Kantian Perspectives on the Rational Basis of Human Dignity

Kant made the dignity of humanity central in his moral philosophy. This essay sketches a broadly Kantian understanding of his position, noting occasionally alternative interpretations. The main questions are these: (1) What is human dignity? (2) By virtue of what do human beings have dignity? (3) Why believe in human dignity? (4) What are the practical implications? The Kantian view is that human dignity is an innate worth or status that we did not earn and cannot forfeit, which we have by virtue of our rational autonomy. A Kantian argument for this belief turns on how we must understand ourselves from practical standpoint. We must strive to make our individual choices worthy of this moral standing, which elevates us above animals and mere things, by never treating persons as mere means and by honouring and promoting humanity positively.

On the Wrongness of Lies

Why are lies wrong? The Kantian answer sees lies as a close cousin to coercion; they are a violation of individual autonomy and a demonstration of contempt. By contrast, the utilitarian answer is that lies are likely to lead to terrible consequences, sometimes because they obliterate trust, sometime because they substitute the liar’s will for that of the chooser, who has much better information about the chooser’s welfare than does the liar. The utilitarian objection to paternalistic lies is akin to the utilitarian embrace of Mill’s Harm Principle. It is possible to see the Kantian view as a kind of moral heuristic, welcome on utilitarian grounds. The Kantian and utilitarian objections to lying have implications for the family, the workplace, advertising, commerce, and politics, and also for constitutional law.

The Moral Basis of State Independence

The chapter takes as its starting point the central claim in Arthur Ripstein’s defense of a Kantian approach to war, namely that each state has a right to be independent from the determining choice of other states. The state’s right to independence is the basis for its permission to use force in national defense, and also for in bello restrictions that limit the permissible means of waging war to those necessary to stop aggression. But what morally justifies the state’s right to independence? And can this right be accounted for on Kantian grounds? Specifically, Stilz focuses on whether the Kantian view, as Ripstein reconstructs it, provides a philosophically satisfying basis for attributing a right to political independence to the state. In the final section, she outlines an alternative reading of Kant that may provide a more compelling moral foundation for this right.

Ethics

Why are lies wrong? The Kantian answer sees lies as close cousins to coercion; they are a violation of individual autonomy and a demonstration of contempt. By contrast, the utilitarian answer is that lies are likely to lead to terrible consequences, sometimes because they obliterate trust, sometimes because they substitute the liar’s will for that of the chooser, who has much better information about the chooser’s welfare than does the liar. The utilitarian objection to paternalistic lies is akin to the utilitarian embrace of Mill’s Harm Principle. It is possible to see the Kantian view as a kind of moral heuristic, welcome on utilitarian grounds. The Kantian and utilitarian objections to lying have implications for the family, the workplace, advertising, commerce, and politics, and also for constitutional law.

The Role of Receptivity in Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation

Commentators on Heidegger’s late-1920s interpretation of Kant often argue that Heidegger reveals himself in this work to be a philosopher of receptivity: Heidegger gives pride of place to the passive aspects of human cognition, our “openness to the world,” over against activity, spontaneity, and understanding (Gordon, 2010, p.7). On this view, Heidegger’s contribution to the transcendental tradition is offering an “affective transcendentalism” (Engelland, 2017, p.223): in response to the central question of transcendental philosophy – What are the prior conditions that enable and structure our experience? – Heidegger emphasizes the prior affectivity that preconditions our experience. While Heidegger’s position, so construed, may appear an exciting strain of transcendental philosophy, it likewise seems to be a considerable departure from Kant. After all, Kant insisted that both spontaneity and receptivity are required for human cognition; this is often referred to as Kant’s “discursivity thesis”. In Kant’s well-known formulation connecting our passively receiving intuitions and actively organizing concepts, “thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75). Therefore, the idea that Heidegger defends a philosophy of receptivity in his interpretive works on Kant contributes to the common view that Heidegger is a bad interpreter of Kant. I challenge the claim that Heidegger defends a philosophy of receptivity in his interpretive works on Kant. This claim derives its plausibility from Heidegger’s opening discussion of intuition, where Heidegger does insist that “thinking is in the service of intuition.” While this discussion grants a kind of primacy to sensibility – in particular, our faculty of sensibility explains why human cognition is finite – I suggest that it does not compromise Kant’s discursivity thesis. Heidegger affirms, with Kant, that understanding and sensibility, two distinct capacities or faculties, are required for cognition. Further, I argue that Heidegger’s claim that sensibility plays a “leading role” in cognition is merely the beginning of Heidegger’s argument; it is not his main intervention. For Heidegger is concerned not with cognition, but with the source of cognition: the very constitution of the human being. And this source, Heidegger insists, is both receptive and spontaneous. Heidegger’s central thesis – that we must consider the imagination to be the fundamental cognitive faculty in Kant – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Under the consensus reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, Heidegger is supposed to be a perfect foil to the Neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant: where the Neo-Kantians privilege spontaneity, Heidegger privileges receptivity. While Heidegger is certainly critical of the Neo-Kantian prioritization of spontaneity, I argue that we must rethink Heidegger’s relationship to the Neo-Kantian view. Heidegger’s main thesis in the Kant interpretation – that the imagination, a faculty that is both spontaneous or receptive, is the “common root” of sensibility and understanding – answers a question that Heidegger takes up from the Marburg Neo-Kantians: what is the origin that unifies the faculties of sensibility and understanding? While the Neo-Kantians insist on an origin in the spontaneous faculty of understanding, Heidegger suggests instead that the origin is the receptive and spontaneous faculty of imagination. Where the Neo-Kantians overemphasize spontaneity, Heidegger restores balance. Ultimately, Heidegger does not prioritize receptivity in his reading of Kant; rather, Heidegger offers a transcendental philosophy that inquires more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

The Highest Good and the Relation between Virtue and Happiness

The paper develops a Kantian view of the highest good and the relation between virtue and happiness. Several Kantian theses are defended, among them the thesis that the highest good is realized only if every virtuous individual is happy, the view that virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness, and the proposition that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for the worthiness of being happy. The author argues that the highest good ought to be realized and that it ought to be that everyone who is virtuous is happy. To prove these claims, the author will use techniques developed by modern deontic logicians. According to Kant, we do not have an immediate duty to promote our own happiness, the aim of morality being not personal satisfaction but rather virtue and the good will. The important question is not “How do I become happy?” but “How do I become good?”. The arguments in this paper support this view.

Human Dignity as a Normative Principle

Böckenförde was one of the most outspoken critics of attempts to legalize new biomedical techniques, such as human cloning, therapeutic cloning, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. In this article, he lays out why the legal principle of human dignity, enshrined in Article 1 of the German Basic Law, not only suggests but even requires the prohibition of such techniques. Drawing on the records of the 1949 Parlamentarischer Rat (the constitution-drafting body), he is able to show that with Article 1 the drafters sought to set a counterpoint to fascist Germany’s total negation of human dignity and that the preservation of human dignity was intended to be the highest and most pressing aim of the Federal Republic. Böckenförde notes further that the Federal Constitutional Court adopted the Kantian view that human dignity means every human being is an end in itself. But who is ‘every human being’? Does it include unborn life? Böckenförde answers in the affirmative and argues that the unborn therefore must be protected by the state from the very beginning of life, from the point of fertilization. Every other point in time in human development, such as the implantation of the embryo in the uterus, or the development of the central nervous system, would be arbitrary criteria for eligibility as a bearer of human dignity. Therefore, all biomedical techniques which treat the embryo not as an end in itself must be prohibited. He lays out the consequences of this argument in detail with regard to cloning and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

Kantian Perspectives on Private Law

This chapter articulates the Kantian approach to private law. It begins by explaining the aims and ambitions of Kantian legal philosophy more generally and, in particular, introducing the Kantian idea that a particular form of thought is appropriate to a particular domain of inquiry or conduct. The chapter situates the Kantian view within a broad natural law tradition. For the part of that tradition that Immanuel Kant develops, the moral structure of natural law is animated by a conception of personal interaction that is so familiar as to be almost invisible. Despite its centrality to both morality and law, in the absence of legal institutions, this natural law is inadequate to its own principles. It requires legal institutions to render it fully determinate in its application consistent with everyone’s independence. It also requires public institutions of adjudication. The chapter further looks at Kant’s “division” of private rights, distinguishing first between the innate right that everyone has simply in virtue of being human and acquired rights that require an affirmative act to establish them. It then goes through the Kantian division of the titles of private right, situating them in relation to the distinction between persons and things. Finally, the chapter articulates the Kantian account of what might be called the naïve theory of remedies—that is, that the remedy is an imperfect continuation of the right that was violated.

Realität als vermeintliche Grenze der Erkenntnis: Hegels Metaphysik im Anschluss an und in Abgrenzung zu Kant

While Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason aims to 'humiliate' reason by declining any possibility of knowledge of things 'in themselves', he does conceive such critique as 'the necessary preparation for a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics'. In this paper I examine in what sense Hegel's Science of Logic goes beyond that Kantian view without neither relapsing back into dogmatic metaphysics nor turning into a mere pragmatism. I argue that reality in itself is ontologically deficient so that it is already reality itself (and not just the categories of understanding) that makes true knowledge of real things impossible. Nonetheless I contend that there is something in Hegel's Science of Logic that is truly absolute and turns Logic into 'a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics', namely what Hegel calls the Concept or the Absolute Idea. Furthermore I point out the concrete importance of these metaphysical claims for human theoretical and practical knowledge. This finally provides a new reading of Hegel's Logic as a de-ontologised Aristotelian metaphysics that not just claims to regulate empirical knowledge in a Kantian manner, but to also conceptually constitute reality 'in itself'.

Patriotism & Moral Theology

This essay examines the question of the moral justification of patriotism, given a Kantian view of morality as requiring an equal respect for every human being. The essay considers the background in Kant's moral theology for his cosmopolitanism. It then considers an extreme version of cosmopolitanism that denies a proper place for love of one's country, and it engages with a contemporary atheist cosmopolitan, Seyla Benhabib, suggesting that there are resources in Kant's moral theology to ground the hope that she expresses but does not succeed in grounding. Finally, it considers patriotism as a perfection of cosmopolitanism, in the same way that love of an individual can be a perfection of love of humanity. The essay suggests that defensible versions of cosmopolitanism put constraints on what kind of love of one's own country is morally permissible. But these constraints require the background in a Kantian moral theology.