One of the standard manoeuvres in contemporary moral philosophy is to present Kant's ethics and utilitarianism as alternative ethical theories. New students learn that there are two main types of ethical theory, those which are consequence-based and those which are not. The first type is called teleological ethics, the second one is called deontological ethics. As typical examples of teleological ethical theories, one refers to classical utilitarianism and such 20th-century developments as rule utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism . As typical examples (...) of deontological ethical theorists, one refers to Immanuel Kant and W.D. Ross.To illustrate and clarify the difference between teleological and deontological ethics, students are often submitted to exercises which ask for Kantian and utilitarian solutions to philosophical dilemmas of various sorts, drawn both from literary classics like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and from other sources. A typical example will run along the following lines. There is unrest in the population. The government authorities think that order can be restored if a certain person is condemned for things which he hasn't done.But the people believe he is the culprit. Would it be morally right to sacrifice a human scapegoat in such a case? What would a utilitarian say to this, and what would a Kantian say? Usually, the exercises are presented in such a way that the students will tend to think that Kantians would always condemn punishing the innocent, whilst utilitarians might come to different conclusions, depending on how they estimate the long-term consequences of punishing the innocent. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She was educated at the University of Illinois and received a Ph.D. from Harvard. She has held positions at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, and visiting positions at Berkeley and UCLA. She is a member of the American Philosophical Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published extensively on Kant, and about moral (...) philosophy and its history, the theory of practical reason, the philosophy of action, and personal identity. Her two published books are The Sources of Normativity (1992) and Creating the King- dom of Ends (1996). (shrink)

This is the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The volume has been furnished (...) with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms. (shrink)

The central problem for normative ethics is the conflict between a consequentialist view--that morality requires promoting the good of all--and a belief that the rights of the individual place significant constraints on what may be done to help others. Standard interpretations see Kant as rejecting all forms of consequentialism, and defending a theory which is fundamentally duty-based and agent-centered. Certain actions, like sacrificing the innocent, are categorically forbidden. In this original and controversial work, Cummiskey argues that there is no defensible (...) basis for this view, that Kant's own arguments actually entail a consequentialist conclusion. But this new form of consequentialism which follows from Kant's theories has a distinctly Kantian tone. The capacity of rational action is prior to the value of happiness; thus providing justification for the view that rational nature is more important than mere pleasures and pains. (shrink)

Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and widely misunderstood, suggests Jackson. He argues that such analysis is mistakenly clouded in mystery, preventing a whole range of important questions from being productively addressed. He anchors his argument in discussions of specific philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism and moving on, via free will, meaning, personal identity, motion, and change, to ethics and the philosophy (...) of color. In this way the book not only offers a methodological program for philosophy, but also casts new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations. (shrink)

The bulk of this volume consists of a somewhat revised version of the Axel Hägerström Lectures given in Uppsala, Sweden in 1991. It also contains previously published papers on the relevance of philosophy of language to ethics and the interpretation of Kant’s moral philosophy. The latter, in particular, deserves comment, but space considerations force me to devote my attention to the Hägerström Lectures, entitled “A Taxonomy of Ethical Theories.”.

Preface In this third volume of my collected papers I have included all but one of my main contributions, apart from my books The Language of Morals and ...

The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's central contribution to moral philosophy, and has inspired controversy ever since it was first published in 1785. Kant champions the insights of 'common human understanding' against what he sees as the dangerous perversions of ethical theory. Morality is revealed to be a matter of human autonomy: Kant locates the source of the 'categorical imperative' within each and every human will. However, he also portrays everyday morality in a way that many readers (...) find difficult to accept. The Groundwork is a short book, but its argument is dense, intricate and at times treacherous. This commentary explains Kant's arguments paragraph by paragraph, and also contains an introduction, a synopsis of the argument, six short interpretative essays on key topics of the Groundwork, and a glossary of key terms. It will be an indispensable tool for anyone wishing to study the Groundwork in detail. (shrink)

… the supreme end, the happiness of all mankind (Kr VA851/NKS 665).The law concerning punishment is a Categorical Imperative; and woe to him who rummages around in the winding paths of a theory of happiness, looking for some advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it (Rl.A196/B226, 6:331; Ladd, 100).

In Kantian Consequentialism, David Cummiskey argues that the central ideas of Kant's moral philosophy provide claims about value which, if applied consistently, lead to consequentialist normative principles. While Kant himself was not a consequentialist, Cummiskey thinks he should have been, given his fundamental positions in ethics. I argue that Cummiskey is mistaken. Cummiskey's argument relies on a non-Kantian idea about value, namely that value can be defined, and objects with value identified, conceptually prior to and independent of the choices that (...) a rational agent would make. The contrasting Kantian concept of value is that to possess value is to be the object of of rational choice. Inasmuch as Cummiskey gives no reason to reject the Kantian account of value in favour of his own account, his argument does not establish that Kant's ethics inevitably leads to normative consequentialism. (shrink)

Kant's Formula of Universal Law is shown to be an inadequate condition for morality because it uses the wrong scope for a universal qualifier, ranging only over the behavior of a set of agents in a world. If it instead ranges over the behavior of all possible agents, then we arrive at the stronger condition that a maxim is morally acceptable just if we can will, not just that all agents follow it simultaneously, but that any agent in any situation (...) may follow it--including, notably, in situations where some other agents are not following it. This stronger formulation avoids some of the counter-examples which Kant's formula is subject to. -/- Author's later note: the argument of this article is improved upon and essentially superseded by his later works on this topic (2012, 2013). (shrink)

In 1993, Richard Hare argued that, contrary to received opinion, Kant could have been a utilitarian. In this article, I argue that Hare was wrong. Kant's theory would not have been utilitarian or consequentialist even if his practical recommendations coincided with utilitarian commands: Kant's theory of value is essentially anti-utilitarian; there is no place for rational contradiction as the source of moral imperatives in utilitarianism; Kant would reject the move to separate levels of moral thinking: first-order moral judgement makes use (...) of the principle of morality; and, relatedly, he would resist the common utilitarian distinction between actions and their motives because any correct description of an action must refer to motivation. The article concludes with the thought that any consequentialist theory based on pre-given ends (teleology) lacks the philosophical resources to distinguish between willing something as a means and as an end, leaving means only, and destroying transparency. (shrink)

In his essay "Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian?", R. M. Hare tries to show that Kant's moral theory contains utilitarian elements and it can be properly asked if Kant could have been a utilitarian, though in fact he was not. I take seriously Hare's challenge to the standard view because I find his reading on the whole reasonable enough to lead to a consistent interpretation of Kant's moral philosophy. Still, I hardly believe that it is necessarily concluded from Hare's (...) reading that Kant could have been a utilitarian. In this paper, I will first show that Hare's interpretation of 'treating a person as an end' as treating a person's ends as our own is reasonable, and so is his reading of 'willing our maxim as a universal law' and 'duties to oneself,' which is based on that interpretation. Then I will argue that Kant couldn't be a utilitarian despite the apparently utilitarian elements in his theory because caring about others' ends is a duty. This is so, in Kant's view, not because happiness is valuable in itself, but because it is the sum of those ends set freely by each rational human being who is valuable in itself, that is, an end in itself. (shrink)