Introduction
Our duties towards future generations constitute one of the most
contentious areas of debate in contemporary ethics. The debate around
this issue has been prompted by climate change and the question of what
kind of world will be left to those who will succeed us: worried that
our efforts towards mitigating environmental damage will be sabotaged by
competing short-term interests, advocates for longtermism argue that we
should set our moral scope not on the next generation, or even the one
after that, but in a future so far distant that we cannot fathom what
the needs or priorities of its inhabitants will be. The monstrous
distance in time invoked by longtermism begs an obvious objection: what
should, or rather, can we do for generations so far removed from us?
Thus, the main spanner in the works of longtermism concerns
representation, or its impossibility: if we cannot constitute a picture
of our moral relata, what is the point of any philosophical reflection
on the subject? Wouldn’t we be engaging in purely unproductive
speculation?
This article sets out to offer some reflections on the matter from a
Kantian perspective. Section §1 discusses the problem of representation
(or lack thereof): on the basis of the Kantian description of
Enthusiasmus, it will be proposed that moral duties towards
these generations constitute the kind of experience of the sublime that
results from the advancement of culture. Therefore, although it does not
lead us to any particular representation, it would evidence a moral
advancement promoted by culture which, although it does not provide
concrete prescriptions for these generations, it reveals a moral
substratum and the capacity of culture to unravel it. Furthermore, this
regard for all of humanity independently of races and borders fits the
Kantian principle of cosmopolitism.
But even if we know we must do something, how can this long-term duty
lead to action? Section §2 deals with this matter by arguing that it is
problematic to place the discussion about our duty towards distant
generations on the level of moral individualism. Section §3 discusses an
alternative: as detailed in Pinheiro Walla’s exhaustive research on the
response to the challenges of climate change from a Kantian perspective,
Kant’s legal theory offers valid and interesting alternatives to the
shortcomings of the purely ethical appeal. It
will be concluded that the tools offered by Kantian philosophy to
understand and act upon the challenges brought by climate change provide
a clear picture of the role co-determination and interrelation play in
Kantian thought.
1.
Moral duties towards far distant generations and the sublime
The discussion about longtermism and its possibilities constitutes a
lively and interesting debate, given its close relationship to the
pressing issue of climate change and its consequences. However, its very
premise leads to its main rebuttal: can we truly speak of a moral duty
towards non-existing subjects, even we cannot make a representation of
them and their needs? In this section, it will be argued that there are
good reasons to consider that seriously contemplating our moral duties
towards future generations might be considered an experience of the
Kantian sublime. To do so, this section will provide a detailed account
of an analogous experience of the sublime: that of
Enthusiasmus, the feeling shared by spectators of the French
Revolution. This analysis will display the elements that constitute an
experience of the sublime, with emphasis on the role of reason and the
lack of a presentation constructed by imagination (§1.1), the role of
culture in bringing about this experience of the sublime (§1.2), and the
moral component of disregarding ethic, familiar, or cultural ties in
those towards which we have a moral duty (§1.3). If the argumentation is
successful, contemplating our duties to future generations would demand
an effort of reason that surpasses the limits of imagination,
corroborating Kant’s theses on the practical use of reason, and
suggesting that the debate about our duties towards far distant
generations might even act a sign of moral development. This would also
cast a light on the role culture plays in moral advancement and raise
relevant implications of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitan right.
1.1. The
sublime, the aesthetically sublime, and Enthusiasmus
When thinking about what constitutes a sublime experience, the
emblematic image evokes the awe one feels when contemplating the
vastness of Nature, the infinite distances of the starry night sky.
However, according to Kant, the moral law within us is just as vast: can
experiences of the sublime arise from contemplating our moral duties? To
answer this question, a significant source of material can be found in
the analysis that Kant provides about the feeling of
Enthusiasmus. In this peculiar affection, the spectators of the
French Revolution experience an enthusiasm that, according to Kant,
reveals a moral disposition which proves mankind’s innate moral
character, constituting a sign of the advancement of society towards the
good. Thus, while there is a reaction to a concrete event (the French
Revolution), what propitiates the enthusiasm itself is a non-
representable relata, the fruit of reason pushing the imagination beyond
its limits. As described by Kant:
Now if we add to a concept a representation of the imagination that
belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much
thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence
which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way,
then in this case the imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of
intellectual ideas (reason) into motion, that is, at the instigation of
a representation it gives more to think about than can be grasped and
made distinct in it (although it does, to be sure, belong to the concept
of the object). (KU, AA 05: 315)
It should be noted that the presentations that elicit the experience
of the sublime are not restricted no physical objects, as it can include
“cognitive achievements” (Menningaus et al., 2019). In the peculiar case
of Enthusiasmus, the cognitive achievement is the realization
of freedom as self-determined will, whose self- provided norms
constitute the ground for the rational causality of the moral law
(Korsgaard, 1996). According to Kant, freedom cannot provide a concrete
presentation, for then we would be speaking of a natural determination
that could be accounted for by theoretical reason, but which would
impede the spontaneity of the will. It is thus understood that freedom,
“independent of the law of causality, in the strictest, that is,
transcendental sense” (Cfr. KpV, AA 05: 29), can only be
presented by analogy, or acting as a schema between the
phenomenal and noumenal homo. When Enthusiasmus is
elicited by the events of the French Revolution, reason goes beyond this
initial stage towards the idea of freedom, and imagination fails to
construct a representation. Kant makes the following observation on the
irrepresentable component of the sublime and the stretching of the
imagination it involves:
There need be no anxiety that the feeling of the sublime will lose
anything through such an abstract presentation, which becomes entirely
negative in regard to the sensible; for the imagination, although it
certainly finds nothing beyond the sensible to which it can attach
itself, nevertheless feels itself to be unbounded precisely because of
this elimination of the limits of sensibility; and that separation is
thus a presentation of the infinite, which for that very reason can
never be anything other than a merely negative presentation, which
nevertheless expands the soul. (KU, AA 05: 274)
Kant thus labels Enthusiasmus as aesthetically sublime,
since it aims at an ideal that cannot be reduced to a manifold of
intuitions subsumable under a concept: it constitutes a form of
schematism in which the imagination is “disembodied” in an effort to
conceive an image that presents the unpresentable. This is why,
according to Kant, historical signs, given the ideal nature of that to
which they point, cannot occur in the pure hypotypicality of theoretical
reason, where formal intuition is subsumed under the concept; they
occur, alternatively, in analogical presentations in which, given that
intuition cannot present anything as an object, we access the unknown
from something similar. The demonstrative sign would here act as a
schema, a means by which concepts can be applied to formal
intuitions. It is this notion of the symbol as schema that
Lyotard contests in his rejection of Kant’s historical aspirations,
which the former dismisses as an illusion born of the appearance that
signs constitute examples or schemas (2009, p. 98).
Getting down to the details, in The Conflict of the
Faculties Kant argues that the reception of the French Revolution
by its spectators demonstrates a common moral character of the whole
human race that allows to hope for progress towards the good (SF, AA 07:
85-87): the enthusiasm with which the Revolution is received reveals a
moral disposition among the spectators. This Enthusiasmus is
defined by Kant as constituted by an affective involvement in the good
which, since it involves this overstepping of the capacities of the
imagination, is an aesthetically sublime emotion (KU, AA 05: 271-272).
The fact that it is labelled as an Affekt (Anth, AA 07: 270)
means that it is not entirely or truly sublime, for it constitutes a
“state of mind [which] appears to be sublime”, but that does
not merit “any delight on the part of reason” (KU, AA 05: 272; emphasis
mine), even though “reason still always handles the reins” (Anth, AA 07:
254). Reason retains its capacity to rule over the inclinations so that
the concrete object to which the enthusiastic Affekt is
directed —the idea of the good— does not induce a disordering of desires
that leads to the dangerous passion of fanaticism
(Schwärmerei). Therefore, Enthusiasmus is not a mere
intensification of sensibility; the presence of an idea beyond all
possible presentation is required, which in turn necessitates the
intervention of reason. Enthusiasmus thus requires
the participation and governance of reason, to which it owes its
“reflective and strategic” component (Wehofsits, 2016). If reason were
to be overthrown by the sheer intensity of emotion, the experience of
the sublime would consequently be suspended, for it cannot begin and end
on a pure emotional impulse: according to Kant, no agitation of the mind
can be called sublime “if they do not leave behind a disposition of mind
that, even if only indirectly, has influence on the consciousness of its
strength and resolution in regard to that which brings with it
intellectual purposiveness” (KU, AA 05: 273).
Clewis addresses this apparently contradictory distinction between
aesthetically sublime and truly sublime by analysing the different
implications of both denominations. Firstly, both aesthetically
sublime and truly sublime experiences involve the
aforementioned “stretching of the mental powers through ideas of reason
in conjunction with imagination” (Clewis 2018, p. 190). Secondly, and
more importantly in establishing a difference between the two, “sublime”
can also point to an elevation over mere sensibility, pointing at the
Kantian notion of reason as apart from nature, and capable of raising
above it. Due to Enthusiasmus being an Affekt, it
involves a crucial component of sensibility that makes it incompatible
with being truly sublime. This ties the concept to another key Kantian
distinction, which refers to the difference between interest and
disinterestedness: whereas aesthetic feelings, such as the contemplation
of beauty, are disinterested —the subject does not feel the need to act
upon it—, Enthusiasmus has a motivational component. But as
observed by Clewis, Kant also points out that Enthusiasmus is
disinterested. How can it show this feature while
having motivational power? Lewis solves this problem by underlining that
the spectators who feel Enthusiasmus are disinterested in some
senses, since “they are not actively contributing [but] they are not
impartial (in this sense they are ‘interested’), for they want
republicans to win”. (Clewis 2018, p. 203). Finally, a key observation
is made by Clewis when underlining the futural nature of this modality
of the feeling, for “the spectators are not enthusiastic about the past
as such, but about emerging possibilities—reflection on which the
imagination, the faculty of possibility, plays an active role. Like
hope, enthusiasm is oriented towards the future” (Id., p.
204).
Regarding its historical implications, Kant states that
Enthusiasmus constitutes a historical sign (“signum
rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon”; SF, AA 07: 85) which
points to a community whose members have advanced far enough in a
culture —the common project that, as expressed in KU, AA 05: 265, makes
us receptive to ideas— to cultivate and communicate an idea of freedom
in accordance with the principles of pure practical legislation (Wood,
1970; Jiménez, 2018). According to Kant, Enthusiasmus as an
event (Begebenheit), constitutes a sign that shows that it is
possible to reconstruct history according to an end ordered a
priori by a germinal reason that orients us towards “the ultimate
purpose of humanity, the morally good” (KU, AA 05: 299) and makes human
beings intervening agents in effective reality. The conditions of
possibility of this sign would validate, in Kant’s account, the
meta-narrative of moral progress, a belief that, as observed by
Kleingeld (2001), operates both as a regulative idea and a practical
postulate.
1.2.
Realizing our moral duty towards distant generations as a product of
culture
As stated by Kant, in order to conceive the idea towards which the
emotion is directed in the experience of Enthusiasmus, the
intervention of culture is necessary: it articulates the irrepresentable
horizon that imagination fails to reach, but towards which reason aims.
This should not lead us to think that, in itself, the sublime is a
product of culture: the sublime is rooted in human nature and our
predisposition to being affected by practical ideas. In addition to its
role in the constitution of ideas, culture is also defined as a way to
“[attune] the spirit to ideas” (KU, AA 05: 326); however, whereas a
culture of skill is the foremost condition for an aptitude to promote
purposes—enthusiastic pathos in its episodic unleashing retains
an aesthetic validity: it is an energetic sign, a tensor of desire
(Lyotard 2009, pp. 81-82) that involves action—, according to Kant a
culture of discipline is necessary to undertake its mandates. “Culture” is thus understood as “the
deliberate approach to reason, the concern for it, in its positive
character, along with awareness of its limitations” (Rotenstreich 1989,
p. 303). The fact that receptivity to ideas such as freedom originates
from a society of discipline, duty, and limits, must not surprise the
Kant reader for, as Dierksmeier points out:
With Kant came into use a conception of freedom that establishes the
necessary limits to liberty not as negations of freedom but as its
manifestations. The rationale behind this notion is that limitless
freedom is a contradictio in adiecto. Freedom, in order to be
real, has to have a gestalt; it cannot be exempt from any
structure, which is why Kant says freedom, not to be heteronomously
orientated, must be autonomous. Freedom has to be a law unto itself. The
fact that freedom has to be given some form and contour is, therefore,
no reduction of liberty. The crucial question is not whether but rather
what kind of limits personal liberty should have (2006, p. 81).
The fact that numerous proposals regarding future generations and the
sensible use of Earth’s resources revolve around concepts such as
“degrowth” and the planet’s environmental limits, that we talk about our
“duties” or “obligations” towards future generations, all point to an
element of responsibility that understands, just like Kant does, that
limitless freedom is a contradictory monster that devours itself. For us
to be free is to make good use of that freedom, so future generations
might also enjoy it without the environmental, economic, or political
constraints that come from extreme weather and its consequences.
According to Kantian parameters, culture thus makes us receptive to this
notion of freedom and to the idea that we have certain duties towards
future generations. We shall go back to this notion of freedom as a
result of interdependent constraints on a later section.
It should also be noted that culture allowing us to acknowledge new
ideas with an involvement in freedom, morality, or practical reason,
does not mean that the moral component in mankind progresses in itself.
In Kantian thought, as underlined by Kleingeld (1999), the universal
validity of moral principles involves that reason cannot progress, but
those predispositions for its use certainly can: in the case at hand,
culture has advanced sufficiently so that the moral endeavour is not
circumscribed to existing persons but includes all future generations,
involving a use of reason that was not previously acknowledged, and a
realization of the possibility of moral progress by going beyond the
margins of mere actuality to aim for a state of welfare that includes
all those who are yet to come. This interpellation of morality is what
makes us susceptible to our duty towards future generations, regardless
of whether they are linked to us in any familiar, social, cultural, or
traditional terms, which takes us to the next point.
1.3. Irrepresentability and
morality
The literature regarding our duties towards future generations
coincides in its necessarily indeterminate nature (Weiss 1990; Slaughter
1994; Johnson 2003; Herstein 2008; Thompson 2010; Huda 2019). The moral
challenge stem from epistemic one: as stated by Tarsney (2023), our
forecasting abilities are not capable of shaping the face of the world
future generations will inhabit, which means that any proposal regarding
our duties and obligations towards them must first justify not only the
appropriateness of its measures, but its very necessity. This
indetermination, according to some authors, is not absolute: we might
not know what to do, but we do know what should be not done, and the
harm we are causing (Barry 1989), and we can make reasonable assumptions
and derive reasonable implications from them by focusing on those future
generations that will be affected in a significant manner by our actions
(Reichenbach 1992, pp. 215-216). Pasek (1992) suggests that we should
aim towards principles rather than obligations, since specific
obligations require a defined object, but principles only answer to
practical reason, while D’Amato’s argument for cultivating a sense of
obligation that goes beyond our calculations regarding how it will
benefit present or future persons (1990, p. 198).
Despite having these scanty grasps, what we ignore is enough for
authors such as Hyde (2023) to reject the mere possibility of
longtermism as a serious ethical discussion: in his scathing criticism
of MacAskill’s “What we owe the future”, the author states that “the
future is simply too large to think about in any detail. […] The idea
that we can even be morally concerned about what is a million years
away, yet again obliged to do something about it, is utter folly” (2023,
p. 149). Among other sources, he bases this conclusion in two Kantian
arguments: that the “formula of humanity” expressed in the
Grundlegung “[refers] to conscious persons with
moral autonomy who are, crucially, alive” (2023, p. 132) and that Kant
states that “ought implies can” (KrV, 548), thus leaving longtermism out
of moral and ethical consideration. But Kantian sources can also add
some nuance to Hyde’s remarks, and even refute some of his points.
Hyde is quite right in his warning of grounding moral duties towards
future generations in the formula of humanity... if said humanity is
exclusively understood on the phenomenal level: in that case, only those
who are alive should be taken into consideration. However, the situation
changes if humanity is understood at the noumenal level of moral agency,
as “humanity as an end in itself”. Flikschuh provides a solid analysis
on this matter: firstly, she criticises Niesen’s (2005) bifurcation
between the “rights of human beings” (das Recht der Menschen)
and the “Right of humanity” (das Recht der Menschheit), arguing
that it seems more plausible to derive the former from the latter
since
the innate right to freedom is an a priori moral right
which, as such, cannot pertain to our phenomenal nature as individual
members of the human race. Indeed, except colloquially, Kant never
speaks of persons as having rights “naturally”, i.e. in virtue of our
sensibly given nature. He typically speaks of the moral concept of
Right. Moral concepts differ from empirical concepts in lacking all
reference to sensible intuition. In contrast to empirical concepts, the
content of moral concepts is non-sensible, or intelligible. (Flikschuh
2009, p. 437)
In a similar note, Eterović
(//openurl.ebsco.com/results?sid=ebsco:ocu:record&bquery=AU+Eterovi%c4%87,%20Igor)
argues towards going beyond a presentist reading of the formula of
humanity by promoting the development of “our dispositions as parts of a
wider community that embraces all human beings not just in this present
moment but also through the history of humankind” (2021, 330), which
according to him means that we have “obligations to further and promote
moral progress” (Id., p. 331). The conceptualization for
“humanity” in the “formula of humanity” thus depends on the level of its
inferences, whether noumenal or phenomenal.
Moreover, Sánchez Madrid argues for the idea of a Kantian defense of
inter-generational justice not from the formula of humanity, but from
his comments on progress and hope found in Über den Gemeinspruch:
Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die
Praxis; particularly from a paragraph that, due to its depth will
be quoted in its entirety:
Although in the usual order of things it is not in the nature of the
human being to relinquish his power by choice’ it is still not
impossible in pressing circumstances. Thus it can be considered an
expression not unbefitting the moral wishes and hopes of people (once
aware of their inability) to expect the circumstances required for these
from providence, which will provide an outcome for the end of humanity
as a whole species, to reach its final destination by the free use of
its powers as far as they extend, to which end the ends of human beings,
considered separately, are directly opposed. For, the very opposition of
inclinations to one another, from which evil arises, furnishes reason a
free play to subjugate them all and, in place of evil, which destroys
itself, to establish the rule of good, which, once it exists, continues
to maintain itself of its own accord (TP, AA 08: 312)
References to the limited role of the providence, the free use of
[humanity’s] forces, and the connection between reason and the rule of
good, leads Sánchez Madrid to argue for a Kantian shift of the concept
of the highest Good from a theological framework to a political one. In
addition to this, our collective and unavoidable tendency towards
representing future generations allows for considering “the
intergenerational character of imagination, which anticipates [their]
material and symbolic needs” (2023, p. 18). From this premise, Sánchez
Madrid claims that the “Kantian defense for the conceptual right to hope
[involves] the anticipation of an inter-generational temporality” (2023,
p.22) which involves a responsible anticipation of the consequences of
our actions.
To further rebate Hyde’s position on the idea that “ought implies
can”, it could be argued that disregarding a moral sign due to our
incapability to extract concrete solutions from it incurs in the same
confusion between the noumenal level of freedom and the phenomenal level
of the specific actions that should be undertaken. As claimed in the
previous section, an experience of the sublime might arise from an event
that points at an irrepresentable freedom. The events of the French
Revolution and the following Enthusiasmus state no specific
“ought”, but they reveal and open a moral space in which freedom is
understood as a way of intervening in the world and in history, neither
of which conclude at the present generation. Realizing that we have
moral duties towards future generations opens up an image of the future
not as the mere succession of causal events, but as a space to be
influenced by our current actions.
However, considering our moral duties towards unborn persons is far
from a novel concept: concepts such as “tradition”, “lineage”, “family
reputation”, and “nation” involve some concern about how our present
actions might affect those that shall come after us. But duty towards
future generations has the potential, if thinking far enough into the
future, of moving beyond those future generations with whom we share any
kinds of bonds, since the further we look into the future, the weaker
our connection with the individuals who inhabit it (Thompson 2010, p.
20). This shift means assuming conditional rights to their fullest
extent, for, as observed by Bandman, by attributing them to future
generations we recognize “that rights are not confined to those who are
near and dear to us in space and time” (1982, p. 101); or, as it can be
added, near and dear to us due to their involvement in structures aimed
at preserving certain characteristics. The desire to perpetuate certain
characteristics vanishes in the moral duty towards all future
generations, highlighting the autonomy of pure practical reason:
Autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws
and of duties in keeping with them […]. That is to say, the sole
principle of morality consists in independence from all matter of the
law (namely, from a desired object) and
at the same time in the determination of choice through the mere form of
giving universal law that a maxim must be capable of. That
independence, however, is freedom in the negative
sense, whereas this lawgiving of its own on the part of pure
and, as such, practical reason is freedom in the positive
sense. (KpV, AA 05: 33)
If we envision future generations as linked to us by culture, race,
nationhood, or even family bonds, we can represent certain aspects of
them: those characteristics serve as a “ground rod” to avoid facing the
negative emotions involved in the experience of the sublime, for no
matter how much reason pulls at imagination, when the vertigo and awe
are too much to handle, the latter can always reject its pull by
returning to the safe sphere of the familiar. In the case of nationhood,
one can think that no matter how much time passes, future generations
will continue to identify in a certain manner and participate in certain
traditions. Thus, imagination is never threatened to leave the
comfortable realm of the known experience.
Thinking of future generations with no social or cultural attachment
towards them also fits Kant’s project for a universal cosmopolitan
condition, which can be understood as “the only
way to speak of a moral culture” (González 2010, p. 299). Kant’s idea of
cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum), understood as the
result of a worldwide union towards universal laws, is
guided by the same practical reason that grounds duty. With the Kantian
idea of cosmopolitism in mind, it can be argued that duty towards all
future generations has a stronger moral component than considering
obligations towards “future generations related to me”, as in the concepts of nation or
race, for it meets the Kantian commitment towards the primacy of
practical reason, the idea of each person as an end-in-themself, and the
highest good as the ideal of freedom (Zammito 1992, p. 307).
Furthermore, by conceiving future generations as transmitters of a
culture, a race, or a tradition, they are also expected to preserve
those characteristics: therefore, they are considered to be the elements
through which something more important is conveyed, which is what must
be preserved. The future generations with whom I am related are thus
understood as the means for the preservation of a series of elements, an
idea that is in direct contradiction with the Kantian paradigm of a
kingdom of ends. Hoping for future generations to carry out the same
characteristics as I do can also have an even more self-centered
meaning: the egotistical aspiration to save a part of oneself through
others, which brings us back to the instrumental use of those future
generations.
This does not mean that disregarding the characteristics of far
distant generations means that one actively wants certain
features, or all features, to disappear. Cosmopolitism does not mean
sociocultural erasure or flattening under a monoculture. On this topic,
Arcos Ramírez (2004) makes an important observation by considering
cosmopolitism in the light of Kant’s patriotism, arguing that with this
proposal, Kant is not advocating for an exclusively universal love that
only allows for bonding with abstract humans devoid of all
factual characteristics. Arcos Ramírez argues that Kant is not a naïve
universalist who believes morality reaches the peak of human potential
when we become desensitized to our fellow man or woman. Feeling and
thinking about future generations no matter their characteristics is not
contradictory with feeling and thinking about the wellbeing of those
close or related to us: it is only contradictory if we believe that, in
carrying on a certain set of characteristics with which I identify,
those generations bearing those features are more worthy of rights and
consideration than those that do not. Neither is contradictory with
imagining future generations not as a single homogenized culture, but as
a variety of cultures and social groups whose specific content we cannot
imagine.
2. We
know, but will we do? The motivational force of duty
The fact that the philosophical community is in the midst of looking
for answers regarding how to make the lives of future generations better
—or, at the very least, not worse— supports Kant’s point that, contrary
to the experience of aesthetic judgement, which elicits restful
contemplation, the mind feels agitated and prone to action when
experiencing the aesthetically sublime. This point, related to the
motivational capacity of moral duties and the feelings that accompany
them, has led to analyses on duties towards future generations from a
perspective centred on individuals, their motivations and emotions. This
section will discuss some of these perspectives, in order to help
clarify a few relevant issues, before outlining the reasons why it is
appropriate to approach the response to this moral challenge from
another section of the Kantian corpus.
In his research on our duties and responsibilities towards future
generations, Huda (2019) starts from two premises: firstly, the
difference established by Birnbacher (2009) between moral emotions —such
as love of humanity— and immediate emotions —such as group solidarity—.
Secondly, the thesis by Care (1982), which states that the
nonparticularity of future generations does not have the capacity to
interest existing generations, whereas we can foster feelings such as
solidarity and loyalty to those generations that we can “put a face on”.
Huda argues that rationalistic motives, which he identifies at least to
some extent with Kantian thought —he refers to the categorical
imperative as an example of such—, as too abstract, or too strong to
implement, which makes him move towards a proposal that deals with what
he calls the motivation problem by including direct motivations towards
effectively existing people. Care’s point is that, although the call of
duty towards a nonparticular humanity might rank higher in Kant’s scale
of moral righteousness, it lacks the motivational power to elicit
action.
Following these premises, Huda’s criticism of rationalistic motives
is grounded on their lack of capacity for encouraging action: while he
does not make any judgment about the moral validity of rationalistic
motives, when addressing an example laid out by Partridge (1980)
—Russian peasants refusing to eat grain reserved for future generations
during the 1921 famine and the Siege of Leningrad—, he finds them as
rare and difficult to be used as the basis for our responsibility
towards future generations. Huda’s thesis that rationalistic motives
towards future generations do not have the sufficient motivational
force, and that emotions play a way larger part in this, has been
convincingly supported by the work of Díaz (2023), who concludes from
his experimental study that moral emotions not only co-occur in moral
actions, but that they have a far greater motivational force than moral
beliefs, to the point that the latter have very little motivational
force, especially when the stakes are high. In addition to this support,
Huda’s thesis can be backed by another source, although probably an
unexpected one: Kant himself. In §28 of The Metaphysics of
Morals, Kant coincides with Birnbacher and Care in their assessment
of love towards all of humanity having little motivational force:
Now the benevolence present in love for all human beings is indeed
the greatest in its extent, but the smallest in its degree; and when I
say that I take an interest in this human being’s well-being only out of
my love for all human beings, the interest I take is as slight as an
interest can be (6: 452).
The key to a successful moral intervention seems to be having a clear
moral goal set by duty, with emotion providing the motivational force to
carry out what reason shows us to be the best course of action. Both are
required in order for action to take place. It is true that according to
Kant it is reason, and reason alone, who can cross the threshold that
separates the aesthetically sublime and the sublime, nature and freedom,
experience and action. However, it still requires the motivational force
of emotions. On the other hand, as explained by Thomason (2017), while
emotions do play a role in morality, their cultivation is not enough in
order to develop moral behaviour, and reason is always necessary to
guide them. Just as the cultivation of emotions can be a noble by
misguided task, merely encouraging or increasing the intensity of the
emotion does not work either:
[…] not only are the sentimental man’s feelings unfree, they are also
ineffective. Kant’s worry is that one whose feeling of sympathy for
others is mere sentimentality, will not connect his feelings with
action. The sentimental man might be too overcome by emotion to assist
those suffering. Indeed, he might even avoid those who suffer, so as to
avoid the personal pain caused him by seeing others suffer. Thus
sentimentality does not facilitate the fulfilment of our duty
of beneficence; rather it might well deter us from fulfilling our duty
(Mathias 1999, p. 262).
Thus, characterizing Kant as categorically opposed to any emotion and
their role in motivation is just plain wrong: Kantian scholars have
provided good arguments for ideas such as the virtuous element of some
moral emotions, such as respect (Cohen 2018). Kant himself only warns
about the dangers of emotions if they overcome reason and take its
reins, hence becoming passions (Sussman 2001; Sherman 2014; González
2015), and as exposed in Moral Mrongovius II, affections such
as sympathy play an active role in moral action by identifying those who
need help the most —we have already covered how the universal moral
value of individuals does not stripe them of their particular
circumstances—. If Kant himself, despite his deontologist principles,
still allows for emotions, affections, and feelings —always under the
tutelage of reason— to have the roles that have been described
throughout this paper, it would be imprudent to disregard them in the
name of keeping a Kantian perspective.
Having clarified the necessary role of emotions and reason, and their
respective roles, we find ourselves in a compromising situation. We
cannot leave emotions without the supervision of reason, but in the case
of our duty towards very distant generations, reason places us before a
duty with little to no emotional attachment. This apparent contradiction
has led some authors, such as Birnbacher, to propose a kind of
compromise: if reason impels us to care for the welfare of future
generations, but we only feel the necessary attachment to mobilize our
actions with our direct descendants, a “chain of love” can be forged, so
that each generation cares for the next: thus, generation by generation,
we would fulfil the duty entrusted by reason while guaranteeing the
motivating power of emotions to promote the necessary actions. However,
as argued by Ojanen, “reliance on the chain of love would likely
emphasize near-term adaptation policies at the cost of genuine
mitigation, leading to exacerbated future damages” (2019, p. 12), trying
to confront the current paradigm of short-term actions with an
alternative set of short-term actions motivated by affection.
So, after so much consideration, are we at a dead end? Is being aware
of our moral duties towards future generations a mere sign of the depth
of our moral capacity, but doomed to be sterile when it comes to
eliciting action? Does reason sabotage itself by proposing a goal so
distant that we are unable to put our emotional and motivational muscles
to work on it? Before becoming discouraged, it is worth realizing that
so far we have been looking for answers to these questions in the realm
of ethics and morals, and focusing on motivation and particular
emotions. Perhaps, if the picture looks so bleak, it is because we are
looking in the wrong domain of Kantian philosophy. After all, basing the
success or failure against climate change on the righteous response to
the call of duty by particular individuals sounds dangerously naïve.
What, then, is the alternative? One of the best analysis of this matter
from a Kantian perspective, while putting forward valid proposals, is
Alice Pinheiro Walla, whose thesis in this regard will be the focus of
the next point.
3.
Cosmopolitan right and duty towards future generations
In her reading of Kant, Pinheiro Walla rightly observes that the
ground of Kant’s legal theory is our condition as spatial beings,
corporeal agents sharing a physical space: this notion, succinctly
summarised by Huber as “structural significance of embodied agency under
conditions of spatial constraint” (2017, p. 1), provides key insights of
Kant’s global thinking and cosmopolitism.
In this regard, climate change highlights the necessary
interconnectedness between all people on the planet, so that every
action has consequences for the agency of others. While freedom and its
signs pertain to our noumenal dimension, Kant’s legal theory deals with
our phenomenal selves; therefore, “as embodied beings in space, the
internal quality of one’s maxim is secondary; what is important is that
one’s action can coexist externally with the equal freedom of choice of
another; that is, we do not violate another’s authority over her own
domain of external freedom” (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 107). The absolute
character of freedom, which can be glimpsed in the experience of the
sublime, displays our possibilities without telling us in what way to
materialize them: that is the reason why it can afford to deal with the
indeterminate, to challenge and break imagination, and to work through
signs and analogies. The phenomenal sphere on flesh and bones has to
deal with how to bring “the external exercise of freedom of a plurality
of persons under a system of external freedom, that is, in accordance
with universal laws which can regulate these interactions” (Pinheiro
Walla 2016, p. 168). In order to support her reading on the matter,
Pinheiro Walla quotes Kant, in a passage that deserves to be quoted in
its entirety:
All human beings are originally in common possession of the land of
the entire earth (communio fundi originaria) and each has by
nature the will to use it (lex iusti) which, because the choice
of one is unavoidably opposed by nature to that of another, would do
away with any use of it if this will did not also contain the principle
for choice by which a particular possession for each on the common land
could be determined (lex iuridica) But the law which is to
determine for each what land is mine or yours will be in accordance with
the axiom of outer freedom only if it proceeds from a will that is
united originally and a priori (that presupposes no rightful act for its
union). Hence it proceeds only from a will in the civil condition
(lex iustitiae distributivae), which alone determines what is
right (recht), what is rightful (rechtlich), and what
is laid down as right (Rechtens). But in the former condition,
that is before the establishment of the civil condition, but with a view
to it, that is provisionally, it is a duty to proceed in accordance with
the principle of external acquisition. Accordingly, there is also a
rightful capacity of the will to bind everyone to recognize the act of
taking possession and of appropriation as valid, even though it is only
unilateral. (MS, RL, AA 06: 267.04–23)
Throughout this paper, it has been mentioned in several instances
that the literature on our moral duties towards future generations —as a
topic deeply related to climate change— has displayed a tendency towards
motivations, personal responsibilities, and how an individual should
answer to the interpellation of duty. Pinheiro Walla also points at this
tendency, describing it as characteristic by Anglophone Kantians not
acquainted with Kant’s legal theory (2020, p. 100). The preceding
mentions about cosmopolitan right and cosmopolitism were not capricious:
as Pinheiro Walla reminds, this notion states that “to deny life-saving
occupation of space to another being, who is in principle just as
entitled as anyone else to any place of the earth, would be to
contradict the very justification for the territorial rights of states”
(Pinheiro Walla 2016, p. 175). Man-made climate change and those
policies that could close off adaptation possibilities to climate change
refugees would therefore “impact on the external freedom of other
persons in a way that is incompatible with their equal external freedom”
(Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 108).
Pinheiro Walla rightly points out that applying a theory of
individual duties to a problem of a global character (a tendency she
diagnoses as endemic in the English-speaking reception of Kant) is
problematic. For the author, the categorical imperative is not such an
effective formula for dealing with this challenge, preferring to base it
on Kantian legal theory “due to its ability to justify externally
enforceable duties and its focus on political-juridical institutions”
(Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 101). Thus, from her perspective, proposals
such as Schönfeld’s (2008), with his naturalistic reading of the
categorical imperative, so that moral values reflect natural facts about
people, and which leads to the proposition that the Kantian formula of
the kingdom of ends must include future generations, is based on a
fundamental error: understanding the categorical imperative as a
requirement of prudential consistency, rather than as a requirement of
principle consistency. A premise such as Schönfeld’s, based on the
notion that “if I want my action to be possible in the future, I must
adopt only environmentally sustainable maxims” (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p.
104), can only lead to hypothetical imperatives. But these kinds of
imperatives
presuppose that we are already committed to the end in question
(because we happen to desire or want it) and command us merely to take
the necessary means to that end’s realization. This might work in the
case of environmental policies if we are already motivated and committed
to pursue environmental goals. But it cannot command us to adopt the end
categorically, if we do not care about it (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p.
104).
The author this invites her readers “to reflect about the limitations
of a purely ethical, individual approach to a collective, global problem
and what individuals and collective agents can be rightfully coerced to
do” (2020, p. 105), while pointing out that Kant himself is aware of
this distinction, which sets the basis for his differentiation “between
the domain of individual virtue and the domain of coercible juridical
obligations in his late work The Metaphysics of Morals”. This
distancing from moral individualism is aligned with Flikschuh’s reading
of cosmopolitism as a matter of right,
rather than of freedom. As the author points out, “the liberal
conception of personal autonomy as rational self-determination – as the
capacity to choose and pursue one’s own conception of the good – tends
to be conflated with Kant’s principle of moral autonomy as
self-legislation” (2009, p. 428); this predominantly Anglophone
perspective has been challenged by the conception “of moral autonomy as
a constraint upon the pursuit of personal autonomy” (Id., p.
429). In this sense, it is worth noting to what extent Kant raises the
necessary combination of aspects: between reason and emotions, between
individual virtue and legal obligations, between the noumenal character
of freedom and legislation that must be applied to phenomenal entities
that share a space. In contrast to the stereotypical image of Kant as an
inflexible, almost dogmatic author, this enquiry shows a Kant who
understands the necessary character of mutual correspondence, sceptical
of universal formulas that only apply to a single sphere or faculty. In
the case at hand, throughout the research, the contributions of
different authors have been collected on why a moral motivation is
doomed to failure, particularly when its account is of an indeterminate
nature. Pinheiro Walla rightly detects that this does not mean that we
should throw in the towel, but that legal and juridical theory should be
directed to where morality points:
Our task is to regulate the relations among those equal spheres of
freedom, thereby integrating them in a coordinated system. Moral
motivation alone cannot secure this coordination, since the task at hand
requires more than the quality of my volition. Having a plurality of
well-meaning drivers does not secure a well coordinated traffic system.
It is not a matter of individual character or good will, but of external
regulation (Pinheiro Walla 2020, p. 106).
4. Discussion and conclusion
It can be summarized that realizing and contemplating our moral
duties towards far distant generations can be lived as an experience of
the sublime in which reason, in its practical dimension concerning moral
duties, and made possible by the intervention of a culture that
contemplates the long-term consequences of our actions and our
responsibilities for the environment, points to an ideal of freedom and
possibility of intervention in the world that exceeds the
representational possibilities of the imagination. The absolute
character of human freedom leads us to ponder what our moral duties are
towards those generations, even if it opens up more questions than it
can provide answers for much like philosophy itself, on the other hand.
But that is, I believe, the crucial point: the experience of the sublime
is not supposed to provide answers, but to serve as a reflection of the
scope of (in this case, practical) reason.
In the experience of the sublime that arises from natural phenomena,
theoretical reason exceeds our capacity to imagine vast magnitudes. In
the experience of events (in the case of Enthusiasmus) or
cognitive achievements in which the absolute character of freedom and
the vastness of our duties are conceived, practical reason goes beyond
what imagination can represent. This does not mean that sensible
phenomena are to be discarded when reason intervenes: in fact, both
dimensions of the phenomenal and noumenal homo are in play
here, as the challenges posed by practical reason are not to be answered
by exercising our individual moral fortitude, or by summoning emotional
motivation, but by legislating our mutual relations as spatial
beings.
The challenge of dealing with the consequences of climate change, of
course, is immense. It involves a political, economic, and technical
effort which requires a level of coordination, planning and imagination
like never before in the history of mankind. However, if the Kantian
account of the sublime is to be right, then the magnitude of the task
must be followed by an effort of equal magnitude, for “feelings of the
sublime precisely activate our determination to withstand these
seemingly incommensurate challenges rather than feel dwarfed by them”
(Menninghaus et al. 2019). In fact, the experience of the sublime, in
order to be described as such, has to leave a trace of resolution and
action, of purpose (Menninghaus 1991): if it does not provide awareness
of our intervening potential in reality, if it places us as mere passive
spectators, we are missing the main element of the experience of the
sublime. In this regard, a key difference between the sublime and the
beautiful is that the former involves an integration of the unpleasant
component of the experience, in a way in which “a counterpurposiveness
for imagination turns into a purposiveness for reason” (Wenzel 2009, p.
396). For the sublime to take place, reason must be capable of aiming
towards an idea that forces imagination into the aforementioned
limit-straining effort. The ought, as pointed out by Hyde, need to imply
a can.
Literature on the topic which accepts as a starting point that
something needs to be done has also asked pertinent questions
regarding what should be done: even if numerous factors might
lead to freeze in stupor over the magnitude of the task, the proposals
arising from this moral challenge keep happening, and pointing at new
and promising directions. For Kant, the realization of these duties and
the subsequent discussion could constitute proof of our innate moral
character and the tendency towards the good. From my more modest
perspective, and in accordance with Lyotard’s diagnosis, it might be too
bold to state that they constitute a schema of moral
progression. However, it does constitute an affirmation of the absolute
character of human freedom, and the fact that its appeals to duty can
occur even in the absence of concrete representations. This discussion,
consequently, can be considered a moral progress as a better
understanding of morality, according to the definition provided by
Nussbaum (2007). On the other hand, the fact that those future
generations do not replicate our characteristics, that we have nothing
“at stake” in that distant future, meet the Kantian principle of
disinterestedness, inherent in the genuine experience of the sublime,
and cosmopolitanism right, which becomes the cornerstone for possible
solutions based on the Kantian theory of law, as developed by Pinheiro
Walla.
What, then, can be done? What is proposed here, in the light of what
has been researched and in order to respond to this immense challenge,
involves several considerations. Firstly, to bear in mind that the
unrepresentable, those generations far distant from us, are part of the
experience of the sublime that opens up in the consideration of our
moral duties, while at the same time challenging our capacity to imagine
in what way can we envision their needs and provide for them. Secondly,
to base the possible answers and proposals not on Kantian moral theory,
but on legal theory: if Kant was perceptive enough to contemplate the
need for a duality between emotions and reasons, between ethical and
legal principles, between noun and phenomenon, how much less should we
contemplate it today. Research into Kantian legal theory presents itself
as a fruitful philosophical terrain from which to articulate concrete
proposals to the legal and political challenges of climate change.
In this sense, the idea of a “chain of love” is based on the
motivating component of emotions for our immediate generations in order
to successively take advantage of their mobilising capacity, greater
than that of reason and any feelings that we might have for generations
far away, and thus maintain over time a care for the planet that is
bequeathed to our descendants. Given how problematic it is to bet on
morality and emotions in this matter, and given the need to constitute a
structured legislative framework, perhaps it would be better to speak of
a chain of laws, or legislative principles. Love cannot be legislated,
but legal frameworks that determine the effects of our spheres of
liberty on the spheres of liberty of the people with whom we share
planet and consequences can.
Finally, this research shows, in many instances, the dynamic
character of Kantian philosophy. This dynamism involves aspects such as
the necessary mutual determination between cognitive faculties, the
active nature of conceptualization and knowledge in the attuning role of
culture, and the interrelation between the noumenal and the phenomenal,
contrary to the belief that the Kantian noumenon is but a negative
instance with nothing to tell us and nothing to provide but a limit. On
an epistemological level, Kant regards experimental science as a
discipline in progress, and this nuclear idea has been taken up by
Sellars (1963) and his successors to underline that the scientific
project, built on empirical concepts, is always a work in perpetual and
dialectal progress (Gironi 2015, 2017; O’Shea 1997, 2017). The mutual
imbrication of epistemology and morality comes to light in the
possibility of our moral decisions and legal frameworks being guided by
a better understanding of climate change and its consequences.
Therefore, it is worth inviting a reading of Kant that is sensitive to
this dynamism: as has been seen throughout this paper, there is no one
key ingredient in Kant that can provide the solution to all problems.
Co-determination, the mutual influence between spheres of freedom, or
the realisation of morality on the basis of empirical knowledge and
legislation are just three instances of the dynamic character of the
critical programme.
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