Okay, hello.
We had a bit of technical difficulty, but now we are ready to go.
Welcome to today's lecture.
I'm Professor Franco Trevino.
Today we'll be talking about deontology.
This is the second of the three normative ethical theories we'll be talking about in Exfil.
The readings for today are Kant's groundwork for the metaphysics of morals, this letter
exchange between Kant and Maria von Herbert, and then David Velleman's article, A Right
to Self-Termination.
So today's, sorry, today's program.
First we'll be looking at the core concepts of deontology, saying a little bit in general
about what deontology as an approach to ethical theory looks like.
Then we'll start with the first part of Kant's argument.
This is where Kant spends a lot of time talking about the goodwill and the value of the goodwill
and the nature of duties, a lot of sort of conceptual analysis that goes on here where
he builds out the foundations of his theory.
And then we get to the practical end of things, the categorical imperative.
This is the decision procedure that Kant recommends for trying to figure out in every single possible
case you face if what you're doing is morally permissible or not.
And then we'll look at Maria von Herbert's letters and see whether and to what extent
there's a criticism of Kant and what is that criticism, and we can talk a little bit about
whether Kant has a good enough reply or not.
And then Velleman on assisted suicide.
The reason we have Velleman here is because Velleman is doing something interesting for
us that is he is showing us deontology and Kantian inspired deontology in particular
in action.
So we're seeing how to use Kantian deontological notions on a particular case.
So just like Philippa Foote was showing us how you can use virtue ethical notions to
talk about euthanasia, so too is Velleman showing how we can use deontological notions
to think about assisted suicide.
And here they come to, and they're dealing with slightly different sorts of cases, but
they're very similar sorts of cases, and they come to different sorts of conclusions.
So it would be interesting then to sort of compare Velleman with Foote because they're
coming at very similar issue from different ethical perspectives.
Okay.
So what are the core concepts of deontology?
Well deontology is a theory that is focused on the nature of the action.
In the last lecture I sort of showed you, I gave you an example of an action.
You had the agent, the action, and the consequences.
Virtue ethics was the theory that focused on the agent.
Now we're at the theory that's focused on the action.
And the way that deontology approaches the action is through this notion of rules.
So it is a theory that's going to have a strong focus on rules for behavior, rules which tell
you what's permissible and what's impermissible, what's right and what's wrong, and rationality.
And so again, remember rationality was also important for Aristotle's conception of ethics,
but here rationality plays an importantly different role.
We'll see that rationality is not, as in Aristotle, connected to happiness, but connected instead
to morality, where morality on the Kantian view and happiness are two very distinct things,
whereas they came together, as if you recall, in virtue ethics.
Okay, so just generally speaking, some features of deontology just to get, give you a little
taste for it before we go into the details of Kant.
So we have rationality and we have these rules.
Well they're connected in a particular way, and that is that the rules are discoverable
by rationality.
That is, if we use reason, we can figure out what the rules are.
And that's in fact what the categorical imperative is, it's a rational procedure for figuring
out what the rules of morality are.
Another feature, because we have this rational capacity, according to Kant and general deontology,
we have a special sort of value.
So rational agents and rational agency has a particular kind of value, unconditional
value, and this unconditional value has important consequences for what kind of theory it is,
and we'll see this throughout.
In contrast to consequentialism, remember this is the theory that assesses actions and
sometimes agents on the basis of consequences.
For deontology in general, the consequences are not going to be a decisive factor for
whether an act is good or not, whether an act is permissible or forbidden.
In fact some acts are going to be forbidden regardless of the consequences.
So we don't even look to the consequences, even in, as we'll see later on, some very
difficult cases where you might say, hey, wait a minute, shouldn't we have an exception
there?
The agent's motive is going to be important for assessing the action.
We saw a similar kind of move also in Aristotle, where I remember Aristotle says something
along the lines of, you know, for an action to be virtuous you have to choose it for its
own sake and you can't choose it for some extraneous reason.
You have a similar move in Kant.
It matters very much why you're following the appropriate rule if you're following it.
It's not enough just to follow the rule.
You have to follow the rule for the right sort of reason.
Okay, so I went through last time some advantages of virtue ethics and some drawbacks here.
I'll do the same again, even though we've only kind of sketched the theory.
I think you are already in a position to see some ways in which deontology has some positive
features that you might like and want from a moral theory.
First, the dignity of rational agents is a key feature of the theory.
This seems like intuitive.
We have a value as rational agents, as human beings, and this is something that's like
front and center in deontology.
And on the practical end, this means that there are strong protections for individual
rights.
In fact, the language of rights really is something that is most at home in deontology,
because deontology is thinking about what rights I have against other agents just in
virtue of the fact that I have dignity as a rational agent.
There are also strong protections for minorities.
Again, we'll see this as this is a problem in the end for consequentialism.
If you're looking at the consequences all the time, it looks like sometimes you'll be
able to sacrifice minorities for the benefit of majorities if all you're doing is calculating
what's the best consequences.
This is the kind of move that's just blocked in deontology.
Again, because the individuals are protected, all members of minorities, quad individuals
are also protected, so you can't go around exploiting people for the benefit of the majority,
even if the benefit is amazing.
And then the other thing is that it's a kind of intuitive theory in that the rules of action
that it generates generally are ones that we already heard.
So the rules that you're going to get are things like don't lie, don't cheat, don't
kill, all the things that you already think are intuitively plausible moral rules, these
are the ones that are going to be in general generated by deontology.
So it coheres with widespread moral intuitions about what is morally permissible and what
not.
Okay, so those are some advantages.
Nope, that is not what I wanted to do.
Here are some drawbacks.
So this is the flip side, right, so the drawbacks are always the flip side of the advantages,
this idea of having rules seems very intuitive and plausible, that the rules we hold to them
even when the consequences might indicate otherwise seems really like a good idea, but
it does seem like it becomes overly rigid in certain situations.
So if there's a situation, for example, where telling a lie might save a life, you might
think well hey, okay, in that situation you tell the lie.
Kant, on the other hand, has a whole article called on the supposed right to lie to save
a life where he argues no, in fact, in that situation you're not permitted to lie even
when someone else's life is at stake.
And that seems really counterintuitive, so that's the flip side of holding on to these
intuitive rules is that when you hold on to them in a principled and rigid way, you get
cases where it looks obvious to a lot of people that you're supposed to lie, but it turns
out that according to the moral theory, no, in fact, you have to tell the truth.
Another drawback, right, again, you have all these rules, that sounds great, it makes it
easy, but a lot of times you have rules that conflict with one another, and it's not clear
what deontology has to say about when the rules conflict.
So Kant will have something to say about when two different types of rules conflict, but
in general, it doesn't seem like there's any guidance for us when two rules seem to pull
us in two different directions.
What do we do in those situations?
Deontology doesn't seem to tell us.
Okay, so that's my sort of general sort of sketch of what deontology is or what it looks
like as a moral theory and what are some of its drawbacks and some of its advantages.
So let's now sort of jump into Kant.
Now I'll say at the beginning, I say this to students every year, Kant is really hard.
Reading Kant is really hard, and trying to explain Kant is really hard.
All of these things are difficult, so if you've read the text and you thought, oh man, I'm
just lost, that's fine.
Some very renowned scholars are also lost with Kant, so don't feel bad about that.
What I'm going to try and do is give a lecture that will then help you when you go back and
read it again, because you will have to read it again if you want to understand it, see
how Kant's argument is built up and put together and give you a better sense of how he wants
us to think about things like the categorical imperative and his different cases that he
brings up.
So this one lecture will not solve all of your problems, in other words, it's not going
to make you understand absolutely everything, but hopefully it will give you some guidelines
for helping you understand the text better when you look at it the next time.
So what's Kant trying to do?
Well he tells us he wants to ground morality objectively in reason.
Again I mentioned this last time, Kant, like Aristotle and like Mill, that's coming later,
thinks that ethics is an objective science, so it's not a cultural projection, it's not
something that we choose as individuals, even though there are all these individual likes.
No, he's going to ground morality objectively in reason such that all rational creatures,
even so far as they're rational, will be able to figure out what to do just by using reason
correctly.
It matters here again using reason correctly, not just using any kind of reason.
So you can only ground morality objectively if everyone is reasoning the same and everyone's
doing that when they're reasoning in the right way.
So this kind of background I think is important for understanding Kant's project because he
says some things that don't seem to make sense or might be puzzling or he talks a lot about
inclination, what is inclination.
So I'm going to try and explain some of these things, but one way of getting it on the table,
I think it's always helpful with a picture.
So that is what I call the dual nature of the human being.
So that's us, the stick figure in the middle, that's a human being.
And we are, as it were, part of two different realms you might call it.
We have a dual nature.
We're both physical beings and insofar as we're physical beings, we're subject to physical
laws.
Physics is a science.
So if you throw someone out a window, they will fall in a predictable ratio and a predictable
speed and a predictable acceleration because we are subject to physical laws.
And to the extent that we're in this physical world, we're also in a deterministic world,
right?
It's cause and effect and there's no freedom in the physical world.
You can't choose not to follow the laws of physics.
We're also rational beings.
We're rational agents.
This gives us a different kind of status and subjects us to different kind of laws.
And so according to Kant, insofar as we're rational, we're subject to the moral laws,
right?
And the science that studies the moral laws is ethics, just like the science that studies
the physical laws is physics.
And insofar as we're in the realm of ethics and moral laws and insofar as we're rational,
we have free will.
So we're, I mean, this is a view on which both determinism and free will are true, but
they're true in their respective domains.
Okay.
So we have, as it were, both this rational side and this physical side.
Now, the parts of us that are pulling us to and towards our physical nature are what Kant
calls in general inclination.
So our inclinations are like our desires, our emotions, our self-interest, all those
things, you know, we want money and jobs and all sorts of things.
All those things are on the side of inclination.
And insofar as we let ourselves be moved by those things, we are letting ourselves be
moved by our physical nature.
Now this word will here, what is the will?
All right, so the will is the part of us that decides.
All right, that's the part of our nature, our minds that makes a decision about what
to do.
And we insofar as we're physical are pulled by inclination in one direction, but insofar
as we're rational, our will is pulled also towards reason.
And so he thinks that the task of morality is to allow ourselves only and always to be
pulled by reason when reason is pulling.
So what I mean by that is he's not saying never follow your inclination, he is saying
never follow your inclination when it conflicts with reason.
Reason should always take precedence over inclination and to let your will be guided
by reason means for Kant to let it be guided by the moral law.
And this here also indicates a deep disagreement that Kant has with Aristotle because for Kant,
happiness for us is on the side of inclination.
So remember for Aristotle was a rational nature which told us how to achieve happiness.
This is very alien to Kant.
Kant thinks that reason's purpose is not happiness because that would pull us this way, but rather
morality.
And that he thinks is a more noble purpose.
He also thinks that as we mentioned last time, there's no good reason to think that being
a good person is going to make you happy.
And that seems sort of optimistic was one of the criticisms of virtue ethics.
So we have this dual nature.
Our will is pulled in different directions by our being physical and having these inclinations,
our being rational and having this faculty of reason.
And what we want to do is use the science of ethics to discover the moral laws so that
Kant will be able to help us use our reason so that we can be morally good.
And that to be morally good means for Kant to have a good will.
So a good will is a will, the faculty of volition, that is guided by reason.
So the will is the faculty of volition.
The good will is the will that makes decisions with the right kinds of motives.
The motive is the reason behind your action.
And generally speaking, there are two kinds of motives here.
One is reason, rationality, and morality, and the other is inclination, self-interest,
happiness.
And those are different kinds of motives that you might have.
Now Kant says the good will is good in itself or good without qualification.
It's good no matter what.
And it's not good because of its consequences.
And here you might help to think about someone who does the right thing, has the right motives,
but the thing they do doesn't turn out the way that they want it.
He still thinks in that case, if you've done the right thing, the will is good, and it's
not tainted by the fact that you didn't achieve the thing you wanted to achieve.
So in this, we need to make a distinction here, very important distinction for understanding.
Kant, right, so the motive is the reason or principle behind the action.
That is to say what is standing behind the action in your mind as an agent.
That's the motive of the action.
That's that with the purpose of the action, the purpose of the action is the way the world,
the way you want the world to be after the end of your action.
So the motive is the principle standing behind the action and the purpose is the consequences
you want to obtain after your action is done.
So the first one, the motive, that's crucial for assessing the morality of the action.
The consequences are not relevant to the goodness of an action.
So this is again a little schema, right, the motive stands behind the action and the action
has a purpose or if you like end as an Aristotle, a goal.
That is not how we decide whether an action is good by its purpose or goal.
We look rather at the motive, right, what is moving the will?
Is it inclination or is it morality?
Okay, so here comes in this notion of duty.
Kant says that the will is good when it acts from or for the sake of duty.
Now our duties on this picture are what the moral law tells us we ought to do.
Right, so these are moral duties that Kant is talking about, not duties in the military
or civic duties or something like that.
These are moral duties.
So we have a good will, right, when we act for the sake of or from duty.
And here again is a very important distinction for Kant, the distinction between acting in
accord with duty or merely in accord with duty or from duty or for the sake of duty.
So here's I think the easiest way to understand the difference.
So sometimes you do what duty tells you to do but for the wrong reason.
All right, so that's acting in accord with duty but not from duty.
When you act from duty, you do the thing that duty tells you.
Why?
Because duty told you to do it, right, because it's your duty.
So when you act from duty or for the sake of duty, you're acting in a way that allows
your will to be moved by reason and reason alone.
You act because what you're doing is your duty and for no other reason.
But again, think of someone who tells the truth because they're afraid they'll get caught
in a lie as opposed to someone who tells the truth because truth telling is a duty.
Those are two different cases.
One, both of them tell the truth so they both follow the rule but one of them does it for
an extraneous reason and one of them does it for an internal reason.
That is because it's a duty to tell the truth.
And this illustrates the further point that actions that are merely in accord with duty
could come from some inclination.
Again, inclination being that grab bag of motives that have to do with self-interest
and happiness that stand in opposition to reason, right?
So the action is what duty prescribes just as in the case of someone who lies but the
motive is improper.
You didn't lie because you were afraid of getting caught, not because it's a duty to
tell the truth.
Okay, so I want to say a little bit now about inclination.
It is, as I said, a kind of sort of grab bag notion in a way because so many things fall
under inclination but it at least distinguishes two kinds of inclinations that you might have.
One is what I call immediate inclination.
An immediate inclination is a sort of calculation of self-interest, a long-term calculation
of self-interest.
So in the example I just gave, someone doesn't lie because they're afraid of the consequences
that might obtain if they get caught.
That's thinking in terms of what's in my interest if this or that happens and that's acting
for immediate inclination.
It's like, oh, if I get caught, that'll be uncomfortable or I'll get in trouble or something
along those lines.
So a calculation of self-interest.
Immediate inclination is a more like an emotional impetus.
So you tell the truth to someone because you like them, not because it's your duty to tell
the truth.
So in there, you're liking the person isn't the right kind of motive for telling the truth.
Again, the right kind of motive on this picture, the only motive that has moral worth is acting
for the sake of duty.
So if you act for the sake of duty, you're not acting because you like someone or because
you're afraid of getting caught, you're acting because this is what your duty is.
So again, I mean, you can just think about this.
You didn't cheat.
I'm going to go optimistic here and say you didn't cheat on your last exam.
And now I want to know why didn't you cheat on your last exam?
Why did you not cheat?
Why did you abstain from cheating on your last exam?
And you know, we don't have time here.
We started a bit late to actually get answers from you.
But when I've done this before, I get all sorts of good answers like, well, I didn't
need to cheat because I knew I was going to do well enough or I was afraid of getting
caught or I just, you know, wouldn't dare to cheat.
So all sorts of reasons that you didn't cheat and no one has ever in my experience said,
I didn't cheat because it's wrong to cheat.
But that, right?
So those of you who didn't cheat on your exam for all those other reasons, Kant thinks you
will, you acted in accord with duty and that's fine.
That's good.
Right?
Keep doing that.
But if you want your action to have moral worth, you should not cheat because cheating
is wrong, right, because it's your duty not to cheat.
So Kant goes through four kinds of cases where duty and inclination are in different relationships.
So sometimes, right, you can do something.
So you have a case, the first case is easy.
It's contrary to duty, but it's useful for some end, right?
So cheating on your exam is contrary to duty, but it'll help you get a better grade if you
don't get caught, right?
So that's that case we set aside.
That's not the interesting case.
The interesting cases here are two, three, and four because they're showing something
important about the relationship between inclination and duty because in a lot of cases, it's going
to turn out that both inclination and duty tell you to do the same thing.
Like in the case of not cheating on your exam because you don't want to get caught.
That tells you to do what duty tells you to do.
And it's difficult in those cases.
In fact, Kant thinks it's impossible to know exactly about yourself why you acted.
So he has these, so you have cases two and three, right, so where duty tells you to do
one thing, but inclination also tells you to do the same thing.
Now if you step back after you've done the action, why did I act?
Well it's never clear, he thinks.
You can't just think, oh yeah, I acted for inclination.
Oh yeah, I definitely acted for duty.
He doesn't think we're good enough at introspection to discover those sorts of things.
That's why case four is especially important for him because in those cases, when all of
your inclinations are telling you to do the opposite of what duty prescribes, but you
do what duty prescribes anyway, in that case, you isolate and can be sure that you're acting
from duty.
So he gives all these cases, I'll just mention the first one.
So there's a shopkeeper who doesn't overcharge their customers, right, so one reason they
could not overcharge the customers is because they think it's bad business.
It's just bad business to try and overcharge your customers.
Eventually, you know, word is going to get around, people will stop coming to your shop.
It's just not a good idea.
So that's someone, that's case two, right.
You do a calculation of self-interest and you don't overcharge your customers, which
is what duty prescribes, but you also have this immediate inclination, this calculation
of self-interest, right.
It's not good for business.
And then case three, let's imagine someone who doesn't overcharge their customers because
they just love people.
They love their customers.
Why would I overcharge my customers?
I love them.
These are my friends, my neighbors.
They come and they talk to me.
I would never overcharge them.
That's someone who has an immediate inclination to do what duty prescribes.
And so in those cases, it's unclear, right, why people are acting.
Even though someone might say, oh, but the reason I don't overcharge the customers, right.
Imagine the person who loves everyone says, well, I love my customers, but really the
reason I don't overcharge them is because it's my duty.
Think, hmm, do you really know, can you really separate out the inclination from the acting
from duty in that way?
I mean, if you ask people and they say the reason I don't overcharge them is because
I love them, then they've told you what their motive is, right.
Their motive is then clear.
But if they have this motive and then they try and claim, well, I'm acting from duty,
it's not always clear, right, whether it's really true that they're acting from duty.
The fourth kind of case, right, so imagine a shopkeeper who thinks, you know what, I
can make a ton of money if I overcharge some customer.
I can just overcharge the children.
They'll never notice the difference.
And then they think, and you know what, I really hate people.
I wish I could overcharge more people.
And then that person thinks, but, but it's my duty to charge a fair price.
That person, right, we have isolated, right, that they are acting from duty.
Now it's very important in this, in understanding what Kant's doing here to avoid thinking the
following thought.
Kant is not saying that we should always want to do the opposite of duty so that we can
do our duty and have our actions be morally worthy, right.
He thinks it's better for us that our inclinations tell us to do what duty tells us to do.
But what he's trying to do is, is important.
He's trying to isolate the right kind of motive and show us what that motive looks like when
it contrasts with what inclination is saying.
So the point is not that we should hate our customers and think we can get away with things
so that we isolate duty.
It's a philosophical point showing what acting from duty looks like when it's all by itself
and not muddled by inclination pushing in the same direction.
Okay.
So just to kind of sum up this part, a good will is a will that acts for the sake of duty,
act for duty.
It does things, it does what duty prescribes because it's what duty prescribes.
Only actions done from duty have moral worth, right.
So if you tell the truth for the wrong kind of reason, right, it's still good that you're
told the truth, but that's not a morally worthy action.
You shouldn't be praised as a good person for it because your motive was not appropriate.
The action was right, but the motive was wrong.
Inflation is this part of us that pulls us towards acting in self-interest and on the
basis of emotions and feelings.
And this is the thing that we need to fight against.
We need to let reason tell us what our duties are and only act on the basis of what reason
tells us.
Okay.
So reason is going to tell us what our duties are, but what are these duties?
Right, so I've been talking about duties, talking very broadly about, okay, don't lie,
don't cheat, these kinds of things, but Kant isn't satisfied with just taking over the
general rules of ordinary morality.
He wants to show us that we can ground these, remember, objectively in reason.
And the categorical imperative is his tool for grounding the rules of morality objectively
in reason.
So for him, moral reasoning is a fully rational procedure.
Remember, reason was in the driver's seat also in Aristotle, but he allowed sort of
feelings and emotions to be part of what constituted these virtues.
For Kant, we are leaving emotions to the side.
That's all inclination stuff.
Reason is supposed to command the will from a sense of duty.
So it's not that reason says, hey, maybe you should do this.
Reason says, you must do this, right, because this is what your duty is.
And our task, right, the will must follow reason and ignore extraneous considerations
that come at us from inclination, right.
That's the larger picture.
And the way in which it's a rational procedure, and here's where it starts to get a bit tricky
and difficult, is this idea of universalizing our possible actions.
In a way, you can think of this as the reverse of the Aristotelian move.
Remember, Aristotle was talking about, oh, we have to do things, each action has to be
in the right way, with the right people, at the right time, for the right purpose.
You have to get all these moral particulars right.
Kant's idea is in a way the opposite.
It's, look, you're in a situation.
You have to universalize that, to generalize the situation away from the particular so
that you can get up to the level of moral principle.
So you want to move always away from the individual and the particular upwards to the more general,
right.
That's Kant's strategy.
And so when we universalize and we rationalize by leaving behind particular features of the
situation.
So and this is done in Kant's language through two steps.
The first step is this idea that actions can be formulated as maxims.
All right, maxims, what's a maxim?
A maxim is just a rule I make for myself.
So if you think, oh, I'm going to do an action here, I'm going to do an action here, well,
I have it as a maxim for myself, then in these kinds of situations, this is how I act.
Right, you can think that someone, you know, here's a very mundane example, not really
a moral example, but maybe illustrative.
Someone says, hey, do you want another beer?
And you say, no, no, no, you know, on weekdays, I don't have more than three beers.
That's just a rule for myself because the next day I'll be destroyed and won't be able
to work.
That's just a rule you have for yourself that you follow and then you apply in particular
situations.
That's a maxim.
So but these maxims then can be generalized even further into laws.
Right, and here you have to be careful.
We don't know, we don't mean sort of legal objects.
We're not talking about, you know, that's, you know, Norway is going to institute a ban
on more than three beers on weekdays or something like that, but a rule that applies to everybody.
Right, so a rule that applies to everybody, if you want to take your maximum, make it
a law, you say, well, no one should have more than three beers on weekdays.
And now you've, you've gone from, no, I'm not going to have a, I'm not going to have
another beer in this situation to a maxim, which is more general to a law or rule, which
is even more general.
Right.
This is like, this is from the individual action to the set of actions.
This is from the set of actions for you to the set of actions for everybody.
So just to sort of again illustrate it.
Right, so I'm in a situation and I consider doing something right.
Just why to get Z. Yes, you have a question.
Yeah.
So, so I mean, in this case, I don't want to get too hung up on the details of the beer
case.
But one thing I will say, and I'll come back to this a bit later is how you formulate the
maximum will be important for how you formulate the law.
So you're onto something interesting here that it seems like in any different case,
there seem to be different ways of formulating the action and then different ways of formulating
the law.
And that actually winds up being an important point that a critical point we'll come to
in a while.
But schematically anyway, you start with an action in a situation X, I consider doing
Y to get Z.
And then you have these two possible principles.
The subjective principle, the principle for me, the objective principle is the principle
for everybody.
So the maximum is, if it's a weekday, I never have a fourth beer when I'm offered.
The rule, whenever anyone is in the situation where they're offered a beer on a weekday,
they never, right?
So this is just a sort of schematic way of showing how you would go about in any individual
instance thinking from an action you're considering doing to a maximum, which would be a general
rule in that situation to, again, a law.
And you move up in generality, you're universalizing again from an individual action to a set of
actions for yourself, from a set of actions for yourself to the set of actions for everyone.
Okay.
So we're looking for the moral law, Kant says, and he thinks it has a certain form.
Now we're taking it away, this is slightly to the side of what we were just talking about,
but it's important because we're trying to figure out what the moral laws are and we're
going to use this rationalizing, universalizing procedure, but we need to know what exactly
we're looking for, right?
What's the kind of thing that we're looking for when we're looking for the moral law?
What is it going to look like when we get to the end?
And this is his analysis, his conceptual analysis of the concept of law.
And he says, a law by its nature commands, right?
So a law tells us what to do.
That's just what a law is.
It tells us what to do and what not to do.
And the form, the grammatical form we use when telling people what to do and not to
do is the imperative, right?
So the imperative form, do this, don't do that, right?
Those are imperatives grammatically.
So we're looking then, he thinks, for an imperative from the moral law, but he thinks that there
are two different kinds of imperatives.
There's what he calls a hypothetical imperative and a categorical imperative.
A hypothetical imperative is formulated as sort of if such and such is the case, then
do X or don't do X.
A categorical imperative is just do X, don't do X.
And what he's trying to consider here then is which of these two formats is the moral
law going to look like?
It is going to be an if then or is it going to be categorical?
Now the hypothetical, there are two kinds of hypothetical imperatives.
I'm only showing this because I think it helps understand the categorical imperative, also
helps see another difference with Aristotle.
So there are hypothetical imperatives of skill.
If you want to be good at tennis, you should practice three times a week.
So practice three times a week is an imperative, but it's hypothetical, right?
If you want to be good at tennis, now probably in this room, there are not many people who
want to be good at tennis, maybe a couple.
And so for them, the imperative works.
That is to say, for those of you who want to be good at tennis, you really ought to
practice three times a week.
But for those of you who don't, then it doesn't matter.
So it's irrelevant for you because you're not interested in the skill.
Imperatives of prudence are important for everyone because imperatives of prudence are
the following form.
If you want happiness, and everyone does, right?
Kant agrees with that, everyone wants to be happy.
This is like the sum of our inclinations for Kant.
Then you should do these sorts of things.
And so there's, if you want to be happy, find someone you can laugh with.
If you want to be happy, find a good job.
You get all sorts of advice you can give.
Aristotle said, if you want to be happy, you have to develop the virtues.
For Kant, that, if you want to be happy, develop the virtues.
This idea that virtue is necessary for happiness, that's an imperative of prudence.
That's one of these things.
That's not a real moral law because Kant thinks that the only thing that the moral law says
is do this, don't do that.
So there are no conditions.
There's no connection to happiness, and there's no connection to any desires we might have.
Any desires we might have, that could tell us to do all sorts of things or not, but it
has nothing to do with morality.
We want to be happy.
There are certain things we can do or not do to make us happy.
That doesn't have anything to do with morality.
Morality is just telling us what to do and what not to do.
So its form, what it will look like, is an imperative and a categorical imperative, not
a hypothetical imperative.
So I'm just going to say a little bit more about the categorical imperative itself.
That is the actual procedure, and then we'll take a break.
So the categorical imperative is Kant's decision procedure.
It is the method whereby he tells us how to figure out what the rules are and what's permitted
and what's not permitted.
There are three formulas.
We're going to be talking about two in this lecture.
The formula of universal law, this is the most difficult one.
This is the one where you turn maxims into laws and then you test them.
Then there's the formula of humanity.
And this is the one that takes into account front and center the inherent dignity of all
rational agents and uses that as a way to test actions.
And then the formula of the kingdom of ends, which is not part of our reading, which we
won't talk about today, but which asks us to imagine living in a world in which everyone
else is also acting perfectly morally.
So it's a different kind of method.
The formula of universal law, which we will focus on right after the break, is this formulation.
Act only in accordance with that maxim, so the rule for you, through which you can at
the same time will that it could be a universal law.
So the test then is to take the maxim on the basis of your action and see whether you would
will it as a universal law.
And this whether you would will it as a universal law bit, this idea is an imaginative procedure.
You're meant to imagine a world in which everyone acts on the basis of your maxim.
And then you're going to test it, but you're not going to test it for whether you like
it or whether you think it seems cool or interesting.
You're going to test it for whether it contains a contradiction, a logical contradiction.
And this is where it gets very tricky and difficult.
But that I'm not going to start now.
Let's just take our break now and start up again at a quarter after.
Okay, so we ended with the formula of universal law, act in accordance with that maxim through
which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.
So how do we do this?
So we consider an action just as we saw, right, when I'm in this situation, I'm going to do
this action in order to achieve that.
You formulate a maxim, you formulate a universal law.
And then you imagine a world in which everyone always follows the law.
This is the sort of the difficult part in a way of the whole procedure.
I mean, you can do the schematic thing where you create the maxim and you create the law.
Now we're asked to sort of imagine a world in which everyone always, as a matter of fact,
acts on this maxim.
And then you have to ask, is there a contradiction in conception?
And this is another way of saying, there's two ways of thinking of how to understand
this question.
One way is it, does it make any sense anymore to act in the way that the maxim I'm considering
proposes?
That's the contradiction.
Does it make any sense?
Another way of asking this question is, is there any purpose or point to acting on the
basis of my maxim in the world in which everyone is already acting in this way?
And so, and I'll come to a little bit more detail about how exactly you do that with
an example.
But the point there is that if there's a contradiction conception, if the world is unimaginable,
or if the world, if it makes no sense to act in this way in that world, then, and so here's
the trick, the opposite of what you're considering is a perfect duty.
And a perfect duty is a duty sort of not to do something.
We'll talk, again, I'll talk a little bit about how that works in a second.
So if it turns out that you can't imagine the world, or the world somehow undermines
itself, the world, the imagined world based on your maxim, then the action you're considering,
you have a duty not to do.
Okay, but if there is no contradiction in conception, you have to ask then, is there
a contradiction in the will?
This is a much trickier notion than the already very tricky contradiction in conception.
And here the idea is, does the will restrict its own purposes?
That's a contradiction in the will.
A contradiction in the will is where the will is somehow working against itself.
And again, I'll try and explain this with an example.
But if there's a contradiction in the will, then again, the opposite of what you're considering
is an imperfect duty.
And again, I'll come in a second to the difference between a perfect and an imperfect duty.
But if the answer is no, and this is also very, another sort of tricky point where students
have historically gone awry.
So if you consider an action, and there is no contradiction in conception, there is no
contradiction in the will, does it mean that your action is moral?
No.
It just means that your action is permissible.
It means that you can do the action, that there's nothing, morality does not speak against
the action you're considering, because the action you're considering does not violate
any duties that you have.
All right, if you're considering watching Game of Thrones instead of watching The Wire
this evening, just to give a completely random example, I can guarantee you that it doesn't
violate any contradiction in conception.
It doesn't violate a contradiction in the will.
So it will turn out that it's permissible for you to do that.
That doesn't mean that it's moral for you to do it, or that it's right, or that Kant
approves of it.
It only means that the action is permissible, and again, that only means that it doesn't
violate any duties that you have.
So lots of actions will just sail through and then end up being morally permissible,
and again, all that means is that morality doesn't speak against it.
So if you have some inclination and morality doesn't speak against it, you can pursue that
inclination, like for example, watching Game of Thrones.
Okay, so let's say a bit more about, and I'll come back to that schema with an example,
so if you're still a little bit unsure about how that works.
So contradiction in conception versus a contradiction in the will.
All right, remember, we're looking for a rational procedure according to Kant, so it's important
then this is a rational process.
So contradiction in conception, you can't imagine the world with the maxim as law, and
again, how that works out in an individual case, I want to just hold off on for a second,
but the idea there then is if you can't imagine, right, if the purpose of the maxim is undermined
in such a world, then you have this thing called a perfect duty, and the contradiction
in the will, the will contradicts itself, and it does so by restricting its own possible
purposes.
So I'll just give another, just a brief example to get some of this going a little bit more
clearly.
So a contradiction in conception, so we've already seen that certain kinds of things
are not going to be allowed, and one way to think about a contradiction in conception
is if your maxim is trying to make an exception of yourself, right, when you universalize
that, it's never going to work, right, if you want to gain some advantage over people,
exploit them, use them in certain ways, right, if once you make that into a law that everyone
does this, your strategy for exploiting people will no longer function.
So that's just one way to think about the kind of thing that the universalizing move
does is it blocks cases where we're trying to act on a maxim which takes advantage of
other people.
The contradiction in the will, maybe I'll just give a context example for this, right,
so he says imagine someone who's considering not developing their talents, so imagine,
you know, Nadal at 18 thinking, ah, tennis is a lot of hard work, maybe I'll just hang
out in Majorca, it's beautiful here, I'll just get a job somewhere around here.
All right, so he's got this magnificent talent, he's imagining not developing the talents,
this is not, this doesn't generate for a contradiction in conception because we can imagine a world
which people fail to develop their talents, doesn't sort of generate any purposes or undermined
or anything like that, but the will restricts itself, he thinks, that in the world in which
we don't undermine, we don't develop our talents, what we do is we restrict the amount, the
kinds of things that we can do, right, so it's the will deciding to restrict the will,
that's the contradiction in conception, so if you don't develop your talents, what you're
doing is you're restricting the things that you're able to do and that's what a contradiction
in the will is.
Okay, so now what are these perfect and imperfect duties?
So the perfect duty is what you get from a contradiction in conception and those are
always negative duties, right, they're negative duties in the fact that, remember, all of
our duties are going to be imperatives and they're all going to be categorical imperatives,
negative duties is a duty not to do something, so don't do X, right, don't kill, right, don't
murder is a perfect duty and it's perfect, here's why it's perfect, because it can be
satisfied at all times, right, and what does that mean is that you can go around literally
always not murdering people, you can go your whole life not murdering people, right, when
you're sleeping you're not murdering people, you know, there's all sorts of the whole,
you perfectly satisfy, I hope all of you in fact, perfectly satisfy the duty not to murder
anyone, right, and negative duties are of this sort, right, a negative duty you can
always abstain from, so you can satisfy them perfectly, right, and there's no, it's not
like, yeah, and in these cases there's no discretion, you can't be like, oh well, you
know, maybe this one case, no, no, no, it's a perfect duty, you can satisfy it at all
times and then you also should satisfy it at all times, imperfect duties, these are
the ones where the will restricts itself, right, and these generate positive duties,
and notice the example of not developing your talents, right, well the opposite of not developing
your talents is developing your talents, right, he has the same kind of, imagine you're considering
just not being, not helping other people, right, if you imagine the world in which everyone
doesn't help other people, you restrict your purposes because you're going to need help
sometimes too, so that's the will contradicting itself, so we have an imperfect duty to help
others, it's imperfect not because it's less of a duty or it's like a lesser duty in some
way, it's imperfect because it can't be satisfied at all times, so again, these two examples,
developing others and developing your talents, they're both imperfect duties, maybe if you're
lucky you can satisfy them simultaneously somehow, but you're not going to be able to
satisfy them when you're asleep, for example, or when you're doing other things, right,
so an imperfect duty is a positive duty that can't be satisfied at all times, that's why
it's imperfect, again, not because you don't have a choice about whether to satisfy the
duty, you do however have some discretion in how you satisfy the duty, so if you have
a duty to help others, that doesn't yet tell you which others to help or how exactly to
help them, right, so you have discretion in what you're going to do in order to help others
and which others you're going to help, right, the category of imperative doesn't tell you
that you have to help Syrian refugees as opposed to refugees from some other country, or many,
many different groups of people that one might help, or animals, right, it doesn't tell you
which of these to choose, it tells you that you have to choose others, well, I guess in
this case animals is out because it was helping other humans, okay, so this process then,
right, this universalizing, imagining and then looking for contradictions is going to
generate then moral laws, both of these kinds of moral laws, now I want to give you an example
just to show you how this works in action, so should I lie in order to get out of some
difficulty, it doesn't matter what the nature of the difficulty is, just imagine you're
in a situation where you think, well, if I just lie, I will get out of it, it won't be
embarrassing, it'll be fine, and imagine, should I lie, so you create the maxim, whenever
I'm in a difficulty, I lie in order to get out of it, so this is the, you know, this
is like the no four beers on a weekday, you just have a maxim for yourself, I lie to get
out of difficulties, this is just how I do it, that's the action, right, is a result
of having this maxim, and now we formulate the law, right, this is the law, whenever
anyone's in difficulties, they lie in order to get out of it, right, so I went from my
action to the generalized action for me, and then the generalized action for everybody,
now we're at the law, now we're supposed to imagine a world in which everyone lies in
order to get out of difficulties, right, as a matter of fact, everyone is always doing
this, this is just how people deal with getting out of difficulties in the world that I imagine
on the basis of my maxim, and so the question is, does it make sense in the world in which
everyone lies to get out of difficulties to lie in order to get out of difficulties?
And the answer, Kant thinks, is no, and the reason it doesn't make sense is because in
the world in which everyone is always lying to get out of difficulties, no one is going
to believe you, and since no one is going to believe you, you will never get out of
difficulties via the method of lying, right, in the world in which everyone lies in order
to get out of difficulties, no one actually gets out of difficulties by lying, because
again, what I said earlier, getting out of difficulties in this way depends on you making
an exception for yourself, right, everyone else has to assume you're telling the truth
in order for a lie to work, but if everyone is a liar, and everyone knows that everyone
is a liar, no one is going to believe what anyone says, so we have now generated a perfect
duty never to lie.
Now if I say, should I lie in order to save another person's life, whenever I can save
another person's life, I lie in order to do it, whenever anyone can save another person's
life, they lie in order to do it, in the world in which everyone is always lying in order
to save other people's lives, lying to save other people's lives doesn't work or make
sense, right, so in the world in which everyone is always lying in some particular situations,
lying in that situation is undermined, because everyone knows that this is the way things
are, so this perfect duty never to lie notice is unrestricted, it doesn't say we have a
perfect duty never to lie in order to get out of some difficulty, it says we have a
perfect duty never to lie, including in cases where we might want to save another person's
life, so this is the way in which in one example the categorical imperative goes in generating
a contradiction in conception, I don't have time to go through a contradiction in the
will example, but if you could take this as something you can do at home, try and do the
not help anyone else and see how you get to a contradiction in the will, you will again
just to tell you, you would get through this unscathed, right, you wouldn't get a contradiction
in conception according to Kant.
Okay, but let's move over to the formula of humanity, the formula of humanity is mercifully
much easier to use than the formula of universal law, it doesn't involve that many fancy universalization
moves or try or and it doesn't involve too many complicated concepts, it involves a couple
though that I want to get on the table, right, so the distinction between having absolute
value and having relative value, right, so rational agency has absolute value, other
things have value because we value them, right, their value is relative to us, money, why
does money have value?
Because humans value it, gold, why does gold have value?
Because humans value it, iPhones, why do iPhones have value?
Because humans value it, everything other than us has relative value, we have absolute
value and this maps on to the distinction between a person, right, that's a rational
agent and a thing, right, things don't have, they only have relative value, persons have
absolute value and this is what Kant says, means when he says that a human being a rational
agent is an end in himself, that means that they are something that possesses value in
themselves, right, a human being possesses value in him or herself, everything else can
be used as means but you can't use human beings as means because that is a failure to recognize
that they are, each individual is an end in him or herself and just to connect this even
more to rationale, the reason you're an end in yourself as a human being is because as
a rational agent what you can do for yourself is set ends or goals, so you are a source
of value, you are a source of goals, you can't be used as a mere means and again this maps
on to another distinction between I started with this notion of dignity, human beings,
rational agents have dignity, they cannot be bought and sold, everything else can be
bought and sold and it's a mistake, right, to buy and sell human beings and this is another
maps onto another distinction, the distinction between intrinsic worth, having value because
of the kind of thing you are and extrinsic worth which means having value because of
your relationship to some other thing, okay, so what is the formula of humanity?
Act in such a way that you use humanity whether in your own person or that of another, always
at the same time as an end and never merely as a means, so several important things to
notice here, first this applies not just to how you treat other people but to how you
treat yourself, right, so use humanity whether in your own person or that of another, so
you have to treat yourself in a way that's not as a mere means, always at the same time
as an end to treat someone else as an end is to respect their rational agency, right,
respect their dignity as a person and never merely as a means, now one tricky thing here
is that of course there are all these situations in which we seem to use people as a means,
so for example I can ask you for example what time it is, what time is it?
It's 11.44, thank you very much, I have just used you as a means but I have not used you
as a mere means because I respected your rational agency by asking you a question, right, I
asked you a question and then you could have just not responded, you could have told me
I don't know, you could have said leave me alone, I'm taking notes, so you didn't, you
answered my question, I thank you for it, that is me treating you as an end while I'm
also using you as a means, right, so that's okay, what's not okay is if I walked over
to you, grabbed your computer, looked at it and gave it back, right, that would be treating
you as a mere means and that would be a different sort of thing and so I mean this rule I think
is or this formula is easier to apply in a lot of cases, so slavery is a very open, clear
case owning other human beings violates the formula of humanity, it is by definition using
someone as a mere means, working for pay seems more like the example I just gave you, we
enter into a sort of contract where I, you know, allow myself to be told what to do in
exchange for money, right, and if I don't like this anymore I can quit, so working for
pay seems permissible, lying again doesn't seem permissible because if I lie to you then
I'm using you as a means, I am trying to propagate false information, I'm trying to fool you,
I'm trying to get you to do something, right, so lying is the kind of thing that is in fact
a way of using others as a means and one reason I take the lying case here is because it turns
out that no matter what formula you use, you come to the same set of rules, so all of the
rules of morality things can be generated by any of these methods, the formula of humanity
foregrounds the inherent value and dignity of rational agency, whereas the form of universal
law foregrounds reason's ability to universalize towards the general principles of humanity,
so they're both foregrounding something about reason but something slightly different about
reason, so I think I'm going to leave that because I want to say a few words about Maria
Von Herbert before we move on to the Velleman article, if you're still sort of wondering
about some things about Kant and I'm sure that some of you are, again I recommend that
you read the text over, maybe listen to this lecture one more time, you can of course send
me or several experts we have on Kant some questions if you have them as well, Maria
Von Herbert is an interesting case, this is a true story, she was someone who was alive
in Kant's time, who had a famous letter exchange with him, she was in despair and looked to
Kant and his theory for certain kind of solace but she didn't find it there, she has read
the metaphysics of morals including the categorical imperative and it doesn't help a bit, so the
reason she says it doesn't help a bit is because she finds it too easy, as an interesting perspective
right so she thinks the commandments of morality are too trifling and too easy to satisfy and
you know on Kant's theory there should be some tension in us because of our dual nature,
we should be pulled by inclination but it doesn't seem like Maria Von Herbert is particularly,
doesn't seem like she has like countervailing inclinations that she's supposed to fight
against so that's how at least she presents herself, it should put her in an ideal ethical
position right, you might think oh well this is great, this is perfect, you have someone
who's just able to follow the dictates of rationality is never in a position where they
will not follow what morality says but it has the kind, well it doesn't have the opposite
effect but it puts her in a position of meaninglessness, she thinks I live according to this theory,
I'm in fact in some ways ideal with respect to this theory but I feel totally empty, so
the question then is is it a weakness of Kant's theory that it does not maybe cannot provide
anything like solace or meaning to its adherents?
Is a Kantian moral saint like Herbert seems to be doomed to a life of empty rule following?
This is the kind of challenge to Kant's theory that we see and the question is well is it
a good challenge to the theory and some might say yes, it shows a weakness, something lacking
in the sort of human aspect of Kant's theory that it doesn't do anything in the direction
of meaning, I mean others can say something like well no this isn't a theory about meaning,
this isn't like Aristotle telling us how to live our lives and be happy, this is just
telling us what we're allowed to do and what we're demanded to do by morality, you know
happiness that's all on, you know meaning that's all on the inclination side, that's
not what my theory is doing.
So that's the kind of sort of debate about you know what is the scope and power of Kant's
theory and is it meant to do the kind of thing that Maria von Herbert sees it failing to
do and that's a discussion that one can have.
Okay so what is going on in Bellman's article?
So Bellman's article is an application of Kantian ethical principles to the case of
assisted suicide and what he's trying to do is use Kantian the ontological notions to
make an argument about the permissibility of assisted suicide that's going to take up
a number of these notions that we just talked about in particular in looking at the formula
of humanity.
So the question that he asks, is there a right for a person to quote live and die in light
of his own convictions about why his life is valuable and where its value lies?
Right so there's one question you might say about whether someone has a right to live
in light of his own convictions about why his life is valuable and where its value lies
and maybe another question about whether someone has a right to die in light of his own convictions
and so this is where the assisted suicide question is going to be focusing obviously
on the die part of it.
So he says that well you can generate a broad principle that answers, you can generate that
is a broad moral principle that affirms the right on the basis of two prior principles
so one, this is principle number one he considers, a person has the right to make her own life
shorter in order to make it better.
So someone who is looking at assisted suicide is trying to make their overall life better
by avoiding some unpleasant bit of it that might happen in the future so you cut it short
in order to make it overall better.
So the principle here is a person has that right, that is to make life shorter if doing
so is a necessary means or consequence of making it a better life on the whole for her.
And again you just have to think someone who is looking forward to some part of their life
in the future that's going to be horrible they decide they want to make it shorter and
avoid having that as part of their life and then their life overall is better.
The second principle, there is a presumption in favor of deferring to a person's judgment
on the subject of her own good.
So when people say it's good for me to do this, it's good for me to do that, we don't
have to always agree with them but there's a presumption in favor of deferring to them
on their own judgments.
So someone who says oh it's good to smoke and you say no it's not really good to smoke,
you don't though thereby attain the right to stop them from smoking, you can argue with
them but you have to defer to their judgment, you have to allow them to do what they want
to do and live their life.
But if you take these two principles together, they imply that a person has the right to
live and die by her own convictions about whether continued life would be better for
him.
So this question that's being asked, Bellamy thinks, is answered in the affirmative if
you assert these two prior principles, that you have the right to make your own life shorter
and that there's a presumption of deferring to a person's judgment on the subject of their
own good.
This is, I mean just to make it even clearer, when you say a person has the right to make
her own life shorter in order to make it better, that's a judgment about the goodness of the
life, right, if that's not clear from the, right, so the subject of her own good, when
you're making it better, you're making a judgment about its goodness or badness, right.
That's how those two principles connect to one another and it's the first principle that
Bellamy rejects, right, this principle that a person has the right to make her own life
shorter, that's the one that he rejects and the reason he rejects this is that he thinks
that the right to die conflicts with values that are non-relative.
Now remember, when we were talking about the formula of humanity, I made a distinction
between relative and absolute values, something has relative value, gets its value from something
else, something that has absolute value just has value in virtue of itself and not as a
result of relationship to something else, right, so things of absolute value, things
of relative value in relation to something that has absolute value, right, so this is,
so this Kantian point, right, the right to die conflicts with values which are non-relative
that is not related to personal interests, so what's a personal interest?
Personal interest is like the things I think about my own good, about my own life, right,
so I like, you know, playing chess, that's something that's interesting to me that has
relative value but it gets its value in this case because I have absolute value and it's
something that's my personal interest.
Now the values connected to the right to die are ones that concern the inherent dignity
of persons, so again this is back to the formula of humanity, right, we have absolute value
insofar as we're rational agents, we have this dignity and it's not something, right,
your dignity as a rational agent is not something that you own in the way that you own your
car or your apartments or your watch or your phone, it's not just yours because its value,
right, your value as a person is not relative to you as an individual.
So Kant, sorry, Kant, Bellman doesn't just assert this, he gives an argument for it which
starts from the question of what's good for a person and so what we're going to do now
is sort of look at this notion of what's good for a person and show what it entails or implies
and what Bellman is going to argue that it entails or implies a value that is non-relative
and if it's non-relative it's not something that we can just make a choice about, not
even for myself.
So what's good for a person is what's rational to want for his own sake, right, so this is,
you know, you want what's good for your children not because you think that this is going to
be good for you but it's going to be good for them, you want what's best for them.
Now he said well why do we want things for the sake of other people, why we want goods
for the sake of other people because we're concerned with the other person.
So this is what he's trying to do here is work out a kind of priority relationship between
the good of a person and the person himself.
So the good of a person is so what do you want for your children, you want them to be
intelligent and caring, you want them to be employed in jobs that they enjoy, in a relationship
with someone that loves them, you have all these desires connected to the good of some
other individual and that's because you care deeply about that individual themselves, right,
the other person.
So that's to argue that a person's good, right, all these things I talked about, right, the
good for the person, that is a relative value and it's relative to the value of the person
herself.
So think back to the formula of humanity to treat someone as an end in themselves, right,
is to treat them as a rational agent and to acknowledge in a way their dignity and absolute
value.
And remember the formula of humanity also applies not just to how I treat other people
but it also applies to how I treat myself.
So right, the formula of humanity act in such a way that you use humanity whether in your
own person or that of another always at the same time as an end and never merely as a
means.
So if you elevate the good of a person, that is to say what's good for them or what's in
their self-interest or what will make their life go well over the person themselves, then
you've gotten the priority relationship wrong.
If you, in terms of the formula of humanity, use an individual to promote their own good,
if you use yourself as a means to promote your own good, it seems like you're violating
the formula of humanity.
I just want to just jump back here a second just to look at principle one again, the one
that he's rejecting, right, a person has the right to make her own life shorter in order
to make it better, right.
So you sacrifice the person for the sake of the person's good and it's then formulated
to make it shorter if doing so is a necessary means or consequence of making it better,
making the life better on a whole.
So again, that's using the person, the individual as a means, again, to that same individual's
good.
And that's what would be to agree to the principle one would be to think that that's okay.
And for Kantian reasons that we've seen, that's a mistake, right.
It's a mistake to think, it's a violation of a moral norm to think that you can use
a human being as a means even to promote their own good, right.
As I have it here, right, we assume that a person's goods matters because we assume that
people matter.
And it's the mattering of people, right, that is the value that Kant is talking about in
the formula of humanity and when he's talking about our dignity as rational agents.
And that's just, that's the same thing that Velleman is talking about when he is arguing
against the first principle, right.
So remember the rhetoric here, there are two principles which generate this idea that you
can make your life shorter to make it better, right.
That first principle he thinks is the one they reject and that's precisely the one which
says that you can use yourself as a means to make your life better.
The second principle that you defer to people on what they think about their own good, that's
a principle that he accepts.
Now does this mean that Velleman thinks that assisted suicide is always impermissible?
No, right.
So those of you who are maybe starting to think about like, oh, well how does this contrast
with what Foote was saying, Foote is also talking about the good of a person, she's
also talking about rights, but she seems to have, you know, have them doing different
things and functioning in different ways, right.
Notice one thing, I'll come back to Foote in a second, is that Velleman thinks that
it's the dignity of the human being that blocks this idea that you can just sacrifice the
life to make it better, but the dignity of the human being can actually disappear, right.
So if someone is in so much excruciating pain that they can never exercise their rational
agency, in that case you're not sacrificing the dignity of the person because it's again
the dignity of the person qua rational agent, right.
So if someone is in a brain dead condition, for example, it doesn't seem like it would
sacrifice their dignity to say, you know, take them off of life support because in that
case the dignity doesn't seem to be present anymore.
So he opens for cases of assisted suicide, but not the sort of case where you have someone
in their full rational faculties who could continue life and pursue other goals, but
doesn't want to.
So his view is restrictive, right, we can't just choose, right, so there are, you know,
certain countries now you can just kind of order a package and then someone will come
and you'll get an injection or a pill or whatever, right, that kind of thing seems to be ruled
out by Bellman's considerations.
Yes.
Would you say it's correct to describe Bellman's theory here as a hypothetical imperative
because you can have the right to endure all life if these conditions are in place?
So good, so the question was, is then what Bellman doing hypothetical because it seems
like he allows for certain conditions?
That's a good question.
I mean, I think that he would say that the answer is it's not a hypothetical imperative
because the idea of the presence of dignity and absolute value, right, generates the categorical
imperative, but once that value is gone, right, then you have a choice, then it's no longer
sort of relevant for the same kind of question, right, so in other words the categorical imperative
is generated by the presence of this objectively valuable rational agency, right, and that's
not like a hypothetical thing in the same way that whether I want to play tennis is
a hypothetical thing or in the same way that whether I want to be happy is a hypothetical
thing.
I mean, unlike Kant though, I think we might say Bellman is more open to this idea that
our absolute value can be undermined by certain conditions that we have.
I think Bellman is more modern in the sense that he recognizes that the kind of rational
agency that we have can be undermined by sickness and illness and pain and that's something
I think that departs from Kant to a certain extent.
So for Kant, our rational agency has this almost magical status whereas it's a much
more mundane thing for Bellman, but I don't think that he would then say it's a hypothetical
imperative because I still think you get from this a kind of moral restriction, but on the
other hand I guess I should say that modern deontologists are much more willing to break
the rules than Kant was, to put it that way, so there's tons of deontologists who go out
and say Kant was wrong to say that you shouldn't lie to save a life, you should lie because
it's a supreme emergency or etc. etc.
So many of those who are currently inspired by Kant don't hold to the letter of Kant on
a number of issues and this might be one place where I think Bellman could be seen as departing
from Kant to a certain degree.
So good, good question.
Now just we have a couple of minutes left, so one way to think about, I promised a comment
on the comparison between Foote and Bellman and here's one I think important way to say
an interesting example that Foote uses that might help you see the difference between
Foote and Bellman.
So Foote says about voluntary euthanasia which is the kind of thing assisted suicide is really
about it's a sort of form of voluntary euthanasia, says about this that look if someone wants
to die no rights are violated in helping them do this and she says by analogy if you say
well you know if anyone destroys my house it doesn't matter you know then and someone
comes and burns down your house well that you've given away the right and having given
away the rights no rights are violated.
So if you say if you voluntarily allow someone to destroy your property none of your rights
have been violated so too if you allow someone to help you die and that's what you want none
of your rights have been violated.
For Bellman this is a deep mistake because we don't own property in the same way that
we relate to ourselves because he thinks that property is one of these things that have
relative value and our rational agency is something that has absolute value.
So I mentioned this before you know the dignity that we possess as rational agencies isn't
ours personally it's a shared objective value so we don't own it in the same way that we
own a house and it's a mistake to then assimilate things like property to the way we own ourselves.
So for remember for Foote she said that you know generally where justice doesn't oppose
euthanasia she says that well charity will generally be in favor of it because euthanasia
is defined as the good you know it's promoting the good of the person dying however right
certain cases it's going to turn out that charity will suggest that we should try and
talk people out of suicide for their own good sorry talk people out of euthanasia for their
own good in exactly the way we would talk them out of suicide for their own good make
them see that there's a better life out there.
Now that strategy again is what Velleman would say is focusing on the wrong thing you're
focusing on the good of the person and not on the value of the person as an individual
and that's what you should really be focusing on when you're talking about assisted suicide
and euthanasia and such things.
Okay thank you very much.