Kant's Human Being by Louden Robert B.;

Author:Louden, Robert B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2011-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

SELF-LOVE AND THE MORAL LAW

In the previous section I argued in part that Kant’s account of radical evil is not primarily a theory about why people commit acts of evil, and that he has good reasons for not offering a theory of this sort. Because of his dual commitments to human freedom and to the ultimate inscrutability of our motives, he does not have a lot to say about what specifically drives people to do evil. For some readers, this result is understandably unsatisfying. What they want from a theory of evil is an explanation of why people commit acts of evil. However, on Kant’s view this is an illegitimate request that is foreclosed by our awareness that we are free beings whose actions are not causally determined. When it comes to human motivations to do evil, all that we can safely and accurately say is that whenever people commit evil, they have intentionally violated fundamental moral norms—they are “conscious of the moral law” but have willfully deviated from it (see Rel 6: 32).

However, this is not quite the complete Kantian story regarding human motives. Kant does secondarily address issues of motivation in his discussion of radical evil, but critics have not been happy with this part of his analysis either. For instance, in the Religion he asserts bluntly that “self-love [Selbstliebe],” “when adopted as the principle of all our maxims, is precisely the source of all evil [gerade die Quelle alles Bösen]” (6: 45, see also 30–31, 36). This assertion that self-love is the sole source of evil has led many commentators to criticize Kant for his allegedly simplistic and naïve account of human nature.

Perhaps the most famous example of the self-love criticism is in Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). In referring to an allegedly new kind of non-Kantian radical evil—one that “breaks down all standards we know,” cannot be explained “by comprehensible motives,” and occurs within totalitarian regimes “in which all men have become equally superfluous”—she states that this new type of radical evil can “no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice.”15 Shortly after her book appeared, Arendt also wrote, in a letter to her former teacher Karl Jaspers (to whom she had sent one of the first copies of her book):

[T]he Western tradition is suffering from the preconception that the most evil things human beings can do arise from the vice of selfishness. Yet we know that the greatest evils or radical evil has nothing to do anymore with such humanly understandable, sinful motives. What radical evil really is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous.16

Bernstein uses this quotation to support his claim that one of Arendt’s “most characteristic thought-trains” is the view that “the most evil deeds that human beings perform do not arise from the vice of selfishness,”17 a thought-train that he endorses and then uses to make a further criticism of Kant’s account of radical evil.

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