What Would Kant Do?

Josh Landy
It’s Philosophy Talk.

Irrational Man
So… Kant would argue that in a truly moral world, there’s absolutely no room for lying.

Ray Briggs
Is Immanuel Kant still a useful guide for how to act in everyday life?

Irrational Man
Even the smallest lie destroys his precious categorical imperative.

Josh Landy
What’s the deal with the categorical imperative?

Irrational Man
Kant said human reason is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, but also cannot answer. Okay, so what are we talking about here? Morality? Choice? The randomness of life? Aesthetics? Murder?

Karen Sthor
How is it that you can think that human beings are such a mess, and yet think that we’re capable of so much more?

Josh Landy
Our guest is Karen Storr, author of Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life.

Ray Briggs
What Would Kant Do?

Karen Stohr
Try as best we can to see others as worthy of respect and love.

Ray Briggs
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Josh Landy
Can you reason your way into being a good person?

Ray Briggs
Or are your feelings a better guide for doing the right thing?

Josh Landy
Should morality be the same for everybody?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re asking: what would Kant do?

Josh Landy
I’m so excited about this show, Ray. Immanuel Kant is so fascinating. He was a German enlightenment philosopher; he wrote all those cool things about aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, he was really big on reason, right? He thought the whole basis for morality was reason.

Josh Landy
Yes, so do you think that’s true? I mean, whatever happened to feelings like empathy?

Ray Briggs
Well, I mean, Kant accepted that feelings are important too, you’re supposed to cultivate cheerfulness, and you shouldn’t laugh at people in a mean, spirited way. But our emotions can lead us astray. And he thought we need reason to be an arbiter.

Josh Landy
Okay, but can’t your reason sometimes get it wrong, and your emotions get it right? Think about like “Huckleberry Finn,” right? Huck has a friend, Jim, who’s a runaway slave. And Huck’s brain tells him, gee, I’m supposed to turn him into the authorities. But his heart says no. Don’t you think his heart is right?

Ray Briggs
Of course his heart is right. But his brain has made a mistake. If he actually listened to reason, he’d understand that it’s always wrong to use another person as a means to an end. But slavery is a system that uses people, it just treats them like objects.

Josh Landy
That sounds like Kant.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s his categorical imperative. You should never use another person as a means to an end.

Josh Landy
Okay, that sounds good. But never? I mean, what about when I go to the bank to open an account? I’m not really there to have like, a long conversation with a teller about how their day went and their kids and stuff like that. That relationship is purely transactional. They don’t want to hear about my life either, right? So I don’t know, does Kant’s rule always hold?

Ray Briggs
Oh, he doesn’t think it’s always wrong to benefit from a transaction, you just have to also recognize that the other person is a human being who matters. So you can’t be rude them. And going back to your example from “Huckleberry Finn,” it’s definitely wrong to enslave people.

Josh Landy
Too bad Kant didn’t get his own memo on that.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, for most of his life, he didn’t actually think there was anything wrong with slavery. And he also said some really appallingly racist things. But if he just applied his own theory, he would have seen that slavery is wrong.

Josh Landy
But if he couldn’t even apply his own theory, how can we expect anyone else to? I think this is a real problem for Kant’s idea that we can like reason our way into being good people. That’s a really nice ideal, but is anyone ever gonna live up to it? Human beings are just too irrational.

Ray Briggs
We’re never going to be perfect at it. But if you work on yourself, you’ll get better. The more you practice overcoming your irrational impulses, the closer you’ll get to being the kind of person you should be. That’s the path to true freedom.

Josh Landy
Freedom? Where did that come from? You just told me that Kant thinks I have to obey a bunch of rules. Never do this. Always do that.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah. People think that moral rules are constraining, and like you would have more freedom if you just did what you want. But that’s not true. All that happens then is that you’re driven around by your emotions. You just reach for other people’s plates whenever you’re hungry and yell at them whenever you’re mad. That would make you less free, not more free.

Josh Landy
Oh, no, I’m not talking about being a jerk. I’m not talking about acting on a whim. I’m talking about living my own life. What if I have values that guide my actions? And that I’m very happy with, but they just don’t happen to be the same as yours. Why should it be a one size fits all?

Ray Briggs
Kant accepts that people can be different to an extent, but there’s some fundamental principles we should all agree on, you know, no murdering, no stealing, no lying, no mixing stripes and plaids.

Josh Landy
Okay, I agree about stripes and plaids and about murder. But I still think there are a lot of interesting questions about individual values versus universal rules.

Ray Briggs
And our guest will help us answer them. It’s Karen Stohr, author of “Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life.”

Josh Landy
Speaking of a guide to life, what would Kant say about today’s political situation? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to find out. She files this report.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Immanuel Kant is famous for his focus on reason and ethics. So I was intrigued recently, when I learned that a group of Kant scholars faced a unique ethical problem. It all started when Russia invaded Ukraine.

NBC
It was unprovoked. But this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed on Ukraine as the sun came up this morning.

Sarah Lai Stirland
The Kant scholars had planned to celebrate his 300th birthday in 2024 in what is now known as Kaliningrad, Russia. That’s where Kant was born. The scholars organizing the event are part of the Kant Gesellschaft. That’s the original Kant society that was founded in Germany to spread the Enlightenment philosopher’s ideas.

Dietmar Heidemann
Everything was fine so far, and then the war started.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Dietmar Heidemann is its primary chairman.

Dietmar Heidemann
I got emails in from all major Kant societies worldwide, asking us what was going to happen, and then after a few days, actually asking us to really revoke the decision.

Sarah Lai Stirland
And to move the conference out of Russia because of the regime’s aggressions against Ukraine and its citizens. But Heidemann got other emails that said that they should keep it there.

Dietmar Heidemann
I received these emails from Russia too. So do not revoke, just one or two weeks and then things are settled.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Some Kant scholars want to wait and see if the conference could be salvaged. They’re worried that pulling out would further isolate their Russian peers who are already in danger of blowback from their government. The current Gesellschaft dilemma is one we all face in our globalized society. Should we isolate Russia because of the actions of its authoritarian regime? Or should we engage with its citizens? It’s one thing to boycott products, but should academics who work in the realm of ideas sever ties with the Russian universities as well?

Andrew Chignell
I mean, the vision was to be doing something kind of good.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Andrew Chignell is head of the North American Kant Society.

Andrew Chignell
It had this kind of missiological feel to it, where like, we should go into places that are intolerant in certain ways and try to speak our minds freely as long as we’re allowed to.

Sarah Lai Stirland
To be clear, all of the Kant scholars I talked to for this story are against the war. But other philosophers worry that the Russian government would use the event to promote the idea that the scholars support its quote, unquote, “special operation.” After all, the government did force the rector of Kaliningrad University to sign a statement supporting the war.

Andrew Chignell
I think Kant would have found that very problematic. He would have a really hard time signing a statement saying something that he absolutely didn’t believe in. I mean, it’s akin to lying in some ways, and Kant is, of course, a very famous opponent of lying under all circumstances.

Sarah Lai Stirland
On March 15, the North American Cancer Society finally issued a statement. It called on the Gesellschaft to relocate the conference, saying that Russia’s unprovoked attack violated international law. 11 days later, the board of the Kant Gesellschaft voted to move the conference to Bonn back in Germany. It condemned Putin’s regime and its actions at the same time; it declared support for Ukrainians as well as Russian scholars who oppose the war. Vadim Chaly, a professor at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, has spent the past three years setting up the conference. He was disappointed by the Gesellschaft decision.

Vadim Chaly
Obviously, a lot of our efforts were made redundant. And that could mean that Kant scholarship might become redundant.

Sarah Lai Stirland
He worries that the events leading up to the conference are symptoms of a more sinister development.

Vadim Chaly
I would not place the blame on those who made the decision to move to Congress because it’s a more general process that is unfolding. And I think it’s general anti-modern attitudes that are prevailing nowadays in Russia. And Kant is, of course, a modern philosopher.

Sarah Lai Stirland
I asked him how it feels being in Kaliningrad right now.

Vadim Chaly
A bit claustrophobic. We’re landlocked, a piece of land that is isolated. Surrounded by obviously not very friendly neighbors, not very friendly at the moment, and the future is uncertain. I’m not so much worried about myself, but I have three kids, I’m worried about their future.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Perhaps we can take a lesson from the Kant philosophers. We should talk and reason with individuals in Russia, even as we condemn the brutality carried out by their leaders. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Sarah. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking: what would Kant do?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Karen Stohr. She’s Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and author of “Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life.” Karen, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Karen Stohr
Thank you. It’s fun to be back with you two.

Josh Landy
Karen, I’m so happy you’re back on the show. Last time you joined us, I don’t know if you remember this, you were giving our listeners advice about their moral dilemmas. But you’ve just written a book about Kant, who’s- he’s not exactly known for his pithy advice. What first got you interested in him?

Karen Stohr
So I’m actually a Kant convert. I started out in philosophy in graduate school not a big fan of Kant. I thought he was kind of boring, hard to read, and very sort of stiff and cold. But my dissertation adviser was a Kantian and I greatly admire him as a human being. I think he sort of provided this really compelling example about a good way to live. And so it just started becoming more and more appealing. But it did take me a long time to convert to Kantianism, I must say, but I’m almost fully there.

Ray Briggs
So what changed your mind, Karen?

Karen Stohr
I think one thing is that— I was able in studying him more, I was able to move beyond what are sort of common impressions of him, sometimes even caricatures, and understand more about what was motivating him, what he thought was most important for us to understand about ourselves and other people. And I just started reading more broadly and realizing what an enormous range of topics Kant covered in his work, and I just kind of got drawn in, it was, I found it to be a really helpful way of thinking about a lot of moral problems that interested me, I think it’s a really rich and fruitful theory.

Ray Briggs
Do you have a way of summing up like what the central compelling motivation is there?

Karen Stohr
So what I think is really compelling about Kant is that he thinks that human beings are basically like a total mess, in many ways ethically, but he also thinks we have, like this tremendous possibility that we can get a lot better. And I find that sort of comforting, in a lot of ways, especially in the current environment. And so I think it was that part of his picture that drew me in, how is it that you can think that human beings are such a mess, and yet think that we’re capable of so much more?

Josh Landy
Yeah, he has that lovely line. Yeah, from such crooked timbre as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made, which sounds pretty bleak. How does he also think, you know, you can, I guess, get it a little bit straighter or something like that?

Karen Stohr
Yeah. So I mean, Kant’s picture of human nature is pretty bleak. He is very worried about vice. In fact, he talks a lot about vice. And the challenges that we face in trying to sort of get ourselves from, from not putting ourselves at the center of our moral universe, which is what he thinks we tend to do. Like, we tend to make the world all about ourselves. And we also have this propensity to like, find other people super annoying. But we have to get over it. And Kant thinks that we can, and we can get over it, in part by sort of letting go of a lot of the worst parts of our nature and sort of looking instead at what we’re capable of doing and being and that’s where his focus on reason comes in. Because he sees reason as our, sort of our salvation, our way of straightening out that crooked wood.

Ray Briggs
So, why is reason the way to being a better person?

Karen Stohr
So Kant is an Enlightenment philosopher, and the folks who know much or read much about the Enlightenment will know that one thing that is characteristic of the Enlightenment is the tremendous faith that people had in the power of human reason: the idea that reason could take us forward, help us understand the world and our place in the world, make sense of things. It was a time in which there were tremendous developments in science and in many other areas, and I think Kant was part of that. His thought was that reason is something that we all share. It’s something that we can all use in order to come up with principles and rules and systems by which we can all live together. And I think Kant really thought that reason was the key to becoming better ourselves as individuals, and also to making ourselves better as communities and nations, working toward peace, working toward better forms of human community. So he was really hopeful about what reason could do for us. I don’t know if he would still be as hopeful if he lived in our world, much. But the Enlightenment was a time of hope.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with Karen Stohr from Georgetown University.

Ray Briggs
What’s the connection between freedom and goodness? Can universal moral laws guide us through everyday dilemmas? And what exactly did Kant have against getting drunk and talking smack?

Josh Landy
Frenemies, dinner parties and gossip, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Does being good mean being better than everyone else? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking what Kant would do with Karen Stohr, the author of “Choosing Freedom, a Kantian Guide to Life.”

Josh Landy
We’re pre-recording this episode. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and get access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Karen, earlier, we were talking about how important reason is to Kant, and one of the main morals he takes from the importance of reason is that we should all obey the categorical imperative. What does that mean?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, so this is one of the more confusing parts of Kant’s theory, and it’s really mostly Kant’s fault. There’s several different formulations of this categorical imperative, which is the primary principle that he thinks we ought to live by. So in one of those formulations, the one that you alluded to earlier, the idea behind it is that we— our job, our moral job, is to sort of live up to the kind of value that Kant thinks that we actually have. And this is called dignity. And Kant thinks that we have dignity in virtue of our rationality. So we all have dignity, no matter what we do, or how people treat us, but we don’t always act like we have that value. And we definitely don’t always recognize it in other people, because it’s really hard, Kant thinks actually, to live that way, it takes a lot of work. And human nature is not our friend. And so in order to sort of live up to this value, we have to get over ourselves. And for, for Kant, getting over ourselves means binding ourselves by principles, principles of reason, commands of reason that we give to ourselves, and he calls this command of reason the categorical imperative. And the categorical imperative is supposed to give us guidance about how we interact with other people, but also how we think about ourselves. And so Kant’s thought is, we have to think of ourselves as having dignity, not being objects for other people to use, or for us to mistreat ourselves. And this has a whole lot of really interesting implications.

Josh Landy
Okay, so— you know, since you’re here, we have the opportunity, maybe finally, I can understand the categorical imperative. So, he has three different formulations, and one of those is the one we’ve be talking about: never treat another person just as a means to your ends. Then there’s one— I feel like I understand that one— then there’s another one I feel like I understand, which is, you know, act as though your principles were binding on everybody. Don’t make an exception of yourself, right. You know, if you imagine everyone living by the way you’re living, and you think that’d be a terrible world, don’t do it. I think I understand that one. But the third one, is something about acting as though you’re in a kingdom of ends. Could you tell us what that one means?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, so this third principle, which listeners who familiar with John Rawls may recognize is the foundation of his political theory, the idea behind it is that we should act as if we are legislating members in a kingdom of ends. And that sounds kind of weird. But the idea is that we need to think of ourselves not just as individuals, but as members of a community with others, other people who are also rational agents, who also have dignity. Because some of what we have to do in our moral life together is come up with rules and principles that we’re going to use to structure our shared life. And so to think of ourselves as members of the kingdom of ends is to think of ourselves as working with people, all of whom have dignity, to come up with the ways in which we’re going to structure society. So it will be a society in which each of us is able to act as the beings with dignity that we are.

Ray Briggs
So I’m a little bit worried about that formulation actually. In an ideal society, if my neighbors were making a lot of noise, I could call the police and expect the police to like come and knock on the door and say, like, please stop making the noise. Or maybe there wouldn’t be police, but there’d be an authority I could call who would say, please stop making noise, and like have a nice negotiation with my neighbor, and there’d be like, no chance that they might shoot my neighbor for making noise. But if in the actual world, the actual police, I have to take into account that like, they’re not the kind of like whatever kind of administrative authority which would exist in the kingdom of ends, like that’s not the actual police. So if I pretend that I’m in the kingdom of ends, I’m going to be miss that, and somebody could get hurt.

Karen Stohr
Yeah, that’s a really important point. So, in many ways Kant’s theory is idealized. It’s like, what would we do if we were all perfectly rational agents? But of course, we’re not. None of us are. And if we just act as if everybody is going to always be doing the right thing and the rational thing, a lot of things are going to go really badly. So, a big and important question is, how well can Kant’s theory cope with the very non-ideal reality of human beings, the crooked wood that we’re all made of? I think the answer to that is pretty well, because if we think about what kind of society do we want, we want a society in which people are treated justly, when people don’t have to fear for their lives, just because of a particular, because of their race, for instance. And so, on a Kantian way of thinking about this, we will be trying to think that given that we know that racism is a thing, and that there are these deep fissures and injustices in our society, what kind of structures and institutions are we going to create, that will help make sure that everybody’s basic dignity gets respected? I think that Kant in the kingdom of ends formulation, can build that in, can build in the imperfection that is part of our individual human natures in our communities.

Josh Landy
Karen, Tim has a comment on our website that’s another kind of worry about the categorical imperative. He writes, “Compassion and pragmatism make a cleaner path in life than the categorical imperative.” What do you think about that?

Karen Stohr
Tim, there’s a lot of people who agree with you, and particularly who read Kant as not advocating especially for compassion. But I actually think there’s a lot of space in Kant for those two values. In many ways, Kant is very practical, like he does recognize what a mess we are, how prone we are to vice and to selfishness and arrogance and all kinds of other flaws. And so in that sense, he does focus on the reality of our circumstances, and the Categorical Imperative can give us some pretty practical advice for that. The compassion part, people often read it, I actually also used to think of Kant this way, as really devaluing emotions, and favoring reason in a way that can seem kind of cold. I think this is, to some extent, not the right picture of Kant, because I think that Kant actually has a lot to say about love. He thinks that– he has this really interesting saying where he says that there are two great moral forces: respect and love. Respect tells us to keep our distance from people, and love tells us to come closer to them. And he really believes that both of those are important, that we do have to have compassion for people, we do have to cultivate sympathy, we do have to treat them as being really important, and that’s going to call for compassion for us. Kant doesn’t think that we can make our moral system rest on compassion, in part because he’s a little worried that compassion is going to be too uneven of a principle, what if I just feel compassion for people I like and not for people I don’t like? That’s not going to be a good way to live my life. So he does want to found his theory on reason, not on emotions like compassion, but I think Kant would say that reason tells us to develop compassion and learn how to care about people.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re asking what would Kant do with Karen Stohr from Georgetown University. I want to ask more about Kant’s theory in action. I don’t know yet what he tells me to do. So, if Kant were giving me advice about like, how to arrange a dinner party, what would he tell me?

Karen Stohr
Kant has a lot of opinions about dinner parties. So interestingly, he thinks that dinner parties have moral importance. They contribute to our knowledge about the world, our information, we learn stuff through our conversations with people. And also they create a sense of fellow feeling, like a good dinner party makes us like people better and feel better about human beings, like not hate people so much. But in order to pull that off, he has a lot of rules about how he thinks dinner party should go: what people should talk about what kinds of things you shouldn’t do, like he’s very anti competitive games, because he thinks it makes people mad at each other. So he has some thoughts about how you structure a dinner party, so that you can achieve these ends and everybody can go home feeling like they’ve made new friends and learned things.

Ray Briggs
So we shouldn’t play Risk or Settlers of Catan.

Karen Stohr
I think it does depend, I mean I don’t know who Kant played games, obviously, it was a pretty competitive crowd. But he’s probably thinking of gambling, but anything that sets people in opposition to each other, it puts them at odds with each other and makes them self-interested, Kant thinks is going to ruin a party.

Ray Briggs
Can we at least gossip?

Karen Stohr
Only if it’s not mean. Kant thinks that— he’s not totally anti gossip, he’s anti mean spirited gossip just for the sake of doing it. So as long as you’re not throwing shade, it’s probably fine. If you’re just sort of spreading the news, mostly because he thinks that when we gossip about people, especially if it’s kind of nasty gossip, we’re doing it because it makes us feel superior to them, and it makes them inferior, and Kant thinks that’s a problem because when we do that, we’re setting ourselves up as being more important than other people in a way that he thinks the Categorical Imperative forbids us from doing it. Because in reality, we’re all equal to each other, and so our social practices have to reflect that.

Josh Landy
You also point out another reason why gossip is bad in your book, that gossip is one of the things that we can do as human beings that essentially demoralize us, right? They desensitize us to vice that normalizes immorality, that sort of get us to expect less of ourselves and each other. So, talking to each other about the bad things other people did, talking to other people about the bad things we did. Even not having good manners, all of these things, as you suggest, contribute to an overall atmosphere in which we’re just not holding ourselves and each other to to the highest standards, which makes me wonder how he’d feel about social media.

Karen Stohr
Yeah, I don’t think Kent would be too keen on a lot of social media. I mean, on the one hand, it’s a good way to share information, which he is fond of, he thinks that’s really important. On the other hand, there’s so much contempt and hatred flying around that it would be worrisome. Yeah, so Kant thinks that if human beings, given what we are, if we’re left to our own devices, to some extent, we’re just going to end up hating people, having contempt for them, that it’s very easy to fall into those patterns and gossip and mockery, like nasty gossip, and mockery and arrogance, there’s a lot of different things that we do that contribute to this atmosphere. And Kant thinks that atmosphere is at odds with morality, it’s at odds with how we’re supposed to see people. And he also thinks it’s going to throw us into a state of despair about the future of humanity and the world, and we really have to fight that. And Kant thinks that the way that we fight that is by doing our best to try to set up our social worlds so that we remind ourselves and each other of the value that we have of our dignity, and try as best we can to see others as worthy of respect and love, like that’s the main moral challenge that Kant thinks we face, and he thinks it’s really hard. But we really, really need to do it.

Ray Briggs
I want to get back to applications because there’s another big one we haven’t talked about yet, which is lying. Kant didn’t like lying, which is not a surprise, but he really didn’t like lying. So he has a famous essay where he argues that if a murderer is at the door looking for your friend, and you’re hiding your friend, you’re not allowed to lie to the murderer about where your friend is. And that just, that just seems striking, like, that’s not what I would have thought was the morally right thing to do. Can you— can you say something about that essay?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, so that essay, probably people who don’t like Kant, that’s often the essay they point to, like, this guy is just like, we just— what can we do with him? So I think this is a place where Kant is really misunderstood. He doesn’t— so in that essay, he does indeed say you must tell the truth to the murderer. But it’s a very weird case, because for whatever reason, this murderer knocking at your door, has in the way that he’s set it up, has some kind of authority to demand that you answer him. So Kant does not think that you have to answer every question that people ask you, because that would be clearly unreasonable. But for some reason, this way that it’s set up, the murderer has some authority to make sure that you answer. And Kant does say that if you’re— when you answer him, like, hey, is your friend in the house? That your answer has to be truthful, but it’s not because you owe it to the murderer. Kant is really explicit that you don’t owe it to the murderer. It’s because he thinks we owe it to society more generally to be truthful. So Kant basically thinks that society can’t function, there can be no such thing as a community unless there’s truth, that the trust that a commitment to truth telling generates is absolutely foundational to our capacity to do anything at all, you know, to to assume that, you know, bridges won’t collapse as you drive your car over them or walk over them, you know, to assume that the medicine that you take is safe. All of these things that we do in our ordinary life depend on our capacity to trust other people to tell the truth. And this is why Kant cares so much about truth, and why he thinks we have to commit ourselves to a principle by which if we’re ever putting ourselves forward as telling the truth, if I’m ever saying to you like okay, right, I’m gonna tell you the truth now, what I say has to be true, as far as I know. That for Kant is foundational to having community at all, and that’s why he takes it so seriously.

Ray Briggs
I think I’m still worried about the conclusion that he comes to, partly because like I can’t imagine what kind of authority that the murderer could have, that would make me owe him information at all. Like, it seems like one of the other things besides honesty that we should expect from each other in this society is a respect for like, us to protect our own information, and to lie if necessary, rather than have people pry into our lives. So I’m worried that like, the verdict in that case doesn’t— doesn’t take adequate account of that, to have the right to not be looked at and not have your life pried into.

Karen Stohr
So Kant would agree with you about the importance of not having people pry into your life, I think, and, you know, it is a really weird case, I can’t even imagine a situation in which the murderer like has authority, it’s almost like you’re under oath, the way that he sets that up. And so what is this, what is the situation where the murderer would have the actual authority to demand an answer from you, because much of the time we don’t? Or most of the time, we don’t. We ask a lot of really nosy and intrusive questions, and Kant does not think that we have to answer them. It’s more that if we do answer them, what we say must be true, because deliberately lying is the wrong way to go about defending yourself and other people from evil. And that’s because he thinks of lying as a kind of direct threat to society, but also to individuals, because it’s attacking the very thing that gives us our value, which is our reason. So, when you lie to someone, not a murderer, but just like an ordinary, an ordinary person, you’re sort of manipulating their view of the world, you’re twisting the facts around to get them to do what you want. And so this is why Kant thinks that it’s fundamentally a way of using people. And Kant thinks we’re just not entitled to do that, even if our motives are good. So Kant is also opposed to white lies. You know, I’m just lying to you because I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Kant thinks that’s patronizing, that I’m like, presuming that I know better than you do about what’s in your interest. And so Kant actually wants us to preserve a lot of space for the use of our own reason, and some of that is going to be defending ourselves against people who ask us nosy questions. And some of it is also going to be allowing, or making sure that the facts are the way that we understand them. And for that, it’s a cooperative enterprise, which is why he thinks we really owe each other the truth when we are purporting to tell each other the truth.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Kantian morality with Karen Stohr, author of “Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life.”

Ray Briggs
Why is reason in such short supply these days? How can we get people to stop lying so much? What would Kant have to say about alternative facts?

Josh Landy
Kantian wisdom for the 21st century, plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Do some school kids need a lesson on the categorical imperative? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Karen Stohr from Georgetown University. And we’re asking, what would Kant do?

Josh Landy
All right, Karen. So you know, you’re the ethicist. If there were one thing Kant would want us to change about society today, what do you think it would be?

Karen Stohr
Well, you mentioned social media earlier, I think Kant would be really worried about social media. I think Kant would find our current situation really depressing, but maybe not surprising. But I think he’d be really troubled by the tone of public discourse, the contemptuous way in which people talk about each other, and the way in which people are very sort of, maybe cavalier about truth telling. I think both of those things would be troubling for Kant, but maybe especially the contempt because it makes it just so hard to have hope in the possibility that we can do better.

Josh Landy
I love that thought. And you know, one of the things that really came out in your book, or at least stood out for me, was this idea of, well, whatever you think of the opposite of contempt as being, a certain kind of spirit of charity or something, now, of course, there are some truly monstrous individuals. But I take it your reading of Kant is that for the non-monstrous individuals who messed up, we’re supposed to think of them as sort of better than their worst action. Is that about right?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, that’s right. I think Kant thinks that from a moral standpoint, we’re sort of required to think of ourselves as being capable of redemption and thinking that other people are too, which doesn’t mean we have to like, go around acting as if everybody is always going to do the right thing, but believing that it’s possible for people to do the right thing, I think is very, very important to Kant. And believing that we can do the right thing ourselves. Kant also thinks that we generally don’t know as much about other people’s motives and reasons as we think we do. We don’t even know that much about our own motives. And so that’s another reason to be charitable, which is that we don’t really know what’s motivating people, or why they’re acting the way that they do. And so, being charitable about what people are doing and what their motives are, and whether they can do better in the future is really central to how Kant thinks we should think about each other.

Ray Briggs
I feel like this raises a bunch of like, interesting moral issues about how you should treat somebody who you know has just done a bad thing. Because one consideration is yes, they’re a human being. Another consideration is you’d like to stop them from doing bad things in the future as much as you can. Would Kant recognize that second consideration as like morally irrelevant, or does he think that recognizing the person’s humanity always overrides any impulse to stop them from doing bad things in the future?

Karen Stohr
I think he actually thinks they’re compatible, that it’s incredibly important to hold people accountable for what they’ve done, their bad actions, but that is actually a way of treating them respectfully, because it is engaging with them and being like, you, you messed up, you know, and we expect you to do better, you know, you can do better and you must do better. So I think that Kant thinks that becoming angry with people and criticizing them for what they’ve done, as long as it doesn’t break out into contempt, as if they’re completely worthless and hopeless, but criticizing, being angry, calling people to account, calling people on what they’ve done, all of that is compatible with respecting them as a rational agent.

Ray Briggs
Right, so how do I draw that line in practice? Does he have any examples that I can work from?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, so he has this interesting passage in the doctrine of virtue, where he talks about correcting people’s errors. And here, he’s mostly talking about having discussions with them, not necessarily their moral errors. But he says, we have a duty to correct errors and people’s reasoning. We can’t let untruths just like go unchallenged. But we have to correct those mistakes in ways that preserve people’s respect for their own understanding. So we’re all familiar with this, right? Like messing up and having somebody completely bash us and treat us as if we’re complete and total idiots versus someone who’s like, yeah, okay, that wasn’t right. But like, you know, here’s what went wrong. And here’s how you could do better. Kant thinks that what we have to do is engage in those hard conversations in ways that leaves everybody with a sense of their own self respect, and what their own capacities are. That’s the only way he thinks we can make progress. If we just dismiss people completely, or act as if they will never ever be able to contribute constructively to any conversation, I think Kant would say that’s disrespectful.

But I also find it interesting. So we’ve talked quite a bit about the kind of situation where we owe something to other people, and what Kant has to say about what we owe to other people, even in, even in contexts like a dinner party, or gossip, but, but what’s fascinating to me is that he also has things to say about our duties to ourselves. You know, from 30,000 feet, that seems a little surprising, that Kant would say, hey, you know, you don’t just owe other people to be charitable to them, and, and to not gossip about them, and to tell them the truth and things like that, but also, you have a duty to yourself to achieve what you’re capable of. Where does that idea come from?

Yeah, this is a great question, because Kant actually thought that respecting yourself is the sort of primary way in which we come to understand what respect really means, that we have to realize that we have value, and there’s sort of two different ways we have value. We have value in ourselves as a rational agent, which means that we have rights to things; we shouldn’t be servile, we shouldn’t let people walk all over us or take advantage of us. Kant thought that was really, really important. But it also meant that we had to take ourselves seriously and our own development, so Kant thought we had a duty to what he called cultivate our talents, or we might say, make something of ourselves, that self respect tells us to, you know, to do what we can to improve ourselves in a wide variety of ways. And this is really central for Kant to having self respect, and sort of claiming our status in the world.

Ray Briggs
That’s a little trickier than the duty not to lie to people. Cuz the duty not to lie to people, all I have to do is like not say stuff that is not true. It’s really easy. But how much of myself do I have to make to make something of myself?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think it’s going to depend on our circumstances. You know, I think Kant would think that if you spend all day lying on your couch and like scrolling through Instagram and eating Cheetos, that you’re probably not living up to your potential.

Josh Landy
But I’m really good at scrolling through Instagram.

Karen Stohr
You could be really good at scrolling through Instagram, yeah. There could be pursuits that you become skilled at. But I think Kant thinks that— I think he thinks we naturally do want to contribute to the world. And as a matter of self respect, we should. We should be trying to figure out what path to take where we can live up to what we’re capable of. And that could take a variety of forms. And I think you’re right, right, that it’s going to be hard for us to figure out what that is, because it’s going to depend, you know, like, how much time do I have to spend working to pay the rent? You know, do I have enough money to pay for my education? Or there’s a lot of what other— who do I have to take care of? There’s a lot of ways in which you can sort of carve out a life that will be compatible with self respect. But Kant thinks that taking ourselves seriously is as important as taking other people seriously.

Josh Landy
I think this is lovely. I think it’s a, you know, it’s a side of Kant that we don’t hear enough about. You know, we hear about Kant the rationalist, and the Categorical Imperative person, and you know, all of this stuff, but you know, what’s coming out of our conversation is he isn’t just a rationalist, he believes in cultivating a virtue of sympathy. And reason isn’t enough, right? Goodness isn’t enough, you also have to— you have a duty to yourself, reason isn’t enough, you also need sympathy. You also need a grateful disposition, you also need hope. You also need cheerfulness. And you also need a community. And that’s a question I wanted to ask you about, Karen. Why does Kant thinks it’s so important, like we can’t do it on our own, we can’t become a better person, a good person, a person who takes care of other people and also fulfills our duties to ourselves, why can’t we do that on our own?

Karen Stohr
Yeah, you know, this is one of the things that I learned in reading more about Kant is how focused he is on our relationships with others as members of the same community. So, he has some beautiful writings on friendship. Usually, people just think of Aristotle on friendship, but Kant actually had a lot to say about it too. And he thinks friendship is a great thing for us, because it’s a way in which we can develop intimacy, we can like, you know, reveal our thoughts, come to understand ourselves, you know, he thought these were really good things in human life. And he also thought that we needed friends to help sort of make ourselves better, to keep us hopeful and to correct our mistakes and keep us like, you know, going on the path that we’ve set for ourselves, and we need bigger communities that can help us do that, too, that can help provide us with the things that we need in order to act as rational agents and live up to our potential. I think Kant does think that yes, we’re rational individuals, maybe first and foremost, but we live in communities with other people, and those communities can make us better or worse. And it’s our job, as a member of that community to try to create a community that is better, that’s going to be better for everyone, it’s going to be progressing. Kant really believed in progress for individuals and for communities. And it’s not going to happen though, unless we like join with other people and try to bring about a more peaceful world, you know, a more just society, you know, a less violent environment, all of these things for Kant are things that we have to do with other people.

Ray Briggs
So we asked you what would Kant change about society, I’m wondering if you have a piece of advice for like individual listeners that Kant would give?

Karen Stohr
I think Kant thinks we have to do what we can to maintain hope in progress, the progress I was just talking about, so that we don’t give in to despair and contempt and like misanthropy about people. And so looking for ways to find hope, you know, there’s this great line from Mr. Rogers of all people, you know, he has this thing about when tragedy strikes, you look for the helpers, this is what he used to tell little kids. I actually think Kant would say that’s pretty good advice. Like, look for the helpers, look for the people who were trying to make things better, even in the world as a mess, so look for them, take inspiration from them, and then go join them. I think that’s what Kant would say.

Josh Landy
Karen, when I think of people who are making things better, I think of you. I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Karen Stohr
Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun. I appreciate it.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Karen Stohr, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, and author of “Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I really love the way that Karen’s book gets applied like actionable advice out of Kant, who I always before this read is like a pretty dry and dusty guy. And I want to also recommend Karen’s “Ask a Coronavirus Ethicist” column in the Washingtonian Magazine for its advice at the beginning of the pandemic.

Josh Landy
Yeah, do you have others too?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I kind of love advice columns. I really like Captain Awkward ‘s blog. Daniel Lavery was Dear Prudence and was my favorite Dear Prudence, and he now has a podcast called Big Mood, Little Mood which is a sort of continuation of that. And Miss Manners is a classic. I think she’s really underrated and I think her advice is sort of deeply empathetic.

Josh Landy
And yeah, Kant, I definitely think, would improve. We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now unreasonably fast and categorically impertinent, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Speaking of Immanuel Kant in the Wikipedia, it seems as though we could be right now very close to achieving some kind of Kantian ideal civilization thanks to an integrated democracy and international cooperation. We’re just inches away from peaceful coexistence, you guys. Stop with the insurrections and the invasions, and we’re good to go. Just give school teachers a raise. We could be on the edge of a new age as golden as the rule. On the other hand, this could be the age of crapola, characterized by phenomenon not always recognized as such. Some crapola is even considered a great notion like blue check Twitter or Dancing with the Stars, but it could all just recede into the noumenon or Plato’s cave or the ether, whatever, to be forgotten. Now we did have the end of history, allegedly, triggered by the end of the Cold War, but I don’t know, the Soviet Union is broken up and Russia has a hot war on Ukraine. The real pushback so far has been more economic than military, like bringing Bitcoin to a knife fight. The rescues have a pretty dull knife too, but I doubt capitalism’s [unintelligible] on its own pocket, it’s not being lined, capitalism is not big on squeezing. And in the meantime, Elon Musk challenged Putin to a sword fight, which doesn’t seemed like something the world’s richest men should do unless there’s a pay per view angle on it, which I doubt and would pay to see that. You could pay me to see that. But if I just take the money and try to use a lot of it, how Kantian is that? Not very. It’s like God gave us flying saucer sightings and LSD. He just had to bunk the noumenon. Also, not long ago, just before all the “you can’t back me, I quit” truck drivers when protesting Canada and American conservatives decided that Trudeau was a fascist because he told the truckers to go home. QAnon disciples gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas for the second coming of John Kennedy Jr. The belief being that when Trump was reinstated, he will resign and Kennedy can become President. Well, Kennedy remained deceased, and that too was the end of history. Kant was a phenomenon of the Enlightenment, which was thick with smart guys, beginning with Diderot and his pals putting together the first encyclopedia, a wonder the modern world, making the noumenon phenomenal, you might say, though disapproved by the French state, Diderot persisted. Towards the end of the Enlightenment, Kant wrote a piece called “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” He was one of those guys who created his own authority by undermining it. How very Western civ. But it made me wonder, did he know he was in the Enlightenment as it was happening? I mean, there were coffee houses, and smart people throwing ideas around and scientific discoveries and enlightened despots. But did he literally think of himself as a figure in a significant historical period called the Enlightenment? My mother used to call the depression the dirty 30s, but that was later in memory. There are the roaring 20s, the swinging 60s. Yes, strolling along, smoking pot, listening to music, letting your hair grow. Suddenly, somebody calls you a damn hippie, are you? Were you not until some proto Trumpie yelled at you from his pickup? Did you remain a hippie until you voted for Reagan? Well, then what happened? Your opinion seems to be too much freedom. Too much social media, no worlds to conquer, it made us bored, we went crazier than we even were and voted for Trump. But what’s wrong with being bored? God gave us hammocks, marijuana and headphones. Why were we not satisfied? Do we really need to open carry handguns to Walmart just to buy a thrill? No, truly we elected the boring guy to be President Joe Biden, but half of us still freaked out because they’d like to think he’s a secret lefty fanatic. Anyway, if Kant didn’t know it was the Enlightenment, how did he know? Was he a premature historian? We call it the Enlightenment because it sowed the seeds of what came after, the French Revolution, the American Revolution. Napoleon, oh well, and the long tedious, brightly lit train ride to modernism. I mean did Dark Ages peasants wonder, are we in the Dark Ages? Well no, Fred, I think it’s the Middle Ages now, and the cusp of the Renaissance. Are you sure? Well, let’s check the calendar, Fred, BC. Oh, no, we’re in 80 oh, silly me, forgot to turn the calendar ahead. And that, my friends is how paradigms are destroyed at least in these times, the age of crapola. Racket down, COVID? What’s that? Just fake news now. History awaits. The end. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or misexpressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Ray Briggs
not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access for a library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The West Wing
It’s Immanuel Kant! “Duty! Sublime and mighty name that embraces nothing charming or insinuating but requires submission.” Every year, a million freshman philosophy students read that sentence …and change their major.