Despisers of religion throughout the centuries have poured scorn upon the idea of sacrifice, which they have targeted as an index of the irrational and wicked in religious practice. Lucretius saw the sacrifice of Iphigenia as an instance of the evils perpetrated by religion. But even religious reformers like Xenophanes or Empedocles rail against ‘bloody sacrifice’. What kind of God can demand sacrifice? Yet the language of sacrifice persists in a secular world. Nor does its secularised form seem much more (...) appealing. One need only think of the appalling and grotesque cult of sacrifice in numerous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The perversion of the Jihad in radical Islam in contemporary Europe would provide another sombre instance. Throughout Europe in the last few years we have seen the revival of a classical Enlightenment atheism, a movement that, far removed from Nietzsche's pathos for the Death of God, pursues a vigorous and relentless policy of Écrasez l'infâme! Indeed, contemporary polemicists like Dawkins and Hitchens wish to emphasise precisely this dimension of Christianity: not just false but nasty! The modern cultured despisers of religion are the self confessed descendants of Hume and Voltaire. Religion is the product of the period of ignorance in the superstitious and terrified fearful infancy of humanity, and is the crude attempt to face the natural human longing for knowledge, consolation and emotional support. How can one strive to defend the concept of sacrifice against such cultured despisers? I think we need to start by reflecting upon why the slaughter of an animal, say, makes holy – sacra facere? The root meaning of ‘sacrifice’ has a basis in ritual practice, as its Latin etymology suggests. Though in common parlance it communicates a giving up or rejection, the word as we are going to understand it signifies the substitution , or more perhaps sublimation , of an item or interest for a higher value or principle. St Augustine speaks of the outward symbol of the true sacrifice of spiritual offering that God requires in the altar of the heart – a sacrifice of humility and praise. The metaphor works because his audience was familiar with the literal sense of the term. (shrink)

Some Kantian ethicists, myself included, have been trying to show how, contrary to popular belief, Kant makes an important place in his moral theory for emotions–especially love and sympathy. This paper confronts claims of Kant that seem to endorse an absence of sympathetic emotions. I analyze Kant’s accounts of different sorts of emotions (“affects,” “passions,” and “feelings”), and different sorts of emotional coolness (“apathy,” “self-mastery,” and “cold-bloodedness”). I focus on the particular way that Kant praises apathy, as “sublime,” in order (...) to argue that his praise of extreme emotional self-control is not incompatible with, but rather complementary to, his praise of sympathy. (shrink)

In ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing’, Thomas E. Hill, Jr, contrasts Kant's notion of happiness with that of human flourishing, explains the role of happiness in Kant's ethics, and suggests some reasons why Kant portrays happiness rather than flourishing as the non-moral good of the individual. While there is much I agree with in Hill's essay, I disagree with Hill on how best to conceive of human flourishing in Kant's philosophy, and on the importance of human flourishing in Kant's ethics. Comparing (...) my views with Hill's is not what chiefly interests me, however. After section 1, I make little explicit reference to ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing’. Instead, I seek to expand the discussion begun there by Hill of ‘how happiness and human flourishing are relevant to [Kantian] ethics’. (shrink)

Kant’s ethics conceives of rational beings as autonomous–capable of legislating the moral law, and of motivating themselves to act out of respect for that law. Kant’s ethics also includes a notion of the highest good, the union of virtue with happiness proportional to, and consequent on, virtue. According to Kant, morality sets forth the highest good as an object of the totality of all things good as ends. Much about Kant’s conception of the highest good is controversial. This paper focuses (...) on the apparent conflict between Kant’s claim that we are autonomous, and passages in which he seems to suggest that we require belief in the possibility of the highest good to motivate moral action. I distinguish three distinct versions of these problematic claims that seem to be present in Kant’s texts: that the highest good serves as (1) a motivational supplement to respect for the moral law, (2) a fundamental spring of right action, and (3) a condition of the bindingness of moral requirements. I argue that the texts are better interpreted to yield alternatives to (2) and (3) that do not conflict with our autonomy. I also argue that, properly understood, (1) does not conflict with our autonomy. In arguing for the last claim, I explore Kant’s notion of radical evil and its implications for human agency and virtue. (shrink)

Kantian moral theories must explain how their most basic moral values of dignity and autonomy should be interpreted and applied to human conditions. One place Kantians should look for inspiration is, surprisingly, the utilitarian tradition and its emphasis on generally accepted, informally enforced, publicly known moral rules of the sort that help us give assurances, coordinate our behavior, and overcome weak wills. Kantians have tended to ignore utilitarian discussions of such rules mostly because they regard basic moral principles as a (...) priori requirements that cannot be tailored to human foibles and limitations. I argue that Kantian moral theories should incorporate public moral rules as mid-level moral requirements for embodied and socially embedded human agents. I explain how certain specific moral judgments about how we ought to act are justified by public moral rules, which are themselves justified by more fundamental moral requirements. (shrink)

In this paper, I will compare Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s reflections on faith as they are articulated in the particular analyses of Abraham’s sacrifice. Kant’s prosecution of Abraham, which commences from the idea of “natural religion”, rests on two interrelated lines of attack, an epistemological one and ethical one, which deem Abraham’s action to be morally reprehensible. For Kant, the primacy of the practical reason leaves no special room for divine duties that are not ethical at the same time. On the (...) other hand, Kierkegaard’s defence of the sacrifice is orbiting around the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical. If such a suspension is possible, then faith is a paradox according to which the single individual is higher than the universal. As such, an absolute duty to god is possible, but such a duty is not rationally justifiable or publicly communicable. My paper ends with to some considerations about the protestant inheritance of both, Kant and Kierkegaard. (shrink)