6 | THE PRESUMPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS

THERE IS CURRENTLY a boom in an interest in ethics, and my professional field—academic philosophy—is by no means an exception. Ethics is probably the most popular area in philosophy, certainly among those that offer the best chance of employment. This is, of course, nothing new. Ethics has always been one of the main strands of Western philosophy ever since its beginnings in ancient Greece. Still, I would argue, there is a specific reason why philosophical ethics is nowadays so in vogue. Traditionally, Western philosophy was generally conceived of, and conceived of itself, as the most fundamental academic discipline, as the source of all valuable knowledge about humans and the world. The natural sciences as well as many social sciences, and, of course, fields in the humanities, had their place in philosophy and were seen as an integral part of it. This is no longer the case. Today no one considers it necessary to study Plato or Aristotle in order to become a physicist, biologist, or even psychologist. When all these disciplines gained practical applicability, academic independency, and public prestige through their separation from philosophy, the prestige of philosophy shrank. Many people in contemporary North American society have no idea whatsoever what philosophy is about—nor what it is “good for.” While most people also have no clue about what exactly academic physicists or psychologists do, they normally assume that they are doing something useful and practical. Accordingly, these fields are able not only to sustain their social esteem but also their public and private funding. This is not the case when it comes to the humanities, and particularly when it comes to philosophy. Ethics seems to be if not the only, then, at least, the most promising, field within philosophy that can pretend to be useful and thus gain recognition and public funds. Few people know or understand what analytic philosophers of language and experts on the history of Continental philosophy actually do and would probably not be particularly enthusiastic about funding them with their tax dollars if they did know. The situation is different with regard to ethics, and this is why it is so important—at least for the survival of academic philosophy.

Ethics is the most applicable field in philosophy. Look at any course calendar to see a list of its multiplying branches: bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, and so on. All these areas can be sold to financing agencies, the administration, the media, and students. They give the impression that they actually contribute to social progress, to a better world, to the public good. All professional philosophers should be grateful to ethics. It allows them to do whatever they do as long as the ethicists shield them from the public eye. Without ethics, the phenomenologists and the experts on Frege would likely be in trouble. Thus both the public and the philosophical profession profit from ethics. The public can happily assume that there are experts who research what is good—and who would not want to know this or at least make some scientific progress toward it? We can be assured that there are people who take care of discovering, protecting, and distributing values in society. The philosophers, on the other hand, can claim that they are in fact useful and therefore need to be given good salaries and plenty of time to read and write books—or do whatever else they do. Being a professional philosopher myself, I often feel that my social status is somewhat similar to that of the cleric in medieval times. No one is really sure what exactly my services consist of, but there is a consensus that it must be something valuable and important, that I deserve to be well paid to teach the young, and that I should be allowed to spend most of my time not producing anything tangible.

There are at present an abundance of philosophical ethics and it would be tiring and confusing to even attempt a list here. Instead, I focus on two moral philosophers who are, in my view, indicative of what ethicists do and attempt to achieve. They are two founding fathers of modern moral philosophy and among the most influential figures in contemporary Western ethics. There are, of course, many others of considerable importance, but I believe that these two deserve special consideration. I think their approach to moral philosophy is quite symptomatic of what has become of Western ethics and what it presumes to be able to achieve. The two philosophers are Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant. Having these two in mind, Niklas Luhmann stated: “The ethics of utilitarianism and of transcendental theory both aimed at a rational or (in the exceptional German case) a reasonable justification of moral judgments.”¹ Modern Western ethics set out to rationally determine what is good or the conditions for what is to be considered good. Many different answers have been given. Still, I think that one does not need to look far to see that the project has been a grotesque disappointment. The epistemological optimism regarding the possibility of constructing a universally valid ethics proved to be unwarranted. Empirically speaking, Luhmann says, academic ethics have failed.² I agree.

The basic problem with academic ethics—and, in particular, with their modern founding fathers—is that it pretends to be a scientific endeavor. It pretends to be able to do actual research on values and norms of behavior and to come up with concrete suggestions of what to do. “What should we do?” is, according to Kant, one of the basic questions of philosophy, and many philosophers have thought and still think that they can come up with definite answers to that question. Ethicists thus typically conceive of themselves not so differently as, let’s say, researchers on traffic who find out how to create a safe and speedy transportation infrastructure. Traffic researchers’ efforts have led to some quite impressive results. Transit in developed Western countries usually functions surprisingly well (see the introduction for more about this). People by and large obey the same rules and follow the same instructions—and everybody is more or less happy with the results. The same thing cannot be said about academic ethics. The scientific truths established by Kant, Bentham, and others are not actually practiced systematically in society. Here and there people follow some rules (often not even knowing that such rules exist); some people even turn to academic ethicists to justify what they do; but no specific set of ethics actually guides our behavior in the way that traffic rules and regulations guide how most people in North America and Europe drive. There is a huge gap between the normative claims of ethicists and the actual application of these claims in society. While many branches of ethics call themselves applied and while there are certainly quite a few people who take the findings of these academic efforts seriously, it cannot be said that we have an overarching, generally accepted and practiced set of scientifically established and proven ethics that the population follows on the whole. People certainly consider themselves to behave ethically—and criticize others for not doing so—but there are no identifiable ethical policies or principles established by a specific school of ethics that are generally acknowledged to be the right ones. Neither the Kantian transcendental theory nor Bentham’s utilitarianism is actually the foundation for how most people in our society act or for what they believe is good. The average person does not follow a specific system of ethical rules. Unlike traffic scientists, applied ethicists have failed to successfully apply their rules and norms. Certainly, all kinds of professional ethical codes today are influenced by various ethical philosophies, but there is no one scientific moral system (like Kant’s or Bentham’s) that is generally practiced. Philosophers like Kant and Bentham stated that they had identified the basic principles for good behavior that, if applied, would bring about a scientifically founded good society. Their assertions, however, turned out to be overly optimistic. Some of their rules and norms are followed (and were probably followed long before they were formulated), but their respective claims to have scientifically identified the definite principles of how to act seem rather presumptuous.

Kant titled the concise summary of his transcendental philosophy the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as Science. He believed—like many other philosophers have—that he had finally managed to turn philosophy into a real science. The principles and axioms he had found were not some idiosyncratic inventions and constructions, but actual scientific truths—not so different, for instance, from the truths discovered by physicists, only more fundamental and reasonable. He also clearly believed that after him, any philosophy (that could justifiably claim to be scientific) would have to be based on his own as the scientific paradigm. This turned out be quite a presumptuous prediction. Kant’s scientific metaphysics includes not only the analysis of pure reason but also the analysis of practical reason. Besides the Critique of Practical Reason, he published Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals, which outline his moral science.

Kant explicitly states in the first paragraphs of the preface to Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals that he considers his moral philosophy to be scientific. According to him, ethics is the science of the laws of freedom.³ It is the science of how to make correct use of our own free will to establish a society based on reason. There is only one reason, and, accordingly, only one reasonable set of ethical rules. Reason is not historical or culturally relative. Strictly speaking, reason has no history and knows no cultural difference. Reason is universal, and if we are able to scientifically understand reason, we will be able to come up with definite guidelines for living reasonably. Kant believed that he had discovered the fundamental principles of reason and reasonable behavior and was thus showing to the world, for once and for all, what can truly be called good and evil. He believed he had found the scientific answer to the perennial question: “What are we to do?”

Kant distinguishes clearly between empirical philosophy and science, which deals with actual experience, and what he calls pure philosophy, which deals not with actual experience but (if it is not merely formal) with reason and understanding alone. Pure reason is transcendental reason, reason that precedes experience. It is reason that is not yet, so to speak, soiled by experience. It is the basic structure of reason that enables us to have experience in the first place. Kant’s aim in his moral philosophy is to come up with a moral metaphysics that “must be carefully purified of everything empirical . . . a pure moral philosophy that is wholly cleared of everything which can only be empirical and can only belong to anthropology.”⁴ This means that the principles of morality have nothing to do with empirical conditions, such as cultural or historical conditions (the science of anthropology would have to take care of these), but are principles that precede any concrete empirical situation. These principles are purely reasonable. They follow unambiguously and necessarily from an analysis of reason alone. Once we understand how reason works—independently and prior to its application in life—we will be able to determine how to use it to guide our behavior. A scientific ethics is concerned with identifying how reason works and what is reasonable independent of any concrete situation. By doing so it will be able to define the only reasonable way of acting in the world. Kant is, as usual, very apodictic about this: “All moral philosophy rests entirely on its pure part.”⁵ Everything that we can scientifically establish about how to act in a truly good way must be based exclusively on the scientific analysis and understanding of reason, a reason untouched by anything empirical.

Kant was obsessed with purity. To me, he is the philosophical equivalent of those who suffer from an obsessive compulsion to clean their hands continuously and are afraid to touch anything that has not been disinfected. He believed in the absolute cleansing of ethics—and I am quite alarmed when it comes to such visions. The homeland I share with Kant has a quite problematic historical record with respect to applied cleansings.

Kant not only believed in the complete purity of his ethics, but also in its scientific nature. Being scientific it was the only feasible ethics and hence, the only possible and absolutely necessary foundation for a good society. This is the reason why he says: “A metaphysics of morals is thus indispensably necessary.”⁶ Kant had discovered the true structure of reason, and any account that substantially differed from his own had to be wrong. He believed his ethical findings to be as solid as the law of gravity.

The basic ethical principle identified and “discovered” by Kant is, of course, the categorical imperative. The better known of its two famous formulations is found in section 7 of the Critique of Practical Reason. It is, in Kant’s words, the “foundational law of pure practical reason,” and it states that one should act in such a way that the maxim of one’s will can always be held as a principle of common law. The categorical imperative basically says that the maxim of one’s action should not be self-contradictory. I cannot reasonably say it is good for me to lie, for instance, because I would then also implicitly state that it is good for everybody to lie. This would cause the very concept of lying to become meaningless because the distinction between truthfulness and nontruthfulness would have been undermined. The maxim “it is OK to lie” is therefore self-refuting and has, for purely rational reasons, to be classified as immoral. The test for the categorical imperative is, according to Kant, a purely rational test of the “universalizability” of any given practical “maxim.” If it is universalizable, it is morally sanctioned, if not, then not. The test seems to be free of any empirical conditions and proves the rightness or wrongness of a maxim once and for all.

Hegel was, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, among the first to come up with a thorough criticism of the categorical imperative. In the section “Reason as Testing Laws” he discusses the issue of private property. Is it OK to steal? Well, if one assumes that private property is a good thing, then obviously not. I cannot say “it is good for me to steal” because this would be self-contradictory. I would, on the one hand, claim the right to private property for myself and deny it to others. But why is private property a good thing in the first place? This is a specific cultural and historical assumption. In a society that does not acknowledge private property, there is nothing wrong with using objects that do not belong to me. One focus of Hegel’s critique is that the supposedly categorical character of Kant’s moral imperative makes it empty and inapplicable. It is supposed to be totally pure of empirical conditions but there are no ethics outside of empirical conditions. Once there is a moral question, it is always within an empirical context. And if one abstracts from all empirical conditions (such as the existence or nonexistence of private property in a society) then one cannot perform Kant’s test at all. In order to perform the supposedly pure test, we always have to adduce some sort of empirical context. Hegel concludes: “It is not, therefore, because I find something is not self-contradictory that it is right; on the contrary it is right because it is what is right.”⁷ Kant’s German purity law of ethics itself seems to be quite contradictory. It pretends not to be historically and culturally contingent, whereas, in fact, it has to be.

My main concern with Kant’s puritan ethics, however, is not that it is philosophically unsound. I am more worried by the actual ethical prescriptions that Kant arrived at on the basis of the categorical imperative. It is most troublesome to see, on the one hand, Kant’s insistence on the purity and scientific necessity of his ethics and, on the other hand, the actual ethical guidelines he comes up with. What is most bizarre and grotesque about Kant’s ethical system is the obvious gap between its scientific and universalist attitude and the actual moral teachings he bequeathed us.

I discuss four concrete examples from The Metaphysics of Morals: his views on sex, servants, the death penalty, and the killing of illegitimate children. Before I do this I stress once more that Kant considered the following examples to be absolutely scientific. They are meant to be based solely on rational and reasonable analysis and absolutely pure or devoid of any cultural or historical contingencies. They are meant to be scientifically valid for every rational human being at any time and any place—including the readers of this book.

In a chapter on marriage, Kant points out that “sexual union” consists in “the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another.” He further notes that this use can either be “natural” or “unnatural,” the first meaning hetero-sexual sex and the latter homosexuality and sex with animals. The latter are “unmentionable vices” for which “there are no limitations or exceptions whatsoever that can save them from being repudiated completely.” Homosexuality is, “categorically,” the same as having sex with animals—and there is absolutely no way to make it socially or morally acceptable. It must be deemed extremely immoral. Similarly immoral is, as Kant concludes soon after, premarital or extramarital sex. If people want to have sex they “must necessarily marry.” Premarital or extramarital sex (even if heterosexual) is gravely unethical and a violation of universally and scientifically valid moral principles.⁸

We also learn a little further on that “servants are included in what belongs to the head of a household and, as far as the form (the way of his being in possession) is concerned, they are his by a right that is like a right to a thing; for if they run away from him he can bring them back in his control by his unilateral choice.”⁹ According to Kant, it is scientifically established that, morally, we can own servants as we own objects and that it is perfectly ethical to hunt them down if they flee.

Kant also instructs us about the morality of punishment. Penal law, according to him, is firmly grounded in moral principles. Very much like Walter Berns, Kant argues that killing certain criminals is morally necessary.¹⁰ Kant says that “every murderer—anyone who commits murder, orders it, or is an accomplice in it—must suffer death.” The death penalty is, as Kant hastens to add “in accordance with universal laws that are grounded a priori.” Obviously, many countries in the world, including Canada and most of Europe, are highly immoral and unreasonable because they have outlawed the death penalty. Even legal practice in the United States is not fully acceptable since, even there, not every murderer is condemned to death. Given the relatively small number of death sentences in most countries, the world has been violating on a large scale some of the most basic universal ethical principles—with the noteworthy exception, one might add, of the Taliban, (Perhaps the Taliban had some Kantian ethical advisors for their legal policies.) To stress that the death penalty is universally mandatory Kant gives the following example: “If a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world, the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve.” The death penalty is a “metaphysical” duty that cannot be neglected, even if it makes no practical sense. It is a necessary moral cleansing.¹¹

Interestingly, Kant mentions a particular exemption, a case where killing does not constitute a murder, and in which, therefore, the death penalty is not called for. This case is a mother’s killing of a child born out of wedlock. Kant once more instructs us about the scientific moral evaluation of such a case: “A child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law (for the law is marriage) and therefore outside the protection of the law. It has, as it were, stolen into the commonwealth (like contraband merchandise), so that the commonwealth can ignore its existence (since it rightly should not have come to exist in this way), and can therefore also ignore its annihilation.” “Illegitimate” children, have, according to pure and universal moral principles, the status of “contraband merchandise,” and therefore their mothers can “annihilate” them without having to fear they will be accused of murder.¹²

These examples clearly illustrate, in my view, how grotesque Kantian moral philosophy is. It pretends to scientifically identify universal moral principles based on pure reason. The outcome of these principles, however, is nothing but a crude affirmation of the dominating morals of Kant’s time and culture—phrased in an extremely pompous pseudoscientific and pseudolegal jargon. It is not my intention to discuss the immorality of Kant’s views on sex, servants, the death penalty, and the killing of children by single mothers—my point of view is not a moral one. What I intend to show is Kant’s incredible philosophical arrogance. Kant’s ethical views are obviously not universal nor based only on pure reason. Since this is the case, his whole ethical system is a monstrous failure. And it proves one of the main claims of this book: Ethics are potentially harmful and can easily lead to social conflict and the use of violence. With such a moral philosophy one can scientifically prove that homosexuals and people who have sex outside of marriage have to be morally and legally condemned, that all murderers and their accomplices must be legally killed, and that certain children can be “annihilated.” Reading Kant, I cannot but think of the Zen Buddhist Linji and what he said about philosophical moralists: “There’s a bunch of fellows who can’t tell good from bad but poke around in the scriptural teachings, hazard a guess here and there, and come up with an idea in words, as though they took a lump of shit, mushed it around in their mouth, and then spat it out and passed it on to somebody else.”¹³

Jeremy Bentham, one of Kant’s contemporaries, developed an ethical system that is quite different in content. What Kant and Bentham have in common is their level of presumption. Both claimed to have identified scientifically the principles of good and evil. Like Kant, Bentham thought that his insights were universally valid and rational and that the world had to follow his system if it wanted to be truly moral. Both believed they had done the world an important service with the publication of their treatises.

Bentham’s “principle of utility” is quite simple and straightforward. I quote the first two sentences from the first chapter of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”¹⁴ In the same apodictic manner as Kant, Bentham claims to have identified the only principles of any possible scientific ethics. In his case, all ethics have to be derived from evaluations of pain and pleasure. Everything that brings more pleasure than pain is good; everything that does not is evil. The problem, of course, is how to establish what is pleasurable and what not—and for whom. Bentham, however, is not hesitant about his project. His treatise is mainly concerned with how to determine, or, more precisely, to measure, pain and pleasure. His ethics, in the end, are a mathematical ethics that pretend to be able to scientifically calculate pain and pleasure—both for individuals and for society as a whole—and thus to distinguish good from evil in a purely rational way. Unlike Kant, Bentham did not pretend to avoid empirical considerations, but he did believe that he had established the universal scientific principles of morality.

I do not list here the pedantic and often grotesque details of Bentham’s analysis or his “felicific calculus” by which happiness can be precisely measured. Interested readers may want to look into this themselves. I suggest such passages as the note on how the weight that “a man [sic]” can lift relates to his sensibility for pain and pleasure.¹⁵ (Weight lifting thus becomes an efficient tool for evaluating the moral quality of certain public policies.) Equally interesting is Bentham’s scientific consideration of the effect of gender on ethics (via the sensibility for pain and pleasure): “In point of quantity, the sensibility of the female sex appears in general to be greater than that of the male. The health of the female is more delicate than that of the male: in point of strength and hardiness of body, in point of quantity and quality of knowledge, in point of strength of intellectual powers, and firmness of mind, she is commonly inferior: moral, religious, sympathetic, and antipathetic sensibility are commonly stronger in her than in the male.”¹⁶

Again, I am not interested in judging the immorality of such statements. But, as with Kant, I am flabbergasted by how the pseudoscientific nature of Bentham’s claims compares with the banality and obvious cultural limitations of what he actually says. There is here the same level of academic pretension that one finds in Kant and the same stereotypical stupidity of many of his actual moral judgments. It has often been said that Bentham’s ethical measurements and ideal of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” could be used for justifying any social arrangement that serves the pleasure of a powerful group. Slavery, for instance, could be deemed good if it inflicts pain only on a social minority (and, if one considers this scientifically, a minority which can be found to be less sensitive to pain on the basis of its ethnicity) and gives great pleasure to a large, and more sensitive, majority.

Bentham was more interested in and much more active than Kant with respect to applied ethics. He wanted to be given the opportunity to shape legislation and for his free market morals to be practiced throughout the world. He tried to persuade the British government to adopt his invention the Panopticon. This prison, based on Bentham’s moral science, would be circular in shape so that all cells could be constantly observed from the center of the building. He also took part in the public debates about how to deal with poverty in Britain and, again on the basis of his moral science, “insisted that those unable or unwilling to work for their own subsistence should not be better off than those who did. In addition, he proposed a system of Industry Houses run by a joint-stock company to house the indigent and make provision for them to labour and through labour acquire the virtues of frugality, sobriety, and industry.”¹⁷

More so than Kant, Bentham actively tried to impose his ethical system on others. He presumed that his ethics would establish a morally correct society and that any society must apply his principles in order to become good. The actual substance of his ethical suggestions about prisons and the poor demonstrates once more the potential social dangers of such a fundamentalist ethics. Kant’s and Bentham’s ethical presumptions were slightly different in character but, in my mind, equally grotesque—and their ethical systems were both monstrous failures.

Notwithstanding their often bizarre moral prescriptions and their pseudoscientific presumptions, Kant and Bentham are still considered to be among the most important and most influential moral philosophers in the modern West. Moral philosophies based on reason or utilitarian principles still flourish inside and outside of academic ethics. But hardly any neo- or post-Kantian advocates the killing of illegitimate children, and most utilitarians do not operate with the felicific calculus. The proponents of today’s philosophical ethics would say that such errors have been corrected and, thus, that ethics have actually progressed. Our current academic ethics, they could say, may be founded on thinkers like Kant and Bentham, but we have gone beyond them. Our present ethics are much better than our historic predecessors. Why then should I throw out the baby with the bathwater and rail against all academic ethics relying only on some of the peculiar absurdities of philosophers who are long dead?

I am not particularly interested in blaming Kant or Bentham for having come up with wrong or even immoral ethical claims. My prime concern is their presumptuousness, their claim to be able to scientifically establish what is good and bad. In this respect, contemporary Kantian ethicists or utilitarians are not so different. Even today, ethicists often argue that their principles are universally valid. And if they are not ethical universalists, they still normally believe that they are able to identify certain principles and guidelines that should be applied in society. They have the habit of prescribing certain ethical codes to society that are presumed to be academically (and thus, scientifically) valid. I believe, with Wittgenstein, that ethics are inexpressible. And by this I mean that there is no such thing as “moral science.” One can, of course, debate what is right and wrong and bring forth good and not so good reasons why this is so. One can have similar arguments with respect to religious or aesthetic values. I do not doubt or deny this. But morality does not seem to be objectively determinable. And if people try to establish scientifically what is good and bad (or, as in the case of Habermas and his followers, the rules for determining rationally what is good and bad), then, it seems to me, this can easily become not only ridiculously grotesque, but also socially dangerous since it easily leads to fundamentalist claims for its application. The same could be said with respect to religious and aesthetic values. Wittgenstein said that if a book were to state conclusively what was right and wrong, all other books would explode.¹⁸ Both Kant and Bentham thought they had written such a book, but so far—in my view, at least—the only books that have exploded are their own.