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Kant’s Justification of Ethics

Kant’s Justification of Ethics

OWEN WARE

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom

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© Owen Ware 2021

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Preface

I once heard it said that because of the sheer amount of time it takes, the person who begins writing a book is not the same person who finishes it. Nothing could be more true about my experience working on this project. The research began in the fall of 2006 when I enrolled in ‘Kant’s Ethics’, a PhD seminar co-taught by Sergio Tenenbaum and Arthur Ripstein at the University of Toronto. My final paper ended up becoming my first publication on Kant, ‘The Duty of SelfKnowledge’ (2009). After my area examination, I decided to pursue my dissertation project on Kant’s moral philosophy under the supervision of Paul Franks, which I defended in the summer of 2010. In the years that followed, I abandoned some of the views I upheld in my dissertation, went on to pursue different aspects of Kant’s ethics, and even ventured into the world of post-Kantian philosophy, writing a book on Fichte (2020) along the way. How the present book came into being is a bit of a mystery, even to me, but I can identify one set of encounters that made its existence possible.

During the 2015–2016 academic year I lived in Frankfurt as a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Goethe-Universität. It was during that year that I had the pleasure of meeting Gabriele Gava, who showed me a hospitality that it seems only Italians are capable of. It was during that year, involving many conversations over espresso, that Gabriele helped me see Kant’s methodology (specifically his distinction of analytic and synthetic procedures) as a key for unlocking the critical system. What I learned from Gabriele helped bring about a kind of revolution in my way of understanding Kant, and it was largely thanks to him that I was able to piece together a new way of applying the analytic-synthetic distinction to Kant’s project of moral justification in the Groundwork and the second Critique In Frankfurt I also benefitted from conversations with Marcus Willaschek and members of his Kant-Arbeitskreis. Among the members of the Arbeitskreis, I was fortunate to become friends with Thomas Höwing, whose warmth and friendliness made my stay in Germany one I shall never forget.

Many other individuals helped me prior to, and after, my stay in Frankfurt. In addition to my dissertation committee members and current colleagues, Sergio Tenenbaum and Arthur Ripstein, I must first thank two individuals from my student days at the University of Toronto who I am now proud to call friends: Anthony Bruno and Ariel Zylberman. The amount of care they have both shown in helping me refine my work is staggering. I am also grateful to Karl Ameriks, Barbara Herman, and Robert Stern for providing me with feedback and

encouragement during the early years of my post-dissertation life, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an assistant professor. One will see in this book just how much the spirit of my reading of Kant is shaped by their scholarship.

I have benefitted from regular conversations with colleagues at the institutions where I worked, including Kristen Gjesdal, David Wolfsdorf, Sam Black, Evan Tiffany, Dai Heide, and many others. One could not ask for a better colleague than Dai; and he helped me see—more than anyone else—the importance of Kant’s metaphysics for understanding his practical philosophy. Other people who have helped shape the views I present in this book, either through written or spoken feedback, include Don Ainslie, Stefano Bacin, Jochen Bojanowski, Claudia Blöser, John Callanan, Robert Clewis, Ben Crowe, Janelle DeWitt, Stephen Engstrom, Michael Forster, Markus Gabriel, Sebastian Gardner, Jeanine Grenberg, Hannah Ginsborg, Paul Guyer, Andree Hahmann, Bob Hanna, Chris Herrera, Karolina Hübner, Thomas Khurana, Karin Nisenbaum, Sven Nyholm, Lara Ostaric, Markus Kohl, Bernd Ludwig, Dean Moyar, Heiko Puls, Andrews Reath, Francey Russell, Lisa Shapiro, Feroz Shah, Irina Schumski, Nick Stang, Martin Sticker, Oliver Sensen, Ulrich Schlösser, Joe Saunders, Krista Thomason, Allen Wood, Benjamin Yost, my two Oxford University Press reviewers, and my supportive editor, Peter Momtchiloff. I do not know how I can repay all these debts of gratitude, and all I can say when I think of these individuals is thank you

I am grateful to have the permission to reuse portions of my previously published articles, many of which have been revised or rewritten here. Chapter 1 draws from ‘Skepticism in Kant’s Groundwork’, European Journal of Philosophy (2016). Chapter 2 draws from ‘Rethinking Kant’s Fact of Reason’, Philosophers’ Imprint (2014). Chapter 3 draws from ‘Kant’s Deductions of Morality and Freedom’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2017). Chapter 4 draws from ‘Kant on Moral Sensibility and Moral Motivation’, Journal of the History of Philosophy (2014) and ‘Accessing the Moral Law through Feeling’, Kantian Review (2015). And Chapter 5 draws from ‘The Duty of Self-Knowledge’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2009).

While writing this book, I have been fortunate to receive the love, support, and companionship of Leah Ware. She makes it all worth it.

Last, but not least, I have had the privilege of teaching many talented students at Temple University, Simon Fraser University, and at my current institution, the University of Toronto. When I wrote this book, I had my students at the forefront of my mind. They have helped me grow as a writer, scholar, and aspiring philosopher more than they possibly could know. This book is dedicated to them.

Italo Calvino once wrote that ‘every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading’, from which it follows, he added, that ‘a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’1 I find these definitions fitting when it comes to the Groundwork and the second Critique, for both of these texts contain—despite their relatively small size—a conceptual richness and systematicity that few other works in the history of ethics have attained. It is perhaps this seemingly inexhaustible quality that underlies the variety of interpretations and controversies that continue to surround Kant’s moral philosophy today. My method for reading Kant in this book is to take the principle of charity to heart and try, as best as I can, to present his arguments in a coherent, consistent, and unified manner. This is not because I think Kant should have the last word, but because I find the principle of charity the most powerful tool for unlocking a philosopher’s position. I do not pretend to have solved all the mysteries of Kant’s project of justifying ethics in the Groundwork and the second Critique; nor do I regard my interpretations here as final or beyond fixing. But this much is clear: Whether or not the reader is sympathetic to Kant, the fact stands that Kant is a ‘classic author’ as Calvino defines it: ‘the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.’2

1 Calvino (1982, 128).

2 Calvino (1982, 130).

Abbreviations

In the case of the Critique of Pure Reason, I follow the standard practice of referring to the 1781 (A) and 1787 (B) editions. For all other texts, citations appear in the order of abbreviation, volume number, and page number from the Akademie Ausgabe, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (29 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900ff). Translation decisions are my own, though I have consulted (and sometimes followed) The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992ff).

Kant’s Works

A/B Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), 1781/87.

Anth Die Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View), 1798.

Br Briefe (Letters), various dates.

FM Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitzens und Wolf’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat? (What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany since Wolff?), 1793/1804.

G Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), 1785.

GSE Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime), 1764.

ID De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis (Inaugural Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World), 1770.

KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason), 1788.

KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment), 1790.

MpVT ‘Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee’ (‘On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Philosophy’), 1791.

MS Die Metaphysik der Sitten (The Metaphysics of Morals), 1797.

ND Nova dilucidatio (A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition), 1755.

NVE ‘Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre von 1765–1766’ (‘Announcement of the Programme of his Lectures for the Winter Semester of 1765–1766’), 1765.

OP Opus Postumum.

Päd Pädagogik (Education), 1803.

R Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Religion witihin the Boundaries of Mere Reason), 1793.

xii Abbreviations

Refl Reflexionen, various dates.

RezSchulz Recension von Schulz’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur Sittenlehre für alle Menschen (Review of Schulz), 1784.

TP Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis (On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice), 1793.

ÜGTP Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie (On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy), 1788.

V-Met-L2/Pölitz Kant Metaphysik L 2 Pölitz (Lectures on Metaphysics Pölitz), 1790/1791.

V-Met/Mron Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1782/1783 Metaphysik Mrongovius (Lectures on Metaphysics Mrongovius), 1782/1783.

V-Met/Heinze Kant Metaphysik L1 Heinze (Lectures on Metaphysics Heinz), 1770–1775.

V-Mo/Collins Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1784/1785. Moralphilosophie Collins (Lectures on Moral Philosophy Collins), 1784/1785.

V-Phil-Th/Pölitz Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1783/1784 Philosophische Religionslehre nach Pölitz (Lectures on the Doctrine of Religion Pölitz), 1783/1784.

V-PP/Herder Praktische Philosophie Herder (Practical Philosophy Herder), 1762/1763.

WDO Was heißt sich im Denken orientiren? (What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?), 1786.

Plato was right in raising this question and asking, as he used to do, Are we on the way from or to the first principles? There is a difference as there is in a racecourse between the course from the judges to the turning-point and the way back.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1.4)

The schools are instructed to pretend to no higher or more comprehensive insight on any point touching the universal human concerns than the insight that is accessible to the great multitude (who are always most worthy of our respect), and to limit themselves to the cultivation of those grounds of proof alone that can be grasped universally and are sufficient from a moral standpoint.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (B xxxiii)

Introduction

The Quiet Avoidance of Justification

When we survey the history of ethics in the West from the ancient Greeks to the present, we see that approaches to moral justification divide roughly into two camps. The first camp starts with a minimal set of premises, say, a thin conception of what it means to be a rational agent, and it then proceeds to derive a substantive account of moral requirements and their normativity. This would be an ambitious strategy of justification, since it tries to get a lot (moral normativity) from very little (a mere capacity to respond to reasons). While clearly a strong version of the ambitious approach, we can easily identify more moderate examples that still share the same form, such as social contract theories that only appeal to self-interest and the instrumental principle. The second camp goes about the task of justification the other way around. Instead of starting with very little, advocates of this strategy start with more—perhaps a whole lot more—such as a conception of thick ethical virtues, and then they work to explain their function, say, for securing an agent’s flourishing. This is what I would call a modest strategy of justification, for instead of trying to get us into the world of morality, it already presupposes our home within that world. The second approach merely attempts to make the standpoint of morality intelligible for those already committed to it.

Ever since the revival of interest among English-speaking scholars in Kant’s philosophy, dating from the 1960s, one can detect a boundary line dividing those who approach his ethics through the framework of the ambitious strategy and those who approach it through the framework of the modest strategy. Among the former we can include the work of Thomas Nagel, David Velleman, and Christine Korsgaard; among the latter, the work of John Rawls, Barbara Herman, and Thomas Hill.1 A parallel boundary line also divides scholars working on Kant’s theoretical philosophy, especially with regard to his transcendental deduction of the categories. Those who give the deduction an ambitious interpretation, according to which we get a lot (the validity of the categories) from very little (a mere capacity for representation) include Peter Strawson, Jonathan Bennett, and Robert Wolff.2 Among those who give the deduction a more modest interpretation, we can

1 See Nagel (1970), Velleman (1989, 2000, 2009), Korsgaard (1996a, 1996b, 2008, 2009), Rawls (1989), Herman (2007), and Hill (2012).

2 See Strawson (1966), Bennett (1966), and Wolff (1963).

Kant’s Justification of Ethics. Owen Ware, Oxford University Press (2021). © Owen Ware. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849933.003.0001

identify Karl Ameriks, Stephen Engstrom, and Robert Stern.3 What motivates these two boundary lines is difficult to tell, but I believe it is partly the result of the meta-philosophical assumptions these writers uphold. In particular, what seems to divide their positions is an attitude toward skepticism, with the first group arguing that Kant’s aim in his theoretical and moral philosophy is to refute the skeptic, and the second group arguing instead that Kant was either uninterested in skepticism or, at most, only concerned to diagnose it.4

My reasons for drawing attention to the reception of Kant’s philosophy is to show just how surprising it is that after sixty years of scholarship, the literature devoted to Kant’s justification of ethics is still rather thin. Some time ago Barbara Herman described the state of affairs as follows:

In the resurgence of work on Kant’s ethics, one notices the quiet avoidance of the issue of justification. This is to some extent the harmless by-product of a new enthusiasm generated by success with the substantive ethical theory. But the other thing at work, I believe, is the suspicion that the project of justification in Kantian ethics is intractable.5

Since Herman wrote these words in 1989, a handful of monographs have appeared devoted to what were once ‘scarcely charted regions’ in Section III of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the first chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason.6 For the most part, however, the suspicion Herman mentions is very much alive, since scholars continue to disagree over nearly every aspect of Kant’s arguments for freedom and morality. While it is not the goal of my book to settle these controversies once and for all, I hope to show that the parameters of these disputes have been unduly narrow, and that Kant’s project of justification links up, in deep and interesting ways, with his theories of moral motivation, moral feeling, and moral conscience.

Like advocates of the modest interpretation, I do not think that Kant was seeking to refute the skeptic on the skeptic’s own terms. Nor do I think that Kant ever sought to derive the moral law or its normativity from a thin conception of what it means to be a rational agent, as I will argue in Chapter 3. However, matters are complicated by the fact that Kant’s so-called modest starting point is not a conception of ethical life in the Aristotelian sense, involving thick virtues, or in the Hegelian sense, involving concrete institutions, but in a conception of ‘common

3 See Ameriks (2003), Engstrom (1994), and Stern (1999).

4 There is a precedent in Aristotle, who acknowledges the limited force of arguments in ethics. ‘Now if arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly, as Theognis says, have won very great rewards, and such rewards should have been provided; but as things are, while they seem to have power to encourage and stimulate the generous-minded among our youth, and to make a character which is gently born, and a true lover of what is noble, ready to be possessed by virtue, they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness’ (1984, X.9).

5 Herman (1989, 131).

6 See Schönecker (1999), Allison (2011), Grenberg (2013), and Puls (2016).

human reason’ (gemeinen Menschenvernunft). And while the form of Kant’s strategy is modest insofar as it works within this conception, the content is arguably not modest at all. If anything, it is wildly ambitious insofar as Kant frames the ends and interests of common human reason in terms of a moral teleology (regarding our essential ends), a moral theology (regarding ideas of the soul and God), and a seemingly robust metaphysics (regarding a distinction between phenomena and noumena). I want to emphasize this from the outset as a reminder that Kant’s attempt to reorient philosophy from a common standpoint is not an innocent philosophical move. Nor is it simply a matter of describing moral experience from a first-person perspective, free from presuppositions. For Kant, as we shall see, the appeal of a common standpoint is that it reveals a use of reason already bound up with moral, religious, and even metaphysical concepts.7

This aspect of Kant’s position will likely strike readers today as antiquated. But in my view it is something we should acknowledge and, if not come to terms with, then at least accept on the grounds of textual accuracy. For many years it was not unusual to hear philosophers denounce Kant’s approach to ethics on the grounds of its ‘extravagant metaphysical luggage’,8 and many shared Strawson’s view that if there is lasting value to Kant’s philosophy, it lies on the merely conceptual (which is to say non-metaphysical) side of his project.9 This sentiment has enjoyed a long lifespan in the field of Kantian ethics, which to this day appears unaffected by a growing wave of metaphysics-friendly approaches to the first Critique.10 Not that long ago, for instance, one prominent ethicist believed it would attract his readership to declare, quite boldly, that ‘we can be naturalists while preserving the moral and psychological richness of Kant’.11 My own view is that separating Kant’s ethics and his metaphysics cannot be won so easily. Nor am I of the opinion that such a separation would be desirable. At any rate, a conviction that will guide my discussion here is that it is worthwhile to approach Kant on his own terms, extravagant luggage and all, and resist the temptation to make his work conform to contemporary trends. Kant himself was of the view that we ‘always return to metaphysics’ (A850/B878),12 and that such a return is necessary if we want to ground ethics as a science. Accordingly, he tells us, ‘those same people who oppose metaphysics still have an indispensable duty to go back to its principles even in the doctrine of virtue and, before they teach, to become pupils in the classroom of metaphysics’ (MS 6:376–7).13

7 See Ameriks (2000) for further discussion of these presuppositions.

8 Williams (1985, 65). 9 Strawson (1966).

10 See, for example, Adams (1997), Watkins (2005), Ameriks (2003), Hogan (2009), Marshall (2010), Insole (2013), Dyck (2014), Stang (2016), Indregard (2018), and Heide (2020).

11 Velleman (2006, 15).

12 A return, he adds, ‘as to a beloved from whom we have been estranged’ (A850/B878).

13 In this context Kant argues that feeling cannot ground a moral principle. Any such principle of feeling, he adds, ‘is really an obscurely thought metaphysics that is inherent in every human being because of his rational predisposition, as a teacher will readily grant if he experiments in questioning his pupil socratically about the imperative of duty and its application to moral appraisal of his actions’ (MS 6:376–7).

Taking this council to heart, my aim here is to understand the basic structure of Kant’s project of moral justification, with a focus on his foundational arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law. For this reason I shall be limiting my investigation almost exclusively to the two texts where these arguments appear—Groundwork III and the second Critique though I will often contextualize these arguments within Kant’s corpus at large, including his writings on theoretical philosophy. My chief aim in this book is to give a fresh interpretation of Kant’s justification of ethics that, while true to the spirit of the modest strategy sketched above, reveals the far-reaching significance of his effort to reorient ethics around a shared, pre-theoretical, and hence common standpoint. To this end I will be building upon the excellent work of recent commentators who have shown the extent to which Kant’s commitment to common human reason plays a central role in his philosophy, although I wish to push this reading further by uncovering its deeper systematic function. A distinctive feature of the interpretation I will be developing over the coming chapters is that Kant’s project of justifying the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law turns on a complex set of argumentative strategies that have gone overlooked by most commentators. At their basis, I shall argue, we find a revolutionary view of the relationship between philosophy and what Kant calls our ‘higher vocation’ (höhere Bestimmung).

Philosophy as Justification

This revolutionary view is central to the project of critical philosophy Kant sets out in the Critique of Pure Reason, making it a helpful place to begin our investigation. Indeed, the opening lines of the first Critique draw attention to our unavoidable tendency to ask questions that transcend sense experience, such as whether we possess an immortal soul, whether we are free in our actions, or whether God exists. At the same time, Kant is clear that what hangs in the balance of these questions is nothing that will occasion despair for the ordinary person. As he explains, the space where such questions lead constitutes the ‘battlefield of metaphysics’ (A viii). To deprive its combatants of their knowledge- claims is thereby a loss that only effects ‘the monopoly of the schools and in no way the interest of human beings’, since ordinary persons are not entangled in such controversies (B xxxii). After all, Kant asks, have the ‘fine-spun arguments’ of the schools—concerning immortality, freedom, or God—‘ever been able to reach the public or have the least influence over its convictions?’ (B xxxiii). He does not think so. Nor does he think philosophers should pretend to occupy such a position of influence. Instead they should seek ‘no higher or more comprehensive insight on any point touching the universal human concerns than the insight that is accessible to the great multitude (who are always most worthy of our respect),

and’, Kant adds, ‘to limit themselves to the cultivation of those grounds of proof alone that can be grasped universally and are sufficient from a moral standpoint’ (B xxxiii).14

Upon hearing such a plea for humility, one might think that Kant is rejecting metaphysics altogether. Yet I believe this impression would be mistaken. In addition to denouncing dogmatism and skepticism in philosophy, Kant goes out of his way to criticize ‘indifferentism’ for its anti-metaphysical character, writing that it signals ‘the mother of chaos and night in the sciences’ (A x).15 As he emphasizes, ‘it is pointless to affect indifference with respect to such inquiries to whose object human nature cannot be indifferent’ (A x), referring once again to those questions that drive human reason to leave its sphere in the sensible world.16 Rather than retreat from the battlefield of metaphysics, then, it is the philosopher’s duty to establish peace by way of a critical examination of reason itself—its sources, contents, and limits—the process of which Kant says will usher a new era in the development of reason, the era of ‘enlightenment’ (A xi). But contrary to what one might expect, this stage does not privilege the theoretical interests of reason, not even in the domains of well-grounded science such as physics, mathematics, and logic. The aim of depriving speculative reason access to objects beyond the sensible world is to vindicate those objects as items of belief for reason in its practical use. The aim, as Kant famously puts it, is to ‘deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’ (B xxx; see also A744/B772).

Behind these claims we find a new model of philosophy at the heart of Kant’s system, what we might call philosophy as justification.17 The inspiration for this model appears to have been occasioned by Kant’s reading of Rousseau, and in a surviving fragment Kant describes the effects of this reading in language reminiscent of a religious conversion:

I myself am a researcher by inclination. I feel the entire thirst for cognition and the eager restlessness to proceed further in it, as well as the satisfaction at every acquisition. There was a time when I believed this alone could constitute honor

14 Kant nonetheless ends on a more positive note: ‘Yet care is taken for a more equitable claim on the part of the speculative philosopher. He remains the exclusive trustee of a science that is useful to the public even without their knowledge, namely the critique of reason; for the latter can never become popular, but also has no need of being so; for just as little as the people want to fill their heads with fine-spun arguments for useful truths, so just as little do the equally subtle objections against these truths ever enter their minds’ (B xxxiv).

15 See Kelsey (2014) for an excellent account of the threat indifferentism poses in Kant’s theoretical philosophy.

16 ‘Why has providence set many objects, although they are intimately connected with our highest interest, so high that it is barely granted to us to encounter them in an indistinct perception, doubted even by ourselves, through which our searching glance is more enticed than satisfied?’ (A744/B772).

17 This is similar to what Rawls (1989) calls ‘philosophy as defense’ and what Ameriks (2000) calls ‘philosophy as apologetics’, although I mean to capture a broader role in speaking of philosophy as justification.

of humankind, and I despised the rabble who knows nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This blinding prejudice vanishes, I learn to honor human beings, and I would feel by far less useful than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity. (Refl 20:44)18

This fragment was composed around 1765, a decade and a half before the appearance of the first Critique, and its influence on Kant’s masterpiece is unmistakable. A recurring theme in the first Critique is that philosophy faces the project of protecting the rights of humanity by making the ground for the ‘majestic moral edifices’ of pure reason ‘level and firm enough to be built upon’ (B376). Kant even defines the true concept of philosophy as the ‘science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason’, adding that the highest of these ends constitutes ‘the entire vocation of human beings’ (A840/B868).19 The practical orientation of Kant’s system therefore explains, on the one hand, why he advocates a close engagement with traditional metaphysics, condemning an attitude of indifference to such crucial questions, and yet, on the other, why he ridicules the fine-spun arguments of the schools, claiming that they never have nor ever will influence the hearts and minds of ordinary persons.20

In saying this, however, is Kant recommending that we settle all disputes in philosophy by appealing to common sense? In wanting to give philosophy a foothold in common human reason, one of Kant’s aims is to supply us with a touchstone ‘for passing judgment on the correctness’ of reason in its ‘speculative use’ (LJ 9:57). The touchstone is what he identifies with the entire moral vocation of human beings, the object of which permits an extension of reason beyond the sensible world, but only for the sake of rational belief. In order to have a guiding thread through the ‘immeasurable space of the supersensible’, Kant says the philosopher must take hold of an interest of reason in its practical use, found already in the most ordinary understanding (WDO 8:137). In this way the philosopher must rid herself of what Kant calls a ‘prejudice against healthy human reason’ (V-Lo/Blomberg 24:193). But this does not obviate the need for insight and science altogether; nor does it render methods of argument and justification unnecessary.

18 For the Rousseau–Kant connection, see Velkley (2002), Ameriks (2012), and Callanan (2019).

19 It is in the sphere of practical reason, Kant argues, that the ‘unquenchable desire to find a firm footing beyond all bounds of experience’ must be directed, once we realize, of course, that such desire will never find satisfaction on speculative grounds alone (A796/B824). ‘Pure reason has a presentiment of objects of great interest to it. It takes the path of mere speculation in order to come closer to these; but they flee before it. Presumably it may hope for better luck on the only path that still remains to it, namely that of its practical use’ (A796/B824). See Ferrarin (2015) and Deligiorgi (2017) for further discussion.

20 Kant makes a similar claim in the 1781 edition: ‘In what concerns all human beings without exception nature is not to be blamed for any partiality in the distribution of its gifts, and in regard to the essential ends of human nature even the highest philosophy cannot advance further than the guidance that nature has also conferred on the most common understanding’ (A831/B859).

In fact, Kant is careful to warn against what he calls a ‘prejudice for healthy human reason’ that would render such methods redundant—adding, with a bite of sarcasm, that ‘to appeal to ordinary common sense when insight and science run short, and not before, is one of the subtle discoveries of recent times, whereby the dullest windbag can confidently take on the most profound thinker and hold his own with him’ (Prol 4:259).

Methods of Justification in Ethics

This last warning is crucial for understanding the topic of this book: namely, Kant’s justification of ethics in Groundwork III and the second Critique. Although Kant thinks moral inquiry must also get a foothold in common human reason, he does not think we can prove or defend the fundamental concepts of ethics by appealing to common sense alone. On the contrary, methods of argument and justification play a key role in Kant’s writings, four of which will occupy our attention in the coming chapters:

• First, there is the skeptical method, or the method of doubting a claim (and ‘bringing it to the highest degree of uncertainty’) in order to motivate inquiry into its sources and origins. This procedure is effective for suspending judgment in matters of speculation with the aim of ‘getting on the trail of truth’ (LJ 9:84; see also A423/B451). As we shall see in Chapter 1, the skeptical method plays a central role in the Groundwork. After claiming that only a good will can be considered good ‘without limitation’, Kant considers the suspicion that this idea has its basis in ‘mere high-flown fantasy’ and that we have ‘misunderstood the purpose of nature in assigning reason as the ruler of the will’ (G 4:394–395). But Kant raises this suspicion, not because he harbors any doubt in the value of a good will, but because the suspicion serves to motivate inquiry into the sources and origins of the idea itself.

• Second, there is the experimental method, or the method of illustrating a claim by way of a thought experiment. This procedure applies in contexts where the claim in question can be made vivid and intuitively compelling, even though it does not admit of a strict proof. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the experimental method plays a central role in the second Critique. After claiming that consciousness of the moral law reveals our freedom to us, Kant sets up a thought experiment to illustrate how common human reason separates morality from considerations of one’s own happiness (KpV 5:30). The experiment has the reader consider the case of a man facing a conflict between duty and death, with the aim of showing that this man would judge it possible to perform his duty even under threats of execution. What then

becomes vivid is the way we judge that the moral law holds more authority than the sum-total of our sensible inclinations.

• Third, there is the polemical method, or the method of defending a claim by countering ‘dogmatic denials’ of it (A739–40/B767–8). This procedure applies in contexts where the claim in question lies beyond the reach of human reason, since we can then show that one is not entitled to reject what one cannot know. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the polemical method plays a central role in Groundwork III. After tracing the moral ‘ought’ to our own intelligible ‘will’, Kant argues that moral motivation requires a ‘causality of reason to determine sensibility in conformity with its principles’ (G 4:460). Yet Kant’s point is that we cannot explain the connection between a noumenal cause and a phenomenal effect in feeling. Thus, ‘where determination by laws of nature ceases, there all explanation ceases as well, and nothing is left but defense, that is, to repel the objections of those who pretend to have seen deeper into the essence of things’ (G 4:459).

• Lastly, there is the phenomenological method, or the method of reflecting on a claim as it appears in consciousness. This procedure applies in contexts where the claim in question displays unique features that come to light, not through conceptual analysis, but only through reflective attention. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the phenomenological method plays a central role in the third chapter of the second Critique. After repeating his earlier claim that we cannot comprehend how reason can determine sensibility, Kant adds that we still have room to consider what effects moral consciousness must have on our capacity to feel (KpV 5:72). Aside from eliciting a painful feeling of self-reproach when we see that we have treated happiness as a lawgiving principle, our consciousness of the moral law also elicits a pleasurable feeling of self-esteem, i.e., when we see that as rational beings we are ‘elevated’ above our sensible nature and hence capable of autonomy.

As we shall see, what makes the phenomenological approach important as a method of justification is that it warrants our possession of a faculty of sensibility attuned to the demands of pure practical reason, without presuming insight into the causal connection between the two. Similar to the experimental method mentioned above, this procedure is effective for establishing moral concepts that do not admit of a strict proof.

Proofs in Moral Philosophy

This brings us to an important question for the present study: What kinds of proof are available within Kant’s moral philosophy? While he never stipulates the exact meaning of a ‘proof’ (Beweis) in his writings on ethics, Kant does speak to

this issue in the first Critique and in his lectures on logic. An important distinction we find in these texts concerns what Kant variously calls indirect, negative, or apagogic proofs, on the one hand, and direct, positive, or ostensive proofs, on the other (A7891/B817). Apagogic proofs work to establish the truth of a proposition by demonstrating the falsity of claims opposed to it—hence, the strategy is indirect or negative, since the truth emerges by way of elimination. Ostensive proofs in contrast work to establish the truth of a proposition by revealing its grounds— hence, the strategy is direct or positive, since the truthemerges by way of insight into its source. The advantage of an ostensive proof, Kant explains, is that it discloses, not only the truth of a proposition, ‘but also at the same time its genesis, its generative source’ (V-Lo/Blomberg 24:233). As he puts it, ‘The direct or ostensive proof is, in all kinds of cognition, that which is combined with the conviction of truth and simultaneously with insight into its sources’ (A7891/B817).21

Applying this distinction to Kant’s moral philosophy is helpful. In the Groundwork, for example, Kant explains that it is one thing to clarify the structure of the moral law and another to justify its application to us as a binding imperative. The problem is that merely clarifying a concept does not give us insight into its genesis. The moral law expresses an unconditional demand, and we experience that demand in the form of an ‘ought’, but we cannot tell from where this demand purports to bind us. For all we know, Kant adds, the moral ‘ought’ might arise from the faculty of the imagination, not from the faculty of reason, in which case it would be an illusion. This question leads Kant in Groundwork III to offer a genetic proof or ‘deduction’ of the moral law’s bindingness. As we shall see, the genetic proof involves a critical examination of our faculty of practical reason— separating its empirical and pure uses—in order to show that our will is not just sensibly affected. Kant argues that the ground of our own sensibly affected will contains the idea of a pure will capable of determining itself on the basis of reason alone. The source of moral obligation therefore lies within us: what we ‘ought’ to do as sensibly affected beings is what we ‘would’ do as beings with a pure will. But what about the moral law itself? Does it not also fall within the purview of Kant’s project of justification? On the reading I shall defend in this book, the necessity of the moral law itself is never the object of a genetic proof or deduction

21 The impression we receive upon hearing these remarks is that the model of an ostensive or genetic proof is clearly superior, in Kant’s eyes, to the model of an apogogic or non-genetic proof. And to an extent that is no doubt the case. However, we should not be misled into thinking that apogogic or non-genetic proofs are to be avoided at all costs, as if their presence would threaten to undermine a program of justification. To be sure, although Kant refers to them as ‘more of an emergency aid than a procedure which satisfies all the aims of reason’, he adds that ‘they have an advantage in self-evidence over the direct proofs in this: that a contradiction always carries with it more clarity of representation than the best connection, and thereby more closely approaches the intuitiveness of a demonstration’ (A790/B818). Although I disagree with the details of his interpretation, Guyer’s (2017) proposal that Kant’s procedure in Sections I and II of the Groundwork largely accords with the apogogic model is helpful.

in Kant’s moral philosophy, not even in the semi-critical form it takes in the first Critique.22 A key piece of evidence in support of this reading comes from Kant’s closing statements in Groundwork III, which have not, I am afraid to say, received the amount of attention that they deserve among commentators.23 What Kant makes clear in these statements is that human reason reaches a limit when it comes to the absolute necessity of the moral law, because human reason can alight upon no further condition under which to subsume (and thereby comprehend) the necessity in question (G 4:463). Were we to find some further condition under which to subsume the necessity of the moral law, then by that very token it would not be a species of absolute necessity after all. For Kant, we can gain insight into the moral law’s bindingness, or its ‘necessitation’ (Nötigung), insofar as we can trace this bindingness to our own intelligible will. But when it comes to the moral law itself, or its ‘necessity’ (Notwendigkeit), Kant argues that all we can do is comprehend its ‘incomprehensibility’ (G 4:463).

When we take these final remarks in Groundwork III seriously, a novel way of interpreting Kant’s justification of ethics opens up. In the first place, we need not view Kant’s assertion in the second Critique that consciousness of the moral law is an underivable ‘fact’ as marking a ‘great reversal’ from his earlier argument in Groundwork III.24 On the contrary, I shall argue that with respect to the moral law’s necessity as a principle valid for all rational beings, Kant’s position shows no signs of wavering between Groundwork III and the second Critique: in each text he upholds that we cannot comprehend the necessity of the moral law and that it therefore admits of no deduction or genetic proof. What Kant makes salient in his later work is that an experimental method can illustrate our consciousness of this necessity as a fact of common human reason, ‘prior to all speculation about its possibility’ (KpV 5:90). But as we shall see, this is a variation of a theme already present in Groundwork III, since even there Kant argues that the ‘practical use of common reason confirms the correctness’ of his deduction, referring us to the case of a scoundrel who, when one sets before him examples of virtuous conduct

22 See §3.2 and §3.6 for my defense of this claim.

23 Rauscher (2009) and Puls (2016) are two important exceptions to this neglect.

24 This is Ameriks’s (1982, 226) turn of phrase. The list of scholars who subscribe to some version of the reversal reading is long, including Ross (1954), Beck (1960), Henrich (1960), Williams (1968), Korsgaard (1989), O’Neill (1989), Allison (1990), Łuków (1993), Neiman (1994), Hill (1998), Allison (2011), Rawls (2000), Engstrom (2002), Darwall (2006), Sussman (2008), Reath (2012), and Grenberg (2013). Other scholars find a significant change in Kant’s project of justification, not because he gave up a proof of the moral law, but because he gave up a non-moral argument for freedom. For this view, see Schönecker (1999, 2006, 2013, 2014), Guyer (2009), Timmermann (2010), Ludwig (2010, 2012, 2015, 2018), Hahmann (2012), and Bojanowski (2017). Noteworthy exceptions to this trend in the literature include McCarthy (1982), Wolff (2009), Wood (2011), and Tenenbaum (2012). However, with the exception of Puls’s German monograph (2016), there have been no systematic efforts to find continuity in Kant’s project of justification from 1785 to 1788.

(even ones involving ‘great sacrifices’ of self-interest) wishes ‘that he might also be so disposed’ (G 4:454).25

Further support for my reading comes from what Kant says about his methodology in the Groundwork and the second Critique. In the prefaces of each work Kant tells the reader that his order of exposition will unfold along two paths, one ‘analytic’, and the other ‘synthetic’. The analytic path begins with what is given in common moral experience and works to clarify the highest principle that makes this experience possible. We follow this path, Kant explains, when we separate what is empirical in our faculty of practical reason (as it is conditioned by sensibility) from what is pure (as it is unconditioned by sensibility) in order to ‘ascend’ to the supreme law of this faculty as a whole—the moral law as a principle of autonomy. Only after discovering this law can we take the synthetic path, which turns back and descends to our original starting point. We follow this path, Kant explains, when we recombine what was previously separated, the empirical and pure parts of practical reason, in order to reveal their necessary connection. In this respect, while both the analytic and synthetic paths constitute a single method, the synthetic path marks the path of justification proper, since it yields a special kind of insight, either insight into the possibility of moral obligation (in the Groundwork) or insight into the possibility of moral motivation (in the second Critique).26

We shall return to this distinction of analytic and synthetic paths more than once in the coming chapters.27 But I should say that my aim here is not to defend a continuity reading for its own sake. The value of this reading is that it clears room for us to explore other possible differences shaping Kant’s project in the second Critique. As I have just hinted at, Kant’s later project is much broader in scope than commentators have traditionally assumed.28 It includes, not just his

25 For a different reading, see Bittner (1989). Sticker (2014, 2015) is one of the few scholars to recognize that Kant’s example of the scoundrel from subsection 4 of Groundwork III signals a return ‘back’ to common cognition. However, like the majority of commentators, Sticker does not contextualize this example with reference to Kant’s methodology, as I plan to do.

26 In an important essay devoted to Kant’s methodology, Gabriele Gava (2015) makes a compelling case for assigning two distinct senses to Kant’s analytic–synthetic distinction in his theoretical philosophy. A broader sense characterizes them as strategies of exposition and a narrower sense characterizes them as modes of cognition. In the latter case, analysis refers to conceptual clarification and synthesis refers to the special a priori insights afforded by Kant’s transcendental deductions. In the former case, an analytic strategy of exposition begins by separating a faculty of cognition into its basic elements, as it is given in experience, and a synthetic strategy recombines what was previously separated in order to show their necessary unity. Interestingly, these two senses come together in the Groundwork and the second Critique. Kant explicitly organizes each text in terms of analytic and synthetic paths, according to which we ascend from the basic parts of practical reason to its supreme law (the moral law), and then descend from this law back to the parts. Moreover, in each text Kant provides analytic knowledge (based on conceptual clarification) along the analytic path and synthetic cognition (based on necessary a priori connections) along the synthetic path.

27 See §1.1, §1.13, §3.1, §3.3, §3.12, §4.1, §4.11, and §4.12.

28 Beck (1960) and Allison (1990) are standard representatives of this view. For an important exception, see Franks (2005).

doctrine of the fact of reason in the first chapter, but also his theory of moral sensibility in the third chapter. On the reading I shall defend, Kant’s synthetic path in the second Critique extends to the question of how the moral law can be a real motivating ‘incentive’ (Triebfeder), i.e., how it can be a subjective ground of action and not merely an objective (and potentially ineffective) principle. Given our inability to comprehend a causality of reason, Kant appeals instead to a phenomenological method in the third chapter and examines the effects that consciousness of the moral law must have on our capacity to feel.29 The result is confirmation of the moral law’s applicability to beings who, like us, are not only rational but also sensibly affected, since the theory of moral sensibility shows that our ‘hearts’ and not just our ‘heads’ are responsive to the demands of duty. This is consistent with Kant’s project of locating the source of morality within us, the aim of Groundwork III, but it goes further, on my account, by describing a positive interaction between reason and feeling, ultimately showing how our consciousness of the moral law influences our faculty of sensibility through moral feelings of self-reproach and self-esteem.

To Whom? From Where? Against What?

If one now wanted a label to capture the spirit of Kant’s metaethics in the Groundwork and the second Critique, as I have presented these texts so far, then I think anti-error theory would be an apt turn of phrase. The error theorist, at least in her traditional guise, tells us that ordinary moral judgments are systematically false. This implies by extension that common human reason is completely mistaken in its conception of ethics. Kant’s metaethics is an anti-error theory to the extent that it gives primacy to the ordinary standpoint of life over the speculative standpoint of philosophy. Yet there is a further point to note in light of Kant’s conversion around 1765, namely, that he seeks to reorient philosophy itself (and not just moral philosophy) to the ends and interests of human beings, making his anti-error theory as much a meta-philosophical view as it is a meta-ethical one. I mention this to help dispel a sense of perplexity readers are likely to have with respect to Kant’s apparent disregard for any form of radical moral skepticism. On this issue I find it instructive to consider Kant’s rejoinder to a critic of the Groundwork ‘who wanted to say something censuring this work’, but in fact, he adds, ‘hit the mark better than he himself may have intended when he said: that no new principle of morality is set forth in it but only a new formula’ (KpV 5:8n).

29 I am sympathetic to Heidegger’s impression of the third chapter—that it is ‘the most brilliant phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of morality that we have from him’ (1927/1988, 133). But I think there are limits to the phenomenological interpretation of Kant defended by Heidegger (1927/1988) and, more recently, by Schönecker (2013) and Grenberg (2013), which I shall discuss at greater length in §4.10 and §4.11.

In reply Kant asks rhetorically: ‘But who would even want to introduce a new principle of all morality and, as it were, first invent it? Just as if, before him, the world had been ignorant of what duty is or in complete error about it’ (KpV 5:8n; emphasis added).

A response some readers might have is that this hypothetical scenario—that the world has been in complete error about duty—is precisely the kind of skeptical threat the moral philosopher is responsible for addressing. But it is important to see from the outset of this book that Kant views this response as mistaken in its idea of what moral philosophy can accomplish, for the same reasons Rousseau gives, speaking through the character of a Savoyard Vicar, when he asks ‘Were not all books written by men? Why, then, would man need them to know his duties, and what means had he of knowing them before these books were written?’30 This is not to say that Rousseau and Kant are apologists for common sense, since they agree that our everyday judgments require development, education, and cultivation, of which the right kind of philosophy (in Kant’s case, a ‘metaphysics of morals’) plays an active role.31 But neither of these writers take it as a condition of success for their theorizing to somehow refute a skeptic who requests a reason to care about duty or ethical life in general, or who regards common reason as totally mistaken in all moral matters. All of this leads me to conclude that a distinctive feature of Kant’s anti-error theory is a self-directed point of focus, insofar as it aims to vindicate the claims of ethics within a pre-theoretical standpoint.

This gives us a preliminary answer to a set of questions Bernard Williams once raised in the context of asking ‘what a justification of ethical life should try to do’.32 In Williams’s view, we should ask any attempted justification the following three questions: ‘To whom is it addressed? From where? Against what?’33 On my reading, while Kant invokes the skeptic’s doubts to provoke inquiry into the sources of morality, he is not addressing the moral skeptic per se. He is not taking up the ‘adversarial stance’ and attempting to deploy an argument the skeptic about morality must accept on pain of contradiction.34 At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that Kant was writing for students and specialists of philosophy—not just to professional scholars, but also to individuals who have turned their reflections to moral issues and who want, if possible, rationally satisfying answers. Neither the Groundwork nor the second Critique were intended to serve as popular treatises; here as elsewhere Kant is explicit about giving scholastic rigor priority over widespread appeal when it comes to laying the foundations of a science (G 4:391–392). Because Kant thinks moral philosophy is corruptible, and in some cases corrupting, it is necessary for his project to reveal the fatal flaws of rival ethical theories, especially those based on empirical principles. So to answer Williams’s second question, ‘From where?’, it is clear that Kant develops

30 Rousseau (1762/1979, 303).

32 Williams (1985, 23).

31 On this point I agree with Sticker (2015).

33 Williams (1985, 23).

34 Wright (1991).

his justification of ethics from the standpoint of philosophy, but one suitably equipped to examine the sources of common human reason.

This brings us to Williams’s third question, ‘Against what?’ That is, what is Kant’s project of justification working to avoid? If my answers to the first two questions are correct, then it is safe to say that Kant is not working to avoid the threat of immoralism. Kant is optimistic that even a scoundrel recognizes the dignity of moral action, however much he fails (perhaps due to frailty) to conform his will to the requirements of duty (G 4:460). But then what is the problem to which Kant is seeking a solution in his writings on ethics? The answer changes depending on what text we have before us, the Groundwork or the second Critique, but what they share in common, on my reading, is an effort to rescue common human reason from the conflict it experiences between the claims of morality, on the one hand, and the claims of happiness, on the other. This is not a mere speculative problem of ‘doubt’ (Zweifel), such as the kind pure reason generates when it oversteps the field of experience, but a practical conflict at the heart of common moral consciousness—in a word, a problem of ‘despair’ (Verzweiflung).35 Yet the despair in question is not so much a crisis of competing forces as it is a crisis of competing self-conceptions, since what the tension between morality and happiness threatens, at bottom, is a disharmony in our higher vocation. It is a threat, as Kant puts it, of becoming obscure to ourselves (G 4:405).

A fourth question we might pose, adding to Williams’s list, concerns what a project of moral justification aims to accomplish. To what end is it directed? If it is correct to say that Kant is working against a threat of self-obscurity, then we can understand his aim in terms of restoring harmony to the idea of our higher vocation. This is the mind-set in which Kant is working to overcome, not doubt, but despair. By making moral experience intelligible to ourselves—either by defending the belief that we are free, or by revealing the source of obligation within us, or by describing our capacity to feel respect for the law—Kant’s goal is to vindicate a lofty yet fragile idea of humanity: namely, the idea of humanity as having a citizenship in a world beyond the sensible one and a destiny beyond the pursuit of happiness. In other words, by making moral experience intelligible to ourselves, the aim of Kant’s justification of ethics is to restore trust in the idea of ourselves as the kind of beings for whom morality applies—that is, finite beings with moral reason and moral sensibility.

This answers what we might call a general question about the legitimacy of our moral vocation, which will make up the largest portion of this book (Chapters 1–4). As we shall see, however, it does not address a specific question of how we can take steps toward our moral vocation, since this raises an issue of how we can

35 See Breazeale (2012) and Franks (2008) for two illuminating accounts of the link between ‘doubt’ (Zweifel) and ‘despair’ (Verzweiflung) in post-Kantian skepticism. See also Grenberg (2013) for a detailed treatment of the problem of a practical conflict between morality and happiness.

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