In his early writings, Kant regarded the autonomy of the will as the supreme principle of morality, as well as the sole principle of all moral laws and of the duties conforming to them. Nevertheless, this impressively sounding principle gradually disappeared from the later Kant’s texts, and there is not much in the literature to explain why. Pauline Kleingeld’s purpose, in the two articles I consider here, is to address this lacuna and to show that there are good philosophical reasons (...) for this principle’s gradual disappearance from the Kantian framework. One of my aims, in this paper, is to formulate and argue for several reservations about Kleingeld’s argument; however, even if these reservations turn out to be apposite, my claim is not that Kant did not actually abandon the Principle of Autonomy; instead, I argue that, even if Kleingeld were right and Kant had abandoned the Principle of Autonomy, he would still not have needed to. (shrink)

Maxims play a crucial role in Kant's ethical philosophy, but there is significant disagreement about what maxims are. In this two-part essay, I survey eight different views of Kantian maxims, presenting their strengths, and their weaknesses. Part I: Established Approaches, begins with Rüdiger Bubner's view that Kant took maxims to be what ordinary people of today take them to be, namely pithily expressed precepts of morality or prudence. Next comes the position, most associated with Rüdiger Bittner and Otfried Höffe, that (...) maxims are Lebensregeln, or 'life-rules'– quite general rules for how to conduct oneself based on equally general outlooks on how the world is. These first two interpretations make sense of Kant's claim, made in his anthropological and pedagogical writings, that we have to learn how to act on maxims, but they become less plausible in light of Kant's probable view that people always act on maxims – after all, how can people learn how to act on something they always act on anyway? The next two views, each advanced, at different times, by Onora O'Neill, make better sense of the fact that people always act on maxims, for they hold that maxims are intentions – either specific intentions, such as 'to open the door', or general intentions, such as 'to make guests feel welcome'– and it is perfectly sensible to claim that people always act on intentions. However, they face the same problem as the two previous views, which is that if people always act on maxims, what sense does it make to say they also have to learn how to act on them? Henry Allison, the main representative of the fifth view, claims, on the basis of Kant's doctrine of the 'highest maxim', that maxims are principles organized hierarchically, such that an agent endorses one maxim because she endorses a more general maxim. Unfortunately for Allison, there is little direct textual support for his claim that maxims are organized hierarchically. (shrink)

The article defends three claims regarding the relation between the different formulas of the categorical imperative. On its prevailing reading, FUL gives different moral guidance than FH; left answered, this problem is an argument for adopting a competing perspective on FUL. The prohibitions and commands of the formulas should be taken to be extensionally the same; but FKE adds a dimension missing from the others, gained by uniting their perspectives, namely, bringing the variety of moral laws into systematic unity. The (...) grammatically ambiguous phrase inGMS, 4: 436.9–10 claims that FA alone unites the other formulas in itself. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that on Kant’s view of action, ‘everyone always acts on maxims.’ Call this the ‘descriptive reading.’ This reading faces two important problems: first, the idea that people always act on maxims offends against common sense: it clashes with our ordinary ideas about human agency. Second, there are various passages in which Kant says that it is ‘rare’ and ‘admirable’ to firmly adhere to a set of basic principles that we adopt for ourselves. This article offers an (...) alternative: the ‘normative reading.’ On this reading, it is a normative ideal to adopt and act on maxims: it is one of the things Kant thinks we would do if our reason were fully in control of our decision-making. (shrink)

On the currently dominant reading of the Groundwork, Kant’s derivation of ‘imperatives of duty’ exemplifies a decision procedure for the derivation of concrete duties in moral deliberation. However, Kant’s response to an often-misidentified criticism of the Groundwork by G. A. Tittel suggests that Kant was remarkably unconcerned with arguing for the practicality of the categorical imperative as a decision procedure. Instead, I argue that the main aim of Kant’s derivation of imperatives of duty was to show how his analysis of (...) the form of moral judgement is indeed presupposed in the four types of moral imperative that philosophers of his time recognized. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente artículo es mostrar cómo la especificidad del discurso moral obliga a introducir un modo de exposición de nuestros conceptos que no acaba de ajustarse plenamente a ninguno de los dos modelos presentados por Kant en el parágrafo 59 de la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar. Situándose a medio camino de esquema y símbolo, la noción de «tipo» actúa como elemento mediador entre la ley moral y cada una de sus posibles concreciones.

The reference to “values” as normatively guiding structures is widespread in contemporary political and societal discussions. Values are expected to improve stability and provide ethical orientation in modern civilizations which are shaped by manifold cultural influences. At the same time values are often underdetermined, not well legitimized and difficult to interpret in concrete cases. The article takes up such appeals to “values” and contrasts them with Kant’s concept of moral value. Moral value, according to Kant, remains dependent on the moral (...) law as a formal procedure. Key issues for the understanding of moral value in Kant refer to overdetermined action and to the acquisition of maxims in life practice. An analysis of these aspects comes to the conclusion that the Kantian concept of moral value bypasses problems associated with the appeal to “values” and is promising for dealing with moral conflicts in modern societies. (shrink)

En el presente artículo, el autor analiza el concepto de leyes prácticas propuesto por Kant en la Crítica de la razón práctica, poniendo énfasis en los antecendentes que este concepto tiene en la escuela del derecho natural moderno y en el giro que este concepto representa, ya que en él se hace patente el paso desde una ética de la obligación hacia una ética de la autonomía. Se analizan además las propiedades esenciales del concepto de leyes prácticas y los problemas (...) filosóficos que surgen a partir de él y se sitúa dicho concepto en el contexto general de la ética kantiana y de la filosofía moral. In this article the author analyzes the concept of "practical law" as developed by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason. The author notes the roots of this concept in the modern school of natural law and states that this concept represents a shift from an ethic of obligation to an ethic of autonomy. In addition, the author analyzes the essential features of the "practical law" concept; the philosophical problems that arise from it, and the place of this concept in the landscape of Kantian ethics and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Open access-introduction into moral philosophy in German language that contains chapters on the concept of morality, on the development and the main positions of normative ethics, on meta-ethics, and on the various fields of applied ethics. One of its distinctive features is that it explicitly reflects on the role of morality and ethics in modern society and that it analyses the import of alternative conceptual and normative positions for determining this role. The book can be freely downloaded from the publisher's (...) website via the URL below. (shrink)

Este texto busca mostrar algunos aspectos de continuidad entre las concepciones de la acción intencional de Kant y Hegel. Esos aspectos son la base de otros conocidos elementos de ruptura que hay entre ellos. Como en las últimas décadas el problema de la concepción de ambos autores en torno a este punto ha sido investigado por múltiples estudiosos, me concentraré fundamentalmente en un punto que no ha sido suficientemente tratado: el modo en que ambos autores conciben la naturaleza de la (...) acción frente a lo que se podría considerar el enfoque dominante al día de hoy: la concepción que llamaré causal-reductiva. Luego de ello sugeriré que en el marco de esta oposición a la concepción causal reductiva surge una divergencia profunda entre Kant y Hegel. (shrink)

Nuestro propósito es señalar el significado kantiano de “modo de pensar” o Denkungsart desde su filosofía precrítica hasta su filosofía crítica. Este artículo examina la relación entre la definición kantiana de carácter y la primacía de la razón práctica y la ley moral, asimismo introduce la noción de Gessinung que se refiere a la dimensión cualitativa del carácter y a la conciencia moral, que en últimas constituye la noción acompañante de la Denkungsart en tanto define la actividad esencial del carácter.