Abstract

Contemporary discussions conflate two understandings of practical necessity: according to one, an action is practically necessary when there are overriding reasons in favor of it such that the agent cannot do otherwise without opening himself to criticism; according to the other, to say that an action is practically necessary is to say that the demand that the agent perform the action is unconditioned, stemming from reason itself or from the agent’s constitution, without making reference to some purpose that the agent could fail to have. The first notion of practical necessity is relatively straightforward, while the second notion is more difficult to understand. In this paper, I distinguish between these two ways of understanding practical necessity, arguing both that they are conceptually distinct and that an unconditioned demand may not be overriding. I argue that it is useful not only to distinguish these notions but also to reserve the term “practical necessity” for the second since, contrary to first appearances, this captures the sense in which necessity within a practical context functions analogously to necessity in a theoretical context. Although my claims can be generalized, I argue for them by reference to Kant’s practical philosophy, making the case that Kant employs the term “practical necessity” in the second sense; failure to distinguish these notions has contributed to a great deal of confusion in the secondary literature on Kant. The proper understanding of the notion of practical necessity within Kant’s philosophy allows us to appreciate how practical and theoretical reasoning are unified but distinct-unified because reasoning seeks to produce and to preserve justification (of action on the one hand and belief on the other) yet distinct because practical reasoning is governed by its own characteristic patterns of inference.