Not all situations are so easily decided, however. Another of Kant’s examples deals with aiding those in distress. Suppose a person sees someone in distress, whom he could easily help, but refuses to do so. Could such a person will as a universal law the maxim that one should refuse assistance to those in distress? Unlike the case of promising, there is no strict inconsistency in this maxim’s being a universal law. Kant, however, says that one cannot will it to be such, because one may someday be in distress oneself, and in that case one would want assistance from others. This type of example is less convincing than the previous one. If the person in question values self-sufficiency so highly that he would rather remain in distress than escape from it through the intervention of another, then Kant’s principle would not require him to assist those in distress. In effect, Kant’s supreme principle of practical reason can tell one what to do only in those special cases in which willing the maxim of one’s action to be a universal law yields a contradiction. Outside this limited range, the moral law that was to apply to all rational beings regardless of their wants and desires cannot provide guidance except by appealing to wants and desires.
Kant does offer alternative formulations of the categorical imperative, one of which appears to provide more substantial guidance than the formulation considered thus far. This formulation is: “So act that you treat humanity in your own person and in the person of everyone else always at the same time as an end and never merely as means.” The connection between this formulation and the first one is not entirely clear, but the idea seems to be that, in choosing for oneself, one treats oneself as an end; if, therefore, in accordance with the principle of universal law, one must choose so that all could choose similarly, one must treat everyone else as an end as well. Even if this is valid, however, the application of the principle raises further questions. What is it to treat someone merely as a means? Using a person as a slave is an obvious example; Kant, like Bentham, was making a stand against this kind of inequality while it still flourished as an institution in some parts of the world. But to condemn slavery one needs only to give equal weight to the interests of slaves, as utilitarians such as Bentham explicitly did. One may wonder, then, whether Kant’s principle offers any advantage over utilitarianism. Modern Kantians hold that it does, because they interpret it as denying the legitimacy of sacrificing the rights of one human being in order to benefit others.
One thing that can be said confidently is that Kant was firmly opposed to the utilitarian principle of judging every action by its consequences. His ethics is a deontology (see deontological ethics). In other words, the rightness of an action, according to Kant, depends not on its consequences but on whether it accords with a moral rule, one that can be willed to be a universal law. In one essay Kant went so far as to say that it would be wrong for a person to tell a lie even to a would-be murderer who came to his house seeking to kill an innocent person hidden inside. This kind of situation illustrates how difficult it is to remain a strict deontologist when principles may clash. Apparently Kant believed that his principle of universal law required that one never tell lies, but it could also be argued that his principle of treating everyone as an end would necessitate doing everything possible to save the life of an innocent person. Another possibility would be to formulate the maxim of the action with sufficient precision to define the circumstances under which it would be permissible to tell lies—e.g., perhaps there could be a universal law that permitted lying to people who intend to commit murder. Kant did not explore such solutions, however. Hegel
Although Kant’s philosophy was profoundly influential, there were several aspects of it that troubled later thinkers. One of these problematic aspects was his conception of human nature as irreconcilably split between reason and emotion. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), the dramatist and literary theorist Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) suggested that, whereas this division might apply to modern human beings, it was not the case in ancient Greece, where reason and feeling seem to have been in harmony. (There is, as suggested earlier, some basis for this claim, insofar as the Greek moral consciousness did not make the modern distinction between morality and self-interest.) Schiller’s suggestion may have been the spark that led Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) to develop the first philosophical system based on the notion of historical change.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm FriedrichGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, engraving by Lazarus Gottlieb Sichling.Courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Portrait Collection 21/32
As Hegel presents it, all of history is the progress of mind, or spirit, along a logically necessary path that leads to freedom. Human beings are manifestations of this universal mind, though at first they do not realize it. Freedom cannot be achieved until human beings do realize it and so feel at home in the universe. There are echoes of Spinoza in Hegel’s idea of mind as something universal and also in his conception of freedom as based on knowledge. What is original, however, is the way in which all of history is presented as leading to the goal of freedom. Thus, Hegel accepts Schiller’s view that for the ancient Greeks, reason and feeling were in harmony, but he sees this as a naive harmony that could exist only as long as the Greeks did not see themselves as free individuals with a conscience independent of the views of the community. For freedom to develop, it was necessary for this harmony to break down. This occurred as a result of the Reformation, with its insistence on the right of individual conscience. But the rise of individual conscience left human beings divided between conscience and self-interest, between reason and feeling. As noted above, many philosophers tried unsuccessfully to bridge this gulf until Kant’s insistence on duty for duty’s sake made the division an apparently inevitable part of moral life. For Hegel, however, the division can be overcome by a synthesis of the harmonious communal nature of Greek life with the modern freedom of individual conscience.
In The Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel described how this synthesis could be achieved in an organic community. The key to his solution is the recognition that human nature is not fixed but is shaped by the society in which one lives. The organic community would foster those desires by which it would be most benefited. It would imbue its members with the sense that their own identity consists in being a part of the community, so that they would no more think of going off in pursuit of their own private interests than one’s left arm would think of going off without the rest of the body. Nor should it be forgotten that such organic relationships are reciprocaclass="underline" the organic community would no more disregard the interests of its members than an individual would disregard an injury to his or her arm. Harmony would thus prevail, but not the naive harmony of ancient Greece. The citizens of Hegel’s organic community do not obey its laws and customs simply because they are there. With the independence of mind characteristic of modern times, they can give their allegiance only to institutions that they recognize as conforming to rational principles. The modern organic state, unlike the ancient Greek city-state, is self-consciously based on principles that are rationally justified.