Kant's Conception of Moral Character: The "Critical" Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment

Abstract

Fashionable among critics of Enlightenment thought is the charge that Kant's ethics fails to provide an adequate account of character and its formation in moral and political life. This text challenges this reading of Kant's thought, claiming not only that Kant has a very rich notion of moral character, but also that it is a conception of systematic importance for his thought, linking the formal moral with the critical, aesthetic, anthropological, and biological aspects of his philosophy. The book focuses on character formation in Kant's moral philosophy, it builds on important work on Kant's aesthetics and anthropology, and brings these to bear on moral issues. The author traces Kant's multifaceted definition of character through the broad range of his writings, and then explores the structure of character, its actual exercise in the world, and its cultivation.