10문제 레이아웃

Kant’s emphasis on human ①respect informs present-day notions of universal human rights. More important, his account of ②utility figures in many of our contemporary debates about justice. In the introduction to this book, I distinguished three approaches to justice. One approach, that of the utilitarians, says that the way to define justice and to determine the right thing to do is to ask what will ③increase welfare, or the collective happiness of society as a whole. A second approach connects justice to ④liberty. Libertarians offer an example of this approach. They say the just distribution of income and wealth is whatever distribution arises from the free exchange of goods and services in an unfettered market. To ⑤control the market is unjust, they maintain, because it violates the individual’s liberty of choice. A third approach says that justice means giving people what they morally deserve—allocating goods to reward and promote virtue. As we will see when we turn to Aristotle (in Chapter 8), the virtue-based approach connects justice to reflection about the good life.

The hotel is magnificent. A bellboy complete with uniform and sharp-creased cap jumps forward and begins to carry our bags into the lobby. Inside, the hotel looks like an orgy of shopping arcades and restaurants all encased in granite and glass. And rather than be impressed, I am worried about the expense, as well as the appearance it must give Aiyi, that we rich Americans cannot be without our luxuries even for one night.

But when I step up to the reservation desk, ready to haggle over this booking mistake, it is confirmed. Our rooms are prepaid, thirty-four dollars each. I feel sheepish, and Aiyi and the others seem delighted by our temporary surroundings. Lili is looking wide-eyed at an arcade filled with video games.

Our whole family crowds into one elevator, and the bellboy waves, saying he will meet us on the eighteenth floor. As soon as the elevator door shuts, everybody becomes very quiet, and when the door finally opens again, everybody talks at once in what sounds like relieved voices. I have the feeling Aiyi and the others have never been on such a long elevator ride.

“But now it is too late to ask her. They are all dead, your grandparents, your uncles, and their wives and children, all killed in the war, when a bomb fell on our house. So many generations in one instant.”

She had said this so matter-of-factly that I thought she had long since gotten over any grief she had. And then I wondered how she knew they were all dead.

“Maybe they left the house before the bomb fell,” I suggested.

“No,” said my mother. “Our whole family is gone. It is just you and I.”

“But how do you know? Some of them could have escaped.”

“Cannot be,” said my mother, this time almost angrily. And then her frown was washed over by a puzzled blank look, and she began to talk as if she were trying to remember where she had misplaced something. “I went back to that house. I kept looking up to where the house used to be. And it wasn’t a house, just the sky. And below, underneath my feet, were four stories of burnt bricks and wood, all the life of our house. Then off to the side I saw things blown into the yard, nothing valuable. There was a bed someone used to sleep in, really just a metal frame twisted up at one corner. And a book, I don’t know what kind, because every page had turned black. And I saw a teacup which was unbroken but filled with ashes. And then I found my doll, with her hands and legs broken, her hair burned off….When I was a little girl, I had cried for that doll, seeing it all alone in the store window, and my mother had bought it for me. It was an American doll with yellow hair. It could turn its legs and arms. The eyes moved up and down. And when I married and left my family home, I gave the doll to my youngest niece, because she was like me. She cried if that doll was not with her always. Do you see? If she was in the house with that doll, her parents were there, and so everybody was there, waiting together, because that’s how our family was.”

The woman in the customs booth stares at my documents, then glances at me briefly, and with two quick movements stamps everything and sternly nods me along. And soon my father and I find ourselves in a large area filled with thousands of people and suitcases. I feel lost and my father looks helpless.

“Excuse me,” I say to a man who looks like an American. “Can you tell me where I can get a taxi?” He mumbles something that sounds Swedish or Dutch.

I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian-Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian-Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering! Well, these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys—in fact, just last week—that Asian-American students, as a whole, do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English tests. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as “broken”or “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.

Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my boss at the time that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.

But it wasn’t until 1985 that I began to write fiction. At first I wrote what I thought to be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state. ” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.

The first version Kant calls the formula of the universal law: “Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” By “maxim,” Kant means a rule or principle that gives the reason for your action. He is saying, in effect, that we should act only on principles that we could universalize without contradiction. To see what Kant means by this admittedly abstract test, let’s consider a concrete moral question: Is it ever right to make a promise you know you won’t be able to keep?

Suppose I am in desperate need of money and so ask you for a loan. I know perfectly well that I won’t be able to pay it back anytime soon. Would it be morally permissible to get the loan by making a false promise to repay the money promptly, a promise I know I can’t keep? Would a false promise be consistent with the categorical imperative? Kant says no, obviously not. The way I can see that the false promise is at odds with the categorical imperative is by trying to universalize the maxim upon which I’m about to act.

The moral force of the categorical imperative becomes clearer in Kant’s second formulation of it, the formula of humanity as an end. Kant introduces the second version of the categorical imperative as follows: We can’t base the moral law on any particular interests, purposes, or ends, because then it would be only relative to the person whose ends they were. “But suppose there were something whose existence has in itself an absolute value,” as an end in itself. “Then in it, and in it alone, would there be the ground of a possible categorical imperative.”

What could possibly have an absolute value, as an end in itself? Kant’s answer: humanity. “I say that man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will.” This is the fundamental difference, Kant reminds us, between persons and things. Persons are rational beings. They don’t just have a relative value, but if anything has, they have an absolute value, an intrinsic value. That is, rational beings have dignity.

This line of reasoning leads Kant to the second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” This is the formula of humanity as an end.

Edward: I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model. When you are subverting the power of government, that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to a democracy. And if you do that in secret consistently, as the government does when it wants to benefit from that secret action that it took, it’ll kind of give its official mandate to go, “Hey, tell the press about this thing and that thing so the public is on our side,” but they rarely, if ever, do that when an abuse occurs. That falls to individual citizens, but they’re typically maligned, it becomes a thing of these people are against the country or against the government, but I’m not. I’m not different from anybody else–I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office and watches what’s happening and goes, ‘This is something that’s not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these policies are right or wrong.’ And I’m wiling to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say ‘I didn’t change these, I didn’t modify the story. This is the truth, this is what’s happening, you should decide whether we need to be doing this.’

Kant’s notion of autonomy stands in stark contrast to this. When we act autonomously, according to a law we give ourselves, we do something for its own sake, as an end in itself. We cease to be instruments of purposes given outside us. This capacity to act autonomously is what gives human life its special dignity. It marks out the difference between persons and things.

For Kant, respecting human dignity means treating persons as ends in themselves. This is why it is wrong to use people for the sake of the general welfare, as utilitarianism does. Pushing the heavy man onto the track to block the trolley uses him as a means, and so fails to respect him as an end in himself. An enlightened utilitarian (such as Mill) may refuse to push the man, out of concern for secondary effects that would diminish utility in the long run. (People would soon be afraid to stand on bridges, etc.) But Kant would maintain that this is the wrong reason to desist from pushing. It still treats the would-be victim as an instrument, an object, a mere means to the happiness of others. It lets him live, not for his own sake, but so that other people can cross bridges without a second thought.