Reprising this intriguing passage from Berel Dov Lerner’s review of Moshe Halbertal’s On Sacrifice (2012):
‘Halbertal claims that despite all its transcendent glory, adoption of the notion of “sacrifice for” can generate especially terrible consequences: “misguided self-transcendence is morally more problematic and lethal than a disproportionate attachment to self-interest” (78, italics in original).
How does this work? First of all, people may think that “since it is the mark of the good that it deserves sacrifice, the reverse must be true too – namely, that sacrifice makes something into a good” (69). Now martyrdom can be motivated by the urge to prove the nobility of one’s cause. Worse yet, willingness to kill others for one’s cause may also be taken as a token of its righteousness; perpetrators of terrible acts of cruelty can come to see themselves as the true martyrs who sacrifice their very humanity for the sake of the cause, or they may hold the psychological burden of their guilt to outweigh the suffering of their victims. Similarly, as in the case of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham, morality itself may be sacrificed for the sake of some greater value. Halbertal soberly comments that “when morality is depicted as a temptation to be surmounted in the name of a higher good, it is always someone else who pays the price” (74). Source: Philosophy in Review 33:2 (2013).
Related: My analysis of Kierkegaard on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Abraham. In the Philosophers, Explained series.
Check out also Barbara Oakley’s Pathological Altruism thesis.
Fascinating… A few comments, perched on the shoulders of many trenchant thinkers and including some thoughts of my own: In the review Berel Dov Lerner writes, “Fortunately, Kant saved Rousseau’s insights [citizenship as a transformative relationship in which the citizen achieves self-transcendence through identification with the general will], by working them out in terms of an ideal and universal kingdom of ends, rather than an actual and limited historical political community.”
Unfortunately Kant’s concept of the kingdom of ends is highly problematic. Based on the second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means” it powerfully evokes a cornerstone of liberal political theory.
But on closer examination one finds that what Kant means by ‘humanity’ is the ability to generate, and to however imperfect degree, abide by the categorical imperative, his highest principle of moral action: an ethical ideal of utter self-abnegation and unconditional obedience in service to abstract, universal principles of duty apprehended and legislated not by reason – in spite of heavy ladling out of the word – but by an ill-defined equivocation of faith, need, wish, intuition and feeling, which revealed and/or validated imperatives emanating from our intrinsic noumenal nature, “the moral law within.” (He did speak of duties to the self and even the goal of happiness in the abstract, but his every premise and argument belied them; he was certainly not the first person whose professed intentions varied from his actual ones). These were to be legislated by what he called the ‘pure practical reason’: based on unprovable, but in his view justifiable postulates, the ‘postulates of pure practical reason’ about the unknowable noumenal world e.g. God, free will, the soul, an afterlife and immortality. (In my view a more honest term would be ‘articles of faith’).
Espousing a singular interpretation of the virtue of consistency, Kant allowed of no exceptions to the practice of a categorical imperative no matter how detrimental to its practitioner or to those affected by his acts. When contemporary French philosopher Benjamin Constant criticized his theory by arguing it implied that, if asked, one was duty bound to tell a known murderer the location of his intended victim rather than lie to him, Kant, in a short response entitled ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns’, agreed: According to his view moral actions do not derive their worth from expected consequences. Least of all the consequence of serving the interests, values, and well being of a self. Nor, to my knowledge, does he discuss how one prioritizes conflicting imperatives.
He placed less emphasis than traditional ethics on service to others and focused more on the act of self-renunciation itself: self-renunciation in service to one’s duty, a concept – unlike obligation, integrity, self-discipline – utterly unrelated to interest. “To behold virtue in her proper form” he wrote, “is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love.” Virtue was to be practiced “apart from every view to advantage of any kind in this world or another.”
Rand and others have noted the essential lack of content of the categorical imperative, though he puts forth a tepid flush of conventional moral notions. But it is evident that what mattered to Kant was not their content but their form: the way they were to be formulated, observed and practiced: based on a kind of faith (in spite of disavowals), held and practiced with unconditional obedience and self renunciation, and allowing of no exceptions – even as Benjamin Constant prodded him to acknowledge, it knowingly resulted in murder.
In ‘The Groundwork’, after discussion of other lesser motivations he says of his highest principle of morality
“Finally, there is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it. This imperative is categorical. It concerns not the matter of the action, or its intended result, but its form and the principle of which it is itself a result; and what is essentially good in it consists in the mental disposition, let the consequence be what it may.”
The Kantian ethic remains perhaps the most extreme incarnation of a rule-based or deontological ethics in which humans existed to serve rules, not the other way around. The rule was considered the end, not the person abiding it.
I see the categorical imperative as the central doctrine of the Kantian enterprise to which ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’ was intended to pave the way (primarily by removing the obstacle of reason): In ‘The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’ and elsewhere Kant refers to it repeatedly in establishing the basis of his moral theory. His ethic usurped the proper place and function of morality and replaced with what I regard as an absurdity: a morality to be practiced without purpose or ends, solely out of reverence for it.
Why was it to be revered?
At the conclusion of ‘The Groundwork’ – after liberal sprinkling of the word ‘reason’ throughout the text – Kant answers, “And thus while we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of [i.e. reasons for] the moral imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility…”
In a long, scholarly and otherwise nonpartisan exposition of his moral theory American philosopher Garth Kemerling is moved to note that his arguments for the ultimate grounds of the categorical imperative are “viciously circular.”
I call it the Loki morality, after the Norse god of trickery and mischief.
I see the categorical imperative nothing but a reformulation in more acceptably secular terms of the highest law of Christian moral action, the supreme imperative embodied in the crusader cry, “Deus vult!” – “God wills it!” Like the categorical imperative, “God Wills it” was for the Christian believer the prime, transcendent principle of moral action: Based on faith and, ideally, practiced with unconditional obedience and self-renunciation: unchecked by nature, reason, interests, emotions, needs, values, circumstances and “philanthropic concerns.” Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada slept in a hair-shirt. But the Christian adherent could still hope for a blissful reward in the next life, whereas Kantian man had been taught that “The principle of private happiness, however, is the most objectionable of all … because the springs it provides for morality are such as rather undermine it and destroy its sublimity.”
Kant had fashioned the form of the imperative; it was Hegel who supplied the content. Kant had removed reason from the moral equation; Hegel supplied the object of faith. Kant hollowed out what was left of the moral self; Hegel filled the empty mold with reverential state worship. Kantian-Hegelian man was now an instrument ready to be used by the divine state guided by its militant world historical hero in service to the unfolding destiny of his Volk, or, in the Marxian adaption: Class.
Deus vult and the categorical imperative nurtured lethal, incredibly powerful psychic dynamics in adherents. Under the right circumstances and leaders societies of such philosophically conditioned individuals coalesced into terrifying collective juggernauts: Vampiric hordes at the bidding of demagogues gifted with the divination of the transcendent objectives to guide them, untrammelled by reason and self-interest. The imperative of Deus vult had moved Christian zealots to wage selfless “holy wars”, commit genocide, persecute and exterminate members of rival sects and burn fellow humans alive at the stake for crimes like heresy, apostasy and witchcraft. In my view the categorical imperative was instrumental in enabling the ‘Führerprinzip’ – leader principle – to become Germany’s dominant political reality. “[H]ow little the masses were driven by the famous instinct for self-preservation” observed Hannah Arendt in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, “…The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves.”
Um…I’m finished now.
I especially respect the Arendt quotation at the end, Ed.
Yes! Recently watched Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ posted in it’s entirety on Youtube. Particularly watching Hitler’s wrap-up speech at the 1934 Nazi party congress and the audience’s response to its last ten minutes provides a powerful illustration of Arendt’s observation. More illuminating are reading choice quotes from Kant on ethics and Hegel on his unique political-historical cosmology. Here’s the speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwAu0vmDLZk
Let’s not forget the background: crash of the stock market, devaluation of the German Mark, oceanic Bolshevism from the East, growing immorality and perversity in art, a smothering war debt, guilt imposed on Germany for “starting the war”, unemployment…just a few items…how would YOU have voted? Is there any difference between an American flag-waver and his Nazi counterpart? P.S. Leni Riefenstahl was probably the best female director-producer in the history of the cinema. Don’t miss her OLYMPICS.
Mr. Dahl,
Pardon me? Guilt imposed on Germany? I can go on and on with who attack first, the Attrition war, the Gaz, the military dictate in 1917. But I will go with the Rapallo treaty 1922 with U.S.S.R to rebuilt German Army, just 4 years after the war!, French head quarter wanted to march on Berlin, they were the strongest Army in the world in 1918 and wanted to dismantle Germany all of it, our english friends refuse and Clemenceau followed their wish. The Austro-Hungarian empire was dismantled to preserve Germany. But the most interesting thing is the Sabern Affair 1913 showing that Germans as a whole consider that other population are sub-species. Nazism didn’t came out of Nowhere it’s part of the German soul to makes to other suffer very badly so if they suffer a little they just have to thank us.
I agree with my ancestor, Germany must be dismantle entirely so that it will never become again a country.