treat nonrational animals, behaving cruelly toward animals would ultimately affect the kind of people we are and the principles upon which we choose to act. Hence, we have duties to animals, but only indirectly – that is, because of how our behavior toward animals impacts us:

Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves. It is inhuman, and contains an analogy of violation of the duty to ourselves, since we would not, after all, treat ourselves with cruelty; we stifle the instinct of humaneness within us and make ourselves devoid of feeling; it is thus an indirect violation of humanity in our own person. (LE 710; see also MM 443; LE 459)

To say that we have indirect duties to animals is a bit misleading. Properly speaking, we have indirect duties to persons through our treatment of animals. We should not treat animals cruelly because doing so coarsens our sensitivity to others’ suffering, a view that psychologists now call the “violence graduation hypothesis.”⁸ If the pain we cause sentient beings (including some animals) does not arouse our sympathy, if we become more desensitized to it the more we inflict it, then it becomes less likely that causing a person pain will concern us. Parallel cases include shooting a dog or allowing a horse to starve when they have served us well over the course of their lives (LE 459, 710). A lack of gratitude toward such animals reflects and reinforces a similar feeling toward people to whom we are indebted. Despite many differences, animals are similar enough to human beings that treating animals badly progressively undermines our consideration for human animals. Animal cruelty ultimately erodes our moral virtue.⁹

Our obligations regarding the treatment of animals are often similar to our obligations to rational beings – refraining from gratuitous cruelty, for example – but the fundamental difference is that we can only have direct duties to rational beings, and to animals indirectly because of our duty to ourselves. I should not unnecessarily harm other people because I ought to respect them. I should treat animals well because if I do not, I will become callous to suffering, which undermines my attempt to develop a virtuous character. This is a crucial premise in Kant’s argument for indirect duties to animals, and there is evidence to support it.¹⁰

I will be more likely to harm other people if I enjoy making animals suffer, and this is morally ...