What, if anything, can stop Donald Trump? Not international law, as the President made clear in a recent New York Times interview, the week he declared Venezuela a wholly owned subsidiary, and began measuring Greenland for drapes. Nor does American law seem to have any hold over the executive will. But Trump admitted one limit on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me”. He raises an interesting question. Can you have a morality all your own? Is morality customizable to one’s idiosyncratic needs?
The idea isn’t obviously batty, at least not to judge by pop culture. “A man gotta have a code”, says Omar Little, a murderous robber on the HBO series The Wire who primly limits his targets to drug dealers. Dexter is a serial killer who preys only on other killers. From Tony Soprano to Walter White, American television has been churning out antiheroes afflicted with sporadic consciences.
The trouble with bespoke morality is that it can be very tailored indeed. Asked by the Times why he demanded ownership of Greenland, Trump explained: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success”. A person who respects others’ property only until he feels a psychological need otherwise is typically called a thief, not a moral paragon.
That said, it’s true that we do often want people to make up their own minds about morality rather than blindly follow the herd. But how do you carve out your own morality without slicing loopholes large enough to drive a Special Forces extraction team through?
Immanuel Kant thought he knew the answer. Morality, according to Kant, is just how an autonomous person behaves. Autonomy equals self-legislation. But you can’t write just any law for yourself. To be a law, rather than a mere whim, a moral rule must conform to a higher law still: the law of reason.
Take stealing. Suppose you are considering filching something – a hotel towel, a doorstep Amazon delivery, the hydrocarbon output of a South American nation. You might be tempted to draft a permissive exception for just this case. But if everyone did the same, your own theft would be no use to you. The idea of property itself would fall apart, as no one would have anything longer than their strength permitted. A morality permitting discretionary theft is therefore what Kant called a “contradiction in conception”. It seems plausible only so long as you imagine yourself governed only by your own whims, and not by the same moral rules you demand from others.
This means that you can have your own morality, but only in the attenuated sense of reasoning to the same conclusions as any other rational person – just as any careful thinker gets the same results from the laws of arithmetic. Yet it is crucial, Kant thought, that you are the one doing this reasoning – and ultimately making the choice to live by its results. That is what makes you autonomous.
The alternative to reasoning is not some free-spirited pursuit of utterly original moral insight. It is what Kant called “heteronomy” – rule by many and various masters, the grab bag of random needs, whims, fears and prejudices that clatter around any person’s psyche, each the distant emissary of some childhood trauma or chance genetic tendency. Allowing your unique stew of heteronomous impulses to drive your decisions might make you stand out, but it would also render you more a spasm of empty causation than the author of a meaningful life.
External law, the sort enacted by legislatures and courts, can therefore be a complement rather than an adversary to the internal law of morality. An external law is a kind of friction on the smooth operation of psychological levers, especially when it makes demands you would rather not obey. Every time you bristle at a legal compulsion it is also a reminder to stop and reason. Why does some particular law feel like an intrusion? Because it is unjust? Perhaps.
Or is it that the law is merely personally inconvenient? In other words, the external law is a spur to do the work of making up your own mind, of discovering the internal law for yourself.
So it is fair to wonder whether a person beyond the reach of external law is really checked by his own morality, or is instead a sort of cosmic pinball, ricocheting off whatever psychological needs might momentarily divert his course. Perhaps you have your own morality precisely when it is not the only thing that can stop you.
Regina Rini holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Reasoning at York University in Toronto.
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