Jesus, Kant, Bentham, and the apparent death of love, part one.

I

What is the place of love in contemporary ethical thinking, as it is manifested in the practical deliberations of our day? 

At one level, you might say, love never had it so good. The 1960s social revolution was in many cases a turn from notions like ‘duty’ and ‘honour’ to ‘love’. The individual, subdued by duty and suppressed by honour, expresses him- or her-self in love. The two mid-century wars had, so it seemed, expended (and at points, wasted) all the reserves of duty. Now, the principle of love, not bound by any tradition or greater principle or deity, was to have its way.

We hear this plea in the lyrics of the Beatles (‘All You Need is Love’), but also in ‘high culture’. As he gazed at the scarred and broken statues of a medieval knight and his lady placed on top of their tomb, Philip Larkin, that rather grim agnostic poet of 1960s England, was reflecting something of his age when he wrote of his ‘almost-instinct, almost true’: that ‘what will survive of us is love’.

With no other plausible transcendent principle left, the spirit of eros appeared to fill the vacuum. It was, so it appeared, the triumph of Venus and Cupid. 

However, I wish to argue that this triumph of a certain form of love was a fluffy pink veneer covering over some more persistent and in the end dominant forms of thinking about human moral behaviour. This train of thought was suggested to me by reading social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided on Politics by Religion. 

Haidt argues that “The two leading theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing”. The two men in question were Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Immanuel Kant. Both of these men, Haidt suggests, suffered from something akin to Asperger’s Syndrome. They were not given to empathizing as much as to systematizing – and (more’s the point), it shows in the moral philosophies that they produced. They were both attempting to place moral philosophy on a rational footing – to give it an objective grounding external to human feelings, but without restort to divine commands. 

Bentham the Englishman was born in 1748 and trained in the law. At the heart of his proposal for ethics is the principle of utility – famously: “the principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question”. Bentham then went on to propose a measure of happiness, “hedons”, and even an algorithm, the “felicific calculus”, by which he could come to the final analysis of utility of any given action.

Now, while there was an emotion involved in Bentham’s ethics – “happiness” – it was there by dint of an attempt to objectively quantify it. The weakness of his proposal is that such a measurement is clearly impossible, and even undesirable. Even if we could calculate the happiness of a given action, is happiness a goal or a by-product of human living in the world?

And yet, the influence of Bentham’s curiously bloodless ethic has been profound – especially when the nearest substitute for “hedons” – namely, money – is involved. Given the impossibility of measuring happiness, but the appeal of an ethic in which we can actually measure what is good with actual numbers, money will do. UNSW historian John Gascoigne maps the deep influence that Benthamite utilitarianism had on the formation of Australian culture and politics. Often this was in strange but practical agreement with the Christian churches, it has to be said.

Immanuel Kant, the Prussian, was born in 1724. He was a popular man amongst his peers, although a man of regular, almost obsessive routine, it has to be said. Like Benthan, he wanted to place morality on an objective and universal footing – protecting it from rampant and chaotic subjectivity. Rational creatures surely would come to the same conclusion about the good in every possible time and place. Morality had to have a timeless form. 

Kant’s single rule he called the “categorical imperative”, and here it is: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. This was less maths, and more logic than Bentham. There are echoes of course of Jesus in what Kant asserts here: it sounds like a systemisation of the Golden Rule. 

The appeal of the Kantian rule is that it appears to act as a check to our self-interest. I cannot have a contract taken out against my enemy unless I think it is also good and right for him to take out a contract against me or against someone I love. If it is not right for him, it is not right for me either. 

That’s a helpful principle to stop the social order imploding. But it tells us nothing about the meaningful content of our lives. Of course it is massively useful to have even the attempt to ground human moral activity in some principle that transcends the merely subjective. A purely relativistic morality will end up in cannabilism eventually, so barbaric is it. We will tell ourselves we are being true to ourselves just as we chew on the barbecued legs of our neighbours. But if it tells us nothing about our inner experience, and indeed wants to prevent us from the entanglement of our loves and interests, it is surely of dubious value. 

Haidt claims that “As Western societies became more educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, the minds of its intellectuals changed. They became more analytic and less holistic”.  For Haidt, this is not because reason has no place; it is rather that we ought to recognise that we simply do not make our moral decisions in a primarily analytical way, and we therefore are limited in the ability to persuade. There is an anthropological lacuna at the heart of Kant’s ethic, which is that we are creatures who have commitments, and loves; and furthermore, that we fail to do our best moral reasoning when we simply set these aside. 

What of the 1960s turn to Eros? Well even that had its roots in Bentham, and in Kant, but spoken in the name of love. Love was code for “express yourself as long as you do no harm” – that is, maximize your own pleasure with freedom so long as you don’t in your taking of your pleasure harm others. It asks you to make a calculation about harm, and to universalise in an apparently objective way.  The vagueness about love as a virtue was entirely deliberate: ‘love’, a concept for which English has only one very malleable word where Greek has four, is used as a cipher for freedom of self-expression and preference. Though the word ‘love’ implies a something that transcends the self, under this usage it is not framed by any considerations of nature or by reference to any transcendent other, since it emerges from me as a pure expression of my inward self. Ironically, the attempt to provide an objective ground for morality bequeathed to us an almost untrammeled subjectivism.