Evolving the Highest Good: A Study of a Kantian Ideal
Embargo until
2024-05-01
Date
2020-03-13
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
While Kant’s moral theory remains central to modern discourse about human dignity and rights, the “highest good” as its ideal remains puzzling. It represents a perfect moral reality where complete happiness comes to the most morally deserving. Yet this moral world also seems self-contradictory since it demands us to strive for a degree of perfection that we know to be out of reach. Consequently, some scholars have called for its abandonment as anti-naturalistic while others insist that Kant’s system cannot function without it. The former argue that bad arguments and ulterior motives (e.g., a wish to stabilize moral motivation or provide a moral proof for God’s existence) drive Kant’s thinking and that a more consistent picture emerges if one removes it. The latter find it important because it adds content to Kant’s metaphysics, anthropology, and rational theology.
Both of these approaches are often hindered from progress for two reasons: First, they assume the highest good’s importance arises only from Kant’s moral theory. Second, they assume that it is a static concept with a stable definition, or one that does not change enough between works to warrant a genealogy. I argue, however, that Kant develops the highest good in order to fulfill a central function in his theory of experience taken as a whole. Moreover, I provide an analysis of the steps in its development. One result of my study is that rather than a doctrine based on a series of bad arguments one finds a single, evolving argument for it as Kant’s thinking matures. Through historical reconstruction, I claim that understanding the highest good depends on tracking how it evolved to unite Kant’s ethics with his natural philosophy in one transcendental worldview, i.e., in one well-ordered experience that presents reality as a harmonious whole. I restrict my investigation to the critical period, including minor works, lecture notes, and personal correspondence. Far from anti-naturalistic or a carrot rewarding moral behavior, I argue that it connects with Kant’s metaphysics and philosophy of nature. As such, it should ground both our morality as well as our investigations of nature as a whole.
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Keywords
Kant, highest good, moral theory, teleology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, religion