Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 150208

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

> 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.

Your bitter and duty-bound Snape is very much the approach to duty 
which Kant is talking about as being inadequate, though.  He starts 
things off "For it is not sufficient to that which should be morally 
good that it conform to the law; it must be done for the sake of the 
law."

Then, when talking about duty, he says "duty does not rest at all on 
feelings, impulses, and inclinations; it rests merely on the relation 
of rational beings to one another..."  This leads directly into the 
discussion about dignity--the intrinsic worth of the human being, 
which the person acting according to the Categorical Imperative 
cannot violate (no, really, it's impossible if you're genuinely 
acting according to the CI and your will is thus never in conflict 
with itself).

The idea of respect for dignity has a great deal of force in Kant's 
moral system; there's something incredibly high and beautiful about 
it.  It's what holds us together as a community of rational beings, 
when we have respect for those things which must apply to all of us 
and thus connect all of us.

> 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. 

Well, unless Snape were to by his will make his treatment of his 
students into a universal law and see perfectly rationally that it 
would hold valid, he's failing the CI in that case.  (And it does 
fail that test because of how it treats other people, such as the 
favoritism.  It's irrational to will favoritism into being a 
universal law--I trust the contradiction is obvious.)

The "in Snape's mind" is the kicker.  That's not good enough for 
Kant, as he explicitly discusses throughout even such a short work as 
the Foundations.

> 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.

I think you are really, really shortchanging the beauty and 
complexity of Kant's concept of duty and everything which goes into 
generating it.  But that's probably going to take us totally OT.

-Nora herself thinks that Rowling tends to be a virtue ethicist, and 
that's part of why she's *totally OK* with what comes across to 
listies as unfair double standards