Abstract
In an important passage in Kant’s Groundwork, he says: “[W]e cannot do morality a worse service than by seeking to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to see if it is fit to serve as an original example—that is, as a model: it can in no way supply the prime source for the concept of morality” (4: p. 408). This is an important methodological pronouncement, and it appears to commit Kant to what might be called a “top-down” procedure for constructing an ethical theory—or at least for defending substantive moral principles. A contrasting method we might call “bottom-up” would attribute to what are commonly called intuitions, especially those concerning concrete cases, a basic epistemological role in such a theoretical normative project. This paper undertakes, first, to clarify both kinds of procedure and to sketch a philosophical methodology that can do justice to certain merits of each procedure; second, to explore, drawing on a methodological analysis the paper will outline, Kant’s actual operative method in much of his ethical writing, particularly but not exclusively the Groundwork; and third, to appraise some aspects of Kant’s actual methods of theory-building as it is seen in his development of his ethical framework. The concluding reflections will show that Kant’s overall achievement in moral philosophy does not depend on certain of his metaphilosophical views. The paper will also indicate some directions of moral inquiry that may be promising for both Kantian and other approaches in moral philosophy.
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Notes
Here and elsewhere in referring to this book references will be to sections numbered as in the Prussian Ed. and, unless otherwise specified the translation is H. J. Paton’s The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948). For detailed discussion of Kant’s use of examples, see Robert B. Louden, “Making the Law Visible: The Role of Example in Kant’s Ethics,” in Louden’s Kant’s Human Being (Oxford: OUP, 2011),” pp. 91–104.
In 4 [the Groundwork]: p. 421 Kant says conditionally that “all imperatives of duty can be derived from this” (the universal law formulation in that section); but he surely holds this. Cf. 4: p. 429 where, having described rational nature as the ground of the imperative (as the humanity formula), he says that from it “it must be possible to derive all the laws of the will.”
See Lewis White Beck, trans., Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 5: pp. 159–160 (pp. 163–164). Mary Gregor’s translation is consistent with this).
Regarding conflicting obligations, Ross, e.g., approvingly cites Aristotle’s dictum in NE 1109b23, “The decision rests with perception.” See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford 1930), p. 32.
See Louis Infeld, trans., Lectures on Ethics (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 111. Page references are to Lewis White Beck’s edition (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1963).
See her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), p. 166. She later quotes him as saying that judgment—which is of course crucial for (among other things) framing the right maxims “cannot be taught” (op. cit., p. 167).
Some qualifications are needed, but not crucial here. I offer an account of role modeling applicable to Kantian moral psychology in relation to learning moral principles in “Role Modeling and Reasons: Developmental and Normative Grounds of Moral Virtues,” in Noell Birondo and Stewart Braun, eds., Virtue’s Reasons: New Essays on Virtue, Character, and Reasons (New York: Routledge, 2017), 126–44.
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930), p. 282.
See Kant’s Introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals, in Mary J. Gregor, trans., The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 13.
Kant makes it clear in many places that the sense in which a priori knowledge is independent of experience does not entail that no experience is required for understanding the a priori propositions in question. See, e.g., CpR B1-2.
For Ross, the obligation is prima facie; for Kant, perfect obligations are often represented as always final, but, as I will shortly explain, that rigoristic position is not essential to his view.
Granted, Kant says, “A conflict of duties… is inconceivable.” See The Metaphysics of Morals (6: p. 223). But Kant quickly adds that two “grounds of obligation can conflict” (ibid.). That is all Rossians require, since it is only prima facie and not final duties that they take to conflict. Passages supporting the compatibility of Kant’s view with Ross’s appear on pp. 261, 273, and 296 in Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, eds., Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).
See the Virgilantius notes, in Heath and Schneewind, op. cit., p. 296.
Gregor has ‘evil in itself’, but the difference does not affect my point here.
See Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 40. Significantly, Hill does not say ‘impossible’.
Sometimes Kant even seems to presuppose that we always act on a maxim, as in fact the wording of at least the universality formulations of the Categorical Imperative may suggest.
Much defense of a distinction between incommensurability and incomparability is provided by Ruth Chang, e.g., in her introduction to her edited collection, Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997). For critical discussion of the distinction and of whether incommensurability forces a recognition of a kind of relativism, see Martjin Boot, “Parity, Incomparability, and Justified Choice,” Philosophical Studies 146 (2009), pp. 75–92 and Incommensurability and its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and Justice (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017).
See on this point Karl Ameriks, “A Common-Sense Kant?”, Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 79 (2005), pp. 19–45.
See Sir David Ross, Kant’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: OUP, 1954), p. 21. Ross should not be taken to ignore Kant’s special use of ‘Anschauung’, commonly translated by ‘intuition’, but Ross might have noticed Kant’s saying (in the context of discussing the Humanity Formula and its relation to dignity) that in indicating his reason for formulating the Categorical Imperative in different ways he intends “to bring an idea of reason closer to intuition (by a certain analogy) and thereby to feeling” (4: p. 436).
Infeld trans. (cited in note 5), p. 5. Heath’s translation has ‘gives man an inner absolute worth of morality’. See Heath and Schneewind, op. cit., p. 44. In either case the striking point is that Kant speaks of the inner worth of persons not as brutely possessed by them but as given by—presumably in some way grounded in—a property (a kind of agential one). This is both plausible and consonant with some leading current views in the ontology of ethics.
One might indeed wonder whether Kant took the Humanity Formula as a kind of secular version of the second Biblical love commandment, as is perhaps suggested by Kant’s own reference to it in, among other places (5: p. 83).
The error here may trace to assimilating the self-evident to the Aristotelian indemonstrable, roughly that to which nothing is epistemically prior. I have discussed the difference in chapter 2 of The Good in the Right, but here I would stress simply that Kant’s ethics does not depend on any such conflation. He does say that practical laws (in the form of universalizable maxims) are “indemonstrable and yet apodictic” (Doctrine of Virtue 224], but here he may well be suggesting both that our freedom sometimes allows more than one law as providing a directive for action in a given context or that its rational support from the Categorical Imperative is non-demonstrative—even if synthetic a priori—thus in either case including what would now be called intuitive. The element here of (limited) pluralism about rules of action—often thought impossible for Kant—deserves serious study but cannot be pursued here.
It may be useful to recall Aristotle’s distinction between “arguments from principles and arguments toward principles” (NE 1095a31ff.) Even if the top level has higher epistemic authority, one might countenance, as Aristotle apparently does, some degree of epistemic authority on the part of the cases from which (as with intuitively clear concrete instances) one might, perhaps by intuitive induction, argue for a principle or explanation.
I have discussed the valuational status Kant attributes to good will in a number of places, arguing that, by contrast with other inherent goods, it cannot be undeservedly possessed. See ch 3 of Practical Reasoning (London: Routledge, 1989) and, for more detail, in a successor volume, Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (London: Routledge, 2006). Granted, one could say a deserved honor cannot be undeservedly possessed; but that trivial point is consistent with the status of good will described in the text in relation to other intrinsic goods.
For detailed discussion of the sense in which good will conditions other goods, see Eric Watkins, “The Unconditioned Goodness of the Good Will,” forthcoming.
J. S. Mill raised one kind of problem of this kind in ch 1 of Utilitarianism, and there have been a host of objections raising such problems since Mill.
This is not to suggest that Kant provided enough explanation of the Humanity Formula to solve the problem. However the problem is described, I agree with Karl Ameriks that “Ultimately…there remains in Kant a central and insufficiently justified belief in an intrinsic connection between morality and absolute freedom.” See Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: OUP, 2003), pp. 161–192, 162.
Here I use Mary Gregor’s translation (romanizing the italics); she uses ‘merely’ where some others have ‘simply’, which the context indicates is less close to Kant’s overall intentions.
Here Hill speaks for the constructivist line of interpretation of Kantian ethics favored by John Rawls and many of his students: “To review, on the Kantian perspective, the ultimate source of human values is not Platonic forms, natural teleology, God’s will, or universal human sentiment. Ultimately, all that is valuable for us stems somehow from the reflective endorsements of human beings” (op. cit., p. 77.) Hill’s rejected alternatives do not include rational intuition. By contrast, Allen W. Wood holds (consistently with my view) that “Kant agrees with the British rationalists’ endorsement of the idea that values lie in the nature of things rather than being conferred on things by someone’s will.” See Kantian Ethics (Cambridge UP 2008), p. 142. Some such axiological realism certainly seems explicit in 4: p. 428, where Kant ringingly affirms the existence of something (“the human being”) “which in itself has an absolute worth.”
Much that I say here and in the remainder of this section is controversial, but I provide a full-scale interpretation of the Humanity Formula—taken in an intuitive way—in Means, Ends, and Persons: The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula (OUP 2016), and I there suggest how endorsing at least much of its normative force is consistent with Kant’s position. My effort here is less ambitious, emphasizing only a few elements of a Kantian axiology. If we emphasize our own perfection and the happiness of others as what Kant considers obligatory ends, then the content of those notions provides teleological grounds for moral obligations. For development of this line see Wood, op. cit., esp. chapter 9, on duties, and also Huston Smit and Mark Timmons, “Kant’s Grounding Project in The Doctrine of Virtue,” in Mark Timmons and Sorin Baiasu, eds., Kant on Practical Justification (Oxford: OUP, 2013), pp. 229–268.
This is a major claim I cannot defend here. But I have suggested a related problem for constructivism as Rawls and others have presented it: it appears, ironically, to be best conceived as committed to reductive naturalism. See my “Moral Knowledge,” in Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard, eds., The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 380–392.
Kant says, e.g., “the dignity of man consists precisely in his capacity to make universal law” (440, p 107), where “the mere dignity… of rational nature in man… should function as an inflexible precept of the will” (85, p. 106).
This defense of Kant against the empty formalism objection usefully contrasts with Christine Korsgaard’s idea that “our own perfection and the happiness of others are identified as obligatory by his contradiction in the will test.” See “Acting for a Reason,” in her The Constitution of Agency” (Oxford 2008), pp. 205–229, 220). My view is compatible with one way to interpret that test but avoids dependence on contingent or highly controversial premises. For a detailed discussion of how moral obligations are determined in Kant’s ethical framework, see Smit and Timmons, op. cit.
I have articulated this position in ch 3 of The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton, PUP, 2004) and proposed extensions and refinements of it in “Kantian Intuitionism as a Framework for the Justification of Moral Judgments,” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 2 (2012), pp. 128–151. My understanding of the Humanity formula is developed at length in Means, Ends, and Persons: The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
This paper has benefited from presentations at Birkbeck College London, Colgate University, Colorado State University, the Goethe University, Frankfurt, and St. Louis University, and for helpful comments I particularly want to thank Gabrielle Gava, Patrick Kain, Pauline Kleingeld, Mark Timmons, Eric Watkins, Marcus Willaschek, and, especially, Karl Ameriks and Katharina Kraus.
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Audi, R. Methodological reflections on Kant’s ethical theory. Synthese 198 (Suppl 13), 3155–3170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01977-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01977-x