Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 150217

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

> Well, exactly.  I don't understand how this conflicts with my view 
> of duty-bound Snape.  He's doing what he's doing for the sake of 
> moral law, and not for any other reason.  

Dumbledore doesn't seem to think so, at least in PS--the whole "go 
back to hating your father's memory in peace" thing.  If Snape is 
acting as he does out of search for his own freedom from the 
obligation, then he's not a good actor according to Kant.  He's more 
like Petunia--taking in baby Harry furiously and unwillingly, but 
doing it nonetheless.  (Anyone want to take that comparison and run 
with it?)  The proper embrace of duty, doing it for the sake of moral 
law in and of itself, requires doing it in complete freedom and out 
of no other motivation than respect and love for the law and the 
freedom of all other human beings.

> You can't get past his manner;  I see someone struggling to do the 
> right thing.  The idea of the struggle was very important to Kant.  

The problem is that both manner and motivation are of intrinsic 
concern to Kant.  Manner is what the whole Kingdom of Ends thing is 
about, after all.  That's part of what makes his philosophy so hard 
to follow, and one case where there is a potential analogy to virtue 
ethics: both theories care a great deal about why something is done, 
maybe even more than what precisely *is* done.  'Right' action for 
the wrong reason is not good, according to (a substantial 
foreshortening and compression of) both theories.  If that ends up 
obtaining in the series, interesting results--to say the least.

> I think Snape is trying to conform to the categorical imperative, 
> in a human as opposed to a perfect way, in that he doesn't treat 
> anyone in a way that his reason tells him is incompatible with it.

But if he were genuinely reasonable and rational, he would realize 
that his treatment of Harry (for instance) is irrational, and 
decidedly incompatible with the categorical imperative.  Same thing 
for his treatment of Neville, and for things like the temper tantrum 
at the end of PoA.
 
> If Snape didn't think Neville was important, he wouldn't care if his
> potions worked or not.

I don't think that's a given; he could value the correctness of the 
potion regardless of consideration of the student learning to do it 
correctly himself.  Being annoyed when things are done correctly does 
not necessarily mean that you have a concern for the ability of 
someone to do it thus--there's a gap in there which is bridgeable, or 
not.

-Nora finds Rowling's embrace of certain double standards 
particularly un-Kantian, but what can you do?