Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category
Notes on Social Darwinism, Sociobiology, and the “Free Market” Continuation?
Often we talk about Social Darwinism, but we seldom know what it means. Here is a link to a brief explanation:
See http://www.ioa.com/~shermis/socjus/socdar.html
The modern revival of this theory is called sociobiology.
See http://www.psych.nwu.edu/~sengupta/sociob.html
Social Darwinism has also returned in an economic disguise where the market determines the survival of the fittest and does the natural selection among corporations and groups that can afford to live and those who cannot.
Notes on Social Darwinism added to Robert Bellah’s lectures on the Sociology of Religion (February 1996) by Peter Krey:
Robert Bellah said, “Economics tends to be done completely in isolation from and oblivious to society and community.[1] Are we the species that has to do what the market demands?”[2]
Some Notes from Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1944, revised edition of 1965). Time period about after Civil War until after WWI.
Laissez-faire conservatives were the first to pick up the instruments of social argument that were forged out of Darwinian concepts. (ff. 5-6) Critics of social Darwinism were first a hard pressed minority, then after establishing their critique, became split over the question whether racist and imperialist invocations of Darwinism had any real justification. (6) Catch words were the “struggle for survival” and “survival of the fittest.” Nature would provide that the best competitors in a competitive situation would win, and that process would lead to continued improvement. In itself this was not a new idea, as economists could have pointed out, but it did give the force of natural law to the idea of competitive struggle.(Ibid.) Slow gradual change seemed reinforced by evolution, and despite hardship, evolution meant progress tending to some very remote but altogether glorious consummation. (7) Thus all reforms were an attempt to remedy the irremediable, which interfered with nature, and could only lead to degeneration.(Ibid.) Social Darwinism was certainly one of the leading strains in American conservative thought for more than a generation. A conservatism that appealed more to the secularist than pious mentality, it was a conservatism almost without religion.(Ibid.) [It contained] A body of belief whose chief conclusion was that the positive functions of the state should be kept to the barest minimum, it was almost anarchical, and it was devoid of that center of reverence and authority which the state provides in many conservative systems. Most importantly, it tried to dispense with sentimental or emotional ties.(Ibid.)
Hofstadter cites Graham Sumner who criticizes rank, status, bond and ties of Medieval times, finding progress in realistic, cold and matter of fact contract, lasting only as long as the rational purpose for it. In a state based on contract, sentiment is out of place in any public or common affairs. It is relegated to the sphere of private and personal relations….Sentimentalist always want to go back to the old order (p. eight). Hofstadter remarks about these passages of Sumner: was there ever a conservatism more progressive than this? He compares Edmund Burke with Sumner, noting that the first is a religious conservative who respects the wisdom of the community, while the other disdains the past and wants the community to give full play to individual self-assertion.(8-9) To just summarize the rest: at this time the conservatives were the real headlong economic and social innovators and daring promoters of new types of organizations, like Alexander Hamilton, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan. The left spoke of conserving old values. This only changed with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It is not quite true that social Darwinism was completely secular. It seemed to be a harsh naturalistic Calvinism considering the necessity of labor, self-denial, and inevitability of suffering, in relation to nature as in relation to God in Calvin’s system. It was to exploit the resources of our country for industrialization, discipline the work force, and produce character with a harsh economic ethic.(10) Though the credit living and over-consumption induced by the advertizing industry in 1965 seemed to show the end of such an ethic, Hofstadter has misgivings of the future of a society bereft of the moral discipline to work. (11) Men of Sumner’s stamp could contemplate human misery with callousness and excessive dogmatic certainty that nothing could be done about it, they tended to be stern masters of themselves. Sumner put his position at Yale into jeopardy three times – over introducing Spencer into his teaching, opposing the protective tariff, and denouncing the Spanish-American War. But ironically, the values Spencer and Sumner held, personal providence, family loyalty and family responsibility, hard work, careful management, and proud self-sufficiency, tended to designate the millionaires as the fittest, who in the struggle for survival were transforming the environment so rapidly that Spencer and Sumners values were less and less fit for survival.(12)
Hofstadter has put the most charitable construction on the leading ideologues of Social Darwinism. In the book the crude and vulgar forms it took with the gospel of wealth, the legitimation of racism and imperialism come to light. It was an apology for the elimination of the unfit.(230) That spelled the poor and the natives, not yet having arrived at white Anglo-Saxon superiority, should first be eliminated. Indeed hospital, asylums, where the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick are kept alive, thus allowing the weak members of civilized society to propagate their kind, [were considered] highly injurious to the race of man.(91) Teddy Roosevelt is shown advising the manly virtue of being warlike, and General Homer Lea makes no excuse for brutality: As we increase the aggregate of individuals and their collective activities, we increase proportionately their brutality.(170) Social Darwinism can be seen leading into the euphoria into which WWI was entered, very much in tune with future racist fascist and Nazi developments.
Hofstadter cites Luther from “On Trade and Usury.” (1524) Luther is complaining about large monopolies of his day:
[They] oppress and ruin all the small merchants, as the pike the little fish in the water, just as though they were lords over God’s creatures and free from all the laws of faith and love.(242)
Quite another natural law is offered here. And Bellah shows that evolution even among animals develops a protective response against the sheer brutality of the struggle for survival. The exaptation,[3] equipping the species to survive, the niche building, and the culture that teaches young animals to survive. All this seems to be jettisoned by Social Darwinism, which teaches that sheer inhuman natural forces determine who lives and dies. In the words of Charles Sanders Peirce: “Every individual for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount expressed a different opinion.”(231)
[1] These two statements come from Robert Bellah and Loïc Wacquant’s Durkheim seminar.
[2] I imagine that in social terms, markets represent competition, natural (economic?) selection, struggle, and survival of the fittest. Bellah is pointing out that the ruthless biological doctrine – nature is bloody in tooth and claw – which is now being challenged even for biological theory, is being misapplied to society through economics. The invisible hand may well belong to Darwin, whose theory is dehumanizing when applied to sociology.
[3] From my notes taken from a Bellah Lecture on Feb. 8, 1996, during a Sociology of Religion course in the University of California at Berkeley: “200,000 or so years ago, what was the brain for? Why that huge computer? They did not have to learn physics. At that time they only wielded sticks and stones among a few human beings. Is that brain just an adaptation in a passive sense? [Stephan Jay] Gould, theorizing about exaptations, does not abandon Darwin in a broad sense, but rather insists on this internal evolution. True, if we do not adapt we will be eliminated. But there is play room, and the higher you go on the evolutionary scale the more play room there is going to be. They are not only adapting but building. It is called niche construction. They see opportunities and respond.
Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals and Freedom of a Christian: Kant and Luther
Kant‘s Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals and Luther’s “Freedom of a Christian”
May 13th 2002 by Dr. Peter Krey
According to Immanuel Kant, the cultivation of reason makes the will good and the only good-in-itself is the good will.[1] It would be up against inclinations, interests and desires. For Kant reason has the capacity to direct the good will to achieve the ethical level of action.
Kant has several definitions of the will: the will is practical reason, the will is the causality of reason. (In my own words, the will is autonomous initiative expressed in reason.) The will is the power so to act that the principle of our actions may accord with the essential character of a rational cause, that is, with the condition that the maxim (i.e., the subjective principle) of these actions should have the validity of a universal law (126).[2]
If you think about pure thoughts a priori, that means before any experience, you have pure reason. In the same way, if you think about the will before it acts, you have pure practical reason. And for the good in itself – and the real possibility of value, human value and ethical action, the principles have to come from such reason inside the self – autonomously and without any regard to consequences – or the ethical becomes lost in the empirical – which realm, according to Kant, cannot deliver such a principle.
Duty is defined as doing the good in itself, the unconditional value, not out of inclination but for its own sake. Opposed to inclination is reverence and to act out of reverence for the practical law constitutes duty. (In my words, duty is the rational good will, especially performed against inclinations.)
Happiness is the concept of the satisfaction of all the inclinations (i.e., desires) as a sum (67).
In the expression, “Honesty is the best policy“ the value is authentic, but the motivation is not yet moral, because if it stopped being the best policy, the person would stop being honest. When we act from a moral virtue or value and not from an immediate inclination or some self-interest and we do not take any notice of consequences, then we do our duty or carry out our obligation (18-19). Duty does not apply to a perfect good will because in this condition it has no subjective obstacles to overcome (18). The “ought“ ascends to the “I will“. Duty is a concept that includes the good will, but is exposed to subjective limitations and obstacles. Duty is the necessity to act out of the reverence for the law. Kant dresses, up the good will shaped by reason in duty and contrasts that with happiness, pleasure and self-interest.
The imperfect admits of no exception in the interests of inclinations.
Kant has four examples that illustrate each kind of duty.
“Under human conditions, where we have to struggle against unruly impulses and desires, good will is shown by acting for the sake of duty.” Duty does not apply to a perfectly good will because then it does not have subjective obstacles to overcome (18). In my words, one who is wholly rational, can be inside the necessity and be mastering it freely or one can be without it and be experiencing the “ought” standing against one‘s inclinations. The latter experiences necessity while the former, only the necessitation of reason (26).
Kant classifies three kinds of imperatives when objective purposes are conceived as necessitating action.
IMPERATIVES
Imperatives or commands are objective principles conceived as necessitating action. These imperatives are:
I. Hypothetical
or an imperative of skill ……… Rules of Skill
good as a means to an end
problematic, technical imperative of skill
II. Prudential
(assertoric) a pragmatic imperative ……….Counsels of Prudence
happiness, according to one‘s own nature
III. Categorical
unconditional……….Laws or Commands of Morality
necessarily followed by a fully rational agent, not based on any previous willing
of some further end. Without any prior condition, morally good in themselves.
We experience them as binding until we are in perfect rational existence.
Not, I ought to do this if I want that. Just I ought to do this, per se.
When Kant defines persons as ends in themselves, then they transcend the phenomenal and also belong to the noumenal.
Kant is thinking through the way from the necessity of nature to the freedom of the spirit. When a person is fully rational according to the subjective principle, s/he wills what s/he ought to do according to a necessary universal objective law of nature – and out of its subjective principle the person makes the law – and makes the law that holds and is moral for everyone in the freedom and the autonomy of the person of the spirit. When a person is fully rational then the “I will“ is not experienced as the “I ought“. The weight of the necessity to do something decreases with the person‘s accordance with the autonomous, free rationality of the spirit. Although Kant speaks only of rationality, Hegel will make a philosophy of the spirit out of it.
For Martin Luther (1483-1546) the ascent or the rapture in the spirit is not in concepts but in persons. The ascent is in the nobility of the spirit and not of blood. The ecstacy is outside the self (extra nos) but always in God and the neighbor. The person gets high in faith and hope and descends in love, always outside the self but never outside of God. The other is down in faith and hope and goes up in love.
People self-destructively try to get high with substance abuse, but here an actual creative ascent takes place where the person is promoted through the increasing stages of the maturity, enhancing the quality of a person’s existence as the spirit struggles with obstacles within and without, suffering in the face of realities, but living out of a strength that overcomes them.
One of the keys in Kant which called Luther’s “Freedom of the Christian Person” (1520) to mind was the expression “at the same time,“ simul in Latin, a word also very important to Luther, who taught that persons were sinners and saints at the same time. They are completely sovereign in faith and completely enslaved in love, completely free because of faith and completely responsible because of love, simul-taneously, i.e., at one and the same time.
Kant’s second, fourth, and fifth formulations of the categorical imperative uses this concept in Luther’s sense in the tension of rationality. For example in the second formulation he writes,
“Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.“
So the maxim, the subjective principle, becomes objective law at the same time. The intelligible “I will” is the sensible “I ought“ in the spiritual depth of freedom changing the “I ought” experienced against the obstacles of our inner inclinations into the “I will” of what I spontaneously and freely will to do. The spiritual ego, the fully rational self, is the sensual self at one and the same time. But they are different fora or dispositions of the ego. (Fora is the plural of forum.) They could also be called ego states, like the psychological superego, ego, and id.
KANT’S DIFFERENT FORMULATIONS OF THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVES
In the ought is found the imperative and in the “I will” is found the indicative.
I. I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.
Note that any fully rational agent who wills an end necessarily will the means to the end.
II. THE UNIVERSAL LAW OF MORALITY AND FREEDOM
Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
III. FORMULA OF THE LAW OF NATURE
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.
Note that this is primarily the law of cause and effect.
IV. FORMULA OF THE END IN ITSELF
Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
Note that all actions have an end as well as a principle.
V. THE FORMULA OF AUTONOMY
So act that your will can regard itself at the same time as making universal law through its maxims.
VI. FORMULA OF THE KINGDOM OF ENDS
So act as if you were through your maxims a law-making member of the kingdom of ends or state or commonwealth.
The idea of an intelligible world is connected with the kingdom of ends in the last chapter. As law-making agents in such a kingdom, rational agents have what is called “dignity,“ that is, intrinsic, unconditioned, incomparable worth or worthiness (36).
member: all finite rational agents
supreme head: an infinite rational agent
VII. A NEW VERSION OF THE FORMULA OF THE KINGDOM OF ENDS
All maxims as proceeding from our own making of laws ought to harmonize with a possible kingdom of ends as a kingdom of nature.
Autonomy of the will is the mastery of the self. In heteronomy others have to discipline, restrain, and contain the self.
A Little about Kant’s Metaphysics
Kant’s Copernican Revolution of thought: although all knowledge begins
with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. [3]
Kant wants to show that pure reason has some kind of reality a priori before it is involved with objects.
If all knowledge has to conform to objects, then a science of pure reason independent of empiricism, would be impossible. But if all objects had to conform to knowledge, then a science of a priori knowledge could well be explored. Kant thus posits two modes of representations, the sensible and the intellectual. Representations of the senses work together with the representations of reason, i.e., concepts that organize and appropriate a knowledge transcending both empiricism and rationalism. Space and time themselves are external and internal forms of sensible intuition, and so are only conditions of the existence of things as appearances. Thus Kant posits appearances, which we can know and things in themselves which we cannot and states that what can be known as a science is (in part?) what the mind has put into objects of knowledge.
For ethics: he states that there is no contradiction in supposing that one and the same will is, in appearance, that is, in its visible acts, necessarily subject to the laws of nature, and so far not free, while yet as belonging to the thing in itself, it is not subject to that law, and is therefore free. The soul viewed from the latter standpoint cannot be known by means of speculative reason (and still less by empirical observation – one cannot know, but one can think freedom…. This relates very much to the sphere of the Freedom of the Spirit and the Necessity of Nature above.
[1]Paul Tillich’s doctrine of ambiguity of all things must end here. The good will could not then be used for good or evil. But when an alcoholic co-opts someone and makes them a co-dependent, it seems to me that the good will of that person could be used to aid and abet the disease of alcoholism.
[2]All the pages to page 52 are from the “Analysis of the Argument“ by H. J. Paton in Kant: Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964); the following pages (after page 52) are directly from Kant’s writing.
[3] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason: Unabridged Edition, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), p.41.
