In this essay, “The Principle of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Its Rise and Fall,” Pauline Kleingeld notes that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy, which played a central role in both the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, disappeared by the time of the Metaphysics of Morals. She argues that its disappearance is due to significant changes in Kant’s political philosophy. The Principle of Autonomy states that one ought to act as if one were giving (...) universal laws through one’s maxims. The criterion of just legislation that Kant accepted in the mid-1780s does not require any actual consent on the part of the citizens—genuine universality is sufficient for a law to be just. Hence, at that time, Kant could indeed explicate the criterion governing the moral permissibility of one’s maxims by drawing an analogy with the criterion governing the justice of political laws. In the Metaphysics of Morals and in other works in the 1790s, however, he added the further condition that laws must be given with the consent of the citizens. With this further condition, the moral criterion was no longer fully analogous to the criterion for political laws being just. Accordingly, Kleingeld argues, Kant dropped the Principle of Autonomy, which was firmly based on that analogy. (shrink)

Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL) is generally believed to require you to act only on the basis of maxims that you can will without contradiction to become universal laws. In “Contradiction and Kant’s Formula of Universal Law” (2017), I have proposed to read the FUL instead as requiring that, for any maxim on which you act, you can will two things simultaneously, without volitional self-contradiction: (1) willing the maxim as your own action principle and (2) willing that it become (...) a universal law. In the present essay, I reply to comments by Mark Timmons, Michael Walschots, Paola Romero, and Stefano Lo Re. In response to their comments concerning the application of the FUL, I expand the interpretive framework of the Volitional Self-Contradiction Interpretation. I argue that Kant also constructs the diagnostic volitional self-contradiction as a contradiction between (1) willing a tested maxim to become a universal law and (2) willing what humans, qua finite rational beings, necessarily will, namely the means to their actual and possible future ends. I also clarify how the two ways in which Kant specifies the test are related. Furthermore, I clarify the relation between the Volitional Self-Contradiction interpretation and other interpretations of the FUL, in particular the ‘Practical Contradiction’ and ‘Logical Contradiction’ interpretations, as well as its difference from the Golden Rule. I also address the objection that the volitional self-contradiction is superfluous, clarify the relation between the Formula of Universal Law and the Formula of the Law of Nature, and explain why the will of an immoral agent does not contain a volitional self-contradiction of the type at issue. (shrink)

Pauline Kleingeld has argued persuasively that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy draws an analogy between two relationships: 1) that between an individual agent and their maxim, and 2) that between a legislator and their legislation. She also suggests that Kant’s evolving views on the normative significance of popular elections made his analogy inapt, which explains its disappearance from his later writings. This comment concurs with Sorin Baiasu that the merits of Kant’s analogy were untouched by his evolving political views. The analogy (...) presupposes that when lawmakers legislate, they do so as representatives of the people, but even Kant’s mature writings posit that unelected lawmakers are representatives of the people in the necessary sense. Facts about whether a lawmaker acquired legislative authority by election, heredity, or conquest do have normative implications in the larger context of Kant’s political theory, but such facts are necessarily temporally upstream of the relation between legislator and legislation, just as facts about how an agent became rational are upstream of the relation between individual agent and maxim. Because the analogy focuses exclusively on these two relationships, it cannot be damaged by such upstream facts. Moreover, we should consider the possibility that Kant’s Principle of Autonomy compares a human will to the united general will of the people itself rather than to the will of a fallible public official or institution. On this alternative reading, it is even more clear that Kant’s evolving views on the significance of elections could have no possible relevance to the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)

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)

The idea of autonomy, presented as Kant’s main achievement in the Groundwork and the second Critique, is hardly present in the ethics of the “Doctrine of Virtue”. Against Pauline Kleingeld’s recent interpretation, I argue that this does not amount to a disappearance of the Principle of Autonomy, but to an important development of the notion of autonomy. I first show that Kant still advocated the Principle of Autonomy in the 1790s along with the thought of lawgiving through one’s maxims. I (...) then argue that the role of autonomy in Kant’s later ethics has a different focus than in the previous works, which requires to connect autonomy with autocracy. Conversely, in the “Doctrine of Virtue”, autocracy, which Kant had employed before as an independent notion, is construed as a new layer of autonomy. What Kant there calls subjective autonomy is thereby considered as reason’s self-government in the maxims of each rational agent. -/- . (shrink)

'Autonomy' is originally a political notion. In this chapter, I argue that the political theory Kant defended while he was writing the _Groundwork_ sheds light on the difficulties that are commonly associated with his account of moral autonomy. I argue that Kant's account of the two-tiered structure of political legislation, in his _Feyerabend Lectures on Natural Law_, parallels his distinction between two levels of moral legislation, and that this helps to explain why Kant could regard the notion of 'autonomy' as (...) apt to express the principle of morality---at least in the mid 1780s. (shrink)