Ep. 372: Kant’s Ethics Lectures (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Hey, everybody. I'm teaching a political philosophy class this fall over the Internet and you can attend. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com class for details. I will be opening enrollment pretty soon and I need to know now who's available when, so I know which sections to offer. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point said, I'm doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 372 is what should we do? We are at long last returning to read more of Kant's ethical works, this time his lectures on ethics given in 1784 and 1785, as conveyed through the notes of his student Georg Ludwig Collins. This is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, partaking of a table of food left in the forest.

0:53 Seth: Yeah, I wondered about that example. This is Seth Paskin, atypically being brought to a feeling of abhorrency for vice in Austin, Texas.

1:04 Wes: This is Wes Alwan putting honor before love in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:09 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, Just considering my duties to myself in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:13 Mark: Those are the most important duties. We had gotten a suggestion from a listener many years ago that I think we. After we had initially done our very early episode on Kant's ethics, whenever we would bring him up, we would refer to, oh, it's just all negative. It's just all. He's just so prim. He's just about what not to do. You know, there's no room for positive virtue. But we had. And this person said, you know, you got to get into this. His actual examples here, that this is actually ethics. There's a little bit of meta ethics, but it's actually ethics.

And so, of course it's going to betray a lot of the strange mores of his time, more so than just, you know, very abstract stuff about the categorical imperative. So it was interesting. He was a little softer and more sensible in some ways than I expected him to be. He would not. I don't think we can argue about this. He would tell the Nazis where Anne Frank is, but in other ways, he's. Yeah. Your duties to yourself, including no masturbation, that kind of stuff like that's more important than you're treating. Because you're just denying your humanity and yourself.

You're just worthless if you don't fulfill your duties toward yourself. You know, put on your mask first, your moral mask.

2:29 Wes: Your moral oxygen mask.

2:31 Dylan: Yes.

2:31 Wes: Before you try to put it on other people.

2:33 Mark: Exactly.

2:34 Wes: Because you can't really fulfill your obligations to Others if you're not fulfilling them to yourself.

2:40 Seth: That's not terribly outrageous thing to say.

2:42 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing to say because I think sometimes we associate someone who's very moralistic with regard to others with a feeling of guilt and maybe self attack, a beating up of the self, which seems like it would be contrary to what Kant's talking about.

3:00 Seth: Well, I don't know. As he was saying it, it seemed, I don't want to say straightforward, but basically in his concept, right, you have to treat. I know this is the Kantian cliche, you treat others as ends, not just as means. But here he really fleshes it out in terms of examples and the way in which to think about it. He talks about the psychological disposition versus the moral disposition. And if you can't treat yourself as an end, if you can't essentially respect the fact that you are the agent of morality, if you can't live in such a way that you fully inhabit and fully embody and manifest this notion of being a moral agent, which is then yeah, how could you act morally or how could you be a moral agent with respect to others? To some extent that that makes kind of sense.

3:54 Wes: This is not a love thyself admonition, interestingly enough. Right. So to fulfill one's duties to oneself, it turns out, involves respect and honor. I think we kind of knew with the end in that self formulation. This word respect I think we're very familiar with. But it was new to me that he associates morality with honor. We got a hint of that kind of idea in Hume. Hume just hints and leaves aside this idea that morality has a lot to do with pride. So I found the psychology of this very interesting here. When we're talking about being good to ourselves and fulfilling duties towards ourselves, we're really talking about something in the domain of respect and honor versus love.

So it's still not a touchy feely, love thyself kind of dictate. But this respect formulation is a discipline yourself depending on what you mean by discipline. There's a whole section on S and M and he's not a big fan,

4:55 Dylan: that's true, but his notion of morality, and there's this part that is suffused with his clearly sort of a Christian point of view that we're fallen people, that we're constantly regulating our inclinations. And the big theme of the morality was one, you're disciplining the things that you are inclined to do. It's not that you are. And that has to do with Honor. But it seemed to me significantly less about what you are aiming towards. It's more about resisting the things you ought not do. It's not about what you are aiming yourself to do and focusing on doing those things.

It's contrary to Aristotle. You are not striving for excellence in doing the things that you want to do. The part about Aristotle or that kind of virtue ethics that's preserved is the notion of habit. You discipline yourself enough that so that you develop the habit of discipline to keep yourself from doing the things you ought not do. But it's completely oriented towards taming the things that incline you. Because we're fallen people, we're corrupted animals to attain our humanity, which is our higher reason. And then you exercise that discipline in order to curb the things that we are most inclined to do.

Again, not aiming towards excellence of our souls towards some specific end.

6:21 Seth: True. And the habitus thing, he drops in about three paragraphs at the end. It's sort of. And by the way, the habitus is not a habit of discipline so much as a habit of abhorrence to vice. Right. It's like, don't tell kids it's wrong.

6:37 Wes: Well, don't tell them that it's wrong because it's harmful. Right?

6:40 Dylan: That's right.

6:41 Wes: So it's an anti consequentialist position. Teach them that it's wrong because there's something innate to the act itself that's. Contemptuous is the word that he used. So again, this is in the domain of honor.

6:52 Dylan: Yeah, contemptuous as well as also disgust. You want to cultivate the feeling of disgust with respect to immoral acts. So that's part of the way you raise a child, which is why you cultivate shame rather than punishment.

7:08 Seth: Yeah, he's not shy about expressing that fact and sharing plenty of examples in this text, by the way. Like, this is why we think sodomy is abhorrent, you know. Oh, really? Is that why we think that? But you know, Dylan, you're absolutely right. He's not. It's not Aristotelian in that respect. There's not striving towards excellence. But he. I have to say, reading Korsgaard before reading this was excellent, because this is like totally echoing. I was like, man, how did she get all that brilliant, concise summary of Kant out of all those horrible critiques?

It's like, oh, she must have been talking about this stuff, you know, this text. But the issue about taming the inclinations is really. I thought he put it very nicely. It's very nicely. Formulated. He's like, we have the freedom to follow or not follow inclinations. That's what makes us human beings. Like we actually have a choice. And you would think it'd be like, wow, okay, so virtue is recognizing the positive inclinations and wanting to achieve them and ignoring. He's like, no, we have to absolutely constrain this freedom. Freedom's great because it's what makes us human, lets us do things, but it's also dangerous.

And so we need immutable, you know, laws that we can follow. Like we need to be obligated and more importantly. Well, so we need to have an enforcement, you know, there needs to be like a third party enforcement thing. It's like to make sure that we follow through on those obligations. That doesn't just sound Christian to me. That sounds like ascetic. It's like it's the kind of thing like, you know, get out the reeds and start whipping yourself in the back. It's a certain kind of. I mean, I don't know what Kant's, you know, version of Christianity was, but sounds very self flagellant.

8:56 Wes: He does though, he criticizes quote unquote monkish virtues.

9:00 Dylan: That's true.

9:01 Wes: This is kind of a theme we've seen in some of the readings that we have in it. And I think as early as Erasmus. Right. So internal Catholic self criticism. This became a thing where the, you know, this idea of monkish asceticism was not in vogue among Enlightenment thinkers and especially Lutherans, you know, especially people who had been influenced by the Protestant Reformation. So Kant might not think of himself in that way.

9:29 Seth: I could find at least five examples right now.

9:32 Wes: Well, yeah, I mean, we can argue about those specific examples.

9:35 Seth: I'm not saying he is or isn't. I'm just saying he sounds like it.

9:39 Dylan: But that might also be a consequence of the time. Right. I mean, I can totally believe that he was positively open minded.

9:49 Wes: And Dylan, I just wanted to quickly address your comment about the negative aspect of this versus the positive aspect because Kant does have a theory of perfect duties and imperfect duties, which we really don't get in this. So imperfect duties being things like the need to perfect yourself, cultivate your talents, for instance, to develop, you know, your inclination to help others when they're in distress. And then perfect duties are more like observing people's rights. Those are the negative ones. Thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that.

And yeah, that belongs more in the domain of. Right. So he does, we do get that variety, but he doesn't make this big distinction that he makes in other places. But a lot. So, yeah, a lot of this does look negative. Although maybe friendship. We do read a section on friendship, so that would be more in the domain of something positive. But a lot of this is, yeah, you're not allowed to commit suicide, not allowed to have sex out of marriage,

10:44 Dylan: not allowed to masturbate, not allowed to

10:46 Wes: have concubines, which I was really disappointed by.

10:50 Mark: Some of that sounded like it's friends who fuck. You can't do that. Even if it seems like it's a square deal. You're just using each other for your. Your bodies. Like, that's still not. It's a defensive marriage.

11:01 Seth: That's because you haven't given yourself wholly over to the other person in order to receive them in return to replace yourself, which of course only happens in marriage. Obviously, you're, you know, the three of us who are married. Wes, I'm really sorry, man, that. That you've been denied the experience of giving yourself wholly over to another in holy matrimony. But for the rest of us, we

11:24 Wes: know the consequences sounded quite cynical. You haven't been married that long.

11:34 Mark: Let's say something about this text. As a text. We read this. Cambridge Edition, 1997. Translated by Peter Heath. There are a number of lecture notes going around. He taught this class, he taught for 40 years at Albertina University in Konigsberg. Started at age 30. He was already doing it for 30 years by the time this set of lectures was given. So he had it down. There's no evidence that he was, like, reading, that the whole thing was reading, you know. So this is not his lecture notes. This is actually a student. However, there is speculation, given how thorough they are, that this is probably a professional who went in and, you know, was pretty much taking dictation.

That this is probably not a lot of insertions by the. Or, you know, oversimplifications. But there are some things that are weirdly terse or repetitive or that you could see. But, you know, this is not any different than we have for Aristotle, right, that we don't have Aristotle's written works. We don't have Epictetus. We have lecture notes. There are quite a few people in the ancient world. It's just. It's a pretty rare thing chronologically. So, right, 1784 to 1785, that school year. So he had published the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785, the Critique of Practical Reason in 1787.

So he was just preparing these seminal ethical works you'd think that he would have had this notion of the categorical imperative, but we don't actually see those words in this text.

13:04 Wes: Just to add some context to this, he's also not teaching from any textbook that he's written. He never wrote a textbook. And he's not teaching from his own books. But eventually when he does publish, he's teaching from a textbook by this guy, Alexander Baumgarten. Remember him? The guy who invented the term aesthetics. So a lot of these notes are him. He goes through this textbook and then he responds to it and riffs off it. So there's only one section that's where he refers to the author and then responds to what the author critiques, what the quote, unquote author is saying. He's talking about Baumgarten. And for years and years, even after he published some of his own work eventually, yet he was still using that Baumgarten textbook.

13:48 Mark: So we did not read every single lecture in here, but we read a representative selection that we found on some syllabi online. So there's a little bit of stuff about morality itself that seemed very familiar. But then duties toward oneself, there's several sections on that. And then duty towards other, including friendship, justice, truthfulness. And ends with some stuff on education. You know, that sounded very, you know, like Plato in the Republic. What he was he going to recommend?

14:17 Wes: Right.

14:18 Mark: How do we make good citizens, given that virtue is so rare and onanism is a very common thing among students, how do we, from childhood through primary and secondary education, how do we train people to fully realize themselves as free moral beings?

14:37 Dylan: When I was just looking when these things were published, I for some reason always forget that Kant wrote the Critique after Having worked for 30 years or something like that, teaching, you know, he was teaching geometry and natural science and geology. He did a whole bunch of work in geology and geography.

14:55 Wes: Yeah, he made like a real contribution to the field, apparently.

14:59 Dylan: Yes. And by the time 1781 comes around with the Critique of Pure reason, which is what, 20 or 30 years after Hume published, because he has that line, he was woken from his dogmatic slumber. I don't know if there's anything else to say other than just it's just sort of astonishing to me that he was sort of a smart, well regarded professor who was walking around the university for decades doing his moral philosophy thing every year, stuff like that. And then he comes out with this gigantic Critique of Pure Reason book. And then what we think of, at least I think of certainly as where he shines and becomes a pillar of Western philosophy, comes practically at the end of his life.

15:51 Mark: So there's still a chance for all of us.

15:53 Dylan: Ah, there we go.

15:54 Wes: The other thing I wanted to say by way of context is he does use in the notes, which we didn't look at, he does use categorical imperative and in our reading he uses the qualifier categorically and categorical commands, basically. But yeah, I think we're reading at a time the Mrongovius that comes later. So we're looking at the Collins notes.

16:19 Mark: Yeah, this book as a whole, it's over 500 pages and it has some more notes on later lectures he gave on the Metaphysics of Morals, which is his very last book in the 1790s. So there's quite a range comment on the intro was. And we can see that Kant didn't teach his doctrine any better than we professors do now in that later stuff. He didn't have very many examples and they were not very illustrative. So I think we picked the rich vein here. So say what we need to say about the first couple sections, the introductory observations, the proem and then the supreme principle of morality. Those are the two that give what we're going to get out of here of his overall theoretical project. So the morality is all about the proper use of freedom, the use of our will. I knew that Sartre was Kantian, but I didn't realize that Sartre was this Kantian until reading this text.

17:18 Wes: Right. And he's saying rules of for the use of freedom. Right. Because he's going to contrast this to anthropological explanation. Right. So we can give deterministic psychosocial explanations and rules for human behavior. Right. Like Freud would do or someone like that. We can say, well, people do X, Y and Z because of motivations A, B and C and time to get up certain psychological conflicts or whatever. And that's not what he's talking about. And as we know, and we get a full taste of this here, he's going to try to derive morality from the very idea of a free will.

Right. What would happen if the will, you know, what are the grounds for the possibility of freedom in the will? Well, it turns out to be this universalization function in the understanding. And therefore it involves that the will not be self contradictory. And then interestingly enough, it seems like we can derive certain moral content from the idea that the will, if it's to be free, can't contradict itself.

18:22 Seth: Right. But the very first thing he establishes too is that the rules for the understanding are not the rules for the will or the rules for willing. And that was actually part of this too that surprised me is he basically concedes the Humean point or basically says that logic and the understanding are.

18:41 Wes: I mean, I do think he thinks it's from the understanding for the evaluative function, but it's not. He's making this early distinction here between the theoretical and the practical in the sciences and then the theoretical and the practical in philosophy. So. Yeah, so what ethics is, it's not one of the functions of the understanding, which is to take objects and put them under concepts. It's not that. That's not what we're doing.

19:05 Seth: Right.

19:05 Wes: We do ethics here.

19:06 Seth: Yeah. Because this is about choice and action and the understanding is not. You don't use the understanding for choice or action. That's really.

19:14 Wes: You do. I mean, I think it gets complicated. We're going to find out because it's a little bit unclear what he's going to say about motivation. I think in this he's going to say as a matter of psychology, Hume is right. Right. The understanding can't motivate reasons can't motivate in the full sense. We can't get action out of that. But then he does say something like the understanding does supply motivation in its tendency towards universalization. So this I actually found quite unclear if he's coming down on the side a little bit different from Hume and saying the understanding and reason can motivate or not.

I couldn't get a full picture of that. It seems like it's almost like a one, two thing where you get this kind of weak motivation from the understanding and that motivation arises in its kind of tendency towards universalization. And then for full action you need to get really into the Humean sentiment part. You can see there's a very human element to him here.

20:10 Seth: Yeah.

20:11 Wes: So, yeah, it's 125 going into 126. The objectively necessitating grounds that restrict freedom must lie in the understanding. The supreme rule is therefore the proper use of freedom. What then is the condition under which freedom is restricted? The general law is always as follows. Behave in such a way that in all your actions regularity prevails. So I will not follow my inclinations. I'll bring them under a rule. This is something we saw. You know, the way Korsgaard puts this, of course, is that we look at our inclinations and see if we can reflectively endorse them. And then. Yeah, I think so. That's one little. That's not the Whole picture. So anyway, I think we're going to have to look at other sections to get at the full flavor of this whole idea that it's the understanding plays a role.

21:02 Dylan: This is also the paragraph, I think it's the first one where you get all evils in the world spring from freedom. So basically any, of course, making the distinction that all evil has to do with bad choice worthy actions, not just bad events.

21:17 Wes: Yeah, this is the scope problem again, right. If we're not free, we can't be subject to morality. Animals can't be morally judged.

21:24 Dylan: But back in of the Supreme Principle of morality on page 65 and really 66, he says at top of 66, this whole section I found a little bit confusing thinking about Korsgaard and Hume because he's engaging in trying to separate morality as contra Hume, not being about feeling, but then also trying to engage in how we establish norms. So at the top he says the supreme principle of all moral judgment lies in the understanding. The supreme principle of the moral impulse to do this thing lies in the heart. So we're trying to combine that actually getting the moral judgment is in understanding, so not in feeling. But the fact that we would want to do this lies in our feeling.

22:18 Wes: Okay, yeah, this is the place I was actually thinking of. Yeah.

22:21 Dylan: Okay.

22:21 Wes: And just give you one other sentence here. The norm is the understanding, but the motive is the moral feeling. The motive does not take the place of the norm.

22:31 Dylan: That's right. And so that's the part that made me think of Korsgaard a lot, because Korsgaard seemed to me humifying Kant. Remember how she basically went through her argument and said that basically Kant can be made aligned to realists, Kant can be made aligned to Hume, Kant can be made aligned to the voluntarists. And that in the end, if you understand each of those projects correctly, you'd understand that they all aligned with Kant's project. This is an example where to me you see Kant disagreeing with that interpretation because he's putting a really hard line between morality understanding and where those norms come from.

And a feeling for objects of the understanding is in itself an absurdity. It can't deny be something both intellectual and sensory. So rather than getting our norms from that reflection now maybe you know, he would ultimately agree with Korsgaard's refinement. I don't know. But Korsgaard is to me, it was most clear here that she's adding in an activity that at least in this text doesn't seem to be part of that reflection. On norms doesn't seem to be, from our feelings, part of Kant's project, which is fine.

23:52 Wes: Well, I think it's more in the Kant than in the Hume. I think she's really back engineering. Hume gives us hints of this whole. He gives it us in a fuzzy way. This, this whole thing with. That's right, reflective endorsement and it's more clear and Kant. But I think, Dylan, you're pointing to something which is important, which is that what Kant is saying is that, yeah, Hume's telling us. Hume, in a way is giving us the kind of psychological science of morality. He's giving us a moral psychology, and he's successful in that. I think Khan is very human on that level, just like he's human when it comes to skepticism about causality.

He really is just. He, when he says he had knocked him out of his dogmatic slumber, he's really taken in Hume hook, line and sinker, and then wants to figure out, well, how do we, what are we going to do with that? And in the case of morality, he's just making the very standard critique. Well, Hume isn't actually answering the normative question. He's not telling us in the end why we have to do something. He falls short of that because you can't to do that. You can't just give us a moral psychology and say, oh, we have all these sentiments. That doesn't tell us why we ought to do it.

24:54 Dylan: Yep.

24:55 Seth: This is a really good section to highlight another kind of like other distinction. Because what Kant says a little further down in that same paragraph. Right. Is that he uses the term pathological as opposed to psychological. But he says, look, for morality, we need to know what we ought to do. It's like if you rely on sentiment or if you think in terms of a psychological, the answer you're going to get is what we want to do and what constitutes morality is going to be the satisfaction of what we want to do, which he says it's like it's epicureanism, but it's not even the right epicureanism.

And I think the strength of Kant's claim here is he said, look, we're trying to solve the problem of freedom. And if you make it psychological or if you rely on the feeling as opposed to the understanding, you can never. You're not solving the problem of freedom. You're not putting the right kind of constraint on freedom. Instead, you're actually just giving in essentially to our desires or inclinations. Inclinations. And it's a very strong claim I would say I'll just put it that way.

26:07 Dylan: I think it's worth reading these last couple sentences. Go ahead. He says the motive does not take the place of the norm. Where motive is lacking, we have a practical fault, and where judgment is lacking, a theoretical one. We are now going to show briefly, in a negative way, what the principle of morality does not consist in. The principle of morality is not pathological. It would be so if it were derived from subjective grounds, from our inclinations and feelings. Morality has no pathological principles, for it contains objective laws of what we ought to do and not of what we want to do.

It is not a species of inclination, but a caution against all inclination. The pathological principle of morality would consist in giving satisfaction to all one's inclinations, and that would be a brutish epicureanism, though it is not yet the true epicureanism. So freedom is all okay. So our morality is rooted in the activity of our freedom as human beings. That freedom is moral in being used to set laws, to regulate our inclinations

27:14 Wes: and bring our inclinations under law, where the reading, you know. So again, this is really. This is all what Korsgaard puts under the category of a critique of not answering the normative question, Right? So he'll say later on down here, supposing the feeling were present in all men to the same degree, there would still be no obligation to act according to feeling. For in that case it could not be affirmed that we ought to do what pleases us, but only that anyone might do such a thing himself because it pleases him. This is like a very oft quoted idea from Kant.

The moral law, however, commands categorically. So morality cannot be based on a pathological principle, either of physical or moral feeling. So Hume was very impressed with this idea that everyone has these feelings, that there's just. There's a hint in that of the categorical requirement that Kant's pointing to, but it doesn't quite get there, and it doesn't quite get there. Just because we all have those sentiments doesn't yet answer the normative question and tell us why. Well, why should I act on those sentiments just because we all have them?

Well, what if I want to go against them in this particular case? Or what if I have conflicting sentiments? So I still need to go beyond that. And you can tell that Kant gets his idea from Hume. He's really like this whole idea of the categorical actually comes out of universal sentiment. He just sees that it's not quite enough and he has to push it one step further.

28:45 Mark: Yeah. The very first terminological distinction that he makes that I see after the practical versus theoretical is a subjective rule which says what actually does occur and then the objective rule of what should occur. So instead of just saying normative and descriptive or is and ought, he puts them both in terms of rules, which I mean I could. Maybe this is a terminological translation issue. Certainly we hear that about law, like science deals with descriptive laws. Ethics is also or legal things. Right. Are law. Legislation is what we're, what we should do.

So we understand that. But to put that in terms of rules, to say when I describe what happens in this scientific experiment, I'm giving a rule for what always happens in this kind of thing. That, that seems a little strange. But I think he is trying to connect the two by saying right through the understanding we recognize, we see reasons, we see these objective rules that we should follow that might not be reflected in what anybody actually does. But to have a whole morality which include not just the recognition of moral laws, but the application of them practically to people, to get them motivated, then you do actually have to bring them into reality, make the objective rule into a subjective rule.

So the question is, how can we possibly do that?

30:06 Dylan: Yeah.

30:07 Wes: And rule is an emphasis on the first person perspective. Right. Laws. We could look at people from the outside and give laws of how they act. But from the inside, even when I'm engaged in non moral decision making, there's a kind of rule aspect involved. Because if I give a hypothetical imperative at some point, I say if I want this, then I have to do this. That's kind of the rulemaking aspect of it that he's talking about. So someone else might say, well Wes does this because of these scientific laws about the brain or about psychology or whatever.

But from my perspective, I would say I want this so I have to do X, Y and Z. Or maybe, you know, or I want it, but I still can't do X, Y and Z. If I get to the level of morality, then that's the type of rule I impose on myself. I can't do X, Y and Z because I would be, I would self, you know, I would be undermining my own will. It looks like willing from the beginning I'm going to lie to get what I want. But actually I lose my freedom in lying because we undermine the conditions for willing.

31:18 Mark: And then just after that. This is going all the way Back to page 42. Objective practical rules are given imperatives, subjective rules are not. So we have the imperatives of skills. This is his hypothetical imperatives are not subjective rules. So this is maybe. I'm not sure where this leaves your. Your thesis that rules are all about the first person perspective. I like that idea. But he also says, well, animals obey rules. Well, does that mean that they're sort of recognizing their desire and following their desire? I mean, maybe. I think that's what.

31:52 Wes: Yeah, there he's using rules more like laws. So I was trying to kind of impose a semantic distinction that he's not consistent with.

32:00 Mark: I kind of, I'm wanting to make him consistent because I think there is something to what you're saying, that when we read Korsgaard, her talk even about animals is that they are aware of what they're doing. They're not aware of like there being some external rule that they're trying to follow that would be an imperative. That would be like an imperative of skill or something. But they are still reacting to.

32:22 Wes: They have reasons.

32:23 Mark: Yes, exactly.

32:24 Wes: And their reason, they perceive their reasons. And the biggest reason is pain.

32:27 Mark: Yep. But I hadn't heard this idea of like, well, if you have an imperative of skill is problematic. So you should, you know, use the saw this way because you know how saws work and you know how from experience how you know, to get the best to go along with the grain of your wood or whatever. So that is a kind of imperative. Pragmatic imperatives are, well, if you know, what do you really need to do to pursue your self interest. So it still is an awareness of some thinking beyond your immediate. And again, we saw this reflected in Korsgaard that you could have. You don't want to just react according to whims, according to inclinations. Even if you're just self interested, you still want to make that a law. You still want to act reasonably self interested. That's the Ayn Rand thing. Be reasonable in your self interest. That's the only thing that reason could mean for Rand.

33:17 Wes: So I just want to clarify though. The problematic imperative is problematic because it chooses arbitrary ends. You can use it for anything that you might want.

33:26 Mark: It's for solving a problem. It's not problematic as in troublesome.

33:29 Wes: But the prudential imperative is still hypothetical. These are two forms of hypothetical imperative. Yeah, the prudential hypothetical imperative. He distinguishes that because it's about happiness and it's about this end that we all share, we might not all want to make a boat and therefore have to say I have to do X, Y and Z to make a boat, but we all want to be happy and There are hypothetical imperatives that are related to happiness, and those are prudential. And he's. Although he does mark, as you pointed out, he kind of identifies happiness and fulfilling all of one's own interests or kind of a hedonistic conception of it.

34:10 Mark: I just happened to be looking this morning at one of the sections that we did not officially assign ourselves on the ancient Greeks. And he characterizes all the ancient Greeks, so the Stoics and Aristotle and everybody else as focusing on the idea of happiness. But their key insight is you should only have happiness if you deserve it. As he says, ethics is not just a matter of working out what eudaimonia is, but the concept of eudaimonia includes not just happiness as a feeling, pathological right pathos, but includes virtue already. So that's his way of.

He could acknowledge some of the rightness of Aristotle by saying, Aristotle was pointing at what I meant Allah. And I'm going to give in my full account here that you don't get in the groundwork, for instance, an idea of that virtue and happiness are aligned. It's not just that morality is just this objective thing that we recognize or we could fail to recognize. And we should probably just ignore all of our inclinations which would pull us towards happiness to focus on the moral, but no, actually to reach our perfection. The destiny of man is the very last section of this whole thing that we read is to clear ourselves of these inclinations that would pull, that would be ruinous to us.

So actually what remains when we get rid of the bad inclinations is actually something that is going to. You can say we are by definition happy. It's a very sort of Stoic strain in Kant that I had not recognized before.

35:38 Dylan: I'm stumbling for a second on your comment, Mark, about how Stoic Kant is. And the reason I'm stumbling over it is that when I think of those Greek Stoics, even in their variety, the dealing with inclination has to do with, not with rulemaking as much as developing the right therapy for your imperturbability, which

36:07 Mark: I think is going to be. I mean, I think it was for Descartes as well. But if you. This is what we're getting out of this text is that yes, there's a focus, especially in this section on the normative, on the objective law, but there's also the moral psychology. So this, this whole text was really making me rethink what constitutes ethics and what constitutes meta ethics, clearly the sources of normativity. That book is pure meta ethics. And she Says, like, I'm not gonna tell you what actually to do. That's for another day. But a pure ethics is just like the Ten Commandments or, you know, business ethics is just like a list of stuff.

And you could kind of characterize it by a few rules. So it would be more philosophical ethics. But unless you're talking about foundational things, about the relationship between the normative and the descriptive, or between moral psychology, then you're not actually doing meta ethics. But here a full ethics is going to be not just some objective rules that you could then derive all our duties from. That's definitely part of it. And he gives us a lot of duties in a lot of great detail and a lot of great nuance in these lectures, but then also considering how we train people.

You know, his ultimate conclusion of this book is like an educational program, right? I compared it to Plato in the Republic. So it is. It's not the exclusive focus on that that the Stoics give on the therapy of desire. But that's definitely part of what he's interested in in these lectures.

37:31 Wes: So I want to point to emphasize 71 and 72 towards the end of this before we move on, because this gives us some of the idea that there's some sort of motive within the understanding that resists the motive of inclination. So he'll say on 71 that immoral actions are those whose intention abolishes and destroys itself if it is made into a universal rule. So we're getting that idea, you know, that fundamental Kantian idea here. And then he'll go on to say that, you know, even though the motivate, that the understanding can't contain a motivating end of action.

Right? Our ends have to be determined by sentiment. As Hume would say, there is a universalizing tendency in the understanding, the understanding. So he'll say how the understanding might contain a principle of actions is somewhat difficult to see. In no sense does it contain the end of the action. The morality of the action consists rather in the universal form of the understanding, which is purely intellectual, assuming that is, that the action is taken universally so that it can exist as a rule. And it is here that we have to bring in the already mentioned distinction between the objective principle of the appraisal of the action and the subjective principle of its performance.

Right? The subjective principle being the feelings that we might have that will actually lead to action. The Hume's point that the reason is not by itself going to motivate of the former we have just been speaking, but the subjective principle, the Motive is the moral feeling. When I judge by the understanding that the action is morally good, I'm still very far from doing this action of which I have so judged. Again, a very Humean point. But if this judgment moves me to do the action, that is the moral feeling, nobody can or ever will comprehend how the understanding should have a motivating power.

It can admittedly judge, but to give this judgment power so that it becomes a motive able to impel the will to performance of an action to understand this is the philosopher's stone. And then he'll go on to say that immoral actions, they can't be made into a universal law. So quote, unquote, the understanding is resistant to them because they run counter to its use of its rule. And then on the next page, on 72, hence in virtue of its nature, there resides in the understanding a moving force. So this is a section I was talking about where he seems to endorse Hume.

Right. The understanding can't motivate us fully. We need ceiling. And then he'll say it's almost like this little qualification that is anti human where there's some sort of motivating force in the understanding and it has to do with the understanding's tendency to need to universalize things.

40:28 Dylan: Yeah, you skipped one line in which you read, which was the moral feeling is a capacity for being affected by a moral judgment. So there he's connecting understanding to feeling directly. He's saying whatever moral feelings that Hume's talking about, that is the thing that is actually a moral judgment detector.

40:52 Wes: Well, the moral judgment, the appraisal happens independently.

40:55 Dylan: Yes, yes, we can do the appraisal. Yes, first.

41:00 Wes: But that doesn't mean we're motivated to do it. So we can see that something is self contradictory and can't be universalized, blah, blah, blah. And then we need an extra step after that appraisal. But in the appraisal there is some kind of motivating thing going on. As far as I. There is a moving force in the appraisal part in a weird way, because there's this. It reflects the tendency, the universalizing tendency of the understanding. I find this very ambiguous and I just wanted to point to that it's

41:28 Seth: not just very ambiguous, but he like sort of drops the subject midway through the next paragraph and he goes on like talking about something else. I mean, I think the positive statement is clear. You have the understanding, it's objective, you have inclinations and feelings, they're subjective. And morality, the rules themselves or the content of morality, as Korsgaard might say is objective, but your feeling about how you feel about that and whether you want to do it and all that is subjective. And it feels like that's pretty clear, right? And then the question is, he goes on and he gives like iteration after iteration where he's saying, but you know, morality is universal and objective and feeling subjective.

And they can't be the same thing. And they can't be. But it says here on page 67, there has to be a principle of morality that is intellectual insofar as it is borrowed from the understanding. Of course, that makes sense, right? Because he starts talking about epicureans and then he makes this connection. This intellectual pseudo principle is the pragmatic principle. So this consists in the rule of the understanding, either so far as the latter gives us the means to hand of so framing our actions that they coincide with our inclinations, or so far as the ground of morality might be immediately known through the understanding.

The first is indeed an intellectual principle, but is still obviously rooted in the inclinations. This intellectual pseudo principle is the pragmatic principle. It rests on the aptitude of the rule to satisfy our inclinations. This principle of prudence is the true Epicurean principle. So when it is said you ought to promote your happiness, that master saying, use your understanding to discover the means of satisfying your inclinations and taste for pleasure. Such a principle is intellectual, but it's pragmatic. So I thought he was going to go on and that the answer somehow in the next couple of paragraphs, he was going to say that the answer to the moral feeling thing is that you have some kind of desire, as Dylan pointed out right at the beginning of the podcast.

Right. Is it for happiness? Is it for consistency? Is it for justice? Is it for that there's some kind of inclination that you have that then drives you to use the power of your intellect, your understanding rather, and then come back and use that to regulate you. So in other words, the moral feeling comes almost prior to the understanding, as opposed to, I have this idea. Does that idea motivate me? Instead it's I have this desire for X, and that's what makes me want to find the objective validation for it.

44:08 Wes: Yeah, this is a kind of Humean idea that he's against. Right. He puts in the category of hypothetical imperative, and he starts off the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals, rejecting this idea that morality can be relativized to happiness. He's making at the point where I was pointing out on 71 to 72, he's making what Sounds like a very Humean point, but it's a little bit different. The Hume's point is that judgments can't give us morality, that we need feeling, right? So we can say the apple's on the table, and if I want to get the apple, I need to pick it up and put it in my mouth if I want to.

But the end is the pleasure of eating the apple, and I need that as a motivating force. And that's the way morality works. And Kant is going to say, yeah, true, the judgment isn't enough, but he's going to say there are such things as moral judgments. That's the appraisal. And that connects. So Hume is saying judgments just fall into the domain of the factual, the is part. Kant is saying we actually can have ought judgments, and even though we also need feeling on top of that. So I just wanted to make that clarification because it's an interesting little tweak of Hume and he's not relativizing morality to inclination in the way that Hume does.

45:26 Mark: All right, well, let's call that the end of part one here. And I guess just as a last point, you know that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone with the British title of that book that was actually about this problem that he was studying common. So they reworked it.

45:40 Wes: It's amazing. Children love it so much.

45:43 Mark: Please come back next week and listen to Part two. Or if you are Partially Examined Life supporter, then Part two should be already in your feed or in there very soon. Unless you support us through Apple, in which case, for various logistical reasons, you'll still see it next week. Thanks, everybody.

45:57 Dylan: Thank you. Good night.

45:58 Seth: Good night.