Very Respected Professor Allen, it is an
honour and a joy to receive you 'in my blog'. Today, our theme will be your
work on Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). More specifically, the discussion will be
about conscience. That is something very few people have these days, and
diamonds are expensive because they are rare to find, so that this is perhaps
an investment: in the future, this blog will be worth millions... I have just
used 'conscience' in the way most people would use this sigmatoid. Most people
on earth have morality tied to conscience inside of their Inner Realities: they
believe that saying, you don't have conscience, implies saying that the person
does not have their moral foundations in place. In 2000, I learned from one of
the biggest before me that Philosophy has the power of creating meaning that
not only goes beyond the lexicon, but may actually frontally oppose the world
references there conveyed by means of printed sigmatoids. Maybe that is the
case of Kant and this sigmatoid, conscience...
Very Respected
Professor Pinheiro, I am happy to contribute to the cause of popularising my
insights, findings, and understanding, but also to make of Kant’s name
something even greater. For Kant, it is your intellect and judgment, not your conscience, that tell
you what you ought to do. All of us have fallible intellects, and powers of
judgment, so we sometimes make mistakes. Those mistakes can be innocent, but we
are also sometimes dishonest with ourselves, and tell ourselves we've made an
honest judgment when we haven't. Conscience is a judgment separate from our
intellectual judgment about what we ought to do. Kant thinks it is an
"inner court" in which I play the role of accused, prosecutor and
judge. Conscience judges me guilty or innocent. I am guilty if I did not follow
my best judgment, or if I acted against it for corrupt reasons. I am innocent
if I did follow it, even if my best judgment was intellectually mistaken and I
innocently did the objectively wrong thing.
Very Respected Professor Allen, you have
very dense writing, to the point of making my 17 lines be worth ten of yours,
so that I beg you to go really slow here. Conscience sounds more like a
spiritual concept, according to what you said, since I now believe the human
soul is something like a one-dimensional being - aligning my thinking with the
‘flat-earth’ theorists’ - whilst intellectual judgement would belong to the
human body, physical brain, and therefore Kant is sounding more like Descartes
at this stage. Conscience is then like Hubbard’s idea of Personal Integrity:
you have it if you do what you think is correct. I would think that they
disagree as to what is ‘best’: basically, Hubbard believes that best is what we
want to do, but Kant seems to believe that best is what is moral. In here I am
concentrating on a very small piece of your so interesting token: ‘did not
follow my best judgement, of if I acted against it for corrupt reasons’. It
seems that Kant allows for us to be intellectually mistaken as for what is
morally correct, what is also very interesting: morality would have to do with
best use of Logic, which I assume is then Classical or Cartesian Logic, so that
there is good and evil, nothing else. In this scenario, if I think that loving
Hamish is a moral act, given the universe that I know, so say my Universe of
Knowledge is limited by my perception, so perhaps I am a person who ‘lives in a
bubble’, and all I know of life is what I am told by those who visit me inside
of that bubble, then my conscience tells me that I must do that, I do, and I am
innocent. If we find out that Hamish was always married with kids, hid his
marriage ring from me, as well as everything else, even with him appearing
every day to visit me ‘in my bubble’, as very-much-in-love partners do, then I
was intellectually mistaken about morality, even though, by the time of the
act, I was innocent, what then tells us that my conscience was clean.
Very Respected Professor Pinheiro,
Conscience is part of our rational nature, which we have as embodied
beings. I would see intellectual judgments, and moral judgments as two rational
functions of the same natural human being. A person can do what he or she
thinks is right, and still not be acting conscientiously, if the thoughts about
what is right were based on dishonesty or self-deception. People can want to do
some terrible things, so I cannot agree that what is best is always what we
want to do. Logic plays an instrumental role in deciding what to do, but moral
principles, such as human dignity, do not come from logic but from other
rational grounds. There are people who live "inside a bubble" and
think only what others tell them. Those people are irresponsible, and should
free themselves, and think for themselves. If they do what is wrong because
they don't have the courage to think for themselves, then they are not
innocent. You would be innocent if you were cleverly deceived by Hamish into
thinking he is single, and then found out later that he has a wife, and family.
But if you let yourself be deceived because you did not think critically about
whom to trust, and whom not to trust, then that is no longer innocent, and if,
in that case, you tried to pretend you acted conscientiously, you are just perpetrating
another guilty self-deception.
Very
Respected Professor Allen, perhaps I was here referring to the Myth of the
Cave, so to people who are artificially deprived from normal life somehow, say
because they have been enslaved, what modernly could equate having been
implanted a CIA bug, or a miniature of a satellite mobile through their ear,
that is, with no surgery, and, since it is slavery, totally without their
consent, and probably without their awareness. In this case, all they can see
is the shadows, or what those who ‘enter the cave’ want them to see through
those. You seem to point at the distinction between intentional, and
unintentional acts, but, at the same time, you seem to fail to recognise that
there are degrees of consciousness that are not readily accessible to us as we
live. Yet, from memory, Kant does recognise those degrees. The Bible talks
about us being punished by it only if we read it, so that one should not be
labeled ‘guilty’ until we can prove that the deception happened during full
awareness. There are perhaps several subtleties involved in all this, several
POVs, and also several concepts that need to converge to a single world
reference, and sigmatoid in our own Inner Realities before we can expose
something that leads to insights that matter. Perhaps you could explain how a
person can deceive themselves through practical examples involving Fuzzy Logic,
and levels of conscious awareness. Would the Collective Unconscious play a role
there? When you say it is not based on Logic, it seems that it is not rational,
so perhaps you could explain, through a practical example, how something is
rational but not logical. In my work, I suggest that we have something called
‘extended ID’, so that we could have a part of our morality in that area. Would
you think that morality, for Kant, is located at least in part there? You
write, ‘A person can do what he or she thinks is right, and still not be acting
conscientiously, if the thoughts about what is right were based on dishonesty
or self-deception’. The difficulties with this one are plenty: you yourself
proposed that people could more frequently do the wrong thing if going for
their own logic, and I agree with that. In this case, one needs a lot of
logical work over their own decisions, and body to get to sublimate, sacrifice,
and act in the name of morality, and therefore against their impulses. That
sounds like something that is mandatorily conscientious to me, so that I really
need a practical example to digest this token.
Very Respected
Professor Marcia, some philosophers, such
as Mill, think that conscience is a sort of conditioned social reflex, making
you feel pain when you violate rules society has taught you. He rightly
concludes that, as people become more enlightened, and think for themselves,
conscience (in this sense) will fade away, and be replaced by rational
judgments. Given what he means by conscience, I think he is right. Kant
distinguishes socially inculcated conscience from real conscience, and thinks
the conscience whose judgment we should follow is the one that involves
exercise of our own rational capacities, not the one involving inculcated rules,
and conditioned feelings. No doubt our rational capacities were acquired
through education by others, but true education has to be distinguished from
mere social conditioning or brainwashing. If we were all simply brainwashed
into thinking what we do, then none of us would be genuine moral agents at all.
Morality itself might then be an illusion we were conditioned to have. The idea
that there is a right, and wrong or that anybody should care what they or other
people do is for the birds.
Very
Respected Professor Allen, you now surprised me because I was not expecting to
have conditioning, especially self-conditioning, of the type I mention in my
work about the new model of the human psyche, taken out of the pile of items we
‘are allowed to draw’ when arguing in the direction of supporting Kant’s views.
Very
Respected Professor Marcia, some people think this is the way it actually is,
or at least they pretend to -- at least when they are doing philosophy, and
want to prove to others -- and to themselves -- that they are the cleverest person in the room.
I think they convince themselves that they are
clever, but probably don't convince others, unless the others are rather
foolish, and gullible. David Hume says that those who consider morality an
illusion are arrogant individuals who are just trying to show how clever they
are but cannot seriously mean what they say. Kant considers the position that
morality is nothing but a "figment of the brain," and gives reasons
to reject it. I am not sure he says everything he should have in response to
these sophistries, but I think he is right in rejecting them. When we are
honest with ourselves, and others, I think we all realize that morality is not
an illusion, and that responsible moral agents have both the fallible capacity
to judge what they ought to do, and the moral capacity to judge whether they
have made this first judgment honestly, and have followed their best judgment.
Kant
thinks that every person who is a genuine moral agent (who can be held
responsible for their actions) has the capacity to make the judgment of
conscience. Kant says that when we say of people that they don't have a
conscience, what we have to mean is that they don't pay attention to its
judgment. That seems to me right, since if they are moral agents at all (not to
be excused on grounds of absent or diminished capacity) then they must be able
to judge themselves in the way Kant says conscience does. I agree with him
about this. He also thinks everyone DOES make this judgment and can't help
doing so. To judge oneself in this way, he thinks, comes to us instinctively if
we are competent rational agents. There I am not so sure I agree. I think
people can, and often do, get so out of the habit of attending to conscience
that it might make sense to say that they don't even hold the inner court --
though if they are competent moral agents, they must be able to. The difference
here between Kant, and me may not amount to much. For if we are sufficiently
habituated to not attending to the judgment of conscience, it may simply be
unclear whether we make such a judgment, and then ignore it (as Kant thinks
many do), or instead do not make the judgment at all (as I tend to think most
people do most of the time).
Very
Respected Professor Allen, you are basically saying that, for Kant, I am
obliged to always be aware of my instinctive moral decisions, and make sure I
stop my action in time if my conscious being has a chance of judging it wrong
on the ‘plans to execute it’. I could illustrate this with a case scenario, and
forgive me if I now reveal all my passion for Contextualism, and dilemmas: my
Extended ID now makes me always wake up at 7 AM, regardless of the beep of the
alarm, so say that today, 27/10/2018, there was no beep. I am in a situation
where it is morally wrong for me, and in general, as for morality of where I
live, that I wake up at 7 AM, since that is before the time my husband, Hamish,
wakes up today. If I wake up before him, then he is lazier than his wife, and I
have been offered his position in top management at the company, since we both
work together. We are on TV, playing Big Brother, and that has to do with justifying
to the other members of the board of directors why my husband is the company’s
choice, not me. I personally, so from an individualistic point of view, would
love to be the top manager, so that pretending that I did not wake up at 7 AM on
national TV is violating my Personal Integrity (Hubbard’s concept). I would not
be deceiving myself, however, and would be acting inside of morality if
pretending. That is because my husband got me my job: I was more experienced,
more competent, but my resume was poorly written, and my references were from
overseas, a Last World nation. I owe him gratitude. It would be ‘unfair’ that I
‘stole’ this promotion from him because he is now in the same situation I was
before: slightly in disadvantage. I am acting as an agent, and I am not
deceiving myself as I ‘pretend’ not to have woken up before him on national
television. Now everyone believes he deserves the job more than me, and the
board feels supported, so that he will get the job. I did that because they
needed a ‘public’ excuse to put him on top, given my qualifications, experiences,
and competency levels. I cheated a little to favour him in the same way he
would have done when I got my first job at the same company, which we share in
the condition of employees. If I followed my Extended ID, and woke up in full
at 7 AM, there would be nothing in his favour, and he would not get the
promotion: I would get it instead. That is what I wanted, and it would be fair
from a cold employer’s, and even audience’s, perspective. By doing things in
the way I did, however, I am a ‘moral agent’ and proceed without deceit, what,
according to Kant, would be fair. Yet, I could be being unfair with myself, and
I could also have already paid the favour by giving him such a treatment in
relation to another situation, say sports played for prizes, so another
situation in another branch of our joint life.
Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods
Professor emeritus, Stanford University
Ruth Norman Halls Professor, Indiana University Bloomington
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Lecturer at IICSE University
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