What does “March of the Penguins” have to do with Kant?
For those of us who are curious about philosophy and keep studying it, we are often part of events that put us to the test. A common scenario can be described more or less as follows.
Imagine you are at a dinner table, having fun with some friends on a Saturday night, and the topic of violence in human beings is brought up. Maybe you are discussing a crime that came up in the news recently, when one of your buddies makes the following pronouncement:
“Last week I watched ‘March of the Penguins’ and, to my utter surprise (spoiler ahead!), these animals are very violent! To the point that, when an infant penguin loses her parents, who are in charge of nourishing her, other adult penguins will come along and kill her simply because there’s nobody left to do the journey to get food for her. Isn’t that unfair? There’s a good amount of violence in the animal kingdom. I watch documentaries all the time and this is a common theme. Then… since we humans are animals, we are bound to be violent, as well.”
You reason with yourself for a while and come to the conclusion that something must have gone wrong in your friend’s last statement. You search for clarification in the wealthy mass of philosophical knowledge that you have patiently acquired throughout the years, to realize that it may be worth pointing out that your friend’s conclusion may not be the case depending on how you look at it.
You wait until dessert time to bring up the topic again, you turn around to your dinner friend and say:
“Kant would disagree with your statement about violence in human beings!”
Now all eyes are on you and you have no choice but to perform your philosophical mission to the best of your abilities. You start explaining that treating humans as animals means for Kant to take away their humanity, which is their dignity since it is based on rationality.
“We humans are endowed with a gift from nature that gives us the freedom to act rightly. Penguins may not be able to decide what’s best from an ethical standpoint, but we have this freedom that is underlying all of our actions.
We wouldn’t be able to talk about ethics at all if we couldn’t see us as free beings who are capable of deciding. Think about how Aristotle classified our actions as voluntary and involuntary. You can only be held accountable for something that you’ve done because you are expected to have performed it in a voluntary way. You can pick up the information that surrounds a given affair, weigh all the facts and make a decision, which will lead to your action.
For Kant, penguins are not built like that. They belong exclusively to the world of nature, since they are not rational beings, for which all of their actions are done involuntarily because they are subject to predetermined laws. A penguin cannot decide if it’s right or wrong to kill the baby: they are programmed to do it! There is, for Kant, no freedom in nature: all of its happenings are based on physical principles.
However, human beings can escape these preordained behaviors by reaching out to their rationality, which is a gift from mother nature. Kant believed that we are imperfect in the sense that we are lazy, we tend to do what benefits us (most of the time) and we have double standards, but he also maintained that humanity based on rationality gives us the chance to improve towards a future in which all human beings will act rightly.
So even if penguins kill each other, that doesn’t mean that we must do the same.”
At this point, you have certainly piqued everybody’s curiosity and they want to know more. Your friend asks you in a sardonic tone of voice:
“That’s very nice, but how about emotions? I’m certainly not rational all of the time. For instance, this morning I got really upset at someone when they cut me off in traffic. Does it mean that I am supposed to override my emotions and pretend that I’m always rational?”
“Certainly not,” you answer with a smirk, “but that is not the point. Being upset at someone is not the same as trying to hurt them. In fact, I am pretty sure you let the person who cut you off go their way safely because you must have thought something to the extent that you are not supposed to injure someone just because they are rude to you. And in that decision, you, my friend, acted rationally.”
Kudos to you! But things got a bit complicated by now and you need more assistance from other philosophers to round up your point.
“Hannah Arendt, the great political philosopher, based her description of political action on this Kantian position. Animals cannot be political because they are only worried about their survival. This is probably why the penguins in the movie killed the baby: they are unable to feed her and, if they try to do so, more of them may perish.
We human beings, instead, have three types of activity: labor, work and political action. Labor relates to our everyday hustle and bustle that lets us be alive, while work helps us build the world we live in through the tools and artefacts that we create. At the same time, we are also rational beings capable of spontaneous actions: we can stop normal and typical business as required by our labor and work activities and engage in ways that lead to our freedom, such as going to demonstrations or congregating to make a decision that affects our civil rights. We are not predetermined in our actions, as the penguins are, but instead, we are a plurality of individuals that can bring to the table all sorts of possibilities that are open to us because we can act upon them without notice. This ability is given to us by the freedom underlying all of our voluntary actions, which are based on our rationality.”
At this point, the whole table has taken their hats off to you and you have officially become the group’s philosophy guru… and all thanks to Kant!
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Yamile Abdala Rioja on Daily Philosophy:
Cover image by Ian Parker on Unsplash.
