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The Objection to Systematic Humbug

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
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Is it quite all right to shake hands with murder in your heart?

The view that our feelings do not concern morality, that we have no duties about them, that it does not matter what we feel, so long as we act correctly, is often attributed to Kant. I am sure he did not hold it, and shall argue as much presently. Certainly it is not surprising that people have credited Kant with such a view. He did lay himself open to that suspicion, because he was too busy shooting at contrary errors to resist it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 204 , April 1978 , pp. 147 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1978

References

1 See his paper on ‘The Nature of Moral Philosophy’ in Philosophical Studies, P. 316.Google Scholar

2 Utilitarianism, Ch. 2, p. 17 (Everyman edn).Google Scholar

3 See a good recent discussion by Williams, Bernard in Utilitarianism For and Against, Ch. 5Google Scholar of his contribution.

4 It is worth noting that Moore could never in any case have endorsed this view, since he said firmly that ‘by far the most valuable things which we can see or imagine are certain states of consciousness’ (Principia Ethica, p. 188).Google Scholar

5 See Thought and Action, pp. 119, 216–222 and 245–250Google Scholar. The same view is more fully, though more crudely, expressed in his earlier paper, ‘Logic and Appreciation’ in Aesthetics and Language, Elton, W. (ed.) (1952)Google Scholar. I cannot here discuss his more central concern in Thought and Action—that of putting speculative thought beyond the control of the Will.

6 Nor is it just preparing to weep, moan, etc. Expressive acts can be performed by actors. They do not give point to feelings, but vice versa.

7 Existentialism and Humanism, p. 41Google Scholar (Mairet trans.).

8 It should, I think, be freely conceded that Dostoevsky and the novelists who have followed him have often weakened their case by exaggeration and paradox. They have sometimes unrealistically ignored or belittled the outer life. This has been a reaction against the contrary bias. Both excesses are bad. But Dostoevsky at his best does not do it, and I do not think he is doing it here.

9 These remarks may sound a trifle slapdash. I have discussed the matter much more fully in Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, forthcoming from the Cornell University Press. See particularly Chapter 12.

10 See a very interesting discussion of phrases like ‘evil, be thou my good’, by Anscombe, E., Intention, sec. 39.Google Scholar

11 Thus Blake—‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). But where there is conflict, one desire must be restrained, even without ‘Reason’.

12 ‘Reason… can of itself be practical’; ‘will is nothing else than practical reason’. Groundwork, pp. 27–29Google Scholar, Beck, 's translation (title Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals); p. 75Google Scholar, Paton, (title The Moral Law).Google Scholar

13 Utilitarianism, pp. 4 and 49 (Everyman edn).Google Scholar

14 Buber, Martin, I and Thou, p. 28.Google Scholar

15 The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774Google Scholar, made a great stir, and served as the bible of the religion of Feeling. It was followed by a wave of student suicides. Kant, 's Groundwork came out in 1785.Google Scholar

16 Groundwork, Beck, , pp. 43–53Google Scholar; Paton, , pp. 88–99.Google Scholar

17 Groundwork, Beck, , p. 14Google Scholar; Paton, , p. 64.Google Scholar

18 See e.g. Epictetus, , Diss. III, xxvi, 1.36Google Scholar; Aurelias, MarcusMeditations, V. 34, VII. 15, 26; VIII. 47.Google Scholar

19 Agamemnon, 177Google Scholar. The word is pathos.

20 Plato's panegyric on Romantic Love, magnificent though it is, must, I think be understood in this way. That love should move us towards Philosophy, and so towards our salvation, seems to be just an extraordinary and celestial piece of luck. It does nothing to recommend taking love itself, or any other feeling, seriously. This is true at least of the Phaedrus piece (244–257)Google Scholar. That in the Symposium (204–212)Google Scholar does come rather nearer to an explanation.

21 In doggerel translation, Schiller's verse runs:

‘Gladly I serve my friends, but I do it, alas, from affection.

Hence I am plagued with doubts that I am not a virtuous person…?’

‘Surely the answer is clear. First you must learn to abhor them,

Then you can do with disgust that which the law ordains.’

22 See for instance the passages which Paton has collected in a paper called ‘Kant on Friendship’, Proceedings of British Academy 42 (1956).Google Scholar

23 Groundwork, Beck, , pp. 9 and 15–16Google Scholar; Paton, , pp. 59 and 63–65.Google Scholar

24 See (or rather hear) Monteverdi, , The Coronation of Poppaea.Google Scholar

25 Paton translates, ‘Reverence is properly awareness of a value which demolishes my self-love’. But this cannot be right. ‘Demolishes’ is quite incompatible with Kant's clearly expressed acceptance of the necessary function of Self-Love on p. 85 (Beck, , pp. 39–40)Google Scholar and elsewhere. Beck, like Abbott, translates the word ‘thwarts’, which seems a natural and satisfactory rendering for ‘abbruch thun’. Kant does not need extra trouble.

26 For God's position, see Groundwork, Beck, , pp. 29–31 and 51–53Google Scholar; Paton, , pp. 77–78 and 95–96.Google Scholar

27 ‘I hate her and I love her. If you ask me why I do this, I cannot answer. But I feel it happen, and I am in torment.’

28 The notion that a certain situation could conceptually demand a certain sort of emotional response, which is mooted in this very remarkable footnote on Respect (Beck, , pp. 17–18Google Scholar; Paton, , pp. 66–67)Google Scholar, Sot further attention in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant explores the position of Beauty as being what we take to be ‘a ground of delight to all men’ and not just a cause of it (p. 50, Meredith trans.). Though struck by the strangeness of this, he insisted that it must be right.

29 Groundwork, Beck, , pp. 14–15Google Scholar; Paton, , p. 64.Google Scholar

30 Spock of Startrek, it should be noted, does not show no feeling. He just shows rather less than those around him. As these are a bunch of hysterical television actors, behaving like television actors, this accounts for his well-earned popularity.

31 See Dent, N., ‘Duty and Inclination’, in Mind (10 1974)Google Scholar, for a more thorough explosion of the idea that there has to be something false or unnatural about deliberately altering one's feelings.

32 See Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals, p. 176.Google Scholar

33 For the sort of circle which genuinely arises here, see Nicomachean Ethics, II, I, and IIIGoogle Scholar, s, even more interestingly, for the effect of this on our responsibility for being the kind of people that we are.