Korsgaard on choosing nonmoral ends

Ethics

Volumn 109, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 5-21

  Ginsborg, Hannah ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0141598389     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233870     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (30)

1. Sometimes Korsgaard writes as though it is our inclinations themselves which confer value on objects (although, again, subject to the condition that they are pursued in accordance with the moral law). For example, in "Two Distinctions in Goodness," she says that "value is conferred by desire" even though desire is not by itself a sufficient condition of the goodness of its object (p. 267). Desirability is "the initial condition" of the goodness of many good things, and so a "main source" of their goodness (p. 268). See also "The Reasons We Can Share," where she says of chocolate that it "gets its value from the way it affects us" and that "we confer value on it by liking it" (p. 284). Saying that objects get their value from the fact that we desire them, but given the condition that they are pursued in accordance with the moral law, seems to me to be different from saying that objects get their value from being rationally adopted as ends. On the first account, it is from our desires themselves that the value initially arises (subject to the constraints of morality); on the second, it is our power of rational choice which is the source of value. In the text I argue that objects of inclination are not freely and rationally chosen: if this argument is successful, it tells against Korsgaard's theory of value as understood in the second way, but not as understood in the first way. However, the first account appears to be problematic for other reasons. It makes it seem as though there are two conditions of value: that the object be desired, and that it be chosen and pursued in accordance with the moral law. If these are two independent conditions of the object's value, then it is hard to see how Kant can argue that the second must take precedence over the first.
2. In The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Korsgaard suggests that the categorical imperative and the moral law need to be distinguished (pp. 98-99). Here I follow the more conventional view that they come to the same thing (this indeed seems to be the view which she adopts in Creating the Kingdom of Ends).
3. As I indicate in the text below, this argument overstates the conclusion that Korsgaard herself actually draws. She avoids saying that the categorical imperative is the only law that a free will can give itself, although she does say that it offers the "unique positive conception" of freedom (p. 162). However, for reasons suggested below, I think that this is the conclusion which she ought to draw.
4. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 6:36.
5. Korsgaard draws the distinction somewhat differently in "From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble," in Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Here she says that actions done from duty are "reason's own actions in a special way" (p. 212); "the person who is motivated by duty is to an especial degree active and truly spontaneous" (p. 213). What makes such actions special is that "the rational will provides not only the ground of choice but the incentive to act in accordance with that ground" (p. 213). This implies that in the case of an action which is not motivated by duty, the rational will provides the ground of choice. It is just this point which my argument is intended to challenge.
6. I believe that there is a connection between the point made in this section and the "hitch" in the argument of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals I which Korsgaard describes in "From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble," pp. 211-12.
7. Kant, Groundwork, 4:448.
8. Kant, Groundwork, Ibid., 4:449
9. It might also be noted that this reading fits better with what Kant says about the Fact of Reason in the Critique of Practical Reason. Here, as Korsgaard herself explains in her discussion of the Fact of Reason in "Morality as Freedom" (p. 175), Kant claims that it is the moral law which reveals our freedom to us. Describing a situation in which a person is faced with an especially stark conflict between inclination and duty, Kant says that "he judges that he can do something because he is conscious that he ought to do it, and recognizes in himself the freedom which would otherwise, without the moral law, have remained unknown to him" (Critique of Practical Reason, 5:30).
10. See also Kant, Religion, 6:26n.
11. Immanuel Kant, Conjectural Beginning of Human History, pp. 111-15.
12. Korsgaard goes on to say that reason at the premoral stage gives us partial guidance in our choice of ends, and it is only through the development of morality that it can give us complete guidance in choosing ends (p. 113). My point here, however, is that at the premoral stage, reason cannot be said to give us guidance in choosing ends at all.
13. If the argument of the last two sections is correct, we end up with the view that the only genuinely rational actions are those performed for the sake of duty. This might be restated as the view that, insofar as we are rational, we ought to act only for the sake of duty, and hence that there is no category of the merely permissible. Korsgaard suggests in "The Right to Lie" that there is a case to be made for this "rigorous" interpretation of Kant's view (pp. 152-53). In this context, she makes the important and valuable point that this interpretation does not imply a life of conventional good deeds: many of the activities we find valuable might be pursued as part of the obligatory end of one's own perfection. This seems to me to be a more promising route to a "livable" interpretation of Kant than the approach I am challenging in this article.
14. Kant, Groundwork, 4:412.
15. The words 'end' and 'purpose' both correspond to the German work Zweck ('end' is standard in translations of Kant's ethical writings, but 'purpose' is often used in translations of his Critique of Judgment). Here I use them interchangeably.
16. For the definitions of the term Zweck on which I am relying, see Kant's Critique of Judgment, Introduction IV (5:180) and §10 (5:220). The interpretation of purposiveness I give here is presented in more detail in Hannah Ginsborg, "Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness" (in Reclaiming the History of Ethics, ed. Andrews Reath, Christine Korsgaard, and Barbara Herman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], pp. 331-32, 342). The sense of end or purpose here is extremely thin: in particular, having adopted something as your end does not entail that you want or desire or value it. All it means is that you take your behavior to be governed by a normative constraint. Thus, for example, my now typing the letter 'a' seven times - aaaaaaa - counts as purposive behavior: I adopted typing the letter 'a' seven times as my end even though I did not desire or value the outcome. In her discussion of Aristotle in "For Duty and for the Sake of the Noble," Korsgaard makes a distinction between "goals" (which corresponds to the thin sense of Zweck introduced here) and "ends": "An end . . . is not merely a goal, something with a view to which some agent acts. To be an end, something must be conceived as good" (p. 215). It is implicit in her discussion that she takes Kant to understand 'end' in the same way, at least in the ethical writings. Part of what I am suggesting here is that, contrary to what I take to be Korsgaard's view, the notion of something's being an end for Kant does not entail that the agent values it or is motivated to pursue it: something can be an end for us without being desired. The reason why there seems to be a connection between having something as one's end and being motivated to pursue it, is not that there is any conceptual connection between the notion of an end and the notion of something's being desirable: rather it is that, as finite rational beings, it is part of our nature to adopt as our ends the things which we desire. More specifically, as I explain briefly in the text below, it is part of our nature to adopt our own happiness as our end, where this involves adopting as our ends at least some of the things we desire, with a view to maximizing the satisfaction of our desires overall. Thus it is conceivable that a being might have ends without having desires (in particular, God), that a being might have desires without having ends (in particular, animals), and perhaps even that a being might have both desires and ends, yet without having its own happiness as its end and hence without making the objects of its desires into ends. Kant seems to think that this last possibility would in fact be impossible for a finite being (see Groundwork, 4:415), but we can nonetheless make sense of it in principle.
17. This might be thought to imply that adopting the omelette as my purpose means that I have a reason to beat the eggs. But it is important to my understanding of purposiveness that it does not mean that: the sense of "ought" here is thinner than the "ought" of rational necessity. (See my "Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness," sec. 6). The point is important in this context because if the necessity of the "ought" is construed as rational necessity, then the distinction I am trying to make between purposiveness and rational autonomy is in danger of collapsing. If it is the case that having adopted a purpose means that you have a reason to take the means to that purpose, then it can plausibly be argued that we must in turn have reasons for our purposes: the fact that I have chosen to make an omelette cannot make it the case that I have a reason to beat eggs unless I have a reason to make the omelette in the first place. I believe that Korsgaard argues along something like these lines in her very deep and interesting paper, "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason" (in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]), but this, and other related points raised in that paper, raise large issues which I do not have the space to discuss here.
18. I believe that something like this middle ground is suggested in the Religion when Kant distinguishes "humanity" on the one hand from "animality" and "personality" on the other (6:26-27). It may also be this ground which we occupy in the premoral stage of reason's influence which Kant describes in Conjectural Beginning, 8:111-12.
19. (Both passages are discussed by Korsgaard in "Kant's Formula of Humanity," pp. 112-13.)
20. See, e.g., Groundwork, 4:415,
21. Critique of Practical Reason, 5:25,
22. and Metaphysics of Morals, 7:387.
23. Kant, Groundwork, 4:415.
24. Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, 20:200n.
25. Another important difference, which Kant does not mention, is that there is no analogue to temptation in the case of the omelette. When I pursue my happiness, my desires themselves tend to interfere with the realization of my purpose. But there are no natural obstacles to the pursuit of other ends. This is perhaps due to the fact that I have my desires in virtue of my animal nature, so that when I seek the end of happiness I set my humanity (my power of pursuing ends) in conflict with my animality: whereas in the case of other ends, say solving a problem in geometry, my animal nature is not affected.
26. Groundwork, 4:416.
27. Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, 20:200, 200n.
28. Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Ibid., 20:198.
29. Kant, First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Ibid., 20:200.
30. This account of Korsgaard's motivations is speculative. Part of my basis for it is what she says about reason and happiness at pp. 111-12; another part is the reservations she expresses in "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason" about Kant's account of the principle of prudence.