Don Pesci: Kant and legislators’ moral duty

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

VERNON, Conn.

If you are a member of a legislature, state or federal, you will have discovered by now that there are inestimable benefits of introducing bills that cannot pass, the most important of which is that dead bills leave in their wake no appreciable consequences.

But dead-on-arrival bills have a useful after-life as campaign fodder. They can be used for boosting a candidate’s bonafides among narrow groups of possible voters from whom intersectional politicians hope to raise campaign cash.

In a bipartisan legislature – Connecticut has not had one for 30 years or more – dead-on-arrival bills usually originate in the House and are killed in the Senate. Of the two bodies, the Senate is often regarded as the more responsible body, brimming with realpolitikers whose eyes are sharply focused on the consequences, intended and unintended, cultural or economic, of proposed legislation.

Kant, we are told, is a deontologist — from the Greek, which refers to the science of duties. For Kant, morality is not defined by the consequences of our actions, our emotions, or an external factor. Morality is defined by duties and one’s action is moral if it is motivated by duty.

Of course most politicians are motivated by what they consider to be a “duty” to hang onto their offices, and this sometimes leads them down dark byways. Generally, politicians have no moral duty to cheat their way into office or, having achieved office, to maintain their positions by proposing dead-on-arrival legislation that they strongly suspect will have no consequences other than as fodder for political campaigns.

But politicians who have sworn off moral considerations rely on dead-end measures because, among other reasons, money and prestige are rewarded in the political afterlife. Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, of Connecticut, did not become a millionaire until, having left office, he happily shouldered his duties as chairman of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

“Most ways of earning money,” Henry David Thoreau reminds us, “lead downward.”

In any case, real political morality is related entirely to the  live  political consequences of political action. All dead-on-arrival political legislation is therefore immoral by Kantian standards, because nonaction is unrelated to any political duty. Then too, the political duties of politicians in a democratic-republican system of government are to the whole polis, not to their own professional advancements, and the interests of the polis cannot be furthered by dead-on-arrival legislation.

In a legislature that is not bipartisan – think Connecticut – partisan legislation generally leads to unopposed live  consequences, often buried beneath mounds of honeyed rhetoric.

Good legislation leads to good consequences, we were taught by our civics teachers, a mostly long-vanished species, and bad legislation leads, way down the road, to bad consequences. However, in politics, what is good for the political geese is not always immediately bad for the ganders they supposedly represent. Many legislative bills have long fuses, the unintended consequences appearing long after the legislation has been launched.

By way of example, we know that legislation leading to higher taxes and spending – the two are related – cannot reduce inflation; inflation itself is a hidden tax, and the solution to high taxes (i.e., inflation) cannot be higher taxes.

Kant would have had no difficulty faulting as “immoral” political actions that violate what he called the “categorical imperative.” We all have a moral  duty to behave in such a way that each and every one of our actions may be considered as under a universal law, applicable to all mankind, including ourselves. This is why cheating and lying are inherently immoral. If cheating were a universal duty, everyone who cheated would in due course be cheated. If lies were tolerated in a constitutional republic, the representative principle would be constantly violated.

To return to dead-on-arrival legislation -- i.e., proposed legislation that cannot pass into law -- Kant might say all such legislation is immoral because a legislator has a moral duty in a constitutional republic to create legislation that benefits his or her constituents. And while dead-on-arrival legislation targeted to a narrow audience may help a legislator in his re-election campaign, dead-end legislation can never benefit the broader needs of the legislator’s constituents.

In fact, Kant might argue, it would be better for the legislator’s constituents if the legislator shirking his principal political responsibility were to be discharged from office by a morally awake constituency that is, unlike the legislator, able to distinguish properly lies from hard truths. No, sir, you may not have your cake and eat it, too, however enticing the thought may be.

All politics must be moral realpolitik and not some variant of magical thinking, according to which words are totems that change reality.

You can say, until the sun goes down, that the proper definition of inflation is not too many dollars chasing too few goods, but saying it, as our moral philosophizing moms and dads insisted – doesn’t make it so. After all the political rhetoric is put to bed, up is still up, down is still down, twice two makes four, and moral action is inescapably related to moral duties.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.