Royal Institute of Philosophy

Kant's Psychological Hedonism

Author(s): A. Phillips Griffiths
Source: Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 256 (Apr., 1991), pp. 207-216
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
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Kant's Psychological Hedonism

A. PHILLIPS

GRIFFITHS

As far as consideration of man as phenomenon, as appearance, as an

empirical self, is concerned, Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing
psychological hedonist.1
It is necessary immediately to qualify this in one, though only one,
Hobbes
respect. For Locke, for example, the will (willkiir)-what
called endeavour-towards or endeavour-fromwards-could
be determined only by pleasure or pain, a mechanical relation of cause and
effect. For Kant, the human will could never be so determined, but
only influenced. This he makes trenchantly clear in the lectures on
ethics, given just before publication of the First Critique, and its
possibility and necessity argued in the resolution of the third Antinomy
of the First Critique, in the Second Critique, in the Groundwork, and
elsewhere. It requires conceiving a person as having a noumenal as well
as phenomenal aspect. This is something a man cannot lose. Hence, if
someone allows himself to be wholly influenced by what is pleasant or
painful, he becomes more like a beast, but nevertheless radically unlike
a beast, since a beast's actions are pathologically compelled, as a will
arbitnrum brutum, whereas a man's actions are only pathologically
influenced, even if wholly so, as a will arbitrium liberum. For the beast,
the relation between stimulus and action is mechanical, as cause and
effect. Kant says when a dog is hungry and sees food, he must eat
whereas a man can restrain himself. But this need not be so; a dog can
be trained not to eat until given the command, even when he is hungry
and in the presence of food. Now how is this different from another
example Kant gives, of a man who claims that, when moved by lust, he
must enter a brothel; of whom Kant points out that he would not, if
there were a gallows outside on which he knew he would be hanged on
coming out? We can say that the dog does not restrain himself, but is
restrained by fear of his master; equally, the man does not restrain
himself, but is restrained by his fear of the gallows. The man might also
I do not know what were the important antecedents of this view for
Kant, whether Hobbes, Locke, Hume or Helvetius; in my view Hobbes is
quite mistakenly regarded as a psychological hedonist, and Hume is hardly
straightforwardly one; the more plausible antecedents would be Locke,
and, perhaps even more so, Helvetius (L'Esp'rt was published in 1758 and
was of course well known in Germany, which Helvetius visited in 1765).
Philosophy66 1991

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A. Phillips Griffiths

be restrained by his consciousness that going into the brothel would be

contrary to the moral law; but it is clearly Kant's view that in both cases
the man would be actively restraining himself, and not merely being
passively restrained.
The difference for Kant is that the man deterred by the gallows is
not, like the dog, wholly compelled by a conjunction of hunger and fear,
but that he allows himself to be wholly influenced by the conjunction of
hunger and fear. But that is to assert of the man only a negative
freedom. There is so far no ground for attributing it to the man, no
more than there would be for saying that dogs could restrain all their
sensuous inclinations, but as a matter of fact on every occasion decide
not to do so. Equally, for Kant, it is no good saying that we observe that
men act against all their sensuous inclinations, because, he points out,
we can never know that there is not some hidden inclination not taken
account of. To make this distinction between the man and the dog (or
are not here concerned with animal
the wholly mythical dog-we
psychology) we must point to some positive ground for it. It is that the
man, unlike the dog, can be moved by reason.
Without this capacity to be moved by reason, there would be no
possible ground for making this distinction. The man outside the
brothel has the capacity to be moved by reason, whether he is or not.
Indeed, we may even say that even if it is only the thought of the gallows
which deters him, he is moved by reason, though only in part; for he
sees that going into the brothel is, because of the gallows, incompatible
with his enjoying life, and hence that not going into the brothel is a
necessary and indispensable means to that end; hence he accepts the
rational imperative, 'I ought not to enter the brothel'. But while this is a
rational principle, dependent on the analytic principle that he who wills
the end must will the means, it is only partly rational, because it
depends in part on something not given by reason, the end, which is
given by his sensuous inclination towards enjoyment.2
2 Kant obscures this somewhat
by saying that such a man, being only
partly determined by reason, is only partly free; but his main doctrine is that
such a man, since he is capable of acting wholly in accordance with rational
principle, is wholly free; not so much half a dog as no dog at all. It is the
former way of talking into which Kant frequently slips which leads to the
misinterpretation that a man is only free when acting from duty, and hence
wholly determined, and hence wholly unfree, and hence not subject to
moral blame, when he acts wrongly. Kant's remark (in the Lectures on
Ethics) that the freer a man is from stimuli, the more he can be compelled
morally, and the degree of his freedom grows with the degree of his
morality, similarly leads to the misunderstanding that a man is wholly free
and wholly moral only when he is totally indifferent to everything except
the moral law; if, indeed, it is entirely a misunderstanding rather than a

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Kant's Psychological

Hedonism

Another way of representing this difference between a man and a dog

is to say that the man as a rational being acts from maxims, which are
rules having a certain generality, which a dog presumablycannot. That
is, in acting a man conceives his action as falling under a certainrule. An
action in the full sense must be one in which he conceives himself
(though not necessarily bringing this to full explicit consciousness) as
doing something as following from a rule for the will, rather than just
finding himself doing something, like sneezing.
Kant's referencesto and examples of maxims and of their formulation
are sometimes perplexing, and have been the subject of a great deal of
discussion. I can only cut into such discussion here, by assertingthat
Kant'sposition is that a maxim must be a rule for the will from which the
action follows; otherwise it is no more than a specificationof the action
itself. This does not mean it is a rulewhich commitsthe agentto any future
action, still less a statementof how he consistentlybehaves; an agent can
changehis ends. But it must be somethingwhich, if fully expressed,would
have to be vastly more complex than the examples Kant gives.
Take his example: I make it my maxim 'to increase my property by
every safe means', which I take to be 'whenever it is safe to do so, I shall
do whatever increases my property'. This formulation is good enough
to submit it to the test of the categorical imperative, but it is clear no
sane man could adopt it tout court, since it would mean he could never
buy food or go to sleep, unless it was unsafe not to do so. This is not an
unserious point; Kant must think a maxim implies the agent's willingness to adopt all the actions following from it, because of the use he
wishes to make of maxims in applying the test of universal law. In this
case, particularly, it implies the action of denying a loan has been made
to him when the contrary cannot be proved. He thinks, quite extraordinarily, that if this were universally done, there would never be any
loans; but that this is quite silly does not affect my point; that in
adopting a maxim one is thereby willing to act on everything which
follows from it; otherwise,Kant's test could not be applied. So, in so far
as a maxim can seriously be adopted, it must envisage all that it might
commit one to.
This throws doubt on my ever having maxims of the required kind.
This point must not be confused with the difficulty that it is impossible to give the full, conscious formulationof a maxim; that would not be
disputed by Kant. Elsewhere, he is willing to allow cognitions which
cannot be consciously exhausted-for example, the definition of given
caricatureof himself that Kant was prone to fall into; or, indeed, it now
occurs to me with regard to this particularremark,the inattentionof
FredericoBrauer,who took down notes of Kant's lectureswhich include
referencesto a paintercalled Argastiinsteadof Hogarth.
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A. Phillips Griffiths

concepts, or the concept of 'right' in jurisprudence. That alone would

not vitiate the possibility of using Kant's test of universallaw, any more
than one's inability to set out all the implications of a geometrical
proposition would make any reductio proof impossible to give, though
it might make it impossible to give every reductio proof.
The difficultyis that any maxim I might sanelyadoptwould surelyhave
to have an ineradicableceterisparibus clause, orprimafacie character.It
is not just that, given certaindifficultcircumstances,I do not knowwhat I
could now steel myself to do, though that is pertinent; it is that I do not
knowwhat, in all sorts of possiblecircumstances,I would want to do, still
less approveof the whole world doing. This is because I have all sorts of
differentcomplexly relatedor independentinterestsand concerns, any or
many of which might be brought to bear in a particularsituation, but
which I cannotpossiblyarrangein some orderof prioritiesor anysimpleor
even complicatedsystem. I know roughlywhat sort of fellow I am but not
fully what I am, if indeed I am exactlyanythingratherthan a centreof all
sorts of disjunctive possibilities. Perhaps, sometimes, when I choose, I
become somethingthere neverwas before. I do not knowof anyschematic
generalprinciplewhich I could acceptas being the Kantianmaximof any
action, still less of all my actions, (cf. Kant'sremarkson Schematism,and
in particularon the necessityforjudgmentin the particularcase, in the first
Critique.)
Nevertheless, Kant thinks there are two, though only two, such
maxims. The first is the maxim of acting on that maxim which is in
accordancewith universal law (which I test by seeing whether I could
will it to be a universal law of nature); the second is that of doing
whatever gives more pleasure than pain. Anything which does not fall
under the former, must fall under the latter. It does not matter that I
may not know in advance what things-perhaps things I have not yet
heardof-will give me pleasure. It does not matterthat I may not know
in advance of examining them what actions may not be in accordance
with universal law. That is merely an ignorance of how the rule will
apply, not of the rule itself. It is not like the difficulty I spoke of before,
of having all sorts of things I care for for their own sake, which are in
various vastly complex ways related or independent. There can only be
two things I care about for their own sake, one, qua rational being,
acting in accordance with pure reason, the other, as a phenomenal
being, acting for the sake of pleasure.
Even a psychological hedonist would not have to adopt Kant's
egregious thesis, if he rejected Kant's account of maxims. Someone
who holds that every action is done for the sake of pleasure need not
hold that one is aiming at whatever will give most pleasure, nor would
that follow. Still less need he hold, or does it follow, that one is always
aiming at what gives a preponderance of pleasure over all actions
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Hedonism

(Kant's notion of happiness), any more than it follows that someone

who aims to hit each of a hundred targets is ever aiming to hit more than
one target, let alone a hundred targets.
But if one were a Kantian psychological hedonist, though without
the qualification to it he makes, one would have to think the maxim of
following pleasure was the only possible one, in so far as one were
rational.
This conclusion does not require a laborious combing of passages in
the Lectures on Ethics, the Groundwork, the First Critique, or his
Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, though I have combed
them and find many such passages which impressively reinforceit. It is
one established beyond cavil by what must be the most authoritative
expression of Kant's position: namely Theorem I, Theorem II and its
corollary, and Theorem III, of theAnalytic ofPure Practical Reason in
the Doctn'ne of the Elements of Pure Practical Reason in the Critiqueof
Practical Reason.
Theorem I starts by claiming that all principles which presuppose an
object as the determining ground of the will are empirical. It is clear,
and made abundantly clear from Kant's classification of all possible
practical principles in the second remark to Theorem IV, that this
refers to all practical principles whatever except practical universal
laws. In the case of all empirical principles, the object is not itself the
determining ground, since it may never exist or come to be; it is rather
the conception of the object as giving pleasure to the agent if it becomes
real. This pleasure is a feeling or sensation. It is not however the
sensation which determines the will, but the expectation of it.
(It may seem that what distinguishes autonomous from heteronomous motivation is that in the former case it is a mere thought-of
what is in accordancewith a universal law-which motivates. But what
is the expectation of pleasure, more than a mere thought? It is not,
however, easy to pursue this point through the thickets of Kant's
account: as we shall see below, even the mere thought concerning law
must have its phenomenal motivational counterpart.)
Thus expectation of pleasure is the only possible motive other than
respect for the law. Even where it may seem that the motive must be
respect for the law, we can never be sure that it may not really be a
hidden expectation of pleasure-one hidden even from the agent.
Given that, it is extremely difficult to show that Kant must be wrong;
one can no more produce a counter-example than one could produce a
counter-example to the principle that every event has a cause or that in
every act of affection towards any living thing there is an arcanesexual
motive. It is no good pointing out cases where the determining object or
state of affairs is one from the existence of which the agent could not
possibly expect to get pleasure, such as making a bequest. It cannot be
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A. Phillips Griffiths

said that the object here is the making of the will or testament, which of
course can be conceived as giving pleasure to the living agent, since this
may be a mere means, and the end, the inheritance of the bequest by
someone, that for which the means is adopted; so that, for example, if
one found out that the intended beneficiary, say one's wife, would
necessarily inherit by law, so that one need not do anything, then one
would not do anything. No, the object here is clearly a state of affairs
which would obtain only after the agent is dead. But Kant could reply
that even if the agent would not expect pleasure after death, he could,
though without knowing it, be motivated by the expectationthat he will
avoid present pain if he can avoid having to think his wife might be left
penniless; something which would be removed, if she is to inherit
whatever he does. Such ingenuity can always fudge up some such
entirely baseless and completely irrefutable supposition which would
save this a priori principle.
I reject this doctrine as false not because I can show it to be false but
because there is not the slightest reason to believe it to be true and very
good reason to think it utterly repugnant, derogatory and degrading.
It implies that apart from the end of acting in accordance with
universal law, no end is better than any other: where all that can be
appealed to is the degree of intensity of pleasure; given that that is the
same in both cases, pushpin is as good as poetry. Mill recoiled from this
and suggested that pleasure itself can be rated good or better not only in
terms of its intensity but its quality. Its status as higher or lower is
conferred on it by its object, for example whether its object has its
origin and status in the understanding; a suggestion on which Kant
pours scorn in advance. 'However dissimilar the conceptions of the
objects' Kant says in Remark I to Theorem II, 'the feeling of pleasure
(since it is the agreeablenessand enjoyment which one expects from the
object which impels the activity toward producing it) is always the
same.' There can be nothing to choose between expected occasions of
pleasure, except the sheer magnitude of pleasure. If the determination
of the will of an agent depends on the feelings of agreeableness or
disagreeablenesswhich he expects from any cause then, says Kant 'it is
all the same to him through what kind of notion he is affected. The only
thing he considers in making a choice is how great, how long-lasting,
how easily obtained, and how often repeated, this agreeablenessis.'3
What makes this so repugnant is not that it reduces all human nonmoral (in Kant's sense of moral) ends to the same level of value, but that
it seems to rob all except one possible one of having any value at all.
3 It would be a nice thought if it could be shown that these desiderata
were the originof Bentham'scategoriesof intensity,duration,propinquity,
and fecundityin the calculusof pleasures.

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Kant's Psychological

Hedonism

What is good about playing football, composing music, being married,

or whatever is thought to be good? Nothing at all about what it is to play
football or compose music or be married. It is just the far from universal
fact that people get pleasure out of them; though it might as well have
been painting their noses red, or sucking rubber teats, if the empirical
causes of sensation had happened to be different. Any such goods are
merely instrumental, conditionally on their external relation to the
merely causally and contingently connected sensations of pleasure. But
is this good any different from the good we can see in thistles-they are
very generally good for causing pain; or in putrid sewage-it is very
generally good for causing the sensation of nausea? Unless of course,
unlike pain and nausea, pleasure is good.
Kant does, admittedly, seem to think it somehow is. He thinks that
happiness, which is the realizationof all a man wants or wishes in lifewhat gives him pleasure-is not only good, but an essential constituent
of the summum bonum. The morally good deserve pleasure, and the
summum bonum consists in all rational beings enjoying pleasure to the
extent that they have a good rational will. Perhaps that possibility will
be realized if in the next life the only desire left to rationalbeings is for
soft drinks, and the sea is turned to lemonade. But why is pleasure or
happiness a reward? Why not pain or nausea, or any other neutral
sensation? Kant gave up this doctrine, in the Opus Postumum:
Vleeschauwer says for reasons unknown to us. But I do not know what
his reasons were for holding it in the first place. The fragment dated by
Menscher 1775 does give a reason, but only by there making the
concept of happiness an idea derived a priori from pure reason. There,
the essential constituent of happiness is contentment or self-sufficiency
which is entirely a priori and independent of empirical laws. What is
pleasurabledepends on empirical laws, so 'one who possesses happiness
can well dispense with pleasures'. But this is a totally different concept
of happiness-though a no less legitimate one-from the concept of
happiness dealt with in the Second Critique, the consciousness of
agreeableness of life. It may be that by then, having had a lot of other
things to think about, Kant retained his confidence in an earlier conclusion while forgetting the premises which gave it a quite different
sense.
Kant's thesis is, I said, not only repugnant, it is baseless. However,
one might respond by pointing out that without some such thesis,
human action becomes inexplicable. Why do people, having the same
beliefs, that is the same view of the circumstances in which an action is
proposed, act differently? Why does one person do one thing rather
than another? Initially one gives the explanation of the action in terms
of the agent's beliefs; the agent, Fred, sent money to a charity because
he believed it would help to relieve those suffering in the Sudan floods.
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A. Phillips Griffiths

That explanation makes sense; it is not as if he had just thrown money

into the sea, and explained that by saying that the sea is, afterall, saline.
But other people with equal financial resources who know perfectly
well what Fred knows about the effect of sending money to the Sudan
do not do it at all; instead, they donate money to the World Congress of
Philosophy, which Fred does not, though he knows just as much about
the effect of doing that as anyone else. There must be some factorwhich
underlies and explains these differences. Putting it in Kant's terms, the
materialof desire, the conceived object, which is the determining cause
of the action of giving money, is in the two cases different; hence there
must be a mediating factor. From a common sense point of view, we
readily accept that in some cases the difference can be accounted for by
taste-by what people variously find pleasurable: some coffee, some
tea. In the absence of any other general explanation, why not generalize
this, in an arcane way even to those cases where the agent denies that
any thought of pleasure enters his head at all?
One reason would be that there are cases where the explanation a
priori cannot be of this sort. And of course- this is the qualification
with which we began-Kant thinks there is just such a case: the case of
acting morally. If there is such a thing, then it necessarily is not acting
just for the sake of pleasure; and we do have moral experience.
Even here, however, Kant's resolution falters. There can be no
explanation, he says, why anyone takes an interest in the moral law.
Acts of pure freedom, determined by nothing but the form of law itself,
are unintelligible. We can only say that they are from a theoretical point
of view negatively possible and through our moral experience positively
possible. Yet he finds it necessary, and explains why it is necessary, that
there should be on the phenomenal level an incentive, in the realm of
feeling, towards acting in accordance with law. There must be some
explanation, some subjective determining ground of the will, he says,
why a will not necessitated to conform to law nevertheless does so. This

ground must be unique-which

means in effect quite distinct from

pleasure-and sufficient. It is not good enough to think that Kant is

saying only that this feeling is as it were epiphenomenal, that it is
consequent upon acting from respect for the law. It must really be an
active incentive, a determinant. This could not have been more trenchantly put than in this passage from the Metaphysic of Morals (1797):
No man is entirely without moral feeling (like pleasure and pain in
general), for were he completely lacking in a capacity for it he would
be morally dead. And if (to speak in medical terms) the moral lifeforce could no longer excite this feeling, then humanity would
dissolve (by chemical laws, as it were) into mere animality and be
mixed irrevocably with the mass of other natural beings.

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Kant's Psychological

Hedonism

This suggests that this feeling fails the test of being subjectively sufficient; since the man who is nearly but not quite morally dead has the
feeling but is never moved by it. More important, however, is the other
demand, that it be unique, and exclusive to the determinationof moral
acts.
The uniqueness of moral feeling depends on more than its being
appropriate only to one distinct object, the moral law. One could as
easily say that the feeling of desire for ice-cream is unique, in that it
could never explain determination towards any object other than icecream; it could never explain drinking lemonade, the feeling of desire
for which must be of its own unique kind. Moral feeling is unique in
that it differs completely from all other determinants of the will: it is a
feeling concerning an object, an end, which unlike all others is not to be
found in nature. That end, the moral law, is universal and a priori, and
hence non-empirical. It is also linked to the feeling of respect for the law
not contingently but necessarily; whereas all other objects of the will
are phenomenal, empirical objects, and the feeling which makes them
objects of the will-the desire for pleasure-is only contingently related
to them.
Obviously I cannot here enter the well discussed question of whether
Kant's doctrine of the noumenal determinationof the will is not only, as
he says, unintelligible, but incoherent. But if I am allowed, albeit
unintelligibly, to attribute to myself action in accordance with the
moral law for its own sake, why cannot I attribute to myself action for
the good of my country for its own sake (call it patriotism) or for the
sake of my marriagefor its own sake (call it one form of love) or for the
good of my children (call it fatherhood). I cannot see why classifying
these as empirical objects makes any difference, especially since they
are not. People all over the world are killing each other and preparedto
sacrifice themselves and the whole of humanity for the sake of various
objects which they all call democracy: what kind of empirical objects
are these? When a man goes to wed, what is this empirical concept of
marriagewhich determines his action in virtue of his conception of the
expected pleasure he will derive from it? Where does he get it? From
observing the mating habits of birds? Sociobiologists may say that it
arises in him in much the same way as the mating habits in birds; but it
is just about such matters that they are most vulnerable. In any case,
what the sociobiologists would describe is hardly the acquisition of a
concept by empirical methods, but the biological generation of what
(like the mating habits of birds) is an innate idea. And this will be quite
wrong if it is treated as a reduction rather than an explanation of how
something the like of which has never been seen before comes about.
Nothing in culture is to be found in nature.
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A. Phillips Griffiths

My choice of examples here suggests that I am adumbrating some

general distinction of objects: objects of culture, such as marriage,art,
democracy, as opposed to mere empirical objects such as ice-cream.
But I want to say just the same thing about ice-cream, as an object
determinant of the human will. Put an ice-cream under the nose of a
dog or a little baby, and the patient will lick, willy-nilly. That is not
what eating an ice-cream is for agents like me. What it is, is something
vastly complex: it is not just eating an ice-cream, but eating an icecreamnot in church, not in front of my children if it encouragesthem to
make themselves sick, not while I am reading a paper on the Second
Critique, not if it is stolen property; that is, the maxim is convolutedly
rich, and embedded in a life which like everyone else's is part of the
culture of a society.
(It is often, if not always, easier and saferto find out what I would do,
if . . .-

by looking at that culture than by asking me to introspect.)

I have said that the empirical hedonism of Kant derogates from

humanity. How it does, has been put as follows:
Holbach represents every activity of individuals in their reciprocal
intercourse,e.g. speech, love, etc., as a relationof utility and exploitation. These relationsarethus not allowedto havetheirown significance
but are depicted as the expressionand representationof a third relation
which underlies them, utility or exploitation. This paraphrase only

ceases to be senseless and arbitrarywhen these individualrelationsno

longerhavevalue on their own account, as personalactivity,but only as
a disguise . . . for a real third purpose and relationship, which is called

the relationof utility. The linguisticmasqueradeonly has sense when it

is the consciousor unconsciousexpressionof a realmasquerade.In this
casethe relationof utilityhas very definitemeaning,namelythat I profit
myself when I harm someone else.
That is Marx, The German Ideology. The severe interpretationof the
underlying reality may be thought harsh when applied to Kant, though
he does say things here and there which hint at it.
That we are interested in, value, something just for what it
is-whether it is simply our duty or anything else-raises questions and
demands for explanations which may remain unsatisfactorily
answered. Certainly, we have no general theory of action which
answersall of them, and that may be because there cannot be one. But it
is better to do without such a theory altogetherthan to accept a baseless
a prion thesis which distorts and demeans humanity in one's own
person and that of others.4
University of Warwick
4 This
paper was contributed to the symposium Kant's Critiqueof Practical Reason at the World Congress of Philosophy, Brighton, August 1988.

216