may perhaps be best gathered indirectly by means of a quotation.
"While the French people in savage revolt against spiritual and secular despotism had broken their chains and proclaimed their rights, another quite different revolution was working in Prussia—the revolution of duty. The assertion of the rights of the individual leads ultimately to individual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the State. Immanuel Kant, the founder of the critical philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped the idea of universal military service. By calling upon which individual to sacrifice property and life for the good of the community, he gave the clearest expression to the idea of the State, and created a sound basis on which the claims to individual rights might rest."[52:A]
The sudden jump, by means of only a comma, from the gospel of moral duty to universal military service is much more logical than the shock which it gives to an American reader would indicate. I do not mean, of course, that Kant's teaching was the cause of Prussia's adoption of universal military service and of the thoroughgoing
subordination of individual happiness and liberty of action to that capitalized entity, the State. But I do mean that when the practical political situation called for universal military service in order to support and expand the existing state, the gospel of a Duty devoid of content naturally lent itself to the consecration and idealization of such specific duties as the existing national order might prescribe. The sense of duty must get its subject-matter somewhere, and unless subjectivism was to revert to anarchic or romantic individualism (which is hardly in the spirit of obedience to authoritative law) its appropriate subject-matter lies in the commands of a superior. Concretely what the State commands is the congenial outer filling of a purely inner sense of duty. That the despotism of Frederick the Great and of the Hohenzollerns who remained true to his policy was at least that hitherto unknown thing, an enlightened despotism, made the identification easier. Individuals have at all times, in epochs of stress, offered their supreme sacrifice to their country's good. In Germany this sacrifice in times of peace as well as of war has been systematically reinforced by an inner mystic sense
of a Duty elevating men to the plane of the universal and eternal.
In short, the sublime gospel of duty has its defects. Outside of the theological and the Kantian moral traditions, men have generally agreed that duties are relative to ends. Not the obligation, but some purpose, some good, which the fulfillment of duty realizes, is the principle of morals. The business of reason is to see that the end, the good, for which one acts is a reasonable one—that is to say, as wide and as equitable in its working out as the situation permits. Morals which are based upon consideration of good and evil consequences not only allow, but imperiously demand the exercise of a discriminating intelligence. A gospel of duty separated from empirical purposes and results tends to gag intelligence. It substitutes for the work of reason displayed in a wide and distributed survey of consequences in order to determine where duty lies an inner consciousness, empty of content, which clothes with the form of rationality the demands of existing social authorities. A consciousness which is not based upon and checked by consideration of actual results upon human welfare is none
the less socially irresponsible because labeled Reason.
Professor Eucken represents a type of idealistic philosophy which is hardly acceptable to strict Kantians. Yet only where the fundamental Kantian ideas were current would such ethical ideas as the following flourish:
"When justice is considered as a mere means of securing man's welfare, and is treated accordingly—whether it be the welfare of individuals or of society as a whole makes no essential difference—it loses all its characteristic features. No longer can it compel us to see life from its own standpoint; no longer can it change the existing condition of things; no longer can it sway our hearts with the force of a primitive passion, and oppose to all consideration of consequences an irresistible spiritual compulsion. It degenerates rather into the complaisant servant of utility; it adopts herself to her demands, and in so doing suffers inward annihilation. It can maintain itself only when it comes as a unique revelation of the Spiritual Life within our human world, as a lofty Presence transcending all considerations of expediency."[55-A]
Such writing is capable of arousing emotional reverberations in the breasts of many persons. But they are emotions which, if given headway, smother intelligence, and undermine its responsibility for promoting the actual goods of life. If justice loses all its characteristic features when regarded as a means (the word "mere" inserted before "means" speaks volumes) of the welfare of society as a whole, then there is no objective and responsible criterion for justice at all. A justice which, irrespective of the determination of social well-being, proclaims itself as an irresistible spiritual impulsion possessed of the force of a primitive passion, is nothing but a primitive passion clothed with a spiritual title so that it is protected from having to render an account of itself. During an ordinary course of things, it passes for but an emotional indulgence; in a time of stress and strain, it exhibits itself as surrender of intelligence to passion.