Este artículo expone los argumentos de Kant y Fichte a favor del deber ético de la beneficencia. De manera concreta, se evalúan las razones para que este deber, en sus respectivos sistemas de deberes morales, obtenga un posicionamiento particular y requiera consideraciones aparte de los criterios que, en general, estructuran dichos sistemas. Además, se hacen comentarios comparativos respecto al papel que juega la facultad de juzgar ante el margen de latitud o de juego que, en particular, implica este deber ético (...) en uno y otro autor. (shrink)

A commentary on Sections XII–XVI of the “Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue”.

Kant claims that love ‘is a matter of feeling,’ which has led many of his interpreters to argue that he conceives of love as solely a matter of feeling, that is, as a purely pathological state. In this paper I challenge this reading by taking another one of Kant’s claims seriously, namely that all love is either benevolence or complacence and that both are rational. I place Kant’s distinction between benevolence and complacence next to the historical inspiration for it, namely (...) Francis Hutcheson’s very similar distinction, in order to argue that love is rational, for Kant, in that it requires certain rational capacities on the part of the agent. I conclude by illustrating that this has important implications for how we understand Kant’s conception of love more generally. (shrink)

Although in his earlier ethical writings Kant explains the concept of moral feeling, inherited from the British sentimentalists, as a peculiar feeling of respect for the moral law that functions as an incentive for moral actions, the Doctrine of Virtue seems to add complexity to the issue. There, Kant discusses two similar aesthetic predispositions, moral feeling and respect, whose relationship to the feeling of respect is far from clear. This article offers a much needed elucidation of the relationship between these (...) three concepts. In the first part, I show that Kant, in the writings before the Doctrine of Virtue, transforms the British sentimentalists’ construal of moral feeling into that of the feeling of respect as the sole moral incentive. In the second part, I argue that, although in the Doctrine of Virtue Kant distinguishes, for a specific reason, between the aesthetic predisposition of moral feeling and that of respect, they are both ultimately identical to the feeling of respect. The conclusion is that nothing of substance changes between Kant’s earlier thinking and his views in the Doctrine of Virtue; for Kant there is just one feeling that properly deserves the name of moral feeling, the feeling of respect. (shrink)

Much has been written about the general moral duty to love one’s neighbors. In this article, I explore the specific application of this moral duty in the work setting. I argue from a secular perspective that individuals have the moral duty to love their stakeholders. Loving one’s stakeholders is an affective valuing of the stake-related values these stakeholders pursue and as such is the real recognition of one’s stakeholders as stakeholders and of oneself as a stakeholder of one’s stakeholders. This (...) moral concept of stakeholder love offers promising contributions to stakeholder theory, leadership theories, and ethical theories in general and business ethics theories in particular. (shrink)

Kant's conception of moral agency is often charged with attributing no role to feelings. I suggest that respect is the effective force driving moral action. I then argue that four additional types of rational feelings are necessary conditions of moral agency: The affective inner life of moral agents deliberating how to act and reflecting on their deeds is rich and complex . To act morally we must turn our affective moral perception towards the ends of moral action: the welfare of (...) others ; and our own moral being . Feelings shape our particular moral acts . I tentatively suggest that the diversity of moral feelings might be as great as the range of our duties. (shrink)

De acordo com um preconceito bastante difundido no meio filosófico, a filosofia prática de Kant não levaria em consideração os sentimentos e emoções. Uma análise cuidadosa dos escritos de Kant revela, no entanto, o papel central exercido pelos sentimentos em sua ética. Neste artigo examinaremos o conceito de amor em Kant e tentaremos aproximá-lo da discussão sobre o amor na tradição analítica contemporânea, especialmente na filosofia do amor de Harry Frankfurt.

Putting together Kant's theory of emotion is complicated by two facts: (1) Kant has no term which is an obvious equivalent of "emotion" as used in contemporary English; (2) theorists disagree about what emotions are. These obstacles notwithstanding, my dissertation aims to provide the foundation for a reconstruction of Kant's theory of emotion that is both historically accurate and responsive to contemporary philosophical concerns. In contrast to available approaches which rest on contested assumptions about emotions, I start from the generally (...) accepted and reasonable premise that what we call "emotions" refers in Kant to a set of mental states, some of which he associates with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure ("feelings"), others with the faculty of desire ("desires"). I then proceed to examine the nature of these two kinds of mental states and their proper treatment. I argue that Kantian feelings are representations of objects' relation to the subject, that have a felt quality, and dispose their subject to certain behaviors. While feelings can only motivate action by causing desires and have no temporal direction, desires - except for certain wishes - are future-directed, which allows them to motivate actions immediately (but they need not bring action about). Equipped with this account of feelings and desires, I proceed to examine the kind of treatment Kant prescribes for them, and argue that feelings (except affects) should be cultivated, that is, acquired and improved so that they could be used to pursue rational ends, while inclinations, i.e., habitual sensuous desires, should generally be disciplined, that is, constrained by rules. The resultant picture is compelling because it rests on minimal assumptions about emotions and successfully incorporates the phenomenological, evaluative, and dispositional functions traditionally associated with emotions. (shrink)