Rorty and Kant on Ethics

The shift from the modern to the postmodern is sometimes described in terms of movement away from foundations, away from an anchor for reality, knowledge, and ethics. Richard Rorty diagnoses a sharp contrast between two constellations of moral views, Kantians and Hegelians. In advancing his theory, Rorty sides with the Hegelians against the Kantians: "If the Hegelians are right, then there are no ahistorical criteria for deciding when it is or is not a responsible act to desert a community, any more than for deciding when to change lovers or professions" ("Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," in Pragmatism [ed. Menand], 330). Rorty's framework oversimplifies Kant's moral philosophy on the "ahistorical" matter, but as a heuristic it captures well an impulse -- namely, to derive ethical criteria from the human condition -- that runs from the Enlightenment, including Kant, to Rorty and beyond.

I. Rorty's Communal Moral Contingency

For Rorty and other non-foundationalist Hegelians, there is “nothing to be responsible to except persons and actual or possible historical communities” (330). Morality does not rest on principles above or outside of societies that dictate action within them. Instead, a society’s “loyalty to itself is morality enough,” and, moreover, “such loyalty no longer needs an ahistorical backup.” Members of a society “need be responsible only to its own traditions, and not to the moral law as well” (332).

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Persons individually and collectively adapt constantly to meet environmental demands, he says. This is largely to preserve what is worth preserving in its fabric, relationships, and institutions, because we understand ourselves as individuals always as members of the groups to which we belong in distinction from other groups. “There is no ‘ground’ for such loyalties and convictions,” Rorty argues, “save the fact that the beliefs and desires and emotion which buttress them overlap” those of other group members with shared moral commitments and life aspirations (333). These historical narratives of self-image justify morally a group’s practices based on their “contrast-effects -- comparisons with other, worse communities” (333). Intrinsic human dignity yields to comparative group dignity.

By contrast, Rorty labels “Kantians” those “who think there are such things as intrinsic human dignity, intrinsic human rights, and an ahistorical distinction between the demands of morality and those of prudence” (329). For Kantians, Rorty maintains, “there is a point of view that abstracts from any historical community and adjudicates the rights of communities vis-à-vis those of individuals” (330). The moral agent is both grounded and guided in ethical decision-making by fixed principles of duty that apply across communities.

So does, as Rorty suggests, a Kantian need ahistorical criteria for deciding on human responsibility? The answer for Kant himself is yes but with an important qualification.

II. Kant's Qualified Categorical Imperative

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. The noumenal is the sphere of things in themselves to which we have no epistemological access. The phenomenal is the sphere of historical experience within which knowledge occurs: categories of reason interpret sense perception of the world. We live and know -- and behave -- within the phenomenal realm where necessary cause and effect occur. This is Rorty’s realm of historical moral criteria.

But for Kant moral agents must be free, autonomous rational beings, not determined by passions and desires that dominate the phenomenal. To adjudicate moral responsibility based on these appetites and impulses is to act by natural necessity, heteronomously, and not to act freely, because we don’t freely choose for ourselves these compelling appetites and impulses. “Freedom,” explains Roger Scruton, “is the power to will an end of action for myself” by reason alone (Kant, 79). The tension Kant tries to resolve is how the freedom that moral action requires could exist meaningfully for human agents who inhabit, and are concerned for real relations in, the phenomenal world.

Kant’s answer: a person exercises rational autonomy within the phenomenal realm and not from grounds or a position completely outside it, as Rorty seems to suggest. This exercise of rational autonomy, of self-imposed reason, frees one from phenomenal constraints:

But now we see that when we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves into the intelligible world as members and know the autonomy of the will together with its consequence, morality; whereas when we think of ourselves as obligated, we consider ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet simultaneously to the intelligible world. (Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, §453)

We are obligated to act in communities inasmuch as we are members of the sensible (historical) world, but by using human reason (the intelligible world) in moral matters rather than varying situational impulses (like a lust to change lovers) we escape slavery to historically contingent drives.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

This use of reason in straddling intelligible and sensible worlds results in the self-imposition of moral law that arises out of the phenomenal realm and can govern all humans as free rational beings. It also, importantly for Kant, transcends the contingency and natural necessity of the phenomenal realm through categorical (i.e., unconditional) imperatives to agents within time and space. This perspective requires that we treat all humans, who equally share this rational faculty, as ends in themselves, not as means. Moreover, this rational commonality means that all humans possess equal dignity. Therefore they are equally deserving of respect as humans, as ends in themselves.

Universal human dignity, for Kant, stems from the human capacity for autonomous reason that makes possible the categorical imperative. And this idea that there is intrinsic human dignity occurs within the context of straddling both intelligible and sensible realms. Put differently, it occurs within the context of transcending the constraints of the phenomenal realm while simultaneously being thoroughly embedded within them: “And the dignity of humanity consists just in its capacity to legislate universal law, though with the condition of humanity’s being at the same time itself subject to this very same legislation” (Grounding, §440; my emphasis).

Kant abstracts from empirical conditions to base moral law in practical reason alone because of how humans are constituted and so that it applies equally to all who share in the common human capacity for rational autonomy. Both explanatory cause and ultimate goal are involved. In this empirically informed way, within this context, he lays a groundwork for moral deliberation -- backup, as it were -- to which Rorty objects. But this moral groundwork is not entirely ahistorical as Rorty claims, and it is unclear that it cannot meet the everyday responsibilities of empirically diverse communities, as Rorty implies.

III. Moral Authenticity and Applicability

Kant’s concern, born in the Enlightenment and pursued variously by thinkers through Rorty, is vital moral authenticity for life in this world. Kant and Rorty offer different explanations. Ultimately, Rorty’s preferred Hegelian moral framework is utilitarian: what is moral is what works maximally for particular individuals and communities. Justification for a moral standpoint stems from comparative success. This brand of utilitarianism emphasizes empirical contingency and views as moral a means if it contributes to a presently acceptable communal end.

No less concerned than Rorty, Kant is concerned to articulate moral criteria that respect actual individuals and communities in real life, but he anchors moral judgments in an ethical principle and motive that treats all humans, because they share the same make-up, as ends rather than as potential means for a community’s preferences. The categorical imperative “is a point of view outside my own experience, which could therefore be adopted by any rational being, whatever his circumstances. The law that I formulate will then be an imperative that applies universally, to all rational beings” (Scruton, Kant, 85). In other words, the categorical imperative for Kant enables humans to look beyond themselves in order to foster even deeper shared commitments across wider circles of communities.

Kant’s moral criteria has feet in both the intelligible and empirical realms to suit human ethics in their actual conditions. It is not pure ahistorical backup as Rorty claims. But this hybridity itself, a blend of intelligible and sensible aspects, reflects in Kant the impulse that thinkers from the Enlightenment to Rorty have followed: to derive, somehow, criteria for moral responsibility from the phenomenal realm.