Kant: Ethics, Misc

In the past two decades, much work on Kant has aimed to delimit and evaluate the bedrock assumptions of Kant's mature Critical philosophy. This volume brings together leading Kant scholars to address this issue in conversation with each other, articulating and interrogating Kant's critical assumptions.

Scholars have widely assumed that the aspects of Kant’s virtue theory that nod to ancient ethics must be cashed out with reference to Aristotle. Interpreters then worry that Kant's conception of virtue as a “moral strength of will” (Doctrine of Virtue, 6:405) must be tantamount to Aristotle’s notion of “continence” (enkrateia) — the state of a person who knows the good, and acts accordingly, but must overcome strong countervailing impulses in order to do so. The result plays into caricatures of (...) Kantian ethics as valorising a joyless standard of duty, which these Aristotelian-oriented commentators (rightly) wish to resist. However, the worry is misplaced. I show that Kant is not thinking about Aristotle here, but is instead engaged with a specifically Stoic approach to ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. I draw on this context to show that Kant’s virtue-as-strength idea is not marred in the ways it appears to be when read through an Aristotelian lens. (shrink)

Kant’s interpreters often assume that his conception of freedom rules out collective responsibility for human badness. Yet in Part 3 of the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, he claims that human beings “mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and make one another evil” (6:94.5-6). On the going assumption, this corrupting act would be something that individuals do to individuals; however, Kant takes it to be something “we” do together, as some kind of group agent. He also supposes (...) that our common corruption is to be overcome through the establishment of the “ethical commonwealth”, which he deems a “duty of its own kind” because it does not hold of individuals to other individuals but of the species to itself, ostensibly acting as a group agent (6:97.17-19). While many commentators acknowledge that Kant calls for a social solution to a social problem, almost no serious attention has been directed to his appeal to group agency and responsibility in this context. This chapter puts contemporary work on group agency — namely, that of Margaret Gilbert, Stephanie Collins, and Thomas Crowther — into dialogue with Kant to advance our understanding of a curious and drastically understudied aspect of his later ethical thought. (shrink)

This paper sketches a Kantian account of forgiveness and argues that it is distinguished by three features. First, Kantian forgiveness is best understood as the revision of the actions one takes toward an offender, rather than a change of feeling toward an offender. Second, Kant’s claim that forgiveness is a duty of virtue tells us that we have two reasons to sometimes be forgiving: forgiveness promotes both our own moral perfection and the happiness of our moral community. Third, we have (...) a duty to withhold forgiveness if with think forgiveness will cause or encourage our offender to wrong us again. This duty to sometimes withhold forgiveness stems from our duty of self-respect, which Kant repeatedly describes as a duty to ourselves to ensure that we are not harmed again. (shrink)

‘[Loneliness] comes from a vague core of the self’ wrote Sylvia Plath. I think Plath is right. To show why, I turn to Kant. For Kant, what lies at the ‘core of the self’ is our capacity for self-consciousness. But, self-consciousness, Kant warns, opens an ‘abyss’ between the active ‘I’ of which we are conscious and the passive phenomenal world we experience. Loneliness, I argue, is the painful experience of standing on the ‘brink of the abyss’, from the standpoint of (...) the noumenal ‘I’. Like Kant, but unlike Plath, I think there is a way out of the ‘prison of the self’ – as Kant calls it. To escape the prison we need a fellow agent to come to this side of the abyss, with whom we can ‘unite our will’ in shared action and thought. We escape the loneliness of the self-conscious ‘I’ in a shared ‘we’. (shrink)

In the Groundwork and all three Critiques, Kant expresses the hope of eventually unifying theoretical and practical reason in one system, with a principle common to both. But he never clarifies what this principle is, leaving scholars to advance different possibilities. I advance a new response to this problem: I claim that Kant begins to refer to what he calls the ‘autonomy of ideas of reason’ in his final decade, enabling a new approach to finally bridging the theoretical and the (...) practical. This concept of autonomy, however, is no longer equivalent to the moral autonomy attributed to the self-legislating will, nor does it refer to the spontaneity of theoretical reason. Instead, it corresponds to the autonomy ascribed to reflective judgment in representing both theoretical and practical ideas of reason. Thus, this conception furnishes a principle, the principle of purposiveness, which I propose as the unifying principle Kant had been seeking. (shrink)

According to the ‘rigorist’ interpretation, the imperfect duty of (e.g.) beneficence does not permit agents to fail to perform any beneficent act that is available to the agent in order to pursue some nonmoral interest, whereas on the latitudinal interpretation, agents are permitted to fail to do so. I defend the latitudinal interpretation by criticising recent defences of rigorism offered by Jens Timmermann and Pauline Kleingeld, arguing that they conflict with important features of Kant’s moral theory, and that the latitudinal (...) interpretation better coheres with Kant’s overall view. (shrink)

I draw on ideas salient in contemporary literate African philosophy to construct two new theoretical ways of capturing the essence of duties to oneself. According to one theory, a person has a foundational duty to “relate” to herself in ways similar to how the African field has often thought that a person should relate with others, viz., harmoniously. According to the second, one has a foundational duty to produce liveliness in oneself. In addition to articulating these novel attempts to capture (...) what all duties to oneself might have in common and showing that each one captures several intuitions about them, I offer some reasons to think that the harmony theory is more attractive than the vitality one. I conclude that there are values prominent in the African tradition that, upon some reformulation, ground comprehensive accounts of what one owes oneself that merit consideration by a global audience as rivals to, say, Kantian-rationalist approaches common in the West. (shrink)

Il rapporto tra natura e libertà è una questione che ritorna in tutta la produzione filosofica di Immanuel Kant. In questo libro, si indaga tale rapporto nella sua dimensione morale. L’obiettivo è mostrare la possibilità pratica di una interazione non dualistica tra natura e libertà, oltre a sostenere che lo sviluppo di un’armonia tra esse corrisponda al fine della morale kantiana da realizzare nella persona e nella storia. Tesi supportata attraverso due percorsi. Il primo, di carattere antropologico-psicologico, si propone di (...) cogliere il ruolo essenziale della natura sensibile all’interno dell’esperienza morale dell’agente e, quindi, la necessità morale dello sviluppo di uno specifico rapporto tra vita emotiva e ragione nel carattere. Il secondo, teleologico-storico, mostra come lo sviluppo di tale rapporto armonico nell’agente si inserisca in una più ampia interazione tra la finalità della natura e la finalità dell’agire umano nella storia. (shrink)

Mi objetivo es esclarecer la tematización kantiana del respeto entendido como sentimiento. En primer lugar, examino los pasajes en los que Kant aborda el sentimiento para dilucidar cuáles son los elementos que lo caracterizan y muestro que son su pertenencia como representación a la sensibilidad, su referencia meramente subjetiva, su cualidad de placentero o displacentero, su apreciación de la concordancia con la vida y su tendencia a la autopreservación o supresión. En segundo lugar, ofrezco una exposición del respeto en función (...) de estas características. (shrink)

On the standard reading of Kant’s ethics, agents are responsible only for their acts of willing, not the consequences of their willing, much less the acts or consequences of other agents’ willing (vicarious responsibility). It is therefore somewhat puzzling to find Kant discussing vicarious responsibility, and with apparent approbation, in the treatment of a case that has come to typify his ethics, the murderer at the door. Nonetheless, he does so, and in his lesser known works, Kant even sets out (...) a rudimentary framework for handling such cases. My goal in this chapter is to draw attention to this neglected aspect of Kant’s ethics. I want to show that Kant accepted vicarious responsibility openly and explicitly, both in his ethical and in his legal theory. In so doing, I hope to reveal how much the current understanding of Kant’s theory of responsibility, accepted by Kantians and non-Kantians alike, has failed to capture fairly basic parts of his thought. (shrink)

The chapter replies to Paul Guyer’s (2020) account of the debate between Mendelssohn and Kant about whether humankind makes continual moral progress. Mendelssohn maintained that progress can only be the remit of individuals, and that humankind only “continually fluctuates within fixed limits”. Kant dubs Mendelssohn’s position “abderitism” and explicitly rejects it. But Guyer contends that Kant’s own theory of freedom commits him, malgré lui, to abderitism. Guyer’s risky interpretive position is not supported by examination of the relevant texts in their (...) intellectual context. I first identify the historical origins of the term abderitism, which here signifies the independence of individual progress from social conditions. By contrast, Kant argues that individual progress cannot be independent of the progress of the species, acting as a corporate agent. This arresting position, I argue, must be understood in light of the Stoic ethical-teleological presuppositions generally accepted in eighteenth-century German discussion of human progress. (shrink)

Critics often accuse Kant and Kantians of rigorism: of advocating highly general exceptionless principles of duty that strictly prohibit action kinds like lying or breaking promises. In this article, I draw on arguments from the generalism-particularism debate to show that the way in which Kantians usually understand universality prevents them from solving this problem and leaves them stuck in a trilemma. I then argue that they should abandon this common conception—the “strict conception,” on which universal principles don’t permit any exceptions—in (...) favor of a “relaxed conception,” on which universal principles do permit certain exceptions, namely principled exceptions. (shrink)

Die meisten Philosophen stimmen darin überein, dass Kant sich dem Prinzip „Sollen impliziert Können“, bzw. „ought implies can“ (OIC), verschrieben hat. Allerdings sind sich nur wenige darüber einig, wie die Bedeutung von OIC zu verstehen ist. Außerhalb der Kant-Wissenschaft gibt es Debatten über die Bedeutung von „sollen“, die Bedeutung von „impliziert“ und die Bedeutung von „können“ in diesem Prinzip. Innerhalb der Kant-Forschung besteht kein Konsens darüber, was Kant zu diesen Themen dachte. In diesem Artikel versuche ich, diese Situation zu verbessern. (...) In Abschnitt I überprüfe ich die Sekundärliteratur zu Kants Engagement für OIC und erkläre, wo die Interpretation meiner Meinung nach schief geht. In Abschnitt II untersuche ich einige der direkten Textbeweise dafür, dass Kant eine bestimmte Version von OIC zugeschrieben wird. In Abschnitt III lege ich dar, was meiner Meinung nach die wichtigsten doktrinären Gründe dafür sind, Kant diese Version von OIC zuzuschreiben. (shrink)

I will first offer a brief interpretation of Kant’s theory of “Aesthetic preconcepts of the mind’s receptivity to concepts of duty as such” (section XII of the “Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue”). These moral predispositions (moral feeling, conscience, love of human beings, and self-respect), I argue, lie at the ground of morality inasmuch as they are the subjective conditions for being affected by concepts of duty to become aware of the necessitation that lies in the concept of duty and, (...) hence, to be able to think of a duty and thus to be obligated at all. I shall then argue that the “love of human beings” as one of those four moral predispositions must be identified with “love that is delight (amor complacentiae); this Menschenliebe is not to be confused with “benevolence (amor benevolentiae)” nor is it the “dexterity of the inclination to beneficence in general”. (shrink)

Zhang Zai’s 張載 “Western Inscription ” and Kant’s “Conclusion” of the Critique of Practical Reason are two profound pieces. As of yet, no comparative study has been made of the two. I argue that a comparative and contrasting study provides us a window into the central and powerful ideas within these two pieces. Section 2 of this article contrasts Zhang Zai’s “Heaven-Earth” with Kant’s starry heavens, his external “wonderland.” Section 3 contrasts Zhang Zai’s teaching of morality by personal commitment and (...) exemplars with Kant’s teaching of morality by a theory based on the moral law within, his inner “wonderland.” Section 4 compares and contrasts Zhang Zai’s human self-realization in the one world of Heaven-Earth with Kant’s human realization in the coming-together of the two “wonderlands.” By stressing some significant differences between Zhang Zai and Kant, I conclude that the view that takes Kant’s coming-together of the two “wonderlands” as a version of the union or interpenetration between the cosmos and the human will need important qualifications. (shrink)

Compared to other aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, Kant’s theory of conscience remains relatively unexplored in the secondary literature on his work. This is no doubt due, at least in part, to the fact that in the Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals (henceforth: Groundwork) and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant's two most widely read works on ethics, conscience plays very little role. However, Kant has extended discussions of conscience in three of his lesser read works: On the Miscarriage (...) of all Philosophical Attempts in Theodicy (henceforth: Miscarriage), the Religion within the Boundaries of mere Reason (henceforth: Religion), and the Metaphysics of Morals. There are also many unpublished notes in which Kant discusses conscience, and it may be conjectured, on the basis of extant copies of students’ notes, that conscience was a frequent topic in Kant’s lectures. As commentators have begun to play closer attention to these lesser read works, the literature on Kant’s theory of conscience has begun to develop. It is thanks to this development that this Element is possible: there is an emerging consensus that Kant’s theory of conscience is important both in its own right and insofar as it can help to correct various misunderstandings that have become part of the standard view of Kant’s ethical thought. This Element is divided into two parts. The first focuses on exegesis of Kant’s ethics. One of the overarching theses of this first part of the Element is that, although many of Kant’s claims about conscience are prima facie inconsistent, a close examination of context generally can dissolve apparent contradictions. The second part of the Element focuses on philosophical issues in Kantian ethics. One of the overarching theses of this part of the Element is that many positions traditionally associated with Kantian ethics, including the denial of moral luck, the nonaccidental rightness condition, and the guise of the objectively good, are at variance with Kant’s ethics. (shrink)

Kant’s account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant doesn’t talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil, and leaves other clues that (...) his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is — by default and yet by our own deed — bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant’s account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources. (shrink)

Nach Kant ist die Armut ein unerwünschtes Phänomen, dessen Entstehung hauptsächlich den durch menschliche Interaktionen entstandenen Ungerechtigkeiten geschuldet ist.

Before comparing the _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_ and the _Critique of Practical_ Reason, this chapter undertakes an essential preliminary task by clarifying Kant’s doctrine of the ‘fact of reason’. According to this doctrine, our consciousness of the moral law admits of no deduction, but it nonetheless serves to warrant our possession of a free will. This chapter begins by tracing the concept of ‘fact’ through the three main stages of its linguistic history, showing that Kant’s use of the (...) terms ‘_Factum_’ and ‘_Tatsache_’ bears an affinity with the British experimentalist tradition. The chapter shows how this context sheds light on Kant’s own experimental method in the second _Critique_. (shrink)

This chapter has three aims. First, it gives an overview of the reception of Kant’s project of moral justification up to the twentieth century, showing that Kant’s first readers detected no great rift between the _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_ and the _Critique of Practical Reason_. A consensus that Kant reversed or rejected the argument of _Groundwork_ III only takes shape in 1960. Second, this chapter returns to the details of _Groundwork_ III and argues that Kant appeals to the (...) idea of an intelligible world to warrant our possession of a free will. Third, this chapter argues that, while the second _Critique_ is mostly continuous with Kant’s earlier argument, it goes further by including a theory of moral sensibility. (shrink)

It is one thing to show that we are the kind of beings for whom morality applies, and quite another to show that our moral aspirations are on the right track. The latter raises a question of moral self-knowledge, since it asks how we as individuals can have assurance that our moral progress is genuine. This chapter argues that a new form of despair emerges from the question of how we can trust our own aspirations to live a virtuous life. (...) The problem concerns either our tendency to self-deception or our inability to know our underlying intentions—two sides of Kant’s opacity thesis. This chapter argues that Kant’s effort to resolve the issue of moral self-knowledge leads him, in _Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason_ and the _Metaphysics of_ _Morals_, to a theory of conscience. (shrink)

This chapter concludes by drawing attention to a parallel between Kant’s early critics (including Karl Reinhold, Leonard Creuzer, and Solomon Maimon) and present-day Kantians. Surprisingly, the chapter shows that these contemporary arguments are closer, both in spirit and strategy, to those first post-Kantians who claimed to be revising or rejecting Kant’s position. Both seek to derive the normativity of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. On the reading of Kant defended in this book, Kant (...) himself was never attracted to such a foundationalist strategy of justification in his mature writings. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Kant’s reasons for resisting foundationalism in ethics give us reasons to critically reassess recent Kantian arguments for moral normativity. (shrink)

This chapter has three aims. The first is to give the reader an overview of Kant’s _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_, focusing on the transitions that link the book’s three sections. The second aim is to understand Kant’s argument in _Groundwork_ III, focusing on his claim that the moral ‘ought’ has its source in our own ‘will.’ This argument is shown to address, not a theoretical form of doubt, but a practical problem of despair that Kant identifies with our (...) tendency to rationalize against moral laws. A further aim of this chapter is to clarify Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic paths as a framework for understanding his project of moral justification. (shrink)

This chapter forms the next main thesis of the present study: the synthetic path of the second _Critique_ is broader in scope, since Kant seeks to reveal a necessary connection between our consciousness of the moral law and our capacity to feel pleasure and displeasure. The chapter picks up where Chapter 3 left off by providing a close reading of Kant’s theory of moral sensibility in the _Critique of Practical Reason_. Two important results follow. First, it is argued that debates (...) over the role of moral feeling in Kant’s moral psychology have failed to acknowledge Kant’s emphasis on the first-personal character of feeling as a feature of our common experience of morality. Second, these debates have failed to connect Kant’s theory of moral sensibility to his project of justification, which the present chapter aims to remedy. (shrink)

Kant’s arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. Many prominent ethicists invoke Kant, directly or indirectly, in their efforts to derive the authority of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. But many commentators have detected a deep rift between the _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_ and the _Critique of Practical Reason_, leaving Kant’s project of justification exposed to conflicting (...) assessments and interpretations. In this major re-reading of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Owen Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. The result is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the reader to ambitious and modest frameworks for interpreting Kant’s justification of ethics. Ambitious approaches try to give us a reason to be moral, or to refute the moral skeptic, whereas modest approaches merely try to make our experience of morality intelligible. One of the goals of the present book is to defend a version of the modest interpretation, but with the caveat that Kant still employs a variety of argumentative methods. Four are highlighted: the skeptical method, (...) the experimental method, the polemic method, and the phenomenological method. After proving a vignette of each, this chapter provides a sketch of the book’s aims and ambitions. (shrink)

Intentar explicar el origen, evolución y violación de un tabú considerado casi universal en las sociedades humanas no es una empresa sencilla dado su carácter polifacético; sin embargo, ello no ha impedido que en muchos ordenamientos jurídicos sea empleado ese sentimiento de repulsión o asco como un elemento para criminalizar una relación sexual aparentemente ofensiva. El artículo sostiene que el matrimonio es la única forma en que las prácticas sexuales entre parientes en condición de igualdad pueden tener lugar. Para ello: (...) I. Presentaremos algunas teorías que ofrecen respuestas a las incógnitas en torno al tabú, II. Veremos por qué para Kant el incesto es un crimina carnis contra naturam en un caso, y secundum naturam en el otro. III. Examinaremos qué es el matrimonio para el filósofo y por qué constituye un ideal regulativo-práctico de las relaciones sexuales humanas. Por último, consideramos argumentos en contra de esta propuesta. (shrink)

A review of "Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals," by Christine M. Korsgaard. New York: Oxford, 2018. Pp. 271.