This is the second post on the collection of Kant’s essays I have recently been rereading. Much like Kant’s essay on enlightenment I cannot remember much from my first reading of “On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use”. This time I found it interesting how instructive it is on the overarching structure of Kant’s practical philosophy. All roads ultimately lead back to the way reason delivers moral duties, a duty to form a just society, and to progress towards moral perfection.

The main point of the essay is to defend theory as necessary for practice. Kant’s argument is quite simple. A practical theory is a sum of general practical principles abstracted from many cases. A person uses the theory by judging whether the case they are faced with falls under the principles of the theory. If it does, they engage in practice. Practice is to bring about some state of affairs according to some general principles. Given these definitions, to engage in practice is to have some theory to guide it and so the view that something might be true in theory but of no practical use is misguided.

At first Kant’s argument here seems strange. What’s the point of it? Is he really arguing against a general proverb? That would be silly. More plausibly I think Kant’s target here, in modern terms, is the view that when it comes to certain practical matters pure a priori principles do not accurately explain the phenomena we care about. This is illustrated in Kant’s three main interlocutors: Garve as a sceptic about pure moral motivation, Hobbes as a positivistic contractarian, and Mendelssohn as a pessimist about moral progress.

On the whole I don’t think the discussion of Garve is that interesting. Garve’s objection, at least according to Kant, is that to act (morally or otherwise) is to judge some end as good and a series of such ends is merely happiness in the most general sense. This is simply the teleological view of morality where the right is defined entirely in terms of the good. Kant’s argument against Garve is however merely a restatement of his own deontological view of morality where the right is unconditional and independent from the good. This argument, despite being an interesting and detailed overview of Kant’s moral theory is unconvincing because it largely involves asserting that the Kant’s ideas of an unconditional moral duty is simpler and clearer than the idea of a conditional moral duty, and that there is a clear distinction between acting to produce happiness and acting so we are worthy of the happiness we can produce. Both of these distinctions are unlikely to convince someone who doesn’t share Kant’s deontological view to begin with.

However, Kant’s discussion of Hobbes is far more interesting. It highlights a subtle difference between Kant’s and Hobbes’s contractarianism. Both argue that the state of nature forces people into a social contract which is the foundation of a just constitution which produces a single supreme political authority to legislate and execute laws. Both also deny people the right to revolt if they judge the social contract has been broken or its ends have not been met. For Kant this would be an incoherent right. It cannot be an explicit right in the constitution as it would set up opposed political authorities with no ability to judge cases of dispute. It cannot be an implicit right as rights must be publicly known for people to justifiably live by them.

However, unlike Hobbes, Kant argues the supreme political authority does have obligations to its people. This means it can wrong people by not protecting their rights. But Kant doesn’t think this gives people a coercive right against political authority. The sole protector of people’s rights against the political authority of their society is a “freedom of the pen” which is the right to publicly express one’s thoughts about the laws and actions the political authority makes. Although Kant isn’t explicit about this, it is safe to say this freedom encompasses more than just formal expressions of disapproval. It is the freedom to use one’s reason publicly as a citizen addressing all other citizens as equals opposed to using it in private in some defined role. Kant alludes to this broader understanding of the freedom because he believes it acts as a form of knowledge distribution so that laws can be made that people actually approve of. As such a just constitution a requires mechanism to foster a spirit of freedom so that people desire to communicate and debate.

All this seems at once quite modern. Kant is terrified by the tyranny that Hobbes’s view allows for and provides a type of liberal compromise. For Kant the freedom of the pen highlights the priority of theory in guiding political philosophy. As opposed to the practical considerations that deny the people the right to revolt, and Hobbes’s denial of any way a political authority can wrong the people it rules over. But at the same time Kant’s view is far too minimal as well. Kant cannot conceive of how a political authority could justifiably be coercively resisted because he collapses the distinction between legitimacy and justice.

For Kant, people have a duty to form a state of right (or justice) because it is the only way to exercise their innate freedom in a way that is compatible with the freedom of others. The social contract is a device of reason that justifies the state of right. It involves asking what kind of constitution could be agreed to by all people as if they voted on it. Kant thinks only constitutions that are based on the following three principles would pass that test: 1) The freedom of every member of society as a human being, 2) The equality of all members of a society as subjects, and 3) The independence of every member of society as citizens. The first principle requires that all are given the freedom to seek their own happiness in a way compatible with others doing the same. This is basically a principle that affords people certain basic freedoms to live and pursue their lives as they see fit. The second principle requires that all are equal in their ability to coerce each other through the public law (ie political authority) of their society. This principle is in short the liberal principle of equal opportunity in social and economic positions. The third principle, which Kant believes presupposes the first two, requires that all people capable of being citizens has the ability to influence law making (eg. through a vote).

One immediate problem is that given his views on the freedom of public reason and enlightenment, Kant contradictingly states that women, ordinary labourers and non-landowners cannot be citizens. Kant offers no real justification for this restriction which can square with his universalist view on the free use of public reason and people’s equality before the law. So, we are left to conclude it is a result of his own unreasoned adoption of the social prejudices of his time.

Kant’s prejudice aside, a deeper problem with his principles is that they are justified on the basis that they are the only principles that all people who use reason freely could agree to. This is because they are the only principles which limit the freedom of all in a way that is compatible with everyone’s freedom. This means that once a political authority is established to legislate and rule according to these principles, it is inherently legitimate. The source of the political authority’s legitimacy is, for Kant, the same as the source of a constitution’s justice. This is why Kant cannot comprehend how the legitimacy of a political authority can be based on implicit rights or conventions that are settled by some historical event like a constitutional convention, a civil war or an earlier revolution.

This problem ultimately goes to the heart of Kant’s remarks on politics and society. For him, the principles of justice that outline the design of a rightful political structure for a society are given by pure reason, they are a priori. Kant’s argument, in short, is that political philosophy is inherently a normative task about what is good and rightful for a people. This is a task that is indifferent to the status quo and evaluates it based on what could be better. For Kant, experience does not provide any insight into making those judgements. But as I’ve sketched above this comes at a cost. To not see political philosophy as a weighing of both positivist and ideal normative considerations is, I think, a serious mistake.

Kant’s remarks on moral progress are no less problematic, but thankfully also no less interesting. Kant’s opposition in this discussion is Mendelssohn’s view that humanity makes no moral progress, and that it merely vacillates between fixed limits of morality and immortality without any decisive step forward. Kant contends that if this were true it would be tragic for a divine being who has created us because it would be an utterly pointless state of affairs, and humanity as whole would have no ultimate end but never ending vice. This would be tragic for a divine being who has created us as it would mean we have no ultimate end and warrant a neverending punishment which would contradict the idea of a morally good divine being. To that end, Kant argues that it is safe to assume humanity does make moral progress and that the burden of proof is on those who deny it. For Kant this assumption is unpacked as the innate duty that everyone can recognise to do morally better and so make moral progress on an individual level.

This is an unfortunately weak argument to lead the discussion. Leaving aside the questions of the existence of the divine being and their psychology, the argument is weak in a deeper way. Ultimately moral progress depends on the moral choices humans make. Assuming we make moral progress because our ideas about the morality of a divine being would not make sense if we didn’t, is to put the cart before the horse. The moral choices humans make and the moral progress that results is antecedent to whether Kant’s conception of morality makes sense. In fact it might show why his conception of morality cannot explain why humanity’s choices are right or wrong and so should be abandoned.

Kant’s final gambit is that moral progress is built into the fabric of reason. Just as reason requires people in the state of nature to form into a civil society, wars amongst countries will force countries to either form into a cosmopolitan state or a federation with common principles of international justice. So again, theory in the form of what reasons we ought to do is useful for our practical problems. Kant’s hand-wavy story about the progress of humanity from civil constitutions to international justice is unconvincing. Even for his time, Kant naively underestimates the capacity for social and technological change to unwind moral progress or stall any mass procession towards international peace.

I think Kant’s most promising arguments for humanity making moral progress are two quick remarks he makes from a more practical standpoint. The first is that we can see that moral progress is possible because we recognise our moral state would only have been possible by the moral progress made in the past. The second remark is that it makes sense to intend towards moral progress because we can see the moral progress made compared to the past and by comparison judge where we are failing now. This more practical standpoint is a better case than a purely theoretical one because it shows why regardless of whether we actually do make moral progress, it makes sense to think we can. Of course, the judgments necessary to see why moral progress is possible and why it makes sense to intend it requires theory. A moral or political theory will play a necessary role in evaluating the past in comparison to the present and the failings of the present to be corrected into the future.