What is Morality - a debate ?

I am looking forward to our discussion about morality on 3^rd February. I have, since childhood, been interested in understanding how society constructs its behaviour and how different cultures have their own nuanced take on what is right and what is wrong.

Two philosophers who hold compelling yet fundamentally different views on the source and implementation of morality are Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Iris Murdoch (1919– 1999). Those of you who know my predilection for using fictional debates as a means of understanding ideas will not be surprised - because I have in the past created debates about Original Sin, The Great Schism and in the near future, I am planning one on The Battle for the English Bible  -  that I decided to pit Kant and Murdoch against each other in an imagined debate.

Immanuel Kant’s philosophical foundations were rooted in a desire to synthesise the two dominant philosophical traditions of his time, which were rationalism and empiricism. His view was that morality should be based on reason and duty, rather than consequences or feelings. He believed there were categorical Imperatives: universal, unconditional commands requiring us to act on rules, universal laws. We must act from pure duty, guided by these rational moral laws, and this was inherently ‘a good thing’, making morality a matter of self-imposed, rational obligation, not external reward or personal desire. 

Iris Murdoch, on the other hand,  viewed morality as a journey of loving attention and what she called ‘unselfing ’: moving away from self-centred fantasy towards a clear and just understanding of reality, especially of other people. An individual is capable of seeing ‘good’. This is an attainable ideal rather than a divine command. Where Kant sees there is a single moral choice, Murdoch perceived a continuous and developing process of seeing more clearly and honestly. What she called a "just and loving gaze" that reduces the ego to reveal the true reality of others. Therefore, moral progress is possible through ‘persistent effort and empathy’. It is not just about rules.

To oversimplify these different poles of understanding of What is Morality? , would be to argue that it is 'Kant’s rational mind versus Murdoch’s emotional sensitivity'. Of course, morality might be a bit of both, but here is my version of the debate when these two meet.

Welcome, Immanuel, I am delighted to introduce you to Iris:

Kant: Madam, it is a pleasure, and I am delighted to be able to discuss with you the question What is Morality.  I must begin with a principle. The foundation of morality is reason alone, distilled into what I have called the  Categorical Imperative. An act is good not from its consequences, but from its maxim—the principle behind it—which must be willed as a universal law. To ask "What should I do?" is to ask, "Can I rationally will that everyone in my situation act thus?" Duty, stripped of all inclination, is the sublime expression of a rational will.

Murdoch: Immanuel, with respect, your system is beautifully austere, but it begins in the wrong place. It begins with an act of will, a deliberate choice of a rational agent. But morality, I believe, begins long before the moment of choice. It begins in the quality of our attention. How do we see the world? How do we see the other? If we see them through a veil of self-serving fantasy, of personal anxiety or sentimentality, then even our most dutiful act may be flawed at its root.

Kant: Fantasy is a matter of psychology, of the empirical self. Morality cannot be built upon such shifting sands! We must abstract from all contingent circumstances—our feelings, our personal attachments—to find the pure, formal law within. A shopkeeper who charges fairly out of love for his customers acts agreeably, but only the shopkeeper who does so because it is right, even if it ruins him, acts from moral worth. The motive must be duty for duty's sake.

Murdoch: But what is "duty" in that moment? Is it not a kind of intellectual abstraction? You speak of respecting persons as "ends in themselves." I agree profoundly. But to truly respect another as an end, one must see them in their intricate, unique reality. This is not a task of the will, but of love—by which I mean the disciplined, unselfish attention to what is other than oneself. A mother tending her child, an artist before her canvas, a person truly listening to a friend's distress—these are moral exercises. They are the slow, difficult work of breaking the tyranny of the self.

Kant: Love! Attachment! These are pathological feelings. They cannot be commanded, and so they cannot be moral laws. I can command myself to act beneficently, even if I feel no love. Indeed, that is the highest test! Your "attention" seems perilously close to a kind of aesthetic contemplation. Morality is not about seeing beautifully, but about acting rightly according to a law given by my own rational nature.

Murdoch: And I say that without that just and loving attention, your rational law risks becoming empty, or worse, a tool of the very self it seeks to transcend. A man may follow a self-constructed rule with perfect rational consistency and still be a moral monster, because he has never truly looked at the suffering, particular individual before him. Your morality is for agents, but mine is also for patients—for beings who are seen. The good is not just in the act, but in the vision that precedes and informs it. It is real, it is magnetic, it draws us out of ourselves.

Kant: You posit a "Good" existing externally, like a Platonic sun. This is metaphysics of the most dogmatic sort! The moral law is not "out there" to be perceived; it is in here, in the structure of practical reason. Autonomy is everything—the self giving itself the law. What you offer sounds like heteronomy, being guided by an external vision.

Murdoch: And what you offer, Immanuel, can feel like a lonely sovereignty of the will. You fear heteronomy, but I fear the unbridled, self-contained ego. The "Good" I speak of is not a dogmatic command; it is the perpetual, difficult object of our striving. We approach it by shedding illusion, by looking upon the world with humility and care. It is in the texture of our consciousness. Is a just man, just when he is willing a maxim? Or is he just in the fabric of his thoughts, in his daily, patient regard for truth?

Kant: The fabric of his thoughts is the realm of virtue, which is the strength of will to execute our duties amidst obstacles. But virtue rests upon the prior foundation of the moral law. Without that objective, rational standard, your "attention" is directionless. One may attend lovingly to a villain and be misled!

Murdoch: Without loving attention, one may apply your rational law with cold, bureaucratic efficiency and cause great evil. The particular must be seen to be respected. Morality, in the end, is less like geometry and more like art. It is the lifelong task of perfecting a vision, which then naturally—though never easily—flows into right action. It is work done in the solitude of consciousness.

Kant: Then we are at an impasse. You ground morality in a perceptual relation to the Real, I in the legislative relation of the Will to itself. You believe we must look outward to know the Good. I maintain we must look inward to find the Law.

Murdoch: Perhaps the impasse is only in emphasis. You provide the unyielding framework of obligation, the necessary skeleton. But I seek to put flesh upon it—the flesh of lived experience, of patient love, of the conscious fight against our own selfish fantasies. Your law commands the act. My 'good' draws the person.

Kant: I cannot accept your metaphysics, Madam. But I will concede this: a will that dutifully follows the moral law would, in its perfect state, also necessarily attend to the particulars of its object with clear-eyed respect. The harmony of the rational and the perceptive may be an ideal we both, in our own ways, strive to articulate.

Murdoch: And I will concede that without the discipline of a demand for the universal, attention risks becoming mere capricious fascination. So we circle the same truth, you from the heights of reason, I from the thickets of human emotion and experience.

So what do you think,  is Kant too mechanical – is his dependence upon rationality inhumane - or is Murdoch’s lived metaphysical experience too relative to apply a fair and just social matrix to human behaviour?