Kantian Ethics Research Articles

The Relationship Between the Self and Others in Williams’ Theory of Integrity

Williams puts forward and develops his theory of integrity on the basis of criticizing utilitarianism and Kantian ethics as too demanding to make enough room for personal projects. Instead, his integrity theory advocates that we should act out of commitments with which we deeply identify ourselves. In doing so, we express who we really are and make our life meaningful. If not so, our integrity would be violated and we may lose ourselves. Such a description of the self in moral life is criticized as solipsism for that it makes the relationship between one’s projects and himself only be regulated by himself. This paper aims to point out that such criticism is inappropriate. To show the inaccuracy of the criticism, the author will analyze the relationship between the self and others in two aspects. The first aspect is about the structure of formation of desires and others, and the second one is about the action responsibility and others. After analysis, in the first aspect of desires, the self needs others to form and stabilize desires, beliefs and motivations to cooperate with others. Others help the self to sustain the sense of reality to prevent the self from forming wishful thinking. As to action, others’ need for response is an important element in ascribing the self’s action responsibility. The self acquires self-conception, self-cognition and self-identity through the interaction with others. Thus, others play an essential role in Williams’ theory of integrity. Although there are some flaws in Williams’ integrity theory, to reexamine his theory is conducive to our understanding of moral life.

The Apocalypse and the Politics of the Impossible

This article outlines various concepts of the Apocalypse and their relationship to such political ideas of modernity as socialism, liberalism and conservatism. Eschatology is based on the idea that time is striving to elaborate itself and fulfil its own meaning and is therefore directly related to the concept of history as the link between the present, past and future. Different versions of the Apocalypse have become the basis for certain political perspectives: the aspiration to eradicate the old world and establish the Kingdom of God is related to the ambitions of emancipatory and revolutionary movements, while liberalism derives its coherence from a Kantian ethics in which the eschatological assumption provides the foundation for personal moral autonomy. However, the attempts of revolutionaries to realize the meaning of history and the eschatological “fulfilment of time” have become a key element in the criticism of emancipatory movements by conservatives. Contrary to the widespread idea that eschatological expectation and politics are opposed, the author argues that the very notion of politics is impossible without addressing certain concepts from the Apocalypse. The similarity of their eschatological tropes should not be taken as a suggestion that socialist, conservative or liberal ideas (which continue to be in a state of fundamental conflict) may possibly converge; but it does indicate a deep connection between politics as such and the notion of the end of time. These foundations of the political are now threatened by a post-politics associated with the disappearance of the experience of time — an “eternal present” in which the multitude of catastrophes we constantly experience devalues each of them as a unique event and inscribes the idea of the Apocalypse in the reproduction of the existing order of things.

Applying Kant’s Ethics to Video Game Business Models

This article expands on existing models of analyzing business ethics of monetization in video games using the concept of categorical imperatives, as posited by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. A model is advanced to analyze and evaluate the business logics of video game monetization using a Kantian framework, which falls in the deontological category of normative ethics. Using two categorical imperatives, existing models of game monetization are divided into ethical or unethical, and presented using the case example of Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017). This analysis aims to provide video game developers and businesses with ethical guidelines for game monetization which may also be profitable for them in the long term. Within the framework of video game monetization, a deontological analysis is relevant due to the fact that the game developer is engaged in a continuous role of making the game more playable/payable. This article applies Kantian business ethics to the context of a new sector, that of video game businesses, and thereby presents a broader ethical perspective to video game developers, which will help them monetize games in an ethical manner which is also profitable in the long run.

Practical Reason

Paul Ricœur’s essay “Practical Reason” was initially published in 1979, and later became part of the book Du texte à l’action: essais d’herméneutique II (1986), marking Ricœur’s transition from the general problems of the justification of hermeneutics as a legitimate philosophical discipline to the problems of practical philosophy in a broad sense. Relying on the analytical theory of action, the interpretative sociology of M. Weber, and the Hegelian critique of Kantian ethics, Ricœur seeks to restore the Aristotelian concept of phronesis or “practical wisdom” in the context of modern philosophizing. This turns out to be unexpectedly relevant where neither Kant’s deontology nor the Hegelian Sittlichkeit can adequately express the entirety of human practical experience in a world where ideology and alienation have become inevitable components of social life.

Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity ed. by Kate A. Moran

Reviewed by: Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity ed. by Kate A. Moran Desmond Hogan Kate A. Moran, editor. Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 309. Cloth, £75.00. This fine collection of essays is dedicated to Paul Guyer. It includes work by distinguished experts and younger scholars across a range of topics in Kant’s theoretical, moral, and political philosophy. Karl Ameriks’s “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’” responds to two misreadings of Kantian autonomy. One dismisses its notion of self-determination, the source of the auto-in autonomy, as an excessively subjective basis for morality; the other interprets its nomos as involving excessive determination of will by reason or sensibility. Ameriks responds with careful analysis of Kant’s “provocative language” concerning the authorship and legislation of morality (186). This includes Kant’s famous description of the will as “giving the law to itself [selbstgesetzgebend] and just because of this as first subject to the law” (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Ak. 4:431). Such formulations, Ameriks argues, do not pick out a “willful process” that undermines objectivity. They reflect Kant’s effort to ground the “strict universality, tantamount to necessity” already imputed to morality in Groundwork II (180). Kant’s concept of moral self-determination thus emerges from the search for a suitable locus for an unconditionally necessary principle of value. Its situation in practical reason justifies talk of “authorship”; however, Kant’s meaning has only “partial, metaphorical overlaps with familiar notions of empirical authorship and legislation” (186). [End Page 152] Kate Moran’s “Inclination, Need, and Moral Misery” sets out from the Groundwork’s notorious claim that “to be free” of inclination “must be the wish of every rational person” (Ak. 4:428). The crucial context, Moran reminds us, is Kant’s effort to exclude inclination as a possible candidate for the absolute worth attributed to humanity. An association of inclination with need, she argues, explains inclination’s morally problematic status. Kant is especially concerned with acquired needs that “change and grow with the indulgence that one allows them,” resulting in a burdensome counterweight to morality and moral misery (KpV, Ak. 5:118). Concern about need’s corrupting potential is consistent with the doctrine of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone that natural inclinations are “good in themselves” (Ak. 5:158). Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s “Kant on Imagination and Object Constitution” offers a compressed presentation of the argument of half of his 2018 Cambridge University Press book on Kant’s theory of imagination (its other half concerns imagination in aesthetics). Horstmann skillfully defends the partial independence of Kant’s productive imagination vis-à-vis the understanding, emphasizing imagination’s indispensability as a “discerning” power in empirical apprehension—the first stage in Kant’s account of empirical object-constitution. Along with Allen Wood, Patricia Kitcher (“Guyer on the Value of Freedom”) takes issue with Guyer’s interpretation of Kantian morality as “means to the preservation,” “promotion,” or “maximization” of freedom. She also challenges Guyer’s view that Kant regards freedom and morality as valuable “primarily as the necessary condition [of] universal happiness” (90). This is not entailed by Kant’s theory of the “highest good” (summum bonum)—though that includes universal moral perfection and proportional, thus presumably universal, happiness. Guyer’s “happiness-friendly Kant” can receive only qualified endorsement given the merely conditional value of happiness, on account of which it cannot ground morality (105). Kitcher’s reading draws solid support from published texts, and from an unpublished note asserting “happiness is no true good [kein wahres Gut].” The note’s continuation shows, to the reader’s relief, that Kant’s target is again only happiness’s unconditional value: “Worthiness is a true and the highest good, but not the complete good” (Ak. 19:187; cf. KpV, Ak. 5:111). Here I can only indicate a few other highlights. Barbara Herman’s “Religion and the Highest Good” offers a new and intriguing reading of the Religion’s Christology. She reads it as a contribution to the “moral imagination” that helps us manage guilt and anxiety arising from a propensity to evil that threatens to derail our moral identities (226). The Religion...

The Masturbator and the Ban

In this paper, I will expand upon Giorgio Agamben’s argument in his defining work Homo Sacer where he accused Immanuel Kant for introducing the state of exception to modernity. According to Agamben, Kant managed to do this by introducing the form of law as “being in force without signifying.” In this line, I will argue that ‘the ban’ is indeed inherent within Kantian morality and all subjects under the law stand in “pure relation of abandonment” vis-a-vis the law. In order to show this, I will focus on Kant’s views on masturbation in the context of his disdainful views about the body and sex and how through these views he formulated ‘duties to oneself’ in a way that condemns the masturbator to ‘bare life.’

Ética das virtudes: em busca da excelência

A teoria ética das virtudes é o modelo mais antigo de filosofia moral, mas a partir do Renascimento foi relegada para segundo plano com o surgimento da ética kantiana do dever e do consequencialismo de Bentham e Mill. No âmbito da saúde, as teorias éticas centradas na virtude e no caráter continuaram a ser preponderantes até aos anos 70 do século passado, quando surgiu a bioética como uma nova área do saber, que procura refletir sobre as implicações éticas resultantes dos progressos científicos e tecnológicos na vida humana e animal, e no ambiente. Assistiu-se a uma mudança de paradigma na ética dos cuidados de saúde, de um modelo baseado na virtude e na inviolabilidade da vida humana, expresso no Juramento de Hipócrates, para um modelo cimentado na autonomia e qualidade de vida do paciente, para o que contribuiu a proposta da metodologia principialista de Beauchamp e Childress e da crescente influência do utilitarismo nas comissões de ética. Nos últimos anos, tem havido um interesse renovado pelas teorias éticas da virtude devido ao contributo de pensadores como Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre e Edmund D. Pellegrino. Foi realizada uma revisão sobre a teoria ética das virtudes a partir das obras de Edmund D. Pellegrino e David C. Thomasma, pioneiros da bioética e dos principais promotores da ética das virtudes na prática clínica, bem como após pesquisa do tema nas bases de dados NCBI/PubMed (National Center for Biotechnology Information) e SciELO (Scientific Eletronic Library Online). Após uma apresentação da história do conceito filosófico de virtude e dos aspetos mais representativos da teoria ética das virtudes, são destacadas oito virtudes particularmente relevantes para a atividade clínica: a fidelidade à promessa, a compaixão, a prudência, a justiça, a coragem, a moderação, a integridade e o altruísmo. Estas e outras virtudes são, em nossa opinião, essenciais para uma prática médica mais humanizada que tenha em conta o bem do paciente, e contribuirão também para contrabalançar a hegemonia do principialismo e de teorias éticas que desvalorizem o papel central do agente no debate bioético atual.

A Study of Ayatollah Javadi Amoli's Criticisms of Kant's Moral Argument from the Perspective of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi's Philosophy of Morality

A Study of Ayatollah Javadi Amoli's Criticisms of Kant's Moral Argument from the Perspective of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi's Philosophy of Morality

Ethical Dilemmas in Human Rights Field Education: A Case Study on Macro Practice in a Reproductive-Rights Policy Setting

In the article that follows, the two authors, a professor/field supervisor and a social work student intern in a conservative western state in the USA, discuss a values-based ethical dilemma in field-based social work education. While having to choose between particular values or perspectives in social work practice is relatively common—perhaps even part of the unique expertise we bring as social workers—the dilemmas faced by social work students in their field placements present particular challenges for the students, their field supervisors, and their instructors. The authors present a case study regarding birth control legislation that highlights those challenges—where an ideal solution for helping a particular population must be weighed with a marginally better but incomplete solution. Ultimately, this case and the authors’ reflection on it suggest the need for ethical training articulated by Gray and Gibbons (2007) that recognizes the limitations of ethical frameworks and the “Kantian and utilitarian ethics that [have] been taken to extremes” and dogmatized in some corners of the social work field (p. 234). Instead, the authors argue in favor of a broader, more flexible ethical training that includes virtue ethics and a focus on human rights. Further, case studies in courses need to include policy practice dilemmas, as these often challenge the dogmatic ethical frameworks that are often ill equipped to inform effective decision making under stressful circumstances.

Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible: Philosophical Analysis of Scriptural Narrative

Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible: Philosophical Analysis of Scriptural Narrative

One more time on the alleged repugnance of Kant's ethics? Schiller's Kallias letters and the entirety of the human being

AbstractIn this paper, I consider the Kallias Letters in connection with Kant's account of moral action in order to analyse Schiller's characterisation of Kant's conception of constraint as aesthetically repugnant. I show how Schiller treats the difficulties inherent to the dualistic view that human beings consist in irreducibly sensible and rational natures. After elucidating the fundamental distinctions between Kant's and Schiller's views, I argue that, although Schiller's charge of repugnance appears too weak to pose a serious threat to Kant's ethics, it nevertheless indicates a significant problem in Kant's dualistic conception of the human being.

Нравственное измерение речевых актов адресованных себе

Нравственное измерение речевых актов адресованных себе

El valor de la experiencia del alumno como contenido educativo

Este artículo reflexiona sobre la importancia de la experiencia del alumno en su proceso educativo, y se inspira en la antropología y la ética de Levinas. Parte del concepto del ser humano como ser histórico, vulnerable, situado en una circunstancia, y de la ética como una respuesta compasiva al otro en su situación de vulnerabilidad y necesidad. La pedagogía cognitiva, al prescindir de la experiencia, se ha visto obligada a utilizar el juicio moral como estrategia adecuada y única para promover y facilitar la conducta moral, según la ética kantiana. Una concepción del hombre sesgada, mutilada no puede dar cuenta de cómo responde a la demanda del otro en su situación concreta. La educación se concibe como acompañamiento, acogida y respuesta compasiva al otro, como un nuevo nacimiento y el comienzo de algo nuevo. Se propone “otro modo” de educar que tenga a la experiencia como núcleo de la acción educativa. Este modelo de educación se traduce en: a) abandono de la filosofía idealista; b) compromiso político y social; c) presencia de la experiencia en el proceso educativo; d) presencia de la ética compasiva como su eje vertebrador; e) un nuevo discurso y un nuevo lenguaje; f) el testimonio del profesor como referente de la experiencia de los valores éticos; y g) la narración como instrumento privilegiado para la acción educativa. Se reivindica otra fuente de pensamiento que dé cuenta del ser humano en su totalidad: ser dotado de razón y también de sentimientos, superando, de este modo, la concepción dualista de la filosofía cartesiana.

De-colonizing the political ontology of Kantian ethics: A quantum perspective

This article explores the relevance of ontological assumptions for justifications of agency and ethics. It critiques Kantian ethics for being based upon an ontological imaginary that starts from the substantialism of Newtonian physics. Substantialism shapes Western political philosophy’s view about who we are as subjects and how the world works. In this ontological imaginary, validation of ethics is based upon universality and abstractions. Furthermore, Kantian ethics underscores an anthropocentric and theocratic vision of how to govern societies. I argue Kantian criteria are not only insufficient to make good choices but are also conducive to wrong ones, since they elicit self-appeasement in international intervention, and contribute to the conceptual repertoire of coloniality. I propose that an ontology of entanglements opens possibilities for overcoming the shortcomings of an ethos based upon abstractions and possibly for correcting some of its moral failures. In a quantum ontological imaginary, the validation of ethical choices relies instead upon the exploration of the apparatuses we deploy, as well as upon careful situational evaluation. Specific practices, rather than an abstract humanity, are the referents for devising such ethos. This position, I argue, resonates with the critical project of decoloniality and its acknowledgment of the political salience of ontological imaginaries.

Heautonomy: Schiller on freedom of the will

AbstractIn his book “Schiller as Philosopher”, Frederick Beiser laments that “contemporary Kant scholars have been intent on ignoring him. If they know anything at all about Schiller, it is only as the author of an epigram satirizing Kant”. Therefore, Beiser calls us “to consider Schiller as a philosopher, to reconstruct and appraise the arguments of his philosophical writings” (Beiser, 2005, p. vii). In this paper, I shall argue that it is Schiller's conception of freedom of the will as “heautonomy” that stands behind his critique and modification of Kant's ethics. However, the systematic significance of Schiller's theory of freedom is not obvious. Its argumentative structure must first be reconstructed—as Beiser has demanded—because it is concealed by an esthetic discourse. A reconstruction of Schiller's theory of freedom shows that he contrasts his concept of heautonomy as individual self‐determination with the Kantian concept of an autonomy or autocracy of reason by the universal moral law. Schiller's own philosophical contribution to the debate on freedom after Kant must therefore not be understood as a mere esthetic balancing and softening of Kant's ethical rigorism. Rather, it shows serious transformations of Kant's approach, which justifies understanding it as a critical step beyond Kant's theory of the autonomy of reason.

Vergonha e ideias de si: abordagem genética e perspetivas éticas

This essay, structured in three parts, traces a conceptual genealogy of the reaction of shame as a primary psychological phenomenon with a deep moral impact upon experiencing subjects, and further analyses two sublimated renderings of the basic emotion: in Kantian ethics and in J.M. Coetzee’s novelistic project. Key-words: shame, genetic approach, Kant, Bernard Williams, J.M. Coetzee.

Making Sense of Social Work’s Troubled Past: Professional Identity, Collective Memory and the Quest for Historical Justice

AbstractSocial work historiography has neglected to engage meaningfully with the most troubling aspects of the profession’s past: the histories of complicity, or at least acquiescence, in acts of state violence and institutionalised oppression. Through the exploration of historical case studies, this article provides a tentative typology of social work’s ‘horrible histories’ focusing on the project of engineering the ideal-type family, in colonial and oppressive socio-political contexts. The authors argue that practices of oppression and complicity can neither be reduced to the ‘few bad apples’ approach nor judged through the individualising prism of moralism, prevalent in Kantian Ethics. Instead, they propose an ethics of transformative reconciliation which is based on the principles of apology, respect for victims and collective action for—professional and social—change.

Popper’s Politics and Law in the Light of African Values

Karl Popper is famous for favouring an open society, one in which the individual is treated as an end in himself and social arrangements are subjected to critical evaluation, which he defends largely by appeal to a Kantian ethics of respecting the dignity of rational beings. In this essay, I consider for the first time what the implications of a characteristically African ethics, instead prescribing respect for our capacity to relate communally, are for how the state should operate in an open society. I argue that while an Afro-communal moral foundation does not prescribe a closed society, it supports an open society politics and law of a sort different from the ones that Popper specifies. For Popper, the state in an open society should improve social arrangements albeit without seeking to promote a particular conception of the good life, should protect rights that merely serve the function of facilitating individual choice, and should employ majoritarian democracy to be able to avoid unwelcome rulers and policies. On all three counts, I show that a relational ethics typical of the African philosophical tradition entails different, intuitively attractive approaches to politics and law.

Impulsionando a lei moral: o lugar sistemático da antropologia no interior da filosofia prática

O presente artigo pretende apontar a problemática da antropologia e sua relação com a filosofia prática no pensamento de Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). O trabalho, desse modo, não apenas tenciona retomar os pontos centrais que estruturam a parte pura da ética kantiana (entendida como filosofia da liberdade), mas também busca chamar a atenção para sua parte impura, a saber: o “homem empírico” e a “consciência moral comum”. Logo, embora uma metafísica dos costumes não possa ser fundada empiricamente, a posição de Kant será a de que poderíamos, pelo menos, realizá-la nesse âmbito, desde que observadas e descritas, por meio “das diferentes doutrinas da razão prática pura”, as condições pelas quais a “ação humana do indivíduo, dos grupos e da própria espécie” encontram-se amparadas. As implicações disso, contudo, não serão propriamente tratadas em sua totalidade, mas introduzidas segundo a ordem de importância necessária à construção do que Kant denominou como sendo “um sistema da liberdade semelhante a um sistema da natureza”.

Understanding Autonomy: An Urgent Intervention.

In this paper, I argue that the principle of respect for autonomy can serve as the basis for laws that significantly limit conduct, including orders mandating isolation and quarantine. This thesis is fundamentally at odds with an overwhelming consensus in contemporary bioethics that the principle of respect for autonomy, while important in everyday clinical encounters, must be ‘curtailed’, ‘constrained’, or ‘overridden’ by other principles in times of crisis. I contend that bioethicists have embraced an indefensibly ‘thin’ notion of autonomy that uproots the concept from its foundations in Kantian ethics. According to this thin conception, respect for autonomy, if unconditioned by competing principles (beneficence, justice, non-maleficence) would give competent adults the right to do anything they desired to do so long as they satisfied certain baseline psychological conditions. I argue that the dominant ‘principlist’ model of bioethical reasoning depends on this thin view of autonomy and show how it deprives us of powerful analytical tools that would help us to think seriously about the foundations of human rights, justice, and law. Then, I offer a brief sketch of a ‘thick’, historically grounded notion of autonomy and show what we could gain by taking it seriously.