This article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a formal agreement with what morality demands of us, such that (...) the social graces give the illusion of virtue. The existence of such a duty can answer Schiller’s persistent objection that Kant’s ethics scares away the Graces with Duty. (shrink)

In this study I provide a thematic comparison of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to suggest that the representation of the ethical in Fear and Trembling is transparently Kantian. At times I draw on Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Conflict of the Faculties, and The Metaphysics of Morals to offer a comprehensive account of Kant’s ethical theory. Both philosophers hold profoundly important positions within the milieu of ethics, however (...) they have always shared a tenuous and at times negative relationship. In this study, I challenge such commentators by showing that when the figure of Abraham is taken typologically and excluded from the text, what emerges from Fear and Trembling is a Kantian based ethics. I argue that a comparative reading of Kant’s Groundwork and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling reveals that Kierkegaard’s thought gravitates towards three central principles of Kant’s categorical imperative, as well sharing some similarities with Kant’s understanding of duty. (shrink)

The present paper suggests to consider Kierkegaard’s use of Abraham’s story in Fear and Trembling in regulative terms, that is, to consider it as a model – not for our moral behaviour but rather for our religious behaviour. To do so, I first rely on recent literature to argue that Kierkegaard should be regarded as a distinctively post-Kantian philosopher: namely, a philosopher who goes beyond Kant in a way that is nevertheless true to the spirit of Kant’s original critical philosophy. (...) Then, I present a post-Kantian reading of Fear and Trembling, focusing on the problematic implications that result from comparing this text with Hegel’s theory of recognition. Finally, I submit that sacrifice in Fear and Trembling is a regulative notion in a Kantian sense. This interpretation addresses some of the most problematic aspects of the text. I conclude that the regulativity of sacrifice may be regarded as an important and perhaps an essential component of Kierkegaard’s overall philosophical strategy. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a quasi-transcendental argument to justify Kant’s infamous claim “man is evil by nature.” The cornerstone of my reconstruction lies in drawing a systematic distinction between the seemingly identical concepts of “evil disposition” (böseGesinnung) and “propensity to evil” (Hang zumBösen). The former, I argue, Kant reserves to describe the fundamental moral outlook of a single individual; the latter, the moral orientation of the whole species. Moreover, the appellative “evil” ranges over two different types of moral failure: (...) while an “evil disposition” is a failure to realize the good (i.e., to adopt the motive of duty as limiting condition for all one’s desires), an “evil propensity” is a failure to realize the highest good (i.e., to engage in the collective project of transforming the legal order into an ethical community). This correlation between units of moral analysis and types of obligation suggests a way to offer a deduction of the universal propensity on behalf of Kant. It consists in tracing the source of radical evil to the same subjective necessity that gives rise to the doctrine of the highest good. For, at the basis of Kant’s two doctrines lies the same natural dialectic between happiness and morality. While the highest good brings about the critically acceptable resolution of this dialectic, the propensity to evil perpetuates and aggravates it. Instead of connecting happiness and morality in an objective relation, the human will subordinatesmorality to the pursuit of happiness according to the subjective order of association. If this reading is correct, it would explain why prior attempts at a transcendental deduction have failed: interpreters have looked for the key to the deduction in the body of Kant’s text, where it is not to be found, for it is tucked, instead, in the Preface to the first edition. (shrink)

In ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing’, Thomas E. Hill, Jr, contrasts Kant's notion of happiness with that of human flourishing, explains the role of happiness in Kant's ethics, and suggests some reasons why Kant portrays happiness rather than flourishing as the non-moral good of the individual. While there is much I agree with in Hill's essay, I disagree with Hill on how best to conceive of human flourishing in Kant's philosophy, and on the importance of human flourishing in Kant's ethics. Comparing (...) my views with Hill's is not what chiefly interests me, however. After section 1, I make little explicit reference to ‘Happiness and Human Flourishing’. Instead, I seek to expand the discussion begun there by Hill of ‘how happiness and human flourishing are relevant to [Kantian] ethics’. (shrink)

In this article the importance of the representational character of politics is illustrated on the basis of the philosophy of Kant. The vanishing of the noumenal in post-modern thinking seems to imply fundamental changes in the sensitive response – aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime – to politics. In the Kantian paradigm the meaning of our affective response to the violence of (human) nature is ruled by a moral perspective of practical reason. Although the representation of practical reason in (...) the empirical is only possible in an indirect way by means of a schematism of analogy, the corresponding – subjectively teleological – aesthetic feelings both of harmony in the beautiful and of resistance in the sublime do symbolize in a reflective judgement the morally determined character and the objectively conceived teleology of nature in the system of rights of a single state as well as of the cosmopolitan world order. (shrink)