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Ayn Rand vs Kant: the duty argument, stated fairly

Rand called him the most evil man in history, which is a sentence that has done more to stop the argument than to make it. Here is the argument. It starts with a crisis he did not invent and was right to take seriously.

Starts atEpistemology, then ethics. The break happens twice, at two levels, and it is the same move both times. First at epistemology, where a means of knowing is reclassified as a limit on knowing. Then at ethics, where benefit to the actor is reclassified as a stain on the act.

What he actually says

Start with the problem he inherited, because without it he looks like a man inventing difficulties. Hume had argued that experience shows us one thing following another and nothing more. We see the ball strike and we see the second ball move. We never see the must. If all we have is what the senses deliver, then necessity, and with it science, has no ground.

Kant thought that was a real crisis and set out to end it. His answer was that the mind is not a passive surface that the world writes on. It comes with a structure. Space and time are the forms in which anything can be given to us at all, and concepts such as cause and substance are the forms in which anything can be thought. Necessity is therefore secured — not because we found it out in the world, but because nothing could appear to us except through that structure.

The price is the famous one. What we know is the world as it appears under those conditions. What the world is apart from them, the thing in itself, is not something we can reach. Kant did not think of this as scepticism. He thought he had saved knowledge by marking off exactly where it applies.

The ethics follows the same shape. Morality cannot rest on what people happen to want, because wants vary and a rule that varies is not a rule. It has to come from reason alone. So he asks what a will would be like that was good without qualification, and answers: one that acts from duty. Test a proposed action by asking whether you could will the principle behind it as a law for everyone. And treat humanity, in yourself and in anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means. Persons have dignity, which is precisely the thing that has no price and cannot be traded away for a better outcome.

Where he is right

Three points, and they are not small.

He was right that Hume's problem is fatal if it is left standing. An account of knowledge that cannot say why anything must be so is not an account of knowledge. Kant took that seriously when it would have been easier to shrug.

He was right that the mind is active. Perceiving is something an organism does, by some specific means, and a theory that treats the senses as a window with nothing in the frame is describing nothing that exists.

And he was right that morality has to be rational and has to hold for everyone. A code that reduces to how you feel this afternoon, or to what your neighbours happen to approve of, is not a code. When he says a person may not be used merely as a means, he is saying something Objectivism says too, and says loudly: no one is a sacrificial animal.

Anyone who cannot state those three points has not earned the right to the next section.

Where it collides: the same move twice

Two collisions, one in each half of the system.

The thing in itself. Kant's argument is that because we perceive by means of a specific apparatus, what we perceive is conditioned by that apparatus, and so it is not reality as it is. Look at what that assumes: that to know a thing as it is in itself, you would have to know it by no means at all — consciousness with no identity, perceiving with no organs and no form. Since that is impossible, knowledge is declared to fall short of its object by its very nature.

Objectivism rejects the premise. That you see by means of eyes does not make what you see an illusion; it makes it what you see. The form in which you perceive something is not a screen between you and it. Kant took the condition of awareness and reclassified it as the limit of awareness, and everything downstream of that move — through to the modern claim that objectivity is a posture — is that one step being carried out more fully.

Duty against inclination. Kant's test for moral worth is that the act was done from duty and not because you wanted to. The more you gain from it, the less it counts. State it plainly and it is an inversion: the fact that something is good for the person doing it becomes the reason to doubt that it was good. Objectivism holds the opposite, and holds it as a matter of fact rather than of preference. Honesty is not a fee you pay; it is what makes long plans possible. You are supposed to want to be honest, and wanting it is not a stain on it.

One smaller problem is worth naming, because critics of Kant lean on it too hard. The universalisability test does less work than it looks like it does. Whether a maxim can be willed as a universal law depends entirely on how the maxim is described, and choosing that description is where all the moral content quietly enters. The test does not derive the content; it dresses it.

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