Chung-ying Cheng’s Dialogue with Confucianism and Kant: A Gadamerian Critique

Gadamer’s hermeneutics offers several strategies for critiquing Chung-ying Cheng’s synthesis of Confucianism and Kant. Interpreting Kant’s Groundwork, Cheng argues that the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is too rigid: if the “life principle” is the ultimate root of Kant’s four types of duty, then human inclinations are good; Kant’s perfect duties turn out to be imperfect in some situations, while his imperfect duties such as benevolence (or ren, in Confucian philosophy) turn out sometimes to be perfect. Although Cheng’s synthesis does not satisfy the Groundwork’s universal aim, it does show how to apply Kant’s insights to empirical moral situations.

Wronging by Requesting

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g., distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases.

Imperfect Duties to Oneself

This essay comments on a particular text in Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue that concerns imperfect duties to oneself regarding one’s natural and moral perfection. After reviewing Kant on ethical duties, duties to oneself, and imperfect duties, the essay asks regarding both duties: what is required, and why? Special questions include: What does Kant mean by the qualification “for a pragmatic purpose” and why is it a duty to oneself “to make oneself a useful member of the world”? Also, why the duty to increase one’s moral perfection is “imperfect” even though it does not allow the same kinds of latitude as the imperfect duties of beneficence and cultivation of one’s natural powers.

Kantian Imperfect Duties

This chapter explicates Kantian imperfect duties and their source-value in obligatory ends. Imperfect duties add material and psychological resources to make the moral habitat safe and accessible. Using the duty of beneficence, the chapter explains the kind of discretion these duties allow and the demands they make. Beneficence is, in the first instance, a relational duty. Engaging with others’ pursuit of happiness, we act for their ends, not their needs, with an eye towards the health of their agency. Relational beneficence is supplemented by two other duties of assistance: a humanitarian duty directed at strangers that obligates us collectively, and a remedial duty for those responsible to repair the effects of their unjust actions. When combined, the three duties of assistance distribute the demandingness of need in a more humane and morally responsive way, at times with the support of juridical institutions that take on some of the moral labor.

Introduction

The Introduction summarizes the path to be taken from a study of imperfect duties to a revised reading of Kant’s moral philosophy as a deontology that integrates the ideas and duties of right with our ethical duties. Explaining why such a path is necessary if we are to understand the moral situation of persons, it sets the agenda for understanding Kant’s account of our ethical and political duties as a single, unified moral habitat.

Conclusion

This chapter reflects on how the book’s method of using the Kantian apparatus to build out the moral habitat idea has been an occasion to fundamentally rethink Kantian theory and to show it capable of engaging creatively with contemporary moral concerns. It has also expanded the very idea of a deontology by drawing out the implications of taking imperfect duties seriously and showing the merits of regarding the practical side of moral theory as a kind of participatory moral science. It offers reflections on the local and global implications of the moral habitat idea, the importance to it of innate right, and emphasizes the place of motive and its connection to moral value in the Kantian scheme.

The Moral Habitat

The Moral Habitat is a book in three parts that begins with an investigation of three understudied imperfect duties which together offer some important and challenging insights about moral requirements and moral agency: that our duties only make sense as a system; that actions can be morally wrong to do and yet not be impermissible; and that there are motive-dependent duties. In Part Two, these insights are used to launch a substantial reinterpretation of Kant’s ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. The system of duties provides the structure for what I call a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together. It is a dynamic system, with duties from the juridical and ethical spheres shaping and being affected by each other, each level further interpreting the system’s core anti-subordination value initiated in Kant’s account of innate right. The structure of an imperfect duty is exhibited in a detailed account of the duty of beneficence, including its latitude of application and demandingness. Part Three takes up some implications and applications of the moral habitat idea. Its topics range from the adjustments to the system that would come with recognizing a human right to housing to meta-ethical issues about objectivity and our responsibility for moral change. The upshot is a transformative, holistic agent- and institution-centered, account of Kantian morality.

Framing the Question (What We Can Learn From Imperfect Duties)

The chapter describes the difficulties encountered in understanding imperfect duties and the misdirection that comes with taking beneficence as their paradigm example. It argues that we get a clearer view of what the duties are like by instead examining three less theorized imperfect duties—gratitude, duties about gifts, and the duty of due care. Each of the duties raises difficulties for conventional accounts of moral requirement that are explored and resolved in three sections called “Middle Work.” Together they reveal the distinctive theoretical demands and deliberative structure of imperfect duties and make it clear why they are important.

Giving

This chapter explores the imperfect duties that belong with gifts and other transfers of goods. It identifies the peculiar wrong in “giving too much” as a status injury made visible in the distortions of relationship caused by the giving. The wrongful giving morally disables or disorients the recipient as an equal partner in the exchange. The source of the wrong is a misuse of morally sanctioned discretion. The chapter then explores the awkward result that in giving too much an action can be not impermissible and yet morally wrong to do. Middle Work 2 explains this result arguing that the pair, impermissible-permissible, should be regarded as contraries, not contradictories. It follows that an action can be morally wrong if it is either of an act-type that is impermissible, or, if not of an impermissible act-type, it is ruled out by moral features of particular circumstances or conditions.

Tracking Value and Extending Duties

This chapter shows how both perfect and imperfect duties require both agents and institutions to take responsibility for tracking moral value across their respective contexts of right and duty. The casuistry that belongs to perfect duties is contrasted with the exercise of discretion essential to acting on an imperfect duty. A defense of juridical imperfect duties is offered. Citizens and officials of the state acting under the auspices of a juridical right or duty may need to exercise the kind of discretion that is the mark of an imperfect duty. Questions about moral change in the content and locus of duties are introduced.