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Reason Alone Cannot Identify Moral Laws

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Notes

  1. In this essay, reason means practical reason in Kant’s sense.

  2. Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Routledge, 2005). The first and the second page numbers respectively refer to that of the Academy edition and that of the second edition published in Kant’s lifetime.

  3. For example, Kant may not hold the thesis consistently in his works. In his essay “Inquiry concerning the distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morality” (often referred to as the “Prize Essay”), Kant praises Francis Hutcheson’s idea that moral feeling is the source of morality. But in the Prize Essay, Kant’s discussion ends inconclusively. He says, “it has yet to be determined whether it is merely the faculty of cognition, or whether it is feeling (the first inner ground of the faculty of desire) which decides its first principles [the first principle of practical philosophy].” Immanuel Kant, “Inquiry concerning the distinctness of the principles of natural theology and morality,” in Theoretical philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2:300. The pagination is that of the Academy edition. J. B. Schneewind claims that “Kant cannot conceive of morality except in a world structured as the Divine Corporation structures it.” J. B. Schneewind, “The Divine Corporation and the History of Ethics,” in Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 190. As we will see, Robert Louden’s interpretation denies that Kant holds the thesis. Henry Allison severs “the analytic connection between autonomy and moral willing,” so that “even heteronomous willing turns out to involve a certain kind of autonomy.” Henry E. Allison, Kant’s theory of freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 95. Also, John Rawls thinks that Kant is engaging in “[p]hilosophy as defense,” not grounding the moral law, but defending it from possible attacks. John Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 528.

  4. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), sec. 135.

  5. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 1, para. 4.

  6. Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 85.

  7. Ibid., p. 78.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid., p. 92.

  10. Ibid., p. 78.

  11. Ibid., p. 92. Onora O’Neill’s response to the formalism charge is similar to the Practical Contradiction Interpretation. See Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 155–160, 215–216.

  12. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, p. 97.

  13. Ibid., p. 99.

  14. Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 154.

  15. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends, p. 100.

  16. Ibid., p. 105n27.

  17. Ibid., p. 100.

  18. Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 137.

  19. Ibid., p. 117.

  20. Ibid., p. 118.

  21. Ibid., pp. 119–120.

  22. Ibid., p. 121.

  23. Ibid., p. 137.

  24. Kenneth R. Westphal, “Practical Reason: Categorical Imperative, Maxims, Laws,” in Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts, ed. Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2011), p. 113.

  25. Ping-cheung Lo, “A Critical Reevaluation of the Alleged ‘Empty Formalism’ of Kantian Ethics,” Ethics, Vol. 91, No. 2 (1981): p. 186.

  26. Ibid., p. 187.

  27. Ibid., p. 189.

  28. Ibid., p. 193.

  29. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, sec. 135.

  30. Ibid., p. 196.

  31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 5:435–436. The pagination is that of the Academy edition.

  32. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Final Destiny of the Human Race,” in Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27:470. The pagination is that of the Academy edition.

  33. Lo, “A Critical Reevaluation of the Alleged ‘Empty Formalism’ of Kantian Ethics,” p. 197.

  34. Ibid., pp. 197–198.

  35. Peter J. Steinberger, “The Standard View of the Categorical Imperative,” Kant-Studien, Vol. 90, No. 1 (1999): p. 98.

  36. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 172.

  37. Ibid., p. 173.

  38. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The pagination is that of the Academy edition.

  39. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, p. 234.

  40. Ibid., p. 174.

  41. Ibid., p. 174n.

  42. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 21. Jürgen Habermas’s and Karl-Otto Apel’s discourse ethics also feature the same idea. On Habermas’s discourse ethics, see Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

  43. Nicholas Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 46–47. Albrecht Wellmer also argues that rational consensus cannot work as a standard of truth. See Albrecht Wellmer, Ethik und Dialog: Elemente des moralischen Urteils bei Kant und in der Diskursethik, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 69–81.

  44. Rescher, Pluralism, p. 51.

  45. Ibid., p. 56.

  46. Ibid., p. 60. Agreement plays a crucial role in social contract theories such as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. The idea that agreement does not guarantee truth and moral rightness applies to those theories too.

  47. Ibid., p. 62.

  48. Karl-Otto Apel, “Macroethics, Responsibility for the Future, and the Crisis of Technological Society: Reflections on Hans Jonas,” in Karl-Otto Apel: Selected Essays, Vol. 2, Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 236.

  49. Franklin I. Gamwell, The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1996), p. 152.

  50. Franklin I. Gamwell, Democracy on Purpose: Justice and the Reality of God (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000), pp. 171–172.

  51. Ibid., p. 171.

  52. Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 168.

  53. Ibid., p. 169.

  54. Ibid., pp. 169–170.

  55. According to Agrippa’s trilemma, an attempt to justify something leads to either infinite regress, circularity, or dogmatism. Elsewhere I examine various responses to the trilemma, and show that it applies at least to rational justification of contentful moral beliefs. See Noriaki Iwasa, “Moral Applicability of Agrippa’s Trilemma,” Croatian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 37 (2013). The trilemma applies to, but not limited to, the following: the premises (a) and (b) in section 8, “the systematic harmony of purposes,” “one’s true needs,” and the objective end in section 10, some common moral ground and the idea that agreement guarantees truth and moral rightness in section 11, the empirical in section 12, and Kant’s moral thesis that reason alone must identify moral laws. According to the trilemma, they are rationally unjustifiable. Therefore, introducing any one of them to evaluate a maxim makes Kant’s ethics heteronomous.

  56. Examining the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, I show that the moral sense or moral sentiments in those theories alone cannot identify appropriate morals. See Noriaki Iwasa, “Sentimentalism and Metaphysical Beliefs,” Prolegomena, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2010); Noriaki Iwasa, “Sentimentalism and the Is-Ought Problem,” Croatian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 33 (2011); Noriaki Iwasa, “On Three Defenses of Sentimentalism,” Prolegomena, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2013). Regarding the divine, I develop standards for grading religions including various forms of spiritualism. See Noriaki Iwasa, “Grading Religions,” Sophia, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2011).

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and John Hacker-Wright, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Value Inquiry, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

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  1. Center for General Education, University of Tokushima, Tokushima, Tokushima, 770-8502, Japan

    Noriaki Iwasa

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Iwasa, N. Reason Alone Cannot Identify Moral Laws. J Value Inquiry 47, 67–85 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9384-y

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