Dr Greg Bahnsen - Normative Ethics: Cynicism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Rationalism (Part 4)

Plato, before we move on, that should have been given last period was that Plato's interest was in saving the uniformity and objectivity of ethics. He wanted to have a concept of ethical duty that was applicable to all men as part of their existing obligation, not being relative from man to man. However, by reducing ethics to intuition, a recollection of the form of the good in a previous existence, Plato unwittingly and unwillingly allowed ethics to become every man doing his own thing. Again, because obviously men differ in their intuitions as to what is right and wrong when it comes to practical duties, decisions in day to day affairs. Consequently, we have another illustration here of a philosopher who's trying to accomplish one thing and in the very effort or struggle to do that accomplishes the opposite thing. Plato wants universal duty, but by making duty rest on intuition, he ends up with variable duty, because men differ in their intuitions, or so they say. We move on now from this first classical expression of a deontological theory to some later deontologists. And I'm thinking first of all here of the combined school of Cynicism and Stoicism. Although you will find in histories of philosophy and even in your ethics syllabus a distinction between the two schools, it is a very difficult matter to distinguish between the Cynics and the Stoics. The Cynics and the Stoics shared a common philosophical outlook in terms of their attitude toward life anyway. They both shared the view that we should react to adversity with passive indifference. Let's say that I have an overwhelming desire for burritos. Now I go to local Mexican food distributor and I want all the burritos this person can supply. But I can't afford all those burritos. And since the person isn't going to give the burritos away free, I'm going to end up frustrated, I'm not going to be satisfied. So both the Cynics and the Stoics said that kind of adversity can be reduced in your life if you'll just reduce the inner desire. It can't control the outward world, the external world, but you can control the internal world. Just reduce your desire to the bare necessities, the simple pleasures of life. Don't have this overwhelming desire for burritos and then you won't have this burrito frustration. So adversity is handled by controlling your inner thoughts, your inner desires. The difference between the Cynics and the Stoics might be expressed in this way. The Cynics added to this attitude, or how we should this program for reacting to adversity, the value of independence from civilization. Whereas the Stoics added the idea of indifference to all pain and passion, to all pain and passion, the Cynics view was that man needs to become independent of the desire for pleasure, must cultivate self discipline, and in order to do that, must renounce civilization and the values, the accomplishments of civilization. The Cynics gave up on family life, renounced social mores. They were called Cynics because kainos in Greek means dog. They advocated the repudiation and defiance of social codes, so that even as dogs engage in copulation in the open, the Cynics believed that human beings should be allowed to do it. Some went and lived in barrels to defy the conventions of their day. So they were really, as the word cynical comes down to us, their attitude was a cynical attitude with respect to civilization. They renounced riches, Crates of Thebes gave up quite a fortune, and his wife gave up her own independent wealth so that they could live in poverty. In fact, Karate's statement was that happiness is poverty. Happiness is poverty. Although there are some evangelicals today who are trying to palm off that attitude as well. It was the Cynics originally in the renunciation of civilization, that were saying it. The Stoics were a school of thought that developed out of Cynicism. Again, their common premise react to adversity with passive indifference. But the indifference that the Stoics practiced was one of indifference to all passion and to all pain. According to the Stoics, everything was material, body and soul, form and matter. And so, although they agreed with Heraclitus that there was a fire or logos that permeated all reality, they believed that this was all part of a basic material reality. Even God, who they deemed the world soul, the logos or the fire, was a material substance as well. According to them, this logos or fire, this God that inhabited all things, controlled the processes of reality in a fatalistic or deterministic way. And yet their ethic called for men to practice self determination, since they can't control the external world. If they're going to die, they're going to die. It's a matter of fate. That idea of que sera, que sera is what we identify today as a Stoic attitude. If I'm going to the dentist and I'm worried about the pain, somebody says, well, you be stoic in there. You go in there and be real stoic. Just kind of grit your teeth and bear it. Be indifferent to the pain, put up with it. You can't Change things in the world. It's fatalistic, it's determined. And yet the Stoics believed in man's self determination. You have freedom on the one hand, you can control your inner life, but in the midst of a universe that's all materialistic and deterministic, one wonders how these two can be brought together any more than oil and water can be brought together. The Stoics believed that there was one universal reason, this logos that permeates all things, as fire, also called the world, soul or God. There is one universal reason, and therefore there is one universal society. There was a cosmopolitan ethic that held to the brotherhood of all men. All men. Universally, then universally, men are under obligation to obey the dictates of the world soul. The laws are the patterns that are discerned in nature, are normative patterns for human existence. So what you have here obviously is the Stoic view of natural law. God permeates all things, even the workings of nature. And the workings of nature are normative for us. We must do what is the natural thing to do. That means living according to reason. This begins to sound like a broken record, doesn't it? All these Greek theories keep coming back to live according to reason. But for them, the reason is this logos pervading the world. And to live according to reason means to live according to natural law, to be in tune with the give and take of reality, the flow of everything. And so we can summarize Stoic philosophy by the phrase that's common today, go with the flow. That is just kind of give in to the course of all things, be indifferent to pain and pleasure, and submit to natural law. Well, there's some questions obviously that we would have for the Cynics and the Stoics, in addition to those scattered remarks to the side that I have given already. We're supposed to live according to reason. But again, what is reason? We're told that everything is materialistic and deterministic. Well, if everything is materialistic, then what is duty? What is the logos? What is natural law? And if everything is deterministic, how can we make any choice to follow it or not? It doesn't seem that ethics is of the part possible, since choice has been removed and the whole concept of ideal duty has been rejected as well. Any questions about Stoicism and Cynicism? Well, another Hellenic school of thought that we need to consider is the later school called Neoplatonism, made popular especially by the writer Plotinus. Plotinus was captured by the unity motif in philosophy. For him, God is the One, the Parmenidean one. He is devoid of all plurality, all diversity. And from this one, that is, the all reality emanates necessarily. He likened this to the rays of the sun coming off the sun. So there's an overflowing in the plenitude of God. And this overflowing is the world that we experience round about us. Man is nothing more than the overflowing of God. Man is essentially divine. At one time, according to Plotinus, man was oriented toward God as though the rays of the sun turned and were oriented toward their source. At one time, man pointed toward God and contemplated the One, the eternal noose, the mind that is called God in mystical intuition. But man turned from that mystical intuition of the One, the mind, God, toward his physical body. And when he redirected the attention of his perception, he fell. Man's fall, then, is to turn away from the immaterial, the unity, the mind to the material, his physical body. As you might guess, salvation is to be found for man, therefore, by returning to his origin, redirecting his mind toward God and away from of the physical world. And this redirection of his thoughts and this redemption which amounts to redeeming yourself, goes through three stages. Purification, where we moderate our impulses, contemplation of God, where we seek intuitive contact with him, and then finally, ecstasy in the most literal sense, where ecstasy outside of standing. Standing outside of yourself. Ecstasy comes when you lose yourself and are now reunited with the One. You are spliced back into the block of reality that knows no differentiation. Well, we've seen these motifs already. We don't have to dwell on them now. The motif of the immaterial being good, the material being evil, all things being united, man's goal, being reunited, to be reunited with the One. Plotinus is clearly using a great deal of Eastern thought with the Platonic concept of good and evil, matter and mind, their dualistic distinction. By seeking a good which goes beyond all distinctions, then the same questions we've asked the Eastern mystics have to be asked of all. For Thymus, if good is beyond everything, then how can we know it? Why should we call anything evil today? How do we pursue it? On the other hand, good is beyond all being. And so we wonder how we can know it. And yet all being must be good, because to the extent that anything is distinct from God, it's unreal. For Plotinus. Well, if all being is good, then one wonders how you can account for sin and injustice and the problems of our world around us. If they are illusion, then we don't have to worry about them. And if they're not illusion that they're real, then how can they be part of God? It doesn't seem you can have this metaphysic and ethical concern combined. The two just don't gel together. What we've been looking at up to this point are ancient versions of deontological ethics or ancient failures to gain a deontological ethic of duty in any way at all. And I want to turn to the modern period now by looking at the rationalist and the empiricist of the modern world. Spinoza has already been discussed under our discussion of teleologism. Descartes had very little to say about ethics. And so among the other rationalists, we come to Leibniz. Leibniz, of all the men that I have to talk to you about today, perhaps is the most difficult to summarize in any intelligent way, in a clear and intelligent way, in a very complicated metaphysics, really ornate. In general, the world according to Leibniz consisted of many indivisible entities called monads, that were similar to minds. However, these minds were growing up, they were developing minds, and they would develop according to laws that were internal to them. Monads would not influence each other. As Leibniz said, they were windowless. They had no connection with one another. Each monad is separate and develops according to its own pattern. Now, an organism, let's say the human body, as it stands over against other bodies, whether it be a chair or a car or another human body, an organism is organized around a queen monad. Okay, if you think of atomism, you have to have one big, one big atom that is the organizing atom for all the rest around it, a queen monad or a soul. And this queen monad, like queen of the bees, sees to it that the other monads work in harmony. Now, what is God? Well, in this theory, God becomes likened to the supreme monado of the universe. However, his relationship is not as clearly defined. His relationship to the other monads is not as clearly defined as we might like according to Leibniz. Now that we understand that all of reality is made up of mind, like monads developing according to their own patterns of development, organisms being organized around queen monads and God being the supreme monad of all. Leibniz says that when we look at this configuration, we have to understand that this is the best of all possible worlds. God really couldn't have made a better world. This is the best way for good to be maximized. God, as well as the other monads are bound by moral principles that are innate to them. So what you have here, although it's something of a sophisticated expression of it, is another expression of natural law. There's this innate characteristic, this innate development within the monads that is their moral duty. Reason enables us to become conscious of these laws, these moral and developmental laws. Reason enables us to be conscious of them and to follow them so that we overcome the corruption of our appetites. We can control our passions and our appetites by reason. How do we know these things? How do we know these moral laws? We intuit them. Now, since each monad is autonomous and is constrained by nothing outside itself, it is said to have free will. And it determines its own future, its own nature. However, there's also a pre established harmony between all the monads, which would seem to refer to a deterministic outlook on life. Leibniz tried to bring the two together. All the monads are working in harmony because of pre established unity or determinism. And yet each monad can become conscious of its own pattern of development and submit to it by free will. And so there's this intuitive natural law theory coming out. Well, the emphasis then enliveness is upon rationalism, the use of intuition to know one's duty and autonomy. People submitting to the natural law that they discern sin, as is the case with Plato, becomes a failure to understand what is going on, a lack of knowledge or ignorance of one's inner principle of development. Or on the other hand, sin is a conflict between man's appetites and emotion and man's reason, not allowing reason to dominate. Now we turn from Leibniz, the utter rationalist, with this very speculative metaphysic, to Thomas Hobbes, who was an empiricist and very much committed to the use of one's senses rather than one's reason. Even as Thales said, look and see, Thomas Hobbes said look and see. That was his method of doing philosophy. Knowledge begins in the senses. According to Hobbes, as we seek the causes for all things and the universal properties of all things, everything in the world amounts to to body and space in motion. There are various kinds of motions operating upon the bodies in space, and all of reality is made up of that interaction, even man. And his soul is nothing but materialistic by nature. Men live in a condition of war. They are competing with one another and they seek to preserve themselves. However, because not everybody in a condition of war can win the war, Hobbes recognized that it might be to everybody's advantage to relinquish their autonomy, to give up their natural liberties for the sake of self preservation. Now who does that sound like? We've already gone over enough ethical theories. You see, that's Protagoras all over again. Protagoras says there is no universal duty except natural law teaching us self preservation. For the sake of self preservation, I might submit to the safety of society. This is what Thomas Hobbes advocated. He said that all men living in a condition of nature, which is a condition of war, should make a covenant with each other, a covenant that will be enforced with punishment to put an end to this state of war and to live in a commonwealth, that is the attempt to gain wealth or happiness in common. To do this, they have to give their sovereignty over to a Leviathan, to some kind of dictatorial ruler who will punish them if they violate the covenant and don't live in harmony with one another. And so moral philosophy built on the actions of the Leviathan really is in the ultimate sense founded in mankind's natural drive towards self preservation. There are some clear deviations from the Bible in Thomas Hobbes. I suppose I don't need to go over that too much materialism. The Bible doesn't teach materialism. How can an ethic develop from materialism? If it's a natural law that men seek their own self preservation, why do we have to exhort them to seek their self preservation and to join up with the Commonwealth and give over their sovereignty to the Leviathan? Autonomous man recognizes no obligation, but an obligation that's self imposed. He doesn't have to submit to the social code unless that is less he imposes it on himself. You see that anarchy is answered by totalitarianism. There doesn't seem to be any balance between the one and the many. And any number of other problems that I think we've discussed in the past with similar theories could be mentioned. Another empiricist making an improvement somewhat upon Thomas Hobbes would be John Locke. Locke was an empiricist who believed that man's mind knows no innate truth. Man's mind is a tabula Rossitz blank at birth, and only experience writes upon that tablet. Only experience gives man any knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, all knowledge is probabilistic at best. We can't know anything for sure because everything is based on sensation, although men are free from external constraint. Locke did not believe in free will. He believes that we live in a deterministic system, even as most empiricists would be inclined to say, how do we know since There are no innate truths, especially if there are no innate moral truths. How do we know the difference between right and wrong? Well, we have to know it, even as we know all things by experience. Experience shows us that virtuous claim conduct brings pleasure, whereas evil conduct brings pain. And so experience is the source of our knowledge about right and wrong. Man, by nature, can do as he sees fit and is obliged to follow only one law, according to Locke. And here the repeating theme is the law, the law of self preservation, the natural law of self preservation. Man is obliged, of course, to preserve others in their lives as well, to the degree that those lives need to be preserved for the sake of his own preservation. If his own preservation is not endangered, then he owes no obligation to others. Obviously, in the state of nature, man may and ought to punish violations of the violation of the principle of self preservation, because if he doesn't engage in punishment, then others might deprive him of his own life. Self preservation leads then, according to Locke, to the idea of social theory in uniformity. The state of nature can be peaceful and it can be kindly. According to Locke, however, it does lack an established universal law that is generally acknowledged and impartially applied. And for that reason, Locke felt that we need to have a social contract to bring uniformity to our societies. The power of the society should extend no further, according to Locke, than whatever is necessary for the protection of life, liberty and property. And for that reason, rulers should rule should gain no more power than what is given to them by the consent of the governed. It was from these sorts of premises, then, that Locke was led to argue against absolute monarchy. Even the legislative system must be kept from a capricious and arbitrary use of power, Locke said, for the people are superior to their legislature and they're superior to their kings. By way of commentary, we see then, the autonomy of the many. Here in Locke, where you have the sovereignty of the Leviathan, in Hobbes, you have the autonomy of the many. Locke ultimately, the individual is his final moral authority. At best, revelation has a subsidiary role for him. Now, given Locke's empiricism, I think the derivation of moral duties, rights and responsibilities is going to be a dubious enterprise. If he's an empiricist, how can he, through his senses, really learn that there is a universal duty, that there's a universal natural law? How can he know anything about ethics simply on the basis of sensation? The final empiricist that I want to consider this morning is Joseph Butler, more obviously a Christian philosopher than locke. Although both professed. Christianity, Protestant Christianity. Butler's writings are part of the 17th and 18th century effort to find a foundation for morals in something other than an appeal to God's will. Because Butler believed that nature and revelation complement each other, he was willing to put aside appeals to revelation temporarily in order to search nature to find a basis for morality. Where can we find a basis for morality in nature? According to Butler, there were two possibilities here. In the first place, you could look at the abstract relationship of things and hope that that might tell you something about moral duty. That had been the approach of Samuel Clark preceding. And Butler felt that while that was a possible approach, a much more fruitful or hopeful and successful approach would be found in considering matters of fact. If you look at the nature of man as a matter of fact, you'll be able to discern your moral duties. Now, Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville are two English philosophers that had done formally anyway, had done the same thing. They had looked at man and man's nature to find the laws to govern man's behavior. Both Hobbes and Mandeville looked at man's drive towards self love as the central concept of ethics. Lord Shaftesbury, on the other hand, considered the instinct for benevolence to be the central concept of ethics in terms of the nature of man. Butler thought that both of these schools of his predecessors, the Mandeville Hobbes approach to self love and Shaftesbury's approach to benevolence, thought that both of these predecessors offered only partial analyses of human nature. Butler wanted to show that both self love and benevolence are part of of a larger whole that encompasses human nature. Butler claims in his writings, in his famous sermons on this subject to have made his observations about ethics on the basis of the whole of mankind, which of course would be nature, which would naturally be required of somebody who wants to found ethics on a study of the facts. You would want to make sure that you've covered all the relevant facts. Butler incredibly made the claim that he had considered the bulk of mankind. And he urges his readers not to be misled about human nature, judging only from their own natures, judging only from their own experience, or giving too much weight to exceptions that can easily be given to the general run of men. Butler says, I realize that I'm generalizing. You can come up with few minor exceptions, but don't be misled by the exceptions and don't be misled by your own individual experience. According to Butler, man is neither self regarding in the extreme. So that he completely sacrifices benevolence. Nor is man so exceptionally benevolent as to exclude all self interest. Man is both. And according to Butler, those two affections aren't always. They certainly are not necessarily incompatible. In fact, benevolence and self love tend to reinforce each other. You see, when I act in a benevolent way, it turns out that I maximize my own welfare too. So if I love myself, I will learn to act in a benevolent way. And to the degree that I do what is really good for me, I turn out doing what's good for others too. And so he thought that benevolence encouraged self love. And further, well, benevolence encourage further. Experience. According to Butler, man is neither self regarding in the extreme, so that he completely sacrifices benevolence, Nor is man so exceptionally benevolent as to exclude all self interest. Man is both. And according to Butler, those two affections aren't always. They certainly are not necessarily incompatible. In fact, benevolence and self love tend to reinforce each other. For you see, when I act in a benevolent way, it turns out that I maximize my own welfare too. So if I love myself, I will learn to act in a benevolent way. And to the degree that I do what is really good for me, I turn out doing what's good for others too. And so he thought that benevolence encouraged self love and further acts. Well, benevolence encouraged further acts of benevolence which would tend then to gain benefit for yourself. So benevolence led to self love, and on the other hand, self love led to benevolence. The two were mutually implicatory. However, Butler goes beyond this discussion of self love and benevolence as you find it in Mandeville and Shaftesbury. And he says there is in fact a superior faculty in man, a superior drive, something that goes beyond these two affections altogether. Benevolence does not have priority over self love, and self love does not have priority over benevolence. You can't reduce these two to one another. Self love and benevolence amount to a complex of affections. Therefore, What goes beyond both self love and benevolence is the faculty of conscience. Butler wants to synthesize his the previous moral philosophers in Britain talking about self love and benevolence. But what he adds to this synthesis is that there's a superior faculty that judges between even self love and conscience. In his strongest characterization of that superior faculty, he says that it is the faculty that pronounces, and I quote, determinately Some actions to be in themselves just, right, good, others to be in themselves evil, wrong, unjust. Conscience, without being consulted, without being advised with, magisterially exerts itself and approves or condemns him, the doer of them accordingly. And this is in Butler's second sermon upon human nature. What he's saying is the conscience has the ability or the capacity then to judge between man's affection, self, love, or benevolence. And it's this conscience that distinguishes man from all the beast, that makes him a moral agent and enables him, in the end to be a law unto himself. Conscience can show man the duty that he should follow based on the laws of his own nature and own inner direction, apart from explicit special revelation. And so Butler gives us a conscientious school of deontologists, duty based on conscience. Of course, Butler could have been much clearer in telling us what conscience is. I hope it's obvious to you from the outset that to characterize conscience as operating without being consulted, without being advised with, makes conscience very mechanical. It doesn't seem to me that a mechanical conception of human nature meets the facts. And moreover, by distinguishing conscience from other sorts of tendencies in human nature and other faculties, Butler is clearly using a faculty psychology as though man is made up of a bunch of individual elements that interact with one another as though they were separate agents. What is considered the fallacy of faculty psychology? It seems further that Butler is not really as clear as we could hope about the standards in accordance with which conscience makes its judgment. Conscience approves of whatever contributes to the good of the whole man and condemns, according to Butler, whatever disproportionately favors some part of man over the whole. So, you see, let's say you want to engage in adultery. Butler would point out that while that act favors, say, physical sensation, it favors it disproportionately to purity of soul, intellectual aspirations, and matters of the mind. And consequently, conscience is going to condemn this because it's getting things out of whack. Things are not going to be in proportion. The question that you're going to have is, how does conscience assess these matters of proportion? At this point, Butler's only answer, I would think, would be to resort to his theology and appeal to consciences directed by God, and therefore can make these judgments, as he has claimed. But in order to do that, he has to resort to special revelation. And that's the very thing that his appeal to conscience is supposed to save him from. So I'm not sure that's really a legitimate out for Him Butler says conscience, if not forcibly stopped naturally and always of course, goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence which shall hereafter second and affirm its own. Basically, that is to say conscience is self validating. Conscience will go on and will receive a higher second to what it's saying. There will be a divine authorization for what conscience says. The problems in the appeal to conscience are not simply these ones that I've mentioned, lack of clarity. By appealing to conscience, as I point out in Theonomy, Butler really reduced normative ethics to subjectivism. Because if conscience doesn't have any objective check and conscience is supposed to stand as an independent source of morality in addition to special revelation, if my conscience tells me one thing and your conscience tells you another, there doesn't seem to be any way to resolve that disagreement. Consequently, he may have an ethic of duty, but he does not have a universalizable ethic, one that can reinforce the objectivity of values and duties. What I've been looking at here now, as we finally get down to the days of Immanuel Kant, are some intermediate deontologists between Plato and Kant. We've looked at the Cynics and the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke and Butler. What does Immanuel Kant add to all of this in terms of the development of philosophy? Well, the rationalist and the empiricist both seem to have arguments that were convincing, persuasive, and yet neither the rationalist nor the empiricist were able to win the day philosophically. They both had defects that could be seized upon by the opposite schools of thought. Kant wanted to find a way of reconciling rationalism, the idea that there are permanent and eternal ideas, and empiricism, that all knowledge is based upon sensation. Well, Kant did something very similar to what Plato did, although it was obviously took a different form or form of expression, and therefore earns him the right to be one of the great philosophers in the history of man. What Kant did, though, is to create a dualism. Plato synthesized the previous philosophers in his day by creating the realm of the forms and then the realm of sense, experience, natural history. Kant also created a dualism, what we call the phenomenal noumenal distinction, the world of appearances on the one hand, and then the world as it really is on the other. The upper level would be the utterly unknowable world of genuine reality. But we can only know things through sensation. We can only know things as they appear to us. And therefore we don't know reality, we only know the phenomena, the world of appearance that is knowable by man. And the reason that realm of appearance is knowable, given all the confusion of life about us, is because man's mind has organizing categories that it imposes on all the sensations and the chaos that comes in to his knowing device. So mathematics and science are salvaged by saying that the principles of math and science are implicit in the human mind in its organizing structure. Even as science is salvaged by looking to the mind of man, ethics is salvaged, as mentioned earlier, by deriving moral truth from the subjective inner self, the numeral self, the self that experiences free will over against the external world in the body. That's part of the mechanism of physical nature. Now, Kant, when it comes to his ethic, points out that if you look at the things which are called good in the world, all of them can be evil. In some circumstances. Somebody says, here's a good bowl of chocolate ice cream. Well, obviously, if you're sick to your stomach, a bowl of chocolate ice cream would be evil. Kant says that's true of all particular goods, except for one. The only thing that we call good that is good in an unqualified way is a good will. A good will, man's will, when it is good, is always good at all times and in all places. What is it that makes the will good? A good will is one that does its duty simply for the sake of duty. There's the deontologism of Kant. Kant is a deontologist because he says we should do our duty regardless of the consequences. We do our duty only for the sake of duty itself. And so Kant, I think perhaps even more than Plato, is the great expression of what is known as deontologism today, the attitude of doing things regardless of consequences. According to Kant, objectively right behavior, although it can be inspired and influenced by prudence and benevolence, or even the respect for the moral law, objectively right behavior is behavior that unqualifiedly follows duty because it is simply one's duty. That is the only motive that is truly a moral motive. I'm doing my duty. It's not just that I respect what is right and wrong, or it seems benevolent, or it's prudent to do it. Therefore, according to Kant, considerations based on concern for one's own well being or the well being of others, indicates a course of action that is at odds with that course of action dictated by the moral law itself. Kant said ethics must not take into Account exceptions must not consider the consequences of our actions. Moral rules must be universally valid. Kant. It's no surprise, therefore, as one of the leading defenders of the view, that there's no such thing as a legitimate lie. If it is a moral law that we are to tell the truth, then we must always tell the truth. It is never justifiable to tell a lie. The good will does its duty for the sake of duty. What is our duty? Well, reason tells us that our duty is to follow the categorical imperative. What is a categorical imperative? Well, it is one that is not hypothetical, it's categorical. A hypothetical imperative would state, if you want to get along well in society, don't rob from others. That's hypothetical. If you want one thing. If this is the case, then do the following. A categorical imperative never has that. If, then structure. The categorical imperative is one that is true under all circumstances and is universally binding, no matter what the conditions may be. For that reason, you can't derive duty from experience, because experience can only give you, at best, an understanding of cause, effect, relationships, hypothetical circumstances. Duty is not derived from experience, it must be derived from the use of reason. Reason as it reflects, reflects on a priori judgments. How do you know, using your reason, whether a duty is categorical or whether it's only hypothetical? Kant says you must use the test of the categorical imperative, and that's to ask whether meaningfully this duty can be universally applied. You ask, what if everyone were to do this? If what we're considering is the possibility that people would make promises and then not keep them. If you universalize that practice making promises but they are never kept, clearly that would be meaningless. There wouldn't be any point, any purpose to making a promise at all if promises were never kept. And consequently the opposite would be our duty rather than that of breaking promises. Everybody is under the universal duty to keep promises, because you can do that without contradiction or absurdity. But the idea that everyone would break their promises makes no sense at all. So Kant says, when it comes to considering your promises, whether to make them and keep them, you should act in such a way that everyone will use you as a model for their own behavior. Act in such a way that what you do can become a universal law for mankind. Act as though everybody was going to follow your rule. Now the law that you're going to follow must be a rationally self imposed law. Kant felt that free will was essential to ethics. Man must be his own moral legislator. What he legislates for himself, of course, is to dictate it as reason, the universalizable law that everybody does even as you do. By the way, we see a little bit of this Kantian thrust in the Golden Rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. We see it even more in what is a popular dictate of morality. If you want to do something and others don't want you to, the response sometimes is, well, what if everybody did that? What if everybody did that? And that really is the heart of the thrust of what Kant's getting at. Ethics must be universalizable. So if everybody can't do this, then you ought not to do it. Because whatever you do, impartiality must apply. You must allow everybody to do. And what should you do? What duty should you follow? It must be a voluntarily imposed duty based on one's reason. You must be free. And freedom, of course, for Kant, implied ability. If you are free, you have the ability to do what is right and wrong. Since the ethical self is autonomous for Kant, and since obligation implies ability, then we may assume that the moral self is free. He said, although we can't prove that fact, because after all, we can only reason and use scientific evidence with respect to phenomenal facts. We can't prove that man is free. In fact, what we look at in the world around us, if you look at the human body, the phenomena, it would seem that all events are caused and man is not free. Nevertheless, the nature of morality leads us to suppose or to intuit, or to posit man's freedom in another realm, in the noumenal realm. How does God come into the question of morality? Well, reason teaches us that the goodwill deserves happiness, that if you act in the proper way, you deserve justice, says you deserve happiness, since virtue and happiness are not always linked in this life, that is, you couldn't prove to people they should be good based on the happiness of all good people. Kant felt that we had deposit the idea that God will give rewards and punishments in a future life. Therefore, although Kant said we cannot know by revelation or by science that there is an afterlife morality, the dictates of morality demand that we posit this as a limiting concept. We don't know man to be free. We don't know that there's going to be an afterlife of rewards and punishments, but we must posit them in order to save ethics. Well, there are a lot of things that can be said by way of criticism of Kant's ethics. In fact, so many hardly knows where to begin. The first place, Kant's ethic is salvaged by, as I've just said, ad hoc rescuing devices. Man's freedom. Why would we ever think that man is free given Kant's conception of the phenomenal world? If our bodies are part of the mechanistic cause, effect, machinery of the universe, why should we think that we're free at all to save morality? Well, what if somebody were to say to Kant, why save morality? Since everything is materialistic and mechanistic, there is no morality. How could Kant answer that? Well, simply by positing the presuppositions of morality, Kant appears as dogmatic as those theologians that he was writing against in his day. He was purely arbitrary and dogmatic in that. There are some sharp differences between Kant and the teaching of the Bible as well. Kant teaches the autonomy of the ethical self, that man is free, that man is able to do what is good, and man must impose his own law on himself. Moreover, ethics is essentially free from God in Kant system. Because Kant is nothing more but a limiting concept. We posit God just as a way to get around some difficulties in are thinking about ethics. Essentially, man is the lawgiver in Kant's system of morality. Kant, of course, is a mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. He has a realm that is wholly known, the phenomenal realm, and then a realm that is the real realm, the realm of alternate reality that cannot be known at all. If it cannot be known at all, how can it be known to even exist? How can we know what the relationship between the two is? Is this world all illusion? Why should we assume, by the way, that all men's minds are uniform in their categorizing techniques? Why should we assume there's any unity to science? Why should we think that all men are alike? Why does Kant guarantee all these grand metaphysical assumptions about human nature? Isn't it the case that since the mind of man affects everything that he believes, that it affects the way the appearances come across to him, that man's mind is distorting reality and that we are really behind a veil of illusion or delusion? We don't know what the real world is like. We only know what the mind tells us it is like. It seems to me you have something of a solipsistic problem developing there that man can't get outside himself, can't be sure of anything. What is it to do duty for duty's sake? Am I under duty to do duty for duty's sake? Well, if I am under duty, why am I under that duty for duty's sake, obviously. And what you get in Kant, then, is an infinite regress that we are under obligation to do duty for duty's sake, and that for duty's sake, and that for duty's sake. What you have is really the philosophy of duty, duty. Do you do your duty because it's your duty to do your duty, and you do your duty because it's your duty to do your duty to do your duty. And it's so abstract and formalistic. It's very much like Plato. It doesn't end up telling you anything. And that's totally unrealistic as well, to think that everybody does their duty just for duty's sake, or that it's even possible to do it. When we come back after a break, we'll consider one final criticism, and that's whether the categorical imperative really tells us what is right and wrong. It.