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Virtues of Freedom
Virtues of Freedom
Selected Essays on Kant
Paul Guyer
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/10/2016, SPi
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Preface
“Virtue” is used in two senses in the title of this collection of essays on the moral
philosophy of Kant that I have written over the last dozen years, corresponding to
two of the definitions we find in the Oxford English Dictionary. One definition is that
a virtue is “A particular form of moral excellence . . . any of certain moral qualities
regarded as of particular worth or importance”; the other is that virtue is “Conform-
ity of life and conduct with moral principles; voluntary adherence to recognized laws
or standards of right conduct.” I argue throughout this book that freedom is a, indeed
the, fundamental virtue in the first of these senses, that which is of intrinsic and
unconditional worth and the source of all more particular virtues and moral obliga-
tions more generally, but also that freedom, or perhaps more precisely what Kant
calls autonomy, is an achievement, a condition of individuals and, when it is shared,
of societies, that must be attained and maintained by the voluntary adherence of
human beings to the moral law in general and to the laws that may be derived from it
for beings in the human condition, the juridical laws of the civil condition (what Kant
calls “right”), and the non-coercively enforceable laws of intra- and interpersonal
morality (what Kant calls “ethics” proper, which is thus narrower than morality as
such). What freedom need not be, although Kant believes that it is also this, is a
metaphysical condition or ability to choose between two alternative courses of action
no matter what one’s prior history would seem to entail that one will do. Kant’s
defense of freedom in this sense—which, since if it exists would exist without any
effort on the part of the individual, could hardly be called a virtue at least in the
second sense mentioned—depends on his transcendental idealism, a doctrine the
defense and even the meaning of which remain controversial more than two centur-
ies after its publication. This doctrine is the basis for Kant’s confidence that “ought
implies can,” that is, that we are always free to choose to do the right thing no matter
what our upbringing, prior choices, and so on might appear to imply. But my view is
that we can let it remain an empirical question just how far human beings are free to
preserve and promote freedom of choice and action in their intra- and interpersonal
doings while still appreciating Kant’s account of the foundation of all duties in the
intrinsic and unconditional value of getting to set our own ends free from unwar-
ranted constraint from others and even from unwarranted constraint by our own
inclinations and his account of the ways in which we can, as he says, cultivate and
strengthen our dispositions to freedom in this sense, while leaving it open whether we
can always get as far in this project as we would like. I say this in spite of the fact that
in at least one prominent place, namely the culminating Section III of his Ground-
work for the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785, his most widely read work in moral
philosophy, Kant attempts to derive the binding force of the moral law upon us from
the alleged fact of our metaphysical freedom; both in earlier works, such as his pre-
Groundwork lectures on ethics and his next major work on moral philosophy, the
Critique of Practical Reason of 1785, Kant lets the supreme value of freedom shine
forth on its own without presupposing the metaphysical claim that we always are free
vi
no matter what, and in the Metaphysics of Morals that he finally published in 1797
(for which the Groundwork was the groundwork), as well as in his lectures through-
out his mature career, he shows how our individual duties and rights can be derived
from the general value of freedom, all without presupposing a metaphysical concep-
tion of freedom of the will. So I think it fruitful to separate discussion of the virtues of
freedom in the senses I have distinguished from discussion of the age-old problem of
freedom of the will as much as possible.
The chapters in this volume, several of which have not previously been published
and several of which have been published only in German translations, are divided
into three parts, entitled “The Value of Freedom,” “The Actuality of Freedom,” and
“The Achievement of Freedom.” By these titles I mean to suggest that the chapters in
the first part focus on Kant’s idea that freedom of choice is itself the fundamental
value promoted by morality; that the chapters in the second part are concerned
primarily with Kant’s attempt to prove that we always have the freedom to be moral,
regardless of what has gone before; and that the chapters in the third part concern
Kant’s account of the development of the virtue of autonomy in the empirical
circumstances of human life. But the chapters were written for a variety of occasions,
and in any case my interpretation of Kant has evolved over the period during which
they were written, so there are some overlaps among them, and this division into
three parts should not be taken too rigidly. It did seem to me, though, that it would
make the collection more approachable to group the chapters this way than to
present them without division. I have left the chapters largely as they were originally
written or published, although in several cases material is included that had to be cut
from a previously published version, and I have rewritten where necessary in the
hope of avoiding any contradictions or confusions among them. In a few instances
I have also added references to secondary literature that has appeared since the
chapters were first done.
Those necessary words having been said, let me say a little more about the general
argument of the work, and then a few words about what is to be found in each
chapter. My approach to Kant’s moral philosophy is based on the assumption that he
revealed its premise most clearly in lectures given around the time that he was writing
the Groundwork. In the lectures on moral philosophy recorded by Georg Ludwig
Collins in 1784–5 (although Collins was probably copying from an earlier transcrip-
tion rather than taking down what Kant was saying verbatim) Kant is reported as
saying that “Freedom . . . is the highest degree of life. It is the property that is a
necessary condition underlying all perfections. . . . the inner worth of the world, the
summum bonum, is freedom according to a choice that is not necessitated to act.
Freedom is thus the inner worth of the world” (MP-Collins, 27:344). And in lectures
on “natural right” recorded in the summer of 1784, the only known transcription of a
course that Kant gave a dozen times, he is reported as saying that “The inner worth of
the human being rests on his freedom, that he has his own will. . . . If only rational
beings can be ends in themselves, it is not because they have reason, but because they
have freedom. Reason is merely a means” (Fey., 27:1319, 1321). I take these claims to
show what Kant actually means when he says in the Groundwork that the “ground of
a possible categorical imperative” is that “the human being and in general every
rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that
vii
will at its discretion” (G, 4:428), which leads to the “formula of humanity”: “So act
that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of every other,
always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (G, 4:429). The
equivalence is secured when Kant defines “humanity” as “the capacity to set oneself
an end—any end whatsoever” (MM DV, Introduction, section VIII, 6:392). Human-
ity is the capacity to set one’s own ends, to set them in some sense freely, free from
domination by other agents but also from domination by one’s own inclinations; but
if this is to be treated always as an end, never merely as a means, then in all self-
regarding actions one must set one’s ends in ways that do not compromise one’s
freedom to set one’s own ends on other occasions and if possible promote or expand
that freedom, and likewise in one’s other-regarding actions, by which I mean any
action that might have an impact on others, one must set one’s own ends in ways that
do not compromise their freedom to set their own ends but if anything promote or
expand that freedom. It takes reason to figure out what this constraint amounts to;
that is why Kant says in his lectures on natural right that reason is the means to
freedom. Reason is not identical to freedom, nor is it of intrinsic value, but it is
necessary in order to figure out how to maximize rather than undermine or minimize
the intra- and interpersonal use of freedom. We might thus say that while freedom is
the only thing of intrinsic and unconditional value, reason is thus first among things
of instrumental value. In his chief exposition of the concept of the categorical
imperative in the Groundwork, Kant tries to put all of this in terms of the require-
ment to avoid contradiction between our maxims and their universalization, where
the contradiction might be between our intention to act on a particular maxim and
the universalization of that maxim or between our intention to act on a particular
maxim and the more general preservation and promotion of agency, in either
case the avoidance of contradiction being the necessary condition of any form
of rationality.
If “humanity” is understood the way I propose, the normative content of Kant’s
moral philosophy quickly becomes clear. What is less clear is how he proposed to
argue for the conception of value that underlies his entire moral philosophy. In the
Groundwork he famously, or notoriously, just asserts it— “Now I say that the human
being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself . . . ”—and notes that
he puts this proposition forth “as a postulate,” to be provided with grounds in the
third section of the book. There we find an argument that draws on the doctrine of
transcendental idealism, with its distinction between how things appear and how
they are in themselves, an argument that infers that no matter how we appear to
ourselves at our deepest level we just are rational and free, and therefore do act in
accordance with the moral law. Kant thus sidesteps any problem of arguing for a
fundamental normative premise, although to do so he not only appeals to a contro-
versial metaphysical premise but also lays himself open to the objection that he
cannot explain how beings who at the deepest level are not only free but also rational
could ever commit an immoral action, an objection that was quickly put to him. In
the Critique of Practical Reason, published with the date of 1788, the year that this
objection was first published by J. A. H. Ulrich, but written in 1787, thus before Kant
could have seen Ulrich’s objection and not in direct response to it, Kant appears to
drop this metaphysical argument and instead to argue that the binding status of the
viii
moral law is just an immediately given “fact of reason” (CPracR, 5:31) that cannot be
inferred from anything else, although it can benefit from an indirect argument
showing that no other candidate for the fundamental principle of morality can lay
claim to the universality and necessity that we expect from a moral or pure practical
law. But whether Kant really gives up the metaphysical argument of the Groundwork
is a nice question, since his key claims in the Critique of Practical Reason are that “We
can become aware of pure practical laws just as we are aware of pure theoretical
principles, by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us” and
that “the concept of a pure will” and thus freedom “arises from the first” (5:30), which
is very similar to what he argued at the key moment of the Groundwork, when he
stated that “a human being really finds in himself a capacity by which he distin-
guishes himself from all other things, even from himself insofar as he is affected by
objects, and that is reason,” which is in turn “pure self-activity”—a pure and free will
(G, 4:452). More generally, Kant seems to have remained attracted throughout his
career to a position I call “normative essentialism.” This is the position, whether it
can be understood empirically, as Kant did in the 1760s, or can only be understood
through the metaphysics of transcendental idealism, as he did after 1770, that human
beings are capable of setting their own ends and that to treat them otherwise is as it
were to deny the most obvious truth about them, the impermissibility of which needs
no explanation other than logic alone. This position is expressed as early as 1764 or
1765 when Kant writes that “In subjection there is not only something externally
dangerous but also a certain ugliness and a contradiction that at the same time
indicates its unlawfulness. . . . that the human being should, as it were, need no soul
and should have no will of its own . . . is absurd and perverse” (20:93), and present
in the Groundwork twenty years later when Kant says that “rational beings are
called persons because their nature already marks themselves out as an end in itself ”
(G, 4:428). On this account, to treat a human being, or any other free and rational
being should there be any others, whether oneself or another, as if it is not a free being
in all of its actions is to contradict its very essence; it is a logical contradiction. It may
well be, as has been prominently argued by Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard,
that the contradiction involved in any particular violation of the categorical impera-
tive should be understood as a practical contradiction, an undermining of one’s own
agency or that of another in a particular or general way, but the underlying reason
why such a practical contradiction must always be avoided is, if I am correct in
ascribing normative essentialism to Kant, that we must avoid the as it were logical
contradiction involved in acting as if something that does have its own will does not
have its own will.
I believe that Kant always remained attracted to normative essentialism, both
before his invention of transcendental idealism and after it, although he was also
often content to let the moral law in the several forms in which he presented it stand
on its own once he had shown how no other candidate for the fundamental principle
of morality could satisfy the (allegedly) self-evident constraints of universality and
necessity. Yet just what kind of freedom must be regarded as belonging to the very
essence of the human being is no easy question. The chapters in Part II are primarily
concerned with Kant’s efforts to prove that we have free will in the sense of being able
to choose either good or evil at any moment in our lives no matter what our lives
ix
have been like hitherto and what might seem inevitable for us to choose. This is a tall
order for Kant to prove, because he has committed himself to a thoroughgoing
determinism at the phenomenal level of experience, what has come to be called
Laplacean determinism, according to which in principle the state of the universe at
any time could be predicted from its initial conditions and governing laws. His way
around this is to argue that temporality and determinism do not hold at the
noumenal level, the level of things as they are in themselves, and there we can at
least believe, on practical grounds, that our choice is free no matter what, and even, as
Kant argues in the Critique of Practical Reason, that our noumenal choice is always
the ground of our entire phenomenal character, so that if the laws of the latter need to
be different from what we think they are in order to make possible a moral choice
that seems inconsistent with everything that has gone before, well, they must be so.
This metaphysical view, fanciful as it may seem, and ultimately be, does not raise a
problem about the possibility of choosing evil, that is, choosing contrary to the moral
law, or, as Kant puts it in his 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
choosing to subordinate morality to self-love rather than vice versa, unless it is
assumed that the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal self. Unfortunately,
Kant does assume that, at least in his works of the 1780s, and it is only in Part I of
Religion that he definitively asserts that noumenal choice is completely free, so that
even having once chosen evil, we are still free to turn around and choose to be good—
good is always open to us, we are not predetermined to be either good or evil, and we
do not need divine grace to choose good. Yet that position might seem to raise yet
another problem, namely, if the noumenal is not temporal, how we can we once
choose evil but then choose good; if the noumenal does not consist of a succession of
moments, then how can we have multiple opportunities for choice? The answer to
this can only be that we can attribute to our noumenal selves everything and just
what we need for morality, that we need the possibility of multiple choices to make
sense of morality, but that noumenal multiplicity cannot really be temporal—that is
just the only way we have of talking about it, given that time is our inescapable form
of intuition, but it cannot be taken at face value.
In any case, I believe that Kant’s assertion that we are always free to do the right
thing no matter what can be separated from his theory of how we are motivated to do
the right thing insofar as we are motivated to do so, and the chapters in Part III
explore what turns out to be Kant’s fairly rich account of what I there call the
empirical etiology of moral motivation and action: the role of feelings not in the
constitution of the normativity of the moral law itself, as on moral sense theory of
the Hutchesonian variety, nor in the determination of the will to be moral in Kant’s
metaphysical theory, but in the transition from the determination of the will to the
performance of action in the phenomenal world. Here I explore the role of what Kant
refers to as the feeling of respect or moral feeling in general as well as of more specific
“aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s susceptibility to concepts of duty” such as
conscience, love of others, and self-esteem. Here I also discuss Kant’s view that
although we need to have such preconditions as a matter of nature and could not
be moved to create them out of whole cloth if we did not have some natural
dispositions in that direction, nevertheless we need to “cultivate and strengthen”
and educate these natural tendencies.
x
Part I concludes with Chapter 7, “Freedom, Ends, and Duties in Vigilantius,” the
notes for Kant’s course on the metaphysics of morals from 1793–4, and was pub-
lished in a volume of papers on Kant’s lectures on ethics edited by Lara Denis and
Oliver Sensen. This chapter extends the argument of Chapter 6 by examining the
more detailed discussion of a number of examples of duties to self and others that we
find in these notes as compared to the often quite compressed treatments that we find
in the eventual Metaphysics of Morals of 1797.
The chapters in Part II, as I suggested, focus especially on Kant’s lifelong
grappling with the problem of free will. Chapter 8, “The Proof-Structure of the
Groundwork and the Role of Section III,” was written for a workshop in Ground-
work III by Dieter Schönecker at the University of Siegen, Germany, and published
in German translation in the volume resulting from that event. Here I am still
focused on Kant’s attempt to prove the validity of the moral law, but by proving
that we have free will and that the moral law is the only possible law of a free will.
Kant’s distinction between the analytic method of the first two sections of the
Groundwork, which determine the content of the categorical imperative, and the
synthetic method of Section III, which proves that it is binding upon us, is well
known. This chapter argues that this distinction should be understood in the
context of Kant’s insistence that transcendental proofs should employ an “osten-
sive” rather than “apagogic” method, that is, not rely solely upon arguments by
elimination but adduce positive grounds for their conclusion. The ostensive argu-
ment for the binding force of the categorical imperative actually begins in Section II
of the Groundwork, with Kant’s introduction of humanity as an end in itself, but
culminates in the claim of Section III that a “human being really finds in himself a
capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself
insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason” (G, 4:452)—an ostensive
claim if ever there were one!
Chapter 9, “Proving Ourselves Free,” originally presented as an invited plenary
address at the X. International Kant Congress in Saõ Paulo in 2005, addresses the
character of Kant’s attempted proofs of the existence of free will more generally. It
argues that all of Kant’s attempts to prove the metaphysical freedom of the will are
first-personal, that is, proofs of one’s own freedom, while the freedom that we impute
to others is actually compatibilist, known empirically, and thus our knowledge of
their motives is also merely empirical and therefore always uncertain. For this reason
Kant supposes that we should be rigorous in our moral self-appraisal, knowing our
freedom always to do the right thing, but lenient in our judgments of others—a good
result for him to reach, I suggest.
Chapter 10, “Problems with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and its
Subsequent Emendations,” was written for a volume of essays on the Groundwork
edited by Jens Timmermann. Kant’s arguments for the freedom of our noumenal
wills in both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, in spite of
differences, raise epistemological problems about knowledge of the noumenal as
well as the question of how a will that is noumenally rational could ever will
immorally, that is, will evil. Kant tries to avert the epistemological problems in the
second Critique through his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, and tries to
sidestep the problem about the possibility of responsibility for evil in the Religion
xiii
by relying solely on the “ought implies can” argument for the freedom of the will,
which does not presuppose that the real will is necessarily rational.
Chapter 11, “Natural and Rational Belief: Kant’s Final Words?,” was written for a
conference on “Final Chapters” organized by Robin Dillon at Lehigh University and
has not previously been published. This chapter also concerns Kant’s resolution of
his problem about responsibility for good and evil in the Religion and argues that this
solution undercuts his long-standing postulate of personal immortality; structured
once again as a contrast between Kant and Hume, it argues that Kant’s position does
not end up being as remote from Hume’s as it initially seems. That is, Kant’s doctrine
of the postulates of pure practical reason seems diametrically opposed to Hume’s
skepticism about belief in any object that cannot be experienced, such as God or an
immortal soul; but while Kant postulates personal immortality in the second Critique
as a necessary condition of the rationality of working toward the perfection of
personal virtue and in the second and third critiques postulates the existence of
God as the author of a nature in which the object of morality, the highest good, can be
achieved, his doctrine of the possibility of moral conversion at any time in the
Religion undermines his earlier argument for personal immortality, and his final
assessment of the conditions of rationality in the Metaphysics of Morals implies that
only the non-provability of the non-existence of God is necessary to make it rational
to try to be moral—a condition that Hume would agree is satisfied.
The chapters in Part III focus on Kant’s account of the empirical etiology of moral
motivation and action: the cultivation and education of virtue in the real conditions
of human life. Chapter 12, “A Passion for Reason: Hume, Kant, and the Motivation
for Morality,” my 2011 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association, continues the comparison of Hume and Kant. Hume
famously argued that reason is the slave of the passions, and sets no ends, moral or
otherwise, by itself; Kant argues that moral action must be determined by reason
alone. Their positions seem diametrically opposed. But Hume recognized that we
have a calm passion for tranquility, which mimics reason, and is a foundation of
morality, while Kant recognized that in the phenomenal world we can act morally
only if under the direction of reason we transform our innate passion for our own
freedom into an enthusiasm for the freedom of all. At the phenomenal level, the gap
between their theories is not as great as initially appears.
Chapter 13, “The Obligation to be Virtuous: Kant’s Conception of the Tugendver-
pflichtung,” was presented at a conference on the virtues organized at Bowling Green
(Ohio) State University by Fred Miller, Ellen Frankel Paul, and Jeffrey Paul, and
published by them in their journal Social Philosophy and Policy in 2010. Here I point
out that Kant distinguishes between the ethical duty to be virtuous and the duties of
virtue proper, those to promote the ends that are also duties, namely one’s own
perfection and the happiness of others. The duty to be virtuous is the duty to fulfill
the latter duties out of respect for duty, or the moral law. But can there be such a duty
without tautology or infinite regress, and when one must have a natural predispos-
ition to virtue in order to be susceptible to the concept of duty or claims of morality at
all? There can be, because the actual content of the general duty to be virtuous is to
strengthen and cultivate one’s natural predisposition to be virtuous in general as
well as one’s more specific natural predispositions to conscience, love of others, and
xiv
self-esteem. Chapter 14, “Kant on Moral Feelings: From the Lectures to the Metaphysics
of Morals,” originally published in a somewhat abbreviated form in a volume of
critical essays on the Metaphysics of Morals edited by Lara Denis, continues the
discussion of the necessity of strengthening and cultivating the natural tendencies
to be moral. In his early lectures on ethics, Kant said that the head is necessary for
knowledge of the moral law but the heart for its execution, that is, he suggested that
moral feeling plays an essential role in the determination to be moral. In the
Groundwork, he seems to repudiate this position by making the feeling of respect a
merely epiphenomenal manifestation of the noumenal determination of the will to be
moral. But beginning with the Critique of Practical Reason, he suggests that the
feeling of respect or a broader set of “aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s suscep-
tibility to concepts of duty” play a role, not in the noumenal determination of the will
to be moral, but in the empirical etiology of moral action. In the second Critique, he
suggests that the feeling of respect plays a role in the selection of particular maxims,
and in the late Metaphysics of Morals that moral feeling in general, conscience, and
the feelings of love of others or sympathy and self-respect are all empirical tendencies
that have to be strengthened and cultivated for the effective translation of the
determination to be moral into particular actions. Finally, Chapter 15, “Examples
of Moral Possibility,” originally published in a volume on moral education edited by
Klas Roth and Chris Sturtevant, discusses the role that real examples of virtue, rather
than mere thought-experiments, can play in our moral education. Kant rejects any
role for empirical examples of human conduct in the determination of the content of
the moral law. Nor would he seem to allow for any role for empirical examples of
action in the discovery of our freedom. Yet although the moral law is in a sense innate
and our freedom to act in accordance with it may be inferred directly from it,
children undergoing moral education nevertheless need examples of moral conduct
to help them see what the moral law may require of them in particular circumstances
and in order to be really persuaded of the possibility of acting morally no matter what
the costs may be. For the latter, in particular, only real examples of moral conduct
will do, so history and biography play an essential role in moral education. I have
introduced these three chapters in a single paragraph because I regard them as
together constituting another core of this collection—to borrow Kant’s terms, per-
haps the heart of the collection alongside the head offered in Chapters 6 and 7.
By way of conclusion, finally, I offer “Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends,
the Ethical Community, and the Highest Good,” originally published in a North
American Kant Society volume Kant and the Concept of Community edited by
Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe. Many strands of his moral thought are pulled
together by a discussion of the various concepts of moral community that Kant puts
forth. The concept of the highest good is the culminating concept of each of Kant’s
three critiques and a central concept in other works as well. But his presentation of it
is ambivalent between individualistic and communalistic conceptions; whether it is a
religious or a secular concept has been controversial; and its relation to the concepts
of the realm of ends on the one hand and of a juridico-civil community or political
order on the other has been disputed. I argue that Kant’s conception gradually
evolves from an ambivalent conception to one that is clearly communalistic, a
condition of humankind that is to be realized within nature, although, in Kant’s
xv
view, a nature whose laws are underwritten by God; that if the element of punish-
ment for the non-virtuous is omitted, as it should be, then there is nothing to
distinguish the condition of the highest good from the realization of the realm of
ends; and that the highest good may include juridical order, not as a mere stepping-
stone to a purer form of virtue, but as an ineliminable component of the highest good
that is possible in the world, for human beings as they actually are. This is all as we
should expect if the basic value preserved and promoted by reality is that of intra-
and interpersonal freedom, but that is to be realized in the natural world that human
beings inhabit and not an imaginary world inhabited by equally imaginary purely
rational beings.
I could not possibly remember and therefore thank all of those with whom I have
profitably discussed Kant’s moral philosophy over the years during which these
essays were written and the longer period—my whole career—in which I have been
working to one degree or another on the subject. I have already implicitly thanked a
number of colleagues and former students, now themselves respected colleagues, in
referring to the occasions for various of these chapters. I would certainly be remiss if
I did not also mention among those from whom I have learned so much Henry
Allison, Karl Ameriks, Dieter Henrich, Barbara Herman, Rolf-Peter Horstmann,
Patricia Kitcher, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Louden, Onora O’Neill, Jerry Schnee-
wind, and especially he with whom I so often enjoyably and profitably disagree, Allen
Wood; among recent students not already mentioned I also want to single out
Wiebke Deimling, J. Michael Nance, and Reed Winegar. To all those who have not
immediately come to mind I can only apologize.
Contents
Abbreviations xix
Sources xxi
Introduction
1. Kant, Autonomy, and Modernity 3
Conclusion
16. Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends, the Ethical
Community, and the Highest Good 275
Bibliography 303
Index 310
Abbreviations
12. “A Passion for Reason: Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality.” Presi-
dential Address, Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association, 2011.
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 86/2 (2012):
4–21. Reprinted with permission of the American Philosophical Association.
13. “The Obligation to be Virtuous: Kant’s Conception of the Tugendverpflichtung.”
Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2010): 206–32; also in book form in Ellen
Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds, Moral Obligation. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 206–32. Reprinted with permission of
Cambridge University Press.
14. “Moral Feelings in the Metaphysics of Morals.” In Lara Denis, ed., Kant’s
Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010. pp. 130–51. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University
Press.
German version: “Kant über moralische Gefühle: Von den Vorlesungen zur
Metaphysik der Sitten.” In Werner Euler and Burkhard Tuschling, eds, Kant’s
“Metaphysik der Sitten” in der Diskussion. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 2013.
pp. 177–210.
15. “Examples of Moral Possibility.” In Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant, eds,
Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary. London: Routledge, 2011.
pp. 124–38. Reprinted with permission of Informa Co.
16. “Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends, the Ethical Community, and the
Highest Good.” In Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe, eds, Kant and the Concept
of Community, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy 9. Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2011. pp. 88–120. Reprinted with permission of
University of Rochester Press.
Introduction
1
Kant, Autonomy, and Modernity
1. Introduction
What is truly modern in Kant’s practical philosophy? The central idea of this
philosophy is that of the fundamental and unconditional value of autonomy, which
is defined at the outset of Section III of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
as “the will’s property of being a law to itself” (G, 4:446). So it seems natural to see
Kant’s conception of autonomy as what is most novel in his work and as his
paradigmatic contribution to the Enlightenment as a self-conscious break with past
conceptions of morality and the source of its authority. Kant himself certainly
suggested that he saw his conception of autonomy as the key to what is new in his
philosophy when, in the conclusion of the Introduction to the Critique of the Power
of Judgment, the last of his three critiques, he summed up his entire system of
philosophy as a theory of “the faculties of the soul in general, insofar as they are
considered as higher faculties, i.e., as ones that contain an autonomy” (CPJ, Intro-
duction, section IX, 5:196).
No doubt there is something right about the assumption that it is Kant’s concep-
tion of autonomy that is his distinctive contribution to modernity. But the claim
must be stated carefully, for there are certainly elements of Kant’s conception that go
back to antiquity, and that might be considered characteristic not so much of
modernity as of philosophy itself: the ideas that we should rule ourselves by laws of
reason and that by so doing we free ourselves of the dominion of our own passions, as
well as the anti-voluntaristic idea that God (if there is one) wills that we should obey
moral laws because they are rational rather than that they are binding just because he
wills them, all of which are parts of Kant’s conception of autonomy but the last of
which in particular might be taken as the defining idea of the Enlightenment, all also
go back to Plato and the Stoics. So is there anything new and modern in Kant’s
conception of autonomy? I will suggest that there is, but that it lies in the “positive”
rather than in the “negative” aspect of Kant’s conception of the fundamental value of
freedom, that is, it lies in his idea that our fundamental value is setting our own ends
as opposed to being pushed around by our passions, coupled with his idea that each
of us must recognize that every instance of such autonomy is as valuable as our own,
thus that autonomy is a universal value.
A second question that I will raise is whether there is anything distinctively
modern in Kant’s way of arguing for this position. Here I will suggest that when
Kant began thinking about the value of freedom, he appealed to essentially empirical
arguments that are continuous with ancient, especially Stoic styles of argument.
In the Groundwork, Kant replaced all such empirical arguments with an a priori
, ,
appeal to our noumenal nature that might be regarded as novel simply because the
ancients did not have his clear distinctions between the empirical and the a priori and
the phenomenal and the noumenal (although at least one prominent twentieth-
century Kant scholar who argued for the decisive influence of Plato on Kant’s mature
moral philosophy might well have contested this claim).1 But Kant quickly backed off
from this style of argument for the validity of the fundamental principle of morality,
presumably because for all that he was happy to argue for “practical faith” in the
noumenal agency of both ourselves and God as the necessary conditions for the
rationality of attempting to fulfill antecedently accepted moral obligations, he realized
that an a priori argument about the noumenal source of the very validity of the moral
law itself would violate the epistemological strictures of his own theoretical philosophy.
This left him with the strategy of accepting the validity of the moral law and its
consequences as a “fact of reason” that could be philosophically defended precisely
by showing that within the epistemological strictures of his theoretical philosophy it
could not be disproven (the same stance Kant takes toward the existence of God).
Perhaps we should also see this defensive and non-foundational argumentative strategy
for moral philosophy as something distinctively modern, perhaps an anticipation of
the method of “reflective equilibrium” advocated by John Rawls.
The discussion in this chapter will therefore be divided into three sections. In
section 2 I will briefly establish the ancient origins of some of the characteristic
elements of Kant’s conception of autonomy. Section 3 will describe what is distinct-
ively modern in Kant’s conception of autonomy. In section 4 I will briefly describe
Kant’s difficult path toward a new style of argument for this conception.
1
See Klaus Reich, “Kant and Greek Ethics,” trans. W. H. Walsh, Mind, New Series 48 (1939): 338–54,
446–63, reprinted in Reich, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Manfred Baum, Udo Rameil, Klaus Reisinger, and
Gertrud Scholz (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), pp. 425–59, especially pp. 427–40.
2
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, Book I,
Part III, section 2, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 181. The Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit was first published,
without Shaftesbury’s authorization, in 1699, but then included by him in the first edition of the
Characteristics in 1711.
3
Christian Wolff, Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica/Rede über die praktische Philosophie der
Chinesen, ed. Michael Albrecht (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985), p. 45 (my translation).
, ,
1759 Kant endorsed Leibniz’s anti-voluntarist view that God chose this world to exist
because he recognized that it is the best among all possible worlds against Crusius’s
voluntarist view that this is the best of all possible worlds simply because God chose it
to exist.4 And in his earliest recorded lectures on ethics, the notes taken by Herder
between 1762 and 1764, Kant stated that “From the arbitrium divinum I cannot myself
obtain the relevant concepts of the good, unless the concept of the morally good be
assumed beforehand . . . the judgement as to the perfection of God’s arbitrium presup-
poses the investigation of moral perfection.”5 So there is no question that the idea that
the fundamental law or laws of morality must be capable of being recognized by
unaided human reason antecedently to any revelation of the will of God and that
any such claimed revelation must be tested against our own insight into the moral law
is certainly a characteristic idea of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment and a
lifelong commitment of Kant himself. But this aspect of the idea of autonomy cannot
be regarded as a novelty in Kant nor in the Enlightenment as a whole, for it goes back
to Plato, and for that reason can be regarded as a defining idea of philosophy itself
rather than of modernity. In the Euthyphro, the very first in the traditional ordering of
Plato’s dialogues, Plato has Socrates argue that the pious is loved by the gods “because it
is pious, but it is not pious because it is . . . loved” by them.6 Socrates argues against
Euthyphro that we can discover what is pious only through our own rational enquiry
into what is right and wrong, and have no independent access to the loves of the gods
by means of which to discover what is right and wrong; indeed, trying to determine the
will of the gods without the compass of our own insight into right and wrong will lead
only to contradiction and confusion. The idea of using our own reason to discover
what is right and wrong is virtually the starting point of philosophy.
The idea that we must regulate our conduct by the use of our reason and not be led
by our passions is also an idea that goes back to Plato and that was particularly
emphasized by the Stoics from the origins of their school in the century following
Plato. Socrates introduces the model of the tripartite soul in which reason should rule
spirit and appetite in Book IV of the Republic (439c–442d), subsequently analogizing
reason to the philosophically trained guardians who should rule the lower orders in
the just republic. “Fashioning an image of the soul in words” (588b), he compares
reason to the human being who can rule over beasts like the lion and the snake
(588c–590c), and concludes that “it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine
reason, preferably within himself and his own, otherwise imposed from without”
(590d)—at least the best-educated humans can be ruled by reason alone, without
reliance on external inducements. The early Stoics transformed Socrates’s idea of the
just soul into the idea of living in accordance with nature, where nature itself is law-
governed and its laws can be discerned by human reason. Thus Diogenes Laertius
4
See Kant, “An Attempt at Some Reflections on Optimism,” 7 October 1759, 2:29–35; see the discussion
in J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 492–7.
5
Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5 (27:9); see Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, p. 497.
6
Plato, Euthyphro 10d, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), p. 10.
, ,
described Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus as saying that the goal for man
is “to live in agreement with nature,” in accordance with our own nature but where
our own nature is part of nature in general: “Therefore the goal becomes ‘to live
consistently with nature,’ i.e., doing nothing which is forbidden by the common law,
which is right reason, penetrating all things.”7 Chrysippus made the continuity
between our own nature and nature in general explicit: “By nature, in consistency
with which we must live, Chrysippus understands both the common and, specifically,
the human nature.”8 And according to Arius Didymus, reported by Stobaeus, “Zeno
defined the goal thus: ‘living in agreement’. This means living according to a single
and consonant rational principle, since those who live in conflict are unhappy.”9 The
assumption is that it is our nature to be rational, so to live in accordance with our
nature is to live in accordance with reason, and our own reason can tell us what this
requires, that being above all the avoidance of internal and external conflict.
The account of early Stoicism preserved by Stobaeus also makes it clear that, as in
Plato, governance by reason means governance of the impulses. “Passion is an
impulse which is excessive and disobedient to the reason which constrains, or an
irrational, unnatural motion of the soul,”10 but in the rational person impulses are
constrained by reason, and so do not become passions. In later, Roman Stoicism, the
idea of the rule of impulse by reason to prevent the development of passion is
transformed into an image of the “happy life” as consisting in freedom from fear
and desire realized through the use of reason. Seneca’s essay De vita beata is one of
the chief texts of later Stoicism. Here Seneca writes that “The happy life . . . is a life
that is in harmony with its own nature, and it can be attained in only one way.” It
must begin with “a sound mind and one that is in constant possession of its sanity,”
accompanied with fortitude, and through the vigorous use of reason we can drive
“away all that excites or affrights us,” from which “ensues unbroken tranquillity and
enduring freedom.”11 Seneca continues: “the happy life is to have a mind that is free,
lofty, fearless and steadfast—a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond
the reach of desire . . . the happy man is one who is freed from both fear and desire
because of the gift of reason.”12 Living in accord with reason frees us from domin-
ation by our own desires, which are the source of our fears, for all our fears might be
collectively characterized as fear of the disappointment of our desires. Freed from
such fear by reason’s insight that these desires bring more trouble than pleasure, we
can live in tranquility.
The ancients thus certainly anticipated some aspects of the idea of autonomy that
seems to be Kant’s distinctive contribution to modernity: Plato pioneered the idea
7
Diogenes Laertius, VII.87–8, quoted in Brad Inwood and Pierluigi Donini, “Stoic Ethics,” in Keimpe
Alegra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld, and Malcolm Schofield, eds, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 675–738, at p. 685.
8
Diogenes Laertius, 7.88, from Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson, eds, The Stoic Reader: Selected
Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008), p. 114.
9
Quoted by Stobaeus, II.75.11–76.15, Inwood and Donini, p. 684.
10
Stobaeus II.10, Inwood and Gerson, The Stoic Reader, p. 137.
11
Seneca, De vita beata, III.3–4; from Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1938), vol. 2, p. 107.
12
Seneca, De vita beata, IV.3–V.1, Moral Essays, vol. 2, pp. 109–11.
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