Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Morality, Universality, Species

Hume and Kant share a general structure of the content of Morality--a Universalist principle correcting Selfish behavior.  The main difference between the two is the source of the principle in individual experience--Sympathy vs. Reason.  In this specific contrast, Kant seems to have the advantage, since Reason is itself the origin of the concept of Universality, whereas, Hume has at his disposal only a concept of interpersonal Similarity that must be generalized from the base case of one and one other.  But the mysteriousness of the source of Universality in Kant's system--Noumenal impersonal Reason--signifies more than Universalist content.  The allusion to a 'Technic of Nature' suggests the possibility of a transcendent source of Morality, which, in the context of the Critique of Teleological Judgment might be a deity that is analogous to an artist in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.  But, it is not until Darwinism, with the focus on a Species, that it becomes conceivable that that source of Human Morality is the Species itself, in which case Universality signifies a genesis and a scope of Morality, above and beyond its content.  On that basis, the content of Morality might be Individualistic, e. g. Egoism, while its scope is still Universal, i. e. its scope is the entire Species, serving a function of the latter, e. g. an adaptive strategy. So, nascent in Kantian Morality is a more radical shift than one of content--one of function.

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