Transcript Reading: Kant Part 6

At our last meeting, we were considering the traditional proofs of God that had been common currency among philosophers in Europe, Western Europe, and North America, and Kant's critique of those arguments—in the sense of an evaluation where he's going to show they don’t work. The last one we had been covering was Paley’s argument from design (the watch and the watchmaker). What would you think if you had never seen a watch, stumbled upon it, and looked at how all the parts work together in order to turn the hands on the face, and how the hands correspond to the hours of the day? Would you think that a natural accident produced that, or that it was the product of intelligent design?

Now, Hume thought about that argument as well, and he had an objection, so we'll cover his as well. But since I started with Kant, let's continue and get his down first. Kant says, a designer is not a creator. You may want to say this is God, but you haven't shown me there's a creator of the world. Whatever this designer is, it could just be a cosmic interior decorator. It makes things better than they would otherwise be, and a lot of the evidence of the design shows thought and care. These things exhibit design, but we don't know anything else about the designer. We don’t know if it is also the creator. We don’t know if the designer is good. We don’t know if there’s only one designer. Hume said, "When I look at some parts of the universe, I think they may have been planned by a committee, because they’re pretty messed up."

There’s also an objection by a guy named Venn, the inventor of Venn diagrams, and I’ll show you that one in just a moment. To finish with Kant, he says the argument not only doesn’t show us a creator or any other attribute of divinity, but it also doesn’t show us that the designer is omnipotent or omniscient. All it gets you is that there is at least one designer. That’s all. That’s the most this argument can get you. And you know nothing else about the designer—it’s intelligent, it can design things, and the design is pretty clever. We admire the way the parts of living things interact to keep the organism alive and so on. That much, maybe. But there are other objections as well, and I think Venn’s is far more difficult to answer than anybody else’s. And Venn believed in God—that’s not the problem. The question is whether this proof works.

Venn says, in order to know whether a proof works, we would first have to know the ratio of designed to undesigned things in the universe.

Why would you need to know that? Well, suppose, by your calculations, the chances of whatever thing A is being an accident are one in 10 million.

Wouldn’t that be a convincing argument that this must be designed? And Venn says, no, it wouldn’t, because if there are more undesigned things in the universe than one in 10 million, then it’s still more likely to be not designed. So, if the ratio of designed to undesigned things is one in 100 million, or, let’s say, one in 10,000, the ratio of undesigned things is greater. There you go—it’s still more likely that the thing is undesigned than designed. I hope you're able to follow that. You’d have to first know the ratio of designed to non-designed things in the world. If the ratio of undesigned things is, let’s say, one in 10 billion, and for everything that’s designed, there are 10 billion things that aren’t, then finding out that the probability of A—whatever A is supposed to be (a human brain, or something else)—being one in 10 million will not, by itself, be convincing. Because if for everything that’s designed, there are 10 billion things, then being one in 10 million isn’t convincing. You’d have to show that the chances are even less than one in 10 billion. So this argument doesn’t work unless you can show what the ratio of designed to undesigned things is in the universe. And Venn points out that you can’t know that unless you already know whether God exists. Because if God exists, there are no undesigned things in the universe at all. And if He doesn’t, they’re all undesigned—or almost all. Let’s say the things that humans and intelligent animals plan and carry out would be designed things—there’d be some—but there are way more things and events that take place in the entire universe than the number of things done by humans, higher apes, and so on.

I think that’s a very devastating argument. But anyway, Kant was convinced it didn’t work, because it didn’t give you God—it gave you something you know not what, or some things you know not what, that planned some of the stuff in the universe. Venn has an even better objection, in my opinion. So I don’t think this succeeds either.

And anyway, I don’t believe for a second that people believe in God because of arguments. There’s a text in the New Testament that warns us, saying, “The natural man will not receive the things of the Spirit of God, because they are discerned spiritually, and he cannot know them.” That means know that they are true, because they are spiritually discerned. Unless God’s Spirit takes away the blindness of one’s heart, no one will ever see a good reason for believing in God. There may be a convincing argument somewhere, convincing to somebody. But even if it initially is, the reply you’ll get is, “Well, I don’t know what’s wrong with this argument, but something is, because it concludes something I don’t believe, and I don’t want to, and I won’t.” That text warns us that the natural man will not receive—cannot receive—the things of God unless the Holy Spirit brings God’s grace to the heart, repairing it so that it can now see the truth about the origin of all things: that it is God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God alone is the creator and designer of the universe. Hume, of course, once said that there's enough design disharmony in the world that it looks like it was designed by a committee. Well, that’s a funny joke, but it’s also a point. The people who argue that you can prove God by appealing to the intelligent design exhibited in some things won’t accept that. They insist on intelligent design, but they can’t show that there was only one designer, or that the designer cares about humans. In fact, they can’t show that the designer loves humans and wants to rescue them from sin and death. Nothing in that argument gets you that far.

So, in my opinion, God is still not a proper object of proof—not because, as some might argue, the categories of the understanding apply only to sensations, but because God created the laws of proof and isn’t subject to them, except in the ways that He specifically allows them to govern the relations He creates with humans and the rest of His creation.

I think that’s enough time spent on that subject. I will come back to what I think are the proper grounds, the actual grounds, for belief in God on the part of people who do believe. We’ll close with that. I won’t let it slide by; we’ll return to it. But for now, we’ve done enough with Kant that we need to turn to the next big subject in Kant, and that’s his ethics.

Kant wanted to save science and ethics from Hume’s devastating critique. He thinks he has saved science because necessity, or necessary connection, is guaranteed by one of the categories of the understanding. It’s something the mind imposes on all experience: things are connected in many ways, but one of those ways is the invariable sequence of A to B.

Now, I pointed out that this doesn’t save causality at all, because real causality means that A produces B, not just that B always shows up whenever A is around. All Kant says the mind does is ensure that B will always follow A—but why? Because the mind makes it so, not because A produces B. So it’s not real causality. Now let’s see if he can do something better with ethics. What’s he going to do to save the idea that there are ethical rules?

To do that, Kant proposes a rule for knowing whether any action you contemplate doing is morally right or morally wrong, and this rule he calls the categorical imperative.

For Kant, everything has to have a fancy name and be a bit strange. "Categorical" just means it allows no exceptions, and "imperative" means it’s a command. You might think he means a command from God, but no, he does not. When Kant is doing his ethics, God is just an idea of reason, so that’s not where it comes from. It comes from reason—it comes from our rational nature. Reason itself commands us not to do what is evil and to do what is good.

So, how does it do that? Well, the categorical imperative is this: take the maxim of your action and universalize it. In other words, write the description of your action as if it were a universal law.

For example, if I’m considering telling a lie, what I’m supposed to do is take the description of this action and write it as a universal law. If I did that, I’d get something like: “All statements are false.” Suppose I was contemplating making a false statement: “No, I wasn’t there last night,” when I jolly well was. Now, if I universalize that and make it true of every statement—imagine a world where all statements are false.

Kant says that’s self-contradictory. I’m going to use the term "self-defeating." Why is it self-defeating? Well, if all statements were false, then this statement itself—that all statements are false—would also be false. When you meet something like that, you know it’s a wrong action. In other words, logical consistency is the test for ethical rightness.

Now you might ask, "Is this going to cover everything that’s wrong?" Everything that's wrong is going to turn out to be self-defeating or self-contradictory, it blows itself up. Immediately after using the example of lying, or not long after, Kant uses another example of keeping a promise. Suppose what I’m tempted to do is break a promise.

If I universalize that, I break it down as though it were a law. I have to write down, "All promises are broken."

What’s the problem with that? Well, Kant says, if this were a law of reality, a law of nature, then there would be no such thing as a promise.

This example is important for a couple of reasons. First, it shows that, although Kant initially said the Categorical Imperative would show that if we universalize an action and write it as a law of nature, it would turn out to be self-contradictory. But this example goes beyond self-contradiction. It doesn’t contradict itself to say, “There are no promises,” or “All promises are broken.” It’s simply inconsistent with the kind of world we live in—a world where promises are possible, and at least sometimes, they are kept. So it’s inconsistent with the way the world is now. But that’s not what Kant initially said the criterion was. So he’s expanded it a bit.

Now, we have to see that fact and say the Categorical Imperative must be redefined: The Categorical Imperative tells us that if we write the maxim of our action as a universal law, it will either be self-contradictory, self-defeating in some other way, or incompatible with the way the world really is now. That’s the third criterion that we get from this example—there would be no such thing as promises.

This example is especially important because, among empiricists, the Categorical Imperative has been frequently misunderstood. John Dewey, for example, in his book Theory of the Moral Life, says that Kant tells us on one page that we can’t look at what happens in the world as a consequence of our actions to tell us whether an act is right or wrong. We can’t just say, “Well, suppose everybody did that—what a mess there would be!” No, Kant says, that’s not what shows an action is wrong. What shows it’s wrong is when we universalize it as a law, and it either defeats itself or is inconsistent with the way the world is.

But Dewey misunderstands this. He thinks that Kant is asking, "What if everybody did that?" Dewey says, "On one page, Kant says we can’t weigh the consequences of our actions, and on the next page, he asks us to consider what would happen if everyone did that." But that’s not what Kant means by a universal law. He doesn’t mean, “What if everybody did that?” He means, “What if that were a law of nature?”

So Kant isn’t looking at what would happen as a consequence of our action. According to Kant, I’m never supposed to consider what the consequences of my actions will be in order to tell whether they are right or wrong. I’m only supposed to look at the Categorical Imperative to tell me whether reason commands me to do it or not. Dewey just missed him on that, and a lot of other people have too.

This is shown by the example here. What does Kant say about the idea that all promises are broken? If that were a law of nature, he doesn’t say that business couldn’t take place because nobody would keep contracts, or that people would break their marriage vows, or that people would feel free to break any promise they ever made. No, Kant says, there would be no such thing as a promise at all—because if it were a law of nature that as soon as anyone makes a promise, they don’t keep it, then promises would become meaningless. They would be as absurd as saying, “I wish I had my own dragon.”

So this example is important because it shows that Kant has expanded the Categorical Imperative, and it shows that people who interpret the Categorical Imperative as asking “What would happen if everybody did this?” are wrong. That’s not what Kant meant.

Now, there are still actions that won’t turn out to be wrong under this expanded view, and there are actually a lot of them.

Suppose I’ve found a way to rob the bank I work for, and I know it’s a way that no one will ever discover. The bank won’t figure it out for the next 100 years. It has no bad consequences—it’s not going to cause a depression if I skim $100,000 over a few months. I don’t tell anyone. Why would that turn out to be wrong?

Does the Categorical Imperative cover that? If we universalize it and write it as a law of nature—"Everyone steals what isn’t theirs"—I’m not sure that’s self-contradictory. And the only reason it’s not true of the world we live in is that many people believe stealing is wrong. So, it’s iffy whether it’s inconsistent with the way the world is. It is possible for people to be honest and not steal money, but that’s not always the case.

Here’s another example that isn’t clearly covered: Someone is rude to someone else—disturbingly rude and mean when there’s no need to be—and it hurts the other person. We’re not allowed to say it’s wrong because it hurt the other person, or because it offends God, or because that’s not how God wants us to treat one another. According to Kant’s expanded criterion, it has to be inconsistent with the way the world is. But it isn’t.

Being rude isn’t self-contradictory, nor is it self-defeating. If we made rudeness into a universal law, it would mean everyone insults everyone else all the time. That’s not how the world currently works, but it could be. There’s nothing about the way the world is that would prevent everyone from behaving that way. It could be—it’s not inconsistent with the way the world is. In fact, the world isn’t like this, but it wouldn’t be incompatible.

But it would still be wrong. I mean, we have it from our Lord Himself. He said, “Anyone who says to someone else, 'You fool!' is not going to be guiltless at the judgment.” Warning taken. But Kant was nervous about all that, so he came up with the second form of the Categorical Imperative.

This one reads: Always treat others as ends and not means, and this gets much closer to what he wanted. Always treat others as ends, not means. In our planning, we have goals that we want to achieve. Maybe there are certain goals I want to achieve just for today, by next month, or sometime in the next year, and that’s okay. We think of means to accomplish those ends. Some of the means may be to go out there and do hard work, and others may involve being really kind to someone. But Kant says we’re not to treat other humans merely as means to an end. Every human being is an end in themselves, ethically. Other human beings should be our goals—to relate to them properly, kindly, lovingly, and caringly, but never as mere means to accomplish an end.

That kind of talk gets you a lot further toward, and closer to, the Christian standard, which is: Love your neighbor as yourself. However, it’s not clear that Kant’s imperative gets you past tolerance. It seems to me that tolerance would satisfy this imperative. I tolerate other people and their differences, no matter what those differences are. I tolerate people of different skin colors, languages, backgrounds, and tastes. I’m completely tolerant of all of that, meaning I accept them as they are. That, to me, would fulfill this categorical imperative. But it doesn’t seem to me that it gets to the point of commanding love for them.

The Christian standard isn’t that I merely tolerate my neighbor—it’s that I love my neighbor, that I seek their good, and balance my own self-interest with love for them. Loving yourself is okay, but there’s supposed to be a balance and equality. My neighbor is human too.

Let me illustrate the difference this way: If I try to tolerate people and fail, that can result in something pretty nasty. It can lead to things like death camps. But if I try to live up to “love your neighbor” and fail, I might still achieve tolerance. The failure of love doesn’t have to go all the way to hatred. It can result in tolerance. However, the failure of tolerance often results in hate. If I look at the differences in my neighbors and can’t stand them—if I don’t like those differences, and don’t like anyone who has them—that can quickly descend into hatred. It can lead to laws that outlaw the things that make people different from me.

So I don’t think Kant’s ethic ever quite comes up to the Christian standard for the reasons I’ve explained. Kant gives at least three versions, or discernible forms, of the Categorical Imperative. The first version says: If a statement, when universalized, is self-contradictory or if it makes the world different from the one we know (for example, a world in which there’s no such thing as a promise), then it is wrong. After all, why would anyone make promises if the moment they’re made, they are broken? In a world like that, promises wouldn’t even be possible because the point of a promise is that someone is going to carry it out.

The second version says: Always treat others as ends and never as means to an end. This one is closer, I grant you, but it still doesn’t reach the Christian standard of “love your neighbor.”

I’ll add one more comment. We’re commanded to love people whether or not we like them. That’s not the same thing. There are certainly people I like and enjoy as friends, and there are other people I dislike being around and avoid, but I still have to love them in the Christian sense of seeking their good and balancing it with mine. So, it’s possible to love people we don’t particularly like. That’s not the same as mere tolerance, and certainly not the same as hatred. We still owe love to those we don’t particularly like or enjoy being around, in the Christian sense of agape—balancing our interests with theirs. There may be some self-sacrifice involved, but it doesn’t command that we always sacrifice ourselves for the other person. We love them as we love ourselves.

I think this gets us to the heart of Kantian ethics. I will say this about it: At least Kant went for rules, right? He believed there are hard-and-fast rules, unlike the tradition of utilitarian ethics, which says, “Look at the consequences of this action. Judge whether it’s the sort of action that will produce the most pleasure for the most people. If so, it’s good. If it produces more pain for more people than pleasure, it’s evil. So, look at the consequences of the act—only that can tell you whether it’s good or bad.”

Kant, however, says, “Don’t look at the consequences of the act.” What tells you whether it’s good or bad is the Categorical Imperative, which is the moral law. For him, the moral law is not the Ten Commandments. It’s the command to act so as to treat people always as ends and never as means to an end. You don’t use them, trample on them, and leave them in the dust. This ethic forbids the dog-eat-dog kind of competition where everyone is at odds with each other. Kant’s law forbids that, but it still doesn’t quite reach the level of “love your neighbor.” 

Okay, I think we've finished that one too. I won’t go on about Kant's ethics any further. It does give us a rule, it gives us a law, and it gives us something to follow. Today, the big divide in ethics is still between Kantian ethics, which are rule-based and say you have a duty to obey them, and utilitarian ethics, which weigh pleasure and pain. That’s the big divide in ethics these days. There’s also a group advocating the revival of virtue ethics, something like Aristotle’s. But rather than cover all of that, I’m just pointing out that the people who like Kant’s approach love it, and they call themselves some kind of Kantian. That means there are definite rules.

One of the troubles with Kant’s ethics is that Kant sees the rules as exceptionless. I made this point before about Christian ethics: there’s an axiom, you might call it, that the fundamental truth of ethics is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The rules we have—things like "Don’t lie," "Don’t steal," "Don’t commit adultery," "Don’t murder," and "Don’t be envious of your neighbor,"—they’re in the Ten Commandments, but they have exceptions. There are times when I might have to kill someone who’s attempting to slaughter my wife and children, or, like the professor I knew who lived in Nazi Germany during the war, I might have to lie to the Gestapo to save the Jews I’m rescuing from the Nazi prison camps who are hiding in my basement. So I tell the Gestapo, “No, I haven’t seen anyone,” when my basement is full of people I’m helping to escape. That is good. It’s a lie, but it’s good. It’s the thing I should do. The law of love overrides any of the specific rules.

Kant can’t say that. He’s backed himself into a corner where it’s reason itself, in the form of the categorical imperative, that commands us. And out of respect for the moral law, out of respect for the laws that make up or that are part of my rationality—which is what it means to be human—I must obey it in all circumstances. So, does that mean I should say to the Gestapo officer, “Yes, my basement’s full of Jews. Arrest me for helping them escape, and go ahead and machine gun them all”? Kant’s answer is, “You tell the truth, no matter the consequences. Don’t decide anything based on the consequences.” People couldn’t believe that anyone would actually say that, so Kant wrote a little pamphlet later in life, and he said, “Oh yes, I do.” Now, listen to this line he wrote: “I would not lie, no, not to save mankind.”

Now, that kind of thinking pushes being good so far that it ends up being evil. You wouldn’t save the whole of mankind by telling the Gestapo officer a lie? I don’t think he deserves the truth because of what he stands for. But anyway, Christianity isn’t in that hole. It’s God who gives the commands, and it’s God who sets the law of love above them. Those commands are what violate the law of love in the vast majority of instances and circumstances. Acting out of love will mostly be in keeping with those rules, but they can be violated and still be in conformity to the axiom of love.

There’s one more thing I think I ought to at least comment on before we close out Kant’s ethics, and that is an old dilemma that he answers in a particular way. The old dilemma goes by the name of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Euthyphro is a character in one of Plato’s dialogues called Euthyphro. In this dialogue, the question is raised, and while they are talking about justice, it applies equally well to love, ethics, and the law. Here’s the way it was raised in Plato’s day:

Do the gods command what is good because it is good, or is what is good good because the gods command it?

We can substitute “God” for “gods” and ask: Does God command us not to steal or lie because these actions are already evil? Does good and evil exist independently of God, and God simply commands us to do the good and avoid the evil? Or is something good because God commands it, and evil because God commands against it? Could God just as easily have said, “Don’t eat bananas,” and then eating bananas would be evil?

The first option seems to make good and evil independent of God. God just chooses one and commands us to follow it. The second option seems to suggest that good and evil are entirely arbitrary, made so by God’s command, and theft and lying are only wrong because He says so.

I think the way the dilemma is phrased, the Christian answer is neither.

The Ten Commandments are not making anything evil or good. They are a revelation, not legislation. They aren’t new laws that make something wrong or right for the first time. They are revealing to us how God created the world. God created the world and us in such a way that these things are evil. So when He commands us not to do them, He’s telling us how the world really works. Some things, of course, are good, and we’re commanded to do them, like “Honor your father and your mother.” It begins with, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” We are commanded both to do some things and avoid others, but this isn’t the first time these things became good or evil. The commandments are revealing to us the truth about God, ourselves, and the world we live in.

How did the world become such that stealing is really wrong, and honoring your parents is really right? God made it that way. So, it’s not true independent of God, and it doesn’t have some other origin. I think that’s the right way to answer this dilemma.

A lot of people are really troubled by it, but Plato didn’t have any idea of a transcendent Creator who creates all of reality out of nothing and makes it just the way He wants. And when His creatures don’t worship Him and fall into sin, He comes to rescue them. He even comes incarnate into the world to save them.

I want to close by reading to you what Kant says about that idea:

Because of these things he has said previously about the original being, Kant says, we must not think of God merely as a legislative or intelligent nature. We should think of this original being as all-knowing. Well, Kant has already ruled out that we can know that. Why should we think of Him that way? Our inmost dispositions, which constitute the moral worth of our actions as rational beings, will not be hidden from Him. We should think of Him as almighty, able to make the whole of nature accord with His highest purposes, and all-good. Kant goes on...

Why in the world would we do that? He has already told us we can’t know that. Yet, he says, we should live as if God is real. But God’s what? Why would God be the answer to all these things? This archetype of God has come down to us from heaven and has assumed our humanity. Wait—what is Kant going to say about this? This ideal of moral perfection, Kant says, can only be represented to ourselves as the idea of a person. So, no real person came down from heaven; it’s just the idea of that person.

Man, as a rational being, cannot form any concept of moral perfection except by picturing it as a person overcoming obstacles. So, we don’t need an actual empirical example to follow—no real person needs to come down and be incarnate on Earth. And no conformity to this ideal demands that this person perform miracles. If anyone believes that, Kant says, they’re showing moral unbelief. Even if such a person had descended and produced immeasurably great good on Earth, we should have no cause to suppose him to be anything other than naturally begotten.

That’s Kant’s verdict on Christianity. It’s a bunch of ideas. Think about them and live as though they’re true, but know that they’re not. No real person came down from heaven. Pretty sad, huh? I think so.