Anti-Climacus

IMMANUEL KANT AND THE METAPHYSICS OF RESPONSIBILITY:

Just a quick thought about Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals--I still have more probability to do--when I read it this time around, I thought almost immediately of this essay in moral philosophy, "Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility" by Susan Wolf, because I think the objection she raises to the deep-self view of free will can apply equally well to Kant's use of rationality as a method to get to applications of the categorical imperative.

Kant thinks we take any situation we're faced with which has a moral component, and choose as our maxim for action that which we would want universalized. Wolf considers the case of a dictator who is habituated into thinking that horribly torturing and killing people is perfectly morally acceptable, if not good. Such a dictator would be able to rationally choose to torture, etc, using Kant's method, and would have reasons for doing their actions which they could articulate. It would just be their morality which was wrong. So it looks like one of Kant's implicit and unjustified assumptions is that a rational actor will have a particular view of morality*.

Of course, you could maybe defend this by looking at the formulation of the categorical imperative where Kant says people must be treated as ends, and never as means, but I think the question can fairly be asked whether this really follows from the categorial imperative, or it's just an argument Kant tries to stick in to make his life easier.

*Of course, if you just index morality back to, say, an ontological disposition of the universe that assigns moral values to acts, you can get around this problem.