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Kantian Respect and Particular Persons1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Noggle
Robert Noggle*
Affiliation:
Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI48859, USA
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Extract

A person enters the moral realm when she affirms that other persons matter in the same way that she does. This, of course, is just the beginning, for she must then determine what follows from this affirmation. One way in which we treat other persons as mattering is by respecting them. And one way in which we respect persons is by respecting their wishes, desires, decisions, choices, ends, and goals. I will call all of these things ‘aims.’ Sometimes we respect another person's aims simply by refraining from doing certain things, such as treating her in ways that thwart her aims, or interfering with her attempt to pursue them. Other times we respect a person's aims by taking positive action to help her pursue them.

But how exactly does respect for persons translate into respect for their aims? And which aims merit respect? One answer comes from Kant.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 449 - 477
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1999

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Footnotes

1

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at colloquia at Simon Fraser University in October, 1997, and at Central Michigan University in March, 1998. Parts of this material were presented at the 1998 meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (under the title, ‘The Web of Self’). I am grateful to Juliet Christie, who commented on the AP A presentation, for her insightful and challenging remarks, and to the members of all three audiences for extremely helpful suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank Don Brown, Colin McCleod, and, most especially, Sam Black for very helpful conversations about the project of which this paper is a part. I also want to thank Ken Rogerson, John Wright, and Bob Stecker for their assistance with the penultimate draft. Finally, excellent comments by two anonymous reviewers and an editor for this journal forced me to improve this paper in various ways, and for that I am also grateful.

References

2 Thus I am using the term ‘aim’ to refer to any spring of, or tendency toward, intentional action. Many philosophers simply use ‘desire’ to cover all these things. ‘Conation’ is perhaps a bit better (though somewhat arcane). ‘Motive’ is ambiguous between ‘reason for action’ and ‘cause of action.’ The reason for using the term‘ aim’ rather than ‘desire’ is that Kant distinguishes sharply between ends and ‘mere’ desires or inclinations. I mean the term ‘aim’ to apply both to Kantian ends and to desires, inclinations, and other action-producing or action-guiding states.

3 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Ellington, James W. trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett 1981), 430Google Scholar. All references to Kant's work are given in Prussian Academy pages.

4 Groundwork 430. For a discussion of the meaning of ‘as much as possible’ here, see Baron, Marcia Kantian Ethics (Almost) Without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1995), 88–107)Google Scholar. In Doctrine of Virtue (450), Kant adds that the ends to be furthered must not be immoral.

5 See Hill, Thomas ‘Kant's Theory of Practical Reason,’ in Dignity and Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Herman, Barbara The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1993), 228Google Scholar; O'Neill, Onora Acting on Principle (New York: Columbia University Press 1975), 106-10Google Scholar; and Korsgaard, Christine ‘Kant's Formula of Humanity’ in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 108-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 88f.

6 See Groundwork, 437-9. For commentary, see Hill, ‘Humanity as an End in Itself,’ in Dignity and Reason, 85-7Google Scholar. See also Korsgaard, Christine ‘Kant's Formula of Humanity’ (Kantstudien 77 (1986) 183–202)Google Scholar, 186-90; Sullivan, Roger J. Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 197-8;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dean, Richard ‘What Should We Treat as an End in Itself?’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (1996) 268-88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a slightly different reading.

7 This qualification is necessary because on the .Kantian view there is arguably no such separation between the rational agent and those ends which are dictated by reason itself.

8 But that's just me. Andre Agassi might have more trouble doing so: tennis is far less contingent an end for him. In missing the distinction between a deeply held end and a trivial end, Kant also misses the fact that persons vary in how their ends are structured. More on this below.

9 Kant claims that ‘what they count as belonging to their happiness is left up to them to decide’ (Doctrine of Virtue, 388). For more on the attempt to show how Kant's ethics can allow context-responsive flexibility in moral practice, see Herman, Barbara Practice, esp. chaps. 4, 7, 8Google Scholar.

10 On certain readings of the idea of end-setting, there may be bigger problems as well. I have suggested that we see end-setting as a fairly passive activity - one which merely weeds out any irrational or immoral aims and promotes the rest to ends. On this view, pretty much all of our permissible aims will also count as ends. But if we take end-setting to be a decision or choice in a stronger sense, then there could be non-irrational aims that are not ends, but which play a large role in making the person who she is. Many of our most central aims are not deliberately and rationally ‘set’ in any strong, active sense. Consider such things as one's devotion to family. Most people never deliberately choose to have this aim. Similarly, many people never deliberately choose their friends, or their religion, or their moral outlook. Yet these things are as much a part of the person (whom we were supposed to respect) as ends which she does deliberately set. If the reason we are to promote a person's ends is just that she has chosen them, then it appears that any chosen end ipso facto has moral status that no other aim has, no matter how much a part of the person's life it might be. So if one deliberates about something trivial, like the best time to go get a chocolate shake, but treats some deeply held aim as an unchosen starting point rather than an object of deliberation, then on this reading, Kant would be committed to the implausible claim that the former is more deserving of respect than the latter.

11 Haworth, Lawrence ‘Autonomy and Utility,’ Ethics 95 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kymlicka, Will offers a similar view in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), 30-5Google Scholar.

12 One might wonder whether this account is adequate as it stands. For it is not obvious that just because someone has preferences, that respecting the person involves respecting those preferences. After all, a person may have lots of things that I don't need to respect and promote, even if I respect her: an overdrawn checking account; a bad hangover; an obnoxious dog.

13 Actually, Haworth wants to resist this claim. And he wants to do so for the same reason I do: certain preferences seem to lack moral status. His solution is to introduce a notion of autonomy according to which a person's preference has moral status ‘only insofar as the preference genuinely is his.’ But while I think he is on the right track, this just adds an epicycle, for now it is simply autonomous preferences rather than preferences simpliciter that get an equal share of moral status.

14 I mean this list to be construed broadly enough to include any representational, motivational, or affective mental state, including such things as memories, patterns of socialization, and attitudes that underlie one's relationships to others. Thus we can think of a person's psychology as reflecting or carrying the traces of her history, relationships, connections, culture, and community.

15 Terms like ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are ambiguous between two closely related but not quite identical ideas. When (analytic) philosophers worry about ‘personal identity,’ or about ‘future selves,’ they are typically worried about a very abstract ontological question: what is it for a person at time t to be the same person as a being at time t+n? In addition to this ontological question about personal identity, we can ask a more psychological question: what makes me the psychological entity that I am? My concern here is the psychological notion of identity rather than the ontological one. I leave it open whether a person's psychological identity may dissolve and a new one be constituted in the very same person, that is, whether ontological identity follows psychological identity. I borrow much of my thinking about the distinction between these two notions of identity and self from Schechtman's, Marya work. See her The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1996)Google Scholar.

16 See Word and Object (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1960), 9-13; ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper 1953), 42-6; The Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1990), 1-16; and Quine, W.V.O. and Ullian, J.S. The Web of Belief (New York: McGraw-Hill 1978), 14–19Google Scholar. See also Cherniak, Christopher Minimal Rationality (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1986) 49–71Google Scholar; Stillings, Neil et al., Cognitive Science: An Introduction (Cambridge: The MIT Press 19— ), esp. 26-30, 73-86, and 142-67Google Scholar; and Anderson, J.R. The Architecture of Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1983)Google Scholar and Human Associative Memory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum 1972).

17 See Atkinson, John and Birch, David An Introduction to Motivation (New York: Van Norstrand 1978)Google Scholar; Audi, Robert ‘The Structure of Motivation,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980) 258-75Google Scholar; Heckhausen, Heinz Motivation and Action (New York: Springer-Verlag 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toates, Frederick Motivational Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986)Google Scholar; and Sloman, Aaron ‘Motives, Mechanisms, and Emotions,’ Cognition and Emotion 1 (1987) 217–33Google Scholar, reprinted in The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Boden, M. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press)Google Scholar.

18 I'll use the term ‘motive (or motivation) to ?’ here to apply to any psychological state that tends to cause its owner to try to ? intentionally. (The concept of motivation turns out to be very slippery. See my ‘The Nature of Motivation,’ Philosophical Studies 87 [1987] 87-111.) If a Kantian end is such a state, then ‘motive’ is synonymous with ‘aim.’ I use a separate term, however, since some people may think that a Kantian end is not an empirical psychological entity at all, but rather an entity that is only defined from the practical-deliberative point of view.

19 Of course, not all of the implications of a person's beliefs and motives will be instantiated in her psyche. And new beliefs and motives are often derived from old ones in ways that are not warranted by (or which may even be prohibited by) theoretical or practical reason. But while the actual web will sometimes diverge from the ideally rational system derivable from the core beliefs and motives, the structure of our psychological networks will, for the most part, roughly correspond to rational derivations of new beliefs and motives from existing ones.

20 See Williams, Bernard ‘Persons, Character and Morality,’ as well as ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism,’ in Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963), 108-18Google Scholar. Compare Richards, Norvin ‘A Conception of Personality,’ Behaviorism 14 (1986) 147-57Google Scholar.

21 I take this kind of narrative structure to exist independently of any attempt by the person actually to tell the story of her life. The act of narration is not necessary for the unity of the self through time and change. This makes my account of the narrative unity of the self somewhat deflationary, as compared to other possible views which emphasize the importance of narrative.

22 Philosophers concerned with the ontological notion of personal identity sometimes suggest that ontological personal identity is maintained over some long interval of time if the person's psychology remains similar between each successive shorter interval of time. See, for example, Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press 1984), 206ffGoogle Scholar. Schechtman has a helpful discussion of Parfit's, view in The Constitution of Selves, 43-6Google Scholar.

23 Classic examples of such theories of autonomy can be found in Frankfurt, Harry ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971) 5–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dworkin, Gerald The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Classic formulations of this objection can be found in Irving Thalberg, ‘Hierarchical Analyses of Unfree Action’; Watson, Gary ‘Free Agency’; and Susan Wolf, ‘Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility.’ These are all usefully collected in Christman, John ed., The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar. The introduction of that collection also provides an especially clear formulation of this objection.

25 I develop and defend an alternative to the hierarchical desire view of autonomy in ‘Autonomy, Value, and Conditioned Desire,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995) 57-69. There I suggest that certain radically heteronomous desires arise from informational states that are causally and informationally isolated from normal beliefs. One result of this isolation is that they are maximally peripheral in the sense defined here.

26 I admit that it is in some ways quite sketchy and metaphorical. Even so, the sketch is actually a bit more detailed than necessary for my purposes here. As will become apparent, the key ideas that I need are, first, that attitudes play a role in constituting one's particular identity; second, that not all attitudes play the same role; and third, that the role that any given attitude plays in the constitution of a person's identity depends on complex relations that it bears to other parts of that person's psychology.

27 This interpretation of Kant is deftly presented by Thomas Hill, in ‘Kant's Theory of Practical Reason’ in Dignity and Reason.

28 I thank an anonymous reader from Canadian Journal of Philosophy for raising this issue.

29 For Korsgaard's views, see Sources, chap. 3. For Herman's, see Practice, chaps. 2, 4, 8.

30 Indeed, both seem to take the idea that identity is a source of obligation as a premise, and then to argue that our common identities as rational agents give us the kinds of obligations Kant posited. Korsgaard argues in Sources that since our particular identities are sources of obligations, then so must our general identities as rational agents. See esp. 115-19. See Herman, Practice, 38Google Scholar, where she notes that’ an attachment to morality can itself be a project that gives life meaning …. One basic attachment, one self defining project, is morality itself.’ Presumably she means that morality is one such attachment among others.

31 In Herman's work this emphasis is tempered by an interest in ‘deriving Kantian duties from the situation of real agents’ (Practice, 205). The thought that Kant's ethics, at least as traditionally read, could benefit from more attention to particularity is, of course, an idea that Kantian Particularism shares. But Herman goes about ‘particularizing’ Kant in a rather different way. She argues that particular context enters into moral deliberation by way of the faculty of moral judgment which determines what particular features of a situation are morally relevant. Kantian Particularism, on the other hand, introduces sensitivity to particular features of a person by directing moral respect specifically toward the particular features of that person's identity.

32 Many Kantian ends — aims that have been the subject of deliberation and choice — will probably turn up near the core of one's motivational network. That is because they will often be chosen according to those criteria that are at the core. In addition, there will probably be some correlation between the strength of an aim and its location in the network: Often a more central desire will be more intense than a more peripheral one.

33 At least given the most natural filling out of the details of the examples. It is certainly possible, however, to imagine individuals for whom driving a BMW or psychedelic thrill-seeking is a major ‘ground project’ or for whom one's ethnic heritage or religious background meant little or nothing to her. If one has such people in mind, then the remarks here and below would have to be adjusted accordingly.

34 This is not to say that we must always refrain from satisfying frivolous preferences, or even that we must always give priority to core aims. Frivolity certainly has its place, but that does not make it any less frivolous.

35 I've discussed certain other implications of this basic view in ‘Integrity, the Self, and Desire-based Accounts of Individual Good’ (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies). There I argue that the network-based moral psychology has important implications for ideal desire accounts of well-being.