"Willingly serve I my friends, but I do it, alas with affection.
Hence I am plagued with this doubt, virtue I have not attained!"
to which he received the reply:
"This is your only resource, you must stubbornly seek to abhor them;
Then you can do with disgust that which the law may enjoin."
These verses are a caricature of Kant's position; he does not require that affections should be crushed, but that they should be stamped with acknowledgment of law before being accepted as motives. But the verses bring out the absurd element in the notion that the affections and inclinations may not of themselves be morally adequate springs to action,—as if a man could not eat his dinner simply because he was hungry, or be amiable to a companion because he wanted to be, or relieve distress because his compassionate nature urged him to it.
It is worth while noting that some moralists have gone to the opposite extreme and have held that an act is not right unless it expresses the overflowing spontaneity of the affections; that a man's act is only imperfectly right when he performs it not from affection, but from coercion by duty. Thus Emerson speaks of men who "do by knowledge what the stones do by structure." And again, "We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say, 'Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.'" The facts seem to be that while, in a good man, natural impulses and formed habits are adequate motive powers under ordinary conditions, there are times when an end, somewhat weak in its motive force because it does not express an habitually dominant power of the self, needs to be reënforced by associations which have gathered at all periods of his past around the experience of good. There is a certain reservoir of emotional force which, while far from fluid, is capable of transfer and application, especially in a conscientious person. Kant criticizes the moral sense theory on the ground that "in order to imagine the vicious man tormented with a sense of his transgressions, it must first represent him as morally good in the main trend of his character" (Abbott, p. 128). Well, a man who is capable of making appeal to the sense of duty in general, is the one in whom love of good is already dominant.
II. Tendency to Fanaticism and Idealization of Authority.—Kant's theory of fixed and final separation between desire and reason leads us into a fatal dilemma; either a right end is impossible, or any end is right provided we fall back on a belief that it is our duty to perform it. Kant holds that every concrete end, every definite purpose which we entertain, comes from desire. Law utters no specific command except "do your duty"; it stamps an end of desire as right only when it is pursued, not because it is an end of desire, but "from duty." The actual end which is before us is, in any case, supplied through inclination and desire. Reason furnishes principle as a motive. We have here, in another form, the separation of end and motive which has already occupied us (p. 248). End and motive are so disconnected, so irrelevant to one another, that we have no alternative except either to condemn every end, because, being prompted by desire, it falls so far short of the majesty of duty; or else fanatically to persist in any course when once we have formally brought it under the notion of duty.
The latter alternative would be the one chosen by a truly Kantian agent because it is alone possible in practice. But the moral fanatic does about as much evil in the world as the man of no moral principle. Religious wars, persecutions, intolerance, harsh judgment of others, obstinate persistence in a course of action once entered upon in spite of the testimony of experience to the harm that results; blind devotion to narrow and one-sided aims; deliberate opposition to art, culture, social amenities, recreations, or whatever the "man of principle" happens to find obnoxious: pharisaical conviction of superiority, of being the peculiar, chosen instrument of the moral law;—these and the countless ills that follow in their wake, are inevitable effects of erecting the isolated conviction of duty into a sufficient motive of action. So far as these evils do not actually flow from an acceptance of the Kantian principle, it is because that has been promulgated and for the most part adopted, where reverence for authority and law is strong. In Germany the Kantian philosophy has, upon the whole, served as a help in criticizing law and procedure on the basis of their rationality, while it has also served as a convenient stamp of rational sanction upon a politically authoritative régime, already fairly reasonable, as such matters go, in the content of its legislation and administration.
III. Meaning of Duty for Duty's Sake.—It is a sound principle to do our duty as our duty, and not for the sake of something else. "Duty for duty's sake" means, in truth, an act for the act's own sake; the gift of cold water, the word of encouragement, the sweeping of the room, the learning of the lesson, the selling of the goods, the painting of the picture, because they are the things really called for at a given time, and hence their own excuses for being. No moral act is a means to anything beyond itself,—not even to morality. But, upon Kant's theory, duty for duty's sake means a special act not for its own sake, but for the sake of abstract principle. Just as the hedonists regard a special act as a mere means to happiness, so Kant makes the concrete act a mere means to virtue. As there is a "hedonistic paradox," namely that the way to get happiness is to forget it, to devote ourselves to things and persons about us; so there is a "moralistic" paradox, that the way to get goodness is to cease to think of it—as something separate—and to devote ourselves to the realization of the full value of the practical situations in which we find ourselves. Men can really think of their "duty" only when they are thinking of specific things to be done; to think of Duty at large or in the abstract is one of the best ways of avoiding doing it, or of doing it in a partial and perverted way.
Summary of Criticism of Kant.—To sum up, the theory which regards duty as having its source in a rational self which is independent of and above the self of inclination and affection (1) deprives the habitual desires and affections, which make the difference between one concrete character and another, of moral significance; (2) commits us to an unenlightened performance of what is called duty irrespective of its real goodness; and (3) makes moral principle a remote abstraction, instead of the vivifying soul of a concrete deed. Its strongest point, its insistence upon the autonomous character of duty, or that duty is organically connected with the self in some of its phases or functions, will appear more clearly as we contrast it with the utilitarian theory.