R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he (...) argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme with unusual sophistication, he offers a new interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility. Rigorously argued, eminently readable, this book touches on issues of broad concern to philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and anyone with an interest in the nature and limits of responsibility. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is seen (...) as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

This paper criticizes two accounts of the normativity of practical principles: the empiricist account and the rationalist or realist account. It argues against the empiricist view, focusing on the Humean texts that are usually taken to be its locus classicus. It then argues both against the dogmatic rationalist view, and for the Kantian view, through a discussion of Kant's own remarks about instrumental rationality in the second section of the Groundwork. It further argues that the instrumental principle cannot stand alone. (...) Unless there are normative principles directing us to the adoption of certain ends, there can be no requirement to take the means to our ends. The familiar view that the instrumental principle is the only requirement of practical reason is incoherent. (shrink)

There is a fairly widespread—and very infl uential—hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. In this essay, I will argue that these hopes are groundless. I will focus on the metanormative hope, but—as will become clear—showing that the solution to our metanormative problems will not come from what is constitutive of action will also devastate the hope of gaining significant insight (...) into first-order, normative truths by focusing on what is constitutive of action. (shrink)

This book follows hard upon Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity. Both present the author's influential version of a Kantian theory of normative ethics and metaethics. Whereas The Sources of Normativity was a systematic investigation of "normativity" written as a single unit, the present volume is a collection of previously published papers, some of them already well known and much discussed, dating between 1983 and 1993. By the nature of the case, one might expect less thematic unity in this book than (...) in the other one, but the present book is a deeper and more wide ranging presentation of the author's views. Korsgaard's historical focus in The Sources of Normativity is less on Kant and more on the British moralists. Creating the Kingdom of Ends deals quite explicitly with the interpretation of Kant's moral philosophy. The papers in this book contain, in my judgment, the heart of Korsgaard's work: a variety of fresh and illuminating insights into Kant's moral theory and its relation to contemporary ethical theory which have helped to reshape the image of Kant's ethics and to refocus the issues dealt with in current moral philosophy. Or to make claims less grand but of more immediate relevance to this review, there is no question that some of the papers in this book have helped to reshape both the present writer's image of Kant's ethics and his conception of the way questions of ethical theory should be addressed. I hope below to say something both about where I think Korsgaard has gotten these matters right, and where I find her position either unclear or dubious. (shrink)

Metaethical constructivism is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, they are not fixed by normative facts that are independent of what rational agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice. The appeal of this view lies in the promise to explain how normative truths are objective and independent of our actual judgments, while also binding and authoritative for us. -/- Constructivism comes in several varieties, some of which claim a place within metaethics while others claim (...) no place within it at all. In fact, constructivism is sometimes defended as a normative theory about the justification of moral principles. Normative constructivism is the view that the moral principles we ought to accept are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical or idealized process of rational deliberation. -/- Metaethical constructivist theories aim to account for the nature of normative truths and practical reasons. They bear a problematic relation to traditional classifications of metaethical theories. In particular, there are disagreements about how to situate constructivism in the realism/antirealism debate. These disagreements are rooted in further differences about the definition of metaethics, the relation between normative and metaethical claims, and the purported methods pertinent and specific to metaethical inquiry. The question of how to classify metaethical constructivism will be addressed in what follows by focusing on the distinctive questions that constructivist theories have been designed to answer. Section 1 explains the origin and motivation of constructivism. Sections 2–4 examine the main varieties of metaethical constructivism. Section 5 illustrates related constructivist views, some of which are not proposed as metaethical accounts of all normative truths, but only of moral truths. Sections 6 and 7 review several debates about the problems, promise and prospects of metaethical constructivism. (shrink)

Andrews Reath presents a selection of his best essays on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on his conception of rational agency and his conception of autonomy. Together the essays articulate Reath's original approach to Kant's views about human autonomy, which explains Kant's belief that objective moral requirements are based on principles we choose for ourselves. With two new papers, and revised versions of several others, the volume will be of great interest to all (...) students and scholars of Kant and of moral philosophy. (shrink)

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 purpose of the Cambridge Edition is to offer translations of the best modern German edition of Kant's work in a uniform format suitable for Kant scholars. When complete (fourteen volumes are currently envisaged) the edition will include all of Kant's published writings and a generous selection from the unpublished writings such as the Opus postumum, handschriftliche Nachlass, lectures, and correspondence. This volume contains the first translation into English of notes from Kant's lectures on metaphysics. These lectures, dating from the (...) 1760s to the 1790s, touch on all the major topics and phases of Kant's philosophy. Most of these notes have appeared only recently in the German Academy Edition; this translation offers many corrections of that edition. As is standard with the volumes in the Cambridge Edition there is an extensive editorial apparatus, including extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, a detailed subject index, and glossaries of key terms. (shrink)

One of P. F. Strawson's suggestions in “Freedom and Resentment” was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively toquality of will: when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will with respect to us, and when (...) we let her off the hook, we are doing so in virtue of her lacking the capacity for the relevant quality of will. Strawson's own attempt to put forward such a view fails, for reasons Gary Watson has given, but several other theorists have advanced their own, more developed,Pure Quality of Willtheories in recent years. Specifically, there have been three distinct interpretations of “will” defended in the literature, yielding three different possible targets of our responsibility responses: quality ofcharacter, quality ofjudgment, or quality ofregard.My first task in this essay will be to show that none of these theories individually can captureallof our responsibility responses, given our deeply ambivalent responses to several marginal cases. One reaction to this fact might be to abandon the quality of will approach altogether. Another, more plausible, reaction is to develop a pluralistic account of responsibility, one that admits three noncompeting conceptions of responsibility, each of which emphasizes one of the three different qualities of will as the target of a distinct subset of our responsibility responses. On this pluralistic approach, marginal agents might be responsible on some conceptions, but not responsible on others. In the bulk of the paper, I discuss each of the relevant subsets of responsibility responses, the different qualities of will they target, what the capacities for the three qualities of will are, and how the pluralistic qualities of will approach could account for our ambivalence in the marginal cases. (shrink)

Plato and Kant advance a constitutional model of the soul, in which reason and appetite or passion have different structural and functional roles in the generation of motivation, as opposed to the familiar Combat Model in which they are portrayed as independent sources of motivation struggling for control. In terms of the constitutional model we may explain what makes an action different from an event. What makes an action attributable to a person, and therefore what makes it an action, is (...) that it issues from the person''s constitution, and therefore from the person as a whole, rather than from some force working on or in the person. This in turn implies an account of what makes an action good: what makes an action good is that it is deliberated upon and chosen in a way that unifies the person into a constitutional system. Through deliberative action we constitute ourselves as unified agents. Platonic justice and Kant''s categorical imperative are shown to be normative standards for action because they are principles of self-constitution. (shrink)

The dominant interpretation of Kant as a moral constructivist has recently come under sustained philosophical attack by those defending a moral realist reading of Kant. In light of this, should we read Kant as endorsing moral constructivism or moral realism? In answering this question we encounter disagreement in regard to two key independence claims. First, the independence of the value of persons from the moral law (an independence that is rejected) and second, the independence of the content and authority of (...) the moral law from actual acts of willing on behalf of those bound by that law (an independence that is upheld). The resulting position, which is called not ‘all the way down’ constructivism, is attributed to Kant. (shrink)

Metaethical constructivism is one of the main movements within contemporary metaethics – especially among those with Kantian inclinations. But both the philosophical coherence and the Kantian pedigree of constructivism are hotly contested. In the first half of this article, I first explore the sense in which Kant's own views might be described as constructivist and then use the resulting understanding as a guide to how we might think about Kantian constructivism today. Along the way, I hope to suggest that a (...) fairly diverse range of views within contemporary metaethics – including some without any explicit allegiance to Kant – may be thought of as pursuing a version of the resulting strategy. (shrink)

The utilitarian conception, which I call “action as production,” holds that action is a way of making use of the world, conceived as a causal mechanism. According to the rational intuitionist conception, which I call “action as assertion,” action is a way of acknowledging the value in the world, conceived as a realm of status. On the Kantian constructivist conception, which I call “action as participation,” action is a way of making the world, qua causal mechanism, come to count as (...) a realm of status. My rather limited aim in this paper is to identify three substantively different answers the question of how action relates an agent to the world, regarded as a context of action. (shrink)

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

Kant’s account of the freedom gained through virtue builds on the Socratic tradition. On the Socratic view, when morality is our end, nothing can hinder us from attaining satisfaction: we are self-sufficient and free since moral goodness is (as Kant says) “created by us, hence is in our power.” But when our end is the fulfillment of sensible desires, our satisfaction requires luck as well as the cooperation of others. For Kant, this means that happiness requires that we get other (...) people to work for our ends; and this requires, in turn, that we gain control over the things other people value so as to have influence over them. If this plan for happiness is not subordinated to morality, then what is most valuable to us will be precisely what others value. This is the root of the “passions” that make us evil and make us slaves whose satisfaction depends on others. But, significantly, this dependence is a moral slavery and hence does not signal a loss, or even diminishment of the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility. (shrink)

Conceptions of individual autonomy and of rational autonomy have played large parts in twentieth century moral philosophy, yet it is hard to see how either could be basic to morality. Kant's conception of autonomy is radically different. He predicated autonomy neither of individual selves nor of processes of choosing, but of principles of action. Principles of action are Kantianly autonomous only if they are law-like in form and could be universal in scope; they are heteronomous if, although law-like in form, (...) they cannot have universal scope. Puzzles about claims linking morality, reason and autonomy are greatly reduced by recognising the distinctiveness of Kantian autonomy. (shrink)

Section I of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is meant to lead us from our everyday conception of morality to the supreme principle of all moral action, officially christened the ‘categorical imperative’ some twenty Academy pages further into the treatise. It is quite striking that in this first section Kant dispenses with the notorious technical language that pervades not just other parts of the Groundwork but also most of the remaining philosophical writings of the critical period. The mere (...) fact that Groundwork I is comparatively accessible does not, of course, make it straightforward or uncontroversial. Kant's readers are faced with, amongst other things, four unconvincing paragraphs on the natural purpose of practical reason (G IV 394–6), a crucial change of topic from good volition to acting from duty (G IV 397), an unstated ‘first proposition’ about moral value that has baffled generations of interpreters (presumably G IV 397–9), and a contentious shift from an allegedly unproblematic principle of practical universalizability to a substantive moral command (G IV 402). (shrink)

Why should we be interested in Kant's ethical theory? One reason is that we find his views about our moral responsibilities appealing. Anyone who thinks that we should treat other people with respect, that we should not use them as a mere means in ways to which they could not possibly consent, will be attracted by a Kantian style of ethical theory. But according to recent supporters of Kant, the most distinctive and important feature of his ethical theory is not (...) his claims about the particular ethical duties that we owe to each other, but his views about the nature of value. They argue that Kant has an account of the relationship between practical reason and value, known as "Kantian constructivism" that is far superior to the traditional "value realist" theory, and that it is because of this that we should accept his theory.1 It is now standard for both supporters and critics to claim that Kant's moral theory stands or falls with Kantian constructivism.2 But this is a mistake. In this paper, I sketch a rival Kantian theory of value, which I call Kantian value realism. I argue that there is textual evidence that Kant himself accepted value realism rather than constructivism. Whilst my aim in this paper is to set out the theory clearly rather than to defend it, I will try to show that Kantian value realism is preferable to Kantian constructivism and that it is worthy of further study. (shrink)

This critical survey of recent work on Kant's doctrine of the fact of reason and his doctrine of the practical postulates (of freedom, God, and immortality) assesses the implications of these doctrines for the debate about realism and antirealism in Kant's moral philosophy. Section 1 briefly surveys some salient considerations from the first Critique and Groundwork. In section 2, I argue that recent work on the role, content, "factual" nature, and epistemic status of the fact of reason does not support (...) an anti-realist interpretation of Kant's ethics. In section 3, I argue that recent work on the derivation and epistemic and ontological status of the practical postulates does not support an anti-realist interpretation of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the suggestion that Kant offers a solution to the Reinhold/Sidgwick Problem in his Metaphysics of Morals. The problem, briefly, is about how Kant can hold moral evil to be imputable when he also seems to hold that freedom is found only in moral actions. After providing a new formulation of this problem under the title ‘Objection R/S’ and describing the popular strategy for addressing it through reference to this text, the paper recounts (...) some of the history relevant to interpreting the passage in question. The paper then argues that this strategy is not supported by the text and indeed proves to be contrary to other arguments that are central to Kant's moral thought. The closing section briefly considers other possible ways of addressing the Objection R/S. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of Kant's recorded thought beyond his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, this essay presents an overview of Kant's account of practical agency as embodied practical agency and argues against the intellectualized interpretations of Kant's account of practical agency presented by Christine Korsgaard and Henry Sidgwick. In both Kant's empirical-psychological and metaphysical descriptions of practical agency, he presents a recognizably human practical agent that is broader and deeper than the faculty of reason alone. This agent (...) chooses action from a reflective distance, but not from the complete affective distance of reason. We choose neither as reason alone, nor even as the sum of all of our ‘higher’ faculties, of cognition (including reason), feeling, and desire, in Kant's view. Instead, we choose as an agent that also has ‘lower’, ‘sensible’ faculties, of cognition (including sense), feeling, and desire, which together comprise our ‘sensibility’. These mental states of sensibility are not merely confused versions of our higher cognitions, feelings, or desires, and so different from them in degree only, but are instead distinct from our higher states in kind also; and these distinct sensible states are not dependent on our higher states and so on a commitment to the value of humanity, for example. For this reason, a choice in favour of sensible states and in opposition to the moral law need in no way undermine its own foundations and thus be incoherent, as Korsgaard and Sidgwick argue, but instead only immoral. Because Kant does not reduce the problem of immoral choice to one of insufficient reflection and ensuing confusion, he does not view moral progress in cognitive terms alone, whether in the form of a clearer understanding of the moral law, improved judgment in applying it, or deeper insight into our own nature as practical agents. Kant instead recognizes the crucial importance of cultivating our feelings and desires over the course of a lifetime both as a way to make ourselves worthy of the humanity within us directly and also as a way to facilitate future moral choices. (shrink)

In this paper, I give a Kantian answer to the question whether and why it would be inappropriate to blame people suffering from mental disorders that fall within the schizophrenia spectrum. I answer this question by reconstructing Kant’s account of mental disorder, in particular his explanation of psychotic symptoms. Kant explains these symptoms in terms of various types of cognitive impairment. I show that this explanation is plausible and discuss Kant’s claim that the unifying feature of the symptoms is the (...) patient’s inability to enter into an exchange of reasons with others. After developing a Kantian Quality of Will Thesis, I analyze some real life cases. Firstly, I argue that delusional patients who are unable to enter into an exchange of epistemic reasons are exempted from doxastic rather than moral responsibility. They are part of the moral community and exonerated from moral blame only if their actions do not express a lack of good will. Secondly, I argue that disorganized patients who are unable to form intentions and to make plans are exempted from moral responsibility because they do not satisfy the conditions for agency. (shrink)

Radical constructivists appeal to self-legislation in arguing that rational agents are the ultimate sources of normative authority over themselves. I chart the roots of radical constructivism and argue that its two leading Kantian proponents are unable to defend an account of self-legislation as the fundamental source of practical normativity without this legislation collapsing into a fatal arbitrariness. Christine Korsgaard cannot adequately justify the critical resources which agents use to navigate their practical identities. This leaves her account riven between rigorism and (...) voluntarism, such that it will not escape a paradox that arises when self-legislation is unable to appeal to external normative standards. Onora O'Neill anchors self-legislation more firmly to the self-disciplining structures of reason itself. However, she ultimately fails to defend sufficiently unconditional practical norms which could guide legislation. These endemic problems with radical constructivist models of self-legislation prompt a reconstruction of a neglected realist self-legislative tradition which is exemplified by Christian Wolff. In outlining a rationalist and realist account of self-legislation, I argue that it can also make sense of our ability to overcome anomie and deference in practical action. Thus, I claim that we need not make laws but can make them our own. (shrink)

In his later writings, Kant distinguishes between autonomy and self-mastery or self-command. My article explains the relation between these two ideas, both of which are integral to his understanding of moral agency and the pursuit of virtue. I point to problems with other interpretations of this relation and offer an alternative. On my view, self-command is a condition or state achieved by those agents who become proficient at solving problems presented by the passions. Such agents are able to stick to (...) the results of self-legislation over time and thereby achieve a form of temporally extended freedom. (shrink)

Turns to questions about the ultimate nature of the content of Kant’s ethical theory. It criticizes aspects of the very influential constructivist reading of Kant’s ethics, originated by John Rawls and his students and employed in Jerome Schneewind’s important account of the history of modern ethics. There are historical and systematic reasons for allowing a much more positive relation between Kant’s ethical theory and moral realism. As with his theoretical philosophy, Kant’s arguments against the metaphysical tradition can be understood as (...) anything but global and complete and as aimed primarily at very specific forms of dogmatic objectivism or relativism. The second half of the chapter points out some ways in which this realist approach can begin to respond to the most obvious objection to it (raised recently by Charles Larmore, namely that it may not do justice to Kant’s special emphasis on autonomy. It argues that Kant’s notion of autonomy does not in fact have the overly subjective implications that are commonly ascribed to it by its opponents – and that also are often assumed, or even glorified, by many who call themselves followers of Kant. (shrink)

When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_ and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This _Critique_ is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. (...) Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)