Gewirthian Perspectives on Human Rights

Per Bauhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317232612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Gewirth's theory of human rights has made a major contribution to philosophy. In this edited collection, contributors from a broad range of disciplines discuss the theoretical and practical application of Gewirthian theory to current world issues. Case studies highlight mental health, the LGBT community, intellectual disabilities, global economic inequality, and market instability to provide a truly interdisciplinary study. This important contribution to human rights scholarship provides a platform for further discussion of Gewirthian theory. It will be of interest to those researching moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as policy makers, social workers, and medical staff.

Part I
Gewirthian Theory

1
Gewirth Versus Kant on Kant’s Maxim of Reason

Towards a Gewirthian Philosophical Anthropology

Deryck Beyleveld

Introduction

When Alan Gewirth claims that the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC)¹ is the supreme principle of morality because its acceptance is dialectically necessary for agents,² he assigns it the same status that Kant claims for his Categorical Imperative (KCI)—that it is a synthetic a priori principle.³ But the PGC and the KCI—as Kant interprets it in his Formula of Humanity (FoH),

So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means

(Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [GMM] 4:429)⁴

—are incompatible principles. This is because, unlike Kant’s FoH, the PGC requires an agent (call her ‘Agnes’) to respect (not to interfere with and, in certain circumstances, to protect) the generic conditions of agency (GCAs) of all agents subject to the will of the recipient agent. The PGC prohibits Agnes from voluntarily damaging her own GCAs or permitting others to so harm her only if her doing so would damage the GCAs of other agents disproportionately against their will, whereas Kant’s FoH categorically prohibits such actions unless they are necessary to protect Agnes or others from equivalent or greater harm. This difference⁵ is due to the fact that Gewirth’s argument for the PGC rests on it being dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept the Principle of Hypothetical Imperatives (PHI):

‘If doing X or having X is necessary for Agnes to pursue/achieve her chosen purpose E, then Agnes ought to do X or pursue/defend having X, or give up E.’⁶

I argue here that this entails that, while Gewirth and Kant share a methodology of dialectically necessary argumentation, Gewirthians must reject a number of central doctrines of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant holds that the dialectical necessity of free will⁷ (revealed by the dialectical necessity of the moral law, for which the existence of free will is a necessary condition—its ratio essendi) is the keystone that enables Agnes to be certain that agents are immortal and that God exists even though immortality and God are not objects of possible empirical knowledge.⁸ But while Gewirth and Kant agree that it is dialectically necessary for Agnes to treat her existence as an agent as the ratio essendi of the moral law, if it is dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept the PHI, then it cannot be dialectically necessary for her to consider the essence of agency to reside in her possession of free will (as Kant has it), because it is then merely dialectically necessary for Agnes to hope⁹ that she has free will.¹⁰ Hence, my central claim is that Gewirth’s argument for the PGC implies a different philosophical anthropology from Kant’s, grounded in Kant’s own philosophical methodology.

I have presented elements of this argument elsewhere and previously compared Gewirth and Kant.¹¹ Here, I focus the comparison on the interpretation of Kant’s maxims of the common human understanding¹² because I consider that what Kant says about these principles

1. Shows very clearly that his claim that KCI is a synthetic a priori proposition,¹³ i.e., that it is ‘connected (completely a priori) with the concept of the will of a rational being as such’¹⁴ but ‘not contained in it’,¹⁵ is that its acceptance is dialectically necessary for agents;
2. Reveals more clearly than elsewhere what his argument for this claim is; and
3. Shows how Kant thinks that the ‘power of judgement’ mediates between ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’ so as to render possible the harmony between theoretical and practical reason that Kant’s view of his philosophy as a system requires.¹⁶

The argument is broken into four parts. Part I contends that Kant’s claim that ‘the maxim of reason’ is derived by rendering ‘the maxim of understanding’ consistent with ‘the maxim of the power of judgement’¹⁷ reveals that his assertion that the moral law is given to agents as the fact of pure reason¹⁸ amounts to saying that it is required on the basis of its acceptance being dialectical necessity for Agnes (i.e., required by agential self-understanding). The maxim of reason (the acceptance of which is dialectically necessary for Agnes, by the very nature of its derivation) amounts to

‘Act in accord with the dialectically necessary commitments of all agents’,

which is equivalent to

‘Act only on maxims when doing so is consistent with universal laws’.

Part II examines how Kant and Gewirth provide this imperative, which is surely Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL) for the KCI:

[A]ct only in accordance with that maxim which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law

(GMM 4:421)

with content. Kant claims that the KCI is grounded in the proposition that rational nature exists as an end in itself,¹⁹ in consequence of which Agnes must consider her existence as an agent to be an end in itself.²⁰ On this basis, if (as both Kant and Gewirth hold) maxims that are dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept are necessarily universal, it is dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept Kant’s FoH. In contrast, Gewirth claims that because it is dialectically for Agnes to accept the PHI, since there are GCAs, it is dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept the prescription SROA (Self-Referring ‘Ought’, with Agnes as its subject):

‘I (Agnes) ought to defend my possession of the GCAs unless I am willing to suffer generic damage to my ability to act.’

On this basis, given the universality of dialectically necessary maxims, the maxim of reason requires acceptance of the PGC.

Part III elaborates on the claim that the PGC is the categorical imperative on Kantian methodological premises.

Part IV outlines the consequent revisions required to the Kantian transcendental project as a whole (which Kant designates as ‘anthropology’),²¹ thereby sketching a Gewirthian philosophical anthropology.

Part I: Kci, The Maxim of Reason, and Dialectical Necessity

Kant’s three principles of the common human understanding (sensus communis) are:

1. To think for oneself;
2. To think in the position of everyone else; and
3. Always to think in accord with oneself.²²

The sensus communis is not what the average person considers to be reasonable or correct. It represents the a priori capacity of understanding ‘which is the least that can be expected from anyone who lays claim to the name of human being’,²³ being

[a] faculty of judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective private conditions that could easily be held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence on the judgment.²⁴

The first maxim is the ‘maxim of the understanding, the second that of the power of judgement, the third that of reason’.²⁵ The maxim of reason is achieved ‘by the combination of the first two’.²⁶ The first maxim is ‘the maxim of a reason that is never passive’;²⁷ the second reflects on one’s own judgements produced by acting in accord with the first maxim ‘from a universal standpoint’.²⁸

In representing general rules for the avoidance of error,²⁹ the sensus communis applies to all reasoning, whether theoretical, practical, or aesthetic. Applied practically, the generation of the maxim of reason surely reveals the essence of Kant’s argument for the KCI in the form of the FUL.

This is because the first maxim requires Agnes to subject all maxims to the scrutiny of her own understanding and not to accept maxims simply on the say so of others, which requires her to give at least some weight to her own personal choices, deliberative reasoning, and associated maxims. The second maxim requires Agnes to adopt any maxims required by virtue of understanding that she is an agent. Thus, it exhorts Agnes to adopt maxims that are dialectically necessary for her to accept, the requirements of agential self-understanding. The third maxim commands Agnes to act only in consistency with maxims that are dialectically necessary for her to accept.

I think that Kant, like internalists generally, reasons that for Agnes to be given a reason to act, she must be given a reason to act from the standpoint of the particular unique agent she is. However, unlike Humean internalists, he infers from the observation that exercise of the power of reflective judgment requires Agnes to recognize that she cannot be the particular agent she is unless she is an agent (i.e., unless she possesses the powers of understanding necessarily shared by all agents), that for Agnes to think that she has a personal understanding to oppose the personal understandings of others, she must reason in terms of any maxims she is required to accept simply by virtue of understanding what it is for her to be an agent. Since requirements that are dialectically for Agnes to accept are generated by the idea of being an agent, and being an agent is the same for all agents, any maxim that is dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept will be dialectically necessary for every agent to accept. Hence, maxims that are dialectically necessary for Agnes to accept are universal. Understanding this, consistency requires Agnes to accept the third maxim, to act in consistency with maxims that are dialectically necessary for any agent to accept, as itself a maxim that it is dialectically necessary for her to accept. As such, reason requires her to adopt the third maxim as the supreme criterion for rational action, which she cannot intelligibly do without treating it as a categorical imperative expressed in terms of the FUL, read as:

‘Act only on maxims that you can act on consistently with universal laws (i.e., consistently with maxims that are dialectically necessary for any agent to accept)’.

Kant’s reasoning may also be put as follows. By virtue of being an agent, Agnes possesses the powers of self-understanding. If she uses these powers to achieve agential self-understanding, then she will necessarily be presented with the concept of a categorical imperative (i.e., it is dialectically necessary for Agnes to entertain the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Introduction
• PART I Gewirthian Theory
• PART II Gewirthian Contributions
• PART III Gewirthian Applications
• Contributors
• Index