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 (...) seems incoherent. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Kant’s theory in a way that overcomes this threat. By way of conclusion, I show how my reconstruction brings a new perspective to a long-standing dispute over intellectualist and affectivist views of moral motivation. (shrink)

The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies, I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care. I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to (...) these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a revival of a theory of conscious emotions as analogous in important ways to perceptual experiences. In the standard versions of this view emotions are construed as, potentially, perceptual disclosures of values. The model has been widely debated and criticized. In this paper I reconstruct an early, qualified version of the perceptual model to be found in the classical phenomenological approaches of Scheler and Sartre. After outlining this version of the theory, I examine its (...) prospects against objections prominent in the current debate. (shrink)

Philosophical and empirical work on the nature of the emotions is extensive, and there are many theories of emotions. However, all agree that emotions are not knee jerk reactions to stimuli and are open to rational assessment or warrant. This paper's focus is on the condition or conditions for compassion as an emotion and the likelihood that it or they can be met in nursing practice. Thus, it is attempting to keep, as far as possible, compassion as an emotion separate (...) from both moral norms and professional norms. This is because empirical or causal conditions that can make experiencing and acting out of compassion difficult seem especially relevant in nursing practice. I consider how theories of emotion in general and of compassion in particular are somewhat contested, but all recent accounts agree that emotions are not totally immune to reason. Then, using accounts of constitutive conditions of the emotion of compassion, I will show how they are often likely to be quite fragile or unstable in practice and particularly so within much nursing practice. In addition, some of the conditions for compassion will be shown to be problematic for nursing practice. It is difficult to keep ideas of compassion separate from morality, and this connection is noticeable in the claims made of compassion for nursing and so I will briefly highlight one such connection that of the need for normative theory to give an account of the value that emotions such as compassion presume and that compassionate motivation is separate from moral motivation and may conflict with it. The fragility or instability of the emotion of compassion in practice has implications for both what can be expected and what should be expected of compassion; at least if what is wanted is a realist rather than idealist account of “should.”. (shrink)

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 (...) mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen and J. Raz object that Constructivism is incoherent because it crucially deploys unconstructed elements in the structure of justification. This paper offers a response on behalf of constructivism, by reassessing the role of such unconstructed elements. First, it argues that a shared conception of rational agency works as a starting point for the justification, but it does not play a foundational role. Second, it accounts for the unconstructed norms that constrains the activity of construction as constitutive norms. (...) Finally, on this basis, it draws a contrast between constructivist and foundational methods of ethics, such as deontology and teleology. (shrink)

According to the standard objection, Kantian constructivism implicitly commits to value realism or fails to warrant objective validity of normative propositions. This paper argues that this objection gains some force from the special case of moral obligations. The case largely rests on the assumption that the moral domain is an eminent domain of special objects. But for constructivism there is no moral domain of objects prior to and independently of reasoning. The argument attempts to make some progress in the debate (...) by defending a robust conception of construction, which names a distinctive view of practical reasoning as transformative. (shrink)