485175 2013

TRE11210.1177/1477878513485175Theory and Research in EducationBrewer

Article

Kant and Rawls on the cultivation of virtue

TRE Theory and Research in Education 11(2) 187­–192 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1477878513485175 tre.sagepub.com

Talbot Brewer

University of Virginia, USA

Abstract In ‘Two conceptions of virtue’, Thomas Hill reconstructs the conceptions of virtue, and of proper moral upbringing, found in Kant and Rawls. Here I offer some brief reflections on these conceptions of virtue and its cultivation. I argue that Kant’s conception of virtue is grounded in a mistaken conception of desire, and that this makes it difficult to account properly for the role of ‘sentimental education’ in a good moral upbringing. I then suggest that, in addition to the explicit conception of moral upbringing to which Hill attends, Rawls has an implicit conception of the cultivation of the virtue of justice. This conception is implicit in Rawls’ philosophical methodology, and it assigns a central and recognizably Hegelian role to reasoned philosophical reflection.

Keywords Desire, happiness, justice, Kant, moral upbringing, Rawls, virtue

In elaborating Kant’s idea of how best to teach youths to be morally virtuous, Thomas Hill focuses his attention on the catechism in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. There is at least one other place where Kant writes at some length about teaching virtue to youths. In the ‘Methodology of Pure Practical Reason’ – the final section of the Second Critique – Kant outlines the appropriate method of expounding morality to youths in order to secure their attachment to the moral law. Kant begins by asking what ‘pure morality’ or ‘pure virtue’ is (Kant, 1956: Ak. 155). By this, he explains, he means the ‘touchstone’ by which ‘the moral import of each action must be tested’ (Kant, 1956: Ak. 155). This sounds very much like the moral worth that Kant sought to isolate in Section I of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant, 2012), so it comes as no surprise when Kant claims that the answer can be elicited from our common understanding of morality (Kant’s starting point in Groundwork I) and tries to isolate it by means of examples of dutiful actions performed in the face of powerful countervailing inclinations (Kant’s strategy in Groundwork I). Corresponding author: Talbot Brewer, Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia, 120 Cocke Hall, Box 400780, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4780, USA. Email: [email protected]

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In a passage reminiscent of the teaching scene from Plato’s Meno, Kant imagines that an ‘exhibition of pure virtue’ (Kant, 1956: Ak. 151–152) might be put before a ten-yearold boy in order to awaken his latent awareness of the ‘touchstone’ of morality. The boy is to be told the story of an honest man who is offered great riches and high rank if only he will bear false witness against an innocent person. This innocent person lacks all power to retaliate, so from the standpoint of prudential self-interest there is nothing to lose and a great deal to gain by lying. To tilt the balance of worldly motivations even further, Kant imagines that the man has everything to lose by refusing to lie: friends and relatives have threatened to break off relations; powerful nobles threaten to torment, imprison, even to kill him if he does not yield. His wife and children beg him to save himself and spare them the grief and suffering that will ensue if he refuses to yield. The thought of causing pain to his loved ones makes him rue his tragic predicament. But he does not doubt what he must do. He refuses to lie. I think Kant is right to suppose that this case will arouse the approval and even the veneration of his imaginary ten-year-old. I am less persuaded by his diagnosis of this veneration. Kant holds that we admire the honest man because we see that his choice to remain dutiful is not driven by concern for the satisfaction of his desires, hence that he is not acting in the name of his own happiness. As Kant puts it, ‘virtue is here worth so much only because it costs so much’ (Kant, 1956: Ak. 156). I think it a mistake to attempt to extract this lesson from the ordinary understanding of morality. I believe that our intuitive approval of this man is grounded in part in the fact that, in his lamentable circumstances, we would not think it a mark of bad character if one were strongly tempted to lie; we might even think that a mild temptation is a mark of good character, since it manifests a laudable concern for the well-being of one’s spouse and children. If the source of psychological resistance were less creditable, the overcoming of that resistance would be less admirable. We would be far more tentative in our approval if we imagined the person as one who finds it generally unpleasant to tell the truth and takes secret pleasure in telling lies, or alternatively as a person who would take great pleasure in seeing the innocent man punished and could never be happy so long as this innocent man’s life goes well. Under these circumstances, duty would have a further cost in the metric of happiness (at least as Kant understands happiness). If Kant’s diagnosis of the case were correct, we would expect this further cost to increase our admiration of the protagonist. Yet this is entirely counterintuitive. The trouble is that the extra cost in happiness stems from, hence manifests, character traits that we find morally objectionable. I think our objection here is best understood as a rejection of the evaluative outlook implicit in the inclinations and affections of the protagonist so described. We object to the malicious pleasure he would take in the unwarranted punishment of an innocent man because it indicates that he tends to see such punishment as good, hence that he has not fully internalized the picture of value that makes it wrong to lie in the first place – i.e. the unconditional value of all human beings. What this modified case suggests is that it is a mistake to trace all moral shortcomings to over-estimations of the reason-giving force of our desires. Sometimes the problem lies in our desires themselves. Desires manifest our pre-deliberative ‘takes’ on practical reasons, and they sometimes reveal our characteristic ‘mis-takes’ about practical reasons.

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I think that errant desires can be morally objectionable even if they do not inform our actual choices. This is of course a controversial claim. But, even if we did not accept this claim, I think we would still have good reason to insist that virtuous character requires the cultivation of apt desires. Most of our actions are not preceded by explicit deliberation, but flow directly from our inclinations and desires. We would be reduced to awkward stutterers in the world of action if we could not rely for the most part on the immediate and unreflective sense of what to do that is given by our inclinations and desires. That’s why any attractive ideal of virtuous character will require an extensive sentimental education. Virtue cannot be awakened in us, all at once, by the sort of story that Kant imagines us telling the ten-year-old. If it could, that would make morally adequate parenting far easier than it is. We need to cultivate an intuitive sense of how to act by incorporating it into our desires and inclinations themselves. As the revisionist Kantian Barbara Herman puts it, we need to become ‘morally literate’ (Herman, 2008). To take one of Herman’s examples, our hunger must be tamed so that our desire for food is directed at morally available food – at the food on our own plate, or on the serving dish, and not e.g. the food on a stranger’s plate (Herman, 1996: 46). If we constantly have to overrule an inclination to eat tasty-looking food on other people’s plates, something has gone badly wrong in our upbringing. We have not internalized a proper appreciation of the limits imposed on our actions by other people and their interests and prerogatives. At this point we might fruitfully revisit the Kantian catechism mentioned by Hill. Among the shortcomings of this catechism as a tool of moral education is that it puts forward a deficient notion of happiness. The deficiency is closely related to deficiencies in Kant’s notion of desire and its role in the appreciation of value. We do not equate success with having things go exactly how we desire, no matter what we may desire. This is not, I would submit, what we want for ourselves insofar as we are thinking only of our own interests, nor is it what we want for others if we have a good heart. The problem is not merely that we do not want ourselves or others to fulfill morally objectionable desires. We want their desires to be attuned to a more ample range of goods than the orthodox Kantian is in a position to recognize. To take Elizabeth Anscombe’s example: if someone we care about is suddenly seized by a desire to take all of the green books in his house and arrange them on his roof, we do not think that things go better for him if this desire is fulfilled (Anscombe, 2000: 26–27). Without some special explanation, we think he’s off his rocker. Presumably we think this because his desire has come loose from any discernible good. Otherwise senseless actions cannot be made valuable, or part of what we want for ourselves or others insofar as we are good-hearted, by the mere presence of a desire to perform them. As Hill points out, John Rawls recognizes that we need a sentimental education if we are to come to have the virtue of justice. This is a step forward. Yet I think that Rawls has more to tell us about the possibility of moral education than is present in his attempt to demonstrate that a society answering to his principles of justice could stably reproduce itself over the generations by inculcating the requisite virtue of justice in its citizenry. I think that we can tease out of Rawls an unwritten conception of moral education that provides an interesting supplement to the written conception of moral education from which Hill has drawn.

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One peculiarity of Rawls’ discussion of the development of the virtue of justice is that he focuses on the question of the stability of an ideal polity rather than on the question of its achievability. As Hill points out, Rawls tries to show that a well-constituted order can promote the sense of justice that it needs to sustain itself over the generations (Rawls, 1971: Ch. 8). But how could we bring about a well-constituted order if we were not already strongly inclined to be just? Doesn’t the virtue have to outpace the actual state of the social order in order to make it possible to improve the social order? Rousseau confronts this ‘chicken and egg’ problem head-on. He maintains that laws must be passably just in order for citizens to become just, and that it is very hard to put in place just laws without just citizens to do it. His ‘solution’ has the flavor of a deus ex machina: a nearly ominiscient and benevolent legislator could give to a nascent republic the laws that it needs to cultivate the republican virtues (Rousseau, 1978: 67–70). Indeed, I’m not sure this can really be called a solution at all. It can as easily be read as a colorful admission of despair. As I read him, Rawls was hopeful that philosophical reflection might take the place of the Rousseauvian legislator, providing an antidote to the despair we might feel at our fallen political condition. Rawls’ theory of justice takes its beginnings from a kernel of reasonableness that he presumes to be present in his readers. We might think of this as a kernel of the virtue of justice, from which the full-blown virtue might be cultivated by philosophical reflection. He presumes that his readers will recognize that certain kinds of arguments are not admissible in public conversations about justice. It doesn’t count as a justification of a basic law or institution that it serves the interests of some sub-class of the citizenry of which we happen to be members. Political justifications must be acceptable in abstraction from any particular creed or identity. This is the conviction that attaches us to the ‘Original Position’ thought experiment (Rawls, 2001: 14–18). Once we run that experiment, we might be surprised by the results. Rawls thinks that many of us will be, since he takes most of us to accept the starting points of the experiment but few of us to recognize the authority of the difference principle or the principle of fair equality of opportunity. He thinks we can move from intuitions about public justification to new intuitions about the need to be much more egalitarian in the distribution of opportunity and wealth. Would such a progression of philosophical thought make us more virtuous? The first set of intuitions are embedded in our characteristic evaluative outlook. They structure our lived sense of what we must do, not just our idle beliefs about what is to be done. Presumably the second set of intuitions would have the same role in our psyches, at least after they have been woven into a stable reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 2001: 29–32). If these newly embedded intuitions track justice more closely than those they supplant, then presumably we become more just when we weave them into our character via philosophical reflection. If that’s right, then it is an implicit commitment of Rawls’ philosophical methodology that philosophical reflection can make us more just. It can awaken in us a concern for our fellow citizens that is not grounded simply in a desire to reciprocate a concern that they have directed towards us, and for this reason it can motivate us to work for a more just condition than the one in which we have actually been raised. If this reading of Rawls is on target, then his ambitions for normative philosophical theory reach further than those of Kant. Kant thinks that our pre-theoretical convictions

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about what we owe to others are already in good order, and that the role of philosophy is to fend off a philosophically induced skepticism by showing that these convictions are not grounded in illusion. They can be vindicated by reasoning about their source. Rawls thinks that normative philosophical reflection can make us more thoroughly egalitarian and therefore more just. At the outset of Justice as Fairness: A Briefer Restatement, Rawls holds that political philosophy can serve the role of orienting our political thought and action, and reconciling us to the political order in which we happen to find ourselves (Rawls, 2001: 1–5). The sort of reconciliation in question is not quietist acceptance of the polity as it stands. It consists, instead, in a Hegelian apprehension of the ‘rational in the actual’ – that is, the seeds of reasonableness in our inherited political forms and traditions, from which a new and more just social order might be cultivated. This, I think, explains why he connects the achievement of reconciliation to the affirmation of a feasibly utopian political vision that answers the question where we ought to be heading as a polity, hence orients our active engagement in incremental political reform. If political philosophy is to clarify and motivate our strivings for a more just social order, as Rawls hopes, it must be capable of awakening in us a devotion to justice that goes beyond a reciprocal readiness to sustain just arrangements from which we ourselves have already benefited. But if it can, then we must have a stronger propensity to be moved by considerations of justice than is presupposed by Rawls’ stability argument. That argument attempts to use relatively weak presuppositions about our responsiveness to considerations of justice in order to show that a just order, once established, can perpetuate attachment to itself over the generations. Rawls’ notion of political philosophy, by contrast, relies upon stronger presuppositions about our responsiveness to considerations of justice. It presupposes that we can be moved to do our part to bring about a more ample and more thoroughly egalitarian form of justice than the one from which we ourselves have already benefited – a form that is only intimated, but not realized, by the public political culture in which we are raised. It presupposes, in other words, that political philosophy can provide a transparent and democratic solution to the chicken and egg problem for which Rousseau, possibly in despair, introduces the legislator. I’m not suggesting – either on Rawls’ behalf or in my own voice – that philosophy can generate the virtue of justice ex-nihilo. If one has not been raised in a political culture that provides sound starting points for normative reflection, philosophy cannot itself make up the deficit. Rawls’ stance is, I think, more modest and more plausible: careful and systematic reflection can deepen and extend the justice of a polity by deepening and extending the justice of the citizenry. When I was a graduate student at Harvard, Rawls once gave me a lift home after a departmental event. I can’t recall the details of our conversation, but I do remember that, when we pulled up at my house, he said something along these lines: ‘While I am often called a Kantian, some people say I am a Hegelian and I think I know what they mean.’ I foolishly didn’t ask him to expand on this intriguing comment. But I’ve often wondered what he had in mind, and if I were to take a stab at reconstructing his thought, I would include some of the reflections I’ve just set out. I think it was his view that, under propitious social conditions, Geist can gradually awaken to its proper calling by reflecting on it, beginning from received ideas that are expressed in actual social arrangements and

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arriving at a new and more adequate outlook that can be instantiated via gradual social reforms in future social arrangements which can, in their turn, provide ensuing generations with even more propitious starting points for their reflections. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

References Anscombe GEM (2000 [1957]) Intention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herman B (1996) Making room for character. In: S Engstrom and J Whiting (eds) Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herman B (2008) Moral Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant I (1956) Critique of Practical Reason, trans. LB White. New York: Macmillan. Kant I (2012) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. M Gregor and J Timmerman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls J (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls J (2001) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. E Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau JJ (1978) On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. R Masters and tr. J Masters. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Author biography Talbot Brewer is Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Virginia. He has written widely on the Kantian and Aristotelian traditions of ethical thought, with special attention to the virtues and to moral psychology. His most recent book, The Retrieval of Ethics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. He is a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, an Associate Editor of Ethics, and has been a visiting professor in the Harvard Philosophy Department.