This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 5.

Several years ago Jürgen Habermas wrote a short answer to the question: “Does Hegel's Critique of Kant apply to Discourse Ethics?” The gist of his short answer is, “no”. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the formalism and abstract universalism of the moral law never even applied to Kant's moral theory in the first place, they also fail to apply to discourse ethics. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the rigorism of the moral law and (...) of Kant's conception of autonomy do hit the mark, discourse ethics successfully draws their sting by reconceiving Kant's moral standpoint along the following lines. 1. Kant wrongly undertakes to establish the moral law as a “fact of reason”: discourse ethics derives the moral standpoint from two premises — one formal, a rationally reconstructed logic of argumentation, and one material, namely our intuitions about how to justify utterances. 2. Kant wrongly contends that we must be able to think of ourselves as both intelligible characters, inhabiting a noumenal world, and as empirical characters inhabiting the world of appearances: discourse ethics allows that in everyday contexts of action and in the context of moral discourse we have one character that has real needs and interests. 3. Kant is also mistaken in arguing that moral autonomy requires human beings to abstract away from their needs and interests and to will universalizable maxims for the sake of their universal form: discourse ethics understands moral autonomy to consist in the free adoption of a standpoint from which conflicts of interest can be impartially regulated, by giving special weight to the satisfaction of universalizable interests. 4. Kant misconceives the categorical imperative as an objective test of universalizability that is applied by individual wills in isolation: discourse ethics reconceives the moral universalism as an ideal of intersubjective agreement of participants in discourse. On the differences between the principles of discourse ethics and Kant's categorical imperative Habermas is wont to cite McCarthy's summary of his — Habermas' — position: “Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm”. (shrink)

According to the objection from positive duties, Kant's Formula of Universal Law is flawed because it cannot be used to derive any affirmative moral requirements. This paper offers a response to that objection and proposes a novel way to derive positive duties from Kant's formula. The Formula of Universal Law yields positive duties to adopt our own perfection and others’ happiness as ends because we could not rationally fail to will those ends (...) as universal ends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 564-565 [Access article in PDF] Samuel J. Kerstein. Kant's Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 226. Cloth, $60.00. Summed up in a sentence, this book is both a critical examination of Kant's claim to have derived a supreme moral principle and a limited defense of (...) class='Hi'>Kant's project that appears to depart significantly from Kant's own approach. Methodologically, a large portion of this book is devoted to analyzing various key concepts and claims about the nature of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason and testing them against "everyday" moral intuitions via numerous examples and counterexamples.Kerstein begins by distinguishing between the tasks of deduction and derivation of a supreme moral principle, whereby a deduction is understood as an argument for the existence of a supreme moral principle, and a derivation simply assumes this conditionally and goes on to argue that a particular principle and no other can claim the title. Kerstein waives the discussion of whether Kant succeeds in giving a deduction and hence satisfactorily refutes moral skepticism. His focus in the book is on the derivation proposed primarily in Groundwork I and II that if there is a supreme moral principle, then it must be that law expressed in his formulations of the Categorical Imperative (hereafter "CI"). Kerstein addresses Bruce Aune's "traditional" reading of Kant's derivation, wherein the argument utterly fails because Kant allegedly infers a relatively substantive command ("Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be universal law") from a purely formal, higher order, and hence relatively empty one ("Conform your actions to universal law"). He then devotes a chapter each to two recent, influential defenses of Kant's derivation that seek his argument outside the Groundwork. Kerstein addresses Henry Allison's attempt to rescue the derivation via an account of agency rooted in Kant's notion of transcendental freedom, elaborated in the second Critique. Kerstein rejects Allison's reconstruction on the grounds that it remains too abstract to generate the degree of specificity arrived at in Kant's Groundwork universalization formulation. Chapter Three examines Christine Korsgaard's alternative reconstruction of Kant's argument that focuses on the formulation of humanity ("Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, always as an end and never as a means only"). He rejects her interpretation because, again, the move from the abstract command to conform to universal law to the substantive formulation about humanity as a universally recognizable unconditional good fails. From the former, more abstract claim, he argues, it does not follow that there is a universally recognizable unconditional good, let alone that this good is humanity in itself (and not, say, utility [happiness], or even some intrinsic value unrelated to humanity, both of which Kant rejects as candidates for the unconditionally good).In his own reconstruction, Kerstein dissolves the criticism of the traditional reading of Kant's Groundwork derivation of the formula of universal law by simply denying that Kant [End Page 564] argues directly from the more generic principle to the specific versions of the CI (91ff). Instead he suggests that Kant's argument is less direct, made by way of laying out a set of criteria that any supreme principle must meet, and showing how the CI meets them while no other candidates can. In the second half of the book he takes a painstaking and critical look at a total of eight criteria, each of which Kant holds to be necessary and together are jointly sufficient for establishing the CI as "the supreme norm for the evaluation of the moral permissability and requiredness of an action, but not of its moral value" (165). This statement includes Kerstein's most controversial and interesting reconstructive claim, namely his denial that moral worth attaches only to actions done in accordance with duty as determined by the test... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 564-565 [Access article in PDF] Samuel J. Kerstein. Kant's Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 226. Cloth, $60.00. Summed up in a sentence, this book is both a critical examination of Kant's claim to have derived a supreme moral principle and a limited defense of (...) class='Hi'>Kant's project that appears to depart significantly from Kant's own approach. Methodologically, a large portion of this book is devoted to analyzing various key concepts and claims about the nature of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason and testing them against "everyday" moral intuitions via numerous examples and counterexamples.Kerstein begins by distinguishing between the tasks of deduction and derivation of a supreme moral principle, whereby a deduction is understood as an argument for the existence of a supreme moral principle, and a derivation simply assumes this conditionally and goes on to argue that a particular principle and no other can claim the title. Kerstein waives the discussion of whether Kant succeeds in giving a deduction and hence satisfactorily refutes moral skepticism. His focus in the book is on the derivation proposed primarily in Groundwork I and II that if there is a supreme moral principle, then it must be that law expressed in his formulations of the Categorical Imperative (hereafter "CI"). Kerstein addresses Bruce Aune's "traditional" reading of Kant's derivation, wherein the argument utterly fails because Kant allegedly infers a relatively substantive command ("Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be universal law") from a purely formal, higher order, and hence relatively empty one ("Conform your actions to universal law"). He then devotes a chapter each to two recent, influential defenses of Kant's derivation that seek his argument outside the Groundwork. Kerstein addresses Henry Allison's attempt to rescue the derivation via an account of agency rooted in Kant's notion of transcendental freedom, elaborated in the second Critique. Kerstein rejects Allison's reconstruction on the grounds that it remains too abstract to generate the degree of specificity arrived at in Kant's Groundwork universalization formulation. Chapter Three examines Christine Korsgaard's alternative reconstruction of Kant's argument that focuses on the formulation of humanity ("Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, always as an end and never as a means only"). He rejects her interpretation because, again, the move from the abstract command to conform to universal law to the substantive formulation about humanity as a universally recognizable unconditional good fails. From the former, more abstract claim, he argues, it does not follow that there is a universally recognizable unconditional good, let alone that this good is humanity in itself (and not, say, utility [happiness], or even some intrinsic value unrelated to humanity, both of which Kant rejects as candidates for the unconditionally good).In his own reconstruction, Kerstein dissolves the criticism of the traditional reading of Kant's Groundwork derivation of the formula of universal law by simply denying that Kant [End Page 564] argues directly from the more generic principle to the specific versions of the CI (91ff). Instead he suggests that Kant's argument is less direct, made by way of laying out a set of criteria that any supreme principle must meet, and showing how the CI meets them while no other candidates can. In the second half of the book he takes a painstaking and critical look at a total of eight criteria, each of which Kant holds to be necessary and together are jointly sufficient for establishing the CI as "the supreme norm for the evaluation of the moral permissability and requiredness of an action, but not of its moral value" (165). This statement includes Kerstein's most controversial and interesting reconstructive claim, namely his denial that moral worth attaches only to actions done in accordance with duty as determined by the test... (shrink)

Ever since Hegel famously objected to Kant’s universalization formulations of the Categorical Imperative on the grounds that they are nothing but an empty formalism, there has been continual debate about whether he was right. In this paper I argue that Hegel got things at least half-right: I argue that even if negative duties (duties to omit actions or not to adopt maxims) can be derived from the universalization formulations, positive duties (duties to commit actions or (...) to adopt maxims) cannot. The paper is divided into three main sections. In the first, I set out the procedures generally accepted among Kantians for deriving positive duties from the universalization formulations. In the second, I set out the arguments from section 1 in more detail and explain why they do not work. In the third, I examine a strategy that might be used to supplement the arguments from section 2 and I argue that it also does not work. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel's Empty Formalism Objection and the Concessive Kantian Response Hegel's Intuitionism: Against a “Supreme Principle of Morality” Kant on the Supreme Principle of Morality: Socratic or Pythagorean? Kant and Hegel: A Reconciliation? Acknowledgments Notes Abbreviations References.

Kant's Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks with Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics as one of the most important works of moral philosophy ever written. In Moral Law, Kant argues that a human action is only morally good if it is done from a sense of duty, and that a duty is a formal principle based not on self-interest or from a consideration of what results might follow. From this he (...) derived his famous and controversial maxim, the categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature." H. J. Paton's translation remains the standard in English for this work. It retains all of Kant's liveliness of mind, suppressed intellectual excitement, moral earnestness, and pleasure in words. The commentary and detailed analysis that Paton provides is an invaluable and necessary guide for the student and general reader. (shrink)

IN THE GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS Kant noted that, while the present work would be concerned only with the supreme principle of morality, he intended some day to write a "metaphysics of morals" in which he would set forth the whole system of man's duties derived from this principle. Twelve years later, in 1797, he published The Metaphysics of Morals in two parts: Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right and Metaphysical First Principles of (...) the Doctrine of Virtue. As the Groundwork made clear, the concept of duty contains that of constraint upon an agent who, because of impulses belonging to his sensible nature, does not necessarily do whatever is objectively necessary in accordance with moral laws. The first part of The Metaphysics of Morals is the system of moral principles on which are based laws prescribing duties that one can be coerced to fulfill. The second part is the system of duties for which only self-constraint through the thought of duty is possible. Each part is said to be a system of duties because it is derived from a first principle and remains on the level of principles that can be known a priori to be binding on men generally. Together they form the whole system of man's duties because the first principle of each is derived from the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative and the division in terms of coercion and self-constraint is exhaustive. (shrink)

Kant held the moral law to be an objective imperative, an entity in its own right. It carries with it prescriptive force, in parallel to other principles of pure reason, like those of logic and mathematics. Objective imperatives therefore do not derive their authority from any other source,such as common consensus or the will of God. In Objective Imperatives, Ralph C. S. Walker seeks to show that this is a highly defensible view: Kant's Categorical Imperative, properly understood, (...) is broadly right. The key to it is rationality, and not universality, which functions only as anapproximate test. Often, Kant sets the matter out badly, and most of the common objections to him can be shown to be due to misunderstandings. A morality that gives us an objective imperative does appear incompatible with the determinism to which Kant commits himself, but Walker argues that thisappearance is misleading. (shrink)

Few if any of Kant’s critics were more trenchant than Hegel. Here I reconstruct some objections Hegel makes to Kant in a text that has received insufficient attention, the chapter titled ‘the Moral World View’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I show that Kant holds virtually all the tenets Hegel ascribes to ‘the moral world view’. I concentrate on five of Hegel’s main objections to Kant’s practical metaphysics. First, Kant’s problem of coordinating happiness with virtue (as worthiness to (...) be happy) is contrived. Kant denies that there is any inherent connection between acting rightly and being happy, but his denial depends on his defining happiness in terms of satisfying inclinations, rather than in terms of achieving ends in general. Second, Kant’s view of moral motivation is contrived; he ultimately admits that we cannot resolve to act without taking inclinations into account. (We cannot resolve to act apart from the matter of our maxim.) Third, Kant’s idea about perfecting our virtue in an infinite progress is incoherent. Kant defines virtue, and evidence of virtue, in terms of overcoming inclinations. Inclinations die with the body. Therefore there can be neither virtue nor evidence of virtue after death. Fourth, Kant’s view of the autonomy of moral agency is inconsistent with viewing the moral law as a divine command. Fifth, Kant’s moral principles cannot be put into practice in concrete circumstances because he supplies inadequate guidance for classifying acts. I conclude that Hegel’s objections to Kant’s practical metaphysics are sound, and I show that the problems Hegel raised against Kant’s account of autonomy and moral motivation are still current, since they have not been resolved, e.g., by Onora O’Neill’s Constructions of Reason. (shrink)

Kant has made an attempt in his Doctrine of Law to show that the principles of natural Law are a priori principles of pure practical reason. He considers this a necessary step towards establishing the obligating force of positive legislation within a legal system. It is not obvious, however, that Law, which recognizes external coercion as a possible incentive for the compliance with its duties, can be reconciled with pure practical reason, which through the categorical imperative commands that one (...) fulfill duty from the idea of duty and so independently of inclination. Accordingly, it is not clear that there is a systematic and necessary connection between Law and morality for Kant and that he has succeeded in his overall objective of justifying positive Law. ;My dissertation is concerned with the question of how, according to Kant, pure practical reason can allow for juridical legislation, a legislation which admits of an incentive other than the idea of duty for the fulfillment of certain duties. I present criticisms of interpretations according to which Law with its external character cannot be reconciled with morality for Kant. I also discuss some interpretations according to which Law with its duties and legislation is justifiable from the point of view of pure practical reason, either as directly derivable from the categorical imperative or as a means for the realization and protection of the individual's moral freedom. I argue that such accounts do not succeed in explaining the possibility of external coercion for pure practical reason. I do maintain, however, that Law is reconcilable with pure practical reason for Kant, and I offer an explanation of how this is so: an examination of the different classes of duties shows that only juridical duties, or perfect duties to others, are such that reason must recongnize for them a kind of constraint other than free self-constraint and therefore must acknowledge the possibility of juridical legislation for these duties. (shrink)

Kant’s moral philosophy usually considers two types of duties: negative duties that prohibit certain actions and positive duties commanding action. With that, Kant insists on deriving all morality from reason alone. Such is the Categorical Imperative that Kant lays at the basis of ethics. Yet while negative duties can be derived from the Categorical Imperative and thus from reason, the paper argues that this is not the case with positive duties. (...) After answering a number of attempts to derive positive duties from the Categorical Imperative, most notably those of Barbara Herman, it sketches an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between the universal moral law and specific moral contents. (shrink)

Hegel attacks Kantian morality most often without stating an opposing moral theory, tending to subsequently take up discussion of religion or the state. Commentators have variously suggested the logical consequence of Hegel's position is "the dissolution of ethics in sociology" without "room for personal morality of any kind" or that Hegel's argument is against Kantian <i>Moralitat</i>, which allows the private individual to appeal beyond social mores to universal moral standards, with Hegel insisting that concrete values come (...) instead from <i>Sittlichkeit</i>, the social order. If thinking of morality as a purely private matter of the individual's conscience seems too abstract, the Hegelian criticisms should show that moral reflections are vacuous unless they take account of the social world in which they will be realized as concrete actions. From the Hegelian's perspective on morality as seen from the more inclusive context of <i>Sittlichkeit</i>, social action that is also moral will not need to be analyzed in terms of Kant's metaphysical dualisms between reason and inclination, intentions and consequences, or the sensible and the intelligible realms. Whereas Kant thinks moral theory leads directly to religious and metaphysical postulates, Hegel deliberately leads it in another direction. He can be understood historically as going beyond Kant's effort to secularize moral philosophy. Kant begins this process by grounding moral philosophy in reason alone, not in religion. Religious postulates may follow from moral beliefs, says Kant, but morality is not derived from religious premisses. In going from private moral conscience not to religious beliefs but to social, political, and historical considerations (which could include religion seen as a social institution), Hegel extends the process of secularizing moral philosophy." Marcuse and Knox could thus both be right, since Hegel's goal is not to replace Kant's moral philosophy with another, competing moral philosophy, but to accept it, while recognizing its limitations, as a special case of a larger theory of social action. In the Hegelian jargon, from a standpoint recognizing Sittlichkeit, Moralitdt is thus <i>aufgehoben</i>, that is, Kant's formal procedures will be both "negated" (criticized for their limitations) and "preserved" (embedded in a more inclusive philosophy). (shrink)

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant presents the moral law as the sole ‘fact of pure reason’ that neither needs nor admits of a deduction to establish its authority. This claim may come as a surprise to many readers of his earlier Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the last section of the Groundwork, Kant seemed to offer a sketch of just such a ‘deduction of the supreme principle of morality’ . Although notoriously obscure, this sketch (...) shows that Kant hoped to base the moral law in the freedom that rational agents can claim as members of the ‘intelligible world’ that transcendental idealism makes available to us. In contrast, the second Critique abandons all aspirations of deriving morality from more basic notions of freedom and practical rationality. (shrink)

Through a careful examination of two detailed investigations of Kant’s Categorical Imperative as a criterion for determining correct action I show that Hegel’s widely castigated critique of Kant’s CI has significant merit. Kant holds that moral imperatives are categorical because the obligations they express do not depend upon our contingent ends or desires and he holds that the CI is the supreme normative principle. However, his actual illustrations show that Kant repeatedly appeals to contingent ends and desires in (...) deriving our obligations and that CI tests often reveal conflicts between maxims and other presupposed norms of action. Moreover, Barbara Herman makes a persuasive case that Kant’s CI test must be supplemented by ‘Rules of Moral Salience’ and by ‘Middle Theory’, which links Kant’s theory of value to a theory of applications. These supplements ultimately shift the principle of universalization from the standpoint of individual morality to social ethics – precisely Hegel’s strategy in his Philosophy of Right! (shrink)

In this chapter, I expound Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he first and most elaborately presented in his early essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), by focusing on the criticism that Hegel levelled against Kant’s (supposedly) arbitrary subjectivism about the categories. This relates to the restriction thesis of Kant’s transcendental idealism: categorially governed empirical knowledge only applies to appearances, not to things in themselves, and so does not reach objective reality, according to Hegel. Hegel claims that this restriction of knowledge to (...) appearances is unwarranted merely on the basis of Kant’s own principle of transcendental apperception, and just stems from Kant’s empiricist bias. He argues that Kant’s principle of apperception as the foundational principle of knowledge is in fact incompatible with his empiricism. Hegel rightly appraises the centrality of transcendental apperception for the constitution of objectivity. But he is wrong about its incompatibility with Kant’s empirical realism. By virtue of a misapprehension of the formal distinction between the accompanying ‘I think’, i.e. the analytical principle of apperception, and what Hegel calls “the true ‘I’” of the original-synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel unjustifiably prises apart the productive imagination, which is supposedly this “true ‘I’”, and the understanding, which is supposedly just a derivative, subjective form of the productive imagination; the latter, according to Hegel, is Reason or Being itself, and is the truly objective. This deflationary reading of the understanding, which hypostatises the imagination as the supreme principle, rests on a distortion of key elements of Kant’s theory of apperception. In this chapter, I show that Hegel’s charge of inconsistency against Kant, namely, Hegel’s claim that the principle of apperception as the highest principle of cognition does not comport with Kant’s restriction thesis, is the direct consequence of a psychological misreading of Kant’s subjectivism. (shrink)

According to Kant, the supreme principle of morality is: “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (G 4:421). This principle has come to be known as the Formula of Universal Law (“FUL”). Few philosophers believe it succeeds. But, I argue, few philosophers have understood what FUL means. This dissertation offers a full defense of FUL. It is, in fact, the supreme principle of morality—and it (...) can successfully derive a viable theory of permissible action and virtuous willing. Kant was right. Chapter 1 considers FUL’s role in relation to Kant’s subsequent formulations of the Categorical Imperative and the broader architectonic of duty he sets up in the Metaphysics of Morals. I argue that Kant’s formulations are equivalent insofar as they are each expressions of the very same moral principle. And I suggest that FUL’s two tests correspond to Kant’s later distinction between duties of right and duties of virtue. Thus, FUL’s contradiction-in-conception test can be used to derive duties governing permissible action, and FUL’s contradiction-in-the-will test can be used to derive duties governing virtuous willing. This sets up the framework for the remainder of the dissertation. Chapters 2 and 3 together interpret and defend Kant’s account of permissible action. In Chapter 2, I argue that we should fundamentally reconceive of the nature and purpose of Kant’s permissibility criterion. Kant’s contemporary interpreters have adopted too psychologistic an account of the maxim. Kantian maxims have little to do with the motivating principles of actual agents. Relying on Kant’s historical context and his account of maxims in rational agency, I argue that FUL tests means-end principles which describe act-types. When its permissibility test is applied to such principles, it can viably derive general duties. Chapter 3 continues this positive account of Kant’s permissibility test and defends it from common objections. I argue that the contradiction-in-conception test rejects an act-type when it would be inconceivable for all rational agents to be directly governed by the type’s means-end imperative as a universal practical law. So understood, FUL condemns act-types because: (1) they are hypocritically self-serving, (2) they inflict agential harm on other agents, or (3) they inflict self-harm motivated by self-love. I defend FUL’s derivations against such act-types against common criticisms, such as that they are circular or overbroad. Turning to prominent objections against Kant’s account of permissible action, I then argue that FUL correctly rules out all and only impermissible actions. Moreover, its conclusions are both nuanced and normatively defensible. In Chapter 4, I turn to Kant’s virtue ethics. I begin by considering the demands of Kantian virtue. I argue that we should reject accounts on which duties of virtue are merely less restrictive duties governing permissible action. Instead, I argue, they represent genuinely virtue-ethical requirements to promote morally worthy ends, namely, the ends of our own perfection and others’ happiness. I show that all of Kant’s duties of virtue can ultimately be traced back to one of these required ends. Then, I argue that FUL’s contradiction-in-the-will test can successfully derive our positive obligation to set the ends of virtue. I conclude that FUL is successful not only as a standard of permissibility, but also as the supreme principle of virtue. (shrink)

According to the received view, Kant and Hegel espouse diametrically opposed views of moral motivation. Kant holds that to act morally is to act out of reflective recognition that a proposed intention ought to be made into a universal law. Action of true moral worth can never be motivated by an immediate inclination. Hegel, in contrast, holds that the natural inclination of an agent, who has been successfully acculturated within a just society, is moral action. The received (...) interpretation is right, but it misses a critical part of Hegel's view and it is to this idea that the entire dissertation is devoted. Hegel does not reject Kant's claim that a necessary condition of morality is autonomous action, which is not determined immediately by natural inclinations or acquired habits. He thinks that precisely such action is the origin of any actual, shared form of ethical life. It is in his idea of a founding act of ethical life that Hegel claims Kant's inheritance. ;The founding act of ethical life does not, however, meet Kant's criterion of moral action. Modeled, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, on Antigone's tragedy, the founding agent acts without being conscious of the universal ethical significance of the act; nor does the community the act transforms acknowledge its significance. The lawmaker and the community are necessarily blind to each other. This tragic, mutual blindness is a condition of the most extreme violence. ;Are there, in reality, any such acts? Modern political life has its founding moment, according to Hegel, in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. The old world and its political structures and institutions has collapsed, leaving action doomed to go unacknowledged. The violence of the Revolution and its aftermath is the condition of the foundation of a new shape of life. Though to be condemned absolutely, it is the necessary condition of the foundation of modern states. The concluding claim of the Philosophy of Right is that war, more generally, is the collapse of the actual life of states and the call to found a new shape of ethical life. (shrink)

This Element defends a reading of Kant's formulas of the moral law in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It disputes a long tradition concerning what the first formula attempts to do. The Element also expounds the Formulas of Humanity, Autonomy and the Realm of Ends, arguing that it is only the Formula of Humanity from which Kant derives general duties, and that it is only the third formula that represents a complete and definitive statement of (...) the moral principle as Kant derives it in the Groundwork. The Element also disputes the claim that the various formulas are 'equivalent', arguing that this claim is either false or else nonsensical because it is grounded on a false premise about what Kant thinks a moral principle is for. (shrink)

Kant both says that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, and objects to the theological version of heteronomy, ‘which derives morality from a divine and supremely perfect will’. In this paper I discuss how these two views fit together, and in the process I develop a notion of autonomous submission to divine moral authority. I oppose the ‘constitutive’ view of autonomy proposed by J. B. Schneewind and Christine Korsgaard. I locate Kant’s objection to theological heteronomy (...) against the background of Crusius’s divine command theory, and I compare Kant’s views about divine authority and human political authority. (shrink)

Kant both says that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, and objects to the theological version of heteronomy, ‘which derives morality from a divine and supremely perfect will’. In this paper I discuss how these two views fit together, and in the process I develop a notion of autonomous submission to divine moral authority. I oppose the ‘constitutive’ view of autonomy proposed by J. B. Schneewind and Christine Korsgaard. I locate Kant’s objection to theological heteronomy (...) against the background of Crusius’s divine command theory, and I compare Kant’s views about divine authority and human political authority. (shrink)

At the core of Kant's ethics lies the claim that if there is a supreme principle of morality then it cannot be a principle based on utilitarianism or Aristotelian perfectionism or the Ten Commandments. The only viable candidate for such a principle is the categorical imperative. This book is the most detailed investigation of this claim. It constructs a new, criterial reading of Kant's derivation of one version of the categorical imperative: the Formula of Universal Law. This (...) reading shows this derivation to be far more compelling than contemporary philosophers tend to believe. It also reveals a novel approach to deriving another version of the categorical imperative, the Formula of Humanity, a principle widely considered to be the most attractive Kantian candidate for the supreme principle of morality. This book will be important not just for Kant scholars but for a broad swathe of students of philosophy. (shrink)

Against the charge that Kant's doctrine of radical evil is inconsistent and alien to his practical philosophy, my aim is to show its necessity within the critical system. First, I undermine the alleged vacuity of Kant's notion of evil by showing that, already in the Groundwork, an evil will is the necessary conceptual correlate of a good will. "Good" and "evil" characterize the agent's form of willing and represent the source of value of right and wrong actions. Then, (...) I show how the doctrine of radical evil derives from Kant's notion of evil. That evil lies at the level of an individual Gesinnung is the result of Kant's radicalizing the use of transcendental freedom. That there is a propensity to evil in the whole species is the result of Kant's naturalizing the principles of his moral psychology. Although Kant is not clear about this distinction, the consistency of his doctrine depends on indicating that an "evil Gesinnung" and the "propensity to evil" are not equivalent concepts. Rather, they refer to different units of moral analysis, the individual and the whole species, and represent a failure to comply with different types of moral obligation: the duty to realize the good and the duty to realize the highest good. The correlation between units of moral analysis and types of obligation explains the isomorphism that Kant detects between them, as well as their logical independence, without which the individual's choice of Gesinnung would be analytically contained in the species' choice of moral nature . Finally, to account for the problem of moral self-constitution I argue for the necessity of assuming a transcendental volitional structure, the unity of acknowledgement or "I will". At the different levels of analysis, this structure organizes the will's manifold intentions according to unifying principles that allow it to recognize them as its own. Although Kant does not mention it, the "I will" is a necessary assumption to account for the continuity of choice and for its possible imputation to an agent. (shrink)

Hegelian ethics, which gives pride of place to the roles and relations that give substance to our moral life, is seen as a rejection of Kant's a priori treatment of morality, moral law and moral agency. Analysis of the so-called religious writings from the late 1790s to the early 1800s, 'The Positivity of the Christian Religion', the 'Love' fragment, and the essay 'On the Scientific Treatment of Natural Law', shows Hegel engaging profoundly with recognizably Kantian (...) problems of moral metaphysics about moral agency, the moral law, nature and freedom. The almost experimental approach of these early pieces yields independently interesting results as well as offering an important insight into the development of Hegel's thought. (shrink)

According to the standard reading of Kant's formula of universal law (FUL), positive duties can be derived from FUL. In this article, I argue that the standard reading does not work. In the first section, I articulate FUL and what I mean by a positive duty. In the second section, I set out an intuitive version of the standard reading of FUL and argue that it does not work. In the third section, I set out a more (...) rigorous version of the standard reading of FUL and argue that even this more rigorous version does not work. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, (...) taken as a name for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

My aim in this note is to shed light on ways of interpreting Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL), by looking at relevant similarities and differences between Pauline Kleingeld and Mark Timmons. I identify both their readings as a formal interpretation of Kant’s FUL, in contrast to the substantive interpretations that favor a robust conception of rational agency as a necessary requirement for moral deliberation. I highlight the benefits that arise from Kleingled’s interpretation in showing the immediacy involved (...) in the volitional self-contradiction when universalizing a maxim. Alongside Timmons, I address a question as to whether Kleingeld’s interpretation is completely free from at least a minimal set of assumptions about practical deliberation more broadly, that seem to play a role in generating the volitational self-contradiction she is defending. I close by raising some skeptical worries about the capacity of this kind of contradiction to translate into a moral judgment triggering action. (shrink)

Kant's moral theory, along with Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics, is one of the three leading moral theories in contemporary Western moral philosophy. I argue in this dissertation, however, that Kant's moral theory suffers from deeper flaws than its proponents have acknowledged---flaws that render it untenable. But a great deal of interpretative argument must be done before this critique can be compelling, since every critique rests on interpretative presuppositions that are liable to be questioned. (...) Hence the dissertation also spends significant time working out the most charitable reconstruction of the "supreme principle" of Kant's moral theory, the Categorical Imperative. ;Chapter I is devoted to identifying which of Kant's formulations of the Categorical Imperative should be taken as most plausible and most worth critical examination. I argue in favor of the so-called Formula of the Law of Nature. Chapter II analyzes the crucial concept of a maxim---what a maxim contains and how maxims are to be identified---and defuses two common types of objection to the Categorical Imperative that rest on misunderstandings of the nature of a maxim. In Chapter III, I argue against several leading Kantian ethicists that Kant takes all nonmoral motives to be self-interested, aiming at one's own pleasure; this thesis is presupposed at a number of points by my interpretation of Kant's moral theory. Chapter IV explicates the Universalizability Test that follows from the Formula of the Law of Nature, with particular attention given to Kant's famous four examples from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Finally, Chapter V develops a number of criticisms of the Universalizability Test, considering and rebutting defenses that prominent Kantian ethicists have utilized or would be likely to utilize. (shrink)

As the interesting title of this work indicates, its author is concerned less with Kant’s theory of morality, with its account of freedom, the possibility of pure reason being practical, and the deduction of the moral law, than he is with Kant’s Sittenlehre, or the account of the moral law as applied, moral judgment, and the substantive, derived duties of justice and virtue. Accordingly, he concentrates almost exclusively on two texts. The first four chapters are a (...) commentary on and assessment of the three chapters of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, and his last two chapters deal with the two main sections of the Metaphysics of Morals. Other important texts of Kant’s moral theory are dealt with, as he says, en passant, and some are not dealt with at all. This approach has the virtue of focusing attention on perhaps the central Kantian moral problem: the nature of the transition from pure moral principles to "morals." It has the defect of being bound in too restrictive a way to the Groundwork as an expression of Kant’s general moral theory. There is no discussion of the synthetic or "regressive" methodology of that work, an approach which Kant realized aided its popular appeal, but greatly limited its theoretical adequacy, nor of the well known revisions Kant made in his moral theory, especially his account of freedom, by 1788. However, the author admits that he did not intend to write a book "directed specifically to Kant scholars." Instead, he tries to keep his discussion of textual interpretation minimal, always tries to present Kant’s arguments in a "contemporary idiom," refers only to English translations, infrequently to the Kant literature, and then only to English language literature. (shrink)

Focusing on the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, historical and contemporary critics of Kant's rationalist ethical theory accuse him of holding an impoverished moral psychology and an inadequate account of character and virtue. Kant's sharp contrast between duty and inclination and his claim that only action from duty possesses moral worth appear to imply that pro-moral inclination is unnecessary for, if perhaps compatible with, a good will. On traditional accounts of virtue, however, (...) having a good will and possessing virtue require pro-moral emotions and inclinations. Thus, Kant's moral psychology seems at odds with the common view that emotions and appetites are constituent elements within virtue. Kant's defenders have argued that an adequate assessment of these charges must address his theory of virtue, as it is set out in The Doctrine of Virtue, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and the Lectures on Ethics. Yet the prospect for reconstructing a plausible Kantian account of virtue from these tests may appear bleak when we see that Kant conceives of virtue as moral strength of will over recalcitrant inclinations, and characterizes virtue in terms of the autocracy of pure practical reason. For autocracy may seem to require the extirpation or suppression of feelings and inclinations. Indeed, it might seem difficult to distinguish the autocratic agent from the agent who, in Aristotle's terms, is merely continent, or who, in Schiller's terms, possesses dignity, but not grace. But these objections misunderstand autocracy. In the thesis, I argue that the self-mastery constitutive of Kantian virtue involves the cultivation of sensibility according to reason and that emotions and appetites modified and regulated by a proper conception of the moral law play a constructive role within Kantian virtue. (shrink)

According to the positive duties objection, it is not possible to derive positive duties from Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL). However, in his recent “Deriving Positive Duties from Kant’s Formula of Universal Law”, Guus Duindam tries to answer this objection. More specifically, Duindam tries to show how both a duty of benevolence and a duty of self-perfection can be derived from the FUL. I critically examine Duindam’s arguments. I maintain that Duindam’s argument (...) for the positive duty of benevolence is ambiguous and that this ambiguity exposes him to a fatal dilemma: on one horn, Duindam faces the same objection that he concedes to be effective against other attempts to answer the positive duties objection; on the other horn, the procedure he recommends cannot be based on the FUL (because it does not evaluate actions on the basis of their corresponding maxims). In addition, I maintain that Duindam’s benevolence argument rests on a procedure that is, in general, intractable and, in this particular case, foredoomed (because it can be shown that there are no positive duties of the kind he tries to derive). From there, I turn to Duindam’s argument for the positive duty of self-perfection. I explain that Duindam’s derivation of the duty of self-perfection, even if successful, does not answer the positive duties objection. This is because Duindam never appeals to the FUL in his derivation of the duty of self-perfection (the derivation is based, rather, on instrumental reasoning from the second-order end to accomplish our first-order ends). I elaborate on this by comparing and contrasting Duindam’s argument with Oliver Sensen’s interpretation of how to apply the FUL in the latter’s recent “Universal Law and Poverty Relief”. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to defend Kant’s idea of the highest good as part of his ethics, particularly in relation to the alleged problem of impossibility, according to which it would be impossible to promote it, due to the obscurity of moral intentions and of the relative nature of happiness. As a preliminary step, a singular definition of the highest good is unfolded, one that sees the highest good as a moral world where virtue will be (...) rewarded with happiness, which is a duty and an object of hope, individually and collectively. Regarding the defense itself, a distinction is made between fallible and infallible duties, and a soft interpretation of the “ought implies can” principle (as developed by Stern) is used. The article also points out what is yet required for an overarching defense of the highest good, namely, a response to the other problems at stake, which are here labeled as those of heteronomy (the highest good undermines the principle of autonomy, since it as an object includes happiness), deduction (the highest good is not contained and does not follow from the moral law), and irrelevance (the highest good is irrelevant for ethics). (shrink)

Sally Sedgwick presents a fresh account of Hegel's critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy. She argues that Hegel offers a compelling critique of and alternative to the conception of cognition that Kant defended in his 'Critical' period, and explores Hegel's claim to derive from Kantian doctrines clues to a superior form of idealism.

In his moral writings, Kant states that moral duty cannot be derived from “the special characteristics of human nature.” This statement is untenable if one takes seriously Kant 's moral views on sexual desire. Instead close study reveals that considerations based on both morality and nature play a role here. The combination of these two elements leads to inconsistencies and difficulties in Kant 's understanding of sexual desire, but they enable us to better understand the importance (...) Kant attributes to marriage within his philosophy of law. (shrink)

The question of whether an artificial moral agent (AMA) is possible implies discussion of a whole range of problems raised by Kant within the framework of practical philosophy that have not exhausted their heuris­tic potential to this day. First, I show the significance of the correlation between moral law and freedom. Since a rational being believes that his/her will is independent of external influences, the will turns out to be governed by the moral law and is autonomous. (...) Morality and freedom are correlated through independence from the external. Accordingly, if the actions of artificial intelligence (AI) are determined by something or someone external to it (by a human), then it does not act morally and freely, but heteronomously. As a consequence of AI’s lack of autonomy, and thus lack of access to the moral law, it does not and cannot have a moral understanding that proceeds from the moral law. Another consequence is that it has no sense of duty, which would follow from the moral law. Thus, moral action becomes impossible for the AMA because it lacks autonomy and moral law, moral understanding and sense of duty. It is concluded that, first, AMA not only cannot be moral, but should not be that, since the inclusion of any moral principle would imply the necessity for the individual to choose it, making the choice of the principle itself immoral. Second, although AI has no will as such, which prima facie makes not only moral but also legal action impossible, it can still act legally in the sense of conforming to legal law, since AI carries a quasi-human will. Thus, it is necessary that the creation of AI should be based not on moral principles, but on legal law that prioritises human freedom and rights. (shrink)

Kant is the philosophical tradition's arch-anti-consequentialist – if anyone insists that intentions alone make an action what it is, it is Kant. This chapter takes up Kant's account of the relation between intention and action, aiming both to lay it out and to understand why it might appeal. The chapter first maps out the motivational architecture that Kant attributes to us. We have wills that are organized to action by two parallel and sometimes competing motivational systems. One determines us (...) by way of motives that are sensuous, natural and given from without, the other by motives that are intellectual, rational, and given from within. Each set of motives belongs to a system of laws – natural motives to the laws of nature, rational motives to the laws of freedom. For Kant, all things, including actions, are what they are in virtue of the laws governing them; actions, qua actions, are always governed by laws that govern individual wills. These laws are Kantian maxims, 'or subjective practical laws.' Maxims, for Kant, thus make actions the actions they are. The chapter then maps out the implications of this motivational architecture for Kant's theory of value. Maxims always advert to or 'contain' both ends and means. Ends are always specifications of one of two ultimate ends. Actions have the moral value they have depending on which of two ultimate ends the maxim adverts to. The possibilities are 'happiness,' or gratification of desires with sensuous origins, and 'duty,' or accord with the moral demand to will in ways that respect free rational agency wherever it is found. Only actions aimed at the latter – actions with rational motives – have moral value. Actions aimed at the former – actions with natural motives – though not immoral in themselves, become so when pursuit works against rational motives. For Kant, actions aimed at happiness are ultimately allied with efforts to sustain our 'animal' existence, and so are governed by terms and conditions given by the natural world. Actions aimed at duty, in contrast, are ultimately allied with efforts to impose a rational form on nature, to make it over, so to speak, according to values not given by nature itself. Actions aimed at duty, therefore, create a specifically moral world, one in which mores and norms, formal and informal arrangements, institutions, policies, and so on, realize, harmonize, and promote free rational agency itself. Finally, the chapter addresses motivations for Kant's view. The architecture of will and the theories of action and value he proposes allow Kant to accommodate a host of intuitions and commitments. His view makes room for metaphysically free agency, and for the lived experience of motivational freedom from ever-changing natural desires. It makes room for conflicts within the will while still holding out hope that resolution is possible. It accommodates views that the best human lives engage 'higher' faculties in sustained ways. It identifies a stable, necessary, universal end amidst the evident contingency, pluralism, and instability of most ends. It makes us, and not God or nature, the authors of our moral lives. In the end, Kant's 'anti-consequentialism,' his focus on intentions, is a way of insisting on actions that take their character and value from what should matter most to us, namely individual and collective free rational agency, rather than only and always taking the character of reactive responses to circumstance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel's Value: Justice as the Living Good by Dean MoyarThimo HeisenbergDean Moyar. Hegel's Value: Justice as the Living Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 384. Hardback, $110.00.Hegel's Philosophy of Right is one of those texts that make it easy to miss the forest for the trees. On the argumentative journey from private property and punishment, via the "emptiness" of Kant's moral (...) law to Hegel's vision of a rational social order, it is easy to lose sight of the overall arch of Hegel's argument. Indeed, this kind of problem is confounded by an ever-growing literature on individual ideas and sections of the text (from Hegel's conception of agency to his argument for the market economy), which, while interesting and rewarding on their own, direct our attention to parts of his argument, rather than to the Philosophy of Right as a whole.Dean Moyar's new book is devoted to making us see the forest again—albeit while never leaving the trees out of sight. Indeed, to stretch the metaphor of forest and trees a little bit further, Moyar builds his ambitious endeavor on two new interpretative theses, which enable him to show us completely new paths through and clearings in the forest, bringing to light previously underappreciated aspects of the argument and adding refreshing new takes on the parts of Hegel's view that are already well known.The first of Moyar's two central theses concerns Hegel's methodology in his Philosophy of Right. Moyar maintains that the structure of the Philosophy of Right can be understood as a "teleologically inferentialist" account: the content of the norms of right is developed through use, where at each stage of the argument the content of those norms is refined by sublating previous failures of application. But while this Hegelian process is dynamic, relying on conflicts and their resolution, the process is—in contrast to some pragmatist forms of inferentialism—not open-ended: instead, or so Moyar convincingly argues, it leads to a point of inferential equilibrium as telos of the text (Hegel's vision of Ethical Life), in which some dynamism persists but further development of right is no longer necessary.This kind of interpretation, Moyar argues, has several advantages: it renders the methodology of the Philosophy of Right consistent with the method of Hegel's Logic, but it also provides us with a general template (which Moyar calls the "basic argument" [30 and passim]) on which to understand all the different transitions in the Philosophy of Right as structurally analogous, thereby showing Hegel to be both intertextually and intratextually consistent. Even more, using this basic argument as a template, Moyar puts himself in a position to generate interesting understandings of all the major and minor transitions in Hegel's text, focusing not merely on the most well-known (the transition from Morality to Ethical Life), but also on those that have traditionally received much less attention (such as the minor transition that leads from the contradiction between right [Recht] and welfare [Wohl] to the Good).The second of Moyar's two central theses concerns the importance of the concept of value to Hegel's project. Indeed, Moyar argues that even though the word 'value' (Wert) may not appear frequently in the published version of Hegel's lectures, the concept of value is at work everywhere in the text. Moyar, consequently, traces the presence of this concept throughout the Philosophy of Right, using it to understand many of the forbiddingly [End Page 327] difficult passages, from the dense section on the "Alienation of Property" early on in the part on Abstract Right, to Hegel's later views on the relationship between right and duty, his precarious theory of the "circulation of value" on the market, and finally his view of history at the end of the Philosophy of Right.In this way, Moyar extracts a rich interpretative bounty: he defends a heterodox reading of Hegel as a legal positivist, reconstructs a Hegelian doctrine of public reason, and argues against an "amoral" reading of Hegel's account of history. Most important, perhaps, is his interpretation of the relationship... (shrink)

Rather than approaching Kant's moral theory in the normal way through a consideration of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason, I do so from the perspective of an extended analysis of other aspects of his work that bear on his moral philosophy . Consideration of the Doctrine of Right suggests that the universal principle of Right Kant identifies is a restricted version of the CI applied to the limited domain (...) of relations between persons at issue in this context. Given that duties of Right deriving from this principle are also regarded as perfect ethical duties, an analysis of the nature and scope of the universal principle of Right can, I argue, be expected to be informative with respect to our understanding of perfect duties and the contradiction in conception from which these are said to derive. Allowing for the more limited scope of merely external duties of Right, analysis of these duties suggests that ethical duties of Right are obligations concerned with ensuring the capacity of rational agents to govern themselves on the basis of reason . This kind of analysis, I argue, is both confirmed and clarified by Kant's subsequent discussion of perfect and imperfect duties of virtue we owe to ourselves under the rubric of concerns with our moral health and moral prosperity. ;The resulting view is, I claim, a promising one that allows us to integrate the different treatments of duties in these two works and accommodate the various duties Kant discusses. In particular, understood in terms of the notions of moral health and prosperity, the concerns engendered here require careful consideration of the particular nature and psychology of human agency and yield a much more subtle and interesting account of duty and of the moral life than those typically associated with Kant. (shrink)

Kant is probably one of the most misunderstood philosophers in the history of Western thought. Some of the most well-known and pervasive objections to Kant’s practical philosophy often rest on considerable misunderstandings of his central theses or a poor and superficial reading of his work. A common misconception is that in Kant’s practical philosophy there is no place or role for human happiness. In Happiness in Kant’s Practical Philosophy: Morality, Indirect Duties, and Welfare Rights, Alice Pinheiro Walla dispels this (...) misunderstanding by elucidating Kant’s conception of happiness (understood in broadly hedonist terms) and showing that, for Kant, the pursuit of happiness plays an important role in our personal and collective lives. This means that, far from endorsing an ascetic ideal of the moral agent, as it is commonly thought, Kant’s system embraces an ideal of the human life in which there is significant space, and even a duty, to pursue pleasurable endeavours. Somehow surprisingly, in Pinheiro Walla’s reading, Kant’s ethics is arguably less demanding than standard interpretations of Aristotelian and Utilitarian ethical theories. (shrink)

Recently, there has been some discussion about the relationship between Kant's conception of right (the sphere of juridical rights and duties) and his moral theory (with the Categorical Imperative as its fundamental norm). In section 1, I briefly survey some recent contributions to this debate and distinguish between two different questions. First, does Kant's moral theory (as developed in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason ) imply , or validate, a Kantian conception of (...) right (as developed in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals , the Doctrine of Right)? In other words, is the Categorical Imperative sufficient to show that the fundamental principles of right are normatively valid? Second, does Kant's conception of right presuppose his moral theory? In other words, is the Categorical Imperative necessary to show that the basic principles of right are normatively valid? In this paper, I will be primarily concerned with defending a negative answer to the first of these questions. In section 2, I will discuss Paul Guyer's attempt to vindicate a positive answer to the same question. In section 3, reasons will be given why any attempt to derive Kant's conception of right from the Categorical Imperative must fail because of the analytic connection between right and coercion. (shrink)

The Groundwork is explicitly concerned with the formulation of the supreme principle of morality. Although happiness is, for Kant, a necessary aim of human action, it is not a duty to seek one's own happiness, since every man seeks his own happiness by nature in any case, and so does not have to be constrained to do so. The positive aspect of beneficence is mentioned by Kant in the derivation from the formula of humanity, where he remarks that (...) to take another person as an end in himself is to take his ends as one's own. There is one important strand in Kant's notion of treating humanity as an end‐in‐itself, and he brings this out in listing perfect duties to oneself and duties of respect to others. The initial implausibility of Kant's ethics is the thought that one can will something in the absence of any desire whatsoever. (shrink)

Any number of criticisms of Kant's moral psychology are directed at his claims that actions possessing moral worth must be performed "irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire" (G 68,400),' and that actions done from duty must "set aside altogether the influence of inclination, and along with inclination every object of the will" (ibid). Rather than desire or inclination, it is "pure reverence for the law" that moves the will in actions done from (...) duty (G 69,401). My present purpose is to defend Kant's view as a plausible tenet of moral psychology by defending it against two lines of criticism. I shall conclude by considering some moral theoretic objections to Kant's view. In so doing I hope to provide a clearer understanding of Kant's position on moral motivation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Religion: A Moral‐Metaphysical Interpretation of ‘Positivity’ Love: Outline of an Ethical Relation Law: Death and Absolute Sittlichkeit References Secondary Sources.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant without SadeFrancis SparshottErmanno Bencivenga’s discussion of “Kant’s Sadism” rests on a misrepresentation of Kant’s enterprise. 1 It presents Kantian morality as a matter of motivation, so that reason has to be pitted against desire. But Kant’s whole point is that, because the psychological causes of one’s actions can never be ascertained, they are irrelevant to morality. Morality is entirely a matter of the reasons for one’s actions, no (...) matter what one’s feelings. It is true that moral questions arise, morality exists, only for finite rational beings, who have inclinations that are relatively independent of the dictates of reason. But that independence does not mean that one should always act against one’s inclinations.The morality of an action depends on the agent’s “maxim”—the subjective practical principle on which one acts, the reasons one has and can give for thinking that what one is doing is right. Kant’s whole discussion is in terms of maxims. The word does occur twice in Bencivenga’s paper, but his account makes no use of it. When he says that “It is the motives of the action, the motives the person actually has—never mind what evidence we have for them—that confer moral content on the action” (p. 41), he does so in flat contradiction of Kant.The confusion underlying Bencivenga’s misunderstanding is most familiar to English-language Kantians from Schiller’s joke: “Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. / Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person. // —Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely, / and then with aversion do what your duty enjoins you.” 2 Both participants in the exchange think [End Page 151] the morality of an action depends on its psychological causes, not on the reasons the agent has for thinking the action right and doing it. Both are wrong.What is revolutionary in Kant’s position is his contention that all a maxim requires to be moral is that agents should really make it their principle at the time of action—that the agent should really stand by it. That means, obviously, that at that moment the agent should be able consistently to will that everyone should act on it. Kant argues that it also means, less obviously, that doing the right thing should be one’s paramount principle, which involves treating humanity and human freedom as an end in itself—ultimately, treating oneself and others as “law-making members of a kingdom of ends.” Thus, for Kant, morality is entirely a matter of rational consistency.Since rational consistency is all that morality requires, morality lays down no plan of action, but presupposes the familiar world in which people already have plans and purposes. What one wills is always some particular thing. Morality has to do with the principles to be followed in pursuing these objectives. 3 Bencivenga’s contention that “making the well-being of some other human, or of one’s own community, or of humankind the goal of one’s action would be relegating rationality to (at best) an instrumental role, and thus denying any ethical value to that action” is wrong. Kant insists that finite rational beings inevitably pursue happiness, 4 and it is their duty to do so for others and (in a sense) for themselves. 5 A leading contention of the Critique is that happiness, like duty, is a component of the summum bonum. Making a principle of maximizing happiness does not destroy the autonomy of the will; the principle is a principle and subject to the critique of consistency, like other principles. Kant explicitly denies what Bencivenga asserts, that it is merely an empirical matter that humans are desirous as well as rational. On the contrary, it belongs to their essence. 6 What is empirical, as Kant explains at some length, is the specific content of a person’s desires.Neither of Bencivenga’s examples tends to show that morality is opposed to inclination. It is true that if the reason moral agents treat people well is really only that, on each occasion, this is... (shrink)

This article challenges the prevailing interpretations of Hegel's account of the concept "contradiction" in the Science of Logic by arguing that it is concerned with the principle of Hegel's method rather than with the classical law of non-contradiction. I first consider Hegel's Doctrine of Essence in view of Kant's discussion of the concepts of reflection in the first Critique. On this basis, I examine Hegel's account of the logical principles based on the concepts "identity," "opposition," (...) and "contradiction." Finally, I point out how the principle Hegel derives from the concept of contradiction actually informs his own method. (shrink)

?Hegel? and?human rights? are rarely conjoined, and the designation?human rights? appears rarely in his works. Indeed, Hegel has been criticised for omitting civil and political rights all together. My surmise is that readers have looked for a modern Decalogue, and have neglected how Hegel justifies his views, and hence just what views he does justify. Philip Pettit has refocused attention on republican liberty. Hegel and I agree with Pettit that republican liberty is a supremely important value, but appealing to its (...) value, or justifying it by appeal to reflective equilibrium, are insufficient both in theory and in practice. By reconstructing Kant?s Critical methodology and explicating the social character of rational justification in non-formal domains, Hegel shows that the republican right to non-domination is constitutive of the equally republican right to justification - both of which are necessary requirements for sufficient rational justification in all non-formal domains, including both claims to rights or imputations of duties or responsibilities. That is the direct moral, political and juridical implication of Hegel?s analysis of mutual recognition, and its fundamental, constitutive role in rational justification. Specific corollaries to the fundamental republican right to non-domination must be determined by considering what forms of illicit domination are possible or probable within any specific society, in view of its social, political and economic structures and functioning. nema. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is that moral evil is for Kant an ineradicable aspect of human existence; moreover the author argues that moral evil is a datum of experience which none of the rationalist systems which preceded Kant's, nor Hegel's system which came after, could assimilate, a rock upon which they all shattered. Reboul's concern is to investigate the "insondable profondeur du mal radical" as this theme appears in the forty years of Kant's active (...) philosophic production; his interest reflects the influence of his mentor, Karl Barth. Reboul is at his best in his clear depiction of Kant's ingenuity at reconciling the optimism of the Enlightenment with the Reformation's conviction of sin. For example, the very insufficiency of Leibniz' attempt to supply a ground for every decision of the will, his inability to explain the reality of willful evil, is used by Kant as an excuse for not going beyond Leibniz' theory. "Expliquer la liberté serait la détruire," writes Reboul. Kant assimilates the idea of progress by assigning it to the level of phenomenal or technical improvements. Moral value resides only in those acts by which we loosen the ties of sensible determination upon the will and render ourselves autonomous. The struggle for autonomy must be fought by each man for himself; there is a decisive limit to the help we can derive from "progress." For Kant man is bent towards evil not only by reason of his spontaneous attraction to sensible objects, but also in virtue of a basic perversion of his faculty of judgment, a perversion which comes close to being identified with liberty itself. It is significant, as Reboul notes, that all of Kant's examples of free will are also examples of moral evil. This low estimate of man's spontaneous faculties is at the basis of Kant's suspicion of all eudaimonistic ethics, his demand that every moral decision be "disinterested," that the moral law be the sole determinant of the will. Just as in the first Critique Kant insists on finding an adequate cause to ground the universality which attaches to the laws of science and mathematics, so in ethics he demands an adequate explanation of the radical character of evil present in the world; this he finds in a perversion of the human faculty of judgment, whereby a contingent element of experience is illegitimately raised to the status of a universal maxim by the will. The moral decision must be disinterested because every attraction by a sensible object threatens to become the occasion for such a definitive fixation of our moral character. But Kant's deeper originality lies in a view which bridges the Enlightenment and later periods. Kant breaks with a convention of systematic philosophical activity which had held sway from the Greeks through Leibniz, the view that reality must be consistent. For Kant, the principle of non-contradiction does not apply to the phenomenal world but only to the noumenal. For Kant, human existence can harbor contradictions; consequently man lives perpetually in tension. As a citizen of two worlds, he is committed to achieving a moral ideal which the basic perversion of his will renders unrealizable. This tension can be viewed optimistically, as with Hegel ; then the "positivity" of evil is interpreted as a necessary step, a " felix culpa," by which God rouses man to greater efforts and brings him to maturity, autonomy, and a vision of the real. The other alternative is the Schopenhauerian interpretation, wherein the tensions in the absurdity of the human condition are taken as too extreme to warrant further participation. Reboul is excellent in showing the form these tensions take in Kant's system: the mystery of how a basically perverted will can be converted into a "good faith," although this is the ethical command; the command never to feel oneself "justified" through having done one's duty, even though the moral command obligates us to strive perpetually for this condition. However, in stressing the harsh import of sin for Kant, and thus saving Kant from Hegel, has Reboul not placed Kant in the company of Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Camus?--P. M. (shrink)

Arthur Kaufmann is one of the most prominent figures among the contemporary philosophers of law in German speaking countries. For many years he was a director of the Institute of Philosophy of Law and Computer Sciences for Law at the University in Munich. Presently, he is a retired professor of this university. Rare in the contemporary legal thought, Arthur Kaufmann's philosophy of law is one with the highest ambitions — it aspires to pinpoint the ultimate foundations of law by explicitly (...) proposing an ontology, a general theory of knowledge and concept of a person. Kaufmann's work derives, first of all, from the thinking of Gustav Radburch, his teacher, and then from ideas of Karl Engish and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The philosophy undertakes to pursue the ultimate foundation of law, law which is understood by Kaufmann, first of all, as a "concrete judgement" that is, what is right in a concrete situation. Justice belongs to the essence of law and "unjust law" is contradictio in adiectio. Kaufmann opposes all those theories, which as the only foundation for establishing just law (Recht) adopt legal norms (Gesetz). In Kaufmann's opinion , such theories are powerless in the face of all types of distortions of law rendered by political forces. He suggests that the basic phenomenon which needs to be explained and which cannot be disregarded by a philosopher of law is so-called "legal lawlessness" ("Gestzliches Unrecht"). "Legal lawlessness" which forms a part of life experience for the people of twentieth century totalitarian states. It proved "with the accuracy of scientific experiment" that the reality of law consists of something more than bare conformity with legal norms. The existence of lex corrupta indicates that law contains something "non-dispositive" which requires acknowledgment of both law-maker and judge. Kaufmann, accepting the convergent concept of truth and cognition, assumes that "non-dispositive" content, emerging as the conformity of a number of cognitive acts of different subjects (inter-subjective communicativeness and verifiability), indicates the presence of being in this cognition. The questions "What is law?" and "What are the principles of a just solution?" lead straight to the ontology of law, to the question about the ontological foundations of law. Kaufmann discerns the ontological foundations of law in the specifically understood "nature of things" and, ultimately, in a "person". He proposes a procedural theory of justice, founded on a "person". In my work, I undertake to reconstruct the train of thought which led Kaufmann to the recognition of a "person" as the ontological foundation of law. In the first part, the conception of philosophy adopted by Kaufmann, initial characteristics of law — of reality which is the subject of analysis, as well as, the requirements for proper philosophical explanation of law posed by Kaufmann are introduced. In the second, Kaufmann's reconstruction of the process of the realisation of law is presented. Next, the conception of analogy which Kaufmann uses when explaining law is analyzed. In the fourth part, Kaufmann's conception of ontological foundations of law is discussed. A critical analysis is carried out in which I demonstrate that the theory of the ontological foundation of law proposed by Kaufmann and the concept of a person included in it do not allow a satisfac¬tory explanation of the phenomenon of "legal lawlessness" and lead to a number of difficulties in the philosophical explanation of law. Finally, the perspectives of a proper formulation of the issue of the ontological foundations of law are drafted in the context of the analyzed theory. My interest is centered on the conception of philosophy adopted by Kaufmann, according to which the existence of the reality is inferred on the basis of a certain configuration of the content of consciousness, whereas at the point of departure of philosophy of law, the data to be explained is a certain process, which is, basically, a process of cognition, while the reality appears only as a condition for the possibility of the occurrence of the process. I wish to argue that the difficulties which appear in the explanation of law are a consequence of the assumed fundamental philosophical solu¬tions, which seem to be characteristic, though usually not assumed explicitly, in philoso¬phy and theory of law dominant at present in continental Europe. Thereby, I wish to show the significance of ontological and epistemological solutions to the possibility of a proper formulation of the problems posed by philosophy and theory of law. Kaufmann proclaims himself in favour of a philosophy which poses questions about the ultimate foundations of understanding of the reality. In epistemology, he assumes that answers to the questions "What is reality like?" and ultimately "What is real?" are inferred on the basis of uniformity of a cognitive acts of different subjects. Cognition of the reality is accomplished exclusively through the content of conceptual material. The two fundamental questions posed by philosophy of law are "What is just law?" and "How is the just law enacted?" The latter is a question about the process of achieving a solution to a concrete case. Since, in Kaufmann's opinion, law does not exist apart from the process of its realisation, an answer to the question about the manner of realisation of law is of fundamental significance to answering the question: "What is law?" and to the explanation of the question about the ontological grounding of law, which is, as well, the foundation of justice. The proper solution has to take into account the moment of "non-dispositive" content of law; its positiveness understood as the reality and, at the same time, it has to point to the principles of the historical transformation of the content. Law, in the primary meaning of the word, always pertains, in Kaufmann's opinion, to a concrete case. A legal norm is solely the "possibility" of law and the entirely real law is ipsa res iusta, that which is just in a given situation. Determination of what is just takes place in a certain type of process performed by a judge (or by man confronted with a choice). Kaufmann aims to reconstruct this process. A question about the ontological foundation of law is a question about the ontological foundations of this process. In the analyzed theory it is formulated as a question about the transcendental conditions, necessary for the possibility of the occurrence of the process: how the reality should be thought to make possible the reconstructed process of the realisation of law. Kaufmann rejects the model for finding a concrete solution based on simple subsump¬tion and proposes a model in which concrete law ensues, based on inference by analogy, through the process of "bringing to conformity" that which is normative with that which is factual. Kaufmann distinguishes three levels in the process of the realisation of law. On the highest level, there are the fundamental legal principles, on the second legal norms, on the third — concrete solutions. The fundamental principles of law are general inasmuch as they cannot be "applied" directly to concrete conditions of life, however, they play an important part in establishing norms. A judge encounters a concrete situation and a system of legal norms. A life situation and norms are situated on inherently different levels of factuality and normativeness. In order to acquire a definite law both a norm (system of norms) and a life situation (Lebenssachverhalt) should undergo a kind of "treatment" which would allow a mutual conformity to be brought to them. Legal norms and definite conditions of life come together in the process of analogical inference in which the "factual state" ("Tatbestand") — which represents a norm, and in the "state of things" ("Sachverhalt") — which represents a specific situation are constructed. A "factual state" is a sense interpreted from a norm with respect to specific conditions of life. The "state of things" is a sense constructed on the basis of concrete conditions of life with respect to norms (system of norms). Legal norms and concrete conditions of life meet in one common sense established during the process of realisation of law. Mutatis mutandis the same refers to the process of composition of legal norms: as the acquisition of concrete law consists in a mutual "synchronization" of norms and concrete conditions of life, so acquisition of legal norms consists of bringing to conformity fundamental principles and possible conditions of life. According to Kaufmann, both of these processes are based on inference through analogy. As this inference is the heart of these processes it is simultaneously a foundation finding just law and justice. How does Kaufmann understand such an inference? As the basis for all justice he assumes a specifically interpreted distributive justice grounded on proportionality. Equality of relations is required between life conditions and their normative qualification. Concrete conditions of life are ascribed normative qualification not through simple application of a general norm. More likely, when we look for a solution we go from one concrete normative qualified case to another, through already known "applications" of norms to a new "application". The relation between life conditions and their normative qualifica¬tion has to be proportional to other, earlier or possible (thought of) assignments of that which is factual to that which is normative. Law as a whole does not consist of a set of norms, but only of a unity of relations. Since law is a, based on proportion, relative unity of a norm and conditions of life, in order to explain law in philosophical manner, the question about ontological base of this unity has to be asked. What is it that makes the relation between a norm and conditions of life "non-dispositive"? What is the basis for such an interpretation of a norm and case which makes it possible to bring a norm and conditions of life into mutual "conformity"? This is a question about a third thing (next to norms and conditions of life), with respect to which the relative identity between a norm and conditions of life occurs, about the intermediary between that which is normative and that which is factual and which provides for the process of establishing of norms, as well as, finding solutions. It is the "sense" in which the idea of law or legal norm and conditions of life have to be identical to be brought to mutual "conformity". In Kaufmann's opinion such a sense is nothing else but the "nature of things" which determines the normative qualification of the reality. Since establishment of this "sense" appears to be "non-dispositive" and controlled inter-subjectively (namely, other subjects will reach a similar result) so, in conformity with the convergent concept of truth, the "nature of things" must be assigned a certain ontological status. According to Kaufmann this is a real relation which occurs between being and obligation, between the conditions of life and normative quality. However, it should be underlined that from the point of view of the analyzed system the "nature of things" is a correlate of constructed sense, a result of a construction which is based on the principle of consistent understanding of senses ("non-normative" and "normative") and is not a reality which is transcendent against the arrangement of senses. In Kaufmann's theory, inference from analogy appears to be a process of reshaping the concepts (senses) governed by tendency to understand the contents appearing in relations between that which is factual and that which is normative in a consistent way. The analogical structure of language (concepts) and recognition of being as composed of an essence and existence is an indispensable requirement for the possibility of the realisation of law, based on specifically understood inference from analogy. It is necessary to assume a moment of existence without content which ensures unity of cognition. Existence emerges thus as a condition of the possibility of cognition. According to Kaufmann, the "nature of things" is the heart of inference through analogy and the basis for establishment of finding of law. Inference from the "state of things" to a norm or from a norm to the "state of things" always means inference through the "nature of things". The "nature of things" is the proper medium of objective legal sense sought in every cognition of law. In Kaufmann's view, the question whether the "nature of things" is ultima ratio of interpretation of law or is only a means of supplement gaps in law or whether it is one of the sources of law, is posed wrongly. The "nature of things" serves neither to supplement the gaps nor is it a source of law as, for example, a legal norm may be. It is a certain kind of "catalyst" necessary in every act of making law and solving a concrete case. Owing to "nature of things" it is possible to bring to a mutual conformity the idea of law and possible conditions of life or legal norms and concrete conditions of life. In Kaufmann's conception the "nature of things" is not yet the ultimate basis for understanding the "non-dispositiveness" of law. The relation between obligation and being is determined in the process of the realisation of law. Both the process itself and that which is transformed in this process are given. A question about the ontological bases of "material" contents undergoing "treatment" in the process of the realisation of law and about being which is the basis of regularity of the occurrence of the process arises. Only this will allow an explanation that the result of the process is not optional. Thus, a question about reality to which law refers and about the subject realising the law has to be formed. To this, Kaufmann gives the following answer: that which is missing is man but not "empirical man" but man as a "person". A "person" understood as a set of relations between man and other people and things. A "person" is the intermediary between those things which are different — norm and case are brought to conformity. A "person" is that which is given and permanent in the process of the realisation of law. It determines the content of law, is "subject" of law; this aspect is described by Kaufmann as the "what" of the process of realisation of law. A "person" consists of precisely just these relations which undergo "treatment" in the process. On the other hand, a "person" is "a place" in which the processes of realisation of law occur, it is the "how" of normative discourse, a "person" is that which determines the procedure of the process, being "outside" of it. This aspect of a "person" is connected with the formal moment of law. A "person" being, at the same time, the "how" and the "what" of the process of the realisation of law, is also, to put it differently, a structural unity of relation and that which constitutes this relation (unity of relatio and relata). According to this approach a "person" is neither an object nor a subject. It exists only "in between". It is not substance. Law is the relation between being and obligation. That which is obligatory is connected with that which is general. That which is general does not exist on its own, it is not completely real. Accordingly, a "person" as such is also not real. It is relational, dynamic and historical. A "person" is not a state but an event. In Kaufmann's opinion, such a concept of a "person" helps to avoid the difficulties connected with the fungibility of law in classical legal positivism. A "person" is that which is given, which is not at free disposal and secures the moment of "non-dispositiveness" of law. Kaufmann concludes: "The idea (»nature«) of law is either the idea of a personal man or is nothing". Theory points at the structure of realising law and explains the process of adoption of general legal norms for a concrete situation. The analysis has shown however, that in this theory a satisfactory answer to the question about the ultimate foundations of law is not given. It seems that in the analyzed theory the understanding of human being takes place through understanding of law. What is good for man as a "person", what is just, what a "person" deserves may be determined only against the existing system of law. A "per¬son" adopted as a basis of law is the reality postulated in the analysis of the process of the realisation of law. It is a condition of possibility of this process ( explaining, on one hand, its unity and, on the other hand, the non-dispositive moments stated in this process). A "person" in the discussed theory is entirely defined by the structure of law, it can be nothing more than that which is given in law, what law refers to, what law is about. Being, which is a "person", is constituted by relations between people and objects, the relations which are based on fundamental links between norms and conditions of life established in a process of bringing them to conformity. It has to be assumed that man as a "person" is a subject of law only as far as realising law "treats" given senses according to their current configuration. The system of law is a starting point and it describes in content what man is as a "person". Moreover, being a "person" is the condition for entering legal relations. Consistently, Kaufmann writes that "empirical man" is not the subject of law, man is not "out of nature" a "person". People become "persons" due to the fact that they acknowledge each other as "persons" — acknowledging, at the same time, law. This acknowledgement is a con¬dition of existence, of the possibility of the occurrence of process of realisation of law and of constituting legal relations which ultimately constitute a "person". Kaufmann assumes, that law tends towards a moral aim: it may and must create an external freedom, without which the internal freedom to fulfil moral obligations cannot develop. However, this postulate is not based on the necessary structure of human being. From the point of view of his system, it is nothing more than only a condition for the possibility of the occurrence of the process of the realisation of law — lack of freedom would destroy the "how" of this process. Thus, the postulate to protect the freedom of personal acts has to be interpreted, in accordance with the analyzed theory, as a postulate, the fulfilment of which aims ultimately at the accomplishment of the very same process of realisation of law itself and not the realisation of a given man. Kaufmann considers a "person" to be an element which unites the system of law as a whole. Law is a structure of relations, which are interdependent and inter-contingent. Consequently, a "person" which is to form the ontological basis of law has to be entity consisting of all relations. Being also the "how" of the process of realisation of law, if a "person" is to warrant its unity, it has to be a common source for all procedures. Hence, a single "person" would constitute a subject of law. Man appears to be only a moment of a certain entirety, realisation of which should be an aim of his actions. Law, creating a "person" as an object and subject of law becomes a primary entity. In the analyzed theory, the basis for determination of aims which law sets to man is not the allocation of man-subject to something which improves him but rather, such relation is only just constituted by law. A question appears, why should aims set in law also be the aims of "empirical man"? Why is this "empirical man" to be punished in the name of a "person" understood in such a way? If, however, it is assumed that what is man is determined by a system which is superior to him, then man has to be understood only as a part of a whole and there are no grounds to prohibit istrumental treatment of man and so the road to all aspects of totalitarianism might be opened. A problem of the application of created theory to the reality arises, the reality which the theory pretends to explain. Ultimately in his theory Kaufmann does not give any systemic grounds for a radical questioning of the validity of any legal norms. Every new norm becomes an equal part of system of norms. It is only its interpretation and application to given conditions of life that may be disputable, however, this refers to all norms without exception. Cohesive inter-pretation of norms and applications is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of just law. New norms have to be interpreted in the light of others, correspondingly, the other norms require reinterpretation in the light of the new ones. Contradiction in interpretation of a norm does not form a basis for questioning norms but may serve only to question the manner of their interpretation (understanding). Therefore, no grounds exist to assume any legal norm as criminal or unjust, and in consequence, to question any consistently realised system based on formally, properly established norms, as "legal lawlessness". As law and a "person" do not exist without the process of realisation of law, the role of legal safety becomes crucial as the condition for the possibility of the occurrence of the process of realisation of law. Denying legal safety would be tantamount to negation of law in general (also of moral law) as negation of safety takes away, at the same time, the basis for occurrence of the process of realisation of law. Moreover, any lack of legal safety would also mean lack of a basis for the existence of man as a "person". Kaufmann's thesis, that civil disobedience is legalized only when it has a chance to lead to success, consistent with his concept of the foundations of law, seems to point directly to conclusions which deny the facts taken under consideration and doubtlessly Kaufmann's own intentions, since it would have to be assumed that accordingly there are no grounds to question a legal system in force based on violence which secures its operation. Force finally seems to determine which one of the mutually irreconcilable normative systems constitute law and which does not. A legitimate position is one which leads to success, it is the weaker system which is negated. If so, then basically violent imposition of law is not an act directed against the law in force but, to the contrary, realisation of law. In the context of the new system the former system of law may be talked about as unjust solely in the sense of being incapable of being consistently united with the new. However, at the base, ultimately, lies force which reaffirms differences and excludes from the process of realisation of law certain norms and their interpretations. Kaufmann was aiming at grounding of that which is "non-dispositive" in a certain given framework of interpretation. Nevertheless, he does not provide foundations for the understanding of phenomena, which he undertakes to explain at a point of departure. Instead of explaining them the theory negates the possibility of their existence. The reality postulated in regard to "non-dispositive" moments of the reconstructed process of acquiring law consist of a specifically understood "person", which appears in Kaufmann's conceptions as a condition of the possibility of the realisation of law. According to this approach understanding of a "person" may be only a function of law. To understand "legal lawlessness" and foundations of justice it is necessary to look for such theory of law in which understanding of man as a "person" and being is not a function of understanding of law (in which a "person" is not only a condition for possibility of reconstructed process of realisation of law; for possibility of cognition processes). It seems necessary to start from theory of being and a "person" based on broader experience than the one assumed by Kaufmann and reconstruct the ontological foundations of the process of realisation of law only in such perspective. Kaufmann points out that that to which law refers is ipsa res iusta a concrete relation of man to other people and things. This relation, in his theory, appears to be basically only just constituted by law (normative senses "applied" to conditions of life). Therefore, understanding the relation between a given man and other people and things which constitute the aim of his actions, that is understanding of good, is enacted against the background of constitution of senses; constitution which is a result of a process aiming towards consistent understanding of particular contents (of nor¬mative and non-normative senses). "Being" is secondary towards constructed senses it is only their correlate. The primary relation consists of relation of a man to law (system of norms), while the secondary relation is one of man to something which is the aim of his action (relation between man and good). Considering such approach it is difficult to envision a satisfying answer to the fundamental question: why does law put concrete man under any obligation to obey it? The source of this problem can be seen in reduction of the base for understanding good to content of obligation formulated in auto-reflection. Such reduction seems to be a consequence of Kaufmann's adoption of "convergent concept of truth" and in con¬sequence his recognition of indirect, essentialistic grasp of reality formulated in concepts as the basic and only foundation of theory of being and of law. In view of such an approach, analogy of law, concepts and being is the condition for the possibility of the process of transformation of senses which aims at consistent interpretation of all law. Existence is postulated with respect to the possibility of unity of experience and cognition. However, also a different approach to understanding of the problem of being and good is possible. In spontaneous cognition being is affirmed, first of all, not as a certain, non-contradictory, determined content, but as something existing. Together with a cer¬tain content (passed indirectly through notions) existence of being is co-given. The basis for unity of being is not formed by the consistence of content, as it is in the case of the theories departing from the analysis of cognition processes, but by an act of existence realising content (essence). Such an approach makes it also possible to go beyond the convergent concept of truth. It is worth mentioning that allocation of an agent to good is realised not only by the content of duty. A statement that something is good is primary with respect to determination of this good in content. The recognised good always bears some content, however, there are no reasons to base the concept of good exclusively on indirect, formulated in concepts cognition. As primary, can be adopted the relation of man to good and not of man to law. Determination in content appears to be only an articulation of aspectual cognition of being, as an object of action. In such a case the basis for relative unity of norm and conditions of life is not the "nature of things" understood as correlate of sense but it is relation to good based on internal constitution of man as potential, not self-sufficient being. It does not mean, that the moments of the process of realisation of law singled out by Kaufmann are not important to determination of what is just. He, quite rightly, points to significant role played by norms in the evaluation of concrete situations, in man's search for closer specification in content of good innate to him. The structure of process of determining law for a concrete situation, to a great degree corresponds to the processes of determining law which take place not only in the legal sciences. Kaufmann's analyses of the process of realisation of law show the complexity of the structure of these processes and point towards important moments allowing a better understanding of law and man. Nevertheless, these analyses cannot be a basis for construction of philosophical theory of law, theory which hopes to point out the ultimate, ontological foundations for understanding law. Kaufmann's results may become fully valid only in a more general perspective including broader experience at the point of departure. (shrink)

Kant realizes the principle of autonomy of the will as the sublime principle of morality. To him, if the principles we will are constituted by a being which poses universal laws, our "will or want" also acts autonomously and independently. Accordingly, moral laws are not only posed by humankind herself but she obliges herself to act according to the laws she herself has posed. Therefore, Kant takes autonomy into meticulous consideration in the realm of action and agency. With this (...) in mind, the current article analyzes this principle on the basis of three extant interpretations of autonomy that is individual, moral, and political autonomies; it elucidates these three kinds of autonomy while referring to their propinquity with Kant's. Ultimately, it comes in conclusion that whereas they have been grounded in different contexts, they do not mainly differ from Kant's autonomy of the will because of their commonality in the two meanings of "being free from dependence" and "capability to pose laws". For Kant, the autonomy of the will can be treated as some kind of moral autonomy: one must be bound/subjected to duties of morality in order to apply or act according merely to one's individual autonomy thereby the political sovereignty can also achieves its entire autonomy. (shrink)