This is only a relatively recent and light-hearted example of something that is actually deeply horrifying at the heart of this administration. Trump as both candidate and incumbent has been willing to associate himself, time and again, with what we all previously took to be the symbols of absolute evil.
Here, after all, is a man who openly adopted a slogan, "America First," that is primarily known for its associations with the KKK, Anti-Semites, and Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s. Here is a man who recently posted a video of one of his supporters, bearing this same slogan on a golf cart, pumping his fist in the air and shouting "white power."
Here is a presidential reelection effort that, in the midst of nationwide protests over systemic racism, is selling in its official campaign store a baby onesie apparently mocking—or at the very least, appropriating from—the slogan Black Lives Matter. One can also reportedly find there a t-shirt that bears a striking resemblance to Nazi iconography.
Plainly, we are faced here with a Republican party very much altered from the days of Neo-conservatism—an ideology which assumed, as we all still do, that Hitler was bad. Indeed, the Neocons were mostly arguing that certain foreign dictators resembled him and therefore necessitated U.S. intervention. Since that time, our partisan divide has plainly become about something very different.
Back in the pre-Trump era, that is to say, our political debate was conducted within the same moral universe. Both Republicans and Democrats claimed to believe in democracy, altruism, racial equality, and the like. Our arguments therefore boiled down to discussions of sincerity, allegations of hypocrisy, and of whether the means employed were the right way to get to the professed ends.
Now, we are grappling with a president who seems to reject the most basic tenets of the post-Holocaust moral consensus, or really even the idea of altruism itself. Trump has said, time and again, that the values he respects most are "strength," "toughness," and the like. Doing the right thing for the sake of others is nowhere on the list.
We are therefore thrust back upon the most basic questions of political philosophy. We are back in fifth-century Athens being asked: why be virtuous? Why be good, instead of evil? Why care about other people, instead of purely advancing one's own interests? Why opt for the Rebel Alliance, instead of taking one's place on the side with the Death Star?
The answer that comes back to us from the Kantian stream of moral philosophy is that people who reject the most basic ideas of other-directed morality are in some way contradicting themselves. If they ask something for themselves, they are in some way logically bound to demand it for others, and vice versa. The universal moral claim is implied in the individual willed act.
We can perhaps see the force of this idea best not from reading the philosophers, but from turning to literature. There is a scene in Stephen Crane's short novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, for instance, in which the eponymous character's older brother Jimmie is confronted with the fact that Maggie has been "ruined" —that is to say, seduced—at the hands of Pete.
Now, we know that Jimmie has tacitly endorsed the seduction of other young women in the past, and even perpetrated the deed himself. So he struggles at first to come up with a reason why it is wrong when it happens to his family, but not when he does it to others. As Crane observes: "He was trying to formulate a theory that he had always unconsciously held, that all sisters, excepting his own, could advisedly be ruined."
To give a similar example, I recall my thoughts as a child hearing my parents read aloud to me from an abridgment of the Iliad. It struck me as perplexing that Achilles is so outraged by the death of his cousin Patroclus. I mean, I understood why he would be sad about it, but why would he feel so righteously indignant? After all, I reflected, hasn't he spent the entirety of the story up to this point killing other people's cousins?
I was later relieved to see that the 2004 film Troy addresses exactly this point. When King Priam shows up in Achilles' tent to try to negotiate the release of his son's body, the leader of the Myrmidons digs in his heels. "He killed my cousin" reasons Achilles (that is to say, Brad Pitt) in arguing for why he should not be expected to give up Hector's corpse. "How many cousins have you killed?" asks Priam (that is to say, Peter O'Toole) in response.
It's a fair point.
There seems to be some sense in which the character of Jimmie, who seduces other people's sisters but does not want his own seduced, and Achilles, who kills other cousins but resents the loss of his own, are being illogical, in addition to immoral. We think their position is ludicrous and muddle-headed, in addition to being unjust. Our idea of "justice" therefore seems to combine elements of both reason and morality.
By the same token, however, there are limits to how much we can collapse one into the other. After all, we seem to feel differently about an illogical chain of reasoning than we do about an immoral act. Indeed, the fact that I was able to frame the distinction at all, in that last sentence, points to the key difference. We regard one of them as immoral, but not the other. One is objectionable on moral grounds, that is to say, the other on purely logical ones.
Émile Durkheim offers a helpful note of caution on this subject. In the course of his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he argues that moral obligations and the categories of logical thought resemble one another, because both ultimately derive from society.
Whether this philosophical move solves any of the problems Durkheim wishes it to is irrelevant for now (I happen to think it does not, because any analysis of "society" will presuppose the categories, so we have not solved the chicken-and-egg issue of priority with which he began). The point here is simply that Durkheim does not regard the similarity between the two forms of violation (logical and moral) to be absolute. His reason is exactly the same one we have just given: we perceive (and treat) illogical moves and immoral acts differently.
Thus: "[t]here is an analogy between this logical necessity and moral obligation," writes Durkheim, "but there is not an actual identity. To-day society treats criminals in a different fashion than subjects whose intelligence only is abnormal; that is a proof that the authority attached to logical rules and that inherent in moral rules are not of the same nature, in spite of certain similarities." (Swain trans.)
This is one major problem with Kant's notion of the categorical imperative. The other is that immoral acts, unlike logical absurdities, show up in the world as a matter of empirical fact.
When a person says something illogical, by contrast—say, they assert two mutually-exclusive claims as true—there is a sense in which we can say they are attempting the impossible. They have said something that they cannot actually mean, because they are gesturing toward a reality that cannot exist even in conception. They are, that is to say, simply talking nonsense.
Immoral acts, meanwhile, cannot so easily be dismissed as not really taking place. To the contrary, they happen in all-too concrete reality. A friend and I were recently discussing this point. We observed: for something that is ostensibly "impossible" or "impermissible" to the human mind, at least on the Kantian theory, an immoral act seems to take place with surprising frequency in the world we actually inhabit.
We are thus left struggling to find the basis of the necessity that Kant's theory would seem to place at the root of moral obligation. We plainly cannot say we are compelled to be moral in a literal sense—at least not in the same way we are compelled to be logical. Illogical thoughts are ruled out of court because they are an attempt to think that which cannot be thought. But immoral acts certainly are not that which cannot be done. Au contraire, they are done every day.
Durkheim, when he returns to the question of the categories at the end of his opus, raises this second objection to Kant's theory as well. Kant's argument leaves us unsatisfied, he notes, on the crucial question of why we have to be moral, why we have to adopt the objective standpoint that his moral theory demands.
Using the terminology he has previously established, Durkheim writes: "What Kant's system does not explain [...] is the origin of this sort of contradiction which is realized in man. Why is he forced to do violence to himself by leaving his individuality, and, inversely, why is the impersonal law obliged to be dissipated by incarnating itself in individuals?"
Do we then have any rational or absolute basis for demanding of the Trump administration that they behave morally? That they choose to belong to our moral universe, rather than throwing out its most basic premisses?
It seems wrong to assert that we have to solve the fundamental and most intractable problems of moral philosophy before we can mount a response to the MAGA people. And even if Kant's system could somehow be salvaged—if we retrieve some compulsory sense in which they are being untrue to themselves, violating their own starting assumptions, by the way they are acting—they might simply reply, with the poet, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself."
It seems that a more fruitful tack would be to argue on prudential grounds. Say to the MAGA people that they are free to do what they will, logically and otherwise, but to confront them with the magnitude of what they are giving up by doing so.
To renounce any principle of reciprocity, after all, removes the basis for group loyalty. The notion that "strength" and "toughness" supersede all other values means that one cannot hope for any mercy when one's own turn comes to be under fortune's heel. Trump has shown time and again, after all, that he will turn on any of his supporters as soon as it is convenient to do so, or simply when he tires of them.
Hence we can argue with Trump's minions as does Prometheus, when he is chained to the rock: "An illness somehow sickens all usurpers:/ the inability to trust their friends." (Romm trans.)
Even more gravely, however, to abandon the principle that one has any obligations to other people is to lose at the same time one's ability to demand anything of others. If one has already acknowledged that morality can have no constraining effect on one's own will, one has forfeited the ability to assert it as a universal principle by which others are bound. One has already made oneself an exception of any such principle, thereby denying ipso facto its universality.
Yet we all want to have our actions accord with some notion of universality, because we want our actions to be not just things that happened, but things that are in some way justified, which is as much as to say that we want them to have such a universal principle behind them.
Furthermore, we want to object to the sins that others commit against us as being not just unpleasant events—in the same way that a cold or a bad rash is unpleasant—but as wrong. Few of us quite want to give up morality when we can apply it to the actions of other people toward us.
One is therefore caught in the same contradiction as Jimmie, whom we discussed above, when one tries to avoid universal principles without behaving morally oneself. One is trying to formulate a theory that all people, excepting oneself, are advised to obey morality, and the joke—Crane's joke—is of course that this cannot be done. More to the point, one also loses the ability to justify any of one's own actions or choices.
This was also a point my friend made in the conversation mentioned earlier. If all universal principles of morality are precluded, he said, then there is fundamentally no reason to do one thing rather than another. It would be impossible to maintain one's humanity, which it indistinguishable from one's status as an agent, if one were to adopt such a theory in a genuine and thoroughgoing way.
Then this past week, I was reading E.H. Carr's classic Twenty Years' Crisis and found that, for all his professed doubts about moral language and moral philosophy, he reaches roughly the same conclusion.
Carr, of course, is best known as a realist in international relations theory—which is almost (but not quite) to say a cynic. In this role, he delivers one of the most comprehensive and unsettling critiques of the moral pretensions of governments, diplomats, and theorists that has even been penned.
After giving morality this thorough drubbing, however, and showing just how often and in what ways it serves as a mere ideological window-dressing for crass self-interest, he nonetheless circles back around again to remind us of its categorical necessity.
For one thing, he notes, the usefulness of morality as "window-dressing" itself suggests that it is conceptually distinct from self-interest. We wouldn't always be seeking to rationalize our own concrete advantage under pseudo-moral guises if one were indistinguishable from the other. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, after all, and that is as much as to say that there would be no need for hypocrisy if vice and virtue were really the same thing.
More importantly, Carr argues that "consistent realism breaks down because it fails to provide any ground for purposive or meaningful action." That is to say, if moral considerations are not a factor in human life, and all our actions are predetermined by self-interest, then there is no sense in which we should do one thing rather than another. Once again, we have forfeited our agency, and thus our right to a place in the human drama, by removing any possible basis for the universal justification of a given action.
But wait, have we just argued our way back around to Kant again? That is to say, have we rediscovered that the necessity to formulate moral ideas is intrinsic to the very fact of our behaving as agents? In which case, perhaps there is something to that categorical imperative after all.
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