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GRIFFITHS
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A. Phillips Griffiths
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Kant's Psychological
Hedonism
A. Phillips Griffiths
Kant's Psychological
Hedonism
A. Phillips Griffiths
said that the object here is the making of the will or testament, which of
course can be conceived as giving pleasure to the living agent, since this
may be a mere means, and the end, the inheritance of the bequest by
someone, that for which the means is adopted; so that, for example, if
one found out that the intended beneficiary, say one's wife, would
necessarily inherit by law, so that one need not do anything, then one
would not do anything. No, the object here is clearly a state of affairs
which would obtain only after the agent is dead. But Kant could reply
that even if the agent would not expect pleasure after death, he could,
though without knowing it, be motivated by the expectationthat he will
avoid present pain if he can avoid having to think his wife might be left
penniless; something which would be removed, if she is to inherit
whatever he does. Such ingenuity can always fudge up some such
entirely baseless and completely irrefutable supposition which would
save this a priori principle.
I reject this doctrine as false not because I can show it to be false but
because there is not the slightest reason to believe it to be true and very
good reason to think it utterly repugnant, derogatory and degrading.
It implies that apart from the end of acting in accordance with
universal law, no end is better than any other: where all that can be
appealed to is the degree of intensity of pleasure; given that that is the
same in both cases, pushpin is as good as poetry. Mill recoiled from this
and suggested that pleasure itself can be rated good or better not only in
terms of its intensity but its quality. Its status as higher or lower is
conferred on it by its object, for example whether its object has its
origin and status in the understanding; a suggestion on which Kant
pours scorn in advance. 'However dissimilar the conceptions of the
objects' Kant says in Remark I to Theorem II, 'the feeling of pleasure
(since it is the agreeablenessand enjoyment which one expects from the
object which impels the activity toward producing it) is always the
same.' There can be nothing to choose between expected occasions of
pleasure, except the sheer magnitude of pleasure. If the determination
of the will of an agent depends on the feelings of agreeableness or
disagreeablenesswhich he expects from any cause then, says Kant 'it is
all the same to him through what kind of notion he is affected. The only
thing he considers in making a choice is how great, how long-lasting,
how easily obtained, and how often repeated, this agreeablenessis.'3
What makes this so repugnant is not that it reduces all human nonmoral (in Kant's sense of moral) ends to the same level of value, but that
it seems to rob all except one possible one of having any value at all.
3 It would be a nice thought if it could be shown that these desiderata
were the originof Bentham'scategoriesof intensity,duration,propinquity,
and fecundityin the calculusof pleasures.
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Kant's Psychological
Hedonism
A. Phillips Griffiths
214
Kant's Psychological
Hedonism
This suggests that this feeling fails the test of being subjectively sufficient; since the man who is nearly but not quite morally dead has the
feeling but is never moved by it. More important, however, is the other
demand, that it be unique, and exclusive to the determinationof moral
acts.
The uniqueness of moral feeling depends on more than its being
appropriate only to one distinct object, the moral law. One could as
easily say that the feeling of desire for ice-cream is unique, in that it
could never explain determination towards any object other than icecream; it could never explain drinking lemonade, the feeling of desire
for which must be of its own unique kind. Moral feeling is unique in
that it differs completely from all other determinants of the will: it is a
feeling concerning an object, an end, which unlike all others is not to be
found in nature. That end, the moral law, is universal and a priori, and
hence non-empirical. It is also linked to the feeling of respect for the law
not contingently but necessarily; whereas all other objects of the will
are phenomenal, empirical objects, and the feeling which makes them
objects of the will-the desire for pleasure-is only contingently related
to them.
Obviously I cannot here enter the well discussed question of whether
Kant's doctrine of the noumenal determinationof the will is not only, as
he says, unintelligible, but incoherent. But if I am allowed, albeit
unintelligibly, to attribute to myself action in accordance with the
moral law for its own sake, why cannot I attribute to myself action for
the good of my country for its own sake (call it patriotism) or for the
sake of my marriagefor its own sake (call it one form of love) or for the
good of my children (call it fatherhood). I cannot see why classifying
these as empirical objects makes any difference, especially since they
are not. People all over the world are killing each other and preparedto
sacrifice themselves and the whole of humanity for the sake of various
objects which they all call democracy: what kind of empirical objects
are these? When a man goes to wed, what is this empirical concept of
marriagewhich determines his action in virtue of his conception of the
expected pleasure he will derive from it? Where does he get it? From
observing the mating habits of birds? Sociobiologists may say that it
arises in him in much the same way as the mating habits in birds; but it
is just about such matters that they are most vulnerable. In any case,
what the sociobiologists would describe is hardly the acquisition of a
concept by empirical methods, but the biological generation of what
(like the mating habits of birds) is an innate idea. And this will be quite
wrong if it is treated as a reduction rather than an explanation of how
something the like of which has never been seen before comes about.
Nothing in culture is to be found in nature.
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A. Phillips Griffiths
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