The common understanding of Immanuel Kant’s morality focuses on the means/ends distinction made in contrast to utilitarianism (the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number). Deontology gets reduced: do not use humans as means, and no outcome, no matter how good, can justify immoral action.  What is overlooked is Kant’s theories about the origins of moral duty or the compulsion towards moral action that each of us is supposed to feel deep down. In this way, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason preserves an element of faith to prove the moral character of humans. What Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek do is disentangle this notion of “compulsion” and “morality” from the Protestant values that Kant asserted where natural and therefore universally True. In de-moralizing the “duty” in Kant, Zupancic particularly changes the standards for determining ethical action. Instead of relying on biblical origins for the good, Zupancic and Zizek argue that the ethical is that which you will die for. The idea is that being willing to die for something is “pathological”, or literally insane, and that it must be, in a sense, disinterested or, at least, not self-serving because it goes against what Freudians and psychoanalysts believe is the most basic human drive — self preservation — or what Freud calls the “reality principle.” Zupancic explains this relationship between the reality principle and psychoanalytic ethics in her book The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, writing:

To use an historical example, anti-slavery hero John Brown was considered by all accounts of his white contemporaries to be totally insane. And by white standards of the time, he was insane because he was willing to die, and did die, to change something that in no way threatened his particular way of living. Thus, John Brown wagered his safety and privilege in his act of sacrifice and went against every natural human tendency of self-preservation and self-interest. He raised the freedom of African Americans to the status of something that was literally more valuable than himself.

In The Fray Contributor