Does abandoning GGT really help?

This my second formal paper for PHILOS C153B taught by Prof. DeWitt at UCLA.

In his attempted interpretation of Kant to account for moral perversity, Louden claims that Kant does not support the guise of the good thesis (what Kant called the old formula), namely the thesis that "to be motivated to pursue X, I must see X as being in some sense good." Rather, he introduced the idea of "the guise of the right", that "to be motivated to pursue X, I must see X as being (morally) right", and that we ought to act under the guise of the right – even though we are (as we know) not guaranteed to act under the guise of the right. When one does not act under the "ought" of the guise of the right (and not act under the guise of the good), it becomes possible for one to "reject the moral law in defiance" and to pursue evil for the sake of evil.

However, this account cannot be satisfactory unless it answers at least this further question: how does one not act under the ought/how does one reject the moral law in defiance? More specifically, he needs to explain how one can voluntarily elect to reject the moral law; for if one can only "reject" the moral law involuntarily, the "rejection" and the consequent actions would not really originate from the agent, and we cannot really attribute the moral perversity, if it exists, to the agent. What makes it harder is that such rejection must not only be voluntary, but shall also originate at least partly from a human faculty that is reason-guided – it would not be a case of moral perversity if moral laws were "rejected" by a mere animal, or if I end up only doing things immoral-seeming as a result of mechanism like patellar reflex; also, to act only for evil, the faculty needs to understand what evil is, which is an abstract property that cannot be understood without the help from reason/understanding. For there to be a genuine perversity, it must originate from a faculty that is (at least partially) constituted by reason, so that it can (1) fully recognize the value of morality yet still voluntarily reject it, and (2) know what actions are evil (and thus need to be done for the perversity). But Louden did not explain how this could be possible. This shall not be surprising, since (1) if the only aim of reason (or the faculty to reject morality, constituted by reason, as mentioned above) is morality/correctness of willing, then it would be impossible to explain how such rejection could be voluntary, and (2) if reason, or the faculty, has an aim competing with morality, then the account would really just become an awkward version of DeWitt's account – and her bifurcation of goods, as we will show, would remove Louden's need to reject the guise of the good thesis. Abandoning the guise of the good thesis does not help.

DeWitt's two-good interpretation goes roughly as follows: There are two goods, namely morality and happiness, where happiness is the net totality of agreeableness. These are both genuine goods valued by us and our reason, in the sense that we all genuinely aim for both of them in our actions. In cases where only one of them can be fulfilled, what we end up doing would show the subordination of goods within us. For example, if I really want to drink coffee, but the only way for me to get it now is to steal (e.g. I forgot my wallet), there are two options for me: to not drink it, or to steal and drink it. If I elect not to drink it, that's because I am abandoning the instance of agreeableness for the sake of morality, i.e. the good of happiness is subordinated under the good of morality. If, on the other hand, I elect to steal and drink it, I would be abandoning morality for the agreeableness, i.e. the good of morality is subordinated under the good of happiness. First of all, this allows us to explain how usual forms of evil could be possible: it is I voluntarily elect to steal, because I, who understand the value of morality and understand that stealing is immoral, yet still prioritize the other good, namely happiness, over morality.

But the above only explains how "evil for good" is possible – what about moral perversity, where one just rejects the moral law, and wills for evil just because it is evil? Easy, just make evil itself a good – i.e., the abstract property of evil can be agreeable to some people. In these people, moral evil is still evil, because it is against morality, a genuine good of theirs. But at the same time, it is also at the same time good, because their peculiar construction makes the abstract property of moral evil (or actions, etc., related to it) agreeable to these people, thus moral evil can further happiness, which is the other genuine good of theirs. When one is said to pursue evil for evil's sake, they are really pursuing moral evil for the agreeableness from moral evil. Since even completely rejecting morality and pursuing evil for the sake of evil can be good in the happiness sense, it becomes conceivable how reason, or a faculty of ours constituted by reason, can possibly voluntarily choose one over the other, because both kinds of goods are considered genuinely valuable by reason.

One may worry that the above account is not talking about true perversity, because as mentioned above, what this interpretation accounts for is "pursuing moral evil for the agreeableness from moral evil", and the agreeableness is a genuine good valued by us and our reason. That is, we are not showing how it is possible for one to pursue true evil for true evil, to pursue something in no way good for something in no way good. But is this really a problem? The real problem here should be, is such "true perversity" possible for us, or even any agent? If it turns out to be impossible, wouldn't the fact that the above account cannot show how such perversity is possible make the account rather more convincing? In fact, if we consider Kant's account of mind in terms of functions, it seems that we would arrive at something like "an absolute evil will would be good when it wills evil for the sake of evil", as argued in my week 10 reaction paper, which means that concepts such as "true perversity" or "absolute evil" could be self-contradictory.

There is one last question left unanswered. It is the "elephant in the room" – that is: "but still, why, would someone subordinate morality, a good that has unconditional value, under happiness, a good that is only conditional?" That question I cannot answer, and maybe can&should never be answered. Even taste doesn't seem to be able to account for that, for even someone who fully understands and values morality, autonomy, etc, and thinks those who subordinate morality under happiness ugly, can still be tempted to prioritize happiness over morality when they see the undeserved agreeableness right in front of them. No matter how good one is, as long as they are finite, moral evil would still always be a possible option for them, just as no matter how evil one is morality would still always be a possible option. But maybe we do not need to address this issue in this paper: even though both interpretations cannot explain why one would actually in some specific case act for evil, bifurcation of goods still is the better theory than the other because it explains how pursuing evil and moral perversity could be possible, and all of these can be explained without abandoning the guise of the good thesis.