Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s ethics had a significant influence on the formation of Kant’s ethics. The extent of this influence, however, has not been sufficiently investigated by existing Kant scholarship. Filling this gap, this paper aims to reveal Baumgarten’s substantial influence on the formation of Kant’s ethics, particularly the complex ways in which Kant’s ethics retains the concept of God as crucial for ensuring that his ethics persist under the scrutiny of reason. In a systematic comparison of the ethics of the (...) two philosophers, I argue that Kant alters and yet accommodates several aspects of Baumgarten’s ethics in his own version of the system of ethics more thoroughly than has previously been perceived. More specifically, I argue, first, that Kant’s rejection of Baumgarten’s conception of “duties towards God” and his alternative notion that duties are recognized as if they were divine commands unveil his criticism of Baumgarten’s conception of how religion is situated in ethics. Second, I argue that Kant’s argument for the extension of pure reason for practical purposes discloses his critical response to Baumgarten’s optimistic assumption about the entirety of pure reason. (shrink)

This paper reinterprets Kant’s argument that conscience cannot err, in light of assessing the influence of Baumgarten’s opposite argument about an erring conscience. I thereby argue that, contra Kant and in agreement with Baumgarten, we have a duty to acquire the capacity of conscience and that we must develop our acute awareness of handling unwelcome events precisely because conscience is involved in deciding the inherent goodness of an action and yet prone to make mistakes. In substantiating this argument, I demonstrate (...) that it is helpful to demarcate self-judgment as a separate faculty in Kant’s theory of conscience. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the possibility of reading Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics of morals as a proposal of global ethics, that is, ethics of the globalizing world. We have a good reason to undertake this exploration because Kant suggests that the earth being a globe with a finite spherical surface is a fundamental condition ofrealization of the universal principle of right among the world citizens. Unfortunately, however, Kant did not develop a theory of cosmopolitan rights as far as he could (...) have. The reason is that he faced with a serious question which originated from his realistic judgment of his time, that it would be almost impossible to establish a cosmopolitan constitution without constraint of power. Today, however, we can hope to find an answer to this question in the development of global civil society and by virtue of this hope we can conceive global ethics which is further developed from Kant’s metaphysics of morals. (shrink)