Kant’s False Basis For Ethics – The Preeminence Of The Autonomous Self

by Gary L. Morella

Kant’s ethics can best be characterized as the preeminence of the autonomous self as the sole moral arbiter to the total exclusion of nature and nature’s God.

Kant wanted to defend a realm of freedom, which is implicitly experience in each individual’s deliberation and action. Kant maintains that human beings are free using two related arguments. 1) I must acknowledge or experience my freedom in every act of deliberation that I engage in. It’s in my power to bring about A or B, and it’s my freedom of choice that leads me to A or B. If I’m seriously deliberating, I’m implicitly assuming my own freedom else my deliberations are a mockery. Thus, I must presuppose myself to be self-determining, the author of principles independent of the foreign influence of the absolute, universal laws of nature and nature’s God. 2) Per Newtonian mechanics my body is under the sway of physical mechanical causes. My passions, instincts are under the sway of this causal necessity. And yet, I find myself obliged by a moral law discovered within me to discern in situations involving moral dilemmas or conflicts that there is an opposition between my instincts and passions which would go the way of satisfying my pleasures and my happiness and what the moral law, the "categorical imperative," demands of me.

For Kant this recognition that I find myself under a law calling me to act in situations of duty against whatever inclinations that I have running contrary to that duty, is an awakening to a free capacity within me that is properly human. This is proof that I possess a rational independence from external causes such as the absolute, universal laws of nature and nature’s God. Kant’s realm of freedom is separate and can come into conflict with the bodily realm of mechanical necessity. He doesn’t argue that this moral law is given by God, nature, or society. I give it to myself according to Kant. I am autonomous, a self-ruler. Each individual as he understands himself to be free is also the originator of this law and subject to it simultaneously. The common humanity of persons is recognized through recognizing each individual’s autonomy. "I’m OK, you’re OK!" Kant thinks that if I were to construe or accept this law from some outside authority, God, nature, or society, I would no longer be autonomous. I would be operating heteronomously (ruled by another). This heteronomy is taken to be a fundamental evasion of my own responsibility and dignity as a person. Kant respects in other persons their dignity. For Kant this dignity consists in obeying a law we give ourselves. Kant’s views on the human person and human dignity are expressed in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals.

Kant recognizes that natural and moral laws deal with what does happen and what ought to happen respectively taken in a fundamental context. One might be quick to assume that he, by such a recognition, sees the difference between authentic freedom, doing what we ought, vs. license, doing what we want. But this is not the case because he misses the truth that natural and moral laws are intimately related for societal common good irrespective of any divine connotations. For example Kant would have no problem with the promotion of homosexuality as a civil right since such a concept is a function of an individual’s with homosexual attractions autonomy to define and legislate his own moral law.

For Kant the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of morality are self-contained within the individual who is causing no harm to his fellow man. Moreover, fellowman, is obliged to recognize this authority else the dignity of the moral legislator is being violated. The fact that the physical consequences of adhering to such a law are dire is of no concern to Kant as autonomy is all that matters.

It was a Kantian Supreme Court Justice masquerading as a Catholic that wrote the majority opinion previously described in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which recognized the unlimited freedom for the totally autonomous unencumbered self. Each individual can now define his own moral universe with no thought given to the simple question of what happens when A’s moral universe collides with B’s in the absence of some universal, absolute truth? The inevitable result of such idiocy is anarchy!

The inconsistency in Kant’s philosophy is his categorical imperative maxim: Act only according that what you do is a function of that action becoming a universal law. How is this possible when a myriad of universal laws unique to individuals may conflict with a similar number of universal laws unique to other individuals, i.e., how is the dignity of the latter set upheld in the face of this conflict of "morally relative universal" laws which is oxymoronic? Kant leaves us in his treatise on the metaphysics of morals with these perplexing statements. "To explain all this is quite beyond the power of human reason, and all effort and work of seeking such an explanation is wasted ... reason should not, to the detriment of morals, search around in the world of sense for the supreme motive and for some interest that is conceivable but is nonetheless empirical." Here Kant seems to commit the ultimate sin of pride by refusing to look in the only logical direction to philosophy’s final questions - theology. This separates him from the brilliance of Aquinas, his inability to reconcile faith and reason.

There is a principle or "rightful autonomy," not radical autonomy, at the heart of the moral life concerning man as the personal subject of his actions. The moral law has its origin in God and always finds its source in Him: at the same time, by virtue of natural reason, which derives from Divine Wisdom, it is a properly human law. The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided - no Kantian ambiguities here where all choices are equal. This law is called natural not because it refers to the nature of irrational things but because the reason which promulgates it is proper to human nature. We are commanded to respect the natural order and forbidden to disturb it. This is why sins against nature cry out to heaven for vengeance (Genesis 18:20-21) as they are sins against the very Author of nature. God cares for man not from without through the laws of physical nature, but from within through reason, which, by its natural knowledge of God’s eternal law, is consequently able to show man the right direction to take in his free actions. This participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is the natural law which involves universality in that it is inscribed in the rational nature of the person, and makes itself felt to all beings endowed with reason.

In summary, if all truth is personal and subjective per Kant and company as dignity demands, then in my very poor imitation of Saint Thomas Aquinas, I would simply ask "how are the questions posed by the following thought experiment answered?" Imagine someone arguing that human dignity is not absolute, but merely relative. There are two replies to such relativism, one theoretical and the other practical. First, a relativist actually makes an absolute claim in stating that "everything is relative." Not only do relativists theoretically contradict themselves with their own first premise, they contradict themselves in practice. As Peter Kreeft notes, "The relativist lets the cat out of the bag when you practice what he preaches, when you act toward him as if his own philosophy of relativism were true. He may preach relativism, but he expects you to practice absolutism.

Kreeft gives the example of telling his relativist students that all women in the class will flunk. Given their relativist premises, the students have no argument to make against so blatantly unfair a practice. Who are they, after all, to IMPOSE THEIR BELIEFS ON HIM? Now apply this reasoning to the dignity of all human life. Many today wish to apply relativism to the value of human life, arguing that personhood is not absolutely, but only relatively, applicable to all human beings. But the lines drawn in such application, based on convenience, are completely arbitrary. If someone tells you that life is complex and demands such arbitrariness, you could ask him, "so does that mean that you wouldn’t mind if a thief, faced with the ‘complexity’ of his own existence, decides to draw some arbitrary lines and steal your wallet?

No one in his right mind stands for the relativistic view of human dignity when it comes to his or her own human dignity. Each of us - even the hardened secularist who preaches relativism - instinctively recognizes that our dignity as persons implies certain moral absolutes of behavior. These moral absolutes are a function of the Natural Law, without which anarchy exists.

Carl Anderson observed, in In Search of a National Morality, that unlike Marxist societies, where the state asserts itself as the embodiment of morality, Western democracies have tended toward a different extreme of Enlightenment philosophy – the morally neutral state. This view of the state is also rooted in the Enlightenment’s view of the human person, its rejection of the Christian recognition of the "createdness of nature," and its replacement of the moral natural law with the abstract state of nature. [See Grant, English-Speaking Justice.] Having lost a sense of the moral natural law and thus of a highest good to which the human person is directed by nature in a teleological sense, which defined happiness for Aquinas, the morally neutral state deals with questions of justice in terms of social contract. George Parkin Grant observed that the influence of Kant upon legal philosophy was to lead to "a sharp division between morals and politics" [Ibid]. As he explained, "Properly understood, morality is autonomous action, the making of our own moral laws. Indeed any action is not moral unless it is freely legislated by an individual. Therefore the state is transgressing its proper limits when it attempts to impose on us our moral duties. . . . The state is concerned with the preservation of the external freedom of all, and must leave moral freedom to the individual" [Ibid].

From this perspective, as Anderson points out, it’s easy to see how in Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court judged the interest of personal choice to be paramount. [See Rice, Beyond Abortion: The Theory and Practice of the Secular State, and Noonan, A Private Choice; Abortion in America in the Seventies.] While the Court discussed abortion in terms of privacy, in reality the Court established a zone of autonomous decision-making in the best tradition of Kant. The Court based its ruling in Roe that the child before birth was not a person and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law upon the assertion that government could not resolve the difficult question of when the life of a human being begins. However, in choosing to hear the appeal in Roe rather than the appeal of a case with a more developed trial record on the question of the biological humanity of the unborn child, the Supreme Court did much to foreshadow the outcome in Roe.

In short, Kant stands in the forefront of those who wished to interpret Christianity as essentially a moral teaching separable from the mythical, cosmological, and dogmatic baggage that encumbers it. [See McInerny, The Question of Christian Ethics referring to Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.] The Christian message, thus saved, turns out to have no essential relationship to Christ – He just happened to recommend it, but, correctly understood, that doctrine is what any rational agent would come to see as his duty. Today that duty is manifested in demanding rights for aberrant self-destructive behavior, and the continued barbaric killing of babies in the womb – some resemblance to Christianity as a function of our "modern rational agents."

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, gets to the core of the matter when he says that the center of our problems is the rejection, at the dawn of the modern age, of what he calls the classical or Aristotelian tradition. This tradition consists of Aristotle himself and later thinkers, such as Aquinas and a number of other medieval writers, whose philosophies were written in a dialogue with Aristotle.

It is a mark of this tradition that it focuses on the virtues which enable man to attain his telos, or end. Man’s end for Aristotle was eudaimonia, which is translated variously as blessedness, happiness, or prosperity. "It is the state of being well and doing well in being well, of a man’s being well-favored himself and in relation to the Divine" [Ibid].

From about the middle of the 17^th century to the middle of the 19^th, diverse thinkers of the Enlightenment tried to find a non-Aristotelian basis for morality that would also be nontheological, owing to the decline in religion during that same period. It was hoped that these new philosophies would provide objective criteria for morality which would appeal to all rational men. But this Enlightenment project, as MacIntyre calls it, failed with Kant singled out as being one of the primary failures. [See Schram, Toward a Response to the American Crisis.]

Modern philosophy being nonteleological presented some difficulties in forming a morality. The solution was the denial of metaphysics which provided an opening for a new defining principle of morality that was characterized by the abandonment of nature, liberating morality from the shackles of the dogmatic pronouncements of the scholastics. This principle for Kant was duty, totally devoid of any concept of happiness as a function of nature, happiness depending only on appetite or whim. For Kant there exists only one thing we know that is good without qualification, and that is good will, independent of any questions regarding happiness or virtue. Thus, morality is reduced to a strict self-rationalization of the human being. It is duty and free will that makes morality possible with freedom or autonomy the peak of Kant’s ethics, a law unto itself free from Divine command. The classic idea of virtue is nonexistent here as to have moral worth, an action must be done from duty, not from some passion or purpose to be attained but by the maxim by which it is determined – a maxim given solely by the lawgiver in the mirror.

The modern moral rational agent will believe in God, freedom, and immortality out of necessity for God as a regulator to mollify the masses. But why believe in God, and what God are we talking about? Why, a God Who has been redefined to fit within the confines of a religion built on pure reason - rational belief. There’s no longer any need for the Bible. You do your duty in a moral sense assuming God will work it out, but you’ve left no room for God paradoxically with nature giving no support to morality. So what are you left with? The answer is sobering – a world in which hedonism is worshipped as a civil right in an affirmative action sense in myriad universes definable by each individual exercising his autonomy to the most ridiculous extremes imaginable, and the death and destruction of generations of children, all of which have dire eternal consequences. Sadly, many people today to include supposed believers, clergy and laity alike, don’t give a damn about damning themselves for eternity!