Valuing Humanity as Cosmopolitan Beings

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism, Communication, and Citizenship Education

Abstract

Robin Barrow claims in his ‘Moral education’s modest agenda’ that “the task of moral education is to develop understanding, at the lowest level, of the expectations of society and, at the highest level, of the nature of morality … [that is, that moral education] should go on to develop understanding, not of a particular social code, but of the nature of morality – of the principles that provide the framework within which practical decisions have to be made” (Barrow, 2006: 6). Barrow’s words are noteworthy not only because he sets out to define the moral education’s modest agenda in terms of principles but also because he asserts that education is important when it comes to teaching students to understand morality in such terms. However, even though he argues that understanding morality is of importance and in particular in terms of principles he does not say much about the function or status of principles. In this paper I will discuss two distinctive features of human beings and bring forth a Kantian notion of morality as a response to Barrow’s idea of developing an understanding of the nature of morality in terms of principles.
In the first part I argue that a distinctive feature of human beings is, according to Kant (1996, 6: 391-392), our capacity to set ends through reason, and reflect upon them. Instead of just acting upon instinct or a desire or an inclination of some sort we as human beings have the capacity to take them up as an object of our choice and as an end to be satisfied or fulfilled, and reflect upon them (c.f. Korsgaard, 1996). In the second part I argue that we act upon principles. That is, we have the capacity to act upon the principle of choice on the one hand, which means that we can choose between different kinds of object, and decide which one to act upon as a possible ground of our action. Moreover, we do not only set an object as our end, use means in order to achieve or satisfy our chosen end, and act accordingly; we also act upon the instrumental principle. That is, the principle that roughly says that we take the means to our ends. This principle constitutively guides our activity and serves as an internal regulative norm for us when we decide to act in order to achieve the end we set up for ourselves (c.f. Andrews Reath 2008). This goes even for the moral law – the categorical imperative, which is the guiding principle one has to follow in order to exercise one’s free agency (c.f. Korsgaard 2008, 2009). I argue that the principles Kant suggests are constitutive of action, and that we do not only develop our understanding, but also value our humanity as cosmopolitan beings when we comply by the principles of practical reason and cultivate our different kinds of predispositions (technical, pragmatic and moral) in practice, and that such an education contributes to the larger societal public good.

Author

• Klas Roth, Stockholm University