Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Speak up, I Kant hear you
Why do we have a duty to be happy? Kant claims that people who are not happy are less likely to do their duty in other areas because they are not as predisposed to moral actions, but If we do good because we want to, Kant says it has no moral worth, in other words those good acts are actually amoral. shouldn't we who wish to be as moral as possible therefore hope for circumstances to disincline us toward acting morally? If the only actions of moral worth are those moral actions we take that we are not inclined toward, it would seem that anyone who wishes to live a life of moral worth is duty bound to be as unhappy as possible. How else are we to increase the moral worth of our actions?
According to Kant, the most moral man in the world hates his life and wants to die. His wife despises him, but he stays with her and treats her well. He has a pathological fear of snakes, so to be moral he runs a snake rescue out of his home. He always gives every dollar he has to panhandlers, even though his job as a snake wrangler never did bring in much money. To top it all off, he has to convince himself to be happy in these miserable circumstances, ignoring the cognitive dissonance of happiness in the midst of a terrible life in which he does everything he is disinclined to do.
And what of the poor soul who just happens to be well adjusted, happy, and never wants to do anything immoral? According to Kant, even if he never does anything bad, he is at best an amoral man because he is inclined to do good, so none of his good actions have any moral value whatsoever. I realize he was going for a model of morality, but what he came up with falls short, and Kant ends up as one more opiate for the masses. His work boils down to, 'do your duty because you should'.
Kant's view of morality is so sublime, so rarified, that it becomes almost impossible to find a moral act in all the world. Who does anything at all out of pure duty? I would propose that all actions are either motivated by some form of self interest or by the inclination or character of the doer. If reason works in to cause a person to act against their baser self, and the result is a moral act, then so much the better that they were able to rise above and do good. Perhaps I could shed more light on the subject by discussing an immoral act. If one were to commit murder, whether in harmony with or against their inclination to kill, the foul deed is done and the consequences follow. That is to say, for practical purposes, an immoral act is immoral regardless of the motivation behind it. I say the same thing goes for a moral act. I don't care how much good will someone might have, I care about what they do.
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