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Kant in Metaethics: The Paradox of Autonomy, Solved by Publicity

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Abstract

Bagnoli addresses Kant’s importance for contemporary metaethics and defends Kantian constructivism as a plausible account of moral obligation. On this view, the appeal to normative principles is constitutive of the exercise of rationality in the sense that principles must be defensible to a plurality of agents; thus Kant is committed to a dialogical interpretation of autonomy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example, John Skorupski, “Aristotelianism and Modernity: Terence Irwin on the Development of Ethics,” European Journal of Philosophy 20, no. 2 (June 2012): 312–37.

  2. 2.

    A third sort of reason for rejecting the narrow understanding of metaethics is that it is too limiting to confine the scope of discussion to conceptual analysis, given the growing impact of the cognitive sciences in the philosophical debates about mind and agency. I will not discuss this sort of consideration because it does not directly concern Kantian scholarship.

  3. 3.

    H. L. A. Hart, “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49 (1948–49): 171–94; Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics,” in Existentialists andMystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1997), 59–175; and G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963). See Carla Bagnoli, “The Exploration of Moral Life,” in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays, ed. Justin Broackes (Oxford University Press, 2011), 197–225.

  4. 4.

    See John Rawls, “The Independence of Moral Theory,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 291.

  5. 5.

    The Kantian problem of theory-laden observations and moral judgments is particularly vivid in the 1950s and 1960s. See W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review 60, no. 1 (Jan. 1951): 20–43; and Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 12, no. 4 (Dec. 1947): 105–22. Compare Rawls, “Independence of Moral Theory,” 288–91. Goodman’s constructivism and Kantian constructivism share the claim that constructions are importantly constrained, and thus they both avoid radical relativism: in some cases there are syntactic constraints governing the manipulation of symbols, and in others there are normative constraints governing the very activity of reasoning.

  6. 6.

    John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” in Collected Papers, 303–58.

  7. 7.

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

  8. 8.

    Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 261; Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” 354; and Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, 203, 241.

  9. 9.

    For a recent survey of the debate on realism in Kantian ethics, see Karl Schafer, “Realism and Constructivism in Kantian Metaethics: Realism and Constructivism in a Kantian Context,” Philosophy Compass 10, no. 10 (Oct. 2015): 690–701; and Patrick Kain, “Realism and Anti-Realism in Kant’s Second Critique,” Philosophy Compass 1, no. 5 (Sept. 2006): 449–65. On the connection between constructivism and practical cognitivism, see Stephen Engstrom, “Constructivism and Practical Knowledge,” in Constructivism in Ethics, ed. Carla Bagnoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 133–52; and Carla Bagnoli, “Constructivism about Practical Knowledge,” in Constructivism in Ethics, 153–82. On the different strands of realism and constructivism in Kant’s ethics, see Oliver Sensen, “Kant’s Constructivism,” in Constructivism in Ethics, 63–81; Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Onora O’Neill, Constructing Authorities: Reason, Politics and Interpretation in Kant’s Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  10. 10.

    Arguably, Kant’s definition of autonomy is precisely the conception that a non-reductive but naturalistic ethical theory should offer: “The ethics of autonomy is the only one consistent with the metaphysics of the modern world” (Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 5).

  11. 11.

    Critics have singled out Christine Korsgaard’s argument of humanity for attack. See William J. FitzPatrick, “How Not to Be an Ethical Constructivist: A Critique of Korsgaard’s Neo-Kantian Constitutivism,” in Constructivism in Ethics, 41–62; Robert Stern, Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Robert Stern, “Constructivism and the Argument from Autonomy,” in Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, ed. Jimmy Lenman and Yonatan Shemmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 119–37; and Robert Stern, “Moral Skepticism, Constructivism, and the Value of Humanity,” in Constructivism in Ethics, 22–40. A different source of reservations against constructivism concerns the status and role of the “fact of reason.” See Bernard Williams, “Practical Necessity,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 124–31. For a reply on behalf of constructivism, see Carla Bagnoli, “Moral Objectivity: A Kantian Illusion?” Journal of Value Inquiry 49, nos. 1–2 (March 2015): 31–45.

  12. 12.

    See Carla Bagnoli, “Constructivism in Metaethics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2011), sect. 9, plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructivism-metaethics/; David Copp, “Is Constructivism an Alternative to Moral Realism?” in Constructivism in Ethics, 108–32; and Nelson Goodman, “On Starmaking,” Synthese 45, no. 2 (Oct. 1980): 213.

  13. 13.

    I defend a fairly robust account of “construction,” as an alternative to a proceduralist definition that is privileged in metaethics. I side with Onora O’Neill when she writes that “Kant’s repeated use of metaphors of construction and collaboration in his discussions of reasoning make it natural to speak of his approach and method as constructivist, and of his aim as the construction of reason’s authority” (Constructing Authorities, 4). For a more extensive argument, see Bagnoli, “Constructivism about Practical Knowledge”; and Carla Bagnoli, “Emotions and the Categorical Authority of Moral Reason,” in Morality and the Emotions, ed. Carla Bagnoli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 62–81.

  14. 14.

    Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 156. The objection has been known since Aquinas, and has been voiced also by Suarez, Pufendorf, and Hobbes. All of them think that the normative and motivational force of obligation rests on an external legislator. See Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 21–27.

  15. 15.

    Many have objected to the ideal of self-sufficiency. See for instance Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); and Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essay on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999). For the objection of uniformity, see, for example, Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 370, 376.

  16. 16.

    The term “dialogical” is also meant to emphasize that the aspect of intersubjectivity is shared by Kantians and Hegelians. See Carla Bagnoli, “Respect and Membership in the Moral Community,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10, no. 2 (April 2007): 113–28. In accordance with the view that constructivism vindicates the proper sort of authority, I have provided a constructivist account of practical knowledge in Bagnoli, “Constructivism about Practical Knowledge.”

  17. 17.

    The term “publicity” occurs in various constructivist interpretations of Kant. Rawls refers to “public recognition” in explaining the requirements of the categorical imperative in terms of the “law of nature” formulation, and then in the formulation of the kingdom of ends. See Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, 171, 208–14. Rawls importantly connects the idea of publicity with the requisites for moral membership. On publicity as a formal requirement of rational justification, see also Rawls, “Independence of Moral Theory.”

  18. 18.

    On the importance of various senses of autonomy of the will, see Stephen Darwall, “The Value of Autonomy and Autonomy of the Will,” Ethics 116, no. 2 (Jan. 2006): 263–84.

  19. 19.

    As O’Neill remarks, this is one rare case in which Kant uses the term Selbstgesetzegebend (“Self-Legislation, Autonomy, and the Form of Law,” in Constructing Authorities, 123n3). Apparently, Kant never uses the term Selbstgesetzgebung or Selbstgesetzgeber; instead, he tends to use non-reflexive terms such as “lawgiver” and “lawgiving.”

  20. 20.

    Here, Kant speaks of human beings as “subject only to laws given by himself but still universal” (G 4:432).

  21. 21.

    The third formula commands “to do no action on any other maxim than one such that it would be consistent with it to be a universal law, and hence to act only so that the will could regard itself as at the same time giving universal law through its maxim” (G 4:434).

  22. 22.

    “The principle of autonomy is, therefore: to choose only in such a way that the maxims of your choice are also included as universal law in the same volition” (G 4:440). On the connection between the claim about universality in scope and the principle of autonomy stated above, see also G 4:431. In what follows I distinguish lawlikeness as a formal requirement from publicity as a scope requirement; they are both formal and structural requirements.

  23. 23.

    “A rational being belongs as a member to the kingdom of ends when he gives universal laws in it but is also himself subject to these laws. He belongs to it as sovereign when, as lawgiving, he is not subject to the will of any other” (G 4:433).

  24. 24.

    The forensic language is used to explicate the nature of reason itself – for example, “This court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself” (Axi–xii). As O’Neill points out, the pervasive occurrence of forensic and political metaphors is an indication that Kant opposes the Cartesian and rationalist methods of inquiry, and proposes a “political,” or public, conception of reason. See O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, 3–28.

  25. 25.

    See Bagnoli, “Constructivism about Practical Knowledge,” §4, esp. 168–70.

  26. 26.

    This formulation is preferable to claiming that the rational deliberator acts as a representative of the moral community, which identifies the standpoint from which to deliberate. The formulation in terms of co-legislators does not generate the false impression that there is already a moral community of which the agent is a member.

  27. 27.

    Andrews Reath, Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 100.

  28. 28.

    For Reath, it is because of the collapse between sovereign and subject of the law that “my reasoning binds others to recognize its validity” (Ibid., 111; see also 78, 104).

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 112.

  30. 30.

    The third formula of the categorical imperative specifies the scope of universality and the condition of moral membership, while connecting to the other two formulas: “A rational being must always regard himself as lawgiving in a kingdom of ends possible through freedom of the will, whether as a member or as sovereign” (G 4:434).

  31. 31.

    “To make my own will the author of my obligations seems to leave both their content and their bindingness at my discretion, which contradicts the idea that I am obligated by them. If we reply to this objection by emphasizing the rationality of these laws as what binds me, then we seem to be transferring the source of obligation from my will to the canons of rationality. The notion of self-legislation becomes a deception or at best a euphemism” (Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, 156).

  32. 32.

    To explicate the difference, O’Neill says that Kant’s sort of reflexivity is “impersonal,” rather than “personal” (Constructing Authorities, 131–36). But this characterization fails to dissolve Wood’s dilemma because it concedes the polarity between the impersonal and personal conceptions.

  33. 33.

    William of Ockham, De connexione virtutum, in Opera Theologica, ed. G. Etzkorn and F. Kelley, vol. 7 (New York: St. Bonaventure, 1984), 11.

  34. 34.

    Compare Karl Ameriks, “Is Practical Justification in Kant Ultimately Dogmatic?” in Kant on Practical Justification: Interprative Essays, ed. Mark Timmons and Sorin Baiasu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153–75. See also Karl Schafer, “Realism and Constructivism in Kantian Metaethics.”

  35. 35.

    This claim follows from standard realist readings. See Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, 30; Charles Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 83–84; and Karl Ameriks, “On Two Non-Realist Interpretations of Kant’s Ethics,” in Interpreting Kant’s “Critiques” (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 263–82.

  36. 36.

    See Onora O’Neill, “Vindicating Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 280–308; O’Neill, “Self-Legislation, Autonomy, and the Form of Law,” 121–36; Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “The Kantian Conception of Autonomy,” in Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 76–96; and J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  37. 37.

    The claim about self-legislation leaves open the possibility that there are no moral principles of this form – that is, principles that all rational agents would accept; this possibility is foreclosed on other grounds. Even so, it does not follow that no one is bound by principles with which one is not willing to comply, or that morality does not in itself have the power to bind us unless we really want to. See Rüdiger Bittner, What Reason Demands, trans. Theodore Talbot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 104–10.

  38. 38.

    “The concept of every rational being as one who must regard himself as giving universal law through all the maxims of his will, so as to appraise himself and his actions from this point of view, leads to a very fruitful concept dependent upon it, namely that of a kingdom of ends” (G 4:433). (Reich can be translated as “commonwealth.”) “By a kingdom I understand a systematic union of various rational beings though common laws” (G 4:433).

  39. 39.

    For a more extended argument, see Bagnoli, “Emotions and the Categorical Authority of Moral Reasons.”

  40. 40.

    See Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 32, 213–42.

  41. 41.

    “I argue therefore that the authority to address practical reasons can take forms that are quite different from the epistemic authority that is presupposed either by theoretical reason-giving or by other forms of practical reason-giving, like advice, where the reasons are not second-personal” (Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 59).

  42. 42.

    The matter is complicated by the ambiguity of the expression “second-personal” as a qualification of a speech act. Some specific obligations arise when one is explicitly addressed second-personally, for example, when I ask you to pay attention to what you are reading. But in Darwall’s view it seems that we incur second-personal obligations any time we are in the presence of somebody who has the authority to issue moral demands. This is because what makes something second-personal is its conceptual link to addressing a demand. See Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 59.

  43. 43.

    Raz, Morality of Freedom, 370n179.

  44. 44.

    On the virtues of dependency, see MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals; and Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, eds., Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  45. 45.

    For a more extensive argument identifying the role of vulnerability in a constructivist account of practical reasoning, see Carla Bagnoli, “Vulnerability and the Incompleteness of Practical Reason,” in Vulnerability in Context, ed. Christine Strahele (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Compare Paul Formosa, “The Role of Vulnerability in Kantian Ethics,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, 88–109; and Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, 33–59.

  46. 46.

    See O’Neill, Constructions of Reason, 53–57, 66–77.

  47. 47.

    “Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings…. Now there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection…. The very existence of reason depends upon this freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back” (A738–39/B766–67).

  48. 48.

    This claim should not be confused with another important sense in which reasoning is public, that is, governed by confrontation and comparison, rather than by the appeal to evidence.

  49. 49.

    O’Neill takes publicity to include the public use of reason (Constructions of Reason, 28–50, 33–34, 70–71, 206). The implication of her view is that the authority of moral norms does not depend solely on the formal features of the norms, but it is ultimately established by public communication, that is, through practices governed by mutual respect and recognition.

  50. 50.

    Earlier versions of this paper have been discussed at the Department of Philosophy at the New School of Social Research in New York, and at the Department of Philosophy at Notre Dame University, cosponsored by the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, in 2011. I would like to thank these audiences, Karl Ameriks, Robert Audi, Jay Bernstein, Alice Crary, Mark Lebar, Elijah Millgram, Onora O’Neill, Christine Korsgaard, Andrews Reath, and especially Stefano Bacin, for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts.

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  1. Department of Studies on Language and Culture, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Carla Bagnoli

  2. Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Carla Bagnoli

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Correspondence to Carla Bagnoli .

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  1. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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Bagnoli, C. (2017). Kant in Metaethics: The Paradox of Autonomy, Solved by Publicity. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_16

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