Kant's Moral Theory Research Articles

Autonomy and the Highest Good

Kant conceives of moral agents as autonomous, capable of motivating themselves to act on a self-given rule of reason, independently of – and even against – their inclinations. Moreover, Kant's moral theory tells agents to realize their autonomy, by striving to do what is right for its own sake. It is because of Kant's emphasis on autonomy that his notion of the highest good has been a topic of controversy. From Kant's time onward, commentators have suspected that the highest good, which promises virtuous agents happiness proportionate to their goodness, introduces heteronomy into morality. The standard response to this concern is that critics have misunderstood the relationship of the highest good to the agent's will: it is an object, not a spring, of moral action. This is a valid response to some articulations of the objection. But it does not adequately address the version that interests me: the charge that belief in God as the guarantor of happiness proportionate to virtue plays an inappropriate motivational role in Kant's moral theory. Kant appears to say that without belief in a God who will make the virtuous happy we would not be motivated to act rightly. This sort of claim seems to conflict with Kant's notion of moral agents as beings who are capable of doing the right thing just because it is right. If this conflict cannot be resolved, Kantians face a dilemma: either weaken the notion of autonomy, or (more likely) weaken the claims about the moral importance of faith in God.

Rational Nature as the Source of Value

The most prominent recent interpretations of Kantian ethics place rational nature at the centre of the theory: I must respect rational nature, whether in myself or in others, because rational nature has a special status as the source of all other values. It is not obvious what it is for something to be the source of value, nor whether rational nature could play this role, but until these issues are settled the coherence of Kantian ethics is in question. In this article I offer an explanation of what it is for rational nature to be the source of value, I show that this claim is an important element of Kant's moral theory, and I defend this conception of value.

What's Wrong with Torture?

Why is torture morally wrong? This question has been neglected or avoided by recent moral philosophy, in part because torture is by its nature especially difficult to discuss. Torture involves degrees of pain and fear that are often said to be utterly indescribable; indeed, these experiences are sometimes said to destroy in their victims the very hope of any sort of communication or shared experience whatsoever. Torture has proved surprisingly difficult to define. There is no clear agreement on the distinction between torture, coercion, and manipulation, or whether such techniques as sleep and sensory deprivation, isolation, or prolonged questioning should count as forms of torture. In addition, we may be fearful of deriving some sort of perverse titillation from the subject, or of being able to dispassionately contemplate the agonies of real victims of torture. Those who have not suffered torture may well feel What’s Wrong with Torture? DAVID SUSSMAN

The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern Linda Lierheimer The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. By Carla Hesse. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 233 pp. $47.50 (cloth), $22.95 (paper). Carla Hesse's The Other Enlightenment challenges the idea of a monolithic "Enlightenment" as created by the great male philosophessuch asVoltaire and Rousseau. Taking as her starting point the contradiction between the notion of an "other Enlightenment" and a traditional definition of "the Enlightenment" as a universal concept, Hesse follows in the footsteps of historians such as Robert Darnton who in the 1980s transformed our understanding of the Enlightenment with his study of "Grub Street" writers. Darnton, along with Roger Chartier and others, presented the Enlightenment in social and cultural, rather than purely intellectual, terms and made us aware that there were many "enlightenments." The story of women, and particularly of the women writers who are the subject of Hesse's book, is surely one of these many enlightenments, one that has been sorely neglected by historians until very recently. The title of the book is also a reference to Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist manifesto, The Second Sex, which told us that women were viewed as "other" in a male-defined world. Hesse's "other Enlightenment" is an intellectual history that connects women who pursued "the public exercise of female reason" (p. 55) from the Old Regime to Beauvoir. While Hesse focuses on France, her work should inspire historians of other regions to explore the important, though often unacknowledged, contributions women have made to the history of ideas and to the creation of a modern sensibility. [End Page 258] The first part of the book examines women's relationship to literacy, publishing, and authorship in the Old Regime. Hesse opens with the story of a servant woman, Jeanne-Catherine Clere, who was executed during the French Revolution for seditious speech. Hesse argues that the seriousness with which her drunken royalist rantings were treated is evidence of an oral culture in which women, from fishwives to salonnières, had a privileged relationship to speech. The gradual displacement of the spoken by the written word in public life, finalized during the Revolution, led to a decline in women's influence over language, particularly since many women were illiterate. Still, as Hesse shows in chapter 2, after 1789 the number of women writers grew steadily. As much as revolutionary ideology tended to relegate women to the private sphere and despite increasing restrictions on women's publishing during the nineteenth century (married women in France were not free to publish and profit from their writing independently of their husbands until 1965), a growing literary marketplace led to the increasing participation of women in the public sphere. Part 2 offers case studies of a number of prominent women writers to show how fiction served as a feminine vehicle for philosophical inquiry. Before the French Revolution, Louise de Kéralio-Robert made her reputation as an historian, most notably as author of a history of Elizabeth I of England. Attacked during the Revolution as a "literary amazon," Kéralio-Robert turned to fiction. Hesse sees this transition as evidence not of the restrictions imposed on literary women after 1789 but as a positive choice of a genre that allowed Kéralio-Robert to rebel against "the masculinist postrevolutionary ideology of separate spheres" (p. 101) and construct a new kind of republican and women's history. Similarly, Hesse reads Isabelle de Charrière's novel Trois Femmes [Three women] as a critique of Kantian moral theory, which denied women moral autonomy. Charrière's very choice of genre, in addition to the content of her novel, challenged the dominant philosophical paradigm and the authoritarian cultural policy of the late revolutionary period. Hesse concludes that the novel proved to be the ideal form for women to explore issues of moral autonomy and to critique their society. Her final chapter, "Fiction as Philosophy," shows that literature allowed women to construct selves that transcended the definitions of gender imposed by science and law. Thus, while the Revolution did not give women political or legal rights, it did allow them...

Moral Objectivity and Reasonable Agreement: Can Realism Be Reconciled with Kantian Constructivism?

Abstract. In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches of Rawls, Habermas and Scanlon. On the other hand, however, objections to moral realism motivate many Kantian constructivists to endorse the antirealist claim that reasonable agreement is the source of the validity of social norms. After analyzing the difficulties in the latter strategy, I try to show how a balance between the realist and antirealist elements of Kantian constructivism can be reached by drawing a sharper distinction between the justice and the legitimacy of social norms.

Could Kant have really been an utilitarian?

In this paper the author examines Hare's idea of reconciliation of utilitarianism and Kant's moral theory. The key term which connects these two theories is the idea of universality of moral notions and judgments. But the real question is: which type of universality, and how does that universality work? Hare's idea of universalisability apparently is not Kantian universality required by categorical imperative. The author concludes that main Hare's argument in favor of "Kantian utilitarianism" is based upon basic misunderstanding of central notions of Kant's ethical theory.

Kant's Dynamic Theory of Character

Kant's moral theory has received trenchant criticism for its rigorism. Rigorism generally denotes an overemphasis on rules in moral theory, and a consequent neglect of the roles of emotional receptivity and perception in moral judgement. Critics of Kant's ethics have invoked the term rigorism with reference to any one of three overlapping features of Kant's moral theory. Usually rigorism designates the 'rigid and insensitive uniformities of conduct' that result from the mechanical application of rules. Occasionally it refers to the excessively strict moral standard implied by Kant's conception of the good will. But some critics object to rigorism in just the sense in which Kant himself understood and embraced it: as referring to moral theories that admit only two types of moral character, namely good and evil ones. The complaint, which Kant was fully aware of, is that this bipolar view of character is woefully inadequate to our experience of the gradations of virtue and vice.

The Anxiety of Influence: Sartre's Search for an Ethics and Kant's Moral Theory

In his book The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry,2 Harold Bloom presents several ‘revisionary ratios’, that is, several ways in which an author may critically refer to his predecessor in order to separate himself3 from the latter. The author’s criticism of his predecessor manifests an anxiety of influence insofar as it overstates the differences and neglects the similarities between his and his predecessor’s works. In this paper I shall show that some aspects of Sartre’s criticism of Kant’s moral theory in the Notebooks for an Ethics mani- fest an anxiety of influence.

Kantian Moral Theory and the Destruction of the Self

Kantian Moral Theory and the Destruction of the Self

Realismo y constructivismo en la teoría moral kantiana: el ejemplo de la ética del discurso

In this paper I argue against the metaethical view of moral Kantianism as a form of constructivism or antirealism. Given that Kantians do not share the expressivism characteristic of standard moral antirealism, Kantian constructivism seems to be an inherently unstable position, which can only be fully developed into either a consistently antirealist or a consistently realist approach. Taking Habermas’ discourse ethics as an example, I contrast a realist with an antirealist interpretation of the principle of universalization, and try to show that only the former is compatible with the moral cognitivism characteristic of Kantian moral theory, whereas the latter unavoidably leads to a decisionist (i.e., relativist) approach.

Review: Kantian Moral Theory and the Destruction of the Self

Review: Kantian Moral Theory and the Destruction of the Self

The Collapse of Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is normally taken to be an alternative to consequentialist and Kantian moral theories. I shall discuss what I think is the most interesting version of virtue ethics – Rosalind Hursthouse's. I shall then argue that her version is inadequate in ways that suggest revision in the direction of a kind of rule-consequentialism.

Kant's Ethical Duties and their Feminist Implications

If feminist ethics is to be “identified by its explicit commitment to challenging perceived male bias in ethics,” as Alison Jaggar states, then Kant's moral theory must be considered non-feminist. Indeed, many feminist philosophers have considered Kant's ethics to be anti-feminist. Some of these philosophers have noted such things as Kant's ascription, in his political theory, of all women to the class of passive citizens, and such reflections, in his writings about human nature, as “I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.” Other feminist critics have argued that Kant's ethics is scarred by male-bias at a fundamental level. For example, Sally Sedgwick has argued that Kant's conception of autonomous, rational agency, embodied in the categorical imperative's universal law tests, is inherently masculinist. Kant's ethics, however, has its feminist proponents as well. Jean Hampton endorses“ a Kantian conception of worth,” according to which “one must respect the value not only of others but also of oneself, and must therefore reject any roles, projects, or occupations which would be self-exploitative”; she develops her own “feminist form of Kantian contractarian theory” as an expression and elaboration of this Kantian notion of respect.

A Kantian Intuitionism

Kant famously said that one could not do morality a worse disservice than to derive it from examples, and this pronouncement, taken together with his formulations and explanations of the categorical imperative, has led some critics to regard him as too abstract. Ross, by contrast, has been widely viewed as taking individual cases of duty to have a kind of epistemic priority over principles of duty, and some of his critics have thus considered him insufficiently systematic, or even dogmatically limited to deliverances of intuition. This paper arises from the conviction that understanding of the categorical imperative may be enhanced by reflection on Rossian principles, and conversely. Kant and other systematic philosophers who have done moral philosophy in the grand style have had too little faith in intuitive singular moral judgement; Ross and other intuitionists have had too little faith in comprehensive moral theory. Drawing in part on an independent account of self‐evidence and its relation to intuition, the paper shows how a Rossian view can be integrated with a Kantian moral theory in a way that yields the major benets of both positions: the moral unication possible through the categorical imperative and other notions prominent in Kantian ethics, and the relative closeness to moral practice of Rossian principles.

Fear of Freedom: A Polemic Against Policy Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Schroeder critiques dominance of policy oriented scholarship in legal academy and argues that jurisprudential, theoretical, and doctrinal scholarship should have equal prestige and presence in academia if for no other reason that these forms of scholarship more closely relate to practice of law that will engage most of our students. Indeed, she argues that despite prevailing perception that policy oriented scholarship is pragmatic and hard-headed, other forms of scholarship have much greater practical application. Although she addresses her critique specifically towards recent trends in law-and-economic scholarship specifically, it is aimed towards policy oriented scholarship generally. She also suggests that critical legal scholarship might be revitalized by a new approach to theory informed by Continental speculative tradition originating with philosophy of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel and continuing into twentieth century with psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. She contrasts thin concept of rationality adopted by both law-and-economics and critical legal studies movements on one hand with thicker one adopted by speculative thought on other. She suggests a reason for both overwhelming dominance of policy oriented scholarship among legal academics as well as estrangement of so much of legal academia from legal practice. Theoreticians and doctrinalists address law from perspective of those who are affected by or practice it. Policy scholarship, in contrast, makes recommendations to legislatures and activist judges who write law. As such, policy scholarship reflects a fundamental fear of freedom. Policy oriented scholars attempt to use law as a tool to subject others to their control in order to achieve what they see as society's objective purposes. Speculative theorists, doctrinal scholars and practicing attorneys, on contrary, seek to understand how law affects those who are subjected to it and to help them use law to achieve their own subjective purposes. Consequently, policy scholars seek a definition of rationality as predictable behavior. In contrast, speculative theory suggests that it is irrational behavior that is rigidly predictable and that rationality is nothing but capacity for pure spontaneity. In recent years, Richard Posner has loosed a blistering tirade on use of neo-Kantian moral theory in legal policy making. Prof. Schroeder shows that this attack is of a piece with utilitarian grounds of neo-classical economics that Posner preaches. Kant's theories of freedom and rationality are inextricably linked to his moral theory. Both are antithetical to economic understanding of rationality as ends-means reasoning. Posner is absolutely correct, therefore, that in order to adopt a theory of economic rationality one must also reject Kantian moral theory; utilitarianism's fear of freedom and a hatred of Kantianism are one and same thing. Nevertheless, despite her promotion of speculative theory in this Article, Prof. Schroeder wishes also partially to defend Posner from attacks of such neo-Kantians such as Ronald Dworkin. The type of detailed normative policy advice often proffered in name of Neo-Kantianism is, in fact, inconsistent with Kantian theory and speculative tradition it engendered. Prof. Schroeder also suggests one reason why earlier crit movement disintegrated: critical legal scholarship failed fully to realize implications of its position. As a result it implicitly repeated basic assumptions about law, rationality and markets adopted by law-and-economics movement, albeit coming to diametrically opposite conclusions. Consequently, crits unintentionally strengthened very legal position they purported to attack. Most importantly, she suggests why law-and-economics movement has consistently refused to acknowledge, let alone respond, to external criticism. From perspective of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, law and economics, on one hand, and speculative theory and legal practice, on other, are literally speaking in two different discourses. The former policy oriented scholarship speaks the discourse of university whereas truly critical theorists, doctrinal scholars and practicing attorneys speak the discourse of hysteric. These two discourses can not communicate directly because they presuppose radically different audiences. Policy scholars claim to speak for governor, whereas theoreticians and doctrinalists try to understand speech of governed. Schematically, each is logical obverse of other.

Duties to animals: The failure of Kant's moral theory

Etude de l'approche indirecte des devoirs envers les animaux chez Kant. Soulevant la question des applications plausibles de la theorie morale kantienne, l'A. montre que les strategies de A. Wood et C. Korsgaard ne parviennent pas a etablir un lien entre le traitement direct des etres humains et celui des animaux.

Accountability of Internet access and service providers – strictliability entering ethicsq

Questions regarding the moral responsibility of Internet access and service providers relating to information on the Internet call for a reassessment of the ways in which we think about attributing blame, guilt, and duties of reparation and compensation. They invite us to borrow something similar to the idea of strict liability from the legal sphere and to introduce it in morality and ethical theory. Taking such a category in the distribution of responsibilities outside the domain of law and introducing it into ethics, however, is a difficult thing. Doing so seems to conflict with some broadly shared and deeply felt intuitions regarding the individuality of responsibility and the relationship between responsibility and guilt. These convictions coincide with some basic ideas in Kantian moral theory and the ascriptive theory based on these ideas. Nevertheless, the problems to which the proposed liabilities / responsibilities relate are so serious that they do not seem to leave room for aloofness. At least, they encourage us to reconsider the idea of strict liability carefully and to assess its merits.

Value and idealism

This paper is concerned with the attempt to base a general theory of value on an idealist metaphysics. The most explicit and fully developed instance of this approach is, of course, found in Kant, on whom I shall concentrate, though I will also suggest that the account I offer of Kant has application to the later German idealists. While the core of the paper is devoted to commentary on Kant, what I thereby wish to make plausible is the idea that Kant's endeavour to base a general conception of value on an idealist metaphysics is of contemporary, not merely historical, interest. Specifically, my suggestion will be that a correct understanding of what is demanded by our ordinary, pre-philosophical grasp of value shows there is reason to think that something along the lines of Kant's transcendental idealism (or, like absolute idealism, developed from it) is required for a fully adequate metaphysics of value. Essential to the case I will make is a distinction between Kant's moral theory and his broader account of value, my claim being that, whether or not Kantian moral theory is ultimately dependent on any metaphysics, the broader conception of value to be found in Kant cannot be detached from his doctrine of transcendental idealism.

Altruism and the Endurance of the Good

Egoism is a pervasive trait in modern market societies that encourages people to focus upon their own self-interest above all else. Third-sector organizations, by contrast, are frequently termed “altruistic.” This essay elucidates the meaning of “altruism” as it applies to these organizations. Moral altruism means direct concern for another's well being—whoever that person might be. This study rejects psychological egoism as a meaningful psychological theory, and ethical egoism as a coherent moral position; it discusses empirical studies of altruism in rescuers of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe as proof against the former form of egoism and Kant's moral theory against the latter. The essay then argues that altruism is a form of public action in Hannah Arendt's sense of this term. The essay concludes that third-sector organizations are altruistic insofar as they engage in public action, thereby, treating beneficiaries with respect for their individuality.

The Impossibility of Supererogation in Kant's Moral Theory

It is common to think that certain acts are supererogatory, especially certain heroic or saintly self-sacrifices for the good. The idea seems to have an ordinary and clear application. Nothing shows this better than the well-known cases which J. 0. Urmson adduced. Urmson argued that no major moral theory could give a proper account of the supererogatory character of such acts, and that therefore none could account for all the facts of morality, as he put it. But his arguments were sketchy. This paper shall show, in some detail, that he was essentially right about Kant's moral theory, and that the criticism goes deep and holds up against recent sympathetic interpretation of Kant's views of duty and worth.