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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 536 8 from human society for those guilty of bestiality, grates on the sensibility that employs "laughter more than hectoring commands" (MP 289), and for this Baier takes him to task. "One wonders," she comments, "about the moral quality of mind and heart of the moral philosopher who is so sure of who deserves death, castration, and ostracism, and so sure that rational social contracts will provide jobs for executioners, castrators, and deporters" (MP 273). She questions Kant's edict that we should require of ourselves what God would require of us, and to judge ourselves as harshly; and ridicules him for then suggesting that we should cultivate the enjoyment of self-discipline: "This could be seen as deontology's bad conscience, its backhanded concession to a more Epicurean ethics. ... Nietzsche's comment ... seems fair enough: that a bad smell of sado-masochism, the reek of blood and torture, lingers on the categorical imperative" (MP 276-277). In comparison, Hume is the very model of lenience: According to Baier, his statement that the merits of human beings would be scarcely worth the 9 value of a supper to the righteous and a drubbing to the wicked shows his disinclination to inflict any harm on an agent in retribution for one dereliction, when that harm may cause suffering to the entire character (MP 273-4). On Baier's view, it is not possible to localize punishment within a person so as to reform the vicious part without injuring the virtuous part; and she believes that we should always look "for the social fault behind the individual fault," and take "the responsibility for evil to be shared, never localizable in individual criminals" (MP 288). She does not explicitly draw the implication that we should therefore refrain from punishing individuals at all, but this would be a natural inference. Baier is particularly incensed by Kant's reasoning regarding how to handle unmarried mothers who commit infanticide. He advocates leniency on the grounds that the victim is not a person whom the law need protect, not on the grounds of sympathy for the mother's social disgrace. While all human deaths require retribution, Kant thinks that God, rather than a human court is the appropriate avenger in this case, since the function of human magistrates 10 is to apply human law to those within its scope. "I should think that Kant's current defenders and admirers must find [this] discussion particularly difficult to recast in a sympathetic way," she comments (MP 277). "This is a pretty shocking and cruel bit of Kantian moral reasoning, cruel in its apparent disregard of the fate of innocent victims" (MP 278). 8 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Pt. I, The Doctrine of Right, on the right to punish, pp. 140-145, 168-169. 9 David Hume, Essays: Moral Political and Literary, Ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1985), pp. 594-5). 10 Gregor, Op. cit. Note 8, pp. 144-145. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
