Rationalizing: Kant on Moral Self-Deception

SATS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg Noller

Abstract Kant’s moral philosophy is challenged by the so-called “Socratic Paradox”: If free will and pure practical reason are to be identified, as Kant argues, then there seems to be no room for immoral actions that are to be imputed to our individual freedom. The paper argues that Kant’s conception of rationalizing (“Vernünfteln”) helps us to avoid the Socratic Paradox, and to understand how immoral actions can be imputed to our individual freedom and responsibility. In rationalizing, we misuse our capacity of reason in order to construct the illusion according to which we are not bound to the absolute demand of the moral law, but rather subject to exceptions and excuses. Finally, the paper interprets the three rules of “common sense” (sensus communis) in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in terms of an antidote to rationalizing.

Author(s):  
Owen Ware

Kant’s arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. Many prominent ethicists invoke Kant, directly or indirectly, in their efforts to derive the authority of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. But many commentators have detected a deep rift between the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, leaving Kant’s project of justification exposed to conflicting assessments and interpretations. In this major re-reading of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Owen Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. The result is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nadelhoffer ◽  
David Rose ◽  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
Shaun Nichols

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nadelhoffer ◽  
David Rose ◽  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
Shaun Nichols

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Timmermann

AbstractWhat is the proper task of Kantian ethical theory? This paper seeks to answer this question with reference to Kant's reply to Christian Garve in Section I of his 1793 essay on Theory and Practice. Kant reasserts the distinctness and natural authority of our consciousness of the moral law. Every mature human being is a moral professional—even philosophers like Garve, if only they forget about their ill-conceived ethical systems and listen to the voice of pure practical reason. Normative theory, Kant argues, cannot be refuted with reference to alleged experience. It is the proper task of the moral philosopher to emphasize this fact. The paper also discusses Kant's attempts to clarify his moral psychology, philosophy of value and conception of the highest good in the course of replying to Garve's challenge.


Kant Yearbook ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Nataliya Palatnik

AbstractMany Kantians dismiss Kant’s claim that we have a duty to promote the highest good – an ideal world that combines complete virtue with complete happiness – as incompatible with the core of his moral philosophy. This dismissal, I argue, raises doubts about Kant’s ability to justify the moral law, yet it is a mistake. A duty to promote the highest good plays an important role in the justificatory strategy of the Critique of Practical Reason. Moreover, its analysis leads to a new perspective on Kant’s conception of moral objectivity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Christopher Fremaux

James Frederick Ferrier is probably best known for the idealism he presents in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness and Institutes of Metaphysic, in which Ferrier critiques and offers an alternative to Common Sense Realism – the dominant school of thought in Scotland in the 18th and early 19th centuries – spearheaded by Thomas Reid and his followers. What has received significantly less attention in the literature, however, is Ferrier's 1866 Lectures on Greek Philosophy, which serves as an important point of connection between the moral philosophy that Ferrier develops in the Introduction and Institutes and what Ferrier takes to be the ethics that Socrates taught and according to which he lived. In this paper, I examine Plato's early dialogues in order to demonstrate that Ferrier's ethics should be understood as a descendent of Socratic ethics insofar as both Ferrier and Socrates endorse the view that individual freedom is only possible through a life of thought that transcends the particularities of sensation.


Author(s):  
Alexander Broadie

This chapter focuses on the Scottish judge James Dundas, the first Lord Arniston, whose 313 page manuscript Idea philosophiae moralis (The idea of moral philosophy) has only recently come to light. Written in 1679, the year of Dundas’s death, the Latin manuscript, the only philosophical work he is known to have written, fits squarely within the category of Reformed orthodox scholasticism. Dundas begins in an Aristotelian spirit by expounding a concept of moral philosophy that rather closely resembles the concept that emerges from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, though Dundas believes Aristotle’s exposition to be the poorer for its not including a concept corresponding to that of the Fall. Dundas also discusses the concept of the will, with special reference to the question whether the will necessarily wills in accordance with the last judgment made in a deliberative process by practical reason, and he emerges from his discussion as a determinist who nevertheless believes that we have free will.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 133-149
Author(s):  
Francesca Fantasia ◽  

This article shows how the correlation between duty and freedom in the moral philosophy of Fichte can be seen as an image constellation. From the perspective of the real being, the act of the absolute opening of reflexivity in the conditional is an object of an ethical duty. Moral law regulates the transition from self-evidence of the absolute to its actual occurrence. Moral law is a logos: It forms people ontologically, and it regulates the process of ‘becoming image’ of the absolute. The genesis of reality, according to Fichte, occurs only through freedom, the theoretical-practical formational principle of the world. This law is the basis of ideals. As such, it is not the basis of the real. Through freedom – spontaneity and non-law – it produces itself, on the one hand, negatively in the real. As the basis of ideals, on the other hand, this law occurs as an ethical norm – non-freedom – and retains its difference to the real. Freedom, in contrast, is the basis and formational principle of reality. As such, it produces, for one, through the negative relationship to the law and forms the real. As genesis and spontaneity, freedom occurs always as non-law and, as such, retains its difference to ideals. In this double negation, the correlation between real and ideal being is simultaneously formed. Freedom remains the object of an absolute duty.Der Beitrag zeigt, wie der Zusammenhang zwischen Sollen und Freiheit in der Moralphilosophie Fichtes als Bildzusammenhang gesehen werden kann. Aus der Perspektive des realen Seins ist der Akt der unbedingten Öffnung der Reflexivität hin zum Bedingten Gegenstand eines ethischen Sollens. Das Moralgesetz regelt den Übergang von der Selbstdurchsichtigkeit des Absoluten zu seinem wirklichen Geschehen. Das Gesetz ist ein Logos: Es bildet ontologisch den Menschen und es regelt den Prozess der ‚Bild Werdung‘ des Absoluten. Die Genese der Realität vollzieht sich nach Fichte nur durch die Freiheit, als dem theoretisch-praktischen bildenden Prinzip der Welt. Das Gesetz ist die Grundlage des Idealen. Als solches ist es keine Grundlage des Realen: Durch die Freiheit – Spontaneitat und Nicht-Gesetz – stellt es sich einerseits, negativ, in dem Realen her. Als Grundlage des Idealen andererseits, tritt das Gesetz als ethische Norm – Nicht-Freiheit – auf, und behält seine Differenz zu dem Realen. Die Freiheit ist dagegen Grundlage und bildendes Prinzip der Wirklichkeit. Als solche stellt sie sich einerseits durch die negative Beziehung zu dem Gesetz her, und bildet das Reale. Als Ursprung und Spontaneität tritt die Freiheit andererseits immer als Nicht-Gesetz auf und behält als solche ihre Differenz zu dem Idealen. In dieser doppelten Negation stellt sich zugleich der Zusammenhang zwischen realem und idealem Sein her. So bleibt die Freiheit Gegenstand eines unbedingten Sollens.


Author(s):  
Simon Robertson

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.


DoisPontos ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valério Rohden

No presente trabalho será demonstrada a estreita, embora discreta, relação da filosofia moral de Kant com a ética antiga, especialmente com o estoicismo de Cícero. O tema será explicitado mediante uma aproximação entre as obras da Crítica da razão prática e Sobre os fins (De finibus), respectivamente de cada um desses autores. Será destacada a crítica de Kant à identificação entre virtude e felicidade e sua reformulação sintética no conceito de “sumo bem”. Na conclusão se torna claro que a realização moral da razão, reivindicada por Cícero, encontra na reformulação de Kant sua determinação mais precisa. The crises of practical reason and stoicism Abstract The present paper shows the close albeit subtle relation of Kant’s moral philosophy to ancient ethics, especially Cicero’s Stoicism. The subject is made explicit by means of a rapprochement between the Critique of practical reason and De finibus, so as to be highlight Kant’s criticism of the classical identifying of virtue and happiness and his synthetical recasting of the concept of the supreme good. The essay concludes by making clear that the moral actualization of reason, reclaimed by Cicero, finds in Kant’s reformulation its most precise determination.


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