Ripheus23

… Kant’s theory of ethics is nowadays regularly placed under the heading of the “deontological” school, with R. M. Hare arguing for a utilitarian variant and Allen Wood an explicitly “teleological” account. Deontology is put on a par with consequentialism and aretaic approaches. By contrast, Kant’s tabulation of ethical theories depends on his conception of the mind.

                Although Kant writes in the language of “faculty psychology,” he does not maintain that we use these different faculties separately over time, or more precisely that if we do so, we fall into various kinds of error. Even when, as is natural, we exercise each mental ability simultaneously, it is possible for us to order sensibility over the understanding, for example, or reason over sensibility. It is this divergence that gives rise to the fivefold table of moral theory given in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.

                Living well before the time of Ayn Rand, Kant was not called to account for egoism as a possible ethical stance. He addresses hedonism, sentimentalism, perfectionism, and theological voluntarism as alternatives to his autonomian doctrine. Before explaining those five options, though, I would say that per the logic used to organize those, egoism would count as a moral theory in which the fundamental moral principle is given from sensibility. Thus it lacks in the absolute universality that we would otherwise ascribe to moral principles in themselves. Egoism is the moral outlook arising from the priority of sensibility insofar as we attend, without further “adieu,” to the unity of apperception, the “I think,” with which all given sensation becomes merely self-referential, hence egoistic—ethically solipsistic—as a normative representation.

                It is the understanding as the faculty of rules that most ethical analysts appeal to, when trying to formulate what Kant would loftily declaim to be the “supreme principle” of morality. Since there are four types of categories of understanding in general, appeals to the understanding result in four types of moral principles. The first, which requires a morally qualified extensive magnitude, defaults to either a single independent quality as the material for ethical theory (hedonistic utilitarianism) or to a single irreducible concept of the good, to be summed up using the arithmetic of extension as such. The point is that, as Kant has it of the axioms of intuition in a theoretical sense, the parts (the units of deontic value) precede the whole (the determination of an action as right or wrong, good or evil).

                Next, moral theorists might interpret the ultimate imperative in terms of an intensive magnitude. I will leave it to the audience to clarify how the positions of thinkers like H. A. Prichard or W. D. Ross exemplify this position (though I will say that with Ross, for instance, the relation obtains due to the convergence of the ceteris paribus clauses surrounding a given moral question and its possible answers).

                Thomas Aquinas, with Aristotle before him, probably falls into the third kind of camp. Indeed, “natural law” ethics, grounded in purposive essences, is nothing else but the deontic conception of the analogies of experience, which give us the conditions of physical substance and causality themselves. Fourthly and lastly, using the postulates of modal association to define the right and the good gives us the necessarily righteous good of God, either as the eternal fulfillment or the almighty author of all other laws of righteous good.

                Kant’s belief, on the other hand, is that moral imperatives derive from reason, which is not the same as the understanding. Though there are rationalistic elements in all moral theories (as all theories involve the activity of reason), it is only Kant’s kind of theory in which reason in itself, as the erotetic faculty, determines morality. That is, the ability to ask questions, which is perforce the ability to ask moral questions, and to order this inquiry transcendentally, itself contains the possibility of answers to those questions. Pure reason, and the practices it inspires, is therefore autonomous, deriving its supreme order neither from the ocean of empirical perceptions nor the lightning of conceptual understanding.