Mirror, Mirror by Blackburn Simon

Author:Blackburn, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Respect

The philosopher who made the most of the ideas we have been approaching was Immanuel Kant. Although a very capable astronomer, Kant lived too long ago to know that we live on a tiny planet of one of the millions of stars at the edge of one out of something like one hundred thousand million galaxies. But he did know that human beings “in the system of nature” are simply insignificant, tiny animals scurrying about the surface of an insignificant and tiny planet in an insignificant and tiny part of the cosmos. However, he insisted, this contrasts wholesale with human beings regarded as persons. One of Kant’s most famous quotations is:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my existence.1

Self-respect is appropriate, in Kant’s picture, precisely because each of us has the capacity to recognize, and to obey, the “moral law within.” It is our capacity to subject ourselves to principles that separate us from mere wanton, animal existence. It gives us our capacity to resist temptation, and to act as judges capable of weighing—and sometimes rejecting and regretting—our own doings. It is this capacity to deliberate while binding ourselves to a moral law that both gives us our dignity and enforces guilt or shame, the consciousness of having fallen short, when we do things that betray it.

Of course, this raises the question of where this “moral law” comes from, and what its dictates are. Here arise the difficulties that fill the volumes of commentary on Kant’s overall moral picture, even if the general direction is clear enough. The easiest version to understand is the so-called formula of humanity: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”2

This clearly insists on respect for the humanity in other persons, on not treating people as mere means to your own ends, on not acting in ways that you could not accept other people acting. It is most clearly flouted by acts of deception and manipulation. These deny victims the power to use their own reason on the situation. By deceiving a person, an agent prevents the victim from deliberating together with him about the course of action that they are to follow. So perhaps under the guise of friendship and cooperation, the deceiver is bent on manipulating the agent’s decision making, or denying their right to assess things as they are and then to make up their own mind. In serious cases this may amount to a betrayal, a fit cause of the resentment that we saw Smith describing above.

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