Practical justification in Kant concerns a number of closely related questions. First: what justifies the fundamental principle of morality (the categorical imperative), and how can we derive specific (moral and political) duties from this principle? Second, what justifies the assumptions that Kant takes to be inextricably bound up with our self-consciousness as moral agents, assumptions such as ‘Ought implies can’ or ‘We have freedom of will’? These questions are central both for interpreting Kant and for assessing the viability of his views from a contemporary perspective. Kant on Practical Justification brings together fourteen essays (plus a brief introduction) that address various important aspects of these questions. In what follows, I will outline the main theses of the individual contributions. Insofar as space permits, I will also raise some questions.
I begin by discussing those essays that focus on issues in Kant's normative ethics. Ottfried Höffe's ‘Anthropology and Metaphysics in Kant's Categorical Imperative of Law’ argues that ‘Kant's moral philosophy cannot make it without anthropological [and empirical] elements’ (110). Höffe shows clearly that Kant relies on various empirical assumptions about the nature of human beings when he generates specific duties in the Doctrine of Right (assumptions such as that newborns are needy beings, 118). However, his interpretation did not strike me as particularly ‘heretical’ (110). For, arguably, much of Kant's insistence on the non-empirical character of morality relates (at least primarily) to the fundamental criterion of rightness which underlies and justifies all specific duties, the categorical imperative (Groundwork (G) 4: 389–90, 409, 426). Höffe accepts that this principle is a priori and non-empirical (113–14).
In ‘Kant's Grounding Project in the Doctrine of Virtue’, Houston Smit and Mark Timmons evaluate Kant's attempt to derive specific moral requirements from the formula of humanity (FH). On their account, FH has rich moral implications that can be explicated by analysing the concepts that figure in FH: humanity, respect and being an end in oneself. The latter concept is, on Smit's and Timmon's view, more or less equivalent to the concept of dignity (238). Drawing on this analysis, they argue that Kant's project of deriving mid-level duties (to oneself and to others) from FH in the Doctrine of Virtue is ‘largely successful’ (267). Smit's and Timmon's essay shows how sustained attention to Kant's fundamental moral concepts can lead towards a fruitful and charitable understanding of his normative ethics. I want to highlight one central feature of their account which struck me as both intriguing and controversial, namely, their understanding of dignity as an ideal of fully realizing one's rational nature (241). This has the advantage that the concept of dignity analytically entails a general duty of moral self-perfection and, further, enables a rather straightforward derivation of the specific duties of apathy, self-knowledge and self-esteem (249–50). But one may worry that there is no firm basis in the text for construing dignity in this ‘ideal’ sense: Kant canonically seems to understand dignity as the actual capacity for morality (4: 435). (For Smit and Timmons, this yields a further concept of dignity in addition to the ‘ideal’ concept, 238–9.) Moreover, only the appeal to dignity qua capacity for morality can explain why we actually have a dignity that morally protects us against (e.g.) torture and humiliation. No human agent has dignity in Smit's and Timmon's ‘ideal’ sense of that term.
Howard Smith's ‘Kant and Libertarianism’ is concerned with the question of whether Kant can be considered a political libertarian. What makes Kant's account attractive to libertarians is that from the legal standpoint of his Doctrine of Right, freedom is conceived ‘negatively’ as the absence of legal restraint (272–4). However, as Smith points out, in Kant this legal space does not exist so that we can ‘exercise an arbitrary autonomy’ (276): Kant's notion of positive freedom entails that we are rationally constrained to take into account the interests and needs of other citizens. Moreover, Smith shows clearly that even Kant's political theory does not merely focus on the negative ideal of absence of legal restraint but also incorporates aspects of the social contract tradition that stresses the importance of reciprocal relations and social solidarity among citizens. On this basis, Kant can prescribe (e.g.) that the government should tax the rich so that it can assist the downtrodden (277–8): a prescription characteristically rejected by libertarians such as the early Nozick.
The majority of essays in this volume concern topics in Kant's moral epistemology, moral psychology and (what we would call) meta-ethics. In ‘Kant's Rechtfertigung and the Epistemic Character of Practical Justification’, Sorin Baiasu argues that Kant's concept of practical justification tracks genuinely epistemic (rather than pragmatic or ‘merely practical’) conditions. This strikes me as very plausible. As Baiasu points out (36), Kant uses the concept of ‘knowledge’ (Wissen) with regard to moral propositions; I would add that the same is true for his concept of ‘cognition’ (Erkenntnis: see 4: 410). Baiasu correctly notes that epistemic vocabulary in Kant is essentially tied to the notion of ‘objective grounds’; he then immediately addresses the issue of how we can have objective grounds for asserting our freedom of will (36–7). But here he passes over what strikes me as a more fundamental question: what objective grounds support our judgements about moral duties? After all, Kant insists that we cognize our freedom of will through our consciousness of the moral law (CPrR 5: 30): the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom (5: 4). I found it puzzling that Baiasu ignores these familiar points when discussing our grounds for believing in free will. There is also a problem with Baiasu's claim that Kant has one unified concept of justification, the notion ‘of an attempt to offer a sufficient proof in support of that which is to be justified’ (40), which extends to Kant's practical philosophy. The problem is this: while Kant indeed holds that we are justified in accepting the moral law, he denies (at least in the second Critique) that our acceptance of the moral law is based on any proof (5: 47).
A question that has received a lot of attention in recent years is whether Kant's ethics is to be understood in constructivist or realist terms. Larry Krasnoff argues for a constructivist reading in ‘Constructing Practical Justification’. Krasnoff's central thesis is that the categorical imperative owes its role as a fundamental principle of practical reasoning to the fact that we need it as a ‘practical surrogate’ (98) for justifying our ‘substantive’ practical conclusions about happiness (102–3, 106). Given the indeterminacy of our concept of happiness, these conclusions by themselves can only be provisional and conditional. We appeal to the categorical imperative so that we can demand unconditional respect from others with regard to our own conclusions about how to live and pay others the same respect for their conclusions. The categorical imperative thus ‘serves as a kind of proxy for the substantive reasons that might justify desire-based principles’ (106). Krasnoff's view is interesting and provocative, but I must confess that I saw no real textual basis for attributing it to Kant. Kant seems committed to denying an essential link between moral principles and desire-based principles of happiness: he argues at length that there is an insurmountable gap between these two types of principles because moral principles have whereas precepts of happiness lack an a priori foundation (CPrR 5: 19–29). Moreover, Kant insists that the moral law is valid for all rational beings (G 4: 389) including an infinite rational being that is entirely outside the scope of desire-based principles of happiness (CPrR 5: 32).
The contributions by Karl Ameriks (‘Is Practical Justification in Kant Ultimately Dogmatic?’) and Paul Guyer (‘Constructivism and Self-Constitution’) have closely related aims: both argue against attempts to provide (on interpretative or more loosely ‘Kantian’ grounds) a kind of deduction of the moral law. Ameriks offers a critical discussion of recent accounts given by Pauline Kleingeld and David Sussman; Guyer scrutinizes Kant's own ‘deductive’ attempts in Groundwork III and Christine Korsgaard's constitutivism. Ameriks and Guyer both argue that since all these attempts towards a deduction of morality fail we should confine ourselves to a modest (‘regressive’) view on which our commitment to the moral law must always be taken for granted and cannot be argumentatively derived from independent grounds (such as the concept of agency). This view, they claim, is one that Kant himself ultimately came to accept in the second Critique. Anyone who favours a more ambitious reading (or development) of Kant's position will need to address their incisive arguments.
The contribution that is most sympathetic to such an ambitious reading is Andrews Reath's ‘Formal Approaches to Kant's Formula of Humanity’. By a ‘formal approach’, Reath means an approach that treats FH as constitutive of agency or volition, in the sense that acceptance of FH is a necessary condition on free rational agency (206). It was not entirely clear to me whether Reath wants to argue that we should treat FH as a principle that is formal in this sense (see his conclusion on 226) or whether he examines how one should carry out the formal approach provided that one already accepts its plausibility. For the latter purpose, Reath offers a perceptive discussion of recent constitutivist accounts provided (on the one hand) by Korsgaard and David Velleman and (on the other hand) by Stephen Engstrom. Reath argues, persuasively in my view, that Engstrom's account might yield the most promising strategy for construing FH as a formal principle (among other things, because it elegantly explains the equivalence of FH and the universal law formula). I would stress, however, that this does not conclusively show the viability of a formal approach to FH, given the worries pressed by Ameriks and Guyer or the further problem (which, I suspect, plagues both Reath's and Engstrom's accounts: see 206, 224) that the formal approach may not allow for conscious akratic violation of FH.
Robert Stern's ‘Kant, Obligation and the Moral Will’ is an attempt to bring Kant's distinction between holy and finite wills to bear on contemporary debates in meta-ethics. I wholly agree with Stern that the significance of this distinction has been underappreciated, and there is much to learn from his clear presentation of the contrast. However, I was not quite persuaded by Stern's suggestion that the contrast allows Kant to steer a middle path between realism and constructivism (142–4) and between externalism and internalism (145–50). Focusing on the former issue, Stern suggests that Kant can give a plausible realist account of moral rightness (as independent of the wills of finite beings) and a plausible constructivist account of moral obligation. But it is not clear to me how one can be a realist about rightness and a constructivist about obligation. That we are obligated to do something follows from (1) normative facts about rightness and (2) metaphysical facts about the structure of our wills (wills that are rational but also sensibly affected). We surely cannot construct the latter facts. Hence, if facts about rightness are understood in realist terms, there seems nothing left to be constructed. To put the point another way: Constructivists such as Korsgaard (in The Sources of Normativity) worry that if rightness is understood in realist terms as a mind-independent property floating in some Platonic realm, then it is unintelligible how we can take ourselves to be normatively bound by facts about rightness. The very idea of being obligated thus becomes a problem. It is puzzling how we could then simply help ourselves to an independently grounded notion of obligation that would solve the problems created by realism about normativity.
In ‘Kant on Practical Reason’, Allen Wood does not argue for one overarching thesis but focuses on a wide range of separate topics in Kant's practical philosophy, such as the relation between reasons and rationality, Kant's conception of prudence, Kant's relation to virtue theories of practical reason, and the significance of mutual recognition in Kant's ethics. In many of these cases, Wood addresses the connection between Kant and contemporary theories. Wood's multi-faceted discussion raises many original and interesting points; I found the discussions of Kant's conception of prudence (which, according to Wood, is ‘conspicuously confused’, 76) and instrumental reason particularly rewarding and thought-provoking. Some of Wood's rather harsh criticisms of contemporary views (e.g. his claim that worries about the normativity of formal principles of rationality are ‘misguided’, 67) seemed to me a bit hasty.
John Hare's ‘The Place of Theism in Kant's Moral Philosophy’ and Adrian Moore's brief reply to Hare consider the extent to which Kant's ethics relies on religious commitments. Hare's central thesis is that for Kant morality does not need religion ‘on its own behalf’, insofar as moral agents are considered as purely rational beings. However, as sensibly affected beings who aim at the highest good we must believe in God as an enabler of the highest good (301–4). Moreover, our own imputable agency is only ever a necessary condition for moral improvement; actual moral improvement requires a supernatural contribution (306). This leads to an illuminating discussion of the sense in which Kant's ethics must and can tolerate a degree of metaphysical unintelligibility (309–10; see Moore's intriguing reply on 316–17).
Henry Allison's ‘Kant's Practical Justification of Freedom’ argues that Kant's attempt to legitimize our practical presupposition that we have free will does not entail any ‘metaphysical’ commitments: Kant's idealism allows him to deny that there is any matter of fact concerning whether we really are free. Allison's essay does not go much beyond his more detailed treatment of these issues in his seminal books Kant's Theory of Freedom and Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Still, the essay is rewarding as a succinct and clear summary of Allison's influential view.
Sebastian Rödl's discussion in ‘Why Ought Implies Can’ begins with the sweeping assertion that ‘contemporary moral philosophy lacks the concept of a practical thought’ (43). However, I must confess that I did not get a clear sense of what this concept is or how it helps in understanding Kant's dictum that ‘ought implies can’. Rödl's claims that ‘consciousness of the moral law is an act of the power to act according to the moral law’ (52) or that ‘thinking the thought [that I should do something] … is acting in the way the thought represents as necessary’ (53) raise a striking worry: the mere thought that one stands under a moral requirement does not yet entail that one acts in the way demanded by the requirement. In Kant's famous example, the man who is conscious that he ought to overcome his self-love is aware that he could do so but does not dare to predict whether he would do so (CPrR 5: 30).
From all the above, it is obvious that Kant on Practical Justification is an excellent collection of original, rewarding and thought-provoking essays. I highly recommend it to anyone who has interests in Kant's practical philosophy or who works in the field of Kantian ethics.
