Righteousness and Road Rage

There is no E-ZPass.

Thank you to everyone who’s been following along with my Iceland series. I will resume it, but I was getting stuck on self-imposed deadlines and expectations. I needed to let myself work on other projects to keep in the habit of writing. So, here is a reflection on Kantian ethics inspired by my latest Uber ride.

Coming off a red-eye in Newark, we were welcomed back to New Jersey by a kind, Christian, road-raging Uber driver. He was a fit, young, smiley guy, and he helped us load our skis and bags into the trunk of his black SUV. It was 7:30 on a Monday morning within commuting distance of New York City. As we crawled through the first toll gate, I noticed that there was a police badge suction-cupped to the corner of the windshield. (He's not a cop. It was his Police Benevolent Association (PBA) badge from his cousin, which gets him a friends-and-family exemption from traffic offenses.) And in the center of the dash was a small image of the Virgin Mary, right by his E-ZPass.

When we hit the inevitable stand-still traffic ahead of the Holland Tunnel, our guy refused to merge and started driving along the shoulder in a lane of his own — so casually, as if it were part of his routine. He sped up to about 40 mph and cut ahead of a hundred cars within ten seconds. Twenty rows ahead, a good Samaritan in a dark-blue mid-size pulled out into the shoulder to block our guy. Our driver was still smiley but clearly peeved. I thought he was done, thought he'd fall into line like a sane human who'd been called out for his bullshit. But the shoulder was wider ahead, and our guy kept inching toward the right guardrail as if he was going to try something. At the opening, he speed up and tried to swerve around the good Samaritan. I couldn't believe he went for it, but the good Samaritan was ready. His dark-blue mid-size nudged us out and blocked the way again.

"Just get over into that lane," I said. Our guy couldn't believe that the good Samaritan would do that to him. He started complaining about it, looking to me for approval. I rejected his fist-bump. "You were in the wrong," I said. He talked about how he could have saved so much time and how, because of that guy, we had to wait in line — as if we deserved to be the only car of ten thousand that didn't have to wait in traffic on Monday morning. "Yeah, everyone's waiting in line." Even after I voiced my discontent, our guy couldn't let it rest and had to protect his pride, I guess. A few minutes later, when we passed the good Samaritan, both drivers rolled down their windows and called each other assholes. One of them was right. "You're not fuckin' special," the good Samaritan yelled as he hucked his soda cup at our car. (Maybe he wasn’t such a great Christian either.) Throughout this whole ordeal, gospel music was playing on the K-LOVE Morning Show, 95.5 FM.

Our road-raging Uber driver cursed at a not-so-good Samaritan while some Christians sang over the radio about how God's everlasting love works through us all.

Our Uber driver's behavior is an example of what Immanuel Kant would call an ecclesiastical faith. He is concerned with following the dogma of the Church, adhering to certain rituals, and idolizing the image of Mary, but these are things that anyone could do, regardless of their virtue or moral character. What good is listening to K-LOVE if you simultaneously take no pain in speeding by hundreds of people in stand-still traffic, and even try to justify it? In 45 minutes of gospel music, we never heard the lyric "Spit in the eye of thy neighbor." Religious practices, if they are divorced from morality, have no bearing on whether you are virtuous or worthy of grace. That's what Kant argues in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and I agree.

"I accept the following proposition as a principle requiring no proof: Apart from a good life-conduct, anything which the human being supposes that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit service of God."

It's not enough to have a Madonna on your dash in place of fuzzy dice. That is not righteousness. Righteousness emerges from good life-conduct, sound moral action. If you subordinate moral virtue to a reverence for God, religion becomes idolatry. You treat God as an idol, one to worship "not through morally upright conduct in this world but through adoration and ingratiation." This is what Kant means by an ecclesiastical faith, and it's all too common. I've never seen it in such stark terms as with our Uber driver, but I know you'd find within any congregation of any religion a large portion who practice a fetish-faith. (Of course, you will also find this in people who worship things that aren't God, like money, sex, or fame.) There are many for whom religion is merely idolatry.¹

In contrast to an ecclesiastical faith, which is focused on adhering to dogma and rituals, Kant proposes a moral faith that exists within the boundaries of mere reason. A moral faith is a religious pursuit of moral perfection, for that is the only way to become well-pleasing to God. By grounding your faith in morality, it becomes self-sufficient; you don't need to defer to an institution to tell you what to do. We humans are moral creatures and have morality as part of our natural faculties of reason. Therefore, you don't need religion to uphold the moral law:

"On its own behalf morality in no way needs religion… but is rather self-sufficient by virtue of pure practical reason."

Kant argues that you don't need the concept of God or the guidance of a church to be morally good; morality exists within the bounds of reason. But there is one more piece to Kant's argument, which is the most nuanced. He says that the pursuit of moral perfection inevitably becomes something religious. Morality does not need religion, yet it leads to it:

"Morality thus inevitably leads to religion, and through religion it extends itself to the idea of a mighty moral lawgiver outside the human being, in whose will the ultimate end (of the creation of the world) is what can and at the same [time] ought to be the ultimate human end."

There are three propositions to unpack here:

1. Morality leads to religion.

2. Through religion, morality leads to the idea of God ("a mighty moral lawgiver outside the human being").

3. The highest possible good in the world ought to be each human's ultimate end.

I only disagree with one of these propositions: the second. I agree that a pursuit of moral perfection leads to religion, even though I would call it a non-religious faith. There is a faith required for morality. You must have the following unverifiable belief: "I have the necessary faculties to discern right from wrong, and I have the duty to uphold in the world what I deem to be just." Morality requires you to conceive of an ideal and aim at that point on the horizon. That's what makes it religious. You reach for an ideal beyond yourself that you can barely conceive, and throughout life, you work to bring yourself closer to the ideal and strengthen your relationship with it. Replace the word "ideal" with "God" in the previous sentence, and you have the general description of a monotheistic faith.

Yes, morality leads to religion. But it doesn't lead to the idea of God. Just because you and I can conceive of "the highest possible good" doesn't mean that there is a being beyond this world who exhibits that perfection, or who created the moral law. Only the concept of the ideal lies within the bounds of reason. It is only the concept of moral perfection that our Earth-bound brains can conceive. The existence of "a mighty moral lawgiver" is beyond the bounds of mere reason because He is, by definition, beyond what we can conceive. You can have a moral faith without God. It is a faith in the the ideal itself and in your duty and ability to approach that ideal through your worldly actions. It would exceed the boundaries of mere reason to deduce the existence of God from our concept of the moral law. If there is a Creator, we are not equipped to know Him. But thankfully, we don't need Him to strive for moral perfection.

That brings us to the third proposition, that we humans ought to make the highest possible good our ultimate end. There is not a more noble pursuit than that of moral perfection. The difficult part is finding the motivation to uphold the Good principle for its own sake, without the promise of worldly rewards or an eternal afterlife. Not only that — you must also accept that you will fall short of the ideal, that you will never arrive at complete moral perfection. But make perfection your aim anyway. That is our beautiful plight in life. It is the tension within the spirit of Man: we dream up the furthest but can only reach so far. No matter how much progress you make, you will always be the same distance from the horizon.

Kant adds God to morality because he wants hope that there is a reward for making yourself worthy of His grace, worthy of happiness.² But that doesn't feel true to me. It feels like manufacturing a motive for doing good, rather than upholding the moral law for its own sake. That's what I aim to do, regardless of whether I am rewarded with happiness in this life or the next. That said, I have faith that being morally good leads to good things in life.

My religion within the bounds of mere reason is one where I serve the ideal of moral perfection without a belief in God. My struggle will be to find comfort in the fact that I will die at sea, and that I will never be able to reach as far as I can dream. But this is what I believe because it is what feels most true to me. My faith is in morality, and my only form of worship is good life-conduct, in accordance with my current best conception of the moral law.

The only point on which Kant and I disagree is that morality inevitably leads to God. On the rest, he and I agree wholeheartedly: the only path to righteousness is through right action, and you are responsible for guiding yourself toward moral perfection.

I'll leave you with a bit of counterintuitive advice: think of yourself as a god. I mean this in one specific way — not that you are an omnipotent being or the creator of the world or someone worthy of worship. I mean to think of yourself as an all-seeing moral judge, because that's what you are to yourself. You are an autonomous moral agent capable of discerning right from wrong, and capable of upholding the moral law. That means that you know — better than any other being in the universe — when you have done wrong. You are your own judge. And when you fail, the only means of expiation is to do better in the future, to bring yourself closer overtime to the ideal. Only you can make yourself worthy of grace, by pursuing moral perfection as if it were your religion.

Springboard

A carefully crafted question to help you dive inwards:

Recall a moment of radical self-honesty, where you admitted to yourself or others that you had done wrong. In that moment, which feeling won out: guilt for what you had done or pride in taking responsibility for it?

Source

Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

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Thank you to

Michael Dean

for feedback on a draft of this essay, and for encouraging me to use the symbol of the Virgin Mary as “an adumbration (a spooky foreshadowing).” This essay features a microcosm, which is a device to ground your thesis in a particular story or example. Michael wrote an insightful essay on it last week that helped me write this piece. It’s one of the first chapters of his Essay Architecture project, which I highly recommend.

Footnotes

1. In case this point is unclear, here's a pop-culture analogy where Taylor Swift is likened to God. (I figure you'll allow me this comparison since it's not too far from reality.) Taylor is an idol, a celebrity, an icon. The way Swifties "worship" her is by attending concerts, buying merch, and boycotting the half of her discography that's not "Taylor's Version." She is at the pinnacle of singer-songwriter success. But Taylor's "righteousness" does not come from being famous; rather, it comes from from her "musical perfection" (analogous to God's moral perfection). Most Swifties follow an ecclesiastical fandom. They do these myriad things out of a reverence for Taylor. But how many try to learn guitar? Kant is saying that the one true way to be a Swiftie is to work unwaveringly toward musical perfection (imagine if he actually said that). True devotion to Taylor, in Kant's view, would have nothing to do with whether you own all four variants of the Midnights vinyl. The virtue of your fandom (faith) would depend entirely on your exhibited musical ability. The only way to become well-pleasing to Taylor would be through good musical performances.

2. Here is evidence for this claim, from Kant's The Critique of Practical Reason (5:129–30), accessed via ResearchGate.net: "The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct. This I cannot hope to effect except through the agreement of my will with that of a holy and beneficent Author of the world… Morals is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy but of how we are to be worthy of happiness. Only if religion is added to it can the hope arise of someday participating in happiness in proportion as we endeavored not to be unworthy of it."