Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics

by John Dewey

From the same point of view we can see that the criterion is found neither in the consequences of our acts as pleasures, nor apart from consequences. It is found indeed in the consequences of acts, but in their complete consequences:—those upon the agent and society, as helping or hindering them in fulfillment of their respective functions.

XXIX.

Criticism of Kantian Criterion of Conduct.

1. With reference to the unification of the conduct of the individual. Of pleasure as the object of desire, we need now say nothing further, but may proceed at once to the criticism of the theory that the will, acting according to the mere idea of law in general, is the end of man and hence that it is the criterion of the rightness or wrongness of his acts. We shall attempt to show that such an end is wholly empty, and that it fails (as much as hedonism) to unify conduct or to place any specific act as to its morality.

The difficulty of the end proposed by Kant is that it is an abstraction; that it is remote. The hedonist leaves out one element from conduct, and takes into account the merely particular or individualistic side; the Kantian abstracts the opposite element—the merely universal. The formal universal, or universal stripped of all particular content, has, considered as an end of action, at least three defects.

I. It is an end which would make impossible that very conduct of which it is taken to be the end—that is, moral conduct. In denying that pleasure is the end of action, we took pains to show that it (or rather the feeling due to the tension between pleasure of a state considered better and the pain of the experienced worse state) is a necessary element in the force impelling to action. The mere conception of an end is purely intellectual; there is nothing in it to move to action. It must be felt as valuable, as worth having, and as more valuable than the present condition before it can induce to action. It must interest, in a word, and thus excite desire. But if feeling is, as Kant declares, to be excluded from the motive to action, because it is pathological or related to pleasure as the object of desire, how can there be any force moving to action? The mind seems to be set over against a purely theoretical idea of an end, with nothing to connect the mind with the end. Unless the end interests, unless it arouses emotion, why should the agent ever aim at it? And if the law does excite feeling or desire, must not this, on Kant's theory, be desire for pleasure and thus vitiate the morality of the act? We seem to be in a dilemma, one side of which makes moral action impossible by taking away all inducing force, while the other makes it impossible by introducing an immoral factor into the motive.

Kant attempts to escape from this difficulty by claiming that there is one feeling which is rational, and not sensuous in quality, being excited not by the conception of pleasure or pain, but by that of the moral law itself. This is the feeling of reverence, and through this feeling we can be moved to moral action. Waiving the question whether the mere idea of law in general would be capable of arousing any moral sentiment—or, putting the matter from the other side, whether Kant gives us a true account of the feeling of reverence—it is clear that this admission is fatal to Kant's theory. If desire or feeling as such is sensuous (or pathological, as Kant terms it), what right have we to make this one exception? And if we can make this one exception, why not others? If it is possible in the case of reverence, why not in the case, say, of patriotism, or of friendship, or of philanthropy, or of love—or even of curiosity, or of indignation, or of desire for approbation? Kant's separation of reverence, as the one moral sentiment from all others as pathological, is wholly arbitrary. The only distinction we can draw is of the feelings as they well up naturally in reaction upon stimuli, sentiments not conceived and thus neither moral nor immoral, and sentiments as transformed by ends of action, in which case all without exception may be moral or immoral, according to the character of the end. The Kantian separation is not only arbitrary psychologically, but is false historically. So far is it from true that the only moral sentiment is reverence for law, that men must have been moved toward action for centuries by motives of love and hate and social regard, before they became capable of such an abstract feeling as reverence. And it may be questioned whether this feeling, as Kant treats it, is even the highest or ultimate form of moral sentiment—whether it is not transitional to love, in which there is complete union of the individual interest on one hand, and the objective end on the other.

For these criticisms at greater length, see Caird, Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. II, Bk. II, ch. IV.

II. The Kantian end would not bring about any system in conduct—on the contrary, it would tend to differences and collisions. What is required to give unity to the sphere of conduct is, as we have seen, a principle which shall comprehend all the motives to action, giving each its due place in contributing to the whole—a universal which shall organize the various particular acts into a harmonious system. Now Kant's conception of the good does not lead to such result. We may even say that it makes it impossible. According to Kant each act must be considered independently of every other, and must be capable of generalization on its own account. Each motive of action must be capable of being itself a universal law of nature. Each particular rule of action is thus made absolute, and we are left not with one universal which comprehends all particulars in their relations to one another, but literally with a lot of universals. These not only fail to have a unity, but each, as absolute, must contradict some other. If the principles always to tell the truth and always to preserve life are universal in themselves, and not universal simply through their relation to some total and controlling principle of life, it must be impossible to reconcile them when they come into conflict.

See Caird, Op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 187-190, and p. 215. Cf. "Treated as universal and without exception, even two such commands as e. g., 'Thou shalt not steal,' and 'Thou shalt not kill,' must ultimately come into conflict with each other; for, if all other interests are to be postponed to the maintenance of the rights of property, it is impossible that all other interests should also be postponed to the preservation of human life—and to make either property or life an absolute end is to raise a particular into a universal, to treat a part as if it were a whole. But the true moral vindication of each particular interest cannot be found in elevating it into something universal and absolute, but only in determining its place in relation to the others in a complete system of morality."