Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 150207


> Pippin:
> I know almost nothing about Kant, but from what you and Sydney
> are saying, it sounds like Snape could be a  satirical critique of this 
> philosophy. He's someone who *thinks* he's utterly rational, 
> except for those occasional moments of CAPSLOCK rage when
> his mighty powers of occlumency fail him, but he has no idea 
> that his subconcious emotions and biases are influencing him
> *all the time*. 


Yeah!  See, I should have kept going.. I think Snape is an example of
both the strengths and the weaknesses of the duty-bound theory of
ethics.  On the one hand, what I find so compelling about it is the
idea, which I feel quite strongly about, that there's a critically
important distinction between niceness and goodness.  And I agree
wholeheartedly with Kant that anybody, regardless of their feelings or
culture, has a way to know the difference between right and wrong and
the capacity to act accordingly.  On the other hand, there's a great
many difficulties with acting exclusively out of duty, particularily
in terms of living a flurishing life.

Nora:
>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...<snip>
>But still, for Kant, unless Snape's actions are done with a good
>will, there can be nothing good about them. 

I'm not completely clear from your post, but I think you're confusing
what Kant means by 'good will', with an idea of 'benevolence', which
is natural as that's what most people mean by 'good will'.  Kant, by
the perfectly good will, meant that one was acting exclusively out of
a sense of duty to moral law.  He explicity excluded from the good
will things like being spiritually full of goodness.  The passage I
quoted in my first post about the guy who was cold and lacking in
sympathy and acts morally solely out of a sense of duty to do so, is
from the whole 'good will' section.  There's a super-clear and concise
little essay here: 
http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~sobel/Mystery_Glory/m_g6.pdf (sorry, it's
a pdf) distinguishing Kant's idea of Good Will from Hume's idea of
benevolence (actually, I think I've just found James' philosopher: 
Hume, who valued justice and benevolence)  

I do think Snape is at least ATTEMPTING to have a good will-- that
he's trying to be on the good side and to find a system of rules that
will enable him to do this, without actually being an instinctively
good person.  I think this is exactly the source of Snape's
frustrations with how the people who break rules all the time somehow
wind up being considered by everyone to be more on the good side than
he is.  

The eternal issue with Snape's teaching unfortunately merely re-raises
everything we've ever hashed out about what makes a good teacher and
what the definition of child abuse is etc etc, and we're unlikely to
resolve it here.  Suffice to say, I think in Snape's mind, he is 
putting considerable effort into fullfilling his duty as a teacher,
against his natural inclinations.  Your view of what the duties of a
teacher are obviously aren't the same as his. 

In a way this ties into the place Occlumency had thematically.  We've
been looking at this from the side of motivation to do good things,
but what about methods for coping with bad impulses?  Snape rants to
Harry that without learning Occlumency, Voldemort will penetrate his
mind and Harry will have no defence against his powers.  It's pretty
clear to me that Snape is talking about himself here, and that
learning to close his mind off to negative feelings by sheer
will-power was important in allowing him to leave Voldemort. Harry on
the other hand is just plain crap at closing his mind to begin with,
and a good thing to because in the end Voldemort and his dark feelings
were driven away by the blinding heat of love alone.  To me this whole
subplot is about how repressing and controlling dark feelings is ONE
way, and can be an important way, to cope, in the end the only way to
really deal with them is to bring them out into the light and overcome
them with loving feelings.  In the same way, doing the right thing out
of duty certainly has it's place, and it's by no means an
insignificant place, but in the end you'd be better off connecting
with the ultimate source of goodness which is love.

Pippin:
> So when he says that he tries to treat Harry like any other
> student, he is being completely  honest, as far as he knows.  
> He doesn't let his *conscious* hatred of Harry influence him, but
> he's wholly and hilariously unaware that his *unconscious* hatred
> makes him view everything Harry does in the worst possible light.

Which is exactly the problem with Kant.  Trying to act out of the Good
Will alone, without any feelings of benevolence to help out, leaves
duty and reason to swim upstream against a torrent of emotion.  It's
just bound to exhaust you. I think Aristotle is my favorite
philosopher because he would have taken this into account, being a
practical man;   but I really appreciate Kant as plug-in to explain
the idea that it's not just good-hearted people that we expect to act
well.  I guess that's why I'm so fascninated by Snape!  

-- Sydney