Morals and Stories (review)

1993

Con-textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy, 2018

2022

This book examines the significance of Kant’s moral philosophy in contemporary philosophical debates. It argues that Kant’s philosophy can still serve as a guide to navigate the turbulence of a globalized world in which we are faced by an imprescriptible social reality wherein moral values and ethical life models are becoming increasingly unstable. The volume draws on Kantian ethics to discuss various contemporary issues, including sustainable development, moral enhancement, sexism, and racism. It also tackles general concepts of practical philosophy such as lying, the different kinds of moral duties, and the kind of motivation one needs for doing what we consider the right thing. Featuring readings by well-known Kant specialists and emerging scholars with unorthodox approaches to Kant’s philosophy, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, politics and ethics. It will also appeal to moral theorists, applied ethicists and environmental theorists.

Filozofija i drustvo

The main idea behind this article is that in order to understand the meaning that Kant's political philosophy is rendered to by the given socio-historical context of a community we need to turn for help to artistic genius whose subjective "I" holds a general feeling of the world and life. It is in this sense that authors of great novels can help us in two ways. First, their works summarise for our imagination artistic truth about man's capacity for humanity, the very thing that Kant considers to be the scientifically improvable "fact of reason". Second, works of great writers offer for our insight destinies of individuals who decide to pursue moral dictate in a society, thus actualising the potential that lies hidden in all of us, making us worthy of respect. As we lack objective scientific standard of measurement, artist's universal feeling of the world is impressed upon us through a narrative about a man who, in a given society and in a given moment, decides to exercise his autonomy and seek the divine in himself. Contemporary social scientists' attempts to prove historical progress is characterised by the very lack of humbleness. Referring to the great novelists' works in this article is aimed to remind scientists of restraint and self-control demanded from them by the citizen of Konigsberg. History as Man's Moral Progress or an Eternal Search for Instruments of Passive Neutralisation of Social Conflict Kant's hope for historical progress was inspired by his observation of the French Revolution. The revolution of a spirited people that we have witnessed in our times may succeed or fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that any reasonable person, if he could hope, undertaking it a second time, to carry it out successfully, would nonetheless never decide to perform the experiment at such a cost.-Nevertheless, in the hearts of all its spectators (who themselves are not involved in the show), I assert, this revolution meets with a degree of sympathy in wish that borders on enthusiasm, a sympathy the expression of which is itself associated with danger. This sympathy can thus have no other cause than a moral capacity in the human race (Kant 2006: 155).

Akten des XI. Kant-Kongresses 2010, 2013

In this paper I would like to approach the relation between art and morality from a slightly different standpoint than is usually done. Commentators usually focus on Kant's claim that beauty is the symbol of the morally good. This approach has generally seen beauty as a sort of auxiliary to morality, a propedeutic in Henry Allison's words, which leaves Kant's moral theory untouched. 1 However, it seems to me that though beauty is not part of the justification project of morality undertaken in the Groundwork, and the second Critique, it can play a role greater than that of merely cultivating our sense of judgment (though this is not doubt of great importance as well). In short, I take it that Kant's theory of artistic production is part of a second explanation of morality through the concept of purposiveness. This point cannot be argued for here. I will argue, however, that art in general and not just beauty, can transform our way of understanding ourselves in the world as a whole in accordance with our fundamental purpose, which is morality. I will be arguing that the problem of becoming moral lies not just in the difficulty of placing the good ahead of our desires but also in the means we choose to implement this maxim. Fine art can help us with the former, and this is Kant's official position, but I will claim that it can also help us with the latter. For example, though burning witches was thought to be a step toward making the world a better place, we now see that it was not. The problem, however, need not have been one of a court having the wrong maxim but of their simply being mistaken about the facts of the world, namely that it is just not the case that old women are sometimes witches. This is a simple epistemological point. Leaving aside the question of the development of natural science all together, I want to argue that the aesthetic domain can help us understand the world as a place in which morality can and does come to pass by improving our shared epistemic schema. Judgments of taste, as

Eighteenth-Century Studies

While many philosophers still know Kant"s ethics primarily from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and perhaps the Critique of Practical Reason, recent scholarship has shown that to truly understand his moral philosophy we must widen our perspective to include the full range of his ethical writings, including the Metaphysics of Morals, the Religionschrift, his lectures on ethics, and various essays on politics and history (e.g. "Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History"). A new monograph by Ann Margret Baxley and a new collection of essays edited by Lara Denis show, in different ways, the philosophical value of expanding and enriching our understanding of Kant as a moral philosopher. The Kant that emerges from these texts is a much more subtle and wide-ranging theorist of human moral life than narrow focus on the Groundwork or the second Critique would suggest. Readers who know Kant"s ethics mainly from the Groundwork might, understandably, have the impression that he holds an objectionably austere view of ethical life. In the first section Kant distinguishes between actions done in conformity with the moral law (pflichtmässig) and

Inquiry, 2000

Interest in Kantian ethics is flourishing. The past twenty years have provided a flood of books and articles explaining how Kant's ethics is more interesting and promising than its detractors have realised. Despite their disagreements on detail, Rawls, Hill, O'Neill, Herman, Korsgaard, and their many followers, are part of a real revival of interest in Kantian ethics. Kant's Ethical Thought, by Allen Wood, has both incorporated and extended many of the distinctive insights that fuel this revival. The influence of Korsgaard is perhaps the strongest here. Wood, however, goes significantly further than other interpreters in his emphasis on the centrality of Kant's conception of humanity as an end in itself and the practical importance of the formula of autonomy and the realm of ends in the derivation of duties. Unlike Korsgaard and others, he emphasises the inadequacy of Kantian universalisability procedures. Wood, however, has contempt for critics who have hastily rejected Kant's ethical theory because of the inadequacy of the formula of universalisability. Wood argues that we only discover the full promise of Kantian ethics when we move beyond the formal principle of morality and focus on Kant's conceptions of human dignity, of autonomy as the source of normativity, and of a harmonious human community. Although Kant's conception of the dignity of humanity has received a good deal of recent attention, Wood has provided an exceedingly careful and detailed reconstruction of Kant's argument. The first half of Kant's Ethical Thought goes over every argument of the first two sections of Kant's Groundwork and seems to consider every possible objection. The result is very slow going. Although I am not sure how many people will work their way through this thicket of arguments, this first part of the book is careful, thorough, and valuable. The conclusion of these arguments is that Kant's ethics is based squarely on the absolute and unconditional value we must find in humanity and thus on the equal dignity of all persons. Wood also concludes that it is only in the idea of the realm of ends that we truly see what the formula of humanity requires and that it is only by willing as we would in a realm of ends that our autonomy is fully realised. Like Kant's critics, Wood argues that we cannot construct an adequate universalisability test without first specifying the morally relevant features of maxims (p. 105). Unlike most of Kant's critics, however, Wood considers (and rejects) the more sophisticated recent attempts to salvage the universalisability procedure. Furthermore, he shows that the concept of obligation requires a more substantive determining ground for the will than a universalisability test of maxims, alone, can provide. The requirements of morality must be based on a substantive value that moral agents must acknowledge to be an objective end. Only such an end could provide the necessary motivational basis for a categorical imperative (p. 114). On Wood's interpretation, Kant's controversial claim that a good will is motivated by duty and that actions motivated by sympathetic feelings alone lack moral worth is much more plausible. Morally good conduct expresses the value or dignity of both ourselves and the equal worth and dignity of other persons. Beneficent actions, motivated by duty, express our respect for the humanity of another person. So, when Kant argues that beneficence motivated by duty, and not inclination, has moral worth and reflects a good will, his point is that principled beneficence express a deeper concern and caring about others. The core of the moral motive is not formal duty but a recognition of the value and importance of both oneself and others. If I

The Palgrave Kant Handbook, 2017

Kant's moral philosophy is the part of his overall system that is most widely defended in contemporary philosophical debates, and his influence on contemporary moral philosophy is vast. The type of moral theory Kant pioneered, sometimes characterized (but not uncontroversially) as deontological or non-consequentialist, is standardly classified today as one of the major systematic approaches in normative ethicsusually alongside consequentialism (of which utilitarianism is one variant) and sometimes also alongside virtue ethics and intuitionism. It is not possible to engage very deeply with contemporary debates between defenders of these approaches, or about many other topics such as moral motivation, the nature of reasons and rationality, or the metaphysical status of moral properties and values, without encountering positions designated as Kantian. There is, however, a subtle and sometimes bewildering distinction between scholarship on Kant's moral philosophy, which aims primarily to interpret and evaluate historical texts by Kant, and positions designated as Kantian in debates among contemporary moral philosophers. It is not surprising that philosophers who find some or all of the historical Kant's moral thought defensible today would devote some of their attention to engaging with Kant's own texts and some of their attention to arguing in contemporary terms for Kantian views, perhaps with (more or less explicit) modifications to