OrangePhilosophy

The argument is fairly straightforward, and much of it is familiar to anyone who knows of Michael Stocker's famous critique of Kant. The Stocker thesis is that Kant expects us to engage in every activity for the sake of mere duty, as if it's mere drudgery that we don't have any emotional or relational reason for doing. I shouldn't visit a friend in the hospital because I care for that friend. I should do it merely out of duty. When you put it that way, Kant sounds like an unfeeling jerk who thinks it's better to engage in mere action without the right sorts of motivation. I agreed with this critique until Bonnie Kent convinced me that the objection radically misunderstands Kant's claim. He isn't saying that we shouldn't go to the hospital to see loved ones because we love them but rather should do it out of duty robbed of emotional content. He's saying that doing so merely because of an emotional response is not acting in any morally commendable way. There's nothing morally special about going to the hospital when you want to be there anyway, because you want to be with your loved one. What's morally commendable is when you do it even in the cases when you aren't emotionally moved to do it. Kant isn't poo-pooing acting out of emotion. He's simply saying those aren't morally distinctive reasons. They may even be good actions, but they're not praiseworthy for moral reasons. Now Laurence comes in at this point in my reflections on Kant with this post taken from an excerpt of his forthcoming book manuscript. He argues for the Stocker point from the example of parental love. If I have parental love of the sort Laurence calls transparent (setting aside my criticism of that claim), then my love doesn't seem to be out of duty. It seems to be the sort of thing Kant wouldn't call a moral reason. Laurence then says that this deeply challenges Kantian morality, but I'm not sure how. Kant could say two things in response. First, he could say that this kind of love is simply not moral. That's not the sort of thing it is. This is in fact what Laurence seems to end up saying. He says morality is not person-specific but is rather impartial, whereas parental love is rightly person-specific. If Laurence is right, then this isn't a problem for Kant. Parental love of this sort is not moral, which is perfectly consistent with saying that it's not moral because it's not done for the sake of duty. It's not a counterexample to Kant's claim at all. It would need to be both moral and not done for the sake of duty to be a suitable counterexample. I think Laurence should agree with Bonnie Kent on this one. What's more is that Laurence has already said that parental love is rightly person-specific. This means that there is a moral reason for its being person-specific. So even though the parental love isn't itself the sort of thing Laurence calls moral, he wants to say that there are moral considerations that affect whether and how we should have this sort of love. This leads to the second claim I think Kant can make. He can say there's a moral reason for having this sort of parental love, and we should pursue that because it's the right thing to do. In normal moral development, we should seek to develop character traits that will lead us to have the kind of parental love Laurence says is transparent. I have questioned whether it's transparent, but there is indeed something that separates it from, e.g., romantic love. I would go so far as to say that we have a moral obligation to seek to develop the sort of character traits that will leave us psychologically positioned to love our children in such a way. This is something we ought to do for the sake of duty. Kant says that any action is morally good only if it's done for the sake of duty. What's morally good about loving one's children in the way Laurence calls transparent love is that it's the proper attitude to have in such a situation. The mere loving isn't what's morally good. It's a good thing to have true of oneself, but it's not a morally praiseworthy action. If I don't have that kind of love for my children, something has gone wrong, so it's definitely good if I have it. In fact, I have a duty to pursue having that kind of love. A given instance of expressing that love isn't moral, but what's moral is seeking to have that kind of love, and I should do that because it's the right kind of love to have. For most people this comes naturally, but that's because it doesn't take much to fulfill this duty for most people. For those who are constructed in a way that's less conducive to developing such feelings naturally, however, the moral duty will loom large. Someone who is autistic may actually be like that, with a diminished capacity to form relational bonds. For an autistic person anticipating parenthood, developing in one's abilities to form such relational attachment is paramount if Laurence is right that parental love of this sort is as important as he says it is. It's thus a duty to pursue. We just don't think about it because we don't think as much about the unusual case of someone who doesn't have these natural abilities. So in the end I don't think parental love as Laurence describes it is a counter-example to Kant's claim that moral action is only for the sake of duty. I think rather that Laurence's own account of what's going on with parental love confirms Kant's statement, as I read Kant.