Kant: Ethics

This chapter investigates the Kantian idea that a rational life is a life of “mere form”—a life in which a “mere form” is the force or spring of action. I start by developing Kant’s practical notion of life—the capacity to be the cause of what one represents. In a second step, I investigate the way in which Kant characterizes a rational life—the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws and to determine ourselves by the mere form of (...) a practical rule. In the third section, I point to some of the attractions and some of the problems of such an account. I close by considering a Hegelian alternative: the notion that a rational life is not the life of “mere,” but of “absolute form.”. (shrink)

Kant's Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant’s conception of reason and its philosophical significance, focusing on two claims. First, it argues that Kant presents a powerful model for understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason as two manifestations of a unified capacity for theoretical and practical understanding (or “comprehension”). This model allows us to do justice to the deep commonalities between theoretical and practical rationality, without reducing either to the other. In particular, through it, we see why the (...) activities of both theoretical and practical reason are governed by a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, while also seeing why reason is essentially autonomous. At the same time, Kant's Reason also reads Kant as presenting us with a compelling picture of the role that reason (as a capacity or power) should play in a systematic approach to foundational philosophical questions. In doing so, it argues for an account of the fundamental norms that apply to rational beings that treats as fundamental neither substantive reasons or values nor merely structural rationality, but instead a robust conception of reason as a power or capacity — namely, the capacity for theoretical and practical understanding. The result is a form of “rational constitutivism” – one which contrasts both with the forms of “reasons fundamentalism” that are currently fashionable and the forms of “agency-first constitutivism” that have dominated much of Kantian metaethics. In this sense, the aim of the book is to vindicate Kant’s insistence that his philosophy represents nothing more or less than reason’s implicit self-understanding coming to explicit and systematic self-consciousness. (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant’s raciology—divided into racialism and racism—is integral to his philosophical system as a whole. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, from his (...) social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. -/- As a scholar, Kant developed a groundbreaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued them with normative relevance. In both roles, he presented a worldview that excluded nonwhites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Some effects of this worldview are still palpable today. Scholars who research and teach Kant’s philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so in a color-conscious as opposed to colorblind way, with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a clear normative orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. (shrink)

This paper develops a new kind of approach to conspiracy theories – a procedural approach. This approach promises to establish that belief in conspiracy theories is rationally criticisable in general. Unlike most philosophical approaches, a procedural approach does not purport to condemn conspiracy theorists directly on the basis of features of their theories. Instead, it focuses on the patterns of thought involved in forming and sustaining belief in such theories. Yet, unlike psychological approaches, a procedural approach provides a rational critique (...) of conspiracist thought patterns. In particular, it criticises these thought patterns for failing to conform to procedures prescribed by reason. The specific procedural approach that I develop takes its cue from the Kantian notion that reason must be used self-critically. I tentatively suggest that conspiracy theorists fail to engage in the relevant sort of self-critique in at least three ways: they do not critically examine their own motivations, they avoid looking at matters from the point of view of others, and they fail to reflect on the limits of human knowledge. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's final publication in ethics was The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of the 1797 The Metaphysics of Morals. This text presents Kant's normative ethical theory. This guide is meant to be read alongside Kant's text, combining accessible explanations and novel interpretations of this difficult text. It is the first book in English devoted to The Doctrine of Virtue, one of Kant's most significant works. -/- Timmons divides the guide into five parts. Part I reviews Kant's life, the history (...) and significance of The Doctrine of Virtue, and situates Kant's ethics within his general metaphysical and epistemological views. Part II is devoted to the General Introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals, which is essential for understanding Kant's ethics. Part III and Part IV turn to The Doctrine of Virtue itself, exploring Kant's defense of a system of duties and corresponding virtues. Part V examines Kant's conception of moral education, the practice of virtue, and the conclusion to the book where Kant explains why the discipline of ethics does not include religion as a doctrine of duties to God. Timmons concludes the book highlighting key aspects of The Doctrine of Virtue, situating Kant's ethical theory in relation to other normative ethical theories. This guide is a vital resource for both students and scholars interested in ethics and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I use Kant’s theory of the aesthetic power of judgment to solve the problem of nonmoral value choice, which Kant himself did not deal with, and prove that my reconstruction can fit into Kant’s philosophy and function as a harmonization and unification of morality and happiness. First, I revisit Kant’s early view of intellectualized happiness to establish the feasibility of this project in Kant’s ethics. Second, by analogy with the contemplative judgment of taste and practical artistic creation, (...) I argue for the universal communicability of pleasure in value choice from the transcendental perspective, on the one hand, and explain the various choices by individuals in reality from the empirical perspective, on the other. Ultimately, I connect the pursuit of intellectual happiness with the fulfillment of the imperfect duty of one’s own perfection, through which a transition from nature to freedom can be accomplished in Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Kant’s early readers were troubled by the appearance of a dilemma facing his theory of freedom. On the one hand, if we explain human actions according to laws or rules, then we risk reducing the activity of the will to necessity (the horn of determinism). But, on the other hand, if we explain human actions without laws or rules, then we face an equally undesirable outcome: that reducing the will’s activity to mere chance (the horn of indeterminism). After providing an (...) overview of this dilemma, this chapter explores how Fichte and Schelling attempted to resolve it, in ways that ultimately shaped the course of post-Kantian idealism in the late 1790s and early 1800s. (shrink)

Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim formation: Kant's theory of reflective judgment. Kant tasks reflective judgment with picking out salient empirical particulars for formation into maxims, associating it with purposiveness, or intentional activity (action on ends). The unexpected resources in Kantian reflective judgment suggest the possibility of a (...) particularist universalism, where recalcitrant particulars directly inform, and in some cases revise, moral principles. Such an account improves on particularist accounts of moral salience and moral perception: rather than deriving moral sensitivity solely from an agent's upbringing or cultural resources, the reflective dimension is situated alongside the universalist dimension of moral principles typically identified with Kantian ethics, allowing for a critical approach both to moral universals and to the reception of moral particulars. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant, with his “brilliantly dry style” (Schopenhauer), expounds the notable theory that “objects are approaching to the mind” via the spectacle metaphor by addressing transcendental idealism in support of the mind as an active knower (mind-making nature), not passive in a realistic sense, while objects of knowledge conform to the mind begotten in categories of understanding. On Kant’s view, James Conant writes, “Kant’s term for this unity, considered at this level of abstraction, is the original synthetic unity of the (...) understanding. This admits of forms of further determination, one sensible and one intellectual. This form of unity – categorial unity – characterizes both the manner in which objects are given to us in intuition and the manner in which concepts are combined in judgments” (Conant 2016: 114). -/- Insofar the same pioneering stance is reflected in the Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1972) and the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 1996), where Kant underscores the accessible account of reason and freedom as the content of fundamental moral principle toward a kind of universalizable moral duty attuned with the formulation of categorical imperative. The justification and groundwork of these moral laws cannot be liaison in sensory experience but on pure reason, which Kant calls “a priori,” a conviction stems from the understanding of rational necessitation of moral obligation and free autonomous agency. This interpretation absorbs the practical principle that underlies the subjective maxim to justify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a universal moral law. Kant starts out saying that an act is morally right if it is performed for the sake of broadening the vista of maxim infused by goodwill consisting of the categorical imperative that sounds an exceptionless command, abstract law, and universally applicable normative principle as well. For Kant, the categorical imperative has many-sided structures: a. Ethical requirements are rational requirements of the moral agent. b. The rational requirement goes toward universal laws. c. These moral requirements must be followed by equality, freedom, and goodwill. (shrink)

Ask most philosophers for an example of a moral rationalist, and they will probably answer “Kant.” And no wonder. Kant’s first great work of moral philosophy, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, opens with a clarion call for rationalism, proclaiming the need to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, a metaphysics of morals. That this metaphysics includes the first principle of ethics, the moral law, is obvious. But what about the second principles, particular moral laws, such as duties (...) of truthfulness, beneficence, etc.? Are these principles metaphysical too? Many have thought not, since they make essential use of empirical and anthropological considerations. I argue otherwise; the second principles are metaphysical and this matters. I do this by taking seriously the metaphysics of the metaphysics of morals—more specifically, by understanding the metaphysics of morals alongside the metaphysics of nature. For, qua metaphysics, both employ a common two-stage methodology, the first stage of which is wholly a priori but the second stage of which is partly empirical. As I explain, appreciating this common methodology sheds new light on how the second principles are to be established, as well as on the reach of Kant’s rationalism. (shrink)

My dissertation examines Kant’s and Rawls’s theories of the moral development of individuals within structured political communities. I reconstruct Kant’s under-studied account of the emergence of reason by looking at his remarks on the transition our species underwent from mere irrational animals into primitive human beings. I show how his account of the emergence of reason fits with his broader view of humankind’s rational progress and the moral development of an individual. Next, I argue that Kant’s anthropological and pedagogical writings (...) influenced Rawls’s early views on moral development in A Theory of Justice. In contrast to other commentators who have located Kant’s influence on Rawls in his emphasis on the free and equal nature of human beings, my dissertation shows that Kant’s anthropological theory of moral development is also at the core of Rawls’s Kantian project. I also argue that the moral-psychological account Rawls develops in Part III of Theory sheds light on crucial aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy, notably on his emphasis on the need for one generation to provide the moral education of subsequent generations in order to achieve political stability. Dissertation Committee: Allen Wood (co-chair), Leif Wenar (co-chair), Juliana Bidadanure, David Hills, David Estlund (external, Brown). (shrink)

A variety of interpreters have argued that Kant construes the animality of human beings as ‘transformed’, in some sense, through the possession of rationality. I argue that this interpretation admits of multiple readings and that it is either wrong, or doesn’t result in the conclusion for which its proponents argue. I also explain the sense in which rationality nevertheless significantly differentiates human beings from other animals.

In this paper I propose an interpretation of Kant’s notion of the highest good which bears political, ethical, and religious layers simultaneously. I argue that a proper analysis of what Kant allows us to hope for necessarily involves what we should hope for as moral agents. I argue that Kant’s conception of the highest good plays a crucial role in his moral theory as it designates the ideal “context” of moral experience which can be described as “a moral world”. Each (...) of these three layers or aspects of the moral world (i.e., political, ethical, and religious) as the interrelated contexts in and through which we realize our moral agency is inextricably linked with the highest good. Without any dichotomy between secular or religious conceptualization of the highest good, in the political and in certain aspects of the ethical contexts we should adopt certain hopes as an implicit aspect of being virtuous, whereas from a religious perspective we are able to, and we may legitimately adopt hope and faith about the cosmic/ teleological context of our moral experience. (shrink)

Vortragstext für die VI. Tagung für Praktische Philosophie Universität Salzburg 27. & 28. September 2018.

Sensen analyzes Kant’s justification of duties to oneself. Why does Kant say that duties to oneself have priority over other duties? Sensen concludes that there is a common idea behind the different formulas of the categorical imperative: the idea that our human capacities have a high importance. Kant’s ethics needs anthropology to derive concrete duties from this general idea.

In this paper, I discuss the legitimacy of using the term “to know” in morality and I develop an approach based on Kantian morality. In my analysis, I take the notion “to know” in the sense that Timothy Williamson does. That is to say, I regard it in opposition to the perspectives that claim “knowledge is jus-tified true belief”. Therefore, in the first part, I briefly introduce “knowledge first epistemology”. In the second part, I build a perspective pointing to the (...) strong correlation between acting and knowing. After that, I provide an analysis of Kantian morality in connection with my discussion. I show how Kant argues for a lawful certainty in morality that allows us to use the verb “know” (in the sense that is evaluated in the first part of this paper). In the next part, I comment on the un-analyzability of knowing in the practical sphere with reference to free will. In my conclusion, upon a general review of the paper, I introduce very briefly an alternative epistemology from Islamic thought regarding the theoreti-cal and practical sphere distinctions. (shrink)

The idea of autonomy, presented as Kant’s main achievement in the Groundwork and the second Critique, is hardly present in the ethics of the “Doctrine of Virtue”. Against Pauline Kleingeld’s recent interpretation, I argue that this does not amount to a disappearance of the Principle of Autonomy, but to an important development of the notion of autonomy. I first show that Kant still advocated the Principle of Autonomy in the 1790s along with the thought of lawgiving through one’s maxims. I (...) then argue that the role of autonomy in Kant’s later ethics has a different focus than in the previous works, which requires to connect autonomy with autocracy. Conversely, in the “Doctrine of Virtue”, autocracy, which Kant had employed before as an independent notion, is construed as a new layer of autonomy. What Kant there calls subjective autonomy is thereby considered as reason’s self-government in the maxims of each rational agent. -/- . (shrink)

The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance. I will then advance an interpretation of what motivates Kant’s commitment to community, and, on its basis, object to Rossi’s views on radical evil –a point which affects how one should conceive the moral vocation of humanity and the role that politics and religion play within it. My reconstruction concludes with a sketch of how the five contributions to (...) this Symposium fit together and deepen our understanding of Rossi’s overall project. (shrink)

How to interpret autonomy plays a crucial role that leads to different readings in Kant’s moral metaphysics, philosophy of religion and moral psychology. In this paper I argue for a two-layered conception of autonomy with varying degrees of justification for each: autonomy as a capacity and autonomy as a paragon-like paradigm. I argue that all healthy rational humans possess the inalienable capacity of autonomy, i. e. share the universal ground for the communicability of objective basic moral principles. This initial understanding (...) stands for autonomy as a capacity about which we can talk of universal validity and justification. Nevertheless, the way a person fully actualizes herself, her freedom, namely autonomy, is shaped by her initial conception of autonomy and moral view of the world. Autonomy as an organic experience of real moral agents, which means an ongoing, non-static, irreducible and inexplicable judgmental process concerning one’s actualization of oneself gives way to consider autonomy as a godlike state of the soul even though one cannot provide objective validity for this. (shrink)

This essay explains Kant’s idea of autonomy of the will and advances a thesis about how it emerges in his moral conception. Kant defines “autonomy” as “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself…” and argues that the Categorical Imperative is that law. I take the autonomy of the will to mean that the nature of rational volition is the source of the formal principle that authoritatively governs rational volition. I give a sense to this (...) idea by pointing to an argument form found throughout the Groundwork and the second Critique where Kant moves from a conception of rational volition as a faculty to a statement of its formal principle. This idea of autonomy emerges in Kant’s moral conception (at the time he writes the Groundwork) as his solution to the problem of moral theory. Common sense assumes that moral requirements apply with unconditional necessity, and the problem of moral theory is to show how such requirements are possible. Kant’s resolution to this problem is to argue that the necessity of moral requirement is genuine only if based in autonomy of the will, only if based in a “law that arises from one’s will”. (shrink)

The ‘Introduction’ to Naturrecht Feyerabend is the transcript of a lecture Kant held at the very time he began writing the Groundwork. It contains the first securely dated occurrence of the term ‘autonomy’ (and its first occurrence in the context of moral philosophy) in Kant’s work. It argues that moral imperatives are categorical and asks how they are possible. Kant’s attempts to answer this question circle around the idea that freedom must be ‘a law to itself’ and lead him to (...) the claim that the form of universal lawfulness, independently of any inclination, can determine the will. Thus various central elements of the Groundwork conception of autonomy are already present in this text. Other elements, most notably the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative and the emphasis on reason as both source and addressee of moral commands, are conspicuously absent. Following a reconstruction of Kant’s overall argument for autonomy of the will in the notes, the paper offers a detailed interpretation of central passages concerning autonomy in order to identify both similarities and differences between the conceptions of autonomy in the ‘Introduction’ and in the Groundwork. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on Kant’s notion of autonomy in his moral philosophy by considering the extent to which he presents a similar doctrine in his theoretical philosophy, where he strikingly claims (e.g., in the Prolegomena) that the understanding prescribes laws to nature. It argues that even though there are important points of difference between the cases of theoretical legislation of the laws of nature and autonomy in moral philosophy, their extensive parallels make a strong, even if not (...) definitive case in favor of the Prolegomena forming at least an important part of the explanation of the emergence of autonomy in the Groundwork. In addition, the comparison proves instructive insofar as it reveals deep structural parallels between Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy regarding his conception of laws. (shrink)

Under contract for the series Elements in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant. -/- The focus of this Element is Kant’s history of human reason: his teleological vision of the past development of our rational capacities from their very emergence until Kant’s own “age of Enlightenment”. One of the goals of this Element is to connect Kant’s speculative account of the very beginning of rationality – a topic which has thus far been largely neglected or at least under-studied in Kantian scholarship (...) – to his well-known theory of humankind’s progress. By doing so, I hope to elucidate Kant’s hopes with regard to reason’s future progress and his guidelines for how to achieve this progress by unifying them with his vision of reason’s past. Another goal of this Element is to bring more attention to Kant’s essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786), where a large part of this account is presented, and to show that this “somewhat unusual” (Yovel 1989) text does not stand in conflict with Kant’s critical philosophy and is not merely tangentially related to it, but actually illuminates and complements certain aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy. -/- This Element is divided into three parts. Part 1 introduces Kant’s speculations about the transition our species underwent from non-rational animals into primitive, rational humans. It also shows how these speculations fit with Kant’s broader view of the development of humans’ reason, or of the species’ gradual process of learning how to make a mature (enlightened) use of reason. -/- Part 2 focuses on a text where the speculative account of the beginning of human history is presented in most detail: the “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”. I defend the exegetical importance of this essay for Kant’s practical philosophy by arguing that the claims Kant makes in it are not merely fictional or imaginative, but play a key role in his teleological view of the progression of human history. I also assess the contribution that Kant makes to the conjectural history genre through this essay and discuss how distinct it is from the most prominent and well-studied conjectural histories of the Enlightenment era. -/- Part 3 focuses on what Kant’s account of the history of reason tells us about his political and pedagogical guidelines for the continuance of humanity’s progress toward the fulfillment of its vocation and for the progress of any given individual. I also present and defend my understanding of what it means to think and act in an enlightened (or as Kant also calls it, a “pluralistic”) way, connecting this idea to the three maxims of good thinking, the public use of reason, and the role of interpersonal communication in advancing our rational capacities. (shrink)

In the second Critique, Kant argues that for the highest good to be possible we need to postulate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul in a future world. In his other writings, however, he suggests that the highest good is attainable through mere human agency in this world. Based on the apparent incoherence between these texts, Andrews Reath, among others, argues that Kant’s texts reveal two competing conceptions of the highest good, namely a secular and a (...) theological conception. In this paper, I argue that Kant has a coherent conception of the highest good which applies to two different domains, namely the domain of the individual humans and the domain of the human species. (shrink)

Hatfield, Joseph M. 2017. “Immanual Kant: from Universal Rationality to Perpetual Peace,” book chapter in Philosophers and War, edited by Timothy Demy, Eric Patterson, and Jeffrey Shaw. Middletown, RI: Stone Tower Press.

RESEÑA / RESSENYA / REVIEW Elogio de la razón mundana. Antropología y política en Kant, por Nuria Sánchez Madrid.

Review of: Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform, by PapishLaura. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 257.

The Preface to my book, Kant's Justification of Ethics.

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...) of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

The prohibition on using others ‘merely as means’ is one of the best-known and most influential elements of Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. But it is widely regarded as impossible to specify with precision the conditions under which this prohibition is violated. On the basis of a re-examination of Kant’s texts, the article develops a novel account of the conditions for using someone ‘merely as a means’. It is argued that this account has not only strong textual support but also significant (...) philosophical advantages over alternative conceptions. (shrink)

In this article we examine Kant’s understanding of toleration by including a study of all instances in which he directly uses the language of toleration and related concepts. We use this study to resolve several key areas of interpretative dispute concerning Kant’s views on toleration. We argue that Kant offers a nuanced and largely unappreciated approach to thinking about toleration, and related concepts, across three normative spheres: the political, the interpersonal and the personal. We examine shortcomings in earlier interpretations and (...) conclude by arguing that the theme of toleration in Kant’s work, while coherent and important, is neither as central nor as peripheral as suggested by previous interpretations. Further, while Kant is critical of the arrogance of toleration in the political sphere, he is more positive toward the role of toleration in the interpersonal and personal spheres since it promotes virtue. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to extract from Kant's writings an account of the nature of the emotions and their function – and to do so despite the fact that Kant neither uses the term ‘emotion’ nor offers a systematic treatment of it. Kant's position, as I interpret it, challenges the contemporary trends that define emotions in terms of other mental states and defines them instead first and foremost as ‘feelings’. Although Kant's views on the nature of feelings have (...) drawn surprisingly little attention, I argue that the faculty of feeling has the distinct role of making us aware of the way our faculties relate to each other and to the world. As I show, feelings are affective appraisals of our activity, and as such they play an indispensable orientational function in the Kantian mind. After spelling out Kant's distinction between feeling and desire, I turn to the distinction between feeling and cognition and show that while feelings are non-cognitive states, they have a form of derived-intentionality. §4 argues that what feelings are about, in this derived sense, is our relationship to ourselves and the world: they function as affective appraisals of the state of our agency. §5 shows that this function is necessary to the activity of the mind insofar as it is orientational. Finally, §6 discusses the examples of epistemic pleasure and moral contentment and argues that they manifest the conditions of cognitive and moral agency respectively. (shrink)

This study reflects upon the fundamental justification of the radicality of Kant’s affirmation according to which religion is “a matter of reason alone”. To this end, this paper bores in two directions: In a first direction, the premises as well as the context of the Critique of Practical Reason’s thesis, according to which the moral law leads to religion, are reconstructed. The question that needs to be clarified in this context concerns the semantic content of the concept of religion that (...) is introduced here in Kant’s argumentation. That question’s resolution will help to show the sense in which religion is not merely a matter of reason alone. In a second direction, further inquiries are made regarding Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone on the ‘plural relation’ between two discourses that originate in different sources – reason and revelation. This shows the sense in which revealed religion enriches reason’s discourse. In that respect, the complexity of the Kantian arguments does not allow us to maintain outright the thesis that religion is a matter of reason alone. (shrink)

Although Kant’s final work in moral philosophy, Die Metaphysik der Sitten, currently attracts much scholarly attention, there is still a lot to explore. This article is an attempt to get to grips with a particular, often neglected passage of the Rechtslehre, namely §35. Here Kant defends the view that not only can a person’s good reputation can be tarnished after his death, but also that this constitutes a violation of this dead person’s property. Here I will not be able to (...) fully clarify what Kant means when he holds that persons can be harmed after their death, but I will put Kant’s view in a few perspectives. (shrink)

This article develops an account of the nature and limits of the state’s legislative authority that closely attends to the challenge of harmonizing Kant’s ethical and juridical theories. It clarifies some key Kantian concepts and terms, then explains the way in which the state’s three interlocking authorities – legislative, executive, and judicial – are metaphysically distinct and mutually dependent. It describes the emergence of the Kantian state and identifies the preconditions of its authority. Then it offers a metaphysical model of (...) the Kantian state and uses it to argue that the activity of juridical lawgiving is an act of the omnilateral will itself. Legislative authority is limited in the sense that it does not include the capacity to create juridical laws that are conceptually incompatible with the idea of universal external freedom. I argue that my proposed account of the legislative authority is wholly consistent with that authority’s exclusive lawgiving capacity and does not threaten the possibility of ‘distributive justice’ – the legal finality that is the sine qua non of a civil condition. (shrink)

This paper aims to discern the limits of the highly influential Incorporation Thesis to give proper weight to our sensuous side in Kant’s theory of moral action. I first examine the view of the faculties underpinning the theory, which allows me to outline the passage from natural to rational action. This enables me to designate the factors involved in actual human agency and thereby to show that, contrary to what the Incorporation Thesis may tempt one to believe, we do not (...) always act on maxims. The result is a revised and more balanced view of how Kant sees the character of moral life. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by suggesting that Immanuel Kant’s argument for the impermissibility of treating others with contempt seems to be subject to a paradox very similar to the well known paradox of forgiveness first described by Aurel Kolnai. Specifically, either the object of the judgment of contempt is not really contemptible, in which case the prohibition on treating him with contempt is superfluous, or else the person truly is contemptible, in which case the prohibition seems unjustifiable, reducing to (...) a mere condonation of wrongdoing. My goal in the paper is to show that this paradox is only apparent. Making use of the philosophy of phrases that Jean-François Lyotard develops in The Differend—emphasizing especially the ideas of phrase-event, presentation, situation, addressor, and addressee—I argue that the Kantian prohibition on treating others with contempt is rationally defensible, even in cases in which we believe the object of the judgment of contempt truly is contemptible. (shrink)