IX—Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil

Abstract

concepts—and they must learn to manage social emotions that involve comparison, such as winning and losing, envy, and jealousy. Finally—and this is where Kant distinguishes himself from all his predecessors—in order to be able to act morally responsibly, human beings must learn to act as motivated by their practical reason. That is to say, they must be able to act as motivated by moral reasons, by whether or not a certain action is right or wrong, and this is difficult because our animality and ‘self-will’ develop earlier and so easily and strongly motivate us. To put this point in Kantianese, to act morally responsibly is to act consistent with respect for, and insofar as possible supportive of, oneself and others as rational beings, as beings who have the capacity to set ends of their own and consequently must be treated as ends in themselves (not mere means) or as having dignity (a pricelessness). To be able to act as motivated by this ought—to do something just because it is the right thing to do and to refrain from doing something just because it would be wrong—is to have developed the third predisposition, namely to personality (moral responsibility). Developing personality requires us not only to master reasoning, but to heed what our reasoning says about the rightness or wrongness of an action (regardless of what we want to do). It requires us to develop our ‘moral vital force.’ Consequently, it takes us (human beings) a long time to develop our animality, humanity and personality into an integrated whole for which we are able to assume moral responsibility. Moreover, this whole can be divided into two components: one component that constitutes our happiness (rational end-setting grounded on and consistent with our animality and humanity) and one that constitutes our morality (ensuring that our actions are consistent with and supportive of a moral world). The highest good (aim) for us in actual, human lives is therefore to bring these two parts—happiness and morality—into as close a union as possible (TP 8, p. 279, CPrR 5, pp. 110-115) and, hence, also, to bring our ‘natural’ and our ‘moral’ vital forces into harmonious union. In addition to his idea of the predisposition to good, Kant’s theory of human nature contains an account of our propensity to evil. In short, on my preferred interpretation, Kant proposes that evil is something we bring upon ourselves through our capacity for choice (setting ends of our own). Evil is furthermore seen as coming in three degrees—‘frailty,’ ‘impurity’ and ‘depravity’—where moving from one degree to the next, from frailty to impurity or from impurity to depravity, means that we lose our way in life in significantly more complex ways (and, correspondingly, healing becomes more difficult subjectively). More specifically, frailty refers to an instance or an area of our life where we are likely to do wrong, impurity to an emotionally unstable pattern of motivations determining our actions, and depravity to a striving to weaken 13 See Kant (R 6, pp. 26-28) for his account of the predisposition to good in human nature and see (Varden, 2020) for my interpretation of his account. 14 For an excellent interpretation of why Kant thinks that going about our lives in this way makes rational sense even when we deserve to be morally happy, but are not, see (Deligiorgi, 2020).