Class 8.1: Duty and Respect
For most of the semester we have been doing a new reading every class session. For this week we are going to have a change of pace and spend two classes over the same reading. It’s fitting that this reading lands in the exact middle of the fifteen-week semester, because this is the reading that first led me to realize that there is important work to be done in the philosophy of interpersonal conflict.
Rae Langton
Rae Langton is a philosopher who teaches at Cambridge University. She is most famous for her work using sophisticated contemporary tools from the philosophy of language to develop and advance an important argument by the feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon that pornography silences women. Langton and others used this argument to answer people who argued that free speech requires us to permit the making and dissemination of pornography by arguing that the existence and dissemination of pornography actually limits women’s free speech by making it more difficult or impossible for them to say ‘no’ to sex. If you pay close attention, you will also see, at the very end of this article, that Langton is already interested here in women being written off or ignored - silenced, that is.
Immanuel Kant
Langton’s article for today is structured around a story about something that actually happened to Kant. We know who Kant is from last week. But there are two more very important things that you need to know about Kant in order for this story to make the most sense. The first is that Kant’s moral philosophy is build around what he called the “Categorical Imperative”, which for him is a kind of fundamental rule of morality. Kant wrote a (short but difficult) book called the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in which he argued for the importance of the categorical imperative, but he formulated this principle in at least three importantly different ways.
The first formulation of the Categorical Imperative says to “act only on that maxim that you can will to be a universal law”. It’s kind of like the principle, “don’t be an asshole”, because it just says to not make exceptions for yourself, but only act in a principled way that you can endorse everyone else acting. This is called the “Formula of Universal Law”. The third and final formulation of the Categorical Imperative is referenced in Korsgaard’s title from last week. It is called the “Kingdom of Ends” formulation. It says to always treat everyone else as if you are making the rules for a “kingdom of ends” of which you are both members. But it is the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative that is most important in our reading for this week. It is usually called the “Formula of Humanity”, and it says to always treat other people “as an end, only, and never as a mere means”. Langton is going to give an explanation of what she thinks this means that is very closely inspired by the last couple of pages of our Korsgaard reading from last week.
The second thing that you need to know about Kant for the story to make sense is that Kant believed that it is never morally permissible to lie. He thought this because he thought that telling a lie requires making an exception for yourself - treating yourself as if the rules that apply to other people don’t apply to you. So he thought that it followed from the “Formula of Universal Law” that it is always morally wrong to lie. Today’s reading starts with a question about lies of omission that arose in the life of a real person who wrote a letter about it to Kant.
Duty and Desolation
It’s sort of hard to introduce this paper. It’s rich and full of ideas and Langton doesn’t even try to say at the beginning what it is about. But we’re reading it because it is full of ideas about what is involved in treating another person with respect and dignity, and with the difference between treating someone as a person and treating them as a thing. If interpersonal conflicts ever involve the feeling of being put down, diminished, disrespected, or dehumanized, the issues raised in this paper are going to be a really promising place for us to start in trying to understand those things, why we do them to each other, and what strategies might help to reduce them.
