characterize the legislators in such a kingdom. And it would be also justified if one expects an ideal of moral legislation. The kingdom of ends as presented by Kant, is an ideal kingdom, and so, it must have ideal legislators and consequently an ideal legislation. The construction materials of the kingdom of ends present members who have basic and required moral attitudes. Attitudes like respect for humanity, and by implication, human dignity- recognising one another as ends in themselves, with dignity above price; consciousness of the autonomy of oneself and other human beings; ability to abstract from personal differences, therefore not being influenced by private interests and desires; a good sense of duty and responsibility; and, above all, possession of a good will. In the presence of such basic moral attitudes, convergence of moral judgment is highly expected. I, as a reasonable moral agent would not consider the rules as externally imposed or given, but as rules legislated by myself as an autonomous moral agent, because now, I must make others' ends and reasons mine, and I must choose mine in such a way that they can be those of others. Such a perspective will in turn make me _ morally committed to conform to the legislated rules. Concerning legislators with such perspective, T. E. Hill Jr. writes that they, the legislators,
will not make rules unless they judge that there is good reason to do so, and they are concerned with reasons that anyone falling under the rules could acknowledge.
They …place a high value on preserving, developing, exercising, and respecting the rational and moral capacities of persons, and they unconditionally attribute a worth to persons that cannot be quantified and is not subject to trade-offs.
Acknowledging that each valued member has personal ends of his or her own, they give weight to whatever enhances members' abilities and opportunities to pursue those ends successfully within the bounds of the moral rules they adopt.67
The point being made with all these characterisations is that any rational agent will not find reason not to conform to the rules emanating from such legislators and their legislation, and reason not to pursue private ends within the limits of what common rules provides. This does not however mean that the concept of kingdom of ends does not present certain worries that make its adoption somehow difficult. Among the worries below are those indicated by
67 Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1992): “A Kantian Perspective on Moral Rules” pp.295-296
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Thomas E. Hill Jr.68 They are some of the problems he envisaged when one tries to use this idealized kingdom as a heuristic for thinking about real world issues.
1.2.3
Difficulties that could be faced in Adopting the Kingdom of ends IdealHaving as its construction material the basic issues in his moral theory, Kant presented his idea of a kingdom of ends as an ideal for a community of moral agents, that is, of rational beings. The problem, then, is to see whether the ideal can be of a practical use, or in a loose way, in what ways and to what extent can the ideal influence a community of moral agents.
Could it be that this ideal would remain a mirage? Among other problems envisaged by Philosophers, those of Thomas E. Hill Jr. attracted my interest.
i. The worry of what sort of issues are appropriately placed under moral rules.
In the first place, Hill Jr. presented kingdom of ends as a perspective for deliberating about rules. His worry then is that “…its use requires us to make judgments about what sorts of issues are appropriately placed under moral rules.”69
The situation is like when a legislator in a kingdom of ends asks the question: ‘To what extent’ or ‘what and what’ is our concern on this issue? In advocating rules, a likely way out as noticed by Hill Jr., is to find agreement within the relevant group on how to handle the issue in question. With regard to many moral decisions, he says, reasonable people can move on well enough without waiting for public agreement on rules. This they do by “relying instead on the individual judgments of people who internalize some basic moral attitudes.”70 However, concerning matters like recurrent questions of life and death, “it seems essential to work towards a widely accepted common framework for decisions”. This, as Hill Jr. sees it, may present no problem, but his worry is that “Kantian legislators …must face prior questions about what issues call for treatment by rules and then about what types of rules are
68 Thomas J. Hill Jr. considered the Kingdom of ends principle as one of Kantian perspectives considered as a way of framing and guiding the moral reflection of conscientious and sincere moral agents when they are deliberating about how to resolve certain practical questions. His project was purely on normative level. The context of his discussion is not like a metaethical debate about the reality and nature of moral properties, or ‘the project of a Cartesian moral philosopher who, doubting all his previous moral opinions, now seeks to build an entire moral system from sparse but indubitable premises.’ The context was that of seeking possible frameworks to use in shaping one's moral reflection on practical issues. P. 286
69 Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1992): “A Kantian Perspective on Moral Rules” p.299
70 Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1992): “A Kantian Perspective on Moral Rules” p.300
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appropriate.”71 The first question is: Does this issue call for a rule or rules? If yes, the second question is: What type of rule or rules?
My stand is that this problem is an issue in a society where there is much emphasis on rules; where every single issue must be tabulated under one rule or the other. However, there will be less need of this worry in the Ideal African-Igbo communitarian order. This is because, in such constellation, no much emphasis is placed on formal rules. Such led to the opinion, by some writers, that Africans have no need of formal rules. However, the fact is that Africans, in their relationships, rely much on the good will of one another and not much on rules.
Although there exist abuses of the said status quo. The African-Igbo also believe that the territory of personal relations is continuous with moral territory, and therefore do not operate with strict and well demarcated social versus moral rules. That is to say that moral and social rules overlap each other. That is why at times, the same cream of leaders could handle both social and moral issues.
Often, Africans operate much with proverbs or wise sayings that cannot be defined as rules. For example, “it takes a whole village to raise a child” is not a rule, but it imposes serious obligations both on moral and social spheres. Nonetheless, for the African, though there exist moral rules, he does not consider it necessary or the best option, always to be thinking primarily of a moral rule in every situation, even if such situations fall under moral rules. So the worry about what sorts of issues are appropriately placed under moral rules loses much weight within the African context.
ii. The worry of the danger of utopian thinking.
Another observation of Hill Jr. is that the kingdom of ends principle, unless qualified, is in danger of encouraging utopian thinking.72
On this Hill Jr. cautioned that unless we are wary, the kingdom of ends principle “may lead us to draw unreasonable inferences about how we should act in our very imperfect world from our thought experiments about ideal agents in a more perfect world.”73 That is, when we hope to realise a kingdom of ends, in which all citizens would conscientiously obey the laws, then we are not facing the true fact that such strict compliance is not achievable in the phenomenal world. This is however not a problem of the principle itself as an ideal, but that of a wrong notion on how ideals are to be understood and applied.
71 Ibid, p.300
72 Ibid, p.301
73 Ibid
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iii. The worry about moral dilemmas, gaps, and disagreements
Lastly, let me mention another worry of T. E. Hill Jr., which is that the kingdom of ends ideal, like any rule-generating procedure, must face the possibility that, in practice, it will produce moral dilemmas, gaps, and disagreements.74 I would not like to go into the debates on moral dilemmas and moral disagreements. I simply accept the possibility of having them, for example, in the process of abstracting from personal differences. Hill Jr. himself further argued that the above situation is to be expected when we try to bring down this ideal to a practical level. This is because of the inevitable human ignorance, fallibility of judgment, weakness of the will, and impurity of heart. Therefore, even with the sincerest good will, conscientious deliberators are likely to disagree about some significant issues. How deliberators react to occasions of disagreement should rather be the worry in a kingdom of ends, and not whether such occasions will arise.
iv. My worry: Absence of possible coordination of individual legislations
A problem about the principle itself as I observed is that every rational will is legislating individually in this possible kingdom of ends, but Kant left us with no clear idea of a possible coordination of all those individual legislations as to effect harmonization.
The idea of a kingdom leads, intuitively, to the necessity of defined common rules, as Kant himself also acknowledged. But the process of a common or combined legislation that will lead to having the common rules is left unattended by Kant. He mentioned only the demand that individuals abstract from personal interests. Is this enough for harmonious coordination that will give rise to a common rule? It is highly doubtful to suppose that individual decisions sui generis are sufficient enough to yield common rules that will lead to coordinated actions within a kingdom of ends. Common rule is a demand for the fact that moral progress or the morality of any community or kingdom is assessed not only from the individual’s way of life but also from the nature of common rules of such community- what got passed by common legislation.
A common rule, above all, is there to ensure coordination of actions of individuals.
However, a possible reply to this objection is to hold that from the onset, the principles Kant was looking for are those that can serve plurality of agents. This is implied in his demand for universalizability of moral principles. That is to say, principles that cannot serve plurality of agents in a certain kingdom of ends, according to Kant, cannot serve as a moral principle, and therefore should be rejected by the moral agent himself or herself. This could then imply that
74 Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1992): “A Kantian Perspective on Moral Rules” p.300
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in such a kingdom, when every moral agent rejects non-universalizable principles, only those principles that serve plurality of agents would survive. And therefore, individual moral decision would have served for coordinated action.
Such a reply is over presumptuous, as it has been often pointed out. In the first place, it presumes that the individual moral agent is always in the best epistemic position to make the best rational or moral decision, unguided. On this, Rawls’ supposition is helpful:
I also suppose that men suffer from various shortcomings of knowledge, thought, and judgment. Their knowledge is necessarily incomplete, their powers of reasoning, memory, and attention are always limited, and their judgment is likely to be distorted by anxiety, bias, and a preoccupation with their own affairs. Some of these defects spring from moral faults, from selfishness and negligence; but to a large degree, they are simply part of men’s natural situation.75
The truth is this: Given these individual natural limitations, it would be difficult for individual agents to arrive at universalizable principles all the time without someone or group of individuals doing the work of “moral midwifery” as in Socratic midwifery. The Socratic
“midwifery” as we know it, does not pretend to create a new knowledge, but only a process through which the “midwife” brings to light something that is expected or that is already in the other, but which this other individual, due to certain epistemic hindrances, could not alone bring to light.
Secondly, it is evident that even the best of laws need custody and therefore protection.
Hence, even when it is taken for granted that everyone would legislate for himself or herself laws that can serve plurality of agents, life in a kingdom demands a sort of publicity or a coordination of the universal legislations, in the form of what ‘we’ as individuals making up a certain kingdom have come up with. Therefore, a kingdom of ends requires common rules formulated in terms of “what we ought to do” or “how we ought to behave”, and that this formulation limits, protects, and be a guide to “what I ought to do”
This requirement commits Kant in his kingdom of ends formula to an implied idea of a communal legislation in terms of “what we ought to do”. “What we ought to do” presupposes also what I will call “communal rational deliberations on maxims of action”. This communal rational deliberation checks or takes care of dangers posed by weakness of will of an individual moral agent. It could also be understood as “group rationality” without which a kingdom of ends would not be built on a solid foundation. This idea of communal legislation circumscribes also a further idea of “communal autonomy”. This is for the fact that legislation
75 John Rawls (1999): A Theory of Justice (Revised Edition), §23 p. 110
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without autonomy is a joke. It sounds however paradoxical to talk of individual and communal autonomy within the one kingdom at the same time. That notwithstanding, I understand the kingdom of ends formula as one that demands that a system of common moral rules be worked out in the form of “what we ought to do”, as one of the conditions that fine-tunes and makes the realization of “what I ought to do” possible. Its target is also to serve as a standard in reviewing proposed actions of members of an ethical community. My critique of communalism will present consensus decision making as a good option in working out these common rules.
My idea is similar to some aspects of Rawls’ idea of an original position in his theory of justice. As summarized by Samuel Freeman, according to Rawls, original position is to be used “to help us work out what we now think”…; it incorporates “conditions…we do in fact accept”… and is a kind of “thought experiment for the purpose of public- and self-clarification.”76 This is the point. There is need, in a kingdom of ends, for a public or communal knowledge of “what we ought to do”, “how we ought to behave”, the moral convictions that we commonly share, even if individuals have already legislated for themselves such rules. Rawls deems it as necessary, the condition in which everyone accepts, and knows that the others also accept the same principles of justice. The publicity condition in Rawls says that the parties are to assume that the principles of justice they choose will be publicly known and recognized as the basis for social cooperation among the people whose relations they organize and regulate.77
In the chapters that follow, we will see how African communitarian order will battle some of these worries in its efforts to establish kingdom of ends.
76 Freeman, Samuel, "Original Position", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/original-position/>.
77 John Rawls (1999): A Theory of Justice (Revised Edition), §23
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CHAPTER TWO