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5. The moral duty of trust and its limits
Natalia Smirnova (Russia). Comments on the Prof. Stekeler’s paper “The logic of "Us" in psychology and the social sciences”
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1, h2> as a good scheme and not any other. Therefore we both know that we have to do hi no matter how sure we are about the success of the cooperation. Kant’s deep insight was that the form of moral judgement just is this form of judgement about free cooperative schemes of actions and the resulting commitments.

Now you certainly will object that morality is not to be confused with group-solidarity. Or rather, that Kant’s principle of morality was not intended as a norm for a we-group of murderers and bandits to escape justice. The point is, though, that we have to differentiate the general form of this principle from questions about ‘universality’. There is no problem anyway to say that moral duty in the universal sense is duty resulting from implicitly accepted coopera­tive action schemes for all of us in an open and ‘all-inclusive sense’ of ‘all mankind’

Examples of such cooperative action schemes are not difficult to find. In fact, they are everywhere. Telling the truth and keeping promises are most prominent examples. But Plato has already seen that despite all threats of sanctions by state power and force it is still due to a kind of free cooperation that we do nothave to fear almost any minute to get robbed or killed. In order to make this clear he had used the story of Gyges who ‘by chance’ did not have to fear the threat of sanctions. Indeed, the cases in which we must trust that other persons use ‘moral judgement’ and act according to schemes of free cooperation are much more common than we may think. Plato was well aware of this. As all ardent supporters of rational decision theory and game theoretic economy, David Lewis is therefore wrong to believe that virtually any relevant case of cooperative action can be turned into a mere coordination problem.

But why have I replaced Kant’s “I-version” of the moral principle, which stresses the subjective point of view, by a “we-version”? The answer is this. For Kant, the objects of moral judgements are subjective maxims. Such maxims are ‘rules’ or rather schemes of individual action h. I think, instead, that the object and topic or moral judgements are (at least sometimes if not always) schemes of joint actions H ‘as such’ and H* ‘for us’, as Hegel had proposed, too. My claim is that the ‘general law’ in Kant’s formulation refers in almost any relevant case to we-actions or cooperative schemes H and H*, not directly to individual action schemes h. What I should do, then, is to act according to H or H*. Therefore it is wrong to assume that according to moral duty ‘all have to do the same’. Rather, each person has to do ‚her duty‘, as Plato already has seen. Of course, my duty or your duty is not given by nature. It is given by our shared intention or joint will, by an already implicitly or even explicitly accepted form of co­operation H. It is clear, by the way, how to bring entitlements or allowances and prohibitions into the picture.

In other words, I use the we-version in order to criticize the following surface readings of the cate­gorical imperative: I must perform an action h if I can accept that everybody has to do h. I am morally allowed to do h in case I can want that everybody is allowed to do h. I am morally forbidden to do h in case I can assent to the moral norm that it is forbidden to do h.


5. The moral duty of trust and its limits

We already have touched the crucial problem of the ‘moral law of free cooperation’. It is the problem of trust. It is concerned with the hope that the other participants of our we-group will do their duty too. This trust and hope is necessary since we actually are interested in the success of our free cooperation. In distinction to Kant, Hegel had acknowledged this clearly. Trust and hope are constitutive for the success of (free) cooperation. If I do not trust that the others shall cooperate, I will most probably ‘leave’ the we-group by just not doing what I am supposed to do according to the implicitly or explicitly accepted ‘best form of cooperation’.27

The problem of trust shows that moral duty is by no means totally unconditoned and independent from the internal end of the form of cooperation in question. This might be the deeper reason why Kant himself had some anxieties about what we can hope for when we fulfil our duty. In his widely contested philosophy or religion, he has accepted that we may have some interest in the overall good consequences of fulfilling our duty. Nevertheless, we should do our duty without thinking about the chances of achieving the common goal Z or even the peculiar merits or gains Zi. The reason of this only seemingly strange prohibition to ‘think rationally’ about the expected outcome of fulfilling my duty by doing hi is this. If each of us would maximize his gains and minimize his risks, free cooperation most probably will not take place at all. It would happen only in the trivial case of a mere Lewis-coordination. In Lewis-coordination it is to my own best that I ‘cooperate’. There is no danger that the other will not cooperate. This very danger defines free cooperation. In fact, only with respect to free cooperation, moral considerations become important.

If we now would think that free cooperations in free associations of persons are complicated, but things get easier when we look at we-groups that are no free associations and do not rest on free acknowledgment of forms of we-co­operation, we would be mistaken. The opposite is the case, as we shall see.

The most important we-group that is no free association is a society in a state. The state turns the society into a closed we-group. It is not, at least not easily, possible to leave the state or to be expelled. It is not possible to leave it without the consent of another state to take me in. The reason is that states divide the whole earth geographically. And they divide whole mankind legally into almost distinctsocieties as we-groups with corresponding institutions, tasks and merits.

We now can apply the method of turning a pre-given system of cooperation by thought into a ‘mere possibility’. We do so when we look at its structure ‘as such’, ‘under the veil of ignorance’. We talk about it as if there were a choice between different versions of a ‘social contract’. Hegel thinks, by the way, that this is the method of thinking. There is no wonder that using this method of thinking can become a danger for a society or rather for its legal framework, the state. The danger is that we make an implicit form of practice explicit. The reason for the danger is that it can always have the result that we withdraw an implicit or ‘empractical’ acknowledgment of a given tradition or practice.

The importance of thinking and free speech is less connected with giving way to romantic or sentimental expressions of myself as an individual. It is important because free speech is the medium in which we make pre-given schemes of social cooperation explicit and think about possible alternatives. We propose such alternatives, evaluate them in comparison to others and to existing forms – and become self-conscious about ourselves. Hegel is therefore absolutely right to identify freedom with self-consciousness and to attack deficient forms of merely individualistic, parochial and sentimental self-consciousness. Intro­spective, psychological self-analysis and empirical investigation of real situations just are not enough.

We rather need some knowledge about historical developments. We need to know for what the time is ripe. We can know this only if we ‘conceptualize our times’, i.e. our system of cooperative practices in which we are the persons we are. And we can conceptualize it only in comparison with other possibilities, utopian or feasible, i.e. with respect to possible alternatives. These alternatives are out of reach of mere introspection and empirical investigation.

The most important institution in which the autonomy of a person is developed and secured is the state and the state-system. It is not idiosyncratic love of the state, but opposition to romantic and sentimental theory offreedom and natural law, why Hegel is so concerned about the state. He agrees with Hobbes that there is no legal law outside the state system. And he agrees with Rousseau, against Locke’s natural property law, that property-rights presuppose some threats of force against possible trespassers. In contradiction to Rousseau, however, Hegel agrees with the tradition of liberalism that property rights are most important for individual freedom and autonomy.

But positive property laws of a state can have as a consequence that a large group of people is so badly treated as, for example, the Negroes or the proletarian work force in 19th century. These positive laws are deeply unjust and have to be changed. Laws are unjust if we can know that many people by no means can agree freely to the imposed form of cooperation in the state. This can be the case even if these people are forced to actually accept the given form of society. On the other hand, we always have to agree that there are limits for a ‘reasonable’ change of the scheme of social cooperation, set by tradition and by the dangers of fast and violent change. It is certainly difficult, and not my business here, to say reasonable things about just and unjust societies, guaranteed by the state-system. I just want to show how important the difference between the open and a closed form of talking about us can be.

The claim that we can acknow­ledge a certain scheme of social cooperation in a state can be outrageous if it only holds for the closed we-group of people that are well off but not for all people involved in the cooperative schemes. The outrageous thing is an abuse of two readings of the “we.” Hegel, for one, had proposed such a claim. But he had at least some anxieties about the injustice in a modern liberal world of private ‘owners’ of cooperative schemes for division of labor and merits. Therefore, we already find in Hegel’s thinking the basic form of a Marxist critique of fundamentalist liberalism.28 But a deep rift between Hegel and Marx remains, of course. For Hegel, at least a certain degree of liberal property rights must be defended by law enforcement. Therefore we need the central power of the state, if we want to defend personal freedom and autonomy. In these claims the ”we” has a good, open use.

In contradistinction to Hegel’s ‘realism’ in the tradition of Hobbes and Kant, Marx, like many anarchists of his time, is essentially a sentimental moralist and a utopian romantic. He dreams of a society that rests on totally free cooperation in large-scale economic production. He thinks that we can, in the end, do without hierarchy in our design and control of a division of labor and merits. He thinks that we can do without the state. If it were not for its unrealistic presuppositions, the idea of communism certainly is appealing. It presupposes not only the autonomous insight and acknowledgment of all parti­cipants with respect to their duties in a complex division of labor and merits. It presupposes the ‘moral power’ of really fulfilling the tasks without any sanctions. A communist ‘society’ would be a purely free we-group of totally free cooperation that rests on pure morality and absolute freedom. In the end, Marx is an even more ardent defender of radical personal freedom against any state and private power than Nozick. But it is at least as dangerous and wrong to follow the ideals of the one as of the other.


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Наталия Смирнова (Россия). Комментарий к докладу проф. Штекелера

Natalia Smirnova (Russia). Comments on the Prof. Stekeler’s paper “The logic of "Us" in psychology and the social sciences”


Prof. Stekeler’s very interesting and highly stimulating paper is a well-argued system of statements, which seeks to discredit K. Marx’s idea of communism as based upon the utopian precondition of free cooperation in the scale of the whole society freed of state power. Meanwhile, the content of the work, the system of arguments here involved goes far beyond its final conclusion. For this reason it certainly makes sense to scrutinize not only the final conclusion, but also to analyze some author’s assumptions which are by all means worth to be discussed. I would also like to make clear the so-called “bifurcation points” (as synergetics puts it) of the text, which may lead to some other paradigms of social thinking.

For this reason I would like to go beyond the framework of classic German philosophy and merge into the field of phenomenology. It does make sense due to the fact, that author himself refers to phenomenology at the very beginning of the paper, claiming his adherence to “phenomenological spirit”.

Let me remind here, that for E. Husserl the “pure” sphere of We is usually constituted by the analogical apperception (with further appresentation) of the meaning of my own body (or rather its das Gebaren) in primordial sphere, my body being the “first creation” (die Urtifstung). To turn away from transcendentally reduced to social world, we have to apply to the works of his disciple, A. Schutz. The first point to be clarified from the socio-phenomenological point of view is the following. I fully agree with Prof. Stekeler’s assumption, that proper understanding of we-sentences depends on the context in which they are used. In the phenomenology of the social world this thesis seems to have been sophisticatedly scrutinized due to the reference to situational –communicative approach to meanings. It implies, that the meaning of words (which compose a sentence) refers on one hand to the “stock of knowledge at hand” and to the scheme of reference, on the other.

The stock of knowledge at hand consists of sedimented meanings of personal experience acquired during the whole life. This knowledge is passive, neutral (“dormant”), but ready to be activated any time we need it.

In distinction to personal stock of knowledge at hand, the scheme of reference is essentially intersubjective. It has been composed not of the explicit meaning of words fixed in the dictionaries and grammars, but also of implicit (tacit) meanings which are to a great extent preconditioned by concrete communicative situation. These tacit or marginal meanings are just a “fringe” surrounding a core of fixed meaning, depicted in the dictionary. What a “fringe”- meaning we actually use depends on many situational-determined factors (to whom I apply, under what circumstances and so on). For this particular reason a scheme of reference can be transferred only by means of vivid communication process. And what is more important with regards to the subject discussed, it constitutes a we-group – community with a commonly shared meaning-structure.

In this respect I appreciate the idea that it is very important to develop the differences between formal linguistic rules and meanings (fixed in grammars and dictionaries) and informal praxis of using the language in a vivid communication process. I tend to agree with Prof. Stekeler’s statement, that it is deeply mistaken to think that a judgment (or an action) is reasonable only if it can be shown, that it follows accepted rules, which can be made totally explicit.

I would also like to join to his conviction that making a fetish of formal explicability of the rules (as the only criterion of rationality) misleads to legalism and scientism (“rulism”) ideology. Prof. Stekeler defines it as “the claim that there is no reason above and beyond the mere rationality of following explicit rules properly”. I also see it as a kind of a deep oversimplification the real state of things. As M. Polany explains it in his famous “Personal Knowledge, knowledge of rules is useful to improve the skill, but it is not sufficient to acquire it.

My second comment concerns the problem of “fear division of labour”. In this respect I would like to refer not to phenomenological, but rather to positivist sociology, namely to E. Durkheim’s conception of social division of labor. In his classic De la division du travail social the author finds out the price to be paid for social solidarity based upon social division of labor. Even if it is acknowledged as “fear” and necessary, it may lead to the impoverishment of person’s labour – as in Durkheim’s example, where a worker produces 1/16 piece of a pin. So, it may sometimes be quite reasonable, that “we all agree that it would be nice and good if we had an institution of a certain form H (as described in non-distributive we-sentences), but nobody wants to do necessary work”.

At last, my third observation regards to K. Marx’s idea of a free cooperation in the scale of the whole society. Prof. Stekeler argues that if not for its unrealistic presuppositions, the idea of communism is certainly appealing. But for these very presuppositions it should be criticized as a dream, romanticism, misleading the theory of a good, justice society. I could partly agree with the statement, I am afraid. Taking into consideration not only anarchical, but also totalitarian experience of humankind of the XX century, I tend not to underestimate its moral or rather humanistic content. I see it as a way to conceptualize the idea of how to overcome alienation (Entfremdung) of man from his basic conditions of life (alienation from nature, labour, generic essence of man etc). This “utopia” cannot be brought into being, of course. But the same holds true for any idea, which highlights transcendental ideal, not reality as it were. Kant’s categorical imperative may serve as the best illustration. People who firmly stick to this principle, could be happy not in real social, but rather in transcendental world. It is unfortunately the case, even though this is a small consolation.