Rationalizing Emotions and The Moral Behavior of Kantians
I've recently been enjoying Joshua Greene's "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul" (penultimate manuscript available here). Greene's research suggests that the moral judgments of Kantian deontologists (who focus on such things as rights, duties, and "respect for persons") tend largely to be rationalizations of evolutionarily-selected emotional responses, while the moral judgments of utilitarians and consequentialists (who focus on such things as maximizing the good of everyone) tend to be more rationally driven (or at least less driven by emotional "alarm systems"). The sorts of cases on which Kantians and consequentialists tend to disagree are cases where maximizing the good violates what we might perceive as someone's rights. Should you push someone in front of a runaway trolley, thereby killing him, if that's the only way to save five other innocent people? Should you smother your baby to death if that's the only way to prevent yourself, your baby, and several other people from being found and killed by Nazis? The Kantian impulse (with caveats and complications, of course) is to say no in such cases, the consequentialist to say yes.
Now if (a.) Greene is right about Kantianism as principally a post-hoc rationalization of evolutionarily selected emotions -- and needless to say it's very controversial! -- and if (b.) the apparently widespread view is correct that Kantians behave less well than consequentialists, and finally if (c.) emotional reactions tend to be more self-serving than do consequentialist principles, then, well, maybe (a) and (c) together explain (b).
Let me stress that I myself have no beef against Kantian deontology or Kantian deontologists and that conditions (a) and (b) are highly speculative. Finally, the only small bit of direct empirical evidence I have on the moral behavior of Kantians versus deontologists (the rate at which ethics books are missing from academic libraries) suggests that patrons are no more likely, and maybe even a bit less likely, to misappropriate Kantian than utilitarian texts.