About this topic
Summary The main interpretive issue surrounding Kant’s understanding of moral motivation concerns how we are to understand the moral motive itself, namely “respect” (Achtung) for the moral law. Kant identifies respect as a feeling, albeit one that has its source in reason, but there is much disagreement over the precise role that this feeling plays in the motivational process, if it plays one at all. Some claim that this feeling plays a positive role in being motivated by the moral law alone, while others argue it does not and is merely ‘epiphenomenal.’ How one characterizes Kant’s view is significant when it comes to understanding it in terms of modern debates concerning cognitivism and non-cognitivism, and internalism and externalism, with interpreters falling on all sides. In many of these debates, attempts are made to compare and contrast Kant’s view to Hume’s. The other issues and key concepts that arise in discussions of Kant’s conception of moral motivation include the following: the role of pleasure in moral action, the concept of an incentive (Triebfeder), the nature of moral feelings, the sense in which moral action is free, the distinction between acting ‘from’ and ‘in accordance with’ duty, and the difference between moral and non-moral motivation. Indeed, Kant’s account of moral motivation often ends up referring to other, larger issues surrounding moral worth, autonomy, Kant’s broader theory of action/agency, freedom and many others.  
Key works Some classic papers, which represent contrasting interpretations of the role of feeling in moral motivation, are Reath 1989 McCarty 1993, Timmons 1985, and McCarty 1994. Other older papers on respect and moral feeling include MacBeath 1973 and Broadie & Pybus 1975 . Among the more influential papers are Nuyen 1991, Geiger 2011, Sytsma 1993, Wuerth 2013, Zinkin 2006, and more recently Ware 2014. For Kant’s empirical psychology, and the role played by feeling, desire, and cognition in both moral and non-moral motivation, see Frierson 2005 and Frierson 2014.
Introductions

For introductions to Kant’s view in general, see Allison Henry 2011 Allison 1990 and Uleman 2016. For how Kant’s view contrasts with alternatives, see Klemme et al 2006. For Kant’s broader theory of action see McCarty 2009 and for a useful summary of the various options on the secondary literature see Sargentis 2012 .

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  1. Natural motives and the motive of duty: Hume and Kant on our duties to others.Christine M. Korsgaard - manuscript
    In this paper I argue that the ground of this disagreement is different than philosophers have traditionally supposed. On the surface, the disagreement appears to be a matter of substantive moral judgment: Hume admires the sort of person who rushes to the aid of another from motives of sympathy or humanity, while Kant thinks that a person who helps with the thought that it is his duty is the better character. While a moral disagreement of this kind certainly follows from (...)
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  2. Kant on the Highest Good and Moral Arguments.Alexander T. Englert & Andrew Chignell - forthcoming - In Anil Gomes & Andrew Stephenson (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Kant. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Kant’s accounts of the Highest Good and the moral argument for God and immortality are central features of his philosophy. But both involve lingering puzzles. In this entry, we first explore what the Highest Good is for Kant and the role it plays in a complete account of ethical life. We then focus on whether the Highest Good involves individuals only, or whether it also connects with Kant’s doctrines about the moral progress of the species. In conclusion, we look into (...)
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  3. The Morality in Intimacy.Jeremy David Fix - forthcoming - In Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Mind.
    Is the exemplar of modern ethical theory estranged from their intimates because the motive of duty dominates their motivational psychology? While this challenge against modern ethical theory is familiar, I argue that with respect to a certain strand of Kantian ethical theory, it does not so much as make sense. I explain the content and functional role of the motive of duty in the psychology of the moral exemplar, stressing in particular how that motive shapes and informs the content of (...)
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  4. Nonaccidental Rightness and the Guise of the Objectively Good.Samuel J. M. Kahn - forthcoming - Journal of Early Modern Studies:Vol. 13, Issue 2, 2024.
    My goal in this paper is to show that two theses that are widely adopted among Kantian ethicists are irreconcilable. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I briefly sketch the contours of my own positive view of Kantian ethics, concentrating on the issues relevant to the two theses to be discussed: I argue that agents can perform actions from but not in conformity with duty, and I argue that agents intentionally can perform actions they take to (...)
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  5. Incentives of the Mind: Kant and Baumgarten on the Impelling Causes of Desire.Michael Walschots - forthcoming - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.
    In this paper I propose to shed new light on the role of feeling in Kant’s psychology of moral motivation by focusing on the concept of an incentive (Triebfeder), a term he borrowed from one of his most important rationalist predecessors, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. I argue that, similar to Baumgarten, Kant understands an incentive to refer to the ground of desire and that feelings function as a specific kind of ground within Kant’s psychology of moral action, namely as the ‘impelling (...)
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  6. Kant and Hutcheson on the Psychology of Moral Motivation.Michael Walschots - forthcoming - In Antonino Falduto (ed.), Problems of Reason: Kant in Context. Berlin: De Gruyter.
    In this paper I argue that Kant’s psychology of moral motivation has less in common with Hutcheson’s view than interpreters have traditionally thought. I first offer an interpretation of the role that feeling, desire, and cognition play in Kant’s account of moral action. I then outline the essential features of Hutcheson’s understanding of desire before arguing that although Kant and Hutcheson share the trivial similarity that even moral action springs from a desire, Kant conceives of the desire at the root (...)
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  7. Demoralization and Hope: A Psychological Reading of Kant’s Moral Argument.Andrew Chignell - 2023 - The Monist 106 (1):46-60.
    Kant’s “primacy of the practical” doctrine says that we can form morally justified commitments regarding what exists, even in the absence of sufficient epistemic grounds. In this paper I critically examine three different varieties of Kant’s “moral proof” that can be found in the critical works. My claim is that the third variety—the “moral-psychological argument” based in the need to sustain moral hope and avoid demoralization—has some intriguing advantages over the other two. It starts with a premise that more clearly (...)
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  8. Hopeful Pessimism: The Kantian Mind at the End of All Things.Andrew Chignell - 2023 - In Anna Ezekiel & Katerina Mihaylova (eds.), Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Optimism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 35-52.
  9. Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency.Markus Kohl - 2023 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    In "Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency", I aim to give a comprehensive interpretation and a qualified defense of Kant’s doctrine of freedom as a systematic conception of rational agency. -/- Although my book follows Kant in focusing on the idea of free will as a condition of moral agency, it denies that moral freedom of will is the only relevant (transcendental) type of freedom. Human beings also exercise absolute freedom of thought (intellectual autonomy) in their theoretical cognition. Moreover, our (...)
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  10. Feeling and Moral Motivation in Kant: A Response to the Frierson-Grenberg Debate.Vivek Radhakrishnan - 2023 - Con-Textos Kantianos 17:111-123.
    In this paper, I aim to resolve the Frierson-Grenberg debate on the nature of Kant’s account of moral motivation that took place in the third issue of Con-textos Kantianos. In their respective interpretations, Frierson and Grenberg fail to accommodate the a priori status of moral feeling when incorporating it into Kant’s moral motivational structure. In response, I provide a novel transcendental interpretation – one that takes the a priori moral feeling both as an incentive of morality and as that which (...)
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  11. Inefficacy, Despair, and Difference-Making: A Secular Application of Kant's Moral Argument.Andrew Chignell - 2022 - In Alessandro Pinzani & Luigi Caranti (eds.), Kant and the Problem of Morality: Rethinking the Contemporary World. London, Delhi: Routledge. pp. 47-72.
    Those of us who enjoy certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our individual, private choices that we are unable to resist. Although he was a deontologist, Kant was clearly aware of this ‘consequent-dependent’ side of our moral psychology. One version of his ‘moral proof’ is designed to respond to the threat of such demoralization in pursuit of the Highest Good. That version (...)
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  12. Kant's Theory of Moral Motivation.Vivek K. Radhakrishnan - 2022 - Dissertation, Manipal Academy of Higher Education
    The main objective of my dissertation is twofold: (i) to investigate how the problem of moral motivation occurs in Kant’s texts, and (ii) to examine how Kant’s account of moral feeling serves as an appropriate solution to it. First, I argue that the problem of moral motivation occurs in Kant’s texts as a skeptical problem concerning the motivational efficacy of practical reason. My view that this problem is integral to Kant’s main ethical project goes against a scholarly trend that dismisses (...)
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  13. Achtung in Kant and Smith.Michael Walschots - 2022 - Kant Studien 113 (2):238-268.
    This paper argues that Kant’s concept of ‘respect’ for the moral law has roots in Adam Smith’s concept of ‘regard’ for the general rules of conduct, which was translated as Achtung in the first German translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. After illustrating that Kant’s technical understanding of respect appeared relatively late in his intellectual development, I argue that Kant’s concept of respect and Smith’s concept of regard share a basic similarity: they are both a single complex phenomenon with (...)
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  14. Kant on Moral Respect.Anastasia Berg - 2021 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (4):730-760.
    Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a (...)
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  15. Laura Papish, Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform. [REVIEW]Samuel Kahn - 2021 - Ethics 132 (1):266-269.
    Laura Papish’s Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform is an ambitious attempt to breath new life into old debates and a welcome contribution to a recent renaissance of interest in Kant’s theory of evil. ​The book has eight chapters, and these chapters fall into three main divisions. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the psychology of nonmoral and immoral action. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on self-deception, evil, and dissimulation. And chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on self-cognition, (...)
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  16. Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform by Laura Papish. [REVIEW]Janelle DeWitt - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (4):651-656.
    Review of: Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform, by PapishLaura. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 257.
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  17. Shared Ends: Kant and Dai Zhen on the Ethical Value of Mutually Fulfilling Relationships.Justin Tiwald - 2020 - Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 33:105-137.
    This paper offers an account of an important type of human relationship: relationships based on shared ends. These are an indispensable part of most ethically worthy or valuable lives, and our successes or failures at participating in these relationships constitute a great number of our moral successes or failures overall. While many philosophers agree about their importance, few provide us with well-developed accounts of the nature and value of good shared-end relationships. This paper begins to develop a positive account of (...)
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  18. Kant on Misology and the Natural Dialectic.John J. Callanan - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    Towards the conclusion of the First Section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant describes a process whereby a subject can undergo a kind of moral corruption. This process, which he calls a “natural dialectic”, can cause one to undermine one’s own or¬dinary grasp of the demands of morality. Kant also claims that this natural dialectic is the basis of the need for moral philosophy itself, since first-order moral reasoning is insufficient to protect against it. I show that (...)
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  19. Kant's Theory Of Moral Motivation.Daniel Guevara - 2019 - Routledge.
    This book offers an account of Kant's theory of moral motivation that comprehends the most challenging and controversial aspects of Kant's theory of the will and human moral motivational psychology. It argues for a new approach to the question about the purity of the Kantian moral motive.
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  20. Formalism and constitutivism in Kantian practical philosophy.Sergio Tenenbaum - 2019 - Philosophical Explorations 22 (2):163-176.
    Constitutivists have tried to answer Enoch’s “schmagency” objection by arguing that Enoch fails to appreciate the inescapability of agency. Although these arguments are effective against some versions of the objection, I argue that they leave constitutivism vulnerable to an important worry; namely, that constitutivism leaves us alienated from the moral norms that it claims we must follow. In the first part of the paper, I try to make this vague concern more precise: in a nutshell, it seems that constitutivism cannot (...)
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  21. Feeling and Inclination: Rationalizing the Animal Within.Janelle DeWitt - 2018 - In Kelly Sorensen & Diane Williamson (eds.), Kant and the Faculty of Feeling. Cambridge University Press. pp. 67-87.
    A common assumption among Kantians is that the feelings/inclinations constituting non-moral motivation are little different from the brute sensations and blind instinctual urges found in animals. And since this “inner animal” lacks reason, it cannot control itself. So our rational nature must step in to govern. The problem, however, is that it must do so as a nature standing above the animal as an independent ruler. I reject this understanding of our lower nature, arguing instead that reason governs from within (...)
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  22. The Self-Determination of Force: Desire and Practical Self-Consciousness in Kant and Hegel.Thomas Khurana - 2018 - In Sally Sedgwick & Dina Emundts (eds.), Begehren / Desire. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. pp. 179-204.
    In a broadly Kantian context, it is often assumed that practical self-consciousness and rational self-determination can only be understood in opposition to pleasure and desire. I argue instead that, already for Kant, rational self-determination is itself a determination of our faculty of desire. Drawing on resources from Kant and Hegel, the paper shows that sensible desire can be understood as a self-determination of our vital forces which is connected to a sensible awareness of our practical existence. In order to constitute (...)
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  23. Autonomy and morality: A Self-Determination Theory discussion of ethics.Alexios Arvanitis - 2017 - New Ideas in Psychology 47:57-61.
    Kantian ethics is based on a metaphysical conception of autonomy that may seem difficult to reconcile with the empirically-based science of psychology. I argue that, although not formally developed, a Self-Determination Theory (SDT) perspective of ethics can broaden the field of Kantian-based moral psychology and specify what it means, motivationally, to have autonomy in the application of a moral norm. More specifically, I argue that this is possible when a moral norm is fully endorsed by the self through a process (...)
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  24. Dutifully Wishing: Kant’s Re-evaluation of a Strange Species of Desire.Alexander T. Englert - 2017 - Kantian Review 22 (3):373-394.
    Kant uses ‘wish’ as a technical term to denote a strange species of desire. It is an instance in which someone wills an object that she simultaneously knows she cannot bring about. Or in more Kantian garb: it is an instance of the faculty of desire’s (or will’s) failing insofar as a desire (representation) cannot be the cause of the realization of its corresponding object in reality. As a result, Kant originally maintained it to be antithetical to morality, which deals (...)
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  25. Kant's conception of Merit.Robert N. Johnson - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (4):310-334.
    It is standard to attribute to Kant the view that actions from motives other than duty deserve no positive moral evaluation. I argue that the standard view is mistaken. Kant's account of merit in the Metaphysics of Morals shows that he believes actions not performed from duty can be meritorious. Moreover, the grounds for attributing merit to an action are different from those for attributing moral worth to it. This is significant because it shows both that his views are reasonably (...)
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  26. The Good, the Bad, and the Badass: On the Descriptive Adequacy of Kant's Conception of Moral Evil.Mark Timmons - 2017 - In Significance and System: Essays on Kant's Ethics. New York, USA: pp. 293-330.
    This chapter argues for an interpretation of Kant's psychology of moral evil that accommodates the so-called excluded middle cases and allows for variations in the magnitude of evil. The strategy involves distinguishing Kant's transcendental psychology from his empirical psychology and arguing that Kant's character rigorism is restricted to the transcendental level. The chapter also explains how Kant's theory of moral evil accommodates 'the badass'; someone who does evil for evil's sake.
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  27. Kant on Moral Satisfaction.Michael Walschots - 2017 - Kantian Review 22 (2):281-303.
    This paper gives an account of Kant’s concept of self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit), i.e. the satisfaction involved in the performance of moral action. This concept is vulnerable to an important objection: if moral action is satisfying, it might only ever be performed for the sake of this satisfaction. I explain Kant’s response to this objection and argue that it is superior to Francis Hutcheson’s response to a similar objection. I conclude by showing that two other notions of moral satisfaction in Kant’s moral (...)
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  28. Kant's Theory of Motivation: A Hybrid Approach.Benjamin S. Yost - 2017 - Review of Metaphysics 71 (2):293-319.
    To vindicate morality against skeptical doubts, Kant must show that agents can be moved to act independently of their sensible desires. Kant must therefore answer a motivational question: how does an agent get from the cognition that she ought to act morally to acting morally? Affectivist interpretations of Kant hold that agents are moved to act by feelings, while intellectualists appeal to cognition alone. To overcome the significant shortcomings of each view, I develop a hybrid theory of motivation. My central (...)
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  29. Moral Sense Theory and the Development of Kant's Ethics.Michael Walschots - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Western Ontario
    This dissertation investigates a number of ways in which an eighteenth century British philosophical movement known as “moral sense theory” influenced the development of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral theory. I illustrate that Kant found both moral sense theory’s conception of moral judgement and its conception of moral motivation appealing during the earliest stage of his philosophical development, but eventually came to reject its conception of moral judgement, though even in his early writings Kant preserves certain features of its (...)
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  30. Kant's Demonstration of Free Will, Or, How to Do Things with Concepts.Benjamin S. Yost - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2):291-309.
    Kant famously insists that free will is a condition of morality. The difficulty of providing a demonstration of freedom has left him vulnerable to devastating criticism: critics charge that Kant's post-Groundwork justification of morality amounts to a dogmatic assertion of morality's authority. My paper rebuts this objection, showing that Kant offers a cogent demonstration of freedom. My central claim is that the demonstration must be understood in practical rather than theoretical terms. A practical demonstration of x works by bringing x (...)
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  31. Kantian Moral Striving.Mavis Biss - 2015 - Kantian Review 20 (1):1-23.
    This paper focuses on a single question that highlights some of the most puzzling aspects of Kants disposition to duty, or strength of will? I argue that a dominant strand of Kant’s approach to moral striving does not fit familiar models of striving. I seek to address this problem in a way that avoids the flaws of synchronic and atomistic approaches to moral self-discipline by developing an account of Kantian moral striving as an ongoing contemplative activity complexly engaged with multiple (...)
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  32. Rational Beings with Emotional Needs: The Patient-Centered Grounds of Kant's Duty of Humanity.Tyler Paytas - 2015 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 32 (4):353-376.
    Over the course of the past several decades, Kant scholars have made significant headway in showing that emotions play a more significant role in Kant's ethics than has traditionally been assumed. Closer attention has been paid to the Metaphysics of Morals (MS) where Kant provides important insights about the value of moral sentiments and the role they should play in our lives. One particularly important discussion occurs in sections 34 and 35 of the Doctrine of Virtue where Kant claims we (...)
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  33. Respect for the Moral Law: the Emotional Side of Reason.Janelle DeWitt - 2014 - Philosophy 89 (1):31-62.
    Respect, as Kant describes it, has a duality of nature that seems to embody a contradiction – i.e., it is both a moral motive and a feeling, where these are thought to be mutually exclusive. Most solutions involve eliminating one of the two natures, but unfortunately, this also destroys what is unique about respect. So instead, I question the non-cognitive theory of emotion giving rise to the contradiction. In its place, I develop the cognitive theory implicit in Kant's work, one (...)
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  34. Kant's Empirical Psychology.Patrick R. Frierson - 2014 - Cambridge University Press.
    Throughout his life, Kant was concerned with questions about empirical psychology. He aimed to develop an empirical account of human beings, and his lectures and writings on the topic are recognizable today as properly 'psychological' treatments of human thought and behavior. In this book Patrick R. Frierson uses close analysis of relevant texts, including unpublished lectures and notes, to study Kant's account. He shows in detail how Kant explains human action, choice, and thought in empirical terms, and how a better (...)
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  35. Kant on Moral Sensibility and Moral Motivation.Owen Ware - 2014 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (4):727-746.
    Despite Kant’s lasting influence on philosophical accounts of moral motivation, many details of his own position remain elusive. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, Kant argues that our recognition of the moral law’s authority must elicit both painful and pleasurable feelings in us. On reflection, however, it is unclear how these effects could motivate us to act from duty. As a result, Kant’s theory of moral sensibility comes under a skeptical threat: the possibility of a morally motivating feeling (...)
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  36. Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics.Julian Wuerth - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of major themes in Kant's philosophy. He explores Kant's ontology of the mind, his transcendental idealism, his account of the mind's powers, and his theory of action, and goes on to develop an original, moral realist account of Kant's ethics.
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  37. Kant's Defense of Common Moral Experience: A Phenomenological Account.Jeanine Grenberg - 2013 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    In this book, Jeanine Grenberg argues that everything important about Kant's moral philosophy emerges from careful reflection upon the common human moral experience of the conflict between happiness and morality. Through careful readings of both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, Grenberg shows that Kant, typically thought to be an overly technical moral philosopher, in fact is a vigorous defender of the common person's first-personal encounter with moral demands. Grenberg uncovers a notion of phenomenological experience in Kant's account (...)
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  38. Kant's Moral Metaphysics. [REVIEW]Anja Jauernig - 2013 - Philosophical Review 122 (4):651-657.
    Review of Kant’s Moral Metaphysics, edited by Benjamin Lipscomb and James Krueger, de Gruyter, 2010.
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  39. Moral Feeling and Moral Conversion in Kant's "Religion".Laura Papish - 2013 - Idealistic Studies 43 (1-2):11 - 26.
    Kant’s account of moral feeling is continually disputed in the secondary literature. My goal is to focus on the Religion and make sense of moral feeling as it appears in this context. I argue that we can best understand moral feeling if we note its place in Kant’s concerns about the possibility of moral conversion. As Kant notes, if the new, morally upright man is of a different character than the man he used to be, then it remains unclear how (...)
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  40. Reliability of Motivation and the Moral Value of Actions.Paula Satne - 2013 - Studia Kantiana 14:5-33.
    Kant famously made a distinction between actions from duty and actions in conformity with duty claiming that only the former are morally worthy. Kant’s argument in support of this thesis is taken to rest on the claim that only the motive of duty leads non-accidentally or reliably to moral actions. However, many critics of Kant have claimed that other motives such as sympathy and benevolence can also lead to moral actions reliably, and that Kant’s thesis is false. In addition, many (...)
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  41. Sense and Sensibility in Kant's Practical Agent: Against the Intellectualism of Korsgaard and Sidgwick.Julian Wuerth - 2013 - European Journal of Philosophy 21 (1):1-36.
    Drawing on a wide range of Kant's recorded thought beyond his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, this essay presents an overview of Kant's account of practical agency as embodied practical agency and argues against the intellectualized interpretations of Kant's account of practical agency presented by Christine Korsgaard and Henry Sidgwick. In both Kant's empirical-psychological and metaphysical descriptions of practical agency, he presents a recognizably human practical agent that is broader and deeper than the faculty of reason alone. This agent (...)
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  42. Kant's 'I' in 'I Ought To' and Freud's Superego.Béatrice Longuenesse - 2012 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86 (1):19-39.
    There are striking structural similarities between Freud's ego and Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, which for Kant grounds our use of ‘I’ in ‘I think’. There are also striking similarities between Freud's superego and Kant's account of the mental structure that grounds our use of ‘I’ in the moral ‘I ought to’. The paper explores these similarities on three main points: the conflict of motivations internal to the mind, the relation between discursive and pre-discursive representation of moral motivation, and the (...)
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  43. Moral Motivation in Kant.Konstantinos Sargentis - 2012 - Kant Studies Online (1):93-121.
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  44. Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary.E. Allison Henry - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals . Allison pays special attention to the structure of the work and its historical and intellectual context. He argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy.
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  45. Rational Feelings and Moral Agency.Ido Geiger - 2011 - Kantian Review 16 (2):283-308.
    Kant's conception of moral agency is often charged with attributing no role to feelings. I suggest that respect is the effective force driving moral action. I then argue that four additional types of rational feelings are necessary conditions of moral agency: The affective inner life of moral agents deliberating how to act and reflecting on their deeds is rich and complex . To act morally we must turn our affective moral perception towards the ends of moral action: the welfare of (...)
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  46. Kant, The Passions, and The Structure of Moral Motivation.John Hare - 2011 - Faith and Philosophy 28 (1):54-70.
    This paper is an account of Kant’s view of the passions, and their place in the structure of moral motivation. The paper lays out the relations Kant sees be­tween feelings, inclinations, affects and passions, by looking at texts in Metaphysics of Morals, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Anthropology, and Lectures on Education. Then it discusses a famous passage in Groundwork about sympathetic inclination, and ends by proposing two ways in which Kant thinks feelings and inclinations enter into moral (...)
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  47. Die Grundlagen der Normativität bei Kant und Spener.Anna Szyrwińska - 2011 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 1 (2):225-238.
    English title: The Fundations of Normativity by Kant and Spener. In one of the chapters in Conflict of Faculties, Kant presents so-called “Spener’s problem”. Kant refers to the conception of the 17th century theologian Philipp Jakob Spener, concerning the problem of radical moral transformation of individuals. Spener became famous as one of the founders and main exponents of pietistic theology, which in the 18th century became one of the most significant intellectual trends at the University of Königsberg and about which (...)
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  48. Adorno's "Addendum" to Practical Reason.Michael Walschots - 2011 - Dissertation, University of Windsor
    This thesis is a discussion of Theodor Adorno's concept of the "addendum". In contrast to Immanuel Kant who claimed that free and moral action amounts to pure reason alone being the cause of action, Adorno believes that a physical impulse is required for action to take place. This thesis begins by discussing Kant's philosophy in the first chapter and moves to a discussion of the addendum in the second. In the third chapter I discuss the addendum's place in Adorno's moral (...)
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  49. The Aesthetics of Morality: Schiller’s Critique of Kantian Rationalism.Anne Margaret Baxley - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (12):1084-1095.
    Philosophers often mention Friedrich Schiller as the author of a famous epigram taking aim at Kant’s account of moral motivation: Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person. To this, the answer is given: Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely, And then with aversion do what your duty enjoins. These joking lines capture a natural objection to Kant’s rationalist (...)
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  50. Kant über Menschenliebe als moralische Gemütsanlage.Dieter Schönecker - 2010 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 92 (2):133-175.
    In the Introduction of the Tugendlehre, Kant identifies love of human beings as one of the four moral predispositions that make us receptive to the moral law. We claim that this love is neither benevolence nor the aptitude of the inclination to beneficence in general (both are also called love of human beings); rather it is amor complacentiae, which Kant understands as the delight in moral striving for perfection. We also provide a detailed analysis of Kant's almost completely neglected theory (...)
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