Popper’s moral thought between Kantian and utilitarian ethics

Abstract

Speaker - Thomas Krumm, University of Marburg Commentator - Paola Romero, Fribourg University While in general, the influence of Kantian philosophy on Popper’s thought has been acknowledged, detailed reconstructions of Kantian thoughts in Popper’s lines of argumentation are rare. This applies to Popper’s epistemology and even more to his rudimentary moral philosophy. While in the scholarly literature, the main focus is on Popper’s philosophy of science and his corresponding political philosophy of the open society, the paper aims to explore fault lines of Popper’s moral thought between Kantian deontology and utilitarian consequentialism with examples from the Open Society and its Enemies (OSE). More precisely, it argues that in the OSE, Popper operates a Kantian ethics of conscience under the predominance of a utilitarian ethics of consequences. This argument is tested with two examples: Popper’s negative utilitarianism and his piecemeal social engineering. His negative utilitarianism rests on the assumption that it is easier for public policy to agree on social miseries than on social happiness. Thus, finding happiness is left to the individual, fighting miseries (including enemies) is declared as a public task. However, even in its inverted, negative form that comes from Popper’s application of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ to the social sciences, it is still a form of moral consequentialism. His concept of piecemeal social engineering could even be characterised as ‘limited consequentialism’. Given this fault line, it is no wonder that Popper never elaborated a moral philosophy, which was so important to Kant as the realm of freedom.