The Kantian Model of Moral-Practical Reason

Abstract

In this essay I will examine several features of the dominant contem porary view about the nature and functions of practical reason, a view finding its most natural home in deontological theories within the Kantian tradition.1 I will suggest that such theories are quite wrong in holding that public morality is the whole of our moral life. I will argue that insofar as they deny there is or can be such a thing as a private moral life, they tend both to mis represent and to undermine the nature of human moral life. Some of my critical remarks on these points will apply, mutatis mutandis, to utilitarian theories as well. My criticism will be made from what, in the main, can be called an Aristotelian position, which holds that practical reason has both public (but not wholly public) and private (but not wholly private) functions, and that each function has its own distinctiveness.2 On this account, practical wisdom is right reasoning aimed at the good of the individual and political wisdom is right reasoning aimed at the common good of the community. Although neither function nor neither good can exist without the other, neither should one be collapsed into the other. I will not have the space to delineate the Aristotelian view in any detail, but through my comments on the Kantian view I will at least give some indications about how such a view of practical reason and morality can be constructed.3