Kant, Respect and Injustice (Routledge Revivals)

The Limits of Liberal Moral Theory

Victor Seidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415570930
• eBook ISBN: 9781135156077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In this work, originally published in 1986, Victor Seidler explores the different notions of respect, equality and dependency in Kant's moral writings. He illuminates central tensions and contradictions not only within Kant's moral philosophy, but within the thinking and feeling about human dignity and social inequality which we take very much for granted within a liberal moral culture.

In challenging our assumption of the autonomy of morality, Seidler also questions our understanding of what it means for someone to live as a person in his or her own right. The autonomy of individuals cannot be assumed but has to be reasserted against relationships of subordination. This involves a break with a rationalist morality, so that respect for others involves respect for emotions, feelings, desires and needs, and establishes a fuller autonomy as a basis for freedom and justice.

VIII
LIBERALISM AND THE AUTONOMY OF MORALITY

Liberal moral and political theory has turned towards Kant for philosophical foundations for a liberalism in which notions of justice, fairness and individual rights play a central role. This is part of a major change in moral, political and legal philosophy which H.L.A.Hart has described as a ‘transition from a once widely accepted old faith that some form of utilitarianism, if only we could discover the right form, must capture the essence of political morality’, to a ‘doctrine of basic human rights, protecting specific basic liberties and interests of individuals, if only we could find some sufficiently firm foundations for such rights’.¹ But this shift has assumed the very autonomy of morality and the fragmented conception of the person upon which Kant’s moral theory is built. It is a liberalism that has been built upon shaky foundations because it has ignored the tensions and contradictions in Kant’s less formalistic later writings.

Even though Kant’s moral theory seems to provide a firm basis for the integrity and separateness of individuals against a utilitarianism which seems to sacrifice the happiness or pleasure of individuals for its goal of maximising aggregate or average general welfare, we have to be careful in assessing this claim. Though the accusation of ignoring the separateness of persons is often seen as a version of Kant’s principle that human beings are ends in themselves, it is rarely connected to the difficulties Kant had in elucidating the moral significance of this principle. Liberal moral theory has inherited the weaknesses as well as the strengths of its Kantian inheritance.

While Bernard Williams’s article ‘Persons, Character and Morality’ opens with the recognition that ‘Much of the most interesting recent work in moral philosophy has been of a basically Kantian inspiration’ he also recognises its difficulty of relating a moral point of view ‘specially characterized by its impartiality and its indifference to any particular relations to particular persons’ (Moral Luck, p. 2) to other points of view. He recognises that though the motivation of a moral agent ‘involves a rational application of impartial principles’ this is not supposed to preclude more intimate and personal relations. But, as Williams shifts away from thinking of this in the liberal terms of ‘the relations between those points of view’ he focuses the issue in more illuminating terms, saying that

the deeply disparate character of the moral and non-moral motivation, together with the special dignity or supremacy attached to the moral, make it very difficult to assign to those other relations and motivations the significance or structural importance in life which some of them are capable of possessing. (Moral Luck p. 2)²

I do not think this can be done without challenging the fundamental assumptions upon which the autonomy of morals is built.

In this conclusion I argue that we need to find other ways of relating morality to other areas of our lives. Notions of respect, autonomy and independence can no longer be secured and guaranteed within a rationalistically conceived moral realm. Without succumbing to a moral relativism that Kant deplored, we need to grasp the moral significance of relations of power and subordination that can undermine our existence as independent human beings. If this can only be done through restoring dignity to our emotional lives, activities, needs and desires, it can help us establish a firmer grasp than Kant was able to do of why we should not treat others merely as means, but always as ends in themselves. But this is to bring issues of power, dependency and oppression into the heart of moral theory.

1 AUTONOMY AND DEPENDENCE

Kant was prepared to deny civic rights to those in relationships of subordination and dependency. He denies people active citizenship if they are dependent upon the will of others. So, as far as Kant is concerned, workers, servants, pupils, peasants and all women ‘must be given orders or protected by other people, and in consequence they possess no civil independence’. Few liberal theorists, however indebted to Kant, would want to admit this conclusion. Nor do they often explore the tensions in Kant’s discussion of the relations between rich and poor. Rather they draw strength from Kant’s general observation that these forms of independence and inequality ‘are not, however, at all contrary to the freedom and equality of these same individuals as men’. In this sense, Kant’s reassertion of the autonomy of morality has been crucially used to sustain, against Kant, the idea that people are equally entitled to full political and legal rights, or as Dworkin has it, to ‘equal concern and respect’.³ So we find the idea that individuals are equally capable of living moral lives serving as a justification for equal treatment within the legal and political realm.

But possibly Kant should not be surprised, since he seems to have prepared the ground for this in his separation of our individual relations to the moral law from our empirical social lives. We exist in different spheres. As I have shown, this has its basis in Kant’s conception of the person as fragmented between the sensible world and the intelligible world. It is our rationality which gives us access to the moral realm which is also the realm of freedom. It is here that our moral autonomy and independence is guaranteed. This is the way we are made invulnerable to relationships of power and subordination within the social world. Our individuality is given prior to our participation and involvement in social relations. This also reflects a hierarchy within ourselves in which we learn to identify the ‘self with our existence as free and equal moral agents. We are to identify with our intelligible, noumenal selves. Our autonomy and freedom have to do with our inner relationship to the moral law. This is at the core of a rationalist vision in which we are always struggling to make our experience conform to the ideals and images we have of ourselves. This has to do with the sovereignty of reason that gives us access to a moral law that exists independently, even if we have constantly to discover it anew for ourselves.

Kant wants to say that when we act morally out of a sense of duty we are expressing our humanity, our freedom and autonomy. We have to raise ourselves above the empirical world, the world of nature which is essentially a realm of unfreedom and determination. There is no way we can express our individualities in our activities and relationships, since these take place in a realm in which our behaviour is constantly being externally influenced. This is the world in which we naturally pursue our happiness, as we strive to pursue ends we set for ourselves. But this can hardly be an expression of our individuality, since Kant essentially sees this as a matter of pursuing our own self-interest. This gives our lives no dignity nor moral worth. There is little of value that can be learnt from our experience. It is not a source of knowledge or insight. Rather it is a realm we are constantly trying to escape as we draw ourselves up to identify with our noumenal aspects. This helps explain our ability to abstract ourselves from ongoing social relations of power and subordination. It also explains why the indignities and humiliations of social life should not really matter to us.

Our freedom and autonomy are guaranteed to us in the intelligible world. Here we can experience ourselves as equal with others and as equally deserving of respect. This is part of what draws us to accept both the autonomy and the priority of the moral since it seems to promise us our freedom and equality. But this is to deny moral significance to relationships of power and subordination and to the ways individuals can experience themselves as undermined and invalidated. If our autonomy and independence is to be guaranteed in our individual relationship to the moral law, what is it that is being undermined and invalidated? This can easily make people feel they have nothing legitimate to protest against and that it is only envy or personal gain that can be motivating them. If the social world is simply a space in which we can prove ourselves morally, through acting out of a sense of duty, then our inherited moral traditions threaten to become powerless in illuminating the moral significance of social relations of power and subordination. If we grow up within a Kantian moral tradition to accept the implicit identification of the moral with the rational and the universal, then we are bound to minimise the moral significance of the hurt and indignities of social life since they become powerless to affect our equality and freedom as moral agents. The split between autonomy and dependence reflects the division between the moral realm and the world of social relations. Since the social world is inevitably a world of determination and unfreedom our energies are being misplaced if we expect our individuality and freedom to find expression there.

This leaves us with a fundamentally fragmented conception of the person. This has been inherited into modern, liberal, moral and political theory as an ethic that asserts the priority of the right over the good. The independence of the moral law has been used to secure the primacy of justice among moral and political ideals and the sanctity of individual rights. As Sandel has pointed out ‘the right is prior to the good not only that its claims take precedence, but also in that its principles are independently derived’ (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 2). This means that ‘principles of justice are justified in a way that does not depend on any particular vision of the good’ (p. 2). Within this view justice is identified with the moral law so that it can be argued against utilitarianism that ‘the virtue of the moral law does not consist in the fact that it promotes some goal or end presumed to be good. It is instead an end in itself, given prior to all other ends, and regulative with respect to them’ (p. 2). Even though Sandel’s stimulating argument recognises that ‘the problem is not simply that justice remains always to be achieved, but that the vision is flawed, the aspiration incomplete’ (p. 1), he tends to accept the fundamental fragmentation of the person that is so much part of the rationalist vision.⁴

Kant’s moral theory rests upon the crucial distinction between duty and inclinations. This establishes a hierarchy within our inherited conception of the person which, as I have shown, leaves us fundamentally divided against ourselves. Our very humanity is to be identified with our reason and morality. Our moral theory has to go beyond finding space for acts of care, generosity and concern that Kant grants no moral worth, to a more basic challenge to this rationalist conception of ethics. This is not to argue against the place of reason in our moral lives, but against a particular form of rationality which conceives our self-control as a matter of the domination of our emotional lives and desires. Hopefully I have helped weaken the hold of this picture over our moral conceptions. It is also important to grasp how it is written into the distinction we draw between the concept of right as a moral category given prior and independent of the good.

Liberal theory has developed itself on the idea that individuals should be free to advance their own conceptions of happiness. We partly show our respect of others by recognising they have their own ends, interest and desires which they should be free to pursue. This means that any regulative principles of justice should not themselves presuppose any particular conception of the good but should guarantee an equal freedom to individuals. This is the only way we can supposedly make sure that we do not impose on some the values of others and so deny them the freedom to pursue their own conceptions. For Kant this meant that the moral law could not have its basis in happiness and could not be implicated in any contingent interests and ends. It is duty which gives the moral law a basis prior to all purposes and ends. So the basis of the moral law is to be found not in the object of practical reason, since people inevitably disagree, but in a subject capable of rationality and so to the independent demands of duty. This connects the priority of right to freedom, since as moral beings, we are equally subject to an autonomous will, But again this depends upon a fundamental split between the moral realm of freedom and the empirical world in which we pursue our individual conceptions of happiness.

Since the sensible world is conceived of as a world of determination our choices can never be free, but will always be conditioned by the desire for some object. ‘When we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves into the intelligible world as members and recognize the autonomy of the will’ (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 461). In this way the issue of autonomy is reserved for the intelligible world as an issue of moral autonomy. This makes it difficult even to raise issues about how individuals can be undermined and their existence as independent moral beings threatened because of the workings of social relations of power and subordination. The issues of autonomy and dependence have been divided into separate and distinct realms. In this way we are fundamentally detached as moral beings from everyday empirical relationships. This is because, in this vision, we only ever freely choose for ourselves when we are completely unconditioned by the contingencies of circumstances. It is this notion of freedom that has to be challenged along with the conception of the person upon which it depends.

Sandel helps clarify these issues when he says that ‘On the deontological view, what matters above all is not the ends we choose but our capacity to choose them. And this capacity, being prior to any particular end it may affirm, resides in the subject’ (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 6). It is this notion of ‘a subject prior to an independent of experience’ which Sandel sees as an inherited flaw in liberal theories of justice. It is an essential part of their claim for the primacy of justice:

It is grounded in the concept of a subject given prior to its ends, a concept held indispensable to our understanding of ourselves as freely choosing, autonomous beings. Society is best arranged when it is governed by principles that do not presuppose any particular conception of the good, for any other arrangement would fail to respect persons as beings capable of choice; it would treat them as object rather than subjects, as means rather than ends in themselves. (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 9).

This ties our understanding of ourselves as freely choosing and autonomous beings to our existence as rational moral agents. This can blind us to the difficulties we face in identifying our individual needs, wants and desires, let alone the connection this can have to defining our autonomy and independence. Fried puts this clearly when he says that by comparison with the good, the concepts of right and wrong ‘have an independent and overriding status because they establish our basic position as freely choosing entities’ (Right and Wrong, p. 8). This is what makes the idea of respect for persons central to liberal moral and political theory. But this is to focus our sense of respect on our capacity to make free choices within an independent moral realm. It also limits our notions of the good to the quest for individual conceptions of happiness. At some level, it seems to be the basic distinction, however useful in drawing a contrast with utilitarian consequentialism, that seems to disorganise our moral consciousness. Not only does it make our sense of respect more formal and abstract than it needs to be, but it hides the fragmented conception of the person upon which it is built.

The idea, as Sandel expresses it, that ‘As the right is prior to the good, so the subject is prior to its ends’ (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 7) shows how the terms of our moral discussion are formed in opposition to utilitarianism. When we talk about ‘the good’ we are already talking in utilitarian terms about the ends and goals individuals choose for themselves. This notion is essentially self-interested, though it accords well with the generally hedonistic assumption that Kant makes about individuals left to themselves without the guidance of the moral law. This is to deprive the notion of ‘the good’ of a broader meaning that could itself challenge utilitarian conceptions of morality.⁵ Liberal theory has tended to accept an essentially utilitarian conception of the good, even if its theory of right is set in fundamental opposition to utilitarianism. This shows itself in the distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘society’ that has provided a fundamental antinomy for liberal theory. Rawls, for instance, in his A Theory of Justice has no complaints with utilitarianism as an account of individual or private morality. Its mistake is to think we can conceive of society in similar terms and so adopt ‘for society as a whole the principle of rational choice for one man’ (p. 26).

As far as Rawls is concerned, utilitarianism does not go wrong in conceiving the good as the satisfaction of my immediate wants and desires. Rawls is quite clear that ‘A person quite properly acts, at least when others are not affected, to achieve his own greatest good, to advance his rational ends as far as possible.’ (A Theory of Justice, p. 23.) He is concerned that we do not fall into explaining the justice of society by imagining that we can conflate the desires of all individuals into one coherent system of desires which we seek to maximise. This is to reduce social choice to a question of efficient administration. The appeal of a contract theory of justice is that, in opposition to utilitarianism, it can take seriously the distinction between persons. But if justice as fairness seeks to restore the separateness of individuals in the way they enter into a theory of justice, it makes itself powerless to explain how individuals are vulnerable to social relations of power and subordination. It inherits the weaknesses, as well as the insights, of a contract theory. There is no way of situating individual moral experience within larger social and historical relationships of power and subordination.

Rawls does not worry about inheriting utilitarianism’s impoverished conception of the good since he tends to think that morality exists at a social level along with justice. Like Kant he thinks that no person’s values or conceptions of the good can escape the determination of our desires and feelings. Morality has to discover an independent source and inspiration. This reflects the basic duality between nature and reason. So we should not be surprised when Rawls says That we have one conception of the good rather than another is not relevant from a moral standpoint. In acquiring it we are influenced by the same sort of contingencies that lead us to rule out a knowledge of our sex and class.’ (Rawls, 1975: ‘Fairness to Goodness’ Philosophical Review, 84, p. 537.) Not only should this encourage us to rethink our inherited conceptions of morality, but, as I have tried to show, issues of sex and class could well become integral aspects of our sense of moral identity. We are not only challenging a rationalist conception of morality that defines itself in terms of impersonal and universal reasons, but the attenuated conception of the person upon which this relies.

Sandel is ready to challenge Rawls for his failure to realise that the fact the utilitarianism cannot take seriously the distinction between persons is ‘a mere symptom of its larger failure to take seriously the qualitative distinctions of worth between different orders of desires’ (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 167). Sandel wants us to conceive a ‘system of desires’ as order...

Table of contents

• International Library of Philosophy
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• I INTRODUCTION: RESPECT, EQUALITY AND THE AUTONOMY OF MORALITY
• II RESPECT AND HUMAN NATURE
• III RESPECT AND DIGNITY
• IV RESPECT, IMPARTIALITY AND THE MORAL LAW
• V RESPECT, INDEPENDENCE AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY
• VI OBLIGATION AND INEQUALITY
• VII LIBERALISM, INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL DEPENDENCE
• VIII LIBERALISM AND THE AUTONOMY OF MORALITY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• International Library of Philosophy