Jesus was the perfect exemplar of the morally good life. As we have seen, Kant considered human beings and human reason to be autonomous and he thus rejected heteronomy (for instance using God’s will as a guide to what is morally right or wrong).
Kant has a problem at the heart of his whole enterprise which is often not recognised and which he did not fully resolve. Kant considered that human beings should aim to act wholly in accordance with the Categorical Imperative – the maxim of their action would then be good. However, he recognised that many people would fail to do this and they would become corrupt as they acted from an evil, false or irrational maxim. Once a person’s life had become dominated by such general principles, they would then be in bondage. The difficulty Kant had was how to explain moral regeneration or a turn around from the evil to the good when he also considered that human beings could bind themselves by their corrupt maxims. The alternatives were to either:
1 say that human beings were not bound by their corrupt maxims and Kant was quite clear that they were, or
2 to say that human beings, once bound, could not turn round from the corrupt to the good and this would have meant that the position of corrupt human beings was hopeless.
As Michalson points out (Fallen Freedom, pp. 125ff.), Kant’s response to this was a most surprising one given the peripheral place allotted to God in most of Kant’s philosophy. He maintained that it was only through the incarnation in which God became man in Jesus Christ that human moral regeneration can take place. In this one area, at this particular point (but not elsewhere) God was central for Kant, yet he did not face up to the consequences of this. It was Kant’s successors, Kierkegaard and Hegel (and, following Hegel, Marx) who were to take seriously the alternatives that Kant failed to grapple with. As Michalson says:
Kierkegaard and Marx represent what happens when just one of the two aspects of Kant’s account of moral regeneration is taken up and emphasised in isolation from the other aspect. As such, their positions shed light on Kant’s own effort to have it both ways.
In Kierkegaard’s hands, the muted Kantian appeal to grace is transformed into a full-blown ‘project of thought’ in which a transcendent act alone is the only antidote to our willed ‘error’, or sin. Contrary to our usual view of these matters, it is in fact Kierkegaard and not Kant who has the more ‘rational’ position here … Kierkegaard shows the only way to offset a willed error is through a reconciling act coming from the ‘outside’, producing the ‘new creature’ … Alternatively, Kant’s more characteristic tendency to locate our moral recovery in our own efforts – however impossible he has made it for himself fully to do this – leads in some sense to Marxism (which) … expels the last remnants of otherworldliness remaining in the position of the philosopher … (Fallen Freedom, pp. 129–30).
Kant represents a divide in the road in the history of moral and philosophic thought. The road that Kierkegaard takes firmly embraces the central importance of a personal God and the action of this God both in history and in the lives of individual human beings. Hegel takes the opposing path and rejects such a view of transcendence – Marx then takes Hegel’s view further and morality becomes entirely a social construct. These issues are still very much alive and the divide is still present today.
Questions for discussion
1 Suggest two moral maxims which would give rise to contradictory actions. How might the differences between these be resolved?
2 Could it ever be morally right, according to Kant, to torture one person in order to get information which would save the lives of a large group?
3 Describe the difference between a hypothetical and a categorical imperative. On what grounds might someone reject an imperative that was claimed to be categorical?
4 On Kant’s view, should the moral principles of intelligent green spiders differ from the moral principles of human beings?
5 What place does God have in Kant’s moral philosophy?
6 In Kant’s view, is saving the life of a child a morally good action? What are the difficulties from his viewpoint in answering this question in the affirmative?
Bentham and Mill – Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is generally thought of as a moral theory which can best be summed up by the phrase: ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. However, in terms of its linguistic origins it may be more aptly described as a ‘theory of usefulness’, after the Latin root word utilis meaning useful. This, then, seems to imply that whatever is useful is moral. On a literal interpretation, therefore, my garden spade and fork are moral implements because they are useful. But clearly this is absurd. However, decisions and actions may be characterised as morally useful. Immoral decisions lead to useless or bad actions and amoral decisions are those which lead to no actions at all.
So, for example, the act of abortion is, in itself, neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. However, it becomes so when we consider to what end the procedure of abortion is being used. If abortion is being used to save the mother’s life and restrict an already large family in a household where the husband is unemployed, and if the abortion is conducted in a humane fashion, then its use may, on utilitarian grounds, be justified, and the act itself becomes a moral one. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, that is, of the family unit, counts over and above the future possible happiness of the single unborn child. If, however, abortion is being used by a young married woman because the pregnancy may interfere with a planned skiing trip, then clearly it is difficult to see how it could be justified, unless a cynical vision of utilitarianism were to be employed in which the maximisation of immediate happiness for the young woman and her skiing party were to count for more than the future possible happiness of the unborn child and the future long-term happiness of the prospective family. To use Singer’s Practical Ethics (1993) argument a minor interest (the pleasure derived from the skiing trip) is placed above a major interest (the life of the child and the future possibilities of family life). Hence, we may justifiably conclude that, in this instance, abortion becomes ‘immoral’.
As we have already maintained, utilitarianism has come to be largely associated with the ‘greatest good or the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Its links with majority rule in democratic politics is obvious. Here, it is assumed to be morally acceptable for there to be government by the majority without the consent of the minority. Unfortunately, all too often, particularly given the voting procedures in the democratic nations of the world, there is government by the minority without the consent of the majority!
It was David Hume (1711–76) the Scottish philosopher who first introduced the concept of utility into ethics but he is not regarded as a utilitarian. Similarly, the phrase ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ was first coined by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) in a work entitled An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, although again Hutcheson is not considered to be a utilitarian in the strict sense.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
The theory of utilitarianism was first fully articulated by Jeremy Bentham who not only wrote about ethics but about politics as well, his most famous work being A Fragment on Government. Because of his interests in both ethics and politics coupled with his desire to improve the social conditions of the masses he founded a movement known as The Philosophical Radicals. Arguably many of the reforms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly those to do with the treatment of criminals, were the result of Bentham’s efforts. Shy but extremely able, Bentham apparently
