Teaching Philosophy 32:4, December 2009 331

Teaching Autonomy and Emergence through

Pop Culture: Kant, Dewey, and Captain Picard

KEVIN S. DECKER
Eastern Washington University

Abstract: Teaching Kantian ethics is difficult, for “getting Kant right” extends
to a wide field of concerns. This paper is aimed at instructors who wish to
give interdisciplinary criticism of Kantian deontology by discussing excep-
tions naturalist critics take to Kant’s concept of “autonomy.” This concept
can and should be supplanted by the notion of “emergent intelligence.”
Surprising support for this project comes from the fictional exploits of Star
Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I conclude by indicating how the residual
lessons from this criticism of Kant should lead us back to an understanding
of emergence within Kant’s own third Critique.

Those of us who are committed to teaching the practical philosophy

of Immanuel Kant on a regular basis know how difficult it is to help
undergraduate students forge through his complicated architectonic and
dense prose. In this respect, it is helpful to schematize Kant’s main
arguments as well as to demonstrate how the meanings of ethical con-
cepts like “duty” and the “good will” hook up with meta-ethical terms
such as “freedom” and “autonomy.” Additionally, caring instructors
will regularly make available conspectuses of the sage of Königsberg’s
deontology, such as the often-reprinted “Kantian Ethics” by Fred Feld-
man.1 However, the concern for “getting Kant right” extends to a wider
field of philosophical pedagogy than ethics: for example, the precise
shape of the concept of autonomy that is arguably the “master idea”
of Kant’s Groundwork is debated in courses as diverse as metaphysics,
modernism, and biomedical ethics.
But what kind of resources are available that give us solid criti-
cisms of Kant that would be useful in an undergraduate course? In the
history of ethics, there have been at least two primary types of Kant
criticism: one that issues from the dialectical philosophies of Hegel
and Marx, and the other from utilitarianism. Taking the latter first,
John Stuart Mill charges Kant with being a “closet consequentialist”:
© Teaching Philosophy, 2009. All rights reserved. 0145-5788 pp. 331–343
332 KEVIN S. DECKER

the first formulation of the categorical imperative, which Mill relates

as “So act that thy rule of conduct might be adopted as a law by all
rational beings,” is actually a prognosticator’s tool for discerning po-
tential contradictions of the “collective interest” of rational agents.2
This criticism, while easy to understand, is not entirely accurate, since
Kant’s sense of “contradiction” is meant to be understood not in the
sense of “at variance with agents’ interests,” and therefore contrary
to prudence, but in the stronger, logical sense of the principle of
contradiction itself. However, utilitarians can still claim that the cri-
terion by which actions are judged to fail the test of the categorical
imperative is unavoidably based upon the hypothetical consideration
of the consequences of universalizing maxims.3 This criticism has the
effect of effacing the difference between hypothetical and categorical
imperatives, and leaves us, as Philipa Foot declares, with the question
of “what it is that makes the moral ‘should’ relevantly different from
the ‘shoulds’ appearing in normative statements of other kinds.”4
When put this way, utilitarian criticisms of Kantian ethics apparently
have more in common with Hegel’s charge of “empty formalism.” How-
ever, Hegel’s handling of Kant, whether presented in terms of explicit
criticism in Faith and Knowledge or implicitly given in Philosophy of
Right, have the opposite problem: these arguments can be very difficult
for undergraduates to understand, and they presuppose a knowledge
of Kant’s attack on metaphysics in the first Critique that invariably
involves instructors in the explanation of metaphysical baggage well
beyond the typical Kantian meta-ethical commitments.5
A third trajectory of criticism has emerged more recently, fueled
by the burgeoning interdisciplinary studies of evolutionary ethics and
cognitive science. This broadly naturalistic line of criticism stems from
the pioneering work of philosophers like John Dewey and Sidney Hook,
and is supported today by well-known figures such as Daniel Dennett,6
George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson.7 These thinkers attempt to provide
explanations for certain key concepts within the deontologist’s reper-
toire that were formerly considered simply normative “givens.” In this
paper, I want to put tools in the hands of instructors who wish to give
incisive and relevant interdisciplinary criticism of Kantian deontology
by discussing certain exceptions that naturalist critics take to Kant’s
concept of “autonomy.”8 I will also explain how that concept can and
should be supplanted by the notion of “emergent intelligence,” and
show how unlikely support for this project may be called upon from
the fictional exploits of Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the
U.S.S. Enterprise. I conclude by indicating how the residual lessons
from this criticism of Kant should lead us back to an understanding of
emergence within Kant’s work, specifically in his third Critique.
 KANT, DEWEY, AND CAPTAIN PICARD 333

1. Autonomy and “Emergence”

“Autonomy” is an idea that many students may be familiar with prior
to reading Kant, and which does a considerable amount of heavy lift-
ing in Kant’s moral theory. As the “ground of duty” as well as of “the
dignity of human nature and of every rational nature,” the principle of
autonomy has two crucial roles to play.9 With reference to the will of
a rational being, autonomy (“giving laws to one’s self”) provides the
negative possibility of a release of the agent’s will from the constraints
of “natural necessity”—emotions, compulsions, and interests Kant treats
as bio-psychologically determined. Autonomy also explains the posi-
tive possibility of an agent becoming a “free cause” through her own
willing. Both roles come together in Kant’s conception of execution
of a duty for no other motive than the sake of duty itself. A genuinely
moral act for Kant is best characterized not only as the fulfillment of
an ethical obligation grounded in universal moral law; it is also cor-
rectly seen, meta-ethically, as the beginning of a new causal chain of
consequences for which only the agent is responsible.
Why does Kant need such a strong sense of moral freedom? From
the standpoint of moral theory, Foot claims that Kant wants to create
a robust distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives,
where the trait of “universality” attends to the latter but not the former.10
As Kant contends, “[T]he human being is bound to laws by his duty
. . . he is subject only to laws given by himself but still universal and
. . . he is bound only to act in conformity with his own will, which,
however, in accordance with nature’s end is a will giving universal
law.”11 However, from the standpoint of the “metaphysics of morals,”
this reason is subservient to a meta-ethical one. Kant in fact wants to
show that there is a parallel construction between the necessity inher-
ent in natural as well as moral laws: “[T]here could be no necessity
that would make what is wrong conform with law.”12 There is a strict
category division between what occurs necessarily according to natu-
ral laws versus what moral laws “necessarily” dictate. In this respect,
anything that is fully explicable according to physical laws cannot have
the primary moral status accorded by Kant to rational beings alone, and
so cannot be understood in terms of the principle of autonomy.
The distinction that follows between “persons” and “things” has
doubtlessly inspired many impassioned classroom discussions about
who and what counts morally, and who and what does not. 13 This
discussion may involve asking about the moral status of the certain
creations of moral agents—artifacts, or organic life engineered through
technological methods. When such questions come up, I, like many
others, turn to science fiction as a method for testing students’ moral
intuitions. Science fiction is exemplary among narrative approaches
for its ability to generate thought experiments that allow teachers and
334 KEVIN S. DECKER

students to consider the ethical dimensions of hypothetical scenarios,

scenarios made more believable by their depiction in a format familiar
to today’s media-savvy generation. Even the creator of Star Trek, Gene
Roddenberry, recognizes this when he cites the thought of legendary
author Ray Bradbury, saying, “Science fiction may be one of the last
places in our society where the philosopher can roam just as freely
as he chooses.”14 What does Roddenberry’s imaginative vision of the
future tell us about the viability of Kantian autonomy?
In the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the produc-
tion staff began exercising their own creative autonomy, taking sur-
prising risks with characters and plots, and the episode “Emergence”
is no exception. In this adventure of the Enterprise crew, an uncertain
threat arises from within the ship itself. Elements of various interac-
tive virtual reality environments within the Enterprise’s “holodeck”
are intruding into each other, producing the unlikely juxtaposition of
a steam engine within a scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As
the technological malfunctions become more serious—the starship
inexplicably, dangerously jumps to warp speed for a brief time—the
chief engineer, Geordi LaForge, and Data, the Enterprise’s android
officer, investigate what seems at first like a fault, but later proves to
be an intriguing technological mystery. It turns out that the ship had
moved itself out of a band of “theta particles” that would have spelled
a premature end to both ship and crew had it remained still.
The episode’s deft storytelling discloses two potentially related
developments of this mystery—one literal, the other metaphorical. In
the first, LaForge’s and Data’s investigations reveal strange multicol-
ored “nodes” that have appeared throughout the ship’s systems. They
report on a surprising implication of these nodes’ design to the first
officer, Will Riker:
LaForge: We found these nodes in several systems around the ship. At some
level or another, they’re all connected.
Data: These nodes were linking the sensors to our warp control and defensive
systems. We believe this is why the ship jumped to warp.
LaForge: When the sensors detected danger the defensive system reacted to
the threat and activated the warp engines to protect us.
Riker is startled by LaForge’s use of intentional language in describ-
ing the nodes. To deepen the mystery, the nodes prevent their removal
by the crew through the generation of force fields; furthermore, their
connections all intersect within the circuitry of the Enterprise’s ho-
lodeck.
There, Riker, Data, and security chief Worf board a holographic
Orient Express. The train’s journey to a place called “Vertiform City”
is the crux of the second, metaphorical, mystery of this story: why
 KANT, DEWEY, AND CAPTAIN PICARD 335

are the unlikely passengers—a gunfighter, a gangster, a country boy,

and a knight in armor, to name a few—assembling a puzzle that looks
suspiciously like one of the multicolored nodes? Why is the knight
cutting a chain of dolls from newspaper? Why is the gangster so con-
cerned about people stealing his brick? And why are these characters
alternately benevolent and hostile to the Enterprise crew as they look
into the mystery?
As the story progresses, both sides of the mystery deepen and con-
verge upon the virtual Orient Express. Data reports that the Enterprise’s
“sensors, engines, replicators, propulsion are all working together now
almost independently of the main computer and the nodes link them all
through the holodeck.” He further theorizes that, properly interpreted,
the actions of the metaphorical characters on the holodeck seem to
directly impact the ship’s functioning. For Data, the fruitfulness of
this interpretive scheme in establishing a one-to-one correspondence
between holographic events and characters, on the one hand, and the
ship’s functions and systems, on the other, warrants further speculation
that turns out to be true:
Riker: Are you saying the ship is under control of the holodeck?
Data: Not precisely. Geordi, does the configuration of connection nodes look
familiar to you?
LaForge: Yeah, it looks a little like the structure of your positronic brain.
Data: That is correct. It would appear that the nodes are in the process of
creating a rudimentary neural net.
Riker: Data, what are you suggesting?
Data: Unlikely as it may sound, I believe that the Enterprise may be forming
an intelligence.
Comparing a synaptic map of the human neocortex, his own positronic
brain, and the nodes on the ship, Data theorizes that this intelligence is
an emergent property of the interaction of the ship’s systems under a
new condition: the influence of passing through a “magnascopic storm.”
As Data explains, “Complex systems can sometimes behave in ways
that are entirely unpredictable. The human brain, for example, might
be described in terms of cellular functions and neurochemical inter-
actions, but that description does not explain human consciousness, a
capacity that far exceeds simple neural functions. Consciousness is an
emergent property.” The emergent intelligence, LaForge summarizes,
is “more than just the sum of its parts.”
I leave the further details of the mystery to you and your students
to explore, especially the ethical question of what to do with what is
effectively a unique new life form—one that proves its autonomy at
the end of the episode. Instead, here’s a summary of the functional
336 KEVIN S. DECKER

characteristics that make up the nodal network centered in the Enter-

prise’s holodeck. It is:
(1) An integrated system that
a. integrates other systems.
b. can function freely of some relevant constraints.
c. acts in ways that cannot be fully understood in terms of the
functions of its parts.
(2) Self-replicating.
(3) Self-protecting.
(4) Symbolically or metaphorically expressive of its central func-
tions.15
It is noteworthy that once the activities that would be subsumed under
characteristics (2) through (4)—like the antics of the holodeck char-
acters and the nodal force fields—are seen for what they are, they
lead Data and LaForge to the supposition of (1). It is because of the
purposive behavior of the ship’s newly integrated systems (protection,
replication, expression) that the claims of “autonomy” or “emergence”
of the new integrated system is plausible. This is significant for our
understanding of the moral conception of autonomy in general, for
this strategy of explanatory precedence is characteristic of naturalist
critiques of deontological ethics.

2. From Autonomy to Intelligence

Naturalists are uncomfortable with the trade-off that Kant makes, se-
curing a strong sense of moral obligation by admitting a free-floating
domain of moral concepts and reasons untouchable by enterprises of
physical or social science. Their critiques are distilled by Lakoff and
Johnson, who claim in Philosophy in the Flesh that, as far as the dis-
course of practical principles goes,
Our very modes of stating abstract moral principles and engaging in abstract
moral reasoning arise from modes of well-being, that is, ‘consequences.’
When we use such metaphorically derived inference patterns to reason about
morality, the principles we get and use are inextricably tied up with ends,
goals, and purposes. In such cases, therefore, the deontological picture of
ethical deliberation just doesn’t fit.16
Although this might seem like a transcendent, rather than an immanent
critique of Kant, naturalists like Lakoff and Johnson are pointing out
that not only did Kant crucially misunderstand the role of causality
and embodiment in moral decision-making, but he makes a category-
mistake by erecting a realm of moral laws that dictate to the autono-
mous will, which are analogous to empirical physical laws but without
any empirical content.
 KANT, DEWEY, AND CAPTAIN PICARD 337

The naturalistic implications of Lakoff and Johnson’s dismissal of

deontological ethics, and by extension, Kant’s strong notion of auton-
omy, will only be suspicious if we hold, as Christine Korsgaard does,
that “Autonomy is the only possible source of intrinsic normativity, and
so of obligation.”17 Students who watch “Emergence” in the context of
discussing Kant’s notion of “autonomy” can immediately see, if not
yet clearly, that the autonomous traits of the Enterprise’s intelligent
node-network are characterized plausibly, but in a completely different
way than the one Kant laid down. They also will have resources with
which to contest Korsgaard: isn’t the emergent intelligence displaying
normative behavior when it protects its fragile, newly replicated nodes?
In this context, instructors may want to discuss this central text from
Kant’s Groundwork:
Beings the existence of which rests not on our will but on nature, if they are
beings without reason, still have only a relative worth, as means, and are
therefore called things [Dinge], whereas rational beings are called persons
because their nature already marks them out as an end in itself, that is, as
something that may or may not be used merely as a means, and hence so far
limits all choice (and is an object of respect).18
To deepen the discussion, instructors might contrast Korsgaard’s de-
fense of Kant’s master idea about autonomy above with the pragmatist
William James’ affirmation of the natural basis of normativity: “[W]e
see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person
there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever
there is a claim.”19 Fellow pragmatist John Dewey introduces the idea
of emergent intelligence as doing much of the work that autonomy
does, without the Kantian metaphysical baggage.20

3. A Deweyan Alternative
Dewey’s corrective to Kant comes without the benefit of contempo-
rary computational theory, cognitive science, and neuroscience that
Lakoff, Johnson, and Dennett use to put flesh on the bones of the
idea of emergent intelligence. The best framework for understanding
Dewey’s alternative to Kantian autonomy was developed rather late
in his long career, in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, a book
that diametrically opposed a priori efforts to ground logic by analytic
thinkers like Russell and Frege. Dewey’s positions in this book are
naturalistic in part because he understands philosophical inquiry—as
with all intelligent inquiry—as an operationalization of certain habits
that have proved to be extraordinarily fruitful in the physical sciences,
but are by no means invidiously scientistic. Instead, intelligent action
and intention guide his casting of the basic categories and methods of
philosophy and logic:
338 KEVIN S. DECKER

In framing ends-in-view, it is unreasonable to set up those which have no

connection with available means and without reference to the obstacles stand-
ing in the way of attaining the end. It is reasonable to search for and select
the means that will, with the maximum probability, yield the consequences
which are intended.21
The inquiry into principles of practical action and rational morality
will itself be, on this view, a practical piece of philosophizing and not
a priori and speculative, as Kant casts it.
From this platform, Dewey rejects Kant’s compromise distinction
between the autonomous person and the phenomenal self, the latter
of which is physically, biologically, and psychologically determined
according to natural laws: “There is no superstition more benumbing
. . . than the current notion that things are not what they are, and do
not do what they are seen to do, because these things have themselves
come into being in a causal way.”22 As an illustration, Dewey asks us
to suppose that, at a lecture he is giving, “my words had the effect of
rendering the future choices of some one of my hearers more thought-
ful; more cognizant of possible alternatives, and thereby rendering his
future choices more varied, flexible and apt.”23 Would the fact of the
causal linkage make a sham out of the choices of Dewey’s audience
members? This implication seems absurd. Although Dewey’s philoso-
phy of causality and its implications for freedom of choice is too com-
plicated to go into here, it should be clear that this criticism dispenses
with Kant’s second desideratum for the concept of autonomy—viz.,
that it provide a basis for the choosing will as a “free cause.”
But is there still a role for autonomy to play in Dewey’s practical
philosophy, perhaps Kant’s other desideratum that this negative sense
of freedom provides us with a release from causal determination of
our will? This isn’t likely, since, in the first place, it is an error to
use the word “autonomy” to refer to any of Dewey’s operative ideas
in the practical sphere.24 For him, the term not only construes ethical
responsibility too narrowly as answerability to law (nomos), but it has
close ties to metaphysical doctrines of freedom of the will that Dewey
discredits.25 Contrary to Kantian meta-ethics, Dewey maintains, “Actual
or positive freedom is not a native gift or endowment but is acquired.”26
It is acquired specifically through the emergence of “intelligence”—
used by Dewey as a term of art—in a process by which the develop-
ment of each individual’s intelligence recapitulates the “phylogeny” of
emergent intelligence in the higher animals in general and the human
race in particular. Intelligence, in turn, emerges for Dewey not as a
distinct mental faculty, but from the adaptation or adjustment of “in-
tellectual efficiencies,” or habits. Dewey agrees with Kant that what
humans have in common with other animals are the instincts—Dewey
calls them “impulses”—that are institutionalized as habitual ways of
 KANT, DEWEY, AND CAPTAIN PICARD 339

acting. What he disagrees with is the notion that habits are in some
way opposed to free and intelligent decision-making and action:
The more numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and
foretelling. The more flexible they are, the more refined is perception in its
discrimination and the more delicate the presentation evoked by imagination.
. . . [H]abits formed in process of exercising biological aptitudes are the sole
agents of observation, recollection, foresight and judgment.27
Here we are presented with a more suitable philosophical framework
for understanding the significance of the discovery made in “Emer-
gence.”28 Not only do cross-cutting and mutually reinforcing habits
critical of other habits—Dewey’s definition of “intelligence”—provide
a naturalistic framework which may be applied indiscriminately be-
tween “natural” and “artificial” agents, but it also untethers the notion
of intelligence—understood as supplanting and transcending Kantian
autonomy—from a too-narrow moral application. Dewey can agree
with Kant regarding the passage in the Groundwork that “rational na-
ture is distinguished from the rest of nature by this, that it sets before
itself an end.”29 In the context of “Emergence,” that end is a sense
of self-preservation not originally programmed into the Enterprise’s
systems. However, when Kant goes on to say that there may be only
one such end for rational nature, that it must be an end in itself and
thus identified with a will acting from autonomy, Dewey disagrees. For
this would be to say that the only significant use of autonomy regards
moral decision-making. In Human Nature and Conduct, he explodes
this conception of the autonomous will, “The essence of habit is an
acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular
acts. . . . Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain
classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than
bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.”30 It clearly seems that
there is little role for autonomy to play once emergent intelligence is
understood along these lines.
From this Deweyan standpoint, it might be of only minor interest
to argue by analogy that systems of instinct or impulse (programmed
circuitry, nodes) give rise to distinctive behavioral functions (sensors,
propulsion, etc.) on the Enterprise. But under conditions of adapta-
tion or adjustment (the effects of the “magnascopic storm”), these
behavioral functions—the equivalent of Deweyan habits—are modified
by need. The Enterprise’s emergent intelligence distinguishes itself
from its basis in pre-emergent systems by exhibiting behaviors of
self-replication, self-preservation, and self-expression that seem to
fill that need. The extent of these functions may be debated; but from
the Deweyan standpoint, the primary reason why we would treat this
new life form still “merely” as a non-autonomous artifact would be
that we are mistakenly focusing on what counts as a precondition
340 KEVIN S. DECKER

for calling something “intelligent” or “autonomous.” Dewey, ever the

pragmatist, reorients us toward consideration of the consequences of
calling something “intelligent.” Unfortunately, given the constraints
of the production of a weekly sci-fi drama in its final season, we are
never given the opportunity to examine the consequences of treating
the emergent Enterprise nodes as intelligent.
Hence, the main point of difference between Dewey and Kant on
the significance of autonomy has to do with what Dewey understands
as “future-directedness” versus “past-directedness” in our explanations.
While Kant looks backward for a criterion for intelligently self-directed
activity, Dewey, like Johnson and Lakoff much later, is interested in
the matrix of interactions between habits or will, on the one hand, and
existential conditions, on the other, that forms a continuum between
the poles of “mere” behavior and intelligent action—the latter being
a sign of “collective self-organization and dynamic emergence.”31 This
discourse of habit and adaptation is what is currently fueling a robust
naturalistic alternative in the discussion of freedom and intelligence
in empirical philosophy of action and cognitive science; we ignore it
in our lessons on ethics, metaphysics, and modernism at the peril of
becoming out-of-date.32

4. A Kantian Alternative
Fortunately, for those of us who like to teach Kant as the brilliant
thinker ahead of his time that he was, Kant himself indicates a path in
his later work that does not depend upon the problematic metaphysical
formulations of the Groundwork. In this respect, it is helpful to teach
the naturalistic alternative to Kant’s view of autonomy explained above
in conjunction with certain passages from the third Critique on the
power of judgment.33 In the second part, the “Critique of Teleological
Judgement,” Kant modifies his earlier view about the strict dichotomy
between natural laws and freedom that had been central to the first two
Critiques. For Kant, the scientific sticking point is the reproduction of
organisms, which not only obey natural laws, but further demonstrate
three levels of reproductive behavior that inanimate things do not. A
living creature demonstrates the capacity to reproduce others of its
own kind generically (the progeny is always of the same genus) and
re-produce itself as an individual (growth); furthermore, each part of
a living organism “generates itself in such a way that the preservation
of the one is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the other.”34
Kant himself recognizes the basis for collective self-organization—what
would much later be called emergence—when he concludes,
An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive
power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power, and in-
 KANT, DEWEY, AND CAPTAIN PICARD 341

deed one that it communicates to the matter, which does not have it (it organizes
the latter): thus it has a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be
explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is, mechanism).35
This turn to emergence in the final Critique should not surprise us;
Kant, like Dewey, shared a passionate interest in the scientific discov-
eries of his day. Both thinkers struggled to provide a philosophical
framework (not a foundation) for scientific knowledge. Both thinkers
were deeply concerned, albeit for different reasons, with the status of
freedom and value in a world increasingly being overdetermined by
fact. We can see, though, in the technological and metaphorical myster-
ies of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Emergence,” a reflection of
their differences regarding the relative significance of autonomy versus
emergent intelligence in the self-determination of moral creatures.36

Notes
1. In Fred Feldman, Introductory Ethics (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1978).
2. Mill, Utilitarianism (Boston: Willard Small, 1899), 120–21.
3. Many thanks to an anonymous referee for Teaching Philosophy for pointing out
this second avenue of criticism.
4. Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” Philosophical
Review 81 (July 1972): 305–16, 309.
5. For a different view of the relationship of these two thinkers, see Robert Pippin,
“Kant,” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchely and William A.
Schroeder (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 35–56.
6. See Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003).
7. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic
Books, 1999), chap. 14, “Morality,” especially pp. 328–34.
8. Although this seems like a narrow focus for criticism, autonomy is not only one
of Kant’s most crucial concepts—closely tied as it is to his meta-ethical discussion of
freedom as a practical postulate of morality—but it has been taken up in various forms
and plays a vital role in discussions within literature of applied ethics; see, for example,
Julian Savulescu, “Rational Desires and the Limitation of Life-Sustaining Treatment,”
Bioethics 8:3 (1994): 191–222.
9. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans.
and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83, 85; Ak 4:433,
4:436.
10. Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.”
11. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 82; Ak 4:432.
12. Ibid., 392; Ak 6:236.
13. A good example is Mary Midgley’s treatment of the moral lives of higher mam-
mals in Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumbing (New
York: Routledge, 1996).
342 KEVIN S. DECKER

14. From the “Inside Star Trek with Gene Roddenberry” bonus CD included with
the twentieth-anniversary edition of the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(Columbia/Legacy, 1998); for more on the philosophical themes of the various Star Trek
movies and spin-offs, see Star Trek and Philosophy, ed. Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S.
Decker (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2008).
15. Many of the conclusions of this paper are supported by Daniel Dennett’s excellent
book Freedom Evolves; the interested reader might compare this list of features with the
conclusions drawn by Dennett about what mathematician John Horton Conway’s “Game
of Life” simulation tells us about the emergence of agency. See Freedom Evolves, chap.
2, “A Tool for Thinking About Determinism.”
16. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 332.
17. Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (New York: Cambridge,
1996), 65.
18. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 79; Ak 4:428.
19. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Writings of
William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1977), 617; italics in original.
20. See John Dewey, “The Naturalization of Intelligence,” in The Quest for Certainty,
vol. 4 of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale,
Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988).
21. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in John Dewey: The Later Works,
1924–1953, vol. 12, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1991), 17.
22. John Dewey, “Philosophies of Freedom,” in John Dewey: The Later Works,
1924–1953, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1984), 109.
23. Ibid.
24. This is pace Daniel Savage, who attempts in the first chapter of John Dewey’s
Liberalism to construct a Deweyan conception of autonomy without realizing the deep
unsuitability of the word for what Dewey is trying to do; Daniel Savage, John Dewey’s
Liberalism (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 17–39.
25. See John Dewey and James Hayden Tufts, Ethics, 2nd ed., in John Dewey: The
Later Works, 1924–1953, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1989), 305.
26. Ibid. 306.
27. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, in John Dewey: The Middle Works,
1899–1924, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1988), 123.
28. For instructors who want to explore emergence in the context of Dewey and Den-
nett, there are more resources in popular culture than simply the episode “Emergence.”
Similar themes emerge in both the sixth season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode,
“Quality of Life,” which focuses on the evolution of self-interested behavior in machines
called “Exocomps”; it’s also profitable to contrast the development of the personality
and abilities of the android Data with his “less-evolved” twin B4 in the feature film Star
Trek: Nemesis (Stuart Baird, director, 2002) and to examine the path taken by the sentient
computer V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, director, 1979). Some
non-Star Trek recommendations include: exploring the actions and motivations of HAL,
the mission computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, director, 1968); ex-
 KANT, DEWEY, AND CAPTAIN PICARD 343

amining the metaphorical sense in which Eliza Doolittle “emerges” under the tutelage of
Dr. Henry Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; and looking at the human prejudices
that stand in the way of admitting that anthropomorphic machines may have transcended
the programming of their creators in BladeRunner (Ridley Scott, director, 1982) and the
re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica television series (2003–2009). For a philosophical
introduction to this issue in Battlestar, see Jerold J. Abrams, “Embracing the ‘Children of
Humanity’: How to Prevent the Next Cylon War,” in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy,
ed. Jason T. Eberl (Blackwell, 2008), 75–86.
29. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,; Ak 4.
30. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 32.
31. Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard, 2007), 61.
32. See also Dennett, Freedom Evolves.
33. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
34. Ibid., 243; Ak 5: 371.
35. Ibid., 246; Ak 5: 374.
36. I appreciate the comments of both Lisa Cassidy of Ramapo College, New Jersey,
and another, anonymous, reviewer; their insights made this paper substantially better.
Special thanks to Jason T. Eberl for comments and editorial advice.

Kevin S. Decker, 266 Patterson Hall, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Washington
99004; kdecker@ewu.edu