Self-Knowledge and Despair

It is one thing to show that we are the kind of beings for whom morality applies, and quite another to show that our moral aspirations are on the right track. The latter raises a question of moral self-knowledge, since it asks how we as individuals can have assurance that our moral progress is genuine. This chapter argues that a new form of despair emerges from the question of how we can trust our own aspirations to live a virtuous life. The problem concerns either our tendency to self-deception or our inability to know our underlying intentions—two sides of Kant’s opacity thesis. This chapter argues that Kant’s effort to resolve the issue of moral self-knowledge leads him, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and the Metaphysics of Morals, to a theory of conscience.

Freedom and Obligation

This chapter has three aims. First, it gives an overview of the reception of Kant’s project of moral justification up to the twentieth century, showing that Kant’s first readers detected no great rift between the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. A consensus that Kant reversed or rejected the argument of Groundwork III only takes shape in 1960. Second, this chapter returns to the details of Groundwork III and argues that Kant appeals to the idea of an intelligible world to warrant our possession of a free will. Third, this chapter argues that, while the second Critique is mostly continuous with Kant’s earlier argument, it goes further by including a theory of moral sensibility.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes by drawing attention to a parallel between Kant’s early critics (including Karl Reinhold, Leonard Creuzer, and Solomon Maimon) and present-day Kantians. Surprisingly, the chapter shows that these contemporary arguments are closer, both in spirit and strategy, to those first post-Kantians who claimed to be revising or rejecting Kant’s position. Both seek to derive the normativity of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. On the reading of Kant defended in this book, Kant himself was never attracted to such a foundationalist strategy of justification in his mature writings. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Kant’s reasons for resisting foundationalism in ethics give us reasons to critically reassess recent Kantian arguments for moral normativity.

Moral Skepticism

This chapter has three aims. The first is to give the reader an overview of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, focusing on the transitions that link the book’s three sections. The second aim is to understand Kant’s argument in Groundwork III, focusing on his claim that the moral ‘ought’ has its source in our own ‘will.’ This argument is shown to address, not a theoretical form of doubt, but a practical problem of despair that Kant identifies with our tendency to rationalize against moral laws. A further aim of this chapter is to clarify Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic paths as a framework for understanding his project of moral justification.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to ambitious and modest frameworks for interpreting Kant’s justification of ethics. Ambitious approaches try to give us a reason to be moral, or to refute the moral skeptic, whereas modest approaches merely try to make our experience of morality intelligible. One of the goals of the present book is to defend a version of the modest interpretation, but with the caveat that Kant still employs a variety of argumentative methods. Four are highlighted: the skeptical method, the experimental method, the polemic method, and the phenomenological method. After proving a vignette of each, this chapter provides a sketch of the book’s aims and ambitions.

Moral Sensibility

This chapter forms the next main thesis of the present study: the synthetic path of the second Critique is broader in scope, since Kant seeks to reveal a necessary connection between our consciousness of the moral law and our capacity to feel pleasure and displeasure. The chapter picks up where Chapter 3 left off by providing a close reading of Kant’s theory of moral sensibility in the Critique of Practical Reason. Two important results follow. First, it is argued that debates over the role of moral feeling in Kant’s moral psychology have failed to acknowledge Kant’s emphasis on the first-personal character of feeling as a feature of our common experience of morality. Second, these debates have failed to connect Kant’s theory of moral sensibility to his project of justification, which the present chapter aims to remedy.

The Fact of Reason

Before comparing the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, this chapter undertakes an essential preliminary task by clarifying Kant’s doctrine of the ‘fact of reason’. According to this doctrine, our consciousness of the moral law admits of no deduction, but it nonetheless serves to warrant our possession of a free will. This chapter begins by tracing the concept of ‘fact’ through the three main stages of its linguistic history, showing that Kant’s use of the terms ‘Factum’ and ‘Tatsache’ bears an affinity with the British experimentalist tradition. The chapter shows how this context sheds light on Kant’s own experimental method in the second Critique.