Over the past few decades, Kant’s theory of virtue and his empirical psychology have received increasing attention. As the psychological conditions that hinder virtuous action, feelings and inclinations have been discussed at length, especially affects and passions. The subjective, psychological conditions that enable or aid human morality, such as conscience, self-control and cultivated sympathetic feelings, have also been addressed in great detail. Closer attention has been paid to Kant’s treatment of moral feeling. Against the common caricature of the Kantian virtuous agent as someone who must be purely rational or devoid of feeling, it has been shown that certain feelings play a positive role in Kant’s doctrine of virtue and therefore ought to be cultivated. Finally, Kant scholars have recently come up with a variety of creative solutions to the puzzle of how to understand his notion of moral weakness.
Borges’s book represents her extensive pioneering work on these topics. It is a well-combined bundle of essays involving, for example, discussions of Kant’s conceptions of virtue, moral strength, moral weakness, self-control, emotions, passions, affects, moral feelings and the feelings of sympathy and love. In a nutshell, the book thematizes the relation between practical reason, emotion and action in Kant’s works. Borges is of the opinion that some Kant scholars ‘have gone too far in seeing emotions as having an intrinsic moral value’ (p. 181). Her aim is not only to explain the real importance of emotion for Kant, but also to show that there is a lesson that Kant can teach us about the emotions.
The book has nine chapters. The first chapter deals with Kant’s account of the causes of action, the issue of overdetermination, the so-called incorporation thesis and weakness of the will. By drawing on Kant’s early distinction between motives and incentives, Borges concludes that the domain of rational agency does not have the same extension as the domain of voluntary action. Whereas the former concerns motives or objective grounds of actions, the latter, wider domain concerns incentives or subjective grounds of action. Her point is that this distinction makes it possible to reconcile the incorporation thesis with weakness of the will, such that the incorporation thesis applies to the domain of the rational whereas weakness applies to the domain of the voluntary. Borges accordingly characterizes weakness as ‘an exception not reflected in the maxim’ (p. 24). From my point of view, Kantian weakness is certainly about incentives, but the assumption that Kant still fully endorses the distinction between motives and incentives in his later works is disputable. Moreover, readings that completely dissociate moral weakness from maxims may fail to accommodate Kant’s claims that moral weakness is the first grade of our propensity to evil and that evil is to be sought in the quality of one’s maxims.
Chapter 2 aims to answer the question of whether Kant thought that we can act without feelings. Borges’s answer is that we can – even without moral feelings and the feeling of respect. On her view, ‘no feeling should motivate us in a pure moral action’ (p. 40). The claim seems to be that none of our feelings can be involved in Kantian self-determination, for it must happen a priori. Accordingly, Borges concludes that Kant’s view is that ‘we do not need an incentive to motivate’ and that ‘the mere thought that something is right is sufficient to trigger the right action’ (p. 58). This strikes me as a radical interpretation of Kant’s account of moral motivation, which seems to fail to do justice to certain pieces of textual evidence, such as Kant’s recurrent identification of the moral law as an incentive (e.g. Religion, 6: 24, 29, 36; Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 387, 446) and his suggestion that moral feeling makes possible the determination of our choice by the moral law as the state in which we ‘take an interest in the action’, or are morally motivated (MM, 6: 399). Furthermore, Kant describes the feeling of respect as ‘a positive feeling that is not of empirical origin and is cognized a priori’ (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 73).
Chapter 3 contains the analysis of the relationship between a priori moral theory and empirical psychology throughout Kant’s writings. Borges criticizes Patrick Frierson’s idea that Kant provides a transcendental anthropology and praises Robert Louden’s account of the impure part of ethics, which is deemed necessary for the application of principles in empirical circumstances. Relatedly, she addresses the relationship between Kantian morality and emotions. For instance, Borges argues that cultivated sympathetic feelings are important because they can serve as surrogates for the motive of duty. She also points out that moral feeling, as one of Kant’s four subjective conditions of moral receptivity, is not the same as the feeling of respect because it can also be pleasurable. I find this point interesting, but I wonder whether it is in keeping with the above quotation (CPrR, 5: 73) and whether the strict separation of moral feeling and the feeling of respect is in line with Kant’s claim that moral feeling is respect for the moral law ‘in its subjective aspect’ (MM, 6: 464).
Chapter 4 is meant to show that Kant’s theory of emotions contributes to the contemporary debate by acknowledging the physiological and cognitive aspects of emotions without forgetting the differences between them. This valuable chapter lies at the core of the book. By drawing on her extensive knowledge of theories of emotion, Borges challenges both Sabini/Silver’s pain-model of emotions and Marcia Baron’s model, according to which we are not passive regarding our emotions. By employing the distinction between the passive, reactive and active self, Borges nicely delineates a continuum of emotions, some of which can be controlled and some not. Against Baron’s account, she argues that sympathy cannot be a model for all emotions and that we are not responsible for our emotions, but only for our actions. I side with Borges’s point regarding the complexity of emotions, but it is not clear to me why this leads her to the conclusion that we are not responsible for our emotions – not even the controllable ones. It also seems to me that Kant’s discussion of the indirect duty to cultivate our natural emotional responses calls for the ascription of responsibility, at least to a certain extent.
In chapter 5, Borges focuses on the possibility of controlling affects in Kant’s philosophy. She appealingly situates Kant’s theory of affects within the polemic between two main schools of physiology from the eighteenth century. On her view, the extent of controlling and cultivating emotions has been overstated by Kant scholars. To correct this, she argues that the possibility of controlling affects depends upon the agent’s temperament and that some affects cannot be controlled merely by the force of the mind and require a kind of physiological intervention. Borges clarifies that her claim is not that affects cannot be controlled at all, because Kant gives examples of moderating one’s shyness and sympathy (p. 120). In my opinion, not every sympathetic feeling is an affect for Kant – sympathetic feelings that do not cause us to lose our composure are not to be called affects. Furthermore, Kant’s claim may be that we cannot control our affects at all when we are in affective states because affects are intensive feelings that actually make us lose control. His point could then be that we rather have a duty to do our best to prevent our feelings from turning into affects.
Chapter 6 is titled ‘Kantian Virtue as a Cure for Affects and Passions’. It begins with an interesting discussion about the consistency between Kant’s claim that morality cannot be grounded in happiness and his later claim that the happiness of others is one of the moral ends that we ought to set for ourselves. Borges then highlights the link between virtue as moral strength, inner freedom, control, apathy and weakness of will by focusing on Kant’s first requirement of inner freedom, which is related to affects (MM, 6: 407). Although she elsewhere acknowledges Kant’s point that affects are feelings and passions are inclinations or a specific kind of desires, she does not seem to use this distinction here to fully account for inner freedom as the constitutive basis of virtue. In other words, my impression is that inner freedom, conceived as freedom from passions and all other inclinations (MM, 6: 407; CPrR, 5: 161), remains elusive.
The topic of chapter 7 is the relation between the good and the beautiful. After having discussed the meaning of the claim that the beautiful can be considered a symbol of the morally good, Borges turns to Kant’s four ‘aesthetical’ conditions of morality in the Metaphysics of Morals. By appealing to the examples Kant offers in the Anthropology, she then explains how social refinement, belonging to the realm of taste, influences the effectiveness of moral practice.
In chapter 8, Borges engagingly addresses Kant’s take on the relationship between women, emotion and morality. By arguing against the widespread claim that Kant holds that women are more emotional than men, she points out that being less rational does not imply being more emotional. On her view, women are less emotional than men: even though they have more feelings such as compassion, their mild affects are less of an obstacle to morality, and their passions are weaker. Borges even claims that women are less likely to have affects and passions and that they are more capable of controlling themselves to get what they want, especially when it comes to the indirect dominion they exercise over men. She concludes that women’s greater capacity for control seems to make them better suited to the role of following the moral law than men. I think that a minor amendment is in place here; namely, the claim that women are better at prudential self-control does not yet seem to show that they are also better at its moral analogue (Lectures on Ethics, 27: 362).
In chapter 9, Borges addresses the question of whether virtue can be a cure for the passions. By linking affects with weakness as the first stage of our propensity to evil and passions with vice as its third stage, she argues that virtue as moral strength can be a cure for affects but not for passions. Indeed, Kant claims that acquired passions are mostly ‘incurable’ and that they do greater damage to freedom because they are based on bad maxims (Anth, 7: 266–7). At times, he leaves open whether it is difficult or impossible to free ourselves of passions once we have them (Critique of the Power of Judgement, 5: 272, n.; Anth, 7: 251, 266). But it is not yet clear to me why moral strength is not needed to prevent us from acquiring passions. Kant’s second requirement of inner freedom seems to oblige us to do our best not to become enslaved by acquired passions (MM, 6: 407). If taking care that our natural inclinations do not turn into passions requires us to avoid adopting the maxims characteristic of passions, this opens up the possibility that moral strength is needed to deal with our temptation to base our maxims on the ends of inclination. Having passions might then initially also indicate weakness or a lack of moral strength. However, this need not undermine Borges’s innovative proposal that healing passions also presupposes the establishment of an ethical community.
Despite the concerns expressed above, I found reading this book both enjoyable and rewarding. I also find the book exceptionally clearly written and informative. Borges swiftly moves back and forth between Kant, his predecessors and his contemporary successors. I believe that readers interested in Kant’s ethics, its broader historical framework and contemporary accounts of the role of emotions in morality will take a lot away from her book.
