Kant: let us compare

Review of Metaphysics, The, June, 2005 by Husain Sarkar

   Every thing in this world is judg'd of by comparison. (1)

   It is impossible to continue in the practice of contemplating any
   order of beauty, without being frequently obliged to form
   comparisons between the several species and degrees of
   excellence, and estimating their proportion to each other.
   A man, who has had no opportunity of comparing the different
   kinds of beauty, is indeed totally unqualified to pronounce an
   opinion with regard to any object presented to him. By
   comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame, and
   learn how to assign the due degrees of each. (2)

IN KANT'S ETHICAL THOUGHT, (3) Allen W. Wood powerfully argues in defense of Kant's alleged notion that we ought not to compare ourselves with others on the moral scale, however much such comparison may be meaningful and permissible with respect to our other skills and characteristics, such as the artistic, practical, or technological. Meaningful, permissible, comparable or not, those skills and characteristics have no inherent worth anyway. These have a market price or a fancy price but no dignity, and it is only dignity which confers incomparable moral worth. A human being, says Kant, "possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world. He can measure himself with every other being of this kind and value himself on a footing of equality with them." (4)

I tend to think, in an a priori way, that to claim that Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi and I have the same absolute, incomparable moral worth is just laughable. They might think that I have the same absolute, incomparable moral worth as they do; I concede. I cannot even bring myself to think it. This is not undue self-abnegation or humility. There is moral inequality here; if that is not a hard moral fact, I don't know what is. (5)

My purposes in this paper are twofold, one primary, one secondary. The secondary purpose is to argue against Wood's claim that, according to Kant, we ought not to make moral comparisons; it is a rather limited purpose, if only because it concedes to Wood a variety of substantial points in the Kantian exegesis, particularly Wood's idea--which is the cornerstone of his book--that the various formulations of the categorical imperative had better be seen as constituting a system, (6) a system in which the Formula of Humanity as End in Itself plays a central role, a role routinely accorded (since Hegel) to the Formula of the Universal Law. (7)

My own reservations about Wood's central thesis lie in the fact that several key passages from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, in which Kant explicitly accords the Formula of Universal Law a prime place in his system and denies such a place to any other formula, are not given a fair hearing and sometimes not even aired. This is no less true of the later work, The Metaphysics of Morals, which is Wood's favored piece to show the importance of the Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself. Had he done so, this might perhaps have resulted in the dull view that Kant was ambivalent--perhaps, even conflicted; but making things neater and more clean-cut than is warranted by the texts does not yield accuracy of interpretation. Of course, this is just a bland assertion and must await justification in a paper different from the present one. Whatever the merits of the secondary, exegetical purpose, my primary purpose is philosophical. It is to demonstrate that we ought to make moral comparisons.

No one can read Wood's book without marveling at how successful he has been in portraying the unity--not to mention depicting the beauty of that unity--of Kant's moral and social philosophy; nothing said herein detracts from that remarkable achievement.

In section 1, I briefly present Wood's central arguments; in section 2, I evaluate them. This evaluation is continued in section 3 with the aid of a key distinction between two types of respect which, I hope, will assist in preserving Kant's keenest insights on this issue. That distinction will enable me to show that my judging and accepting the incredible moral worth of some human beings in comparison to my own moral worth is compatible with my valuing myself "on a footing of equality with them." In section 4, I crudely outline the advantage of a moral theory which permits moral comparisons.

I

Here is how section 6 of chapter 4 of Kant's Ethical Thought opens:

   The thesis that every rational being is an end itself with absolute
   worth has an immediate but radical corollary: The worth of all
   rational beings is equal. In other words, the worst rational being
   (in any respect you can possibly name) has the same dignity or
   absolute worth as the best rational being in that respect (or in
   any other).... (FH) [Formula of Humanity as End in Itself] implies
   that all the normal (comparative and competitive) measures
   of people's self-worth--wealth, power, honor, prestige,
   charm, charisma, even happy relationships with others--are
   expressions of an utterly false sense of values. (8)