A Consideration of Ethics: Kant and Kierkegaard

Just to note: This week I'm talking about ethics in the blog through two philosophers that I'm most familiar with. However, all of you should feel free to post with your own preferred ethical systems and philosophies as well.

The Definition of Moral

1. a. Of or relating to human character or behaviour considered as good or bad; of or relating to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil, in relation to the actions, desires, or character of responsible human beings; ethical.

b. Of an action: having the property of being right or wrong, or good or evil; voluntary or deliberate and therefore open to ethical appraisal. Of a person, etc.: capable of moral action; able to choose between right and wrong, or good and evil.

3. b. Relating to, affecting, or having influence on a person's character or conduct, as distinguished from his or her intellectual or physical nature.

4. a. Of a person, a person's conduct, etc.: morally good, virtuous; conforming to standards of morality.


Ethics

One of the most basic questions that people seem to wrestle with is, “How can I know right from wrong? And how can I act rightly?” Another way of phrasing that question is, “What makes a person’s actions morally good?” Parents, teachers, and religious leaders try to interpret their thoughts and texts on the subjects in order to train children, students, and congregations to act in a way that is preferable. But just whose way is the preferable way? Whose right is the right right to choose?

We know that human beings generally don’t follow a moral system completely consistently. We all mess up sometimes, we fail, we act poorly. However, there are other times when even the constructed ideal moral systems of various families and communities collide in the most unfriendly of ways. For instance, one society believes in polygamy, and both men and women agree to the practice and would like to see it continued. Most of Western society considers this to be immoral. Is there a way to establish a moral system which could apply to all mankind? Can there be a universal code of behavior which all should follow? And can that code be universally implemented with any sort of practicality?

The intellectual study of ethics intercedes for basic human experience in answering these questions. If ethics is the science of morals, the study concerned with the principles of human duty, then ethical behavior at its basic level then, can be described as that which it is our human duty to discover and adhere to.

Some ethical choices seem obvious. Don’t murder someone. Don’t steal things that don’t belong to you. Don’t lie to each other. At least, we think these seem like simple ethical commands when we offer them to small children as guiding principles. As we get older, we realize, I believe, that none of these situations are as simple as they might seem. Don’t murder is a fine thing to say generally, but what if you are being attacked? Is it ok to murder in self-defense? Is it ok to steal from a store if you are literally starving? Is it ok to tell the little white lie to benefit someone’s self-esteem or make a situation easier to handle as long as the lie won’t hurt anyone? We tend to begin to think of ethical counter examples which we can justify as correct actions based upon circumstance.

Philosophers, religious teachers, and civic leaders have attempted to define limits for human behavior in order to create the best way for human beings to live. In order to structure our conversation about ethics, we will examine several ethical positions, religious and secular. We will entertain two main questions:

1. Should God be the sole determinant of ethics?
2. Can ethics exist outside of God?

Should the command of God be the sole determinate of ethics?

One perspective on ethics is that the command of God or gods ought to determine what constitutes a good and moral human being. Being the creator of human kind, or, at the least, more powerful and knowledgeable, a divine being should have the ability to command human beings, telling them what actions to take, and requiring immediate obedience. One might consider the Christian moral system to be such a system.

However, according to our wonderful friends as Wikipedia, “The theory runs into many philosophical problems. One objection is that it implies that morality is arbitrary. If divine command theory is true, morality is based merely upon god's whim. Thus, if god had willed cruelty and dishonesty to be virtues, and mercy and charity to be vices, then they would have been. The natural reply to this objection is that god would not have commanded such things because he would not command evil, but this faces the difficulty that, on divine command theory, it is only god's command that makes them evil.”

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

The explanation of the relationship between God and ethics unpacked by Soren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling illustrates some of the problems with an ethical system determined by an absolute divine being, but states that these questions are central to the experience of being one who is faithful.

Kierkegaard uses the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac found in Genesis 22 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&chapter=22&version=31&context=chapter) in order to illustrate the difference that the control of a higher power can make in ethical determination. Abraham is commanded by God to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah to “sacrifice him there as a burnt offering,” and he complies, taking his son to the mountain and preparing him for death. At the final moment, God intervenes, providing a lamb for sacrifice and saving Isaac from death.

While religious communities tend to consider this story with awe at how the man of faith followed the command of God even when it was difficult, I can’t help but read it with a degree of horror. God has asked Abraham to commit murder, an act which God will include as sinful in the Ten Commandments given to Moses. Has God asked Moses to sin?

Kierkegaard expresses the same trepidation in ethical terms: “The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac; but on this contradiction lies the very anguish that can make one sleepless” (31). Certainly it should make one nervous to consider that in this story the command of God is to be willing to murder. “If faith cannot make it into a holy deed to murder one’s own son,” Kierkegaard determines, “then let the judgment fall on Abraham as on anyone else” (31).

However, Kierkegaard explains that faith in fact can make it into a holy deed to murder one’s own son. He explains that “the ethical is the universal, and as the universal applies to everyone” (62). Faith, though, he explains as a paradox wherein “the single individual is higher than the universal” (63). When that is true, ethics are suspended. In fact, ethics can be, for the man of faith, a temptation. Kierkegaard writes, “What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep him from doing God’s will” (70).

If ethics is based upon duty, then, what is the duty of man according to Kierkegaard? He explains, “the duty is precisely the expression of God’s will” (70).

Scholar Geoffrey Clive, in an article entitled, “ ‘The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical’ in Nineteenth Century Literature” analyses Kierkegaard’s ethical examination of Abraham:

“One of Kierkegaard’s most arresting concepts is the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical,’ the transgression of the moral principle in Fear and Trembling” as required and justified by religious faith. Communicating indirectly through Johannes de Silencio, who, characteristic of bystanders, is at once incredulous and irresistibly fascinated, Kierkegaard discerns Abraham’s holiness as a paradox, namely his preparedness to stand above the Law out of respect for the Lawgiver. While it is incumbent upon every man qua father to love his own son, Abraham acknowledges a duty toward God which in effect contradicts his family obligations, let alone his natural impulses. He makes himself an exception to the universal, an offender of public opinion, by obeying an esoteric supernatural voice enjoining murder. Thus, Abraham is tempted by the ethical. Undoubtedly, his unwillingness to sacrifice Isaac would have gained for him the approbation of everyone, but acting against the inner light of human consciousness and the ruling ideas of the crowd, Abraham became holy by the “virtue of the absurd.” Surely no contemporary could understand him except God.”

Kierkegaard allows God to possess dominion over man outside of the ethical because God himself is outside the human ethical. The Bible cites other examples where God has called his people to do things which might be considered unethical, such as rewarding Rahab for lying in order to protect the Jewish spies she was housing.


Can ethics exist outside of God?

We have discussed morality based in God as supra-ethical and therefore the one who determines the action of man through the imposition of his will. However, not all believe in God. Is there an ethical system that human beings can create from rational principles which would apply to both religious and non-religious people in the same way? Are there central human duties which can be separated from religious duties?

The maintenance of a civic society would seem to indicate that the answer ought to be yes. Our society is governed by principles of jurisprudence which bring together people of diverse backgrounds, cultural experiences, and social classes. Immanuel Kant introduces one method of determining a principle through which all human beings can rationally and ethically act regardless of religious persuasion.

The Categorical Imperative of Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant attempted through his philosophy to determine based upon pure reason the concepts which his society attributed to God. Because an individual can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, he ought to create hypotheses which can be innately reasoned within a human being.

Kant believes that a moral philosophy should be pure, that is it should be based upon the freedom of a man to reason judgment. To explain why Kant thinks a pure moral philosophy is necessary, we must first understand what Kant meant by the term “pure moral philosophy” . According to Kant, “All knowledge is either material and concerned with some subject, or formal and concerned solely with the form of understanding and reason themselves” (365a). Material philosophies are divided into two categories based on whether they are concerned with nature or with freedom. If they are concerned with nature, Kant calls them physics or natural philosophy. If they are concerned with freedom, Kant calls them ethics or moral philosophy (365a). Kant distinguishes two different types of philosophy -- empirical philosophy and pure philosophy. While empirical philosophy is formed on the basis of experience, pure philosophy is formed on the basis of a priori principles, defined as those precepts which are formed prior to experience and are innate in the mind (365a). The term for a pure philosophy which is “confined to determinate objects of the understanding” (365a), is metaphysics. According to Kant, the empirical part of metaphysics may be called practical anthropology and the rational part may be called morals. Based on the prior definitions, a pure moral philosophy is a philosophy of the freedom of man based on the innate principles of his mind. Practical anthropology, on the other hand, is the formulation of philosophy from the actions which one can observe in man.

Practical anthropology is lacking as an approach to moral philosophy because, as Kant claims, man “has not so easily the power to realize the Idea [of a pure practical reason] in concreto in his conduct of life” (366b). Therefore, using the actions of man to form a philosophy of the correct moral behavior which a man should follow cannot satisfy. Simply put, a man does not always do what he ought to do. A pure moral philosophy, however, uses man’s reason to inform the correct moral actions. Kant explains,

A metaphysic of morals is thus indispensably necessary, not merely in order to investigate, from motives of speculation, the source of practical principles which are present a priori in our reason, but because morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm for correct moral judgment. (366a)

In order to create the grounding thread for the metaphysic of morals, Kant introduces the concept of the good will -- moral actions performed for the sake of the moral law (366a).

The good will is the quality which informs talents, temperament, and gifts of fortune and which directs them to their proper moral uses in spite of happiness or any other feeling. The difference between the good will and the talents, temperament and gifts of fortune is that the latter are morally neutral -- that is, they can be put to good use or to bad use (as in the example of the scoundrel on 367a) -- whereas, the good will cannot conceivably ever be used to unfavorable and incorrect moral ends. The good will “shines like a jewel for its own sake as something which has full value in itself” (367a). The good will makes a man perform his duty and take correct moral actions.

All correct moral actions rely upon the categorical imperative, a command for behavior which relies upon the support of the good will. The categorical imperative reads, “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (380b). All moral action performed for the sake of the moral law follows from the categorical imperative.

The main reason Kant is against acting on impulse and instead demands action based upon duty is that impulse cannot be governed by the categorical imperative. Kant’s example of the suicidal man illustrates this principle. A man wishes to kill himself which is his impulse reaction to his ill luck. However, when he applies the moral test to his action, he finds that his duty to his own life forbids his action. Another of his examples is a man who wishes to keep his wealth to feed his impulse toward pleasure. Yet, his duty toward humanity requires that he help those in need, which actually helps himself in the long run, when the time comes that he himself is in need.

Many suggest that this principle sounds a great deal like Jesus’s command, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Geoffrey Clive compares the ethics of Kant to the ethics of Kierkegaard:

“The moral law being holy, Kant does not allow the moral agent to be answerable to God in a way that would conflict with his obligations towards other rational beings. In Streit der Fakultaten, he declares with regard to Abraham that the voice of God cannot be known save negatively as that not incongruous with the categorical imperative. However majestic, he argues, man construes his confrontation by God to be, it becomes illusory by virtue of violating practical reason. Abraham, accordingly, should have answered God as follows: ‘That I ought not kill my good son is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt; that you, as you appear to be, are God, I am not convinced and will never be even if your voice would resound from the heavens.’”

The claim Kant makes is that if God commands something against the ethical as determined by the categorical imperative, then it is not God who does so, and therefore man should not follow that command.

On some level, perhaps, this conversation is practical-application continuation of last week’s conversation concerning reason and faith. Is our behavior defined by reasoned contemplation of what we should do as defined by reasonable responsibility to other rational human beings? Or is it defined by a faithful adherence to a God who is beyond the human notion of the ethical?

Questions to consider:

1. From where do you obtain your notion of what constitutes an ethical human being? In other words, how do you personally determine right (good) actions from wrong (bad) ones?
2. Which ethical notion appeals to you more, that of Kant or of Kierkegaard, and why?
3. Are there ever exceptions to an absolute moral system? On what grounds are these exceptions derived?
4. Can God ever command man to do something that is unethical?