Ethics and the common good: abstract vs. experiential.

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Ethics and the common good: abstract vs. experiential.

In "History, Reason and Hope: A Comparative Study of Kant, Hayek and Habermas," (1) Professor Richard B. Day endorses the theory of communicative action put forth by Jurgen Habermas as further contributing to Immanuel Kant's ideal of an "ethical commonwealth" in which every individual is treated "always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means." Conversely, Day holds that Friedrich Hayek's vision of a spontaneous order of free markets facilitated by limited, constitutional government "collapses Kant's project rather than continuing it" and is therefore inimical to the Kantian ideal.

I shall argue, on the other hand, that Kant is not the final word on personal or political ethics. Indeed, his thought suffers from a fundamental weakness that is retained by both Habermas and Professor Day and, to a lesser degree, by Hayek. The latter theorists have failed to incorporate into their thinking several advances over Kant's ethics and epistemology that profoundly affect how we ought to think about universals, including most especially that of the ethical. The result of this failure is a highly abstract view of ethics, both personal and political, that does not take into account the concrete circumstances of morality and also does not consider that rigid adherence to abstract principle may have adverse, even disastrous, consequences. There is an alternative to this flawed view which holds that moral universality and practical action can be synthesized. Contributors to the latter approach include Irving Babbitt, Benedetto Croce, and the contemporary theorist Claes Ryn, among others. In what follows, I shall demonstrate the deficiency, first of all, of Kant's ethical philosophy and, secondarily; of the positions espoused by Habermas and Day. I shall also present reasons why the alternative theory, sometimes called value-centered historicism, is superior when judged by its experiential results and why Hayek's social and economic prescriptions are largely compatible with this alternative theory.

In order to complete the critique of Kant, it will be necessary to contrast the epistemological foundations underlying his ethics with those underpinning the more recently developed ethical theory mentioned above. The latter epistemology was made possible by the emergence of philosophical insights that recognize the creative imagination, or intuition, as synthetic activity. Explicating the concept of synthetic imagination, for which ironically Kant's own work prepared the way, is essential to showing the possibility of man's grasping the particular situation in which he must act, including the likely consequences of pursuing alternative possibilities. The creative imagination points the way to remedying a major defect in Kant's ethics and in derivative ethical theories.

Before the conception of the creative imagination was formulated, intuition had been viewed as images in memory that resulted from the more or less random combination of discrete sense impressions. From this perspective, all that mankind could know directly from experience were isolated and transitory particulars that lacked any comprehensive meaning. To surmount this problem classical and Christian thinkers from Plato through St. Thomas Aquinas and beyond envisioned a realm of universals in which the good, the true, and the beautiful existed as eternal and unchanging forms. Man, according to this line of thought, could escape from meaninglessness in this world by adhering to unchanging rules of ethics, rationality, and aesthetics as determined by reason. For centuries morality in the West was defined as following eternal rules, which could be applied to different circumstances through casuistry. Gradually, however, the hold on man of universals that were no longer part of specific experience weak ened together with the authority of unchanging moral rules. After the skeptical criticism of Hume took hold in the eighteenth century, leading thinkers believed that there was little certainty remaining except in mathematics and abstract logic, which did not depend on knowledge from outside the mind itself.

The invaluable contribution of Kant (1724-1804) was to rescue thought from this philosophical cul-de-sac with his revolutionary concept of the "synthesis a priori," which was elaborated in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant agreed with Hume that the discrete representations of intuition are...

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