griffiths -kant's psychological hedonism

8/11/2019 Griffiths -Kant's Psychological Hedonism

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Royal Institute of Philosophy

Kant's Psychological HedonismAuthor(s): A. Phillips GriffithsSource: Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 256 (Apr., 1991), pp. 207-216Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3751626 .

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Kant s Psychological HedonismA. PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS

As far as consideration of man as phenomenon, as appearance, as anempirical self, is concerned, Kant appears to be a thoroughgoingpsychological hedonist.1

It is necessary immediately to qualify this in one, though only one,respect. For Locke, for example, the will (willkiir)-what Hobbescalled endeavour-towards or endeavour-fromwards-could be deter-mined only by pleasure or pain, a mechanical relation of cause andeffect. For Kant, the human will could never be so determined, but

only influenced. This he makes trenchantly clear in the lectures onethics, given just before publication of the First Critique, and its

possibility and necessity argued in the resolution of the third Antinomyof the First Critique, in the Second Critique, in the Groundwork, andelsewhere. It requires conceiving a person as having a noumenal as wellas phenomenal aspect. This is something a man cannot lose. Hence, ifsomeone allows himself to be wholly influenced by what is pleasant or

painful, he becomes more like a beast, but nevertheless radically unlikea beast, since a beast s actions are pathologically compelled, as a willarbitnrum brutum, whereas a man s actions are only pathologicallyinfluenced, even if wholly so, as a will arbitrium liberum. For the beast,the relation between stimulus and action is mechanical, as cause andeffect. Kant says when a dog is hungry and sees food, he must eatwhereas a man can restrain himself. But this need not be so; a dog canbe trained not to eat until given the command, even when he is hungryand in the presence of food. Now how is this different from anotherexample Kant gives, of a man who claims that, when moved by lust, hemust enter a brothel; of whom Kant points out that he would not, ifthere were a gallows outside on which he knew he would be hanged oncoming out? We can say that the dog does not restrain himself, but isrestrained by fear of his master; equally, the man does not restrainhimself, but is restrained by his fear of the gallows. The man might also

I do not know what were the important antecedents of this view forKant, whether Hobbes, Locke, Hume or Helvetius; in my view Hobbes isquite mistakenly regarded as a psychological hedonist, and Hume is hardlystraightforwardly one; the more plausible antecedents would be Locke,and, perhaps even more so, Helvetius (L Esp rt was published in 1758 andwas of course well known in Germany, which Helvetius visited in 1765).

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A. Phillips Griffiths

be restrained by his consciousness that going into the brothel would becontrary to the moral law; but it is clearly Kant s view that in both casesthe man would be actively restraining himself, and not merely beingpassively restrained.

The difference for Kant is that the man deterred by the gallows isnot, like the dog, wholly compelled by a conjunction of hunger and fear,but that he allows himself to be wholly influenced by the conjunction of

hunger and fear. But that is to assert of the man only a negativefreedom. There is so far no ground for attributing it to the man, no

more than there would be for saying that dogs could restrain all theirsensuous inclinations, but as a matter of fact on every occasion decidenot to do so. Equally, for Kant, it is no good saying that we observe thatmen act against all their sensuous inclinations, because, he points out,we can never know that there is not some hidden inclination not takenaccount of. To make this distinction between the man and the dog (orthe wholly mythical dog-we are not here concerned with animal

psychology) we must point to some positive ground for it. It is that theman, unlike the dog, can be moved by reason.

Without this capacity to be moved by reason, there would be nopossible ground for making this distinction. The man outside thebrothel has the capacity to be moved by reason, whether he is or not.Indeed, we may even say that even if it is only the thought of the gallowswhich deters him, he is moved by reason, though only in part; for hesees that going into the brothel is, because of the gallows, incompatiblewith his enjoying life, and hence that not going into the brothel is a

necessary and indispensable means to that end; hence he accepts therational imperative, I ought not to enter the brothel . But while this is arational principle, dependent on the analytic principle that he who willsthe end must will the means, it is only partly rational, because it

depends in part on something not given by reason, the end, which is

given by his sensuous inclination towards enjoyment.2

2 Kant obscures this somewhat by saying that such a man, being onlypartly determined by reason, is only partly free; but his main doctrine is thatsuch a man, since he is capable of acting wholly in accordance with rationalprinciple, is wholly free; not so much half a dog as no dog at all. It is the

former way of talking into which Kant frequently slips which leads to themisinterpretation that a man is only free when acting from duty, and hencewholly determined, and hence wholly unfree, and hence not subject tomoral blame, when he acts wrongly. Kant s remark (in the Lectures onEthics) that the freer a man is from stimuli, the more he can be compelledmorally, and the degree of his freedom grows with the degree of hismorality, similarly leads to the misunderstanding that a man is wholly freeand wholly moral only when he is totally indifferent to everything exceptthe moral law; if, indeed, it is entirely a misunderstanding rather than a

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Kant s Psychological Hedonism

Another way of representing this difference between a man and a dogis to say that the man as a rational being acts from maxims, which arerules having a certain generality, which a dog presumably cannot. Thatis, in acting a man conceives his action as falling under a certain rule. Anaction in the full sense must be one in which he conceives himself(though not necessarily bringing this to full explicit consciousness) asdoing something as following from a rule for the will, rather than justfinding himself doing something, like sneezing.

Kant s references o and examples of maxims and of their formulation

are sometimes perplexing, and have been the subject of a great deal ofdiscussion. I can only cut into such discussion here, by asserting thatKant s position is that a maxim must be a rule for the will from which theaction follows; otherwise it is no more than a specification of the actionitself. This does not mean it is a rule which commits the agent to any futureaction, still less a statement of how he consistently behaves; an agent canchange his ends. But it must be something which, if fully expressed, wouldhave to be vastly more complex than the examples Kant gives.

Take his example: I make it my maxim to increase my property byevery safe means , which I take to be whenever it is safe to do so, I shalldo whatever increases my property . This formulation is good enoughto submit it to the test of the categorical imperative, but it is clear nosane man could adopt it tout court, since it would mean he could neverbuy food or go to sleep, unless it was unsafe not to do so. This is not anunserious point; Kant must think a maxim implies the agent s willing-ness to adopt all the actions following from it, because of the use hewishes to make of maxims in applying the test of universal law. In thiscase, particularly, it implies the action of denying a loan has been madeto him when the contrary cannot be proved. He thinks, quite extraor-dinarily, that if this were universally done, there would never be anyloans; but that this is quite silly does not affect my point; that inadopting a maxim one is thereby willing to act on everything whichfollows from it; otherwise, Kant s test could not be applied. So, in so faras a maxim can seriously be adopted, it must envisage all that it mightcommit one to.

This throws doubt on my ever having maxims of the required kind.This point must not be confused with the difficulty that it is impossi-

ble to give the full, conscious formulation of a maxim; that would not bedisputed by Kant. Elsewhere, he is willing to allow cognitions whichcannot be consciously exhausted-for example, the definition of given

caricature f himself that Kant was prone to fall into; or, indeed, it nowoccurs to me with regard to this particular remark, the inattention ofFrederico Brauer, who took down notes of Kant s lectures which includereferences o a painter called Argasti nstead of Hogarth.

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concepts, or the concept of right in jurisprudence. That alone wouldnot vitiate the possibility of using Kant s test of universal law, any morethan one s inability to set out all the implications of a geometricalproposition would make any reductio proof impossible to give, thoughit might make it impossible to give every reductio proof.

The difficulty s that any maxim I might sanely adopt would surely haveto have an ineradicable eteris paribus clause, orprimafacie character. tis not just that, given certain difficult circumstances, do not know what Icould now steel myself to do, though that is pertinent; it is that I do notknow what, in all sorts of possible circumstances, would want to do, stillless approve of the whole world doing. This is because I have all sorts ofdifferent complexly related or independent nterests and concerns, any ormany of which might be brought to bear in a particular situation, butwhich I cannot possibly arrange n some order of priorities or any simple oreven complicated system. I know roughly what sort of fellow I am but notfully what I am, if indeed I am exactly anything rather han a centre of allsorts of disjunctive possibilities. Perhaps, sometimes, when I choose, Ibecome something there never was before. I do not know of any schematicgeneral principle which I could accept as being the Kantian maxim of anyaction, still less of all my actions, (cf. Kant s remarks on Schematism, andin particular n the necessity for judgment n the particular ase, in the firstCritique.)

Nevertheless, Kant thinks there are two, though only two, suchmaxims. The first is the maxim of acting on that maxim which is inaccordance with universal law (which I test by seeing whether I couldwill it to be a universal law of nature); the second is that of doingwhatever gives more pleasure than pain. Anything which does not fallunder the former, must fall under the latter. It does not matter that Imay not know in advance what things-perhaps things I have not yetheard of-will give me pleasure. It does not matter that I may not knowin advance of examining them what actions may not be in accordancewith universal law. That is merely an ignorance of how the rule willapply, not of the rule itself. It is not like the difficulty I spoke of before,of having all sorts of things I care for for their own sake, which are invarious vastly complex ways related or independent. There can only betwo things I care about for their own sake, one, qua rational being,acting in accordance with pure reason, the other, as a phenomenalbeing, acting for the sake of pleasure.

Even a psychological hedonist would not have to adopt Kant segregious thesis, if he rejected Kant s account of maxims. Someonewho holds that every action is done for the sake of pleasure need nothold that one is aiming at whatever will give most pleasure, nor wouldthat follow. Still less need he hold, or does it follow, that one is alwaysaiming at what gives a preponderance of pleasure over all actions

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(Kant s notion of happiness), any more than it follows that someonewho aims to hit each of a hundred targets is ever aiming to hit more thanone target, let alone a hundred targets.

But if one were a Kantian psychological hedonist, though withoutthe qualification to it he makes, one would have to think the maxim offollowing pleasure was the only possible one, in so far as one wererational.

This conclusion does not require a laborious combing of passages inthe Lectures on Ethics, the Groundwork, the First Critique, or his

Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, though I have combedthem and find many such passages which impressively reinforce it. It isone established beyond cavil by what must be the most authoritativeexpression of Kant s position: namely Theorem I, Theorem II and itscorollary, and Theorem III, of theAnalytic ofPure Practical Reason inthe Doctn ne of the Elements of Pure Practical Reason in the Critique ofPractical Reason.

Theorem I starts by claiming that all principles which presuppose anobject as the determining ground of the will are empirical. It is clear,and made abundantly clear from Kant s classification of all possiblepractical principles in the second remark to Theorem IV, that thisrefers to all practical principles whatever except practical universallaws. In the case of all empirical principles, the object is not itself thedetermining ground, since it may never exist or come to be; it is ratherthe conception of the object as giving pleasure to the agent if it becomesreal. This pleasure is a feeling or sensation. It is not however thesensation which determines the will, but the expectation of it.

(It may seem that what distinguishes autonomous from heter-onomous motivation is that in the former case it is a mere thought-ofwhat is in accordance with a universal law-which motivates. But whatis the expectation of pleasure, more than a mere thought? It is not,however, easy to pursue this point through the thickets of Kant saccount: as we shall see below, even the mere thought concerning lawmust have its phenomenal motivational counterpart.)

Thus expectation of pleasure is the only possible motive other thanrespect for the law. Even where it may seem that the motive must berespect for the law, we can never be sure that it may not really be ahidden expectation of pleasure-one hidden even from the agent.Given that, it is extremely difficult to show that Kant must be wrong;one can no more produce a counter-example than one could produce acounter-example to the principle that every event has a cause or that inevery act of affection towards any living thing there is an arcane sexualmotive. It is no good pointing out cases where the determining object orstate of affairs is one from the existence of which the agent could notpossibly expect to get pleasure, such as making a bequest. It cannot be

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said that the object here is the making of the will or testament, which ofcourse can be conceived as giving pleasure to the living agent, since thismay be a mere means, and the end, the inheritance of the bequest bysomeone, that for which the means is adopted; so that, for example, ifone found out that the intended beneficiary, say one s wife, wouldnecessarily inherit by law, so that one need not do anything, then onewould not do anything. No, the object here is clearly a state of affairswhich would obtain only after the agent is dead. But Kant could replythat even if the agent would not expect pleasure after death, he could,though without knowing it, be motivated by the expectation that he willavoid present pain if he can avoid having to think his wife might be leftpenniless; something which would be removed, if she is to inheritwhatever he does. Such ingenuity can always fudge up some suchentirely baseless and completely irrefutable supposition which wouldsave this a priori principle.

I reject this doctrine as false not because I can show it to be false butbecause there is not the slightest reason to believe it to be true and verygood reason to think it utterly repugnant, derogatory and degrading.

It implies that apart from the end of acting in accordance withuniversal law, no end is better than any other: where all that can beappealed to is the degree of intensity of pleasure; given that that is thesame in both cases, pushpin is as good as poetry. Mill recoiled from thisand suggested that pleasure itself can be rated good or better not only interms of its intensity but its quality. Its status as higher or lower isconferred on it by its object, for example whether its object has itsorigin and status in the understanding; a suggestion on which Kantpours scorn in advance. However dissimilar the conceptions of theobjects Kant says in Remark I to Theorem II, the feeling of pleasure(since it is the agreeableness and enjoyment which one expects from theobject which impels the activity toward producing it) is always thesame. There can be nothing to choose between expected occasions ofpleasure, except the sheer magnitude of pleasure. If the determinationof the will of an agent depends on the feelings of agreeableness ordisagreeableness which he expects from any cause then, says Kant it isall the same to him through what kind of notion he is affected. The onlything he considers in making a choice is how great, how long-lasting,how easily obtained, and how often repeated, this agreeableness is. 3

What makes this so repugnant is not that it reduces all human non-moral (in Kant s sense of moral) ends to the same level of value, but thatit seems to rob all except one possible one of having any value at all.

3 It would be a nice thought if it could be shown that these desideratawere the origin of Bentham s ategories f intensity, duration, propinquity,and fecundity n the calculus of pleasures.

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What is good about playing football, composing music, being married,or whatever is thought to be good? Nothing at all about what it is to playfootball or compose music or be married. It is just the far from universalfact that people get pleasure out of them; though it might as well havebeen painting their noses red, or sucking rubber teats, if the empiricalcauses of sensation had happened to be different. Any such goods aremerely instrumental, conditionally on their external relation to themerely causally and contingently connected sensations of pleasure. Butis this good any different from the good we can see in thistles-they are

very generally good for causing pain; or in putrid sewage-it is verygenerally good for causing the sensation of nausea? Unless of course,unlike pain and nausea, pleasure is good.

Kant does, admittedly, seem to think it somehow is. He thinks thathappiness, which is the realization of all a man wants or wishes in life-what gives him pleasure-is not only good, but an essential constituentof the summum bonum. The morally good deserve pleasure, and thesummum bonum consists in all rational beings enjoying pleasure to theextent that they have a good rational will. Perhaps that possibility will

be realized if in the next life the only desire left to rational beings is forsoft drinks, and the sea is turned to lemonade. But why is pleasure orhappiness a reward? Why not pain or nausea, or any other neutralsensation? Kant gave up this doctrine, in the Opus Postumum:Vleeschauwer says for reasons unknown to us. But I do not know whathis reasons were for holding it in the first place. The fragment dated byMenscher 1775 does give a reason, but only by there making theconcept of happiness an idea derived a priori from pure reason. There,the essential constituent of happiness is contentment or self-sufficiencywhich is entirely a priori and independent of empirical laws. What ispleasurable depends on empirical laws, so one who possesses happinesscan well dispense with pleasures . But this is a totally different conceptof happiness-though a no less legitimate one-from the concept ofhappiness dealt with in the Second Critique, the consciousness ofagreeableness of life. It may be that by then, having had a lot of otherthings to think about, Kant retained his confidence in an earlier con-clusion while forgetting the premises which gave it a quite differentsense.

Kant s thesis is, I said, not only repugnant, it is baseless. However,one might respond by pointing out that without some such thesis,human action becomes inexplicable. Why do people, having the samebeliefs, that is the same view of the circumstances in which an action isproposed, act differently? Why does one person do one thing ratherthan another? Initially one gives the explanation of the action in termsof the agent s beliefs; the agent, Fred, sent money to a charity becausehe believed it would help to relieve those suffering in the Sudan floods.

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That explanation makes sense; it is not as if he had just thrown moneyinto the sea, and explained that by saying that the sea is, after all, saline.But other people with equal financial resources who know perfectlywell what Fred knows about the effect of sending money to the Sudando not do it at all; instead, they donate money to the World Congress ofPhilosophy, which Fred does not, though he knows just as much aboutthe effect of doing that as anyone else. There must be some factor whichunderlies and explains these differences. Putting it in Kant s terms, thematerial of

desire,the conceived

object,which is the

determiningcause

of the action of giving money, is in the two cases different; hence theremust be a mediating factor. From a common sense point of view, wereadily accept that in some cases the difference can be accounted for bytaste-by what people variously find pleasurable: some coffee, sometea. In the absence of any other general explanation, why not generalizethis, in an arcane way even to those cases where the agent denies thatany thought of pleasure enters his head at all?

One reason would be that there are cases where the explanation a

priori cannot be of this sort. And of course- this is the qualificationwith which we began-Kant thinks there is just such a case: the case ofacting morally. If there is such a thing, then it necessarily is not actingjust for the sake of pleasure; and we do have moral experience.

Even here, however, Kant s resolution falters. There can be noexplanation, he says, why anyone takes an interest in the moral law.Acts of pure freedom, determined by nothing but the form of law itself,are unintelligible. We can only say that they are from a theoretical pointof view negatively possible and through our moral experience positively

possible. Yet he finds it necessary, and explains why it is necessary, thatthere should be on the phenomenal level an incentive, in the realm of

feeling, towards acting in accordance with law. There must be some

explanation, some subjective determining ground of the will, he says,why a will not necessitated to conform to law nevertheless does so. This

ground must be unique-which means in effect quite distinct frompleasure-and sufficient. It is not good enough to think that Kant is

saying only that this feeling is as it were epiphenomenal, that it is

consequent upon acting from respect for the law. It must really be an

active incentive, a determinant. This could not have been more tren-chantly put than in this passage from the Metaphysic of Morals (1797):

No man is entirely without moral feeling (like pleasure and pain in

general), for were he completely lacking in a capacity for it he wouldbe morally dead. And if (to speak in medical terms) the moral life-force could no longer excite this feeling, then humanity woulddissolve (by chemical laws, as it were) into mere animality and bemixed irrevocably with the mass of other natural beings.

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This suggests that this feeling fails the test of being subjectively suffici-ent; since the man who is nearly but not quite morally dead has thefeeling but is never moved by it. More important, however, is the otherdemand, that it be unique, and exclusive to the determination of moralacts.

The uniqueness of moral feeling depends on more than its beingappropriate only to one distinct object, the moral law. One could aseasily say that the feeling of desire for ice-cream is unique, in that itcould never

explaindetermination towards

any objectother than ice-

cream; it could never explain drinking lemonade, the feeling of desirefor which must be of its own unique kind. Moral feeling is unique inthat it differs completely from all other determinants of the will: it is afeeling concerning an object, an end, which unlike all others is not to befound in nature. That end, the moral law, is universal and a priori, andhence non-empirical. It is also linked to the feeling of respect for the lawnot contingently but necessarily; whereas all other objects of the willare phenomenal, empirical objects, and the feeling which makes them

objects of the will-the desire for pleasure-is only contingently relatedto them.Obviously I cannot here enter the well discussed question of whether

Kant s doctrine of the noumenal determination of the will is not only, ashe says, unintelligible, but incoherent. But if I am allowed, albeitunintelligibly, to attribute to myself action in accordance with themoral law for its own sake, why cannot I attribute to myself action forthe good of my country for its own sake (call it patriotism) or for thesake of my marriage for its own sake (call it one form of love) or for thegood of my children (call it fatherhood). I cannot see why classifyingthese as empirical objects makes any difference, especially since theyare not. People all over the world are killing each other and prepared tosacrifice themselves and the whole of humanity for the sake of variousobjects which they all call democracy: what kind of empirical objectsare these? When a man goes to wed, what is this empirical concept ofmarriage which determines his action in virtue of his conception of theexpected pleasure he will derive from it? Where does he get it? Fromobserving the mating habits of birds? Sociobiologists may say that itarises in him in much the same way as the mating habits in birds; but itis just about such matters that they are most vulnerable. In any case,what the sociobiologists would describe is hardly the acquisition of aconcept by empirical methods, but the biological generation of what(like the mating habits of birds) is an innate idea. And this will be quitewrong if it is treated as a reduction rather than an explanation of howsomething the like of which has never been seen before comes about.Nothing in culture is to be found in nature.

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My choice of examples here suggests that I am adumbrating somegeneral distinction of objects: objects of culture, such as marriage, art,democracy, as opposed to mere empirical objects such as ice-cream.But I want to say just the same thing about ice-cream, as an objectdeterminant of the human will. Put an ice-cream under the nose of adog or a little baby, and the patient will lick, willy-nilly. That is notwhat eating an ice-cream is for agents like me. What it is, is somethingvastly complex: it is not just eating an ice-cream, but eating an ice-cream not in church, not in front of my children if it encourages them to

make themselves sick, not while I am reading a paper on the SecondCritique, not if it is stolen property; that is, the maxim is convolutedlyrich, and embedded in a life which like everyone else s is part of theculture of a society.

(It is often, if not always, easier and safer to find out what I would do,if . . .- by looking at that culture than by asking me to introspect.)

I have said that the empirical hedonism of Kant derogates fromhumanity. How it does, has been put as follows:

Holbach represents every activity of individuals in their reciprocalintercourse, e.g. speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility and exploita-tion. These relations are thus not allowed o have their own significancebut are depicted as the expression and representation f a third relationwhich underlies them, utility or exploitation. This paraphrase onlyceases to be senseless and arbitrary when these individual relations nolonger have value on their own account, as personal activity, but only asa disguise . . . for a real third purpose and relationship, which is calledthe relation of utility. The linguistic masquerade nly has sense when itis the conscious or unconscious

expressionof a real

masquerade.n this

case the relation of utility has very definite meaning, namely hat I profitmyself when I harm someone else.

That is Marx, The German Ideology. The severe interpretation of theunderlying reality may be thought harsh when applied to Kant, thoughhe does say things here and there which hint at it.

That we are interested in, value, something just for what itis-whether it is simply our duty or anything else-raises questions anddemands for explanations which may remain unsatisfactorily

answered. Certainly, we have no general theory of action whichanswers all of them, and that may be because there cannot be one. But itis better to do without such a theory altogether than to accept a baselessa prion thesis which distorts and demeans humanity in one s ownperson and that of others.4

University of Warwick

4 This paper was contributed to the symposium Kant s Critique of Practi-cal Reason at the World Congress of Philosophy, Brighton, August 1988.

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