Goranhammer wrote:Kant said in The Categorical Imperative that mankind has an innate sense of moral law, but it doesn't force him to comply with it, and that his selfish desires will get in the way.
I don't think that's what he said (in the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals). I think he believed that man, if he were "enlightened" about the veracity of categorical imperatives would behave morally with or without the state - lying, murdering, stealing; they're categorically wrong, and inconsistent with rational behavior. A wise man - one who saw truth and hated inconsistency - would not behave that way under any circumstance. "Selfishness" that doesn't fit into the imperatives, to Kant, is bestial and "heteronomous." He also had a kind of rather Lutheran salvation theme to his work; people were inherently in that bestial state of "original sin" until the light of reason saved them from wrong. And there was nothing particularly innate about it, particularly as the later British intuitionist school argued for; it was all about hard reasoning.
I think humanity's pretty adaptable. Written law was a huge improvement over what came before it; I think that's beyond doubt. But humanity has variable preferences; most of us place value on the welfare of our family, and I think that that valuation could be extended to the whole of humanity given a certain kind of socialization.
It strikes me that if it's impossible for man to behave morally, some or all of the time, there's no use in protecting it in the first place with written law. We simply couldn't justify our own existence then, and certainly not our salvation. I don't expect the reality that we aren't selfless to simply pass silently, though.