Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full download Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform Laura Papish file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Kant on Evil, Self-Deception, and Moral Reform Laura Papish file pdf all chapter on 2024
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-truth-about-denial-bias-and-
self-deception-in-science-politics-and-religion-adrian-bardon/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-evil-within-why-we-need-moral-
philosophy-1st-edition-diane-jeske/
https://ebookmass.com/product/leibniz-on-the-problem-of-evil-
paul-rateau/
https://ebookmass.com/product/martyrdom-self-sacrifice-and-self-
immolation-religious-perspectives-on-suicide-margo-kitts/
Kantian Commitments: Essays on Moral Theory and
Practice Barbara Herman
https://ebookmass.com/product/kantian-commitments-essays-on-
moral-theory-and-practice-barbara-herman/
https://ebookmass.com/product/on-the-self-discourses-of-mental-
health-and-education-julie-allan/
https://ebookmass.com/product/hume-on-the-self-and-personal-
identity-dan-obrien/
https://ebookmass.com/product/aesthetic-experience-and-moral-
vision-in-plato-kant-and-murdoch-looking-good-being-good-1st-
ed-2021-edition-meredith-trexler-drees/
https://ebookmass.com/product/heidegger-on-being-self-concealing-
katherine-withy/
Kant on Evil, Self-Deception,
and Moral Reform
ii
Kant on Evil,
Self- Deception,
and Mor al Reform
Laura Papish
1
iv
1
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 certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To the memory of my father, Richard P. Papish
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations and Translations xiii
Introduction 1
3. Kantian Self-Deception 67
Conclusion 233
Bibliography 237
Index 247
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people who have helped make this book a reality. To start,
I want to thank Lucy Randall, Hannah Doyle, and the rest of the staff at
Oxford University Press who helped at various stages of production. I want
to give special thanks to Lucy, since without her enthusiasm at the very
beginning of my work on this manuscript, the project would never have
gotten off the ground. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to my colleagues
in the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University (GW).
I wish to thank Gail Weiss, who was chair upon my hire and who continued
to advocate and look out for me during my career. I also wish to thank Tad
Zawidzki, my current chair, as he has enabled me—through research and
travel support, a flexible teaching schedule, and overall good vibes—to both
complete this manuscript and secure a much-needed set of course releases
to help me recover from completing it. In addition, I owe an enormous debt
to David DeGrazia, who has served as my mentor throughout my time at
GW. David has offered invaluable advice both on publishing in general and
on how to develop this particular book project, and at crucial junctures he
has helped me navigate the publishing process and my reviewer feedback.
I feel incredibly lucky to have him as a mentor, since without his encour-
agement and guidance I would have never had the confidence to try to
write a book. I also want to thank GW and the John Templeton Foundation
for financial support. In 2015, GW granted me a University Facilitating
Fund award, which proved especially helpful to my research that summer.
Through the Templeton Foundation, I was able to participate in Christian
Miller’s 2013 Character Project Summer Seminar, and without this oppor-
tunity I would not have been able to do the research that informed much
of Chapter 2.
There are many more people who played distant and near roles in the
development of this book. I want to note my gratitude to John Russon,
my undergraduate professor, whose excellence as a teacher and passion
x
for philosophy made me love the field to begin with. During my time as a
graduate student, I was surrounded by first-rate philosophers who played
essential roles in my academic career, among them Richard Kraut, Rachel
Zuckert, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, and Paul Guyer. More recently, I relied on
an extensive network of Kantians to help spark, develop, and refine the
ideas put forward in this book. I have benefited greatly from study group
meetings sponsored by the North American Kant Society and I thank the
hosts who arranged these meetings, including Melissa Seymour Fahmy,
Colin McQuillan, Huaping Lu-Adler, and, again, Rachel Zuckert. I am
grateful to audiences that gave valuable feedback at several additional con-
ferences and invited talks, including those held at the University of Oslo,
the University of Vienna, George Mason University, the University of
Chicago, and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress.
I also want to note my gratitude to the other members of the D.C./
Baltimore Kant Group, which has enabled me to be part of a supportive,
warm, and intellectually fierce community. Mavis Biss, Joseph Trullinger,
Mike Nance, Tim Jankowiak, and Oliver Thorndike have all been consistent
and challenging interlocutors these past few years, and I am extraordi-
narily grateful to them for their input on earlier drafts of several of the
chapters or ideas in this book. Our group was formed in 2014 by Huaping
Lu-Adler, and I want to express how thankful I am to her for giving us such
a special, intimate, and serious place to share our works in progress. In
fact, without having had the opportunity to read some of Huaping’s ex-
cellent work, and to learn about the kind of resource Kant’s lectures on
logic could be for those interested in Kant’s practical philosophy, this book
simply could not have taken shape. Within the realm of Kant studies, I fi-
nally want to note my debts, first, to Krista Thomason, who also has offered
extremely helpful and incisive feedback concerning past drafts of my work,
and, second, to the two reviewers commissioned by Oxford to review my
manuscript. Their careful, thoughtful, and constructively critical replies to
my earliest version of the text enabled me to produce a substantially re-
vised and improved book, and while I am, of course, solely responsible for
any mistakes or missteps that remain in the final version, their input was
invaluable. I deeply appreciate the time and care both reviewers put into
this project.
Finally, I want to thank the friends and family members who have
supported me as this book project took shape. Alison Peterman has been
a dear friend from our first days at Northwestern, and since then we have
staked out a trail writing proseminar papers together, rallying each other
through the job market, and taking much deserved breaks by eating her ex-
cellent pancakes and having cocktails in person and over Skype. Katherine
[x]
Wasdin, who is part of my cohort at GW, has explored D.C. with me, been
my co-navigator of the tenure track, and both has exposed me to some of
the coolest, strangest, movies I’ve ever seen and has accompanied me to
more metal shows than I’m sure she’d like to remember. Luis Mier y Terán
has helped make D.C. home with barbeques, trips, adventures, and an ever-
increasing stream of cat videos and pictures. The Northeast’s best bluegrass
band—Calamity Row, which includes Josh McDonald, Jordan Cutler, and
Annie Miller—has given me fun nights out throughout the school years
and summers, and has helped make D.C. the best place I have ever lived. My
family and in-laws have provided steady encouragement these past years,
and I want to thank Rod and Jo Winther, Melinda Winther, Sara and Mike
Kopp, Dave Riley, Genevieve Riley, Liz Papish, and my mother Mary Ann
Papish. She and my adored, late father Richard Papish never once doubted
my choice of philosophy as a profession, and I am extremely fortunate to
have known, from the time I was a child, that I should do what I love for
work and do it well. My father was so pleased when I declared a major in
philosophy that he went to Labyrinth Books in New York City and picked
out for me Gregory Vlastos’s Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. If I was
going to do philosophy, he said, I would want to start at the beginning.
I have tried my best to produce work as serious as he thought me capable of.
Finally, my deepest thanks go to Chris Winther, my husband and best
friend. Chris is the funniest, most fun, and best person I have ever known.
I spent many late nights and weekends at the office working on this book,
and even on the most sleep-deprived, writer-blocked, and frustrating days,
it never really bothered me since I knew I would come home to someone
who would have me laughing within minutes without even trying. The part-
nership and home we share, complete with the two most darling cats that
have ever existed, Schuylkill and Catharine, are the most valuable things
in my life.
[ xi ]
xi
A B B R E V I AT I O N S A N D T R A N S L AT I O N S
References to Kant’s writings are cited in the body of the text and
according to the volume and page numbers in Kants gesammelte Schriften,
herausgegeben von der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900). The only exception is the Critique of Pure
Reason, where my citations follow the standard A/B pagination. References
to Kant’s Reflexionen also include the number assigned to them by Erich
Adickes.
My quotations of Kant rely on English translations from the Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, edited by Paul Guyer and Allen
W. Wood where available, and I have had to supply my own translations
for only a few Reflexionen. The following list contains both the translations
used and abbreviations for Kant’s works.
I mmanuel Kant’s account of evil remains one of the less explored and
more controversial elements of his broader moral theory. The reasons
are manifold.
Kant’s moral writings largely discuss the metaphysical underpinnings
of morality, such as the possibility of moral motivation, how freedom and
rationality relate to the ability to bind oneself to moral principles, and the
need to specify the terms of the moral law independent of historical con-
text, generalizations about human nature, or the specific desires or goals
of any given individual. This allows Kant to purify his moral theory of any
cultural, anthropological, or personal elements, and to develop an account
of the moral law that would hold for any rational agent whatsoever, but
it also forces much of Kant’s moral theory to gravitate toward both the
wholesome and the ideal. Thus, while Kant focuses on articulating the
conditions of a Kingdom of Ends, wherein all rational wills are aligned in
the pursuit of moral goodness, he does not offer a sufficiently extensive or
fully clear account of the shortcomings that human beings are vulnerable
to or the apparent variety of evil in everyday life. Though we know much
about the hallmarks of morally worthy action, Kant spends comparatively
little time explaining wrongdoing or evil actions or characters.1
These difficulties are aggravated by the context in which Kant finally,
albeit briefly, addressed the problem of human evil and the reception
1. Throughout this chapter and this book, I use the notions of evil and immorality
interchangeably, as I think Kant himself is inclined to. This is in contrast to the work
of certain contemporary Kantians, such as Ernesto Garcia, who argue for a distinction
between evil and immorality. See “A Kantian Theory of Evil.”
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Cross-head Designed by Mr. Porter.
Contract with Ormerod, Grierson & Co. Engine for Evan Leigh, Son & Co. Engine
for the Oporto Exhibition. Getting Home from Portugal.
Trouble with the Evan Leigh Engine. Gear Patterns from the Whitworth Works.
First Order for a Governor. Introduction of the Governor into Cotton Mills.
Invention of my Condenser. Failure of Ormerod, Grierson & Co.
Diagrams from Engine of Evan Leigh, Son & Co. Sixteen Pounds to the Inch.
And, after all, the fault was largely mine. I did not think of it till long
afterwards, and it did not occur to anybody else, not even to those
most deeply interested in the boiler. My surface condenser was the
cause of all the trouble, and that was why I have to this day deeply
regretted having put it in. The oil used in the cylinder was all sent