In answering what “enlightenment” is, Kant claims that it is to think for and only for yourself and for no one else. In order to be “enlightened”, one must only consider their own feelings and disregard the feelings of others. For example, if someone were to make a large decision that would impact not only themselves but others around them, they should disregard everyone else and only think about what the impact will be on themself. This is interesting as most would see this as selfish or inconsiderate while Kant finds this to be freeing. This begs the question: Is thinking solely for oneself a selfish act or self-enlightening?
This philosophy can be seen today as birth rates are steadily declining and one of the major reasons for the decline is due to the cost and time of raising a child increasing. This has led to many would-be parents to choose not to have a child as it not only saves them a ton of time, but money and stress as well. The cost of raising a child has increased over the years as the cost of living and health insurance steadily increases while support systems such as parental leave continues to decline. However, many parents desire grandchildren for personal reasons and also to continue the lineage. If one refuses to have a child for financial and freedom reasons, would it be an act of selfishness to their parents or enlightenment to themselves?
“A lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent.” This statement stood out to me in Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” Civil freedom, or the absence of strict laws and rules that limit what people can or cannot do in a society, leads to a lack of intellectual thought, according to Kant. When there are restrictions that people must follow, their intellect thrives and grows. On the other hand, if people are able to act however they please, they don’t need to think too hard about much, because there is nothing to think about changing.
This statement reminded me much of the political climate in America right now. Many minorities are being restricted in what they can or cannot do, mostly implicitly. This disparity and unfairness, though clearly awful and unfair, has allowed such people to band together in huge intellectual and social movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, and the Pride movement. If no limitations or restrictions had ever existed, these groups may not have had the opportunity to join together in unity and solidarity with each other. Kant claims that this intellectual enlightening will ultimately lead to civil freedom: “Thus once the germ on which nature has lavished most care – man’s inclination and duty to think freely – has developed within its hard shell, it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasingly able to act freely.” This is what we are seeing today; for decades, minorities have been marginalized and discriminated against. Now, as a result of the people’s increasing intellect, we are finally seeing equality and freedom surfacing.
Below is an image of a Black Lives Matter march in Seattle, displaying the enormity of this united movement.
Kant argues that to act
rightly is to act from duty. One’s maxim of action ought to be none other than
one’s adherence to the “law,” namely the law of morality and what it
prescribes, which is good in and of itself. Actions are therefore not analyzed
or evaluated with regards to their consequences, but instead with regards to
whether or not they are performed out of a sense of duty. Kant’s deontology is
strictly concerned with the intentions and motivations for actions, and so it
dismisses that the outcomes effectuated by those actions are of any import in
moral evaluation. To help better bring out the intuition, consider three cases:
In acting out of a sense of duty, I donate food to
charity. One unfortunate homeless man who received my food ended up choking
while eating it and he died as a result.
I am walking along a crowded street, and there is a
child on the side of the road who is in need of help. With the intention
of gaining applause from the crowd, I help the child. Absent the crowd, I
may have hesitated helping the child or even not helped her at all.
A rich businessman donates one million dollars to
charity, barely noticing the hit in his bank account. A poor man donates
one quarter to charity, causing him to take severe precautions in his
spending for the rest of the month.
Each one of these cases is
meant to bring out the moral sense of actions in deontological terms. In the
first case, while my donating food to charity ended up causing the death of the
homeless individual who ate that food, I still acted from a sense of duty–out
of respect for the moral law–and so performed morally. Even though there ended
up being bad consequences, my action was still good. In the second case, it
seems as if my action was bad (or at the very least, problematic), even though
there were good consequences as a result. Think of whether or not you would
feel treated as a proper human being if someone saved you simply because they
thought it would afford them fame or money–it seems like one may be justly
offended by such a notion, even though the action resulted in good
consequences. In the last example, it seems that it would be morally
objectionable to say the businessman did something “more morally”
simply on account of his having more money–one’s financial standing is trivial
with respect to one’s capacity to act morally.
With this in mind, to what extent do you think social media causes actions that are counter to deontological morality? We see people often posting about their “passion” for certain activist causes, celebrity deaths, and so forth, yet, is it reasonable to assume they all do so out of a sense of duty? Furthermore, with a system that has algorithms garnered towards getting more likes, comments, shares, or whatever (depending on the platform), might we be suspicious of not only the maxims of other peoples’ actions (via their posts), but even our own? Given the uncertainty of knowing pure motives when there are all of these confounding and external variables, do you think social media can still be a platform that encourages moral behavior (within a Kantian deontological framework)?
This past Tuesday, my day ended completely differently than I had planned at the start of the day. I’m deathly afraid of public speaking and my sense of humor is dead-pan at best, so I would have never imagined myself standing in front of a stage of people doing a stand-up comedy set. At 5:30 AM when I went to work, I was scrolling through my socials on the bus and stumbled upon an event at a local restaurant called Herb and Wood. The event was a “Worst Date Ever” themed storytelling competition. Ironically, the prize was dinner for two at said restaurant. Maybe it was the prospect of free food, or perhaps the tiredness of waking up at 4:45 AM for work, but I ended up submitting a set a mere 10 hours before the event.
I really enjoyed the experience so much! I had absolutely no expectation coming into this event, other than to enjoy myself and have a few laughs with my friends. However, I ended up winning $150 of dinner so it was 100% worth the 10-minute stand-up set I threw together in a matter of hours. But, my biggest motivation to sign up was to challenge myself to be out of my comfort zone and maybe learn a new skill. While I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, at the beginning of the year I always say to myself that I will try something new each month because I never know until I try it if I would be any good. This has led me to discover so many of my current passions and hobbies like cooking, powerlifting, and now maybe even stand-up comedy!
This mindset really reminded me of a lot of Kant’s perspective on untapped talents. He states in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is failing to do your duty when “[one] finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to give himself up to pleasure than to trouble himself with enlarging and improving his fortunate natural predispositions” (74). He argues that it is a disservice to yourself to not try and see what talents you have the potential to love. If you go in without any sort of intention of winning (like I did) and do something new purely out of wanting to be happy, even if you fail, it is still morally good to have tried at all. So, I encourage you all to try something out of your comfort zone (maybe even once a month!)
Below, you can see a brief video of me mentioning UCSD as part of a bit 🙂
Kant began section I by saying that there is nothing in the world that is good except good will, “it is impossible to think of anything at all in the world … that could be considered good without limitation except a good will”
People can be good to others everyday but if their intentions are ill intended then their actions cannot be consider good. Consider the following scenario; you are at your relative house for dinner and they are discussing the Australian Fire. Then one of your cousin had a bright idea and told the family, ‘let’s all pull out our phones and donate money to help’, one by one everybody donate 5-50 dollars. You are sitting there with your phone out feeling pressured to do as others are doing so you donate 10 dollars just to do it, while your little bother donated 5 dollars, his weekly allowance. If Kant were to rate your action vs your little bother’s action he would place your bother’s action above your, because he had good intentions and good intentions goes along way. He donate all the money he have now and next week and the week after, soon at add up more than your single donation. Doing one good deed for the sake of it cannot hold up to multiple smaller deed.
Kant’s ideals, compared to the other philosophers we’ve covered so far, seem to be the most idyllic. While he acknowledges the propensity of humans to err, the other philosophers take it as fact that it is simply a fundamental of reality – Kant philosophizes as if this behavior is a choice, not as if it happens no matter what. He encourages people to “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”. To me, this assertion seems unrealistic but also worthwhile.
The idea of using others for your own gain is nothing new. Beyond happening on a small level, this type of behavior is pervasive, even in the highest level of government. While it’s a nice idea to rid the world of political corruption, as of right now the President of the United States is still holding his position exclusively because he’s taken advantage of his “party supporters” by making them his political scapegoats. Many influential republicans have taken the fall for him to secure his position as president, and as president the only thing he’s done is avoid catching fire for being corrupt. Trump hasn’t done anything for the country – he has only used his presidential power to avoid scandal. In spite of this, he was just acquitted by the senate of impeachment. Clearly, Kant’s philosophy does not realistically represent how things go down, even if it is a much better vision for how humans should interact. I think it’s a good idea to put it down on paper as philosophy, but to blindly ascribe to this system of belief because it seems like utopia is extremely naive.
Kant’s perspective that consequences of an action are not what matters, but rather the “moral worth” of the action is important really resonated with me. Kant argues that if a person is doing something because they have the motivation to do good rather than bad, then how the action actually results is irrelevant. The most significant part of the action was the motivation itself and the attempt to try to do good.
When thinking about an action’s moral worth rather than the action’s consequence, I immediately thought about charities. We always see things on the news where large charities that get donated millions of dollars. You think how much good work they can do with all that money. I am part of an organization where we do fundraising so that we can donate to charities around San Diego. At a recent fundraiser, we only raised $300 and a lot of the members felt upset that we wouldn’t be making a big enough impact. However, once I read Kant’s philosophy on this, I felt better that though my organization couldn’t donate millions of dollars, we still were trying to do our little part to help out the community.
Through this, I realized that not everyone can donate huge amount of money to charity, but, if we all look at doing an action with moral worth, it doesn’t matter how much money you are able to donate, whether it is $1 or $1 million. It is the fact that people are trying, help even in the smallest way, to make the world a better place.
Below is an infographic on charitable donations in the US in 2018. As you can see, 70% of charitable donations was by individuals rather than the 5% by corporations.
While discussing the proper actions one should take to make one’s life meaningful, Kant states that “To assure one’s own happiness is a duty…” (pg.54). This is to prevent the desire from becoming a “…great temptation to transgression of duty“. In the same way, love is another form of duty. Kant is showing that actions following duty and not desire are meaningful and worthwhile but sometimes these duties are our own desires. This becomes even more complicated when one’s happiness infringes on other duties, mostly when they happen to contradict. What duty should one follow when multiple contradict each other? Multiple movies, plays and TV shows revolve around the idea that the best way to love someone is by letting them go, even if it means sacrificing your own happiness. Is this type of self-sacrifice truly worthwhile and morally meaningful? If not, a good portion of the Romance genre can be called into question to determine the rationality behind the decisions made by many of the characters.
One such play, Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, depicts the story of Segismundo, a man who was locked in a tower from birth, and his escapades when he receives his freedom (Spoilers!). When a lost woman, Rosaura, stumbles upon his tower, he finds himself falling in love with her not knowing she is already engaged to be married. At the end of the play, and finding himself king over Poland, he decides to let Rosaura marry the man she loves, the one who she was engaged too, and instead marries Estrella, a princess. Even though Segismundo was deeply in love with Rosaura throughout the play, he ends up letting her go and be happy instead of forcing her to be his bride. He acted according to his duty by truly loving her and by marrying a princess as was expected by him of his subjects. In doing so, he does not assure himself of his own happiness. By acting according to two duties, his actions mathematically were moral and valuable as following the two duties outweighed the opposing duty of his happiness. But should his happiness taken the forefront of his actions?
If I’m asleep, don’t let me wake. If this is real, don’t let me dream. ~Pedro Calderón de la Barca
As you walk down the street and decide to give a dollar to a homeless woman around the curve, you don’t expect this little amount to be able to buy her a new life, but you still decide to help her because you know that any amount will be better than nothing and will make a small contribution to one of her needs in one way or another. It is not about how big or small the outcome will really be, but rather the intention behind the action.
This ideal is emphasized in Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals as it is stated, “an action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided on.”
Some of the major issues that our society faces, such as climate change, have many people who contribute towards the manner because they voluntarily want to help and are motivated to help the cause. For example Leonardo Dicaprio has made use of his resources to be involved in and even create his own charity, the Leonardo Dicaprio Foundation, in which he seeks after the wellbeing of our planet Earth. Though his team continuously works hard to protect the planet, the repercussions of climate change are too strong to be fully controlled. One could say that there would really be no reason for Dicaprio and everyone else in the world to put an effort into stopping/controlling climate change because at the pace that it’s going, it will not be sufficient. However, Kant would argue that their actions are valued and have moral worth because of the good intentions behind them regardless of the immediate effects.
In Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant makes the claim that a good will is good if it has intrinsic goodness. Specifically, that it is good even when the will is not effective. In his words, “it would, like a jewel, still shine.”
He’s wrong. A good will with no positive outcome is just a lame excuse for saving face when you don’t care about something. Doing something good necessitates positive action on the world. Let’s say, for example, that your friend Bob gets cancer out of nowhere and has no way to pay for it. According to Kant, I could simply tell Bob that I’m “sending my thoughts and prayers” and walk away, still doing a good will. And then Bob will die because Bob lives in the U.S. and Bob is uninsured and broke. Wow, not even God was strong enough to save Bob from a shitty healthcare system. At least you get to watch your childhood friend Bob die knowing you had a good will! I’m sure Bob would like that.
Let’s propose a new definition of a good will: you have to try to bring about a positive change in your environment. In this scenario when Bob gets cancer you decide that thoughts and prayers aren’t going to do jack shit and so you start a GoFundMe to raise money for a plane ticket to Norway. Wow! After raising $1400 you send Bob to Norway where they decide to treat him because the hospitals there are more interested in saving another human’s life than taking the sick Bob’s money as he dies. The end.
