The ancients Plato and Augustine and the moderns Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham, on the contrary, wanted to find some elemental, single Good that could be poured into useful shapes whole, unalloyed. Kant called it “pure reason” (reinen Vernunft), Bentham “utility.” Their intellectual program, attempted over the next two centuries by hundreds of ethical philosophers down to John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and still going strong, was to reduce the virtues to a virtue. Here is all of virtue, the Platonic idea of The Good, the virtue of virtues, here on my convenient pocket-sized card, with no stories or traditions behind it, no culture; merely universal Reason.
Thus Kant, with a pocket-sized, 3 inch-by-5 inch card inscribed: “Imagine the action you propose to take would be elevated to a general rule for all society.” Or Rawls: “Imagine you are a risk-averse person making rules for society behind a veil of ignorance about your own location in the society.” Such meta-rules are as applicable to creatures on a planet circling Proxima Centauri as to us humans.
From its beginnings in Plato’s writings ethical monism did not work very well. As Aristotle said—he apologized for thus refuting his teacher—“it is not easy to see how knowing the same Ideal Good will help a weaver, . . . or how anybody will be a better physician or general for having contemplated the absolute Ideal.”[1] The neo-Aristotelian and anti-Kantian turn in recent ethical philosophy can be put this way: it’s no good talking like Plato or Kant of The Ultimate when most of the ethical issues we face are matters of practice as a weaver or a physician or a mother. Or to put it more strongly, as people like Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish do, the Ultimate never comes up.
In the preface to his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Kant declared “the ground of obligation must be looked for, not in the nature of man nor in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but solely a priori in the concepts of pure reason.”[2] We are to study how people are supposed to behave without reference to their psychologies or their customs or their histories.
He offers in the Groundwork only two reasons for this on-its-face bizarre assertion about the proper method of ethics—which on Kant’s authority was then followed scrupulously for nearly two centuries by ethical philosophers in the West. First, he says, there is and should be a division of labor between theorizers and observers “if we are to know how much pure reason can accomplish.” He means that we are to set aside actual human culture, in the manner so to speak of a controlled experiment. And second, “morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm.”[3]
A virtue ethicist is moved to respond, a trifle impatiently: “Why, dear Immanuel, `must’ a division of labor govern ethical philosophy, why `must’ there be an ultimate norm, why does it seem plausible to you that we will be corrupted by a lack of such a norm, why `must’ duty be derived as though by geometric proof from an axiom of a hypothetically `pure’ Rational Creature, who never was a child, never had a mother or father, never walked the actual streets of an actual Königsberg?” Kant in the Groundwork suggested no reply, or merely the Platonic/Cartesian reply that we “must” turn our minds to an ideal rather than to the “merely” ordinary. In The Critique of Practical Reason the method is defended as separating “ought” from “is,” following Hume in this. But why would it seem plausible that “ought”-sentences would have no contact with “is”-sentences? They do{n’t} in life.
Kant entirely separated ethics from anthropology and psychology, indeed from any empirical claim whatsoever. Ethics in his view was to take place in its own realm. After him therefore ethical thinking in the West was haunted by the fear that to justify ethics in actual humans is to fall prey to a “naturalistic fallacy,” as G. E. Moore came to call it in attacking Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick for their utilitarianism. One ought not to derive an Ought from an Is, an ethical precept from a factual statement. Thus, “free trade is desirable because it causes happiness in humans as they actually are” is an error.[4] A fallacy. Illusion.
“When we run over libraries persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?” Hume asked in the peroration of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748):
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.[5]
No theology; no natural law; no ethics. We are to have only mathematics on the one hand and on the other the “sciences”—though in the wide, non-post-1850-English sense, that is, systematic studies of the world, human or natural: Wissenschaften.
But no philosophy either, whether academic or worldly, is to survive the flames. It does not seem to have occurred to Hume that his Inquiry would be among the first to go, and shortly thereafter his theoretical essays on economics advocating free trade. Nor does it seem to have occurred very often to the philosophers in Kant’s train that in saying “You ought not to derive Ought from Is” they were engaging in a natural human ethical activity.[6] Nor does it seem to have occurred to them that a Greek-admiring ethics or the Roman equivalent of morality would lack point unless based on philosophical psychology (ethos) or philosophical anthropology (mos).
Kant helped create the glorious yet mischievous utopianism of the Enlightenment project; but by fiat, not by reasoning. He had one implicit reason, though not mentioned in the Groundwork, which must as ordinary politics be given weight. It is that we “must” strip social status from ethics. Universal, unparticular Reason, he seemed to reason, would apply to a miller as much as to a marquis. Writing in a world of 1785 in which status most oppressively ruled, the egalitarian axiom of Kant, and of Bentham and Smith and Locke and Richard Hooker and John Knox and for that matter St. Thomas of Aquino, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Jesus of Nazareth, was revolutionary stuff. “A man’s a man for a’ that” is an explosive idea.
I say it had been foreshadowed in soul-focused religions, especially in Protestantism and it appears in Early-Church Christianity, such as in the democratic governance of John Knox’s Presbyterianism or Calvin’s Geneva, or among the still more radical Congregationalists or Quakers or Baptists—who in some eras would let even women preach—or among the Lutheran Pietists of Kant’s ancestry. As it was put at the dawn by a Presbyterian soldier, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”[7]
Kant’s notion that status is an accident but that the human duty to Reason is an essence echoes his own absolutist king, Frederick the Great. Frederick wrote an Anti-Macchiavel in 1740, published in French under Voltaire’s auspices at the Hague in the same year that Frederick ascended the throne. It was the year Kant entered university as a student at the former Prussian capital. Kant’s own book on ethics was published in his old age, a year before the end of Frederick’s long reign. In the Anti-Macchiavel Frederick forswears personal gain from kingship, thus contradicting as he imagined Machiavelli’s supposedly self-profiting prince. He declares famously that “the ruler is far from being the arbitrary master of his people; he is indeed, nothing other than the first servant.”[8] In 1842 Thomas Macaulay the Liberal noted sarcastically that Frederick had nonetheless “studiously kept up the old distinction between the nobles and the community. In speculation, he was a French philosopher, but in action, a German prince.”[9]
In 1785, aged 61, and with increasing rigor as he grew older, Kant scornfully rejected an “anthropological” approach to ethics. Kant was not scornful of anthropology itself as a subject. Indeed, he taught it every Saturday morning in term, as Manfred Kuehn tells us in his recent, splendid biography.[10] But Kant thought it was to be impaled on Hume’s Fork to include facts of actual human life in ethical philosophy. Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Kant said, had awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. But, oddly, he did not appear to know of Hume’s other, ethical treatise, of human nature.[11]
For instance Kant rejected as a maxim of a true and therefore universal ethics the “honor” (Ehre) that, as Kuehn notes, “may even have been more important to the citizens of the larger towns and cities of Prussia” than to the literal and Ehre-regarding aristocracy. Thus Kant’s father was of the honorable guild of harness makers, if poor, and Kant himself of the honorable guild of scholars.[12] Kant appealed rather to an egalitarian psychology reminiscent I repeat of the Pietism of his parents—Kuehn, though, does not think that Pietism was the source. “Honor is something entirely conventional,” Kant wrote. “By contrast, the representation of right lies deep in the soul of everyone, even of the most delicate child.”[13] Find the maxim within the soul and we can construct a pure, ultimate, non-anthropological universal ethic.
There was another, personal reason for Kant’s fascination with ethical maxims and his increasing rigor in hedging them off from the life world. This was his intimate friendship from age 41 to age 62 with Joseph Green, an English trader in timber, fruit, and spices, a Hull man who lived most of his adult life in Königsberg. Kant had many friends within the bourgeoisie of the city, as did Adam Smith at the same time in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The parallels between Kant/Green and Smith/Hume are striking; and Mr. Green was in fact a conduit for Humean ideas to Kant. As the Kant scholar Lewis White Beck expressed it in his brilliant parody of 1979, an alleged manuscript of Boswell’s account of a (non-existent) visit to the Königsberg group in 1785, “Dr. Smith had told me of an English merchant here resident, a Mr. Green, a man of prudence & virtue.”[14]
Green was “the most intimate friend Kant ever had.”[15] Like Kant a lifelong bachelor, Green spent every afternoon and early evening for twenty-one years in Kant’s company, supplying the philosopher with detailed criticism. The criticism, Kuehn notes, seems to have resulted in a comparative lucidity in Kant’s writing style, lost after Green’s death in 1786. Kant’s writings during the friendship contained “many phrases and idioms . . . that can be traced back to the language of merchants, such as `borrowing,’ `capital’,’ and so forth.”[16] One might guess that Kant refused offers from the universities at Erlangen and Jena in 1769-70 in part because his special friend of by then three years standing was attached by business to Königsberg. Kant did mention his “very wide circle of acquaintances and friends” in the letter awkwardly taking back an initial acceptance of the offer from Erlangen.[17] He also declined a call to Halle in 1778.
Green’s influence on Kant was psychologically profound and philosophically important. According to Kuehn, Green’s example transformed Kant’s character. Mr. Green was above all a “Man of the Clock,” the title of a comedy in 1765 by the famous progressive Königsberg playwright and member of their set, one of Kant’s followers and later his benefactor, Theodor Hippel, spoofing Green.
Mr. Green was not difficult to spoof. Kuehn recounts that Kant and Green had arranged one day to take a carriage ride together the next morning at exactly 8:00 in the morning. Kant was a little late. He had not yet become the Professor Kant by whose comings and goings one could adjust one’s watch. Yet Green, true to his maxim of following the clock, set off in the carriage anyway. Passing Kant hurrying along the road towards the house, he drove past him, “with Kant vigorously signaling for him to stop.” He did this not because he was angry at Kant’s tardiness but merely because “it was against Green’s maxim” to deviate from any prudent plan.[18] In the play Hippel has his Green character declare, “I do not get up because I have slept enough, but because it is 6:00 a.m. I go to eat not because I am hungry, but because the clock has struck 12:00.”[19]
The case shows vividly the force of a bourgeois and even a specifically English and non-conformist version of Reason in the Enlightenment. Besides Kant and his English merchant and Smith and his Scottish ones there is Voltaire, who himself made a fortune in finance before he was 30—he added to it throughout his life, and died one of the richest commoners in Europe—and the English merchant to whom he dedicated in 1732 his play Zaïre.
In Hippel’s play an academic character, based it seems on Kant as he was in 1765, age 41, before Green took entire charge, complains that in his own, non-bourgeois work prudence and plan cannot rule: “A dissertation . . . is not a bank draft. With such work one cannot keep hours.” Kuehn remarks that “little by little [Kant] learned to write philosophy like a bank draft,” until in the year before Green’s death he produced The Groundwork:
Green’s effect on Kant cannot be overestimated. . . . [Kant] gave up playing cards to please Green. His visits to the theatre became rarer, and late in life they ceased almost altogether. Green was completely tone deaf. . . . Kant, “at least in his early years” [wrote a contributor to the memorial lectures for Kant in 1804] “listened to good music with pleasure.” He gave up that custom as well. . . . The elegant Magister [that is, a German academic before his professorship] with somewhat irregular and unpredictable lifestyle changed into a man of principle with an exceedingly predictable way of life. He became more and more like Green. . . . The days of the whirlpool of social diversions were coming to an end—not suddenly, but slowly: maxim by maxim. . . . Kant’s view of maxims, as necessary for building character [“morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm”], was, at least in part, indebted to Green’s way of life. It was not an accident that in the lectures on anthropology in which Kant spoke of maxims, he often claimed that the English had the most solid understanding. He himself relied on the judgment of his English friend.[20]
The Kantian tradition in ethical philosophy, then, begins with a monomania for Prudence Only—a Prudence worthy of Jeremy Bentham and the modern economists. In a not charming sense it is bourgeois. That such intemperate lunacy lies at the heart of the modern and anti-Aristotelian theory of ethics should perhaps give pause.
Bernard Williams, another of the pioneering virtue ethicists since the 1950s, concluded that “The resources of most modern moral philosophy are not well adjusted to the modern world.” “Its prevailing fault, in all its styles, is to impose on ethical life some immensely simple model,” such as Contract behind a veil of ignorance, Rationality as European bourgeois men might define it, or Utility, which seems so measurable.[21] An intellectual revolution was initiated 1690 through 1785, dethroning the thick, storied, pagan-Christian account of the virtues, plural, and erecting one or another universal monism in their place. Reason was to become a new monotheism, demanding sacrifice and promising salvation in return, either here below or in the Good Society by and by.
It was an admirable effort, courageous and prudent and hopeful, worth the attempt. Perhaps it had something to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie, uneasy in a system of the virtues which had classically talked of heroes and saints. It certainly had to do with the contractarian idea so obvious to the bourgeois that, in the words of Richard Rumbold (the Presbyterian soldier I mentioned) before he faced the hangman in 1685, “the king having. . . power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as to make them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another.”[22] No saddles and spurs. And the scientific revolution must have made ethicists strive for a similar rethinking.
Yet on the whole, except as I say as a historically contingent rhetorical tool of liberals against status, Locke’s or Kant’s or Bentham’s system have failed. They succeeded negatively as a political expedient, thank God. But afterwards they failed positively as an ethical guide. They have not given us guides to action and they have not matched how we live.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, I, vi, 16 (1097a).
[2] Kant, Grounding, 1785, Ellington trans., p. 56 f.
[3] Kant, Grounding, 1785, p. 57.
[4] See Lisska 1996, pp. 57, 73.
[5] Hume 1748, last page, his italics.
[6] Compare Putnam, Realism, 1990, p. 115; and discussion in McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion, 1994, p. 277 and p. 95ff.
[7] Richard Rumbold, speech on the gallows, Edinburgh, 1685, from The World’s Famous Orations. Great Britain: I. (710–1777). 1906. In full at http://www. bartleby. com /268/3/15.html.
[8] Frederick II, Anti-Machiavel, 1740, Chp. 1.
[9] Macaulay, “Frederic the Great,” 1842, p. 188.
[10] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 272.
[11] Pluhar, “Translator’s Introduction,” 1987, p. xxxi, note 8.
[12] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 281; compare pp. 27, 43.
[13] Quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 43.
[14] I am such an incompetent scholar of Kant and of Boswell that on finding this on the internet I believed for a day or so that it was genuine.
[15] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 157.
[16] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 241.
[17] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 163.
[18] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 155.
[19] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 155.
[20] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 156.
[21] Williams, Ethics 1985, pp. 197, 127.
[22] Rumbold’s speech on the gallows: http://www. bartleby. com/268/3/15.html
Hi Deirdre. Nice thougths.
I would like to comment on the contrast you draw between Plato and Aristotle. I like the way you present it.
For Plato, man is a fallen being. To recover his former splendor, he must return to the origin—that is, to the world of eternal Ideas. This return, which is nothing more than the intellectual contemplation of those Ideas, is itself redemptive. The person who achieves this contact undergoes a complete transformation. In practical terms, however, very little changes. The same flesh and the same eyes remain among us, yet the wisdom that emanates from such a person seems to belong to another world. This amounts to an anthropological pessimism: the best has already existed, and our task is to recover it. Naturally, this recovery comes through intellectual vision. How such a vision is to be communicated to those who have never experienced it is another matter.
Aristotle is not Plato abandoned; he is Plato transformed. Man is no longer a fallen being. He is a natural being, like every other living thing. Nature as a whole—including human beings—is a combination of two principles: potentiality and actuality. The redemptive value lies in actuality, in nature fully realized. Yet reaching actuality requires a process of purification: the elimination of unrealized potentialities. This is a natural process that takes time. Here we find an anthropological optimism, because the best lies in the future rather than in the past.
That said, both approaches share the same weakness: they place the ultimate goal on an intellectual plane beyond immediate, accessible reality. As Popper argues, this is the justificatory source of every form of totalitarianism: the willingness to sacrifice the present physical world—even through the gravest injustices—in order to hasten the arrival of a metaphysical, redemptive future.
At first glance, Aristotle may appear to be an empirical scientist. But he is not. At best, his science remains subordinate to a fixed intellectual ideal. That ideal, or ultimate end, is not something that can be reached through ordinary human conduct alone.
For this reason, I believe that your criticism of Plato, Augustine, and Kant—that they concentrate virtue in a single principle and then relocate that principle to a realm inaccessible to practical human action—also applies to Aristotle.