Can There Be Common Knowledge without a Common Language?: German Pflicht versus English Duty

Pflicht! You great exalted name …, what is your venerable origin and where does one find your roots?

—Immanuel Kant, quoted in the Grimms’ “Deutsches Wörterbuch”

It is widely held that, as Allen Wood, the editor of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, puts it, “Kant is the most influential moral theorist in modern times.”¹ Declaring himself to be a Kantian, Wood elaborates: “Of all figures in the history of ethics, Kant did the best job of identifying what lies at the heart of moral values and principles.”² Wherein lay the central insight that could be taken to justify such an assessment? One view links Kant’s importance with the tenet that “right,” rather than “good,” lies at the foundations of ethics. Charles Larmore, the author of The Morals of Modernity, calls the putative priority of right over good “the imperative conception of morality.”³ According to Larmore, “Kant himself did not in fact recognize from the outset that a central feature of his moral thought had come to be a priority of right over good.” Still, Larmore concludes that Kant’s “commitment to understanding morality as a system of categorical imperatives” led him to recognize the priority of right:⁴ “One of the principal tasks of the Second Critique was to defend, this time explicitly, the necessity of making the right prior to the good.”⁵

This claim is disturbing. The adjective right and its (putative) German counterparts, richtig and recht, do not even appear as entries in such basic reference works as Caygill’s Dictionary of Kant⁶ (from the series of Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries) or Eisler’s Kant-Lexikon.⁷ Nor do the words richtig or recht appear in the indexes of Kant’s own work or of German secondary works on his philosophy. The English noun right does appear as an entry in the Dictionary of Kant, but not the adjective; and while the German noun Recht appears in the Kant-Lexikon as well as in the indexes to Kant’s own works and those of various German works on him, the adjectives richtig and recht do not. Indeed, as I have sought to show in an earlier article, the adjectives right and wrong, which are English cultural keywords, have no semantic equivalents in German (or other languages).⁸ Their modern meanings are, so to speak, English cultural artifacts, with their roots in the Puritan revolution of the seventeenth century. How can Kant be responsible for building an ethics on the foundation of “(what is) right” instead of “(what is) good” if there is no German word for “right” (in the relevant sense)?

True, in some contexts the English right can be translated into German as richtig or recht, but in others it cannot. Above all, German does not have a colloquial pair of opposites corresponding (in the moral sense of those words) to the highly colloquial English pair of “right” and “wrong.” It is true that one can speak in German, as Bernhard Schlink does in his novel Die Heimkehr, of “die abstrakten Grössen Recht und Unrecht” (the abstract quantities Recht and Unrecht) and that the phrase “Recht und Unrecht” could be translated in that context as “right and wrong.”⁹ But German children are not taught the moral basics of life in terms of “Recht und Unrecht,” as English-speaking children are taught about “right and wrong.” In German, the moral basics are gut, böse, and Pflicht—all three, keywords of Kant’s ethics and of German moral discourse in general.

For example, when we read in the English translation of Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser that, during her trial, the protagonist Hanna, a former guard in Auschwitz, “wanted to do the right thing,” this phrasing sounds very colloquial and very natural, but “doing the right thing” is an English concept, not a German one.¹⁰ The German original uses not the word recht but the expression richtig machen (“Hanna wollte es richtig machen”), which suggests something like “correctness” and does not have the ethical...