CONSERVATIVE

necessary condition? There is a classic way to ground
the necessity of the Good. It involves tying Goodness
to existence. This is the approach we find in Boethius,
who bequeathed it to the whole Latin Middle Ages. He
presupposes that the Good and Being wax and wane
together, that they run parallel to each other. There’s no
difficulty in recognizing in this foundational assumption
the scholastic doctrine of the convertibility of the
transcendental properties, especially of Being (Ens) and
the Good (Bonum): ens et bonum convertuntur.
If every being, as such, is good, then the presence
of the Good is necessary wherever there is something,
which is to say, everywhere. The Good may even
stretch farther than Being, as Dionysius Areopagita
suggests. But turning to his mystical theology would
lead us too far. I agree with his doctrine, up to a point.
But it is recondite and far from our present-day ways of
thinking. Better, therefore, to proceed indirectly and in
more-familiar terms.
Let us begin with something very much of
concern in the modern era: human freedom. It is
something that ethics presupposes and fosters. Kant’s
account of the foundation of morals shows this with
great clarity. Ethical life is genuinely ethical if and only
if it holds in check the influence of external agents. To
be governed by something external to oneself leads to
what Kant calls “heteronomy”. When we are governed
by others, we are not responsible for our actions. We
may do moral acts at the command of others, but to
be a moral agent in the full sense requires us to obey
our own laws. We need to attain the condition of
“autonomy”, the condition of life in which our doing is
a direct consequence of our will. The truly good person
is thus the person who does good deeds at his own
command.
Yet in this we presuppose something. The good
deeds come from a subject that is already there. There
must be a self who is the seat of self-command. This is
not something we should take for granted. What kind
of subject is the source of free action? Whence comes
this moral subject?
We can begin by stipulating that this subject is
a rational being. It must be rational to be able to act.
As Aristotle points out, simple motion is not action. A
stone that rolls down a steep slope doesn’t act. Neither
does the plant that grows, pushes its roots deep in the
earth, and unfolds its boughs. Nor does an animal act,
properly speaking, for acting means implementing a
course of action that one has planned and chosen, in
freedom.
This should not lead us to assume that human
beings are the only moral subjects that exist. Kant
explicitly states that the subjects that abide by the moral
law are not necessarily human beings, but rational
beings in general. In the Critique of Practical Reason,
he insists that the moral vocation “is declared by the
reason to be a law for all rational beings in so far as
they have a will, that is, a power to determine their
causality by the conception of rules”. This moral calling
stipulates that the law we establish for ourselves must
be a universal law. “It is, therefore, not limited to men
only, but applies to all finite beings that possess reason
and will; nay, it even includes the Infinite Being as the
supreme intelligence”.
Schopenhauer poked fun at the idea and wrote
with contempt that Kant probably thought of the nice
little angels. He was right, even more than he knew. For
Kant appeals to the angelic mode of rational existence
as a way to dramatize what he sees as the all-conquering
power of reason. In “Perpetual Peace,” his meditation
on the triumph of righteousness and the end of history,
he seeks to show that the problem of building an
enduring political constitution is in principle soluble
even if the citizens are devils, provided the devils are
rational. If they listen to their calculating reason, these
utterly bad creatures can understand that it is in their
interest to live in peace with each other.
In his belief that reason can govern even devils,
Kant exaggerates the paradox that David Hume
expressed one generation earlier: that politicians should
take their bearings from the assumption that “every
man must be supposed a knave”. Modern thinkers have
generalized the insight. The trick is to design a political
system in which everyone has a self-interested reason
to play by the rules. Human society is a pack of wolves
domesticated by rational self-interest.
Now, one may ask whether this makes things
too easy. Did Kant not make his task too light? Did
he in fact choose the simpler case, while giving the
impression of choosing to scrutinize the more difficult
one? Because devils are so utterly bad, you can’t expect
the shadow of a good intention when they set up their
pandemonium. This would seem a terrible impediment
to any enduring political arrangements. But this is only
one side of the coin. The flip side is that, by choosing
devilish beings, one avoids the question of the temporal
and bodily existence of rational beings.
As do angelic beings, the devils float in what
Greeks called aiōn, and the Romans aevum, a time of
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Detail of “The Triumph over Evil” (c. 1550/1580) by
Anonymous showing many infants, playing instruments and
carrying weapons, while demons are dragged, hanged, and
pierced with arrows.
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Summer 2015