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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 558 the views of some particular Kantian such as Rawls or Scanlon, and some fictional collection of straw men - "the Kantians, or "contractarians" - whose purported views are too implausible to take seriously. Take, for example, her criticism that a Kantian Contract-Theoretic morality focuses merely on freedom under conditions of interpersonal conflict, whereas Hume attempts to solve the "deeper problem" of intrapersonal conflict and instability over time (MP 61). Clearly she cannot be leveling this criticism at Kant, who produced an epistemology articulating conditions for the unity of intuition, them and how they were manipulated rather than what they were (also see MP 263 for more specious arguments that "Kant's much admired version of autonomy ... turns out on closer inspection to be a monopoly of a few representative propertied males"). At MP 30 she verbally cartoons a "Kantian picture of a controlling reason dictating to possibly unruly passions," which, I have already argued, was not Kant's view, nor that of any Kantian I know of. At MP 84-87 she gratuitously attacks Kant's categorical imperative procedure as isolationist, his concept of autonomy as selfish, and his concept of the kingdom of ends as inherently patriarchal and lacking "procedures for shared decisionmaking." At MP 88 she faults Kant (1) for his assumption that the same reasoning capacities exercised on the same subject matter under the same conditions will produce agreement among the reasoners, on the grounds that actual rational people do disagree, (2) for neglecting to explain how to judge only matters of interpersonal concern - as though the kingdom of ends formulation of the categorical imperative did not address this very question, and (3) for failing to free his mind of religious prejudice, as though he had not argued repeatedly and bravely, against governmental pressure, that God's commands must obey reason rather than vice versa. At MP 115 she claims that only philosophers who do not "remember what it was like to be a dependent child or who [do not] know what it is like to be a parent or to have a dependent parent, an old or handicapped relative, friend, or neighbor will find it [plausible] to treat such relations as simply cases of co-membership in a kingdom of ends," thereby adding the presumption of authorial omniscience with respect to various philosophers' memories to her caricature of Kant's kingdom of ends. At MP 248 she lampoons Kant's concept of the social relations among nations as "a sort of Leibnizian harmony of moral monads." At MP 250 she faults Kant for the "elitist or at least selective individualism" of his thought. Aat MP 255 and 257 she makes much of Kant's sexism, as though every male philosopher in the history of philosophy with the possible exception of Mill were not also patently sexist. At MP 277 she faults Kant for seeing a link between formulations and applications of the categorical imperative on the one hand and the mores of his own society on the other, as though this redounded to the discredit of the categorical imperative. And at MP 290 she suggests that "it might be easier for men than for women to be helped to self-definition by a reading of the full corpus of Kant's works," thereby managing to insult and confuse simultaneously all the women who have found it easy to be so helped and all the men who have found it difficult. Of course none of this prevents Baier from enlisting Kant in her own cause when this is convenient: As we have already seen, she uses a universalization argument to minimize the damage that would be done in a society governed by shaming principles, appeals to "rules and recipes" that may help us design lasting schemes of cooperation, and to the presence of a categorical imperative as one of the benchmarks of a genuine moral theory. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
