Question

Kant asserts that there is a crucial distinction between Acting from Duty and Merely Acting in Accord with Duty, says that only the former has genuine moral worth, and that the former requires not acting solely out of inclination.

1. Why would a contractualist like Glaucon disagree with these claims?

2. Why would Hume disagree with these claims?

Answer 1

• In acting from duty, and in acting in accordance with duty, the action is the same. The difference relates to the motivation of the act (my will).Thus, in acting from duty, I perform the action because it is my duty, irrespective of whether or not I am inclined to do it, or of whether or not it is in my interests.
• Contrary wise, in acting in accordance with duty, whilst I do perform the action that duty commands, I don’t do it for that reason. Rather I do it because I am inclined to – it pleases me or is in my interests.
• For instance,A shopkeeper is honest with a naive, easily duped customer, not because it is his duty to be honest, but because it will help build his good reputation, and his business. He acts in accordance with duty (he is honest) but not from duty (i.e not because honesty is right whether or not it helps his reputation and business).
• The philanthropist is going through a really bad time in his life. He no longer has any inclination to help the needy, and it gives him no pleasure. Nevertheless he does it because it is the right thing to do. Now he acts from duty.
• Only acting from duty has genuine moral worth. Recall that for Kant, morality is something that all rational beings can self-prescribe simply because they are rational.
• No desire or inclination can underpin morality because not all rational beings will, necessarily and universally, have these desires (the unhappy philanthropist, for example, has no desire to help the needy).
• Furthermore a desire can conflict with duty eg a desire to help a man at dead of night struggling to lift a statue into his car boot outside the back door of the museum.
• In disconnecting morality from desire, Kant is opposing Hume’s passion-based (rather than reason-based) account of moral motivation.
• Hume and Kant disagree about the motives involved in the performance of our duties to others. Hume thinks that natural virtues such as benevolence are best performed from “natural” motives, but that there are no natural motives for the performance of the “artificial” virtues, such as justice and fidelity to promises, which are performed from a sense of duty. Kant thinks all duties should be done from the motive of duty.
• These motives do not involve moral thoughts, or desires whose content must be specified in terms of moral or normative concepts. So when we are moved by these desires, we are not trying to do our duty, or the right thing, or what is virtuous, or what is owed.
• Many of the natural virtues that Hume identifies, such as prudence, temperance, greatness of mind, cheerfulness, and so on, redound primarily to the benefit of the person who has them, but one of the most important natural virtues, benevolence, is a ground of our duty to be helpful and kind to others.
• On the other hand, Hume believes that the duties associated with what he calls the “artificial virtues” – most notably those of justice and fidelity to promises – are generally motivated by the sense of duty.
• It is his conception of human interaction that leads Hume to think that benevolence is natural while there is something artificial about our motives to act justly and to keep our promises. For Kant, on the other hand, no form of adult human motivation is “natural” in Hume’s sense – all adult human motivation involves the agent’s use of nonnatural concepts such as “law” or “reason.”
• According to Kant, to be motivated by the motive of duty, ultimately, is simply to be motivated by the other person himself, by the sheer normative fact of the other person himself. He’s there, he’s a source of reasons, a fellow deliberator and a standing source of claims.
• And in one way, Hume agrees with this. For Hume’s moral sense is not just the voice of our private approvals and disapprovals. Because of sympathy, and its universalizing effects, it the voice of humanity itself, internalized in each of us. And when it regulates our conduct, we are in a sense there for each other, present to each other, making normative claims.
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