Speaking of which, Kantian ethics contains a very rigid conception of duty—for example, the command “do not lie.” This injunction is an absolute duty: even if a murderer asks you where your beloved is, and you know that if you tell the truth and do not lie to mislead him your beloved will be killed, you still must not lie. Moral duty is that hard. For, in any case, murder is the murderer’s fault, whereas lying is your fault; whether or not there is a murder, lying is always wrong. If your beloved happens to appear at the very place you falsely claimed she was, then would her being killed also be your responsibility? In short, lying won’t do, and murder won’t do either: the murderer should not kill, and you also cannot lie……
Is Kant’s ethics really so cold-blooded? Although I am not a Kantian in ethics, I am still willing to offer a further interpretation. “Duty” is beyond question, but on the other hand, more fundamentally, there is the human moral will, a certain most basic “good intention” or “conscience,” and that is the more important thing. Kant also admits that too many philosophers are not a good thing; it is better for ordinary people to act on intuitive good intentions. So what is philosophy for? Philosophy’s mission is first of all to place limits on reason through critical reflection, so as not to let it fall into hubris. That is to say, certain norms derived through philosophical reflection fundamentally serve to constrain reason rather than to guide action. For instance, if you lie in order to protect your beloved, or even kill in order to protect others, such acts, placed in their corresponding contexts, all reveal your humanity, your spirit, and one might even say they are expressions of your virtue. A good person—or rather, a person with a strong good will and compassion—may also, in a concrete context, do something “wrong.” Here I distinguish between the right and wrong of actions and the good and evil of being a person. Doing something wrong does not mean becoming an evil person; conversely, being a good person does not mean one must always keep to the rules in everything. The standard for right and wrong in action is one thing, the standard for good and evil in character is another; though related, the two do not correspond directly.
Traditional ethics often has an absolutist tendency, and thus a perfectionist one—that is, it seems as though human beings could find a way of life that is supremely good and beautiful, with all of their actions orderly and beyond reproach. Yet freedom lies precisely in the ability to violate rules: someone who follows established absolute rules in everything is not a “good person,” but merely a good robot. A truly flesh-and-blood “good person” would be an არსებence capable of violating rules in the appropriate way. In short, human beings should pursue “being a good person,” but that does not mean “never doing anything wrong”; at most it means “doing wrong as little as possible.”
Thus, the distinction between right and wrong in actions still has to be maintained; one cannot say that because you “appropriately” lied in some concrete context, it therefore follows that “lying is right.” The idea of “duty” here limits reason’s “going astray,” that is, it prevents the generalization of context-dependent situations into universals. As a rational person, I should establish some principles for myself, and principles, as principles, ought to possess universality. But establishing principles is not my most fundamental pursuit; what I pursue is “being a person,” and the significance of duties and principles that impose norms on action lies in using a kind of negative control to promote the perfection of my personality. And with regard to the perfection of personality, what is more fundamental is the cultivation of feeling.
This is also like the management of love. Regarding a romantic relationship, we may have all kinds of principles and even duties—for example, one should not cheat, one should not lie, one should take care of each other, one should do this and that. But these norms of “what should/should not be done” are not what you ultimately seek; nor can a perfect romantic relationship be created by principles alone. If one merely follows the rules without the drive of intuition and feeling, then a romantic relationship is entirely a phantom of signs. Only when the word “lover/beloved” contains not merely a series of behavioral norms but also signifies some sincere feeling does it become meaningful. But are principles completely useless? If there is no sense of norm at all, and one simply lets primitive emotion overflow, then a good love relationship cannot be formed either; you may, like a beast, take one with every glance, but you cannot stabilize love.
So we are led to think that in Kant, the significance of ethical reflection likewise lies precisely in stabilizing and maintaining good moral feeling, and that the principles established through reflection are, on the one hand, absolute standards, while on the other hand also applied relative to context; when one invokes a standard to measure a particular act, the standard is absolute, but if one uses it to measure the good and evil of an entire person, then the relationship becomes relative.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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