Allen W. Wood Quotes (1942-)

“John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed everything. It showed not only that ethical theory could be treated with analytical sophistication and applied to issues of vital social concern but also that Kantian ideas were indispensable to doing this in the right way. Rawls’s thought never stagnated, however. He continued reflecting on how the Kantian liberal tradition can best be articulated in the late twentieth century.”

“Kantian ethics is fundamentally committed to a radical critique of human social life, especially of social life in its “civilized” form. This critical tendency is not a mere ancillary feature or contingent concomitant of Kantian ethics. It conditions the fundamental conception of Kantian ethical theory.”

“Among those who stressed the ‘autos’ were Kant’s early [[w:German Romanticism|Romantic followers and critics (usually both followers and critics at once) who thought that each of us should be the author of our own morality. My morality, therefore, is valid only for me, as an expression of my unique individuality. After all, a moral law proceeding from my will seems by that fact alone to be a law valid only for me, perhaps even a law whose content is subject to my whims and arbitrariness. But that leads to a natural question: How can a law bind me at all if I am its author, because that apparently puts me in a position to change or invalidate it at my own discretion? The same thoughts, once we try to answer this question, might also lead in the direction of associating the concept of moral authority with some notion of individual “authenticity,” “choosing oneself,” or “becoming who one is,” sometimes taking those who travel this road beyond morality entirely. For just that reason, however, the self-esteem which appears to ground Kantian morality can begin to seem (as it does to some of Kant’s critics) like a kind of arrogance or even a perverse self-deification, in which each person blasphemously usurps the traditional place of the Deity as the giver of moral laws. The tradition that went in this direction therefore included some, such as the later Schelling and Kierkegaard, whose encounter with Kantian ethics ended (paradoxically) in some form of “theonomy” or theological voluntarism that either preserved the notion of autonomy only by a speculative pantheist merging of the self and the Deity or else rejected outright (as a demonic or satanic principle) the whole idea that the rational creature might tear itself away from its creator and claim authority over itself.”

“The dominant model is not a good one for understanding the ultimate basis of moral value, for grounding our present moral beliefs or for pointing the way to radical revisions in them. For these tasks, the older, more philosophical model found in Kant and Mill is far better.”

“Kant in fact seems to have begun his reflections on moral theory as an adherent of Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense theory. Even after abandoning it, he persists in maintaining the importance of “moral feeling” and tries consistently to make a place for it within his moral psychology.”

“Kant’s moral outlook is also fundamentally determined by a subtle, shrewd, historically self-conscious (and characteristically Enlightenment) conception of human nature and human psychology that most treatments of Kantian ethics (even sympathetic ones) have largely overlooked. This side of Kant owes a great deal to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it belongs to a radical tradition in the social criticism of modernity whose later representatives include Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Karl Marx. The Kantian mistrust of our empirical desires reflects a Rousseauian picture of the way our natural desires have been influenced by the loss of innocence – the restless competitiveness – characteristic of human beings in the social condition, especially as found in the social inequalities of what Rousseau and Kant called the “civilized” stage of human society but was later renamed “modern bourgeois society” or “capitalism.” Again, to miss this continuity is not only to misread Kant; it is badly to misread the history, and even the living reality, of the social order that is all around us.”

“For as a hedonist, Bentham apparently bases moral status not on the dignity of rational nature but rather solely on the capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And this is clearly different from the Kantian position. Yet I claim that Bentham’s idea here is in general terms not inconsistent with Kantian ethics but is instead a corollary of the Kantian position. I would even claim that Kantian ethics provides a better justification for it than Bentham’s hedonism–a shallow empiricist doctrine that cannot account properly even for the values it assigns to pleasure and pain in human beings. […] Nonhuman animals do not have the capacity to reason or to talk. Therefore, beyond making the obvious point that they are not persons in the strict sense, whether they have or lack these capacities is irrelevant to how we should treat them. Bentham is therefore correct in telling us not to ask about these matters when we are deciding how to treat animals. What is relevant, because it relates their capacities to those of rational nature, is the fact that they can suffer, and desire, and sometimes also care – about members of their own species, or even occasionally about members of other species, such as humans. Bentham is therefore also correct in telling us what we should ask about these capacities, for they are the relevant ones. Bentham is correct, however, not because Kant is wrong, but because Kant is right.”