The aim of Kate Moran’s Community and Progress in Kant’s Moral Philosophy is to provide a defence of the central role of community in Kant’s ethics, or, as she puts it in her conclusion, ‘to show that Kant’s moral philosophy makes room for, and indeed requires, a social element in a way not typically acknowledged by his critics’ (241). In the first and by far the longest chapter of the book she argues that the notion of ‘the highest good’ for Kant refers to a secular ethical community that is realizable on earth, and that its role in the economy of his moral theory is to ‘guide and justify’ moral action. She argues in chapter 2 that, given Kant’s theory of moral choice and individual moral autonomy, the moral activity that is guided and justified by the notion of the highest good is the moral activity associated with moral character development, and that this activity has a fundamentally social element.

In the remaining three chapters of the book she argues that certain social relationships and institutions are important social contributors to, and perhaps even necessary conditions of, the realization of the highest good. She argues that these institutions contribute to bringing the highest good, construed as an ethical community, into existence because they contribute to the development of moral character in its members. Hence these three chapters examine closely Kant’s view that individuals have a duty to participate in certain social relationships and institutions for the sake of developing their moral character, thereby furthering progress towards ethical community. Each chapter addresses specific duties of concern to Kant, respectively: duties of moral education, moral friendships and civil society. In each case Moran makes a strong case that these duties follow from the fundamental duty to bring about the highest good (construed as ethical community) possible on earth, and that each of these duties requires social engagement. These last three chapters are interesting and informative, and they tie together different aspects of Kant’s views on the duty to provide for moral education, to engage in moral friendships and to participate in civil society.

These chapters are intended to build upon the arguments of chapters 1 and 2, which make up the first half of the book. In the interest of brevity I will focus on those, and recommend the last three as in themselves valuable contributions to scholarship.

In her introduction Moran argues that if Kant’s theory of the highest good is consistent with the rest of his moral theory, then it can be used as a lens for clarifying and possibly resolving certain problems in Kantian ethics. In particular she focuses on long-standing criticisms of Kantian ethics as hyper-individualist and consequently unable to accommodate important communitarian insights, and also upon its excessive demotion of the moral value of human happiness. She turns to Kant’s doctrine of the highest good for a remedy, focusing on what she sees as its fundamentally social character. For Kant, the ‘highest good’ (summum bonum) is a rational idea of a world in which happiness and moral worthiness to be happy are commensurate, that is, it is an ideal state of affairs in which happiness is distributed among individuals in accordance with their moral virtue. Moran’s task, then, is to first provide an argument for the consistency of Kant’s injection of a teleology into his ethics via an account of the necessary object (goal) of moral judgement with his deontological view that the morality of actions rests solely on agents’ intentions in choosing to perform them.

Chapter 1, ‘Kant’s Concept of the Highest Good’, which amounts to about one-third of the entire book, is devoted to an interpretation of Kant’s theory that provides such an account. The length of the chapter is a testament to the difficulties in doing so. Moran gives several related arguments for a resolution of the tensions between Kant’s account of the highest good and the rest of his moral theory, which for the sake of brevity I will subsume under two main claims. First, she wants to show that the highest good for Kant is not merely compatible with the fundamentals of his moral theory’s deontological approach and its emphasis on individual rational autonomy, but is part of the very justification of moral action. Moran also argues that his doctrine of the highest good supplements Kant’s ethics with the guiding moral idea of a progressing moral human community – an idea that provides the human will with both an object and incentive for moral action.

Moran expands upon this latter claim in the rest of the book by showing how Kant uses the idea of the highest good as a necessary guide and motivation to ethical character building, and overall her argument for the teleological aspect as an augmentation of his ethics is strong. This claim does, however, invite the criticism that it fails to honour a core tenet of Kantian ethics, namely, that right action cannot be grounded upon any contingency, and that social arrangements, even the most basic ones like moral training, friendship and civic institutions, are not guaranteed a priori as background conditions of an individual’s decision-making context. Moran’s position, if correct, raises interesting questions about Kant’s well-known example of the good will in the Groundwork, namely the former friend of humanity whose moral feelings, friendships and social commitments have been utterly destroyed by past experiences and who therefore has no use for humanity except in complete abstraction. This former friend of humanity is a shining example of the good will precisely because he has through no fault of his own found himself in a socially untenable situation – a situation that Kant obviously takes to be altogether possible. On Moran’s reading of the centrality of the highest good to Kant’s ethics, it is questionable whether this character’s failure of feeling for human beings really qualifies him as morally virtuous. Moran’s account problematizes this sort of case using Kant’s own work on virtue. I take it that this is the sort of issue she has in mind when she remarks in several places that it is important to ‘think of moral agency in terms of a person’s character’ (126) and to be willing to revise our (Kantian?) views on moral agency. But the tension in Kant’s ethics does not appear to be resolved, in that case.

Turning to the issue of the role of the highest good in moral justification, Moran defends her claim that ‘Kantian agents ought to think of the achievement of the highest good as part of the justification for moral action’ (3) by identifying the highest good with the idea of a secular ethical community achievable on earth. She argues that this interpretation enables us ‘to see that while the initial justification of Kantian morality stems from reason alone, this very understanding of morality issues forth a notion of the goals of morality that can help guide and justify future actions’ (20). Since she later says that this guidance and justification can never supplant individual application of the moral law, her claim about initial justification stemming from reason must simply assert that the moral law sets rational ends that guide our choices. It does not follow that these ends, including the rational idea of the highest good, are the source of moral justification of these choices. The only way this could be shown is by an argument to the effect that the individual who chooses to pursue these ends, in this case the highest good, is thereby making an autonomous choice based purely on wanting to do the right thing.

Moran appears to take this approach when she argues that the relationship between the moral law and the highest good is ‘structural’ (42) and that having an idea of the highest good is a condition of the very possibility of moral action (37) or a necessary condition of moral action (40). But for Kant, the concept of the highest good is a complex one that already includes the concept of the moral law, along with that of human happiness (always at least partly empirical) and of synthetic connection of these disparate elements in a (rationally ideal) systematic totality (5: 109–10). In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant is clear that the highest good can ‘determine the pure will’ only in virtue of this inclusion: ‘the concept of [the highest good]... is likewise the determining ground of the pure will. This is because the moral law, included and thought in this concept... determines the will as required by the principle of autonomy. This order of concepts should not be lost sight of...’

In other words, any moral justificatory work the concept of the highest good might do is in virtue of the inclusion of the concept of the moral law. It is hard to see exactly what work the social element of the highest good (the ideal proportioning of happiness) does in the justification of moral action above and beyond what the element of the moral law already contributes to the concept of the highest good.

Finally, in this chapter Moran argues that Kant’s view of the highest good developed and changed over the course of his Critical period, so that his account of its role in human morality gradually came to emphasize the social component, while the theological component (the ideal ordering that gives rise to a need to postulate immortality of the soul and God’s existence) became increasingly residual. She argues that Kant’s later ‘secular’ version of the highest good is considerably less dismissive of human happiness and material needs than was his earlier, theological version, and that Kant’s considered view, as expressed in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) is thoroughly social, moving from an account of individual happiness in proportion to individual virtue to ‘shared happiness that is the natural result of shared or general virtue’. Leaving aside the question of whether she can satisfactorily explain what ‘shared happiness’ amounts to for Kant, and whether the analogy between individual virtue and community virtue can be fully squared with a Kantian account of moral choice in terms of the ‘determination of the pure will’, it is important to note that her secular account is not quite as this-worldly as she suggests. She admits as much herself when she points out that ‘In order for general happiness to follow from general virtue Kant must still posit an author of the laws of nature who makes it possible and predictable that happiness will, over time, follow from virtue’ and that ‘this component of Kant’s thought seems to undergo no major revision’ (80). But this admission, mentioned almost in passing, is a rather major capitulation to the theological account of the highest good. The need to postulate God’s existence remains, since no matter how closely a community of individual human beings approximates perfect virtue through moral sensibility on earth, they are still always threatened by the spectre of an uncooperative nature whose non-rational forces may at any time work to create utter misery and nullify the command of reason to seek the highest good. Further arguments are required to fully secularize this aspect of Kant’s doctrine, but Moran’s arguments for how to replace the postulate of immortality are strong.

In chapter 2, ‘Moral Action and Moral Development’, Moran argues that Kant’s view of agency is to be understood not simply in terms of individual moral choices made using a ‘categorical imperative procedure’ but also in terms of ‘habits of thinking and developing certain motivational aids over the course of a lifetime’ (99). Appealing to her earlier arguments that scholars need to shift focus from Kant’s account of ‘isolated’ individual moral choices to his account of ‘the progress of a moral community’, she argues that ‘habits of thought and character traits take on an added importance’ in Kant’s moral theory. She acknowledges a problem for her view created by the fact that in Kant’s ethics ‘an agent’s moral successes and failures are attributable only to that agent’. The argument of this chapter, then, is focused on showing not that social influences are necessary factors for moral agency for Kant, but rather returns to the ‘supplement’ account wherein for Kant, social relationships and institutions ‘can make virtue more likely’ (110). She builds on Felicitas Munzel’s work on Kant’s notion of Denkungsart in the development of moral character and Barbara Herman’s work on ‘salience rules’ in moral judgement to point out ways in which social input increases the likelihood of moral success in both realms. She mentions the importance of ‘moral’ imagination for putting oneself in the position of others as another aspect of moral character development that depends heavily on social relations, and she argues against readings of Kant’s ethics that portray it as a Manichaean conflict between desire and morality. Abandoning this caricature of Kant’s theory of moral development, she argues, allows us to discover in Kant’s writings a great deal about how the cultivation of certain affective states and dispositions can make improvement of moral character more likely, and about how the furthering of social practices and institutions that effectively take up these developmental tasks can come to be a moral obligation on Kant’s account.

Moran concludes this chapter by reaffirming her claim that character traits and habits of thought are not only important but central to Kant’s ethics. Since social factors can and do play an important role in the development of these traits and habits, it follows that on Kant’s account, human beings have an obligation to nurture and develop these social institutions and relationships. An ideal that combines the concept of a will determined by moral autonomy with the command to bring about an ethical community on earth will clearly require these social activities in one form or another, and the rest of Moran’s book effectively supports her larger claim that social elements are of enormous importance in the improvement of moral judgement, moral character and ultimately in the construction of moral societies. Whether or not her account will satisfy Kant’s communitarian detractors depends upon whether it can answer the core question of what exactly Kant took to be the relationship of the individual moral determination to individual social obligation. That question remains, it seems to me, but Moran’s valiant efforts to answer it are well-worth considering.