A. PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist. He makes trenchantly clear in the lectures on ethics, given just before publication of the First Critique. For Kant, the human will could never be so determined, but only influenced.
A. PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist. He makes trenchantly clear in the lectures on ethics, given just before publication of the First Critique. For Kant, the human will could never be so determined, but only influenced.
A. PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist. He makes trenchantly clear in the lectures on ethics, given just before publication of the First Critique. For Kant, the human will could never be so determined, but only influenced.
Author(s): A. Phillips Griffiths Source: Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 256 (Apr., 1991), pp. 207-216 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3751626 . Accessed: 04/05/2011 17:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Cambridge University Press and Royal Institute of Philosophy are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org Kant's Psychological Hedonism A. PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS As far as consideration of man as phenomenon, as appearance, as an empirical self, is concerned, Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist.1 It is necessary immediately to qualify this in one, though only one, respect. For Locke, for example, the will (willkiir)-what Hobbes called endeavour-towards or endeavour-fromwards-could be deter- mined only by pleasure or pain, a mechanical relation of cause and effect. For Kant, the human will could never be so determined, but only influenced. This he makes trenchantly clear in the lectures on ethics, given just before publication of the First Critique, and its possibility and necessity argued in the resolution of the third Antinomy of the First Critique, in the Second Critique, in the Groundwork, and elsewhere. It requires conceiving a person as having a noumenal as well as phenomenal aspect. This is something a man cannot lose. Hence, if someone allows himself to be wholly influenced by what is pleasant or painful, he becomes more like a beast, but nevertheless radically unlike a beast, since a beast's actions are pathologically compelled, as a will arbitnrum brutum, whereas a man's actions are only pathologically influenced, even if wholly so, as a will arbitrium liberum. For the beast, the relation between stimulus and action is mechanical, as cause and effect. Kant says when a dog is hungry and sees food, he must eat whereas a man can restrain himself. But this need not be so; a dog can be trained not to eat until given the command, even when he is hungry and in the presence of food. Now how is this different from another example Kant gives, of a man who claims that, when moved by lust, he must enter a brothel; of whom Kant points out that he would not, if there were a gallows outside on which he knew he would be hanged on coming out? We can say that the dog does not restrain himself, but is restrained by fear of his master; equally, the man does not restrain himself, but is restrained by his fear of the gallows. The man might also I do not know what were the important antecedents of this view for Kant, whether Hobbes, Locke, Hume or Helvetius; in my view Hobbes is quite mistakenly regarded as a psychological hedonist, and Hume is hardly straightforwardly one; the more plausible antecedents would be Locke, and, perhaps even more so, Helvetius (L'Esp'rt was published in 1758 and was of course well known in Germany, which Helvetius visited in 1765). Philosophy 66 1991 207 A. Phillips Griffiths be restrained by his consciousness that going into the brothel would be contrary to the moral law; but it is clearly Kant's view that in both cases the man would be actively restraining himself, and not merely being passively restrained. The difference for Kant is that the man deterred by the gallows is not, like the dog, wholly compelled by a conjunction of hunger and fear, but that he allows himself to be wholly influenced by the conjunction of hunger and fear. But that is to assert of the man only a negative freedom. There is so far no ground for attributing it to the man, no more than there would be for saying that dogs could restrain all their sensuous inclinations, but as a matter of fact on every occasion decide not to do so. Equally, for Kant, it is no good saying that we observe that men act against all their sensuous inclinations, because, he points out, we can never know that there is not some hidden inclination not taken account of. To make this distinction between the man and the dog (or the wholly mythical dog-we are not here concerned with animal psychology) we must point to some positive ground for it. It is that the man, unlike the dog, can be moved by reason. Without this capacity to be moved by reason, there would be no possible ground for making this distinction. The man outside the brothel has the capacity to be moved by reason, whether he is or not. Indeed, we may even say that even if it is only the thought of the gallows which deters him, he is moved by reason, though only in part; for he sees that going into the brothel is, because of the gallows, incompatible with his enjoying life, and hence that not going into the brothel is a necessary and indispensable means to that end; hence he accepts the rational imperative, 'I ought not to enter the brothel'. But while this is a rational principle, dependent on the analytic principle that he who wills the end must will the means, it is only partly rational, because it depends in part on something not given by reason, the end, which is given by his sensuous inclination towards enjoyment.2 2 Kant obscures this somewhat by saying that such a man, being only partly determined by reason, is only partly free; but his main doctrine is that such a man, since he is capable of acting wholly in accordance with rational principle, is wholly free; not so much half a dog as no dog at all. It is the former way of talking into which Kant frequently slips which leads to the misinterpretation that a man is only free when acting from duty, and hence wholly determined, and hence wholly unfree, and hence not subject to moral blame, when he acts wrongly. Kant's remark (in the Lectures on Ethics) that the freer a man is from stimuli, the more he can be compelled morally, and the degree of his freedom grows with the degree of his morality, similarly leads to the misunderstanding that a man is wholly free and wholly moral only when he is totally indifferent to everything except the moral law; if, indeed, it is entirely a misunderstanding rather than a 208 Kant's Psychological Hedonism Another way of representing this difference between a man and a dog is to say that the man as a rational being acts from maxims, which are rules having a certain generality, which a dog presumably cannot. That is, in acting a man conceives his action as falling under a certain rule. An action in the full sense must be one in which he conceives himself (though not necessarily bringing this to full explicit consciousness) as doing something as following from a rule for the will, rather than just finding himself doing something, like sneezing. Kant's references to and examples of maxims and of their formulation are sometimes perplexing, and have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. I can only cut into such discussion here, by asserting that Kant's position is that a maxim must be a rule for the will from which the action follows; otherwise it is no more than a specification of the action itself. This does not mean it is a rule which commits the agent to any future action, still less a statement of how he consistently behaves; an agent can change his ends. But it must be something which, if fully expressed, would have to be vastly more complex than the examples Kant gives. Take his example: I make it my maxim 'to increase my property by every safe means', which I take to be 'whenever it is safe to do so, I shall do whatever increases my property'. This formulation is good enough to submit it to the test of the categorical imperative, but it is clear no sane man could adopt it tout court, since it would mean he could never buy food or go to sleep, unless it was unsafe not to do so. This is not an unserious point; Kant must think a maxim implies the agent's willing- ness to adopt all the actions following from it, because of the use he wishes to make of maxims in applying the test of universal law. In this case, particularly, it implies the action of denying a loan has been made to him when the contrary cannot be proved. He thinks, quite extraor- dinarily, that if this were universally done, there would never be any loans; but that this is quite silly does not affect my point; that in adopting a maxim one is thereby willing to act on everything which follows from it; otherwise, Kant's test could not be applied. So, in so far as a maxim can seriously be adopted, it must envisage all that it might commit one to. This throws doubt on my ever having maxims of the required kind. This point must not be confused with the difficulty that it is impossi- ble to give the full, conscious formulation of a maxim; that would not be disputed by Kant. Elsewhere, he is willing to allow cognitions which cannot be consciously exhausted-for example, the definition of given caricature of himself that Kant was prone to fall into; or, indeed, it now occurs to me with regard to this particular remark, the inattention of Frederico Brauer, who took down notes of Kant's lectures which include references to a painter called Argasti instead of Hogarth. 209 A. Phillips Griffiths concepts, or the concept of 'right' in jurisprudence. That alone would not vitiate the possibility of using Kant's test of universal law, any more than one's inability to set out all the implications of a geometrical proposition would make any reductio proof impossible to give, though it might make it impossible to give every reductio proof. The difficulty is that any maxim I might sanely adopt would surely have to have an ineradicable ceteris paribus clause, orprimafacie character. It is not just that, given certain difficult circumstances, I do not know what I could now steel myself to do, though that is pertinent; it is that I do not know what, in all sorts of possible circumstances, I would want to do, still less approve of the whole world doing. This is because I have all sorts of different complexly related or independent interests and concerns, any or many of which might be brought to bear in a particular situation, but which I cannot possibly arrange in some order of priorities or any simple or even complicated system. I know roughly what sort of fellow I am but not fully what I am, if indeed I am exactly anything rather than a centre of all sorts of disjunctive possibilities. Perhaps, sometimes, when I choose, I become something there never was before. I do not know of any schematic general principle which I could accept as being the Kantian maxim of any action, still less of all my actions, (cf. Kant's remarks on Schematism, and in particular on the necessity for judgment in the particular case, in the first Critique.) Nevertheless, Kant thinks there are two, though only two, such maxims. The first is the maxim of acting on that maxim which is in accordance with universal law (which I test by seeing whether I could will it to be a universal law of nature); the second is that of doing whatever gives more pleasure than pain. Anything which does not fall under the former, must fall under the latter. It does not matter that I may not know in advance what things-perhaps things I have not yet heard of-will give me pleasure. It does not matter that I may not know in advance of examining them what actions may not be in accordance with universal law. That is merely an ignorance of how the rule will apply, not of the rule itself. It is not like the difficulty I spoke of before, of having all sorts of things I care for for their own sake, which are in various vastly complex ways related or independent. There can only be two things I care about for their own sake, one, qua rational being, acting in accordance with pure reason, the other, as a phenomenal being, acting for the sake of pleasure. Even a psychological hedonist would not have to adopt Kant's egregious thesis, if he rejected Kant's account of maxims. Someone who holds that every action is done for the sake of pleasure need not hold that one is aiming at whatever will give most pleasure, nor would that follow. Still less need he hold, or does it follow, that one is always aiming at what gives a preponderance of pleasure over all actions 210 Kant's Psychological Hedonism (Kant's notion of happiness), any more than it follows that someone who aims to hit each of a hundred targets is ever aiming to hit more than one target, let alone a hundred targets. But if one were a Kantian psychological hedonist, though without the qualification to it he makes, one would have to think the maxim of following pleasure was the only possible one, in so far as one were rational. This conclusion does not require a laborious combing of passages in the Lectures on Ethics, the Groundwork, the First Critique, or his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, though I have combed them and find many such passages which impressively reinforce it. It is one established beyond cavil by what must be the most authoritative expression of Kant's position: namely Theorem I, Theorem II and its corollary, and Theorem III, of theAnalytic ofPure Practical Reason in the Doctn'ne of the Elements of Pure Practical Reason in the Critique of Practical Reason. Theorem I starts by claiming that all principles which presuppose an object as the determining ground of the will are empirical. It is clear, and made abundantly clear from Kant's classification of all possible practical principles in the second remark to Theorem IV, that this refers to all practical principles whatever except practical universal laws. In the case of all empirical principles, the object is not itself the determining ground, since it may never exist or come to be; it is rather the conception of the object as giving pleasure to the agent if it becomes real. This pleasure is a feeling or sensation. It is not however the sensation which determines the will, but the expectation of it. (It may seem that what distinguishes autonomous from heter- onomous motivation is that in the former case it is a mere thought-of what is in accordance with a universal law-which motivates. But what is the expectation of pleasure, more than a mere thought? It is not, however, easy to pursue this point through the thickets of Kant's account: as we shall see below, even the mere thought concerning law must have its phenomenal motivational counterpart.) Thus expectation of pleasure is the only possible motive other than respect for the law. Even where it may seem that the motive must be respect for the law, we can never be sure that it may not really be a hidden expectation of pleasure-one hidden even from the agent. Given that, it is extremely difficult to show that Kant must be wrong; one can no more produce a counter-example than one could produce a counter-example to the principle that every event has a cause or that in every act of affection towards any living thing there is an arcane sexual motive. It is no good pointing out cases where the determining object or state of affairs is one from the existence of which the agent could not possibly expect to get pleasure, such as making a bequest. It cannot be 211 A. Phillips Griffiths said that the object here is the making of the will or testament, which of course can be conceived as giving pleasure to the living agent, since this may be a mere means, and the end, the inheritance of the bequest by someone, that for which the means is adopted; so that, for example, if one found out that the intended beneficiary, say one's wife, would necessarily inherit by law, so that one need not do anything, then one would not do anything. No, the object here is clearly a state of affairs which would obtain only after the agent is dead. But Kant could reply that even if the agent would not expect pleasure after death, he could, though without knowing it, be motivated by the expectation that he will avoid present pain if he can avoid having to think his wife might be left penniless; something which would be removed, if she is to inherit whatever he does. Such ingenuity can always fudge up some such entirely baseless and completely irrefutable supposition which would save this a priori principle. I reject this doctrine as false not because I can show it to be false but because there is not the slightest reason to believe it to be true and very good reason to think it utterly repugnant, derogatory and degrading. It implies that apart from the end of acting in accordance with universal law, no end is better than any other: where all that can be appealed to is the degree of intensity of pleasure; given that that is the same in both cases, pushpin is as good as poetry. Mill recoiled from this and suggested that pleasure itself can be rated good or better not only in terms of its intensity but its quality. Its status as higher or lower is conferred on it by its object, for example whether its object has its origin and status in the understanding; a suggestion on which Kant pours scorn in advance. 'However dissimilar the conceptions of the objects' Kant says in Remark I to Theorem II, 'the feeling of pleasure (since it is the agreeableness and enjoyment which one expects from the object which impels the activity toward producing it) is always the same.' There can be nothing to choose between expected occasions of pleasure, except the sheer magnitude of pleasure. If the determination of the will of an agent depends on the feelings of agreeableness or disagreeableness which he expects from any cause then, says Kant 'it is all the same to him through what kind of notion he is affected. The only thing he considers in making a choice is how great, how long-lasting, how easily obtained, and how often repeated, this agreeableness is.'3 What makes this so repugnant is not that it reduces all human non- moral (in Kant's sense of moral) ends to the same level of value, but that it seems to rob all except one possible one of having any value at all. 3 It would be a nice thought if it could be shown that these desiderata were the origin of Bentham's categories of intensity, duration, propinquity, and fecundity in the calculus of pleasures. 212 Kant's Psychological Hedonism What is good about playing football, composing music, being married, or whatever is thought to be good? Nothing at all about what it is to play football or compose music or be married. It is just the far from universal fact that people get pleasure out of them; though it might as well have been painting their noses red, or sucking rubber teats, if the empirical causes of sensation had happened to be different. Any such goods are merely instrumental, conditionally on their external relation to the merely causally and contingently connected sensations of pleasure. But is this good any different from the good we can see in thistles-they are very generally good for causing pain; or in putrid sewage-it is very generally good for causing the sensation of nausea? Unless of course, unlike pain and nausea, pleasure is good. Kant does, admittedly, seem to think it somehow is. He thinks that happiness, which is the realization of all a man wants or wishes in life- what gives him pleasure-is not only good, but an essential constituent of the summum bonum. The morally good deserve pleasure, and the summum bonum consists in all rational beings enjoying pleasure to the extent that they have a good rational will. Perhaps that possibility will be realized if in the next life the only desire left to rational beings is for soft drinks, and the sea is turned to lemonade. But why is pleasure or happiness a reward? Why not pain or nausea, or any other neutral sensation? Kant gave up this doctrine, in the Opus Postumum: Vleeschauwer says for reasons unknown to us. But I do not know what his reasons were for holding it in the first place. The fragment dated by Menscher 1775 does give a reason, but only by there making the concept of happiness an idea derived a priori from pure reason. There, the essential constituent of happiness is contentment or self-sufficiency which is entirely a priori and independent of empirical laws. What is pleasurable depends on empirical laws, so 'one who possesses happiness can well dispense with pleasures'. But this is a totally different concept of happiness-though a no less legitimate one-from the concept of happiness dealt with in the Second Critique, the consciousness of agreeableness of life. It may be that by then, having had a lot of other things to think about, Kant retained his confidence in an earlier con- clusion while forgetting the premises which gave it a quite different sense. Kant's thesis is, I said, not only repugnant, it is baseless. However, one might respond by pointing out that without some such thesis, human action becomes inexplicable. Why do people, having the same beliefs, that is the same view of the circumstances in which an action is proposed, act differently? Why does one person do one thing rather than another? Initially one gives the explanation of the action in terms of the agent's beliefs; the agent, Fred, sent money to a charity because he believed it would help to relieve those suffering in the Sudan floods. 213 A. Phillips Griffiths That explanation makes sense; it is not as if he had just thrown money into the sea, and explained that by saying that the sea is, after all, saline. But other people with equal financial resources who know perfectly well what Fred knows about the effect of sending money to the Sudan do not do it at all; instead, they donate money to the World Congress of Philosophy, which Fred does not, though he knows just as much about the effect of doing that as anyone else. There must be some factor which underlies and explains these differences. Putting it in Kant's terms, the material of desire, the conceived object, which is the determining cause of the action of giving money, is in the two cases different; hence there must be a mediating factor. From a common sense point of view, we readily accept that in some cases the difference can be accounted for by taste-by what people variously find pleasurable: some coffee, some tea. In the absence of any other general explanation, why not generalize this, in an arcane way even to those cases where the agent denies that any thought of pleasure enters his head at all? One reason would be that there are cases where the explanation a priori cannot be of this sort. And of course- this is the qualification with which we began-Kant thinks there is just such a case: the case of acting morally. If there is such a thing, then it necessarily is not acting just for the sake of pleasure; and we do have moral experience. Even here, however, Kant's resolution falters. There can be no explanation, he says, why anyone takes an interest in the moral law. Acts of pure freedom, determined by nothing but the form of law itself, are unintelligible. We can only say that they are from a theoretical point of view negatively possible and through our moral experience positively possible. Yet he finds it necessary, and explains why it is necessary, that there should be on the phenomenal level an incentive, in the realm of feeling, towards acting in accordance with law. There must be some explanation, some subjective determining ground of the will, he says, why a will not necessitated to conform to law nevertheless does so. This ground must be unique-which means in effect quite distinct from pleasure-and sufficient. It is not good enough to think that Kant is saying only that this feeling is as it were epiphenomenal, that it is consequent upon acting from respect for the law. It must really be an active incentive, a determinant. This could not have been more tren- chantly put than in this passage from the Metaphysic of Morals (1797): No man is entirely without moral feeling (like pleasure and pain in general), for were he completely lacking in a capacity for it he would be morally dead. And if (to speak in medical terms) the moral life- force could no longer excite this feeling, then humanity would dissolve (by chemical laws, as it were) into mere animality and be mixed irrevocably with the mass of other natural beings. 214 Kant's Psychological Hedonism This suggests that this feeling fails the test of being subjectively suffici- ent; since the man who is nearly but not quite morally dead has the feeling but is never moved by it. More important, however, is the other demand, that it be unique, and exclusive to the determination of moral acts. The uniqueness of moral feeling depends on more than its being appropriate only to one distinct object, the moral law. One could as easily say that the feeling of desire for ice-cream is unique, in that it could never explain determination towards any object other than ice- cream; it could never explain drinking lemonade, the feeling of desire for which must be of its own unique kind. Moral feeling is unique in that it differs completely from all other determinants of the will: it is a feeling concerning an object, an end, which unlike all others is not to be found in nature. That end, the moral law, is universal and a priori, and hence non-empirical. It is also linked to the feeling of respect for the law not contingently but necessarily; whereas all other objects of the will are phenomenal, empirical objects, and the feeling which makes them objects of the will-the desire for pleasure-is only contingently related to them. Obviously I cannot here enter the well discussed question of whether Kant's doctrine of the noumenal determination of the will is not only, as he says, unintelligible, but incoherent. But if I am allowed, albeit unintelligibly, to attribute to myself action in accordance with the moral law for its own sake, why cannot I attribute to myself action for the good of my country for its own sake (call it patriotism) or for the sake of my marriage for its own sake (call it one form of love) or for the good of my children (call it fatherhood). I cannot see why classifying these as empirical objects makes any difference, especially since they are not. People all over the world are killing each other and prepared to sacrifice themselves and the whole of humanity for the sake of various objects which they all call democracy: what kind of empirical objects are these? When a man goes to wed, what is this empirical concept of marriage which determines his action in virtue of his conception of the expected pleasure he will derive from it? Where does he get it? From observing the mating habits of birds? Sociobiologists may say that it arises in him in much the same way as the mating habits in birds; but it is just about such matters that they are most vulnerable. In any case, what the sociobiologists would describe is hardly the acquisition of a concept by empirical methods, but the biological generation of what (like the mating habits of birds) is an innate idea. And this will be quite wrong if it is treated as a reduction rather than an explanation of how something the like of which has never been seen before comes about. Nothing in culture is to be found in nature. 215 A. Phillips Griffiths My choice of examples here suggests that I am adumbrating some general distinction of objects: objects of culture, such as marriage, art, democracy, as opposed to mere empirical objects such as ice-cream. But I want to say just the same thing about ice-cream, as an object determinant of the human will. Put an ice-cream under the nose of a dog or a little baby, and the patient will lick, willy-nilly. That is not what eating an ice-cream is for agents like me. What it is, is something vastly complex: it is not just eating an ice-cream, but eating an ice- cream not in church, not in front of my children if it encourages them to make themselves sick, not while I am reading a paper on the Second Critique, not if it is stolen property; that is, the maxim is convolutedly rich, and embedded in a life which like everyone else's is part of the culture of a society. (It is often, if not always, easier and safer to find out what I would do, if . . .- by looking at that culture than by asking me to introspect.) I have said that the empirical hedonism of Kant derogates from humanity. How it does, has been put as follows: Holbach represents every activity of individuals in their reciprocal intercourse, e.g. speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility and exploita- tion. These relations are thus not allowed to have their own significance but are depicted as the expression and representation of a third relation which underlies them, utility or exploitation. This paraphrase only ceases to be senseless and arbitrary when these individual relations no longer have value on their own account, as personal activity, but only as a disguise . . . for a real third purpose and relationship, which is called the relation of utility. The linguistic masquerade only has sense when it is the conscious or unconscious expression of a real masquerade. In this case the relation of utility has very definite meaning, namely that I profit myself when I harm someone else. That is Marx, The German Ideology. The severe interpretation of the underlying reality may be thought harsh when applied to Kant, though he does say things here and there which hint at it. That we are interested in, value, something just for what it is-whether it is simply our duty or anything else-raises questions and demands for explanations which may remain unsatisfactorily answered. Certainly, we have no general theory of action which answers all of them, and that may be because there cannot be one. But it is better to do without such a theory altogether than to accept a baseless a prion thesis which distorts and demeans humanity in one's own person and that of others.4 University of Warwick 4 This paper was contributed to the symposium Kant's Critique of Practi- cal Reason at the World Congress of Philosophy, Brighton, August 1988. 216