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Article Excerpt
I am concerned to investigate courageous humility as a social virtue from a Kantian point of view. There are at least two obstacles in so doing. First, Kant is rarely thought to be a virtue theorist, and contemporary Kantian political theorists more often require not civic virtue, but only adherence to certain formal procedures that assure justice even in the face of an utter lack of virtue. (1) Second, recent discussions of civic virtue encourage moral minimalism. To expect too much morally of a citizenry is to undermine the hope of a successful society; we must therefore not be too demanding of the bearers of these civic virtues. Any citizen should be capable of them, without too much difficulty. This minimalist trend most often leads to understanding civic virtues as being merely instrumental: a state is virtuous if it assures the flourishing of a particular society, whatever the ends or purposes of that society are. (2)
My concern for Kantian humility as a social virtue thus bucks both Kantian methodologicalism and moral minimalist trends in recent literature. On the one hand, I do insist that Kant is a virtue theorist, even in the social realm; and, on the other, to claim humility as a potentially social or civic virtue rejects moral minimalism. I have already argued elsewhere that whatever his concern for rules and procedures, Kant is also a virtue theorist, so I will not defend that point here. (3) But to bring a more robust concern for virtue to the social level, while avoiding moral minimalism in a definition of the civic virtues, demands further discussion.
First, we must draw a distinction between the "social" and the "civil" or "civic." We can find in Kant's Doctrine of Right an appeal to the social, which is natural and pre-civil:
[A] state of nature is not opposed to a social but to a civil condition, since there can certainly be society in a state of nature, but no civil society (which secures what is mine or yours by public laws). This is why right in a state of nature is called private right. (6: 242) (4)
My interest in this pre-civil state of society is not so much that it is a realm of private right, but more basically that this is a pre-civil, but still social, realm. The state of nature is constituted by "societies," including "conjugal, paternal, [and] domestic societies in general, as well as many others" (6: 306).
Kant also speaks of this natural social realm as being at least "compatible with rights" (6: 306), thereby setting up an understanding of this natural, social state as grounding a realm of private right, a realm guided by external laws of freedom. Such compatibility is what Kant relies upon to move from this state of private right to public right, where the mere compatibility with law becomes the explicitly publicly lawful realm of distributive justice.
But we could also speak of this natural social realm as compatible with a law that does not permit of realization in externally enforceable laws of freedom, that is, with moral laws of internal freedom. Since this natural social space is a space logically previous to any external enforcement of public laws of "what is mine or yours" (6: 242), it makes sense to seek a compatibility for it with a law that already "exists" in some sense, that is, in the moral law that is found already in the rational being in this natural state.
And since it is in the distinction between externally enforceable and nonexternally enforceable laws that Kant distinguishes between the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue, (5) if we can make this move, we can also speak of this natural social realm as being compatible with the laws of virtue. That same natural society that grounds our entry into civil society and public right would thus also ground our entry into civil virtue. And the laws of virtue of an explicitly civil society would be grounded in the norms of this natural society of persons.
It must be admitted that within the Doctrine of Right, Kant does not suggest such a natural grounding of virtue. But in the Doctrine of Virtue, he hearkens back to this state of nature when he notes, in his discussion of the duty of beneficence, that in order to move beyond the maxim of self-interest, we must remember that human beings "are to be considered fellowmen, that is, rational beings with needs, united by nature in one dwelling place so that they can help one another" (6: 453). (6) Through an appeal to our natural state of connectedness to other persons, we can ground a concern for social virtues. (7) This appeal to a natural social state compatible with internal laws of freedom provides us with a strong normative standard that any actual, empirically existing human community would need to follow; we should expect no less of citizens in a civil society than would be expected in this natural social state that claims a compatibility with laws of internal freedom.
My main concern here is to discuss the social virtue of humility. To do so, we shall need to introduce a further articulation of the social space: it is subject to radical evil. Indeed, in the Kantian world-view, we can make most sense of any virtue if we understand it as a response to radical evil (as opposed to seeing "inclination" simpliciter as the enemy of virtue). This paper is thus split into three main parts. First, I further define the social space via Kant's account of radical evil. I then consider the social virtue of courageous humility. Finally, I turn to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, first to show late eighteenth-century Northamptonshire as a society subject to radical evil, and then to Mansfield Park's heroine, Fanny Price, as a shining example of the Kantian social virtue of courageous humility.
1. Social Evil
Our propensity to evil is the general tendency to place concerns for self above concerns for morality. Allen Wood has suggested that a propensity to evil develops only in society. (8) For him, radical evil reduces to what Kant calls "unsocial sociability," our tendency to be simultaneously drawn to and undermining of social ends. I do not agree with this account. I have, elsewhere, (9) gone into more detail about the good Kantian reasons to emphasize nonsocial, individualistic dimensions to radical evil. Kant's commitments to autonomy, the absolute value of individual moral agents, and the resulting curious category of "duties to self" all provide a general framework of individualistic commitments within which radical evil too must find its individualist moment.
But to admit individualistic expressions of radical evil is not to say that it does not find explicitly social expressions as well. To appreciate these, we need to explicate further what this realm of the "social" is. Kant defines the social through appeal to the fact that we share purposes with other persons. When we say that persons "share" a purpose, we are not identifying some super-individual social agent who acts corporately. Rather, we are making the more modest claim that individual agents share an obligation sufficiently similar that we are able to say of them, as a group, that they are obligated to act toward the same goal, value, or purpose; and, further, that there is some minimal awareness among these agents that this obligation or these obligations are so shared.
We can textually ground Kant's moral concern for shared purposes by looking to the value of a moral community to which he appeals in the Kingdom of Ends formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Kant claims there that the ultimate "purpose" of the moral law itself is a social, not merely individual, purpose. Despite the fact that moral worth is located within individual rational beings, and that the law is enacted through individual autonomous acts, the ultimate purpose of this law is to achieve a "systematic union of rational beings" under "common laws," a union in which rational beings are related to each other "as ends and means" (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4: 433). What precise ends or purposes can be attributed to this society of rational beings beyond Kant's appeal to a bare "union"--that is, a unity or harmonious interaction of its members related "as ends and means"--is a difficult question that I set aside for the present.
We can, nonetheless, take this moral demand for systematic unity of rational beings as a guide for understanding the development of civil societies, much as we did with his appeal to a natural social state compatible with laws of internal freedom. The Kingdom of Ends formulation provides a guide for the explicitly formulated positive laws of individual communities, and indeed, for its more unspoken, "common" laws. To the extent that an actual community of rational beings takes this ideal as regulative, guiding its own systematic unity as a community, we can speak of a specifically moral value attributed to a community of rational beings, qua community.
This moral community is pursued in any act whose maxim is in agreement with the Categorical Imperative. In this formal sense, every moral act is an act with social concern. Yet there are also acts with a more explicit social concern. Given Kant's nonconsequentialist leanings, such explicitly social acts must be those that take as their motivation a concern for...
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