Kant

An ethical digression

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

[letting the middle P of PPE have an airing]

When I was a newly-arrived undergrad, exposed for the first time to the idea of philosophy and the terms and characters of ethics, ‘consequentialism’, ‘deontology’, JS Mill and Immanuel Kant, I leapt to the glib conclusion that the utilitarians were obviously right and Kant (as I dimly understood him) wrong. How could duty matter more than happiness? How could doing something out of respect for the moral law matter more than the actual effects of your actions? Of course you’d lie to the axe murderer at your door!

But now, decades later, I find the calculations of utility less appealing, and the idea of acting out of a good will seems a stronger, firmer pole for a moral compass. If only consequences matter, not principles, there are so many excuses, so many get-out clauses available to weasel out of responsibility or honour: It doesn’t matter – no one will even know, everyone else does it, or: just one more plastic bottle in the sea causes less harm than the convenience to me… etc. etc.

But duty doesn’t let us off. It is, as Kant has it, categorical, absolute. And, like virtue (the third leg of the ethicist’s stool), it is a matter of who we are, not just what we do and the effects of our actions on the world.

You may say there’s no point in fighting a losing battle against climate change or tyranny. You can’t make any difference as an individual caught in the machine. Take the easy road, make the best of it, make hay while the sun shines. But duty (or virtue) says, ‘not in my name’. My small choices cannot stop the sixth extinction, but if the human species is to leave a world impoverished, I don’t want to be a thoughtless contributor to that end. Just so, citizens protest against the warmongering of their governments, in hope of effecting change of course, but beside hope, in acknowledgement of a moral imperative: this is wrong and I would not be part of it. ‘Duty’ is an old-fashioned word, but I have heard it lately, from the mouths of Earth Protectors, doing their best to preserve and restore ecosystems.

The other word that goes with ‘duty’ is ‘respect’, respect for the moral law, respect for moral agents as ends not means, respect for our own ability to choose, respect which applies absolutely, not just if it makes us (or the sum of us) happier. But when it comes to living together on this finite world, perhaps we need some virtues too – to counter the hubris of ‘treating humanity always as ends not just means’, of being ‘legislators in the kingdom of ends’ (Kant again) – primarily humility, and recognition that we are in not on the world.

We need the habit of respect for the ecosystem; we need not to have to deliberate about whether to buy that, throw that away, eat that, abstain from that. We need a way of living that makes the right things not necessarily easy to do, but easy to choose, because they come naturally. Individually, we need to hone the right instincts and habits; socially and politically, we need to build the right institutions, so that those institutions support and enable, rather than undermining and frustrating, our best intentions.

Money – an Antinomy

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Thesis: Money makes the world go round.

In our world, money is the measure of all things.

It is useful, we are told, by the economic sages, as a store of value and medium of exchange. Without the institution of money we would have to rely on supplying our own needs or bartering real goods with each other. This raises problems of coordination of supply and demand, and of storage of stuff. How do I find the people who produce what I need and want what I can produce? If no such people exist, how do I find the time to swap my produce for something that I can swap again for what I want? How long a chain of bartering is feasible? And where do I store the intervening (possibly perishable) goods between one link and the next? This presents a daunting and impossibly inefficient picture. But along comes money – something we all agree to treat as a universal solvent of value, easy to swap for anything, easy to store without risk of decay, requiring no complicated deliberate coordination of a network of production and exchange. As long as we all trust each other to accept this medium, it is a fantastic social benefit.

And once it exists it can be used to do more than just enable exchange between different people in different places. It can travel through time. We can save it up for the future, to enable us to live once we can no longer produce anything to swap for what we need.

Can we imagine a world without money? That seems very hard to do.

Antithesis: Money is the root of all evil.

Money increases the possibility of extreme inequality in resources between people (and peoples). The accumulation of wealth in vast amounts is much easier in practice when that wealth can be stored as gold in a bank vault or even better as digital records in a virtual vault, rather than in the form of goods, land, buildings, etc., which take effort to maintain and make use of. And once inequality in possession of wealth exists, it gives the wealthy people power over the rest. Unequal wealth is, at bottom, a tool of power over other people. When money is the measure of all things, we all need access to it to live, so those who control the money can control the people who need it. (If we were all equally wealthy, wealth would not give us power over each other. In that case it probably would make little sense to talk of wealthy individuals; instead society as a whole would be wealthy.)

With accumulated inequality, money becomes, instead of a mere medium of exchange or a convenient stand-in for valued things, a bestower of power and worthiness on its owners and of value on what can be bought. People without money come to be seen as valueless, because they lack the fundamental economic power – purchasing power. And things that cannot be bought and sold, like ecosystems and kindness, cannot be valued. The economic magic of the invisible hand that supposedly adjusts supply and demand to create an ideal equilibrium ignores the needs of the poor and the non-human, because those ‘demands’ are not expressed in monetary terms. So we see desperate attempts to protect the environment by ‘monetizing’ its ‘services’ or creating a market in carbon emissions. Meanwhile, inequality in power grows, as the institutions of government, meant to serve us all, are captured by the power of money over information, over political parties, over elected decision-makers.

To those that have shall be given…

 

But does the usefulness of money, the apparently essential services it provides, require that such unequal wealth must be possible? Can the concept of a medium of exchange be separated from that of a store of value that can be accumulated so that some people end up holding vastly more than others? Can the antinomy be resolved? Universal basic income anyone?

‘there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’

~ flissw ~ Leave a comment

Some thoughts about consciousness, imagination and ethical value – a brief philosophical excursus (with apologies for pontificating and a vaguely relevant picture to dilute the verbiage)

 

Our ethical universe is defined by the scope of our imagination. That is, the moral significance of another being for me corresponds to my ability to imagine the world they experience. In a world of so many people, we are inclined and encouraged to focus our concern on those nearest to us, whose lives resemble ours. One death near at hand counts for hundreds on the far side of the world. And people nearer to home may be excluded from our attention by the differences between us and them, differences which we perceive as barriers, the walls of a black box we need not look into.

Consider a person whose physical or cognitive faculties are very constrained, whose life one would think from the outside is terribly limited. Such a person might well be neglected by society and by individuals in society, as living a life of little value to themselves or anyone else. How many ‘utils’ can such a life hold, even in the best of all possible worlds? What is the point, says the devil’s advocate, of wasting resources on such as them? (Think of the people not so long ago, put away in institutions, left there to endure miserable lives, out of sight, out of mind.)

But as soon as one seriously considers what it would be like to be that person, to be in that box, such dismissive neglect is hard* to maintain. Because for them, their life, their world, is (as for all of us) a universe. So if that life is deprived, miserable, painful, a universe is those things.

From the inside, we all live in/constitute an entirety – the world as experienced by us. While, from an objective point of view, we are each only insignificant fragments of a vast physical manifold, from a subjective point of view, our (my) consciousness contains everything. And before/after this life, nothing exists.

 

Sculpture_Watts
Sculpture: Personal Space (with visitors) – plaster, bronze, wood

 

Is this a solipsistic image? Perhaps – except that we are capable of a less egoistic stance, which asks us to exercise our (moral) imagination; we can attempt to empathise, at least to think about the content of those other black boxes. That is to recognise that every conscious being contains/constitutes a personal universe. This recognition is what calls up the claims of respect, à la Kant. As soon as I consider the life-world of the other in imaginative empathy, the weight of their needs for whatever would make their universe tolerable is felt. This acts as a counterweight to the caricatured utilitarian idea that individual values/utils can be added and subtracted, balanced against each other, and perhaps that some lives might not be worth living.

This may be an impractical thought. It does not much help us make policy decisions, which must somehow deal with costs and benefits and the distribution of scarce resources. How can choices between equally and absolutely valued lives be made? But perhaps it does just act as a reminder that no life, no person, ought to be seen as ultimately negligible. General policies tend to treat people as statistical abstractions, as beans to be counted. This makes the decisions easier. Such decisions should not be easy, though; they should not be taken lightly. They need to be anchored by an acknowledgement of the weight of particular lives.** Again we look to Kant: every conscious self deserves, demands, respect, as an end and not simply as a means.

 

*I had written ‘impossible’ but that would perhaps underestimate our capacity for hard-heartedness.

**It often seems that the people with power are, perhaps because of that fact, less likely or able to engage in imaginative empathy with respect to those they have power over, because their lives are so different or because it would make hard decisions even harder. Hence the recurring suggestions that members of government should experience the effects of their policies themselves by, for example, attempting to live on benefits.

 

Copyright © 2014 Fliss Watts