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Copyright ©2021 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77170-151-8
Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.
All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.
Contents
I. A Circuitous Route
II. Becoming Philosophical
III. The Categorical Imperative
IV. Human Rights
V. Implementation
The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Onora OâNeill in London, England, on October 3, 2016.
Onora OâNeill is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Introduction
The Benefits of Struggling
Immanuel Kant is not the easiest philosopher to read.
To start with, he is German, which not only makes him notoriously hard to grapple with for many of those who donât speak German as a native language, but is surprisingly troublesome even for those who do, with many German scholars rather bizarrely opting to ponder his ideas in English.
Then there is the fact that Kant was known to be a particularly formal and scrupulous thinker even by 18th-century Prussian standardsâwhich is indeed saying somethingâa philosopher who prized our capacity for reason above all else, developing a highly systematic and abstract interpretation of how we come to know and have confidence in the world around us through the medium of our human minds and associated categories of understanding.
But Kantârigorous, all-encompassing sort that he wasâdidnât limit himself to matters of metaphysics and epistemology. He also had a great deal to say about ethics and morality in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which has the dubious reputation of being particularly challenging to penetrate even by Kantian standardsâwhich, as youâve doubtless recognized by now, is truly saying something.
The celebrated moral philosopher and Kantian scholar Onora OâNeill remembers that her own path to Kant was hardly straightforward. As a young graduate student she was initially intrigued by the âextremely fashionable rational choice modelsâ that surrounded her before eventually becoming convinced of its fundamental implausibility.
âI didnât feel that it gave one any insight into good reasons for doing anything. To say, âI prefer X,â or âI like Xâ is not a very good reason for doing X. It might be a good reason in certain circumstances with lots of other stuff put in there.
âSo the idea that preferences and desires have either normative or explanatory force seems to me a bit over the top, although theyâre widely taken to have that sort of force of weight.â
What she was looking for, was some clear structureâsome straightforward, objective, defensive way of being able to determine what should be done in a given situation. That brought her, naturally enough, to Kantâbut not straight away.
âThe detour I took before I started reading Kant seriously during my second or third year as a graduate student, was a detour to look at people who were trying to use certain formal constraints on top of utilitarianism, although their utilitarianism was muted and masked.
âIt was the formalism that attracted me. I suppose the fundamental intuition is: If you can get places with minimal assumptions, thatâs much more valuable than getting places on the back of extravagant assumptions. And that parsimony in premises is what I thought I was going to find in looking at some of these 20th-century writersâpeople like Marcus Singer and Kurt Baier.â
Eventually, appropriately enough, she discarded the vestiges of utilitarianism injected by later thinkers and recognized that what she was looking for was clearly delineated by Kant himself.
âKant is different. The categorical imperative combines two aspects of what is loosely called universalism.
âOne is the idea that principles have the form of law: they cover all cases in a certain domain. So whether it is âThou shalt not bear false witnessâ or âRemember to renew your subscription at the end of the monthâ, it is universal in formâitâs addressed to anybody.
âBut what is interesting about the categorical imperative is that Kant is also asking whether it is universal in scope. And thatâs a different matter, because universal in scope means that it is a principle for anybody and everybody. So, âRenew your subscription at the beginning of the monthâ does not have universal scopeâit will only apply to people whose subscription falls due this month, et cetera.
âKant is putting forward both a formal criterion and a scope criterion. Heâs saying, âPrinciples that do not meet both are not fit to be universal laws and should be rejected.ââ
Well, you might think, I can see how using such a decision procedure can be profitably used to guide my individual moral behaviour, but surely it doesnât have many implications in terms of my relationships with others throughout society.
But youâd be wrong. Because the universality that Kant places so much stress on, naturally implies a high level of direct interaction, potential or actual, with our fellow human beings.
âKant thinks that the key is to realize that thereâs a plurality of agents. Otherwise, what would this universality be for? Itâs got to be able to reach, not just those of a particular sentiment or particular outlook, but just anybody.
âKant thinks of reason, or reasoning, in a transactional way: I give someone a reason; he accepts or rejects the reason and gives me a reason in return.
âFrom there you can get to the thought, âWell, whate...