Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [50]
Kant rejects approach one (maximizing welfare) and approach three (promoting virtue). Neither, he thinks, respects human freedom. So Kant is a powerful advocate for approach two—the one that connects justice and morality to freedom. But the idea of freedom he puts forth is demanding—more demanding than the freedom of choice we exercise when buying and selling goods on the market. What we commonly think of as market freedom or consumer choice is not true freedom, Kant argues, because it simply involves satisfying desires we haven’t chosen in the first place.
In a moment, we’ll come to Kant’s more exalted idea of freedom. But before we do, let’s see why he thinks the utilitarians are wrong to think of justice and morality as a matter of maximizing happiness.
The Trouble with Maximizing Happiness
Kant rejects utilitarianism. By resting rights on a calculation about what will produce the greatest happiness, he argues, utilitarianism leaves rights vulnerable. There is also a deeper problem: trying to derive moral principles from the desires we happen to have is the wrong way to think about morality. Just because something gives many people pleasure doesn’t make it right. The mere fact that the majority, however big, favors a certain law, however intensely, does not make the law just.
Kant argues that morality can’t be based on merely empirical considerations, such as the interests, wants, desires, and preferences people have at any given time. These factors are variable and contingent, he points out, so they could hardly serve as the basis for universal moral principles—such as universal human rights. But Kant’s more fundamental point is that basing moral principles on preferences and desires—even the desire for happiness—misunderstands what morality is about. The utilitarian’s happiness principle “contributes nothing whatever toward establishing morality, since making a man happy is quite different from making him good and making him prudent or astute in seeking his advantage quite different from making him virtuous.”2 Basing morality on interests and preferences destroys its dignity. It doesn’t teach us how to distinguish right from wrong, but “only to become better at calculation.”3
If our wants and desires can’t serve as the basis of morality, what’s left? One possibility is God. But that is not Kant’s answer. Although he was a Christian, Kant did not base morality on divine authority. He argues instead that we can arrive at the supreme principle of morality through the exercise of what he calls “pure practical reason.” To see how, according to Kant, we can reason our way to the moral law, let’s now explore the close connection, as Kant sees it, between our capacity for reason and our capacity for freedom.
Kant argues that every person is worthy of respect, not because we own ourselves but because we are rational beings, capable of reason; we are also autonomous beings, capable of acting and choosing freely.
Kant doesn’t mean that we always succeed in acting rationally, or in choosing autonomously. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. He means only that we have the capacity for reason, and for freedom, and that this capacity is common to human beings as such.
Kant readily concedes that our capacity for reason is not the only capacity we possess. We also have the capacity to feel pleasure and pain. Kant recognizes that we are sentient creatures as well as rational ones. By “sentient,” Kant means that we respond to our senses, our feelings. So Bentham was right—but only half right. He was right to observe that we like pleasure and dislike pain. But he was wrong to insist that they are “our sovereign masters.” Kant argues that