Kantian Commitments: Essays on Moral Theory and Practice PDF
Preview Kantian Commitments: Essays on Moral Theory and Practice
Kantian Commitments Kantian Commitments Essays on Moral Theory and Practice BARBARA HERMAN 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Barbara Herman 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944571 ISBN 978–0–19–284496–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844965.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Contents Preface vii Abbreviations of Kant’s Works xiii Notes on Original Publication xv PART ONE: RETHINKING KANT’S ETHICS 1. Reasoning to Obligation 3 2. The Difference That Ends Make 21 3. Making Exceptions 42 4. A Mismatch of Methods 58 5. Kantian Commitments 84 PART TWO: EXTENDING THE BOUNDARIES 6. A Habitat for Humanity 103 7. Morality Unbounded 125 8. We Are Not Alone: A Place for Animals in Kant’s Ethics 157 9. Other to Self: Finding Love on the Path to Moral Agency 175 10. Religion and the Highest Good: Speaking to the Heart of Even the Best of Us 193 References 211 Index 213 Preface The ten essays collected here represent a series of efforts to rethink many of the things I took myself to know about Kant’s ethics. Some look again at core Kantian arguments; some offer readings of less investigated parts of Kant’s writing; some try to fill out what a Kantian theory should look like in terms that respond to demands of contemporary moral theory. All connect with a familiar set of issues in Kant interpretation: what counts as moral reasoning, the status of human persons as moral agents, how the facts of our being socially embedded and materially embodied shape our duties. You might assume these issues were largely settled by now. Perhaps there are remaining puzzles in the application of the famous categorical imperative procedure, but we know how it’s supposed to go and certainly what it’s for. And perhaps there are difficulties in getting the original Kantian ideas to apply to the more social parts of moral theory, but recent Kant-i nspired contractualisms have extended the theory’s ability to reach beyond the ethics of individuals. And so on. But I have come to doubt that significant arguments I and others developed con- nect in the right way to core Kantian commitments, and it is my growing con- viction that I should be unsettled in what I have taken myself to know that is the origin of these essays. The unsettling began in a seminar on Kant’s ethics that included graduate students who had worked with me for several years, as well as first- and second- year students who were relatively new to the material. In thinking how to proceed in a way that would be useful to both groups I decided to try to present the Groundwork intuitively, as a straightforward way of thinking about morality, while keeping an eye on the text. The result was the argument of “Reasoning to Obligation” (Chapter 1). If morality belonged to practical reason and practical reason was (because it had to be) about reasoning, then we should be able to find analogs to formal standards of good reasoning— validity and soundness—on the practical side. And we could, looking at Kant’s examples, see that what he was arguing was that there were limits to what could be reasoned to from self-i nterest, using contradiction-u nder- universalization as a validity test. As the essay aims to show, this shift in focus not only opens interpretive doors, it also resolves a number of old problems about the categorical imperative tests and moral worth. It also set up a new viii Preface way to think about the status of persons as ends-i n- themselves, thinking now of ends as premises for reasoning and taking the next natural step of regard- ing a reasoner as a final end (not an end- for- something). As argued in “The Difference That Ends Make” (Chapter 2), this insight unravels some of the more recalcitrant textual puzzles surrounding the argument for the formula of humanity and also shows the connection between that formula and the more fundamental formula of universal law. To fill out a “good reasoning” story requires that there be true premises. These are found in the Metaphysics of Morals’ obligatory ends. The result is a more resilient and flexible Kantian account of moral value and deliberative requirement, one that is surprisingly sensitive to the complexities of ordinary human living. “Making Exceptions” (Chapter 3) explores the interesting consequences of this for Kant’s supposed rigorism. In the two following essays, “A Mismatch of Methods” and “Kantian Commitments” (Chapters 4 and 5), the “good reasoning” account is tested against competitor hybrid and contractualist theories that take themselves (mistakenly, I argue) to be preserving the best of Kant’s insights while adding resources that can manage hard cases that Kant gets wrong. While I am confident the arguments of these essays make real advances in our understanding of Kant’s theory, I am quite sure that they are not the last word on their topics, not even my last word. I do not find such a state of affairs troubling: it has been my experience with these texts that they reveal them- selves slowly and in stages. There is of course their sheer difficulty. And then there is the need to peel away assumptions we bring to the texts that introduce questions they were not meant to answer, and assumptions that rule out con- cepts and ideas central to the moral project as Kant sees it, sometimes block- ing appreciation of its ambition and scale. So I anticipate still other rounds of becoming unsettled and rethinking and reassembling the pieces.1 The second half of the collection takes on some new projects. The first bits of Kant I worked on seriously, as a graduate student, were his historical essays, especially his curious remarks about how we should resolve the under- determination of historical narrative in a morally progressive way. The barrier to understanding these remarks was obvious. How could Kant, who denies a role to empirical content in the foundation of morals, think there was a need to adopt a progressive historical narrative? Or that genuine moral progress 1 It is thus no surprise that I now see the essays in Part One as stages on the way to the view of Kant’s ethics I argue for in The Moral Habitat (2021). The essays are, however, independent of that study, making their own arguments in response to distinct challenges to, and criticisms of, the Kantian project. Preface ix occurs independent of the agency of good persons? Since Kant wrote the his- torical essays in the same years as his major ethical works, the interpretive problem could hardly be ignored. Indeed, it was on my mind for more than thirty years, a continuing background source of many of the questions responsible for my going back to rethink basic ideas about Kant’s views of agency and moral action. At long last, and at the urging of Amélie Rorty, I wrote “A Habitat for Humanity” (Chapter 6), a partial reading of Kant’s wonderful “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” Taking that essay seriously, morally and philosophically, was instructive in gaining insight into Kant’s larger moral scheme (larger, that is, than the foundation arguments that are the concern of the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason). It also helped settle the question whether Kant’s moral system was constructed with an eye to accommodating the actual circumstances of per- sons, as well as offering an idea of how they might be changed for the better by self- consciously moral agents acting together. Embedding the moral project in a political setting—as “The Idea for a Universal History” does, and, when you think about it, as does the Metaphysics of Morals—raised the question whether and how anything like the morality-fi rst Kantian account could accommodate the various pluralisms that currently concern us. “Morality Unbounded” (Chapter 7) takes up this challenge in Kant- informed if not Kant- specific terms. That these questions are not at all alien to Kant is evident in his complex negotiation with the claims of religion. The last three essays take up topics that are often seen as impediments to working out a Kantian ethics within the framework he offers. They concern the moral status of animals, how we are to think naturalistically about moral development, and Kant’s idea of the highest good. I don’t think it’s a necessary aspiration to make good on every one of Kant’s texts and arguments; we are free to move beyond Kant’s limitations, and should do so where he gets things wrong, or simply can’t see beyond his personal or historical horizon. However, one of the lessons of my “unsettling project” is that there is a risk in premature abandonment, and considerable value to be had from engaging with hard texts as imaginatively as one can. In that spirit, “We Are Not Alone” (Chapter 8) takes on Kant’s difficult idea that our duties to animals, though real, are indirect—“duties with respect to” and not “duties to”—and tries to make sense of why he might think not having such duties would “uproot a natural disposition” that morality needs. The interesting puzzle is not why being cruel to animals might lead us to be cruel more generally, but why not having a duty to animals would change our nature.
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