Between the devil and the deep sea

Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant

Do human beings have the ability to discover moral truths? Hannah Arendt starts her discussion in ‘Responsibility and Judgement’ by noting that most people in Nazi Germany didn’t act as if they did:

There is not only the gruesome fact of elaborately established death factories and the utter absence of hypocrisy in those very substantial numbers who were involved in the extermination program. Equally important, but perhaps more frightening, was the matter-of-course collaboration from all strata of German society, including the older elites which the Nazis left untouched, and who never identified themselves with the party in power… It proved more-over than no one had to be a convinced Nazi to conform, and to forget overnight, as it were, not his social status, but the moral convictions which once went with it.

Hannah Arendt

How can one still believe something like a Kantian ethical philosophy? In the quote below, Arendt discusses Kantian positions that no longer seem tenable.

Not for a moment would [Kant] have doubted that, confronted with the example of virtue, human reason knows what is right and that its opposite is wrong… “the knowledge of what everyone is obliged to do, and thus also to know, [is] within the reach of everyone, even the most ordinary man.” And if someone had asked Kant where this knowledge within reach of everybody is located, he would have replied in the rational structure of the human mind…

And yet, in an earlier essay, Arendt explains the need for a “firm footing” for ethical philosophy:

For only if we assume that there exists a human faculty which enables us to judge rationally without being carried away by either emotion of self-interest, and which at the same time functions spontaneously, that is to say, is not bound by standards and rules under which particular cases are simply subsumed, but on the contrary, produces its own principles by virtue of the judging activity itself; only under this assumption can we risk ourselves on this very slippery moral ground with some hope of finding a firm footing.

Arendt finds that for both Socrates and Kant, ethics is an obligation to yourself to act in a way such that you are able to live with yourself (or to have a clear conscience).

Kant’s famous formula: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can become a general law for all intelligible beings,” all take as their standard the Self and hence the intercourse of man with himself.

She finds this to agree with her observations:

If you examine the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt, you will discover that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or a crisis of conscience… Hence their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said “This I can’t do,” rather than, “This I ought not to do.”

A desire to live with a clean conscience is for Arendt the slender ground remaining, and perhaps enough for a very limited rational capability to perceive truth:

In the case of moral, as distinguished from scientific, truth, however, it is assumed that the commonest man and the most sophisticated one are equally open to compelling evidence - that every human being is in possession of this kind of rationality, of the moral law within me, as Kant used to say.

… Morally the only reliable people when the chips are down are those who say “I can’t.” The disadvantage of this complete adequacy of the alleged self-evidence or moral truth is that it must remain entirely negative.

Here Arendt proposes a half-full Kantianism, where we can rationally perceive only what we shouldn’t do but not what we should¹. Is this a sound enough footing?

TLDR: The quote from Arendt below:

The more these things are discussed, the clearer it becomes, I think, that we actually find ourselves here in a position between the devil and the deep sea.

1. Later in the essay, Arendt proposes a second solution inspired by Kant, where we can make positive judgements, though they are not grounded in rationality, but rather by a common subjectivism.