Immanuel Kant and Utilitarian Ethics

Samuel Hollander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032198156
• eBook ISBN: 9781000584424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Adopting a view of utilitarian ethics in which motivation in the public interest takes on greater weight than is generally appreciated, this book explores the extent to which the philosophy of Immanuel Kant is consistent with this nuanced version of utilitarianism.

Kant's requirement that full ethical merit needs an agent to act purely 'from duty' to forward 'the universal end of happiness' rather than from a personal inclination to achieve that end clearly distinguishes his position from the version of utilitarian ethics adopted here. But this book also demonstrates, by reference to his formal ethical works and his lectures on ethics and anthropology, Kant's approval of a secondary category of conduct – conduct 'in conformity with' duty – entailing other-regarding or 'sympathetic' motivation to advance general happiness, differing from the utilitarian position only in its meriting a qualified degree of ethical credit. After comparing Kant with eighteenth-century utilitarian writers from Locke to Smith, and also with Bentham and Malthus, the book evaluates reactions to Kant by J.S. Mill and Karl Marx and proposes Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) as a 'precursor' for maintaining a 'Kantian' doctrine of conduct 'from duty' and for other shared features. In terms of public policy, the work demonstrates Kant's justification of poor relief and reduced inequality, his proposal for a state education plan and his opposition to paternalism.

This book provides essential reading for academic specialists and students concerned with the interface of political economy and ethics, as well as the history of economic thought, history of political thought and intellectual history.

1 Kant on Virtue

DOI: 10.4324/9781003260981-2

Whereas Kant stipulated as a prime ethical duty the obligation ‘to produce and promote the highest good in the world’, his famous rule for full ethical credit required an agent to act strictly from ‘duty’ such that the happiness of others must be of no consequence to him. This rule clashes radically with utilitarian ethics which requires that actions be undertaken motivated by other-regarding concern. But Kant recognized that the conditions required of conduct ‘from duty’ set unreasonably high standards, and accordingly introduced a secondary category of conduct only ‘in conformity with’ duty, allowing for ‘sympathetic’ motivation concerned to advance general ‘happiness’, thus approaching the utilitarian position although less than whole-hearted ethical award was attainable in this manner wherein lies the difference with utilitarian doctrine.

This chapter elaborates the distinction between the two categories of duty as found in the formal analyses of ethics. It proceeds to Kant’s insistence on the practical relevance of the notion of ‘morality’, his estimate of prospects for moral progress, and the role accorded education in that regard. The matter of ‘prudence’ or action motivated by private advantage is briefly addressed.

A further issue considered is the contrast between ‘duties of virtue’, for which ‘external lawgiving is not possible’ because ‘an internal act of the mind’ is entailed, and ‘duties of right’ for which external lawgiving is possible raising the issue of appropriate political arrangement to assure the protection of rights. We then turn to the responsibilities ascribed to the state regarding social welfare or ‘public well-being’. The chapter closes by reviewing morality within the ‘cosmopolitan’ context as envisaged by Kant.

1.1 Principles of Ethical Conduct

As explained in the Preface, the concerns of this book do not require an intimate appreciation of Kant’s notoriously difficult Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Nevertheless, this work formulates conveniently for us the distinction between, on the one hand, the ‘rule of prudence’ relating to actions motivated by the quest for happiness, requiring pragmatic experience;¹ and, on the other, the ‘law of morality’ ‘which has no other motive but to deserve to be happy’, taking ‘no account of desires and the natural means of satisfying them’, based as it is ‘on mere ideas of pure reason, and known a priori’. I spell this out to convey the fact that the essential Kantian principles of ethical conduct are to be found clearly expressed in the earlier work although perhaps easily missed:

Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires, extensively, in regard to their manifoldness, intensively, in regard to their degree, and protensively, in regard to their duration. The practical law, derived from the motive of happiness, I call pragmatical (rule of prudence); but the law, if there is such a law, which has no other motive but to deserve to be happy, I call moral (law of morality). The former advises us what we have to do, if we wish to possess happiness; the latter dictates how we ought to conduct ourselves in order to deserve happiness. The former is founded on empirical principles, for I cannot know, except by experience, what desires there are which are to be satisfied, nor what are the natural means of satisfying them. The second takes no account of desires and the natural means of satisfying them, and regards only the freedom of any rational being and the necessary conditions under which alone it can harmonise with the distribution of happiness according to principles. It can therefore be based on mere ideas of pure reason, and known a priori.

(Kant 1966 [1781]: 516)

Although Kant distinguishes between conduct motivated by the prudential quest for happiness and the moral law entailing ‘no other motive but to deserve to be happy’ by acting in ethically appropriate fashion, he leaves an unsettling impression of a quest for happiness, albeit at one remove, by implying the accumulation of credit for repayment in the next world. Thus, elaborating ‘the moral world’, he writes that ‘as we are bound by reason to conceive ourselves as belonging necessarily to such a world, though the senses present us with nothing but a world of phenomena, we shall have to accept the other world as the result of our conduct in this world of sense (in which we see no such connection between goodness and happiness), and therefore as to us, a future world’ (518). It followed that ‘God and a future life are two suppositions which, according to the principles of pure reason, cannot be separated from the obligation which that very reason imposes on us’ (518–9).

The principle of acting ‘from duty’ – though lacking the terminology – is present in the Critique of Pure Reason in the elaboration of the assertion that the law of morality turns on ‘mere ideas of pure reason, and known a priori’: ‘I assume that there really exist pure moral laws which entirely a priori (without regard to empirical motives, that is, happiness) determine the use of the freedom of any rational human being, both with regard to what has to be done and what has not to be done, and that these laws are imperative absolutely (not hypothetically only on the supposition of other empirical ends), and therefore in every respect necessary’ (Kant 1966 [1781]: 516). Here, we have an early formal allusion to the notion of a Categorical Imperative governing conduct from duty.

Notice that the notion of pure a priori moral laws is adopted axiomatically partly on the basis of (unnamed) ‘enlightened’ authority – which is scarcely ‘Kantian’ procedure – but also on an assurance that any individual who thought through the matter conscientiously would inevitably arrive at the Kantian perspective: ‘I feel justified in assuming this, by appealing, not only to the arguments of the most enlightened moralists, but also to the moral judgment of every man, if he only tries to conceive such a law clearly’ (Kant 1966 [1781]: 516). This is no casual matter, but reflects the view, as we shall find elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason, that duty is revealed by reason which provides the means of purifying decision-making from sensuous interest while at the same time allowing man ‘to take into consideration at all times his well-being and woe’. A later statement in Metaphysics of Morals II: Tugendlehre affirms that a man ‘has a duty to raise himself from the crude state of his nature’, and that ‘[n]atural perfection is the cultivation of any capacities whatever for furthering ends set forth by reason’ (Kant 1996 [1797b]: 518, 522). ‘Reason’ itself, one is invited to conclude, can be depended upon to reveal what strict duties reflecting a priori moral laws are in practice, without Kant necessarily having to tell us, and to distinguish them from actions designed to enhance well-being.

Kant’s perspective on moral laws is best understood as an application of his position regarding knowledge in general which is summarised by Popper as opposed to ‘the theory of the empiricists down to and including Hume’, whereby ‘knowledge streams into us through our senses, and that error is due to our interference with the sense-given material’ (Popper 1983 [1945]: 368). Kant argued to the contrary ‘that knowledge is not a collection of gifts received by our senses … but that it is very largely the result of our own mental activity’, which to proceed required that we abandon‘the untenable ideal of a science which is free from any kind of presuppositions…. He made it quite clear that we cannot start from nothing, and that we have to approach our task equipped with a system of presuppositions which we hold without having tested them by the empirical methods of science; such a system may be called a “categorical apparatus”. Kant believed that it was possible to discover the one true and unchanging categorical apparatus, which represents as it were the necessarily unchanging framework of our intellectual outfit, i.e., human “reason”’.

I return to the notion in the early Critique that the moral law entails ‘no other motive but to deserve to be happy’ by acting in ethically appropriate fashion. It appears in the later Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals where, notwithstanding (as we shall see) that acting purely ‘from duty’ requires the elimination of all forms of motivation, both self- and other-regarding, it is yet remarked ‘that an impartial rational spectator can take no delight in seeing the uninterrupted prosperity of a being graced with no feature of a pure and good will, so that a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition even of worthiness to be happy’ (Kant 1996 [1785]: 49; emphasis added), implying motivation but of an exceptional order proving the general rule. Similarly, a ‘will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself … must … be the highest good and the condition of every other, even of all demands for happiness’ (52).² This orientation suggests a Rousseau- like emphasis on ‘le coeur sensible’ as precondition for morality, famously opposed, of course, by Edmond Burke. (See also note 19).

The notion of ‘good will’ is also found in the Critique of Practical Reason in the same contrast drawn with ‘well-being’:

Well-being or ill-being always signifies only a reference to our state of agreeableness or disagreeableness, of gratification or pain, and if we desire or avoid an object on this account we do so only insofar as it is referred to our sensibility and to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure it causes. But good or evil always signifies a reference to the will insofar as it is determined by the law of reason to make something its object; for, it is never determined directly by the object and the representation of it, but is instead a faculty of making a rule of reason the motive of an action (by which an object can become real).

(Kant 1996 [1788]: 188)

It is nonetheless allowed that ‘our well-being and woe count for a very great deal in the appraisal of our practical reason’ while cautioning that the individual

is nonetheless not so completely an animal as to be indifferent to all that reason says on its own and to use reason merely as a tool for the satisfaction of his needs as a sensible being…. No doubt … he needs reason in order to take into consideration at all times his well-being and woe; but besides this he has it for a higher purpose: namely, not only to reflect upon what is good or evil in itself as well – about which only pure reason, not sensibly interested at all, can judge – but also to distinguish the latter appraisal altogether from the former and to make it the supreme condition of the former.

(189–90)

‘Good will’, we have seen, is represented in the Groundwork as the only possible candidate for something ‘good in itself’. It is, Kant goes on to add, good ‘without limitation’ regardless of ‘what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition’, a feature which is ‘to be valued incomparably higher than all that could merely be brought about by it in favor of some inclination and indeed, if you will, of the sum of all inclinations’ (Kant 1996 [1785]: 50). By ‘inclination’, be it noted, Kant intends ‘the dependence of the faculty of desire upon feelings [which] always indicates a need’ – distinguishing here between ‘practical interest in [an] action’, or mere ‘tak[ing] an interest in something’, and ‘pathological interest in the object of the action’ involving actually ‘acting from interest’ with an eye to the proposed end (67n).³ It is the latter which is ruled out by ‘good will’. On this view, ‘usefulness or fruitfulness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it’. To act in a manner wholly consistent with the dictates of a good will is said to imply acting strictly ‘from duty’ – the concept of duty ‘contain[ing] that of a good will’ – for mere conformity with duty does not suffice (52–3). Duty is also represented as ‘a condition of a will good in itself’ (58).

Action ‘from duty’ implies in fact at one and the same time both the irrelevance of the actual outcome of an act – or ‘realization of the object of the action’ – meaning that a failure to achieve the intended outcome of a dutiful action does not detract from an agent’s ethical merit since it is his intention alone that counts – and of motivation deriving not from duty but from ‘faculty of desire’ and ‘incentives of the will’, to achieve that object:

[A]n action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action but merely upon the principle of volition in accordance with which the action is done without regard for any object of the faculty of desire…. [T]he purposes we may have for our actions, and their effects as ends and incentives of the will, can give actions no unconditional and moral worth.

(Kant 1996 [1785]: 55)

We must however be cautious and take note of two important qualifications. First, it is not only bad consequences that are not imputed to the dutiful agent but also good outcomes since he acts solely from duty so that actual results of his conduct become irrelevant for moral status. Second, bad consequences attributable to the agent’s neglect or carelessness or incompetence were regarded by Kant as reducing, or rather eradicating, the ethical merit earned by obedience to duty. Although (as far as I am aware) he does not explicitly spell this out in the formal texts devoted to ethics, it is implied by the very notion of dutiful obedience, an insight specified in the Vigilantius version of the lectures on ethics that action is required for the fulfilment of ethical duty provided such action is coupled with the end or maxim expressing the Categorical Imperative (see below 2.1). That action to realise duty is required implies that such action be undertaken responsibly by the ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction and Plan of Work
• 1 Kant on Virtue
• 2 Kant’s Königsberg Lectures on Ethics
• 3 Kant’s Königsberg Lectures on Anthropology
• 4 Kant in Eighteenth-Century (Utilitarian) Context
• 5 Kant and Some Later Intellectual Relations
• 6 Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592): An Early Precursor of Kant?
• 7 Kant and Utilitarian Ethics: A General Overview
• Index