1. Common Misconceptions about Grenberg

It has been interesting to me, since my book came out, to discover a couple of ways in which my ideas have been characterized (including by the present critics) which I feel do not entirely accurately articulate my intent in the book. I take that fact as much as a criticism of myself as anything else. I think I sometimes spoke loosely in ways that I should not have (I will bring up an example of that later). And I suspect that the structure of my book failed to get across what I was hoping it would. More specifically, the first part of the book (three chapters) provides an interpretative framework to bring to the rest of the book. Part II is about the Groundwork and part III is about the Critique of Practical Reason. But each of these parts takes as its background or interpretative point of view the ideas expressed in part I, which themselves range from discussion of the Metaphysics of Morals to the Religion to the Critique of Pure Reason. And although I did try to highlight points in parts II and III where I was relying upon or assuming elements from the interpretative framework as part of my interpretation of the Groundwork or the second Critique, it is my suspicion that I should have done that more frequently, more extensively and more clearly.

In any event, I find that two main confusions about my work have tended to occur, both of which are found at various points in the comments of my present critics. I will begin with an explanation of these points.

2. Response to Ware

I turn now to one of Ware’s main criticisms: his claim that I cannot successfully defend what he calls proposition (2), namely, that ‘what is forced upon us is accessible only in our receptive faculty, i.e. sensibility’ (301). Ware argues that there is evidence in Kant’s theoretical philosophy that Kant believes one can be attentive to a fact in a purely cognitive, non-receptive way. We can, he says, ‘display the pure use of our cognitive faculty as a fact’ without appeal to a receptive faculty; instead, it is possible that ‘concepts … force’ themselves upon you (304) so that, apparently, it is our faculty of understanding (Ware simply calls it a ‘cognitive faculty’), not a faculty of receptivity that gains these concepts. Ware then suggests that the same point for making sense of attentiveness is revealed by a reference to Kant’s theoretical philosophy at the opening of an important second Critique passage, which I removed for the purposes of my argument, namely, that facts can be impressed upon us without appeal to a faculty of receptivity. So in both theoretical and practical philosophy, it is not the case that ‘what is forced upon us is accessible only in our receptive faculty, i.e. sensibility’. I wish to respond to this line of criticism.

I must admit that, because I am deeply committed to careful readings of texts, I am sensitive to the accusation that I might have ‘adjusted’ the relevant text for my purposes. It is true that I omitted the passage Ware mentions. But two points: (a) that passage is not as damning to my reading of things as Ware takes it to be and (b) elsewhere in the book, I address at length the theoretical parallel to attentiveness on the practical level, arguing in fact that both require appeal to a receptive faculty. My deleting of the relevant second Critique passage in chapter 8 was an effort to streamline discussion to focus on practical issues at that point, having already dealt with the theoretical parallel in chapter 2.

My discussion of the Second Analogy and the concept of causality in chapter 2 articulates an understanding of how, contra Ware, we need to be given something in sensibility so as to make a transcendental argument to the conditions for the possibility of that experience. This is just Kant’s point when he notes, famously, that:

Applied to the Second Analogy, this just means that we start with an experience, something given to our senses, like the ship moving from upstream to downstream, or my viewing of a house. It is only from such given experience of necessary relations of representations that are forced on us (much like the categorical necessitation of the will is forced on the Gallows Man) that we are able to stand back and make a priori claims about the conditions for the possibility of this precise experience of necessity. In my book, I make a lot of hay about the idea that we actually experience necessity, both theoretically and practically; this kind of experience is the source of both our awareness of pure a priori concepts theoretically and pure a priori moral laws practically.

Now Ware asserts that the passage he quotes from the B Introduction shows that Kant accepts that we need not appeal to a receptive faculty in order for a concept to be forced upon us. But I disagree. Both in that passage and in the one I excised from the second Critique, Kant makes a general claim about how we become aware of concepts that hold with necessity. These claims are not so much an assertion about how that awareness of necessity comes about, only an indication that such awareness comes about. Here are the two passages in question:

Both of these passages state simply that, if one removes all interfering ‘empirical conditions’ (i.e. if only you ‘attend’), one finds that the necessity of concepts or moral laws force themselves upon one. Neither of these passages states how that occurs. Furthermore, Ware refers only to a passage from the B Introduction, a point in the Critique when details of how this happens have not yet been articulated. So interpreters are left to figure that out for themselves.

Ware states the following:

I agree entirely with what Ware says here. The point on which we disagree concerns how that consciousness or awareness of the necessity of moral laws and theoretical principles comes about. Ware says we use only our ‘cognitive faculty’ here (understanding for theoretical principles and reason for practical principles?), but this does not make sense. The understanding is not a capacity for receiving things. This is a basic Kantian point:

So I would turn Ware’s ideas back to him and ask the question: what story can Kant tell about how one receives something, or has something forced upon herself, without appeal to sensibility? My account preserves the traditional Kantian epistemological idea that knowledge requires sensibility and understanding. Your account suggests that, both theoretically and practically, awareness of necessity is forced upon us without appeal to sensibility but only to the faculty of concepts, i.e. understanding. But I cannot make sense of how that would work. And indeed, when one looks later in the first Critique, for example, to the ways that Kant describes in the Second Analogy as to how it is that we come to terms with the necessity of the concept of causality, he himself sticks with the idea that we start with what is received in sense experience, then think about the conditions for the possibility of that experience. I find nowhere in Kant’s writings that he explicitly defends the idea that the faculty of understanding is a capacity for receiving things. So even with further discussion of the theoretical parallel to my account of being attentive to the necessity of the moral law, I continue to assert that both cases require a moment of receptivity (in the theoretical case, sense perception or experience; in the practical case, felt experience) in which something is given to us upon which we can attend and reason.

I certainly agree with Ware in that we are both friends of feeling in Kant! I appreciate his offering of an alternative way of thinking about the integration of moral feeling that is more significant than Allison’s account but which preserves the stated structure of the Analytic of the second Critique. Ware suggests that, although we have some non-felt recognition or consciousness of the authority of the moral law (thus ‘justifying’ its authority for us – call this ‘objective’ determination of the will?), this first level of justification is strengthened and confirmed when subjectively we recognize its authority and thus are motivated to act on it through the moral feeling of respect. This subjective level of determination of the will is thus both motivational and justificatory in its role. In Ware’s words:

Ware thinks that by accepting this two-stage justificatory process, ‘we can appreciate the justificatory weight of respect, in other words, without making it identical to the fact of reason’. I have already explained how I am not making the fact and respect identical; setting that aside, it does seem that Ware’s account places more distance between justification and feeling, allowing first a non-felt moment of justification, followed up by a felt moment of justification which is simultaneously a moment of motivation to action.

I agree that such a reading would make the Analytic more coherent. It seems to me, though, that this reading gives feeling a role for justification only by collapsing the distinction between justification and motivation. That the moral law can, as Ware puts it, be ‘subjectively practical’, i.e. that it can in fact be operative in my life, seems more of a motivational claim than a justificatory one. I suppose it affirms the initial justification in that we discover that we are actually capable of acting on the thing to which we already know we are obligated. It is hard for me to decide on this account just how sure I am about being obligated to moral demands before I am motivated to act on them. Do I have to wait until I succeed in acting on moral demands to confirm that I was obligated to them at all? But if not, a further problem arises: I would already, before motivation to action and before my experience of moral feeling, know that I am obligated to the moral law. But that is what seems to be out of step with Kant’s understanding of the common moral agent. It would be odd, for the common agent, to split recognition of the authority of the moral law into two separate moments, one austere, non-felt recognition followed only later by a felt motivational state. A central idea of my account is that experience of the moral feeling of respect simply is definitional of the human moral experience, from beginning to end. I encounter moral demands through this feeling; although I did not focus on this in the book, we are motivated by moral demands through taking up this feeling in the right way. This point about the felt-throughout coherence of common moral experience was exactly the point I was making against Allison’s account in my book. So although Ware’s account keeps the Analytic in better order, and it does provide a secondary justificatory role for feeling, in maintaining an artificial distinction between common non-felt and common felt states of consciousness, it is less true to a coherent picture of the common moral agent.

Nonetheless, Ware takes his reading to be more in line with the order of the Analytic, and I will grant him that point. But my way of reading the Analytic is that it is more at odds with itself than Ware suggests. There are two competing stories about the grounding of morality, one common and one more expertly philosophical. My reading highlights one of those strands, arguing that the Analytic has stronger epistemic justification if we accept the epistemic role of feeling in consciousness of the moral law (and that the expertly philosophical account has no adequate explanation of the source of that consciousness).

3. Response to Moyar

I turn now to the concerns raised by Dean Moyar. I should begin by emphasizing that I am not a Fichte scholar, and that I do not consider myself qualified to assess the ways in which Moyar interprets Fichte, though I am happy to trust him about how he interprets Fichte. My larger worry – and an area in which I do feel I have a bit more expertise! – is the question of whether and to what extent we can bring certain Fichtean ideas to Kant’s texts. I suspect this move towards Fichtean ideas is at the heart of the disagreements that exist between me and Moyar. In particular, they seem to me to violate the limits of reason as Kant would want to establish them.

First, Moyar worries that I abandon all appeal to causality in favour of moral obligation (I will comment on that shortly), and suggests that we should separate activity of the self and universality of law. In making that separation,

It is just this move that strikes me as exceedingly un-Kantian. I am happy to admit that Fichte makes this move, but to try to bring to Kant a notion of rational causality that is more ‘primitive’ than that rational causality inevitably associated with morality via the Reciprocity Thesis is to try to resolve Kantian interpretive issues by turning him into Fichte.

Why is this move un-Kantian? First, as I have just suggested, Kant himself would not speak of a rational causality detached from moral demands in this way. Second – and this is perhaps more crucial – claiming that we have epistemic access to this primitive form of causality alongside space/time (saying, as Moyar does later, that ‘we have a third form of intuition, the intuition of acting as such’, 298) simply destroys the limits of reason as Kant would accept them. As I have argued in the book, by the time we get to the second Critique, Kant even abandons any phenomenological access to freedom as he typically understands it:

We do not have an experience of freedom, felt or otherwise; we do not experience ourselves as positively, actively free. Period. I know that this is a huge difference between Fichteans and Kantians; I can even lament that my own first-personal phenomenological experience is lacking something that Fichteans apparently experience. But I accept Kant’s insight here that we do not experience ourselves as positively and actively free. And, to get back to my original point, claiming we do is a major violation of the limits that Kant institutes for what we can and cannot know about the noumenal realm. To experience myself as free would be to experience my noumenal self, my rational spontaneity as such. And although Kant – and I – think that it is important to discuss such things and even make practical claims about them, to claim that I experience myself as free in this robust sense would be to violate the limits of reason as established in the first Critique. Kant does toy briefly with the idea, in the Groundwork, that we can get experiential access ‘to what there may be of pure activity’ in us (4: 451). But it was precisely because he sought this non-morally informed conception of our rational selves that the work of Groundwork III was a phenomenological failure. As I argue in chapter 5, once one looks at what experience of freedom we actually have, it turns out, at best, to be one of negative freedom (i.e. one of experiencing ourselves as not constrained by things external to us). But no amount of attentive reflection on that experience is going to yield freedom in the positive sense of affirmation of moral obligation. There is just not enough to that experience to yield those conclusions.

So although I agree with Moyar that Fichte’s appeal to an intuition of activity as such has some similarities to my notion of phenomenological experience (it is not an experience of objects, it is accessed through feeling), I do not recognize Fichte’s appeal to an intuition of activity as such as the right phenomenological starting point. Kant hoped in the Groundwork that feeling would get us access to this primordial part of ourselves; but that was exactly where his first phenomenological attempt failed. To get to things noumenally active, we need to take the long way around through our genuine felt experience of being constrained and obligated; and the freedom we will be able to claim as a result (not as a felt experience, but as something we infer attentively from our felt experience of obligation) is always and only that freedom necessarily connected with our capacity as moral agents, not a more pure or primordial non-moral freedom.

Moyar states: ‘The key point is that I claim (following Fichte’s reading of Kant) that noumenal agency is just the consideration of action under the perspective of freedom, whereas Grenberg has a more metaphysical picture of noumenal agency in mind’ (295). So Moyar claims a more basic understanding of noumenal agency that can be equated with what he calls a ‘natural finite’ perspective on conscience. But I just do not see how he can have it both ways: is this noumenal agency, or is this natural finite human consciousness? Maybe I am missing something about how Moyar understands things, but it seems to me that his Fichtean commitments do not allow him to reduce consciousness from the perspective of freedom to a natural finite thing. I think he is more noumenal than he wants to admit. I am confused too about why Moyar thinks that the Fichtean two-standpoint view is closer to the common point of view than my own. It seems neither common nor Kantian to me.

One might accuse me of violating similar limits when I claim a felt experience of categorical obligation as the starting point. But it was with just these concerns about what can and cannot come within phenomenological experience that I argued that we must begin with the feeling of categorical obligation. Again remember: the fact of reason itself is not a feeling; indeed, like freedom, the fact is something that cannot be located within the experience (felt or otherwise) of finite rational beings. Rather, I experience a feeling of a particular sort which attentive reflection reveals must have a distinctive causal history. That is, it must come from the moral law acting upon my will and sensibility; without such a rational cause, we could not otherwise explain the experience of absolute necessitation of the will. And so, unlike the bare felt experience of negative freedom, the new felt experience of necessitation that emerges in the conflict between morality and inclinations does yield results upon attentive reflection. That is why it is more phenomenologically satisfying.

In my move from a felt experience of freedom to a felt experience of categorical obligation, Moyar worries further that I am rejecting all appeal to rational causality as such. That is not true. Moyar says, correctly, that ‘it is precisely a reliance on theoretical arguments about causality that Grenberg is determined to reject in the name of the common point of view. She criticizes Kant’s argument in Groundwork III in part by arguing that it relies on a thesis of “global causal determinism”’ (294; emphasis added). He is right that part of my assessment of the failure of Groundwork III involves pointing out that Kant feels the need to appeal to theoretical claims from the first Critique that have not been accessed from his nascent practical point of view, which is decidedly a phenomenological point of view. I thus argue that appeal to a theoretical claim in the middle of a phenomenological, practical argument is out of order. But Moyar then goes on to say:

Here is where Moyar misunderstands my position (or at least tends in that direction). The fact that I reject Kant’s appeal to a theoretical point about causality when he is in the middle of a practical argument does not mean that I reject ‘the equation of willing=rational cause=law’. Indeed, as Moyar rightly points out, I cling firmly to that equation when I go on to assess what we can learn about the fact of reason when we attend to our felt experience of obligation. The section from which Moyar quotes is one in which I argue that the feeling of obligation the Gallows Man experiences, when attended to, reveals itself as evidence of the fact of reason. In other words, the felt experience points us back towards its cause (which is not itself ‘given’ in the feeling). What it points us back to, amongst other things, is that, whatever causes my feeling of necessitation, it has to be formal not material; this is because a material cause would not be adequate to the experience I in fact have of absolute necessitation of my will. The law I encounter in my felt experience must have a rational cause, and that rational cause is the moral law itself, residing in my noumenal self. So yes, I whole-heartedly accept the equation of willing, rational cause and law. What I reject is the claim that I could encounter such things in felt experience, or any other experience. Again, the point is that I have a felt experience of obligation, an experience which, upon attentive reflection, leads me to acquire certain beliefs about rational causality and its effect on my will. I do not experience rational causality, or myself as in the midst of using it.

Moyar worries that I am not entitled to this move from felt experience to the objective moral law. Here is what he says, first quoting me, then commenting on what I say:

I will comment on the worry of mystery shortly. But first, Moyar worries that I have not shown that the moral law itself is the cause of my felt experience. And in a sense he is right. As the passage quoted from me points out, we need to admit something mysterious about the cause of my felt experience of obligation. The moral law is not ‘given’ in my felt experience the way ‘absolute necessitation of my will’ is given in felt experience. This is just the experience of the Gallows Man who realizes that he feels compelled to avoid malicious lies even if this brings harm to him. If the moral law is not given in experience (because it is beyond the limits of reason to hope that it could be), we need instead to take what we can from what we do experience as saying something about what must have caused that experience. In chapter 9, I defend the claim that ‘the Gallows Man’s experience of moral obligation is an experience of the fact of reason; that is, an experience of the objective, synthetic a priori cognition of that necessary, universal, autonomously legislated law determining the will by its mere form’ (207). This language reveals to me how I failed to express myself clearly. What I should have said is that attentive reflection on the felt experience of moral obligation reveals that this felt experience must be caused by something that is ‘necessary [and] universal’, that is, an ‘autonomously legislated law determining the will by its mere form’. The point is this: attentive reflection on my felt experience reveals that, whatever the cause of it is, it is something that must have these qualities (necessity, universality, formality, autonomy). I will not go through all my arguments for each of these points here. But I do think I have shown, whatever the cause of my felt experience is, it has these qualities. So I can agree with Moyar when he wonders whether there might be something other than the moral law that is the cause of my felt experience, to this extent: there might be something other than the moral law that is necessary, universal, formal and autonomous. But I do not know what that thing would be. We do better to admit, while I cannot simply know (in the theoretical sense) the moral law, that the moral law is the most reasonable thing to understand as fulfilling these conditions. I can thus say that I have a practical cognition of the moral law that is compatible with me also finding something mysterious about this cause upon which I have stumbled through attentive reflection on my felt experience.

But we need to think further about this mystery. Moyar seems perplexed by my willingness to embrace mystery and wonder as part of a rigorous philosophical account of Kant’s ethics: ‘I have some questions about this mystery’. But let us think about mystery in Kant’s writings. Once we accept Kant’s account of the limits of reason in the ways I have suggested, and reject the more Fichtean hope of knowledge of our active, noumenal selves from the inside, it should not surprise us that we need, as rational beings, to acquire a different relationship to the realm of the noumenal than that of simple knowledge. I argue in the book that what we end up with is a practical, not a theoretical, cognition of both the moral law and freedom, but that practical cognition is the kind of epistemic animal that sits happily with the idea that there remains something mysterious about what is thereby cognized. To say that we practically cognize something is simply to say that we understand enough of it for practical purposes: here, for knowing what our obligations are and what we should do. But knowing that much about something leaves plenty of room for us to admit that we do not know that thing – here, the moral law – completely. We can thus still wonder at, or find mysterious, that very thing of which we have a practical cognition.

Kant himself, in both the Groundwork and the second Critique, reflects on the mystery that we must admit about those noumenal things we cannot know fully. He emphasizes that what we wonder at is not moral obligation itself; that is at times all too painfully clear to us. I know very clearly what I have to do! What we wonder at instead (and indeed, what we have a duty to wonder at) is the moral law’s ‘inscrutable source’ or cause (Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 400). Here is another example, now from the Groundwork, one of my favourite examples of Kant’s embrace of incomprehensibility. Although this point is made after the (failed) deduction of the moral law from freedom in Groundwork III, I would argue that it still applies to the recognition of the qualities of the law that must cause our felt experience of obligation in the second Critique, and is entirely of a piece with the passage just quoted from the Metaphysics of Morals:

What I take Kant to be saying here is that if we are going to set our moral sights high (if we are going to hope to say something about a supreme, unconditional law of morality and not just about prudential maxims), we must simultaneously be willing to accept that there will be something about the object of study that is in principle incomprehensible to us. I whole-heartedly accept this point! To lay my cards on the table (as Moyar did when he admitted he was a Hegelian), this is an account of practical cognition that makes it compatible not only with mystery but also, eventually, with a rational faith in God. That, however, is a story for another occasion.

So Kant accepts a sense of mystery that sits happily with practical cognition. But I think that contemporary interpreters are hesitant to integrate these sections, hoping instead to set them aside. Philosophers do not like it when we cannot know something! But I think a commitment to the limits of reason is so deeply a Kantian thing that it is better to take Kant at his word here and to realize that a strong metaphysical reading of our noumenal selves requires that we not only admit but welcome a relationship of mystery or wonder to moral philosophy. With an acceptance of the limits of reason comes the welcoming of wonder into philosophy.

One final reaction to a series of Moyar’s comments, even as I admit that space does not permit me to respond to everything interesting and good that he has brought to the table. Moyar wonders at the end of his comments about my understanding of the relationship of the common to the philosophical, and asks whether we are licensed to ‘correct common morality with tools of philosophy’ (299). This one is easy: No! To expand: the whole premise of my book has been that our common experience of morality is the life-blood for practical philosophy. Unless we had these common experiences, philosophers would not be at all entitled to reflect upon things moral. And they are now entitled to reflect on things moral only to the extent that attentive reflection on our felt experience allows. The work of philosophy is not to correct common moral experience, but only to unpack, clarify and reveal it. I think this too is a very Kantian point of view. In my book I note numerous passages from Kant’s moral works (especially the second Critique and the Metaphysics of Morals) in which he is almost derisive about so-called ‘expert’ approaches to morality. Here is one of them, from the second Critique:

It seems that Kant is not worried about correcting the common point of view by appeal to expert philosophical reflection. To the contrary, he is worried about how expert philosophers get so attached to their pet theories (and the publications, recognition, jobs, etc. they might get from them) that they lose sight of what I call that ‘life-blood’ of practical philosophy, our common moral experiences.

Moyar wonders what this ‘ordinary moral judgement’ would look like, with particular concern for the relative relationship of the experience of feelings and consciousness of the moral law. He also says that I have misunderstood his own order of first and second-order moral judgements. I regret that misunderstanding on my part. His clarification of first-order object-oriented versus second-order subject-oriented ‘supervisory’ judgements is helpful to me in correcting my misunderstanding, though I could use further clarification myself of his order of things. For example, is not the supervisory function at least moving us towards choice? Why would I engage in such oversight except for the practical purpose of deciding what to do on the best evidence possible? In any event, I want to respond to some of Moyar’s queries on the order of moral judgements. I suspect that I will not be able to satisfy his concerns fully, but here is a beginning. Here is what Moyar asks:

I hope from what I said in response to Ware’s questions that it is clear that feeling does not justify our obligation to the moral law. It plays an epistemically enabling role in showing us that our own rational natures justify the authority of the moral law for my will. Feeling plays an enabling, not a straightforwardly evidential or justificatory role in knowing the demands of the moral law.

So the order of things is like this: I have a particular felt experience, perhaps not unlike the Gallows Man’s experience (though hopefully less intense!) of wanting to do something but worrying that it is the wrong thing to do. I experience this through feeling. Like the Gallows Man, I find that this ‘it would be wrong’ sticks to my feelings and will not go away. In terms relevant to the moral feeling of respect, I am feeling the ‘negative’ aspect of the feeling, that constraint of my inclination that says ‘Hey! Do it!’ This feeling of the constraint of my inclinations will not go away, even when I try to ignore it. It wakes me up at 3 in the morning as a pang of conscience; it haunts me. In Kant’s language in the second Critique, it occurs even against my will: ‘my spirit bows whether I want it or whether I do not’ (5: 77). That is, it does if I am honest with myself. And this is a big ‘if’, for this is the moment when I say to myself that I must ‘set … aside all empirical conditions’ (5: 30), i.e. my strong desire to do the thing in question. So, if I am honest with myself, I look at this conflict and learn something from it: this tugging on my feelings that will not go away is a sign of the fact that I am obligated to ways of acting that are not conditional upon my inclinations. I learn that, and decide that these grounds for acting (the unconditional ones) hold with more authority than those grounded in my inclinations. I have, in other words, become conscious of the authority of the moral law. These feelings then are something that precede my consciousness of the moral law, and upon which I rely to understand what the moral law is and its authority over me. Thus: ‘[A]ny consciousness of obligation depends upon moral feeling to make us aware of the constraint present in the thought of duty’ (Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 399). Call this consciousness of the moral law consciousness of the objective determination of my will. I have not yet decided what I will do; i.e. my will has not yet been subjectively determined. If I allow the authority of unconditional demands to have its proper sway in my choice, I will do the right thing. If, instead, I allow ‘empirical conditions’ to win the day, I will do the wrong thing.