Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends

Kantian Perspectives and Practical Applications

Jan-Willem van der Rijt, Adam Cureton, Jan-Willem van der Rijt, Adam Cureton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000520224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This book advances our understanding of the nature, grounds and limits of human dignity by connecting it with Kant's notion of an ideal moral community, or "Kingdom of Ends". It features original essays by leading Kant scholars and moral and political philosophers from around the world.

Although Kant's influential injunction to treat humanity as an end in itself and never merely as a means has garnered the most attention among those interested in analyzing human dignity with a Kantian lens, Kant himself places much more emphasis on the Kingdom of Ends as crucial for defining human dignity. The chapters in this collection focus not only on interpretive issues related to the Kingdom of Ends but also on practical applications that have the potential to advance discussions about the nature and foundations of rights, the content of moral principles, the importance of moral ideals and attitudes and the nature of moral motivation. Exploring and connecting the ideas of human dignity and the Kingdom of Ends significantly deepens our moral understanding, advances discussions in moral and political philosophy and enhances our appreciation of Kant's moral theory.

Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends: Kantian Perspectives and Practical Applications will appeal to scholars and advanced students of Kant, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory.

Part I Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends in Kant’s Groundwork

1 The Dignity of Freedom

Paul Guyer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003027874-3

1.1 Introduction

Great claims have often been made for Kant’s concept of dignity. Actually, in his main published works in moral philosophy he uses the word we translate as “dignity” (Würde) sparingly – a few more than a dozen times in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, twice in the Critique of Practical Reason, and once in the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals – and never to say anything that he could not and does not say without it. In the most complete lectures in moral philosophy, Collins and the other transcriptions associated with it and Vigiliantius, he does not appear to have used the term at all.¹ Of course, the student transcribers might have missed Kant’s usage of the term, which does occur in some of the Reflexionen or notes that Kant himself used for his lectures. But the note-takers would probably not have missed the term altogether if Kant had used it frequently. Be that as it may, my claim is that Kant’s occasional talk of dignity is just one, rhetorical expression among others of the unconditional binding force of the moral law. Nevertheless, examination of both the published passages in which Kant does use it and some of the notes, primarily from the 1770s, where it also appears can shed some light on what is the key concept in Kant’s moral philosophy, namely humanity as the freedom of human beings to set their own ends. This essay will explore the connection between Kant’s concepts of dignity and humanity, and will attempt to resolve a tension in Kant’s account of the latter, namely whether dignity attaches to the general capacity of human beings to set their own ends and the capacity for morality that this (somehow) implies, or only to the use of this capacity actually to set ends that are themselves already approved of by morality. My view is that the latter interpretation risks circularity and is best avoided.

1.2 Dignity

Dignity is not a property of any person in its own right, like height or weight, but a rank or standing accorded to a person in virtue of something else that is more like a property. In traditional usages of dignitas in Latin, Würde in German, or “dignity” in English, the term signifies elevated standing ascribed to an individual in virtue of an office or, in the words of the lexicographers the brothers Grimm, “social rank” – holders of offices in government or church enjoy a dignity that others do not in virtue of their office. A derivative sense connotes a manner of conduct expected of the holder of such an office. The Oxford Latin Dictionary gives the following senses for dignitas, though not in this order: rank, status, or a position conferring rank, etc.; fitness for a task, i.e., fitness for a position conferring rank; the quality of being worthy, excellence, or impressiveness, i.e., that of someone’s conducting themselves as expected for the high rank or office they hold; and a condition in which one enjoys one’s own and others’ esteem, presumably for the rank one holds and for one’s conducting oneself in accordance with that rank.² The idea seems to be that dignity requires as one necessary condition holding a certain position or office, then as an additional necessary condition acting in the manner expected of one holding such a condition, which in turn entitles one to esteem in the eyes of others and oneself. The Oxford English Dictionary begins its definition with “the quality of being worthy or honorable, worthiness, worth, nobleness, excellence,” but then suggests that such a quality is linked to “Honorable or high estate, position, or estimation,” or an “honorable office, rank, or title,” and finally states that the term also connotes “Nobility or befitting elevation of aspect, manner, or style; becoming or fit stateliness, gravity”;³ again, the idea is that dignity accrues to one who holds a certain, high rank and who conducts him- or herself as befits that rank, i.e. as should be expected of persons holding such a rank (although, of course, dignitaries do not always act with the dignity required by their office). Finally, the Deutsches Wörterbuch of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm derives modern Würde from older forms (Old High German Wirdî, Middle High German wirde) meaning rank, status, office, and thus defines it most generally to mean “social rank or station [Stand] and the status [Geltung] or honor” resulting therefrom, to which already attaches even in Old High German “desert” (Verdienst), i.e., respect for acting in accordance with such a rank or station, thus “in application to persons … conduct and norm of inner being and acting and their sensible expression in appearance and conduct.”⁴ Again, the term connotes holding high office, acting in accordance with it, and being recognized as doing so. In all of these ideas of dignity, the common idea is that a person is due respect as holding a certain office or rank, that the person should act in accordance with the expectations for conduct and deportment in that office, and that others should accord them that respect for satisfaction of both conditions. Or, officeholders should treat their offices and themselves with due respect, and others should accord them that respect – but surely the first requirement also means that officeholders should treat those over whom they have rank but also for whom they are responsible appropriately according to the standards of their office, whatever that might involve.

There is no suggestion in these definitions that everyone has dignity and should be accorded dignity; on the contrary, rank or station implies difference in status, so on this traditional meaning some people have dignity that others do not. Obviously this is a fundamental difference from Kant’s conception of dignity. Kant’s view is that there is such a thing as the “dignity of humanity” or dignity in humanity as such;⁵ everyone has humanity, it would seem; so everyone has dignity or is due respect.⁶ The kind of dignity that Kant has in mind does not attach to particular offices or ranks that only some people enjoy while others, indeed the majority of others, do not, precisely because that kind of dignity consists in some people outranking others. The essence of Kantian morality is that no one outranks anyone else. Nevertheless, some features of the traditional conception of dignity are useful for thinking about Kant’s special conception. First, dignity in the traditional sense is not anything like an intrinsic property of persons, but at best a second-order property that attaches to them in virtue of something else, namely a special rank or status that they hold – itself, to be sure, also not an intrinsic property in the same way as, perhaps, a person’s genome might be.⁷ For Kant, dignity attaches to persons, all persons, in virtue of their humanity, in the form of the “dignity of humanity,” but since humanity turns out to be freedom, dignity attaches to persons in virtue of their freedom.⁸ The freedom of human beings is the fact from which morality begins and derives; the dignity of humanity is just an expression of that foundational fact. Second, Kant’s conception of dignity reproduces the twofold character of traditional dignity, although in Kant’s case this might seem to be a source of tension: sometimes he says that dignity lies in or attaches to freedom as the capacity for morality, which all persons have, but sometimes he suggests that it attaches to a particular person in virtue of her morally correct use or exercise of that capacity, that is, in virtue of her being moral. In contemporary terms, sometimes Kant seems to treat dignity as a status inherent in all human beings, sometimes as a status contingent upon morally good behavior. This tension needs to be resolved.

In the next section, I clarify the link between dignity and freedom in Kant. In the following section, I examine the apparent tension between Kant’s suggestions that dignity attaches to the freedom of human beings as such and that it attaches only to the morally correct exercise of that freedom, the achievement rather than merely the necessary condition of morality. The final section proposes a way around this difficulty, at least at the level of actual moral practice. The key idea is that the moral obligations of each of us arise from our own freedom and that of others, thus if you like from our own inherent dignity and that of others, but do not depend upon the moral achievements of those to whom our obligations are owed, or their contingent dignity.

1.3 Freedom

Let us begin with the relevant texts. As there are not many more than a dozen references to dignity in Kant’s published works in moral philosophy, so there are only around a half-dozen such references in Kant’s notes (Reflexionen).⁹ The first of these is R 1179, found among the notes for Kant’s lectures on anthropology, the text for which was the chapter on empirical psychology in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Metaphysica,¹⁰ and as such focusing on the definition of character and referring to dignity only as part of that definition. The phrase “dignity of humanity” has already been quoted from this note, but here is more of it:

What is essential in a good character is the worth [Werth] that one places in himself (in humanity), with regard to actions related to himself as well as in relation to others. For character signifies that the person has derived the rule of actions from himself and from the dignity of humanity. Self-selected and firm resolves demonstrate a character, although only if they are similar to one another. He who binds himself to arbitrary rules makes an artificial character; for those are not maxims.¹¹

This note, dated from 1772 to 1775, contains several clues about Kant’s nascent moral philosophy. It suggests that the moral law (“rule”) must originate within the self, but not arbitrarily, so not in mere personal preference. It introduces the term “maxim,” but, contrary to some of Kant’s later suggestions that a maxim is whatever rule a person happens to act on, “subjectively,”¹² it contrasts genuine maxims with arbitrary rules. It suggests that morality concerns how one regards and acts toward oneself as well as how one regards and acts toward others; morality is not just a matter of “what we owe to each other.”¹³ And it suggests that the “rule of action” for the agent with a good, that is moral, character is to be derived from what is in herself, namely the “dignity of humanity.” But it does not explain what humanity consists in, and since dignity is, as I am assuming, not an intrinsic property but is dependent on humanity, the status that humanity itself should have, this note does not yet tell us very much about dignity itself.

Another note from the same period, although this time found among notes in a section of his copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica that Kant discussed in his metaphysics rather than anthropology lectures, connects morality to humanity, but without using the word for dignity at all: “Morality is the correspondence of the free power of choice with the end of humanity and of human beings in general, namely with necessary conditions of the universal ends of humanity and of human beings.”¹⁴ The reference to free choice (freyen Willkühr) is crucial, for it implies that only beings who have such choice are moral agents, or subject to moral demands and assessment; but it still does not tell us what humanity is, or what relation there might be between free choice and humanity. This note could also suggest that the “end of humanity” or “universal ends of humanity” is somehow to be defined independently of the free power of choice, as an external constraint on the use of freedom, which would thus be a necessary condition for moral imputability (as it always is for Kant)¹⁵ but not sufficient to constitute the normative content of morality. That is yet to come.

Several other passages offer what we might call a nominal definition of dignity, which we also find in the most prominent invocation of dignity in Kant’s published work, namely that dignity is a kind of value on which no price can be placed, and which therefore cannot be traded against other values on which prices can be placed. Thus, in another note from the early reflections on anthropology, although here he is explicitly talking about good will rather than dignity, Kant says that

The good that can be imputed to someone, i.e., that stems from his good will, is his merit; that which can certainly be ascribed to him, but which is not from his good will, is his talent. The latter determines outer worth (in the market of Algiers), the latter determines his inner worth before conscience. The former: what he is good for; the latter, how good he is.¹⁶

The market of Algiers was, of course, a slave-market, where human beings were bought and sold at prices reflecting the services that could be expected from them; the value of good will has nothing to do with that. That the good stemming from a good will is something that can be imputed to a person implies that such a will must be a free will. The connection with dignity may not be clear, but other passages say the same thing about dignity, namely that it is a value beyond ordinary price. Thus, in a note that could only be ascribed generally to the years from 1776 to 1789, and entered into Baumgarten’s section on utilitas, to which Kant is obviously making a pointed contrast, he writes that utilitas is “A value for which something else can be given as an equivalent.” By contrast, “Virtue has no price. Dignity is the inner value, which therefore has no price.”¹⁷ The same thought is expressed in the main discussion of dignity in the Groundwork:

In the empire of ends everything has eithe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations for Kant’s Works
• Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends: An Introduction
• Part I Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends in Kant’s Groundwork
• Part II The Politics of Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends
• Part III The Ethics of Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends
• Index