Logic Can't Tell You What Is Good or Right: Kant and Spock

Reason, Morals, and the Categorical Imperative. Kant wanted to deal with the problem of human dignity by appealing not to nature but to reason – which is the impartial judge of particular cultural practices. For Kant Reason was not, as it is for me, that part of our mind that can be in conformity or at least harmony with reality but something more narrow, pure reason: Aristotelian logic plus self-evident axioms. These self-evident axioms, furthermore, did not apply to nature. For example, Leibniz took the principle of sufficient reason as both self-evident and as telling us something about reality (i.e. the proposition that everything must have a cause). For Leibniz, Reason (intuition) assured us of this truth. But if like Kant you do not just assume that nature as it appears to us is the same as nature as it is in itself, then the claim that the principle of sufficient reason tells us something about the world itself rests on an assumption that is (no longer) self-evident. Thus it is not self-evident. 

   This attempt to ground morality in "pure reason" arose in part through the challenge of moral skepticism, i.e. the claim that no neutral standard exists to adjudicate conflicting claims given the mechanical universe he presupposed.

    It was also a response to a change in how nature was conceived. Kant took over – uncritically – the paradigm of nature worked out by people like Galileo and Newton. As a Galileo scholar described his idea of nature:

 

The sky is not blue and roses are not fragrant. I just experience them to be so, or they appear to me – affect me – as being like that. The real, objective world is therefore the world of the primary properties, while the realm of subjective secondary qualities is the domain of animals and human beings", and quotes Galileo:" ‘I think that if one takes away ears, tongues, and roses, there indeed remain the shapes, numbers, and motions, but not the odors, tastes, or sounds; outside the living animal these are nothing but names’ (Buyse, 2013)

 

A consequence of this idea is that morals are also projected onto nature or reality and cannot be conceived as a response to anything objectively real. Rape is wrong not because if violates the who and what a woman is, but is a projection of something secondary supplied by us, like odors, tastes, or sounds. Nature is indifferent, inherently without meaning or value. While the modern paradigm of nature seemed unquestionably true to Kant, he could not accept this implication for morality. Thus he tried to give morality a new foundation outside of nature, in pure reason (logic plus self-evident axioms).

    Moreover, grounding our moral or immoral responses in nature missed something essential about morality for Kant. This is complex, but I think what it all boils down to is this: nature, even for Aristotle, is contingent: it is what it is. Conforming our actions and responses to what happens to be the case – what happens to make us happy or to allow us to flourish – is thus also contingent. If our natures were different, morality would be different. For Kant – and he is right, I think – what is moral and immoral would be different. But that makes no sense. Morality is absolute. If it is evil to rape, then it is always necessarily evil.

     While Aristotle could not account for this in his idea of nature, Christian thinkers like Aquinas could, as God was the author of nature. God is absolute Being and Goodness in one. Rape then – as an example of a clearly evil act – violates the nature of a woman as she is created by known by God. [That by the way is an argument for the necessity of God in the grounding of morality.] But Kant rejected the idea of Creation as metaphysical. He didn’t deny it could be true, but he did deny that we could know that it was true. All we can know of nature is limited by the Galilean-Newtonian idea, which he uncritically accepted. Thus the only option to ground morality as absolute was pure reason.

      Thus Kant believed that the power of reason to uncover culturally non-relative truths in science, logic, and mathematics could be applied to morality as well - like Spock.   The issue thus seems to be whether such a neutral standard can be identified.  A good case can indeed be made that mathematical and scientific truths have validity for all human cultures; the idea of a European, Indian or Japanese physics or math seems absurd. But morality is not physics or math.  Reason is universal only to the extent it remains formal; as soon as appeals to the value-soaked world are made, reason cannot be appealed to as impartial judge.     

              Kant argued for a rational moral principle, one that would give us a calculus to tell us whether our actions were truly moral – the categorical imperative:

 

…handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, daß sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, p. 68).

 

… act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

The categorical imperative was self-evident for Kant and indirectly applied to nature. We know that it must apply to nature for Kant because we experience duty and this experience, uniquely, cannot be doubted in spite of its being an alien in the Newtonian conception of nature. Of course, pure reason - logic -  is independent of a person's values: “All men or mortal.  Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal” is valid for all times and cultures.  Does Kant's rational principle have that same objectivity? Is it irrational for one man to insist that men have more dignity than women, and thus what may be made into a universal law for all men should not apply to women?  Only if one sees men and women as equal in dignity – but that is the very question supposed to be answered by the categorical imperative. A hopeless circularity.

            Put another way:  neither logic nor pure reason will not tell us what is good or bad, and thus what the content of the categorical imperative should be.  If one man believes that women should not be treated as of equal worth, and another man denies this, then both may universalize their beliefs without contradiction: one might claim: “Act so that you never treat a woman as of equal dignity to man, which would be a violation of the natural order of the world.”  If one claims that such discrimination is irrational, then she goes beyond logic and includes purely natural or cultural value-laden claims: it is irrational because it is wrong to treat women as inferior, whereby pure reason can't tell you if it is wrong or right. (I suppose if you could define 'inferior' as something that could be investigated by science - some standard of strength or intelligence - then reason would have something to say. But as morality has nothing to do with how smart or strong someone is - it is just as evil to rape a woman with an IQ of 200 as it would be to rape a woman with an IQ of 100 - this is a red herring.)

     But if “rational” is understood to imply or presuppose particular values, then what is morally “rational” cannot be determined independently of these:  as many conceptions of reason as there are moralities become possible.  Attempting to adjudicate between such claims by appealing to the categorical imperative is thus obviously circular. No independent conception of reason can underwrite one value argument against another. 

   The problem arises by conceiving of nature as Galileo did: as devoid of meaning. Thus meaning is exiled from nature, banned on a non-natural island: namely, in our minds. And there is no bridge from our minds (our morality) to this mechanical nature where we all have our being - contra Kant. Nature - including our bodies -  is on this conception nothing but a blank screen onto which we project meaning even as we project odors and colors. That was also Spock's conception of nature. 

   What is rational depends on what is real and what we can know. Kant's conception of pure reason is a function of his conception of nature and our mind's being cut off from nature, confined to its own representations of nature. Because nature for Aristotle and Aquinas are different from Kant's conception, reason and knowledge are different. To violate the inherent goodness of another human being - as a creature, not necessarily how they live - would be contrary to reason. For Kant it would be to violate a formal rule that only makes sense if you assume what Aquinas did, that human beings are precious in some way. 

   And this is what always frustrated me about Spock: his superstition that formal logic could solve substantive disputes – McCoy was more logical! If peoples, places, or anything else is not intrinsically good in some way, it goodness (that they exist in the first place) is not part of their reality, then no morality. Logic is just as useful to Hitler as it is to Primo Levi. It is indifferent to morals. What is self-evident depends already on a moral attitude. 

 

 . . .

The Second Categorical Imperative. Another example from within our culture using Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act so that you treat at all times the humanity in your own person as well as in other people as an end in itself, and never as a mere means to an end. (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 79).”  For some within our own culture, prostitution is a violation of dignity because it involves human beings (women) being used as a mere objects and not respected as ends in themselves. Others deny it must be such a violation, claiming that dignity is satisfied as long as they consent to the practice, their consent ensuring that they remain subjects and do not become mere objects.

                Reason (actually formal logic), again, cannot tell us who is right here. Whether x or y is right is beside the point; the point is that no independent conception of reason – including Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative – can help us here. To claim that prostitution is a violation of human dignity might be true, but one can't prove it by appealing to this principle of reason. The question at issue would be precisely whether consensual prostitution involves using women as objects, and only attention to one's values and the particulars of the social context of the practice can answer this.  And so, again, we are back to that part of nature / reality which is soaked in the values, histories, interpretations of human subjects.

               The real question is whether this “failure” implies that ‘there is no morality’ or whether ‘anything goes.’ The trap consists precisely in seeing appeals to value neutral standards as the proper method of argumentation in moral questions. The starting point is our moral response – for example, to evil. For me to say:  “Oh, Mr. Protagoras, I see you are right! And now I know that my subjective feelings about rape or racism have no ground in reason!”  The evident absurdity (and immorality) of this kind of thinking should make us wary of this trap.