Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 150191

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Sydney" <sydpad at ...> wrote:

> 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.

I think the problem here is that you're taking the 'duty' aspect of 
Kant and trying to work with it alone, when it's built out of a 
number of very specific assumptions and arguments, especially the one 
about the perfectly good will.  He starts in the Foundations (oh, 
bless my old marked-up copy from first year) using duty as a way to 
illustrate precisely what he means by the perfectly good will, until 
you get (around 402 or something) "I should never act in a way that I 
could not also will that my maxim should be a universal law."  That's 
the core statement right there.

> 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.

But still, for Kant, unless Snape's actions are done with a good 
will, there can be nothing good about them.  I still don't buy the 
whole 'martyr' thing either, but it's not essential to strands of the 
DDM argument.

> 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.

But on the other hand, Snape has absolutely no problems with a 
somewhat...haphazard enforcement of rules for the students and such 
under his control.  He makes it personal, and he lets his favoritism 
out of the bag.  I think Neri's charge of Snape being somewhat 
mechanistic (there, describing a hypothetical perception of the Life 
Debt magic) has some teeth to it.  Rules enforced, but probably not 
with the Kantian awareness of the deep metaphysical nature and 
meaning of the rules--otherwise he wouldn't be inconsistent as he is.

For instance, remember that Kant's perfectly good will is perfectly 
rational, which is how Kant gets around the objection that "Each 
person *thinks* he's doing the objectively right thing."  From a 
Kantian perspective, showing cruelty to students in the pursuit of 
their education is not acceptable.

The thing that you cannot, cannot escape with Kant is how much he 
privileges consistency, and refuses the tendency to classify actions 
into the more and less important for moral evaluation.  He says 
pretty early on that that would be inconsistent and illogical.

-Nora is too lazy to type out Kant's fourth example of the dutiful 
man in the second section, but will only offer that it indicts 
someone for indifference and not using all of his faculties in the 
best way possible to actively help other people