Here a typical take on Kant: he’s terrible because he wants you deny your natural and human motivations. He wants you to do things because they are your duty, not because they suit your nature. This would ruin love and love-based relationships. He would have you tell the truth to some Nazi at your door. He’s crazy.
Think of it this way: Baron is Kant’s PR guy.
It is a ton of work to study chapter 5, but it is worth it. Let me take this opportunity to describe again the big pay-off to studying this stuff that I have been mentioning all semester. To help motivate you for chapter 5.
1. I bet some of the details will become permanent fixtures in your brains, and this will be handy because you will forever after have a pretty good grasp on Kant. Such a skill might not come up every day, but it can be handy if you ever come across someone merely pretending to understand the guy.
2. Also, memorizing an account like Baron’s tends to, I think, just make the world more interesting even if the details fade: something like the structure of her proposal lingers on in a person’s understanding, so that we are more ready recipients of complicated proposals for ever after.
There is so much to get through in chapter 5 — I am going to try to give you in this post a grasp of her agenda. In class Thursday (the baby is fine, and I will be back) we’ll practice depicting in detail the moral psychology of Kant, which is what she is trying to do in this chapter.
Here are the main issues this chapter addresses.
a. Other critics and interpreters of Kant have been misguided to the extent that they fail to recognize the complexities Marcia reports in Kant’s moral psychology. They exist! Careful attention to Kant’s writing bears this out.
b. According to Baron, when it comes to moral actions, there are times when duty is NOT a sufficient motive. This is so complicated, but it comes down to this: duty cannot get you to chose the “when” and the “how” aspect of an imperfect duty. It simply cannot get you there. So when you buy a gift for Katherine—duty is incapable of picking out the gift.
c. Baron thinks the focus Kant places on “moral worth” is regrettable and confusing. She will not handle the issues of this chapter by using some measure of the moral worth of actions.
d. Baron rejects several accounts of duty in this chapter. One is the notion that duty is a “back up” motivation. In other words, you are not going to be able to say “I do this because I love you, but if I didn’t love you I’d do it out of duty.”
e. Baron is embarrassed by some of what Kant wrote. She has to apologize for him in this chapter. Here is an example: Kant wrote “all admixture of incentives which derive from one’s own happiness are a hindrance to the influence of the moral law on the human heart”?
f. There is one sense of “overdetermined” that applies to Kant, and that he can accept. Let’s say love is what normally motivates, say, our parents’s behavior towards us. Their behavior is moral as long as duty is also a sufficient motivation. “Of course I would do that, I am your mother” sounds like the duty talking. It is “layered” with the love, but duty alone would get your mom to be kind to you.
OK, to situate ourselves– let’s look to where she wants to get. Turn to page 186. What does she want for Kant? What does she suggest is possible for him?
She wanted to defend Kant from the notion that Kant puts too much value on acting from duty. They way she does this is by introducing some distinctions of her own (ones we were introduced to last time: primary and secondary motives.) By invoking these, she does not have to deny where Kant “does seem” to “attribute special value” to duty. But she gets to point out that there is no reason to hold that duty is more valuable as a primary motive than as a secondary motive.
I know this is very complicated. She is doing some serious alteration of Kant, in a sense. He does not talk of secondary and primary duties. So she is suggesting that IF we take these distinctions to apply, THEN Kant’s praise of duty is not so bad BECAUSE duty can work as a SECONDARY MOTIVE as well as in the more typical case he mentions (where it is a PRIMARY MOTIVE.)
In other words, she is critical of Kant as he reads. According to her, he does seem to over-emphasize duty. He needs to emphasize moral psychology and secondary motives more. Alex, can you tell us more about the reasons Baron has for making this criticism?
Baron also has a second problem with Kant. Let’s take a collective glance at the passages from Kant, p. 185. These sentiments of Kant’s are also regrettable in her view. He should “not” have “spoken” about moral worth in these ways. Read these passages carefully. Brooklyn, can you sum them up for us?
A lot of people think of Kant as a “reject sensuous attachments” kind of guy. Baron is rejecting this depiction of him. But note: it is not as if this depiction is just a caricature. He says these things. It is just that, on balance, Baron is going to argue these things do not fit with what he says more frequently. This happens when we interpret older philosophers. They aren’t always consistent, and fans see no reason to bind them to every single view they espouse. The result would be to treat the figure as merely being incoherent. Baron is attempting to edit Kant a bit, to make him coherent. But be aware of how easy it is to cast doubts on what she is doing. Think hard about these passages.
Now, let us move to the start of the chapter. She offers many possible ways to make sense of “overdetermination” (and these match different ways of thinking about duty.) She begins by pointing out how ambiguous the notion of overdetermined actions is. Lot’s of things are overdetermined of course. If you go to lunch both because you are hungry and because you want to see a friend there—your action is overdetermined. But this is to give us no information about your actual incentive when acting.
So even this philosophical notion (not much use for it practically) is vague and confused as a result. Baron tries to straighten this out. She begins by distinguishing HYBRID action from an OVERDETERMINED action.
A HYBRID action is one that requires TWO motives to be working together to get something done. It is kind of an unfortunate name she’s given it. But if you would skip lunch if your friend were not there, and if you would not see your friend for lunch if you were not also hungry: well, you have a HYBRID action. You needed two motives to work together to get it done.
These Kant clearly will not count as having moral worth. Go ahead and have lunch, go ahead and donate money if it makes you feel good: but do not turn to him for moral credit. Hybrid acts are not what he considers moral. Daniel, why is this?
So then Baron is left to argue that an action merely being OVERDETERMINED is NOT a problem for Kant IF WE INVOKE THE RIGHT SENSE OF OVERDETERMINED.
THE WRONG SENSE OF OVERDETERMINED IS the idea that you can do something because it is moral and because you want to. Nicole, can you describe this “wrong sense” of overdetermined to us? If you are using it, you cannot say that Kant even allows for overdetermined actions to be moral. Andrew, can you explain why this is for us?
THE RIGHT SENSE OF OVERDETERMINED is the LAYERED sense I mentioned above. Baron, of course, thinks Kant needs to talk of primary and secondary motives. She wants us to see duty as being commonly a secondary motive. This means you visit your wife because you love her. It is also your duty. But loving her is not a “want to do” motivation. It is a moral motivation “regulated” by duty. You only love your wife SO FAR AS it is moral. No killing for your wife, for example. That kind of love is not “regulated” by a secondary motive. John, does this explain matters enough? Can you help further?
Baron wants the combination of love (etc.) and duty to be no problem for Kant. He must allow something like love to work as a primary motive and give the behavior moral credit for Baron to get what she wants. So how does she put this? She says it is “possible” for Kant to see things her way. By p. 169-170 she is ready to demonstrate this precise possibility.
Let’s consider how she does this in these steps.
1. Would Kant really want to say that the only moral worth we can grant is to something that is motivated by duty alone? Baron is going to argue “no.”
2. According to Baron, when Kant emphasizes duty, it is just to ‘isolate’ the phenomenon of a good will. Without using a very clear example of being motivated by duty alone, he can’t make it clear that “love” or some other motive, is not moral. Abby, can you explain Baron’s take on this further?
3. Where she departs from Kant: she does NOT want your mom acting “because she is your mom” to count for MORE MORALLY than when she is acting out of duty and love. If this is what Kant wants (and some passages seem to suggest it) she is going to have to disagree with Kant (or disagree with him in those places, and he is inconsistent.)
But she tries to explain that Kant has good worries about the “impurity” that can be encouraged if we do not emphasize the need for duty to motivate us. It is natural for us to do things out of love. If he is not careful, people will not recognize the need to do things out of duty as well. It is just that Baron thinks he should have been more clear to show how compatible love and duty are.
4. The Pablo/ Paulo example. Katherine, what is it that Baron shows through these two contrasting examples?
5. We have been given all the details in this chapter of Kant’s account of moral psychology. For example: what purity is, what it is to have our wills determined by law.
Here is something we will do in class Thursday, but you can practice all you want as you read this chapter. Draw a big heart on a piece of paper, and for full credit, do the following. Depict a heart that is as pure as it can be. Relate this heart to: imperfect and perfect duties. Include somehow in the heart inclination and duty. Relate these in some meaningful way to the categories of primary and secondary motives. Relate all of this somehow to the “moral law.” For a bonus point: fit the good will in there somewhere.
Also, see if, by the end of reading chapter 5, you can answer with confidence the following. We will then try to do the same in class.
1. According to Marcia Baron, it is possible to always act from duty as a primary motive. T F
2. According to Marcia Baron, Kant wants us try as best we can to at all times act from duty as a primary motive. T F
3. According to Marcia Baron, it would be good for Kant to grant actions done from duty special moral worth. T F
4. According to Baron, duty and inclination can never be thought to “mix.” T F
5. According to Baron, duty and inclination can be thought to “blend. “ T F (p. 161)
5. According to Baron, one can both act from the sense that something is required and because one wants to do something, at the same time. T F
6. According to Baron, one cannot both act from the sense that you should do something and because you want to do this thing, at the same time. T F
If you post a comment to this (which would be great) it seems to take a while for it to show up! But they do eventually.
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