Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 150177

First, a disclaimer-- I'm not a philosophy student, aside from
general-audience reading and your basic 101 courses in university.  My
husband does have a degree in philosophy, though, so I braved much
embarassment to run this by him for rough accuracy!  He does say that
anyone who claims to understand Kant is mistaken;  so take everything
here with a bucket of salt.

The second disclaimer is that most of this post appeared in various
posts over that the Sugarquill forums a couple of years ago.  I've
clipped and rearranged and added some stuff.  I'm sorry it's so long
and rambly, I had not time, as they say, to make it shorter.  Now, on
to the post!

***************
It's only after typing out most of this post, that I discover, through
yahoo's search (possibly the first time anything's been discovered
with that), that Snape and Kant have been brought up here before, and
more than once!  In fact, a challenge was issued:

Ellecain:

>Can anyone accept
> my challenge to prove to me that Snape's thinking goes along the
> lines of Kantian philosophy?

I don't know about Snape's thinking, but there's a good reason why
Kant's thinking is often brought up in connection with Snape. There's
certain passages in Kant that are almost impossible to read (for a
Harry Potter fan, anyways!) without thinking of Snape.  When people
think of Kant, the first thing is probably the categorical imperative,
or the 'rules' thing.  But that's not the only thing Kant talked
about.  The Kant thing with Snape is the 'duty' thing.

Although this post is (*sigh* of course) a bit Snape-centric, I hope
it can lead to a broader discussion on the series generally.  Rowling
is bringing up, again and again, questions about personality, choice,
and goodness.  Her characters are constantly faced with the choice
between "what is right and what is easy"-- a choice between their duty
and their inclinations.  This choice appears to each character in a
different way, depending on their inclinations-- Lupin, for example,
is faced with a choice between his duty to protect the students vs.
his inclination to be liked, to not disappoint Dumbledore.  So at the
very heart of the series, is a question of what you might call Virtue
Ethics.

A few years ago, I was listening to a discussion on BBC Radio about
Virtue Ethics (believe it or not, I've stumbled on-line across more
than one person who listened to this program and thought about Harry
Potter!)-- that is, what do we mean when we say that someone is a good
person? How can we tell? And how can we develop ourself to become good
people? They had a first-rate panel of philosophy professors on, and
they boiled the main two diverging strands of thought down to the
Aristotelian and the Kantian.  

Aristotle was very interested in balance and had a point of view we
might call holistic-- he felt that virtue or goodness flowed naturally
from being a flourishing person generally. Virtue was a set of
conditions-- emotional and material-- that would produce good actions.
For him, you couldn't separate doing a good deed from also having
emotions of good will:


"...to experience these emotions [fear, courage, desire, anger, pity,
and pleasure] at the right times and on the right occasions and toward
the right persons and for the right causes and in the right manner is
the mean or the supreme good, which is characteristic of virtue."

and

"The virtue or excellence of man will be such a moral state as makes a
man good and able to perform his proper function well."  (The
Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. by J.E.C. Weldon (1892))

Incidentally, he also thought that having the power to take action on
one's good intentions was equally essential to the 'good man'-- so a
man automatically could be more good than a woman, because of his
greater power of action!  In Harry Potter terms, I'd use Dumbledore
the example of an Aristotelean 'virtuous man', because of Rowling's
emphasis on his balance and moderation, which was so important to
Aristotle (I'm experimenting with lining up the books to the Tarot
sequence, on account of the Tower card, and I'd associate Dumbledore's
heavy presence in this book with the Temperance card).  Dumbledore is
very powerful, mentally, magically, even physically; he is a leader of
his community; he tends to express appropriate emotions-- stern with
the Dursleys, twinkling and playful with the kids, repelled but
dignified with the DE's, etc. etc.  So, his good actions and his
well-ordered mind and feelings are in tandem.

Now Kant (who wrote in the late 18th century) at first accepted
Aristotle's model of virtue; but later in life he began to question
it. If you did a good deed out of friendship, was really a good deed,
or was just a way of getting pleasure, the animal pleasure of helping
a friend? Even if you were doing good deeds out of a desire to be a
better person, that still came back to a kind of self-gratification.
This worried Kant not because he was against pleasure, but because it
seemed shaky basis for a system of ethics. Can you really trust your
personal feelings not to lead you astray-- for instance, if you
dislike someone?  And were people with bad emotions not expected to be
capable of acting well?  Surely there had to be a sounder, more
universal basis for ethics, one that was not dependent on a person's
individual feelings?  As he put it:

"Feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a
uniform standard of good and evil, nor has
any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings."
(Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics)

Kant lived at a time of great scientific progress and wondered if you
could isolate what made a truly good action, the way you could isolate
what made a gas burn in a chemical experiment. You had to imagine a
situation where you removed all external self-interest from the person
doing the action-- liking people, wanting to be thought of as good by
their neighbours, even wanting to think of themselves as good.
Ultimately, he decided, the only PURELY good action would be done out
of sheer duty to 'supreme law', a rational moral code accessible to
all human beings who gave the matter enough thought. It had nothing to
do with having nice feelings:

"Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves
happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."  (Critique
of Practical Reason)

In other words, the professor on the radio panel said, Kant's ideal
ethical actor would be a miserable bastard with an iron will and a
devotion to duty.  Kant goes into quite an extended description of
this hypothetical person.  First, he describes the common idea of a
'good man'-- a jolly, good-natured, philanthropic sort.  Then Kant
continues,

“Suppose then that the mind of this friend of man were overclouded by
sorrows of his own which extinguished all sympathy with the fate of
others, but that he still had power to help those in distress, though
no longer stirred by the need of others because sufficiently occupied
with his own; and suppose that, when no longer moved by any
inclination, he tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and
does the action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone;
then for the first time his action has its genuine moral worth.

"Still further: if nature had implanted little sympathy in this or
that man’s heart; if (being in other respects an honest fellow) he
were cold in temperament and indifferent to the sufferings of
othersâ€"perhaps because, being endowed with the special gift of
patience and robust endurance in his own sufferings, he assumed the
like in others or even demanded it; if such a man (who would in truth
not be the worst product of nature) were not exactly fashioned by her
to be a philanthropist, would he not still find in himself a source
from which he might draw a worth far higher than any that a
good-natured temperament can have? Assuredly he would. It is precisely
in this that the worth of character begins to showâ€"a moral worth and
beyond all comparison the highestâ€"namely, that he does good, not from
inclination, but from duty.” (Groundwork of a Metaphysics of Morals)

I don't know about you, but, well, I just can't NOT think of Snape
when I read this!  I think Snape is exemplifying something important
about Rowling's moral philosophy that she shares with Kant (assuming,
as I always do, DDM!Snape), and that the 'source from which he draws
worth higher than a good-natured temperament' what she was talking
about when she said in an interview about Snape:

MA: Oh, here’s one [from our forums] that I’ve really got to ask you.
Has Snape ever been loved by anyone?
JKR: Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than
Voldemort, who never has.

To me this makes perfect sense, and also hits on the flaw in Kant's
'supreme law' that is supposedly accessible through pure reason. 
Psychopaths like Riddle are not deficient in reason, so why are they,
amongst the human race, incapable of moral understanding?  Surely what
they lack is not reason, but love. 

There's an interesting book, "A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues"
by Andre Compte-Sponville, where the author posits that Kant's
ultimate moral force would be better understood by love, rather than
reason, at least to begin with. It is through love that we really
conclude that another person is as magical and special as we are
ourselves. Only then, now using reason, can this feeling of the
importance of the individual life be extended outwards. Even if we
don't feel love for humanity in general, we can ground our feelings of
duty to other people on this initial experience of recognizing the
importance of someone outside ourselves.  The example that pops into
my head for this is "Casablanca"-- Rick "sticks his neck out for no
one", until his renewed love for Ilsa awakens his moral sense, even to
the point of giving her up for the greater good. 

Snape is more culpable than Voldemort because, in a Kantian sense, he
ought to have known better than to join the Death Eaters, as someone
with both an experience of love, and the strenth of will and reason to
extrapolate it.  Voldemort, in a way, isn't culpable at all, because
as someone with no love at all he has no way to access the universal
law that's the source of moral action.  This is why I root so hard for
Snape loving Lily as solving the central Snape mysteries-- because it
seems really important that Love should be a central mover in the
books, particularily to inspire moral action, and particularily in
people not otherwise inclined to it!

I wonder if this doesn't tie in with what the Life Debt is all about
as well-- there does seem to be a whiff of Kant's 'perfect good
action' in both Harry's and James' saving of their respective debtees,
in that neither of them really WANTED to save them, they just felt
they had a duty to a higher principle.  

This is mostly what I meant a while back when 'paged Dr. Kant' in a
discussion about Snape, but to get a little deeper into Kant's ethical
system- because it's been brought it up before, and because it does
tie into the 'right vs. easy' thing-- I should clarify (as far as my
limited understanding goes!) what Kant meant by 'duty to the supreme
law'.  For Kant, the supreme law, which anyone could understand by
excercize of reason, was that all human beings are important and equal.

You can recognize this strain of Enlightenment thought in the US
Declaration of Independence which was written around the same time:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created
equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inailenable
rights...".  These rights were not based on anybody's feelings, they
weren't begged of the King or of those in power because of their
benevolence and generosity-- the rights were simply inherent in the
individual by virtue of them being human.

>From this principle Kant derived two rules of thumb: that one should
treat all people as ends rather than as means; and (in a variation on
the Golden Rule), that no action could be considered right unless it
would be right if done by everyone, all the time, either BY you or TO
you.  This is where Kant's famous, terrible example comes in, that if
lying is wrong, it is ALWAYS wrong, and that if, for example, a man is
being pursued by a murderer, and the murderer asks you where his
vicitim is hiding, you should tell him.  Along with nearly everyone
else in the world, I think this is going a little far, and that
obviously he's ignoring the also universal principle that one should
try to protect people from murderers.  Kant's moral philosophy, while
laying an essential groundwork for Enlightenment ideas, especially on
the subject of human rights and liberties, is not exactly helpful as a
handbook for day-today moral behaviour.  Precisely HOW one goes about
treating people as ends, not as means, or how one balances competing
moral claims isn't part of what he talks about.  He also doesn't talk
much about what he means by 'actions'-- is Snape's meaness to his
students an 'action' or is it just a style of acting? His ideal
duty-bound misanthropist is bound not to be spreading a whole lot of
joy and laughter around, does that not factor into the moral equation?
 This is the part of Kant's moral's philosophy that Nora has an issue
with in relation to Kantian!Snape in post #146146 (I can't find her
more recent one that replied directly to one of my posts.. curse you,
yahoo search funciton, curse youuuuuu!!):

Nora:

>It was a
>lot easier, immediately following the shocking revelations of the end
>of GoF (which really have lost most of their kicker by now, haven't
>they?) to argue for Snape as the Believer In What Is Right Regardless
>of Personal Cost Or Inclinations.  The evidence for this was his
>turning away from the DEs, without any other information to
>complicate it.

>I'd say that it done be complicated by now, and furthermore, Snape
>has been revealed as a character driven by personal issues
>(regardless of whether Rowling ultimately puts a broadly-phrased
>white or black hat on them) to a degree that Kant doesn't apply well
>any more.


So, it's hard to say, depending on how you read Kant.  In the sense
that DDM!Snape is driven pretty much entirely by duty, his having
personal issues that react against that make him even MORE of Kant's
ideal actor.  The DDM interpretation of the Tower scene, for example,
is that Dumbledore's "Severus... please..."  is an appeal to Snape's
duty to protect the kids and the mission over his personal inclination
for martyrdom.  On the 'rules' thing, and the 'ends vs. means' things,
Snape runs into the same problems that Kant himself runs into, of
definintions and of not dealing with competing claims.  I think, for
example, that Snape would consider that he is treating his students as
'ends' as opposed to 'means', in that he's cramming their heads full
of Potions knowledge out of his duty to make them into people who
understand potions (treating them as an end), not to gratify any love
he has for teaching (using them as means to enjoy interacting with
kids, at the expense of their learning).  And I do think that it's
significant that the thing Snape constantly harps on about James, is
not his cruelty, but that he thought "rules didn't apply to him"-- so
rules, according to JKR, seem to be very important to Snape's
understanding of ethics.  In general though Snape's, er,
results-oriented approach to life, and most obviously the fact that as
a double-agent he practically lies for a living, prevents him from
being the perfect Kantian.  Although, as Kant himself said, "Out of
the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made"!  So
maybe he can be a crooked Kantian.

More running out of steam now, than actually concluding...

The Potter books are so incredibly rich in personalities and
situations you could find a philosopher to fit all the characters-- 
Sirius makes me think of Rousseau, and the romantic Natural man who
follows his noble-savage impulses.  Hermione's starting to edge
alarmingly towards a Nietzchean view of herself as a Superwoman whose
superior intelligence gives her dominion over lesser mortals...

Sydney-- why yes, I do have a storyboard due in a couple of days, why
do you ask?