This article seeks to show the importance of Cicero for Kant by pointing out the systematic relationship between their respective views on ethics and law. Cicero was important to Kant because Cicero had already elaborated an imperative, “quasi-jural” conception of duty or obligation. Cicero had also already prefigured the distinction between ethical duties and duties of justice. The article does not establish any direct historical influence, but points out interesting systematic overlaps. The most important in the realm of ethics are (...) a universal rationalism; a rule-based normative framework of duty; and skepticism about (Cicero), or rejection of (Kant), eudaimonism. In the realm of political theory, it is the centrality of law and of property that unites both thinkers; both reject voluntarism in thinking that consensus flows from the right external laws, not the other way around, and thus creates a juridical community; and lastly, both Cicero and Kant believe that transparence, or publicity, is a key ideal that might be presupposed by both the ethical and the juridical domain. The article thus shows that both Cicero and Kant separate ethics from law, but there are indications that neither has given up the aspiration to bridge the two realms on a higher plane. This reading of Kant yields both a more Ciceronian Kant and allows us to perceive Kantian aspects of Cicero. (shrink)

When we think about Kantian virtue, what often comes to mind is the notion of respect. Respect is due to all persons merely in virtue of their status as rational agents. Indeed, on the Kantian view, specific virtues, such as duties of beneficence, gratitude, or self-perfection, are so many ways of respecting persons as free rational agents. To preserve and promote rational agency, to protect individuals from threats against rational agency, i.e., to respect persons, is at the core of virtue. (...) No doubt, part of the appeal of the Kantian notion of respect is that it offers an intuitive way of talking about the wrongness of manipulation and coercion, and in general, the wrongness of unfairly taking advantage of another. For to respect persons is to take seriously their status as persons, and to forswear, at some level, actions and attitudes that would compromise their dignity. Talking about respect has become shorthand for signaling deontological concerns. More formally, within recent Kantian exegesis, respect is viewed as yielding a more accessible and less contrived account of the Categorical Imperative than the more traditional criterion of universalizability and the contradictions tests applied to it. Within the Kantianinspired political theory of John Rawls, respect is also a core notion, representing a pervasive good, the bases of which, just states have an obligation to distribute to their members. Yet, for all its appeal, respect is an odd feature of Kantian ethics. For it is an emotion in a theory that prides itself in grounding morality in principles of reason alone. In this essay, I draw attention to the importance of respect in Kant's account in order to show just how he makes room for the emotions. Indeed, I shall argue that on Kant's account of full moral agency, we are emotional as well as rational creatures. Although Kant often portrays respect as an abstract emotional attitude mysteriously connected to our rationality, I argue that on a suitable revision, respect can be transformed into a more concrete attitude, cultivated and expressed alongside other emotions requisite for full virtue. (shrink)

Over the last 60 years the idea of human dignity has become increasingly prominent in the political discourse on human rights. In United Nations documents, for instance, human dignity is currently presented as the justification for human rights. In this paper I shall argue that the contemporary way in which human dignity is thought to ground human rights is very different from the way human dignity has been understood traditionally. My aim is to contrast the contemporary paradigm of dignity to (...) a different one that has been prominent historically from Cicero onwards. My conclusion is that if one wants to use the contemporary conception of dignity, one cannot refer to the history of philosophy for support of this conception, and if one wants to use this history in support, one would have to employ a different conception of dignity that uses a different pattern of thought. (shrink)

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Kant’s account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant doesn’t talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil, and leaves other clues that (...) his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is — by default and yet by our own deed — bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant’s account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources. (shrink)

Scholars have compared Joseph Butler and Immanuel Kant’s moral theories, claiming that they both center on the concept of autonomy. In this thesis, I argue that, despite this superficial similarity, they disagree about the core commitments of their conceptions of autonomy. Butlerian autonomy relies on inferring from the normative authority of conscience to the descriptive that human nature is adapted to virtue, and from this descriptive claim about human nature to moral obligation. Kant rejects these inferences, and therefore rejects the (...) key components of Butlerian autonomy. Moreover, I argue that Kant’s rejection of Butler’s conception of human nature renders Butler’s stoic conception of virtue unavailable to Kant. (shrink)