It might surprise some people to learn that a considerable amount of Kant's moral thought is devoted to the concept of virtue. In stark contrast to the rigorist caricature that has emerged from selective readings of his Groundwork,Footnote 1 Kant's later writings on morality demonstrate a remarkable sensitivity to matters of virtue and the relevance of moral character for religion and reason. However, thanks to the prominence of this caricature, there exist today two widespread assumptions about Kant. The first holds that Kant is a philosophical rigorist whose legalistic ethical theory is obsessed with duty and principle, to the complete exclusion of emotion, virtue and character formation. The second holds that Kant's 1794 text, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,Footnote 2 with its extensive treatment of character in relation to his notion of ‘radical evil’, rests uncomfortably within Kant's philosophical corpus, sitting at odds in particular with his writings in moral philosophy, which largely bracket the question of religion.
I want to challenge these assumptions by claiming that Kant's writings exhibit a deep understanding of moral motivation, character-formation, and virtue, which is of timely significance for contemporary debates in moral philosophy and philosophy of religion.Footnote 3 I will also argue that Kant's Religion does not sit at odds with his moral philosophy, but in fact marks the culmination of his moral philosophy generally, and his writing on virtue in particular. And I will claim that Kant's concerns in both moral philosophy and religion are ultimately inseparable, delineating a unique and significant moral religion, which is crucially distinct from both moral legalism and religious orthodoxy.
Before proceeding further, however, the term ‘moral religion’ demands further explanation. For it is presented here, in the broadest Enlightenment sense, as the rationally responsible attempt to recover a fundamental human goodness overshadowed by the corrupting influence of society. Deeply influenced by Rousseau, Kant's moral religion can be likened to a civic or common religion: a distinctly democratic, shared moral perspective which is social, universal, and bound up with autonomy and rationality. It therefore differs from what sociologists have called historical religions – which most people today usually associate with the notion of religion – which are inextricably bound up with a heteronomous allegiance to particular institutionsFootnote 4 (although this is not to say that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive).Footnote 5 Kant's moral religion is thus a rational attempt to articulate and promote the dignity of each individual within a moral idiom of traditions and commitment to a common good (like Rousseau before him).Footnote 6 It is consequently of timely significance for both moral philosophy and philosophy of religion in a contemporary society increasingly shaped by clashes of identities often saturated with religious elements, and where the definition and role of religion in the public sphere are matters of continual contention.
In what follows, I begin with an outline of Kant's account of virtue and character formation. I argue that this often-overlooked aspect of Kant's philosophy serves to answer the charges of abstract formalism and rigorism often levelled by contemporary virtue ethicists, as captured in Richard Rorty's allegation that Kant aims to ‘derive solutions to moral dilemmas from the analysis of moral concepts’.Footnote 7
This reconsideration of Kantian virtue serves to ground my second claim: that Kant's understanding of moral evil is rooted not in religious orthodoxy, but in the Enlightenment anthropology which he inherits – and develops – from Rousseau. This Enlightenment belief, in an originally innocent state of nature, masked but never completely destroyed by the corrupting influence of society, is particularly significant when it comes to interpreting the Religion, which emerges from this reading neither as a work in speculative theology nor as a crude dismissal of religion; but rather as a constructive proposal for a moral religion. This anthropological reading of moral evil has significant implications both for Kant's interpretation of the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin, and his conviction that moral evil can and ought to be overcome. Hence it is that while Kant presents the cultivation of virtue as an arduous struggle – against the pull of heteronomous inclinations corrupted by society – he refuses to deny the possibility of moral perfection, and the potential restoration of original innocence. For Kant's moral religion is grounded on a single, crucial, regulative belief: that human beings, despite their propensity to evil, are fundamentally‘innocent’; and that there always remains, untainted and uncorrupted, a core original ‘predisposition to good’, such that for each and every human being, no matter how deep the corruption, when it comes to morality, ‘ought’always implies ‘can’.Footnote 8
Kantian Virtue
Virtue ethics is defined broadly as an agent-centred ethics, distinguished by the primacy given to the character of the agent: the sort of person she must be in order to do the right thing(s) in a given situation. Contemporary accounts take as their point of departure Aristotle's conception of virtue as a complex disposition that encompasses one's desires, emotions, perceptions, attitudes, interests, and expectations. In sum, one's virtues (and one's vices) are fundamentally a matter of who one is.Footnote 9 This focus on character grounds the chief objection levelled by virtue ethicists against Kant's moral philosophy: that it is rigidly rule-governed, unable to give an adequate account of motivation and virtue.Footnote 10
However, the charge seems peculiar when Kant's own understanding of virtue is considered. For while the virtue tradition has, at various junctures, drawn on several versions of a definitive list of ‘the virtues’ (like the four – or five – in Greek ethics, and the three – or seven – in Christian ethics), nothing comparable appears in Kant's writings. By contrast, Kant thinks the virtues by a person differ with their ends and plans of life, which vary too much from person to person to make any generalized list pertinent to all of us.Footnote 11 Particularity and character are thus on the same page. So contrary to the objection, Kantian virtue appears, in this instance, to be less rule-governed and less abstract than what has typically been found in the virtue tradition. The objection appears to be mistaken.
A full understanding of Kant's definition of virtue is inconceivable apart from his unique conception of human willing. As Kant presents it in the Religion, the human will includes both legislative reason (Wille) and the faculty of desire (Willkür). Wille is the purely rational structure which introduces the moral law into the expression of human willing. Willkür, on the other hand, is the power of choosing between alternatives; it is determined by an incentive only to the extent that the individual has incorporated that incentive into her maxim. Accordingly no impulse or desire can be a determining incentive for Willkür until Willkür chooses to make it so.Footnote 12 For unless this power to choose its determining incentives is attributed to Willkür, it cannot be both free and yet under the influence of desires and incentives. Sensible incentives are thus compatible with absolute freedom inWillkür,Footnote 13 a fact confirmed by the experience of obligation from which our awareness of Willkür arises. As Kant explains, the moral law ‘makes us conscious of the independence of our power of choice from determination by all other incentives (of our freedom) and thereby also of the accountability of our actions.’Footnote 14
Unlike Willkür, however, Wille does not choose between alternatives. It is rather the source of an ever-present incentive in Willkür which imposes its own normative rational nature. And it is the presence of Wille, in relation to Willkür, which constitutes what Kant refers to as the predisposition of the will to ‘personality’. This predisposition is the ‘susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive to the power of choice.’ This is significant, for it entails a capacity to incorporate respect for the moral law into one's maxim – a capacity which indicates an original or fundamental goodness, or, in Kant's terms, ‘original predisposition to good.’ The mere possibility of respect as the moral feeling indicates that ‘there must be present in our nature a predisposition onto which nothing evil can be grafted.’Footnote 15 This, as we shall discover, is the crucial presupposition on which Kant's moral religion is grounded.
However, despite this original predisposition to goodness, the ‘propensity to evil’ emerges as a fundamental aspect of lived experience. Yet Kant is adamant that this propensity cannot and must not reside in our sensible nature. As he sees it, moral evil can only arise in the moral realm, the realm of free choice– the human will. But sensible nature – itself bound up with causality – does not belong to the domain of free choice, or the moral realm. Our sensible inclinations, therefore, cannot be morally evil (or good, for that matter). They are ethically neutral. Rather, this propensity to evil is ‘rooted in’ and ‘interwoven with’ our ‘subjective highest basis’ of the adoption of ‘all maxims’– our power of choice.Footnote 16 Evil is thus the wilful subordination of moral maxims to sensible maxims. It is an intentional adherence to one's desires despite one's moral feeling. It is thus ‘radical’ insofar as it radically disrupts the human being's original predisposition to goodness.
On the basis of this conception of human willing, encompassing the lived experience of radical evil, Kant defines virtue as a matter of strength. Strength is measured by its capacity to overcome resistance. A person is therefore more virtuous the greater the struggle of her will in resisting temptations to transgress duties. For Kant, moral strength is an ‘aptitude’ and a subjective perfection of the power of choice, or Willkür. So if virtue is a habit, as Aristotle claims,Footnote 17 then Kant will insist that it is a ‘free habit’, and not merely a ‘uniformity in action that has become a necessity through frequent repetition’Footnote 18. This marks a crucial point of convergence for Kant with Aristotle, since both are adamant that virtue is exhibited in actions that are desired and done for their own sake on rational grounds. Furthermore, Kant shares Aristotle's belief that virtue is acquired through practicing virtuous action.Footnote 19 In light of this, the charge that Kant neglects the cultivation of virtuous character also seems misplaced. For Kant thinks virtue is a capacity that the moral agent is capable not only of cultivating, but also of perfecting – a point that will be of great significance to his moral religion.
A central component of Kant's Doctrine of Virtue is the distinction between duties of right and duties of virtue. The fundamental difference between these two sets of duties is that while a duty of right can be externally imposed (as the law of a state binds its citizens, say), a duty of virtue must be self-imposed or, in Kant's words, ‘based only on free self-constraint.’Footnote 20 Of course, duties of right can also be self-imposed, that is, from the spirit of duty, rather than from fear of external sanction.Footnote 21 But duties of virtue cannot, conversely, be legally enforced. They are thus a matter of character.Footnote 22
Kant's conception of virtue lays specific stress on the strength of the will in constraining itself, in obeying an internal sanction. But Kant also insists that virtue involves not only the capacity to resist one's inclinations when they are contrary to duty, but also the capacity to ‘master one's inclinations.’Footnote 23 In other words, it is a duty of virtue to transform our natural inclinations in ways that align with morality. The perfection of our humanity involves choice guided by reason's own principle (in other words, the Categorical Imperative). But perfection also involves working up our natural inclinations to support that principle. In Kant's own words:
When it is said that it is in itself a duty for a human being to make his end the perfection belonging to a human being as such (properly speaking, to humanity), this perfection must be put in what can result from his deeds, not in mere gifts for which he must be indebted to nature; for otherwise it would not be a duty. This duty can therefore consist only in cultivating one's faculties (or natural predispositions), the highest of which is understanding, the faculty of concepts and so too of those concepts that have to do with duty. At the same time this duty includes the cultivation of one's will (moral cast of mind), so as to satisfy all the requirements of duty.Footnote 24
However, this inclusion of natural inclinations (correctly cultivated) among the virtuous person's attributes is tempered when Kant claims, just a few lines later, that as a human being one has the duty of cultivating one's will ‘up to the purest virtuous disposition, in which the law becomes also the incentive to his actions that conform with duty and he obeys the law from duty.’Footnote 25 Kant thus seems to be issuing two demands. On the one hand, we are to develop our talents and emotional capacities as part of virtue (and so to conceive of virtue along the Aristotelian model of character habituation). But on the other hand, we are nevertheless to develop a purer attitude of virtue, which is grounded in and responds to the rational nature of persons as end-in-themselves, and moral legislators. So it would appear that while we need to cultivate our natural inclinations to support our capacity to act from autonomous principles, the latter remain, in the ‘purest’ sense, the source of morality. But this then raises the question as to how genuine Kant's appeal to natural inclinations really is. Does Kant genuinely share with Aristotle and his successors the belief that properly cultivated emotions are indispensable to the good life? Or does his appeal to virtue, in the end, amount to little?
Not necessarily, for two significant reasons. To begin with, by arguing that the ultimate ground of morality must rest in the authority of reason, Kant is making a metaphysical – and, by extension, ontological – point. Reason is the transcendental source of moral deliberation. Morality is rooted in the rational nature of human beings: it is a fundamental capability that lies anterior to any corruption by external sources. This is important, not just for our understanding of Kantian virtue, but for our broader understanding of Kantian ethics. For when Kant appeals to the rational nature of human beings, he is appealing not to any particular faculties, nor even to bare reason itself, but rather to fundamental (rational) humanity. This means that each and every human being, regardless of their reasoning capacity, is fundamentally rational. Since rationality is a fundamental attribute of humanity, to be human is to be fundamentally rational, and thus worthy of respect, regardless of the shape of one's cognitive faculties.Footnote 26 This is an aspect of Kant's thought that will proves deeply important for understanding the anthropology that underlines his moral religion, particularly his insistence that the human ‘predisposition to good’ always precedes the ‘propensity to evil’.
Second, while Kant is arguing that the ultimate ground of a moral project must rest in the authority of reason, he is not denying that natural inclinations can be shaped by and respond to that authority. Rather he is claiming that this responsiveness to morality, as rooted in the rational nature of persons, flourishes best in someone who has properly cultivated their emotional capacities. There is a noticeable emphasis in the Doctrine of Virtue on character, on who will act in morally worthy ways from a pure attitude of virtue. And the thought is that the virtuous person is the one who cultivates emotions that do not battle with her duty, but positively promote it. Such emotions are not themselves expressive of the purest attitude of virtue, since they are not themselves the ultimate source of adequate reasons for doing what is required or determining what is morally permissible. However, they form a crucial dimension of character that, ultimately, best supports moral motivation.
Kant's claim is a persuasive one. Emotions, after all, have no normative content apart from the normative moral framework within which the emotional moral agent operates. As a result, they cannot be viewed as sources of morality, in and of themselves. A good example of this is compassion. For while compassion itself has a basic structure that enables me to attend to a vulnerable other in her time of need, it does not equip me, in and of itself, with the means of ensuring that my compassion is expressed in the right way, or even directed at the appropriate target. I might, for example, initially find myself drawn by feelings of compassion to the fellow human being who I see shackled in chains. I then learn, however, that this person is guilty of several cruel and callous acts of murder, and, reasoning that murder is wrong, and that he thus deserves to be punished, cease to feel compassion towards him (since a precondition for compassion is the thought that the object of compassion's suffering is undeserved). In other words, compassion itself is not a normative view. It is rather a motivation compatible with a wide range of ethical views (indeed, our standard experiences of compassion will usually incorporate the answers that our cultures give to them). Furthermore, the failure to hold fast to a robust commitment to each person's equality on the basis of dignity will leave us no way of saying when ethical relations are going bad. This is not to say that emotions cannot play a considerable role in the moral life, but that they must operate within some sort of normative framework which determines what that moral life is. It is within normative structures that compassion is made practical.
At the same time, it is equally clear that the moral life cannot be determined by the idea of duty alone. Emotions equip us with remarkable modes of attention that help us track what is morally salient as morally salient in our circumstances. Compassion, again, is a good example of this; for it is an emotion that draws the moral agent to occasions of distress or need which a bare adherence to the idea of duty – detached from the modes of attention with which our emotions endow us – might miss. In short, duty alone is insufficient to provide information about which objects and circumstances require our moral attention. It is for this reason that Kant stresses the ‘indirect duty’ bearing upon us ‘to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them.’ For as he rightly observes, ‘this is still one of the impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the representation of duty alone might not accomplish.’Footnote 27
Be this as it may, we are still left with an uneasy tension between the call to cultivate emotions, and their apparent subordination in favour of the ‘purest’ attitude of virtue, one motivated entirely by duty (the ideal towards which Kant seems to believe the virtuous person should aspire in cultivating her emotions). However, understanding the source of this tension clarifies matters. Kant's entire moral philosophy orients, of course, around the purity of the good will, and thus the purity of the moral agent's motive in acting morally. Simply put, Kant thinks emotions have a role to play in the moral life, but only insofar as they enhance, and do not diminish, morality. As Nancy Sherman explains: ‘Kant wants to repudiate sentimentalism, not sentiment. At bottom, his worry seems the reasonable one, that indulging sentiment can sometimes be more a matter of self-absorption than altruistic engagement in the social world. The problem is that Kant is not always effective in making this point.’Footnote 28
So the proper cultivation of the emotions is central to Kant's conception of both virtuous character and duty. Moral agency, for Kant, is about doing one's duty for the right reason, but also, ideally, with the right attitude. This is best exemplified in Kant's theory of ethical duties. This is a teleological theory, based not on the inherent ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of actions, but on which actions promote certain obligatory ends. Kant argues that we as human beings have two such ends: our own perfection (met by the ‘duty to ourselves’), and the happiness of others (met by the ‘duty to others’).Footnote 29 It is the latter end, the happiness of others, that is of interest here. For the ‘duty to others’, which meets this end, itself consists of two independent sets of duties: duties of love, and duties of respect. Duties of respect are narrow or strict duties not to behave in certain ways toward others, while duties of love are wide or meritorious duties, allowing for latitude regarding how, how much, and toward whom, we act benevolently. Kant, in turn, isolates three specific duties of love: the duties of beneficence, gratitude, and sympathetic participation.
Now, it is the duty of sympathetic participation that is of particular interest here. For it dispels finally any remaining (false) assumptions that Kant is indifferent – or even opposed – to emotions in favour of some rigid formalism. Sympathetic participation includes the duty to cultivate the feeling of sympathy in order to strengthen our sensitivity to the needs of others and to strengthen our capacity to perform duties of beneficence. Kant emphasises that there is no duty just to feel sympathy for the joys and sorrows of others, at least if that feeling is ineffectual. ‘Participation’ is rather the active sharing in the situation of others, and seeing things from their point of view. For it is this active involvement that will usually give rise to both feelings of compassion and beneficent actions that are both informed by the active sharing in the others’ situation and taken from a standpoint aligned to theirs, so that it is emphatically not a standpoint of cool detachment or condescending superiority.Footnote 30
By emphasising the duty of sympathetic participation, then, Kant is as far as one can imagine from the mistaken caricature against whom objections were raised at the outset. By stressing the active involvement needed in attending to others, Kant presents us with a rich account of moral agency, the end result of which constitutes a significant cognitive and emotional achievement on the part of the moral agent. In pressing for an account of moral character that seeks to situate the appropriately cultivated emotions within a framework that holds fast to the moral agent's responsibility to respect both herself and others in their fundamental (rational) humanity, Kant lays a foundation that will prove crucial for the development of his moral religion, to which I now turn.
Kant's Moral Religion
In the Religion, Kant offers an account of human nature as hierarchically structured by distinguishing three predispositions which characterise human nature: the predisposition to animality as a mere living being; the predisposition to humanity as a living and rational being; and the predisposition to personality as a living, rational and responsible being. The predisposition to animality concerns self-love expressed in our impulses for self-preservation, propogation of the species, and community with other human beings. The predisposition to humanity concerns self-love expressed in our cultural strivings and social dependence upon and rivalry with others. Finally, the predisposition to personality is the capacity to hold ourselves morally accountable by justifying our actions in terms of autonomously generated moral principles. All of these predispositions are ‘original’ parts of human nature which, when properly transformed and ordered, form a more inclusive, composite conception of good moral character. As Kant explains:
… these predispositions in the human being are not only (negatively) good (they do not resist the moral law) but they are also predispositions to the good (they demand compliance with it).Footnote 31
For Kant, then, a well-regulated character is not simply a matter of the absence of counter-incentives. The goal is rather to transform our self-love so that it promotes and advances compliance with the moral law. Moreover, Kant's language suggests that cultivated natural and social powers are not simply necessary conditions of moral agency, but necessary, hierarchically structured parts of the overall character of the original predisposition of a human being to achieve the moral good.
Kant thus shares with Aristotle the idea that virtue can only be achieved as the result of habituation. Indeed, his hierarchically structured account of moral character echoes the ancient project of ordering the parts of the human ‘soul’ and rendering them harmonious. But he departs from Aristotle in stressing the ‘incessant labouring and becoming’ involved in this process. Whereas Aristotle's account of virtuous action involves the non-rational part of the soul ‘listening to’ the rational part, Kant's account of practical reason simply involves the will, which itself directly produces desires, both good and bad, depending on its predisposition to good or propensity to evil. Accordingly, and to a far greater extent than Aristotle, Kant never loses sight of the ‘invisible enemy’ which always threatens to corrupt us, no matter how nobly we strive to adopt the proper maxim.Footnote 32 Consequently, Kant understands the pursuit of virtue as a constant struggle to ensure that we continue to adopt the moral law as our maxim. Because we are finite and flawed beings whose conformity to reason must take the form of self-constraint, virtue is constantly required if we are to follow rational principles, which may command unconditionally, but become subjectively ‘irresistible’ only through virtue.Footnote 33 Kant's moral psychology is undoubtedly sceptical. But he arguably provides us with a more graphic – and fitting – account of the extent of the struggle involved in the cultivation of moral character than what we find in Aristotle and his successors in the virtue tradition.
At the same time, however, Kant's scepticism here risks masking a more fundamental belief that lies at the heart of the Religion. This is his conviction that, despite our ‘propensity to evil’, there is an ‘original predisposition to good’ that remains forever uncorrupted. Understood in light of his discussion of the cultivation of moral character, we can understand this fundamental belief of Kant's as a regulative ideal. The perfection of one's virtue is the ideal toward which the human being should always strive, because, as originally good or innocent, she is always fundamentally capable of attaining this perfection, no matter how tainted she may be by the corruption of moral evil.
Significantly, the idea of an ‘original predisposition to good’ runs directly counter to the Christian doctrine of original or hereditary sin. Human beings, on Kant's reading, are not born into evil. Instead, the root of moral evil lies strictly within the bounds of human volition. As each human being is born originally innocent, so she is entirely culpable for the subversion of the moral law to her heteronomous inclinations. As Kant explains, moral evil must ‘always be a deed of freedom’, for otherwise ‘the use or abuse of the human being's power of choice with respect to the moral law could not be imputed to him, nor could the good or evil in him be called “moral”.’Footnote 34
It is for this reason that Kant configures the biblical narrative of the Fall in Genesis 3 as a story about a universal aspect of lived (human) experience, rather than a single, unique event at the beginning of (human) history. Adam, on this reading, should be understood as the universal representative of every human being, since ‘it is clear … that this [acting freely, but always with our propensity to evil] is what we do daily, and that hence [in non-historical, narrative terms] in Adam we have all sinned.’ Of course, this brings us no closer to an intelligible explanation concerning the origin of evil. Yet the image we gain from the text is still significant. For, as Kant notes, it portrays ‘evil at the beginning of the world, not, however, within the human being, but in a spirit of an originally more sublime destiny.’ This non-specific ‘beginning’ thus portrays evil coming from outside the human as ‘originally’ created. The human being's original predisposition should therefore be seen as a predisposition to good. The narrative of the Fall depicts Adam falling from innocence (through an act of free will), ‘not as corrupted fundamentally.’Footnote 35
Accordingly, when Kant insists that the cultivation of virtue in pursuit of moral character is a strenuous matter, this should not be taken as an ontological claim about a fundamentally corrupt human nature. Instead, Kant's argument should be interpreted anthropologically. For Kant's seeming mistrust of our natural inclinations (mistaken by many as the byproduct of either a legalistic, philosophical rigorism, or a reactionary religious orthodoxy) can in fact be attributed to a mistrust of all human behaviour – to the extent that it has been shaped by society. And it is here that Rousseau's influence upon Kant is most apparent. For, like Rousseau, Kant holds that our inclinations, considered in themselves, as expressions of our bodily or animal nature, are ethically neutral, and are only corrupted by ‘an invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and is hence all the more dangerous.’ This enemy, however, is not original sin, but rather the ‘vices of culture’: the competitiveness, social inequality, ‘the unjust desire to gain over others’, the ‘radical propensity to evil’ which develops along with our reason (as Rousseau also thought), and hence only in society.Footnote 36 In Kant's own words:
It is not the instigation of nature that arouses what should properly be called the passions, which wreak such great devastation in his originally good disposition … Envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these, assail his nature, which on its own is undemanding, as soon as he is among human beings. Nor is it necessary to assume that these are sunk into evil and are examples that lead him astray: it suffices that they are, that they surround him, and that they are human beings, and they will mutually corrupt each other's moral disposition and make one another evil.Footnote 37
It might be objected that this emphasis on the influence of Rousseau fails to appreciate sufficiently the background for Rousseau's own belief in the corrupting influence of society. Specifically, one might object that it fails to recognise that Rousseau identifies the social condition which yields the emergence of moral evil as the byproduct of a departure from a garden paradise which sustains its own state of innocence (not unlike Eden).Footnote 38 But this objection fails to recognise that, for Rousseau, this garden represents a state of innocence only insofar as it is entirely amoral. For while Rousseau believes that the social condition is accompanied by the possibility for evil, it is equally accompanied by the possibility for good that would not itself arise in the garden. It is only in society that human beings come to be their own work, because it is only with others that people perfect themselves and devise their own modes of life.Footnote 39 So to be moral, argues Rousseau, we need to leave the garden, and its accompanying state of amoral innocence. But this departure from the garden comes at a price. For as your capacity to do good increases, your capacity to do evil increases in equal measure.Footnote 40
So Kant, following Rousseau, is sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a virtuous moral character. But he will never dismiss it as an impossibility. For his unwavering belief in original innocence grounds the conviction that moral perfection is something that will always remain within the limits of human capability (and, for that reason alone, it ought to be pursued).Footnote 41
Understood thus, Kant's moral religion emerges as a significant contribution to both moral philosophy and philosophy of religion on the basis of two remarkable claims. First, the ‘original predisposition to good’ means that human beings are fundamentally capable of moral perfection, despite the reality of moral evil. Second, as fundamentally capable, or originally ‘good’, human beings are not fundamentally fallen or originally sinful. The propensity to evil simply masks – but does not erase – the original predisposition to good. Kant thus shifts the focus of religion away from notions of fallenness and sin, towards the potential restoration of innocence that lies fully within the realm of human capability. The focus of religion becomes, in this instance, unmistakably moral.
Another substantial aspect of Kant's moral religion is his treatment of respect. In the Critique of Practical Reason, in a section entitled ‘Of the Motives of Pure Practical Reason’,Footnote 42 Kant presents respect (for the moral law) as itself a distinctive moral emotion. The explicit focus of the passage centres on the effects of practical reason – that is, the source of the moral law – on our phenomenal nature. Kant's claim is that practical reason motivates us directly, but also that as affective creatures, we experience that determination affectively, as respect. Kant thus presents respect not as a separate sort of moral motivation, but rather as the effect of moral motivation on feeling.
I argue that Kant has captured something hugely important with this notion. For he puts forward a conception of morality that allows for a feeling or affectation which is responsive to persons simply as persons; as ends-in-themselves, independent of any contingent circumstances or other external factors. This can be contrasted with feelings cited as morally ‘fine’ within standard accounts of virtue, which are always context-specific. The feeling of sympathy, for example, always responds to particular situations of need, just as pity always responds to undeserving tragedy or misfortune. Respect, however, is different, for the focus is never local or context-specific. So by including respect at the heart of his presentation of moral character, Kant offers an account of the virtuous moral agent who will not be bound by circumstance or context, but will be driven by an unerring respect for all persons, in their fundamental humanity, as ends-in-themselves.
Moreover, in doing so, Kant offers a means of universalizing a tendency, inherent within a range of ethical models (including virtue-oriented accounts of Christian ethics), towards localism or shared context. This can be illustrated by considering the distinction, initially drawn by Bernard Williams, between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ ethical concepts.Footnote 43 Roughly, ‘thick’ ethical concepts are local or world-guided concepts that guide one's actions, while ‘thin’ concepts are not world-guided, and not necessarily action guiding. A thin concept will not tell you how to act, a thick concept will. Accordingly, we can say that, in contrast to the emphasis on particular narratives inhabited by particular ethical communities (as prevalent in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, or Stanley HauerwasFootnote 44), and the accompanying thick ethical concepts inextricable from the particular ethical communities with which they are associated, the Kantian notion of respect is a thinner ethical concept, applicable to a wide range of narratives, that can be shared across a range of ethical communities. While respect may not guide specific actions (which will continue to be informed by the thick concepts associated with one's particular ethical narrative), it may still be embodied in the intentions of a range of ethical agents across different communities, and thus be shared by these different agents and their respective communities. So while particular ethical communities may fail to reach an agreement over, say, the appropriate practices associated with welcoming guests, they might at least agree that the underlying intention of the welcome could well be the same across a range of communities (i.e. respecting the guest may be embodied in the intention which underlies the welcoming act).
Insofar as an ethics of virtue is driven by ideals, those ideals will tend to be interpreted in a form relative to the context in which they are received (as Hauerwas argues). Consequently, the very ‘virtues’ which contribute to a good character will vary considerably depending on the context. Of course, this is not to say that the ‘ideal’ of what constitutes a ‘good life’ should be universally shared across contexts, communities and cultures. Human life owes its rich texture to the diversity of practices, institutions, and interpretations of what constitutes a meaningful existence. To undermine that would be unthinkable. What Kant's moral religion provides, I suggest, is a robust apparatus with which to regulate the pursuit of the ‘good life’, regardless of what one's culture or context deems that to be. It ensures that the moral agent is guided, first and foremost, by the respect that her reason dictates she owes both to herself and to others on the basis of their fundamental (rational) humanity. Returning us to the definition of ‘moral religion’ established at the outset, we can characterise Kant's moral religion as a thin concept, governing the rational pursuit of moral perfection, that cuts across particular traditions and communities. It should therefore not be seen as undermining any beliefs associated with particular traditions or communities, but rather as establishing a means by which members of those traditions and communities can cultivate virtue (in the Kantian sense) while still being guided by their specific beliefs, ideals and thick concepts. Moral religion, we might say, is a regulative ideal which aims to ensure respect for all others in their fundamental humanity, while striving toward the restoration of original innocence which human beings remain forever capable of attaining.
As this paper has aimed to demonstrate, Kant has a great deal in common with the virtue tradition, not least in his understanding of character-formation and ‘sympathetic participation.’ What he offers, though, is a means of reconsidering virtue, in a manner that extends far beyond the propensity to localism that has long been a hallmark of the virtue tradition, and its interpretation and manifestation in particular models of religious ethics. By rooting the moral law in the fundamental universal capacity of human reason – which we all share – Kant provides a framework for virtue, based on respect for all persons, regardless of context, on the basis of their fundamental (rational) humanity, and their fundamental capability or ‘predisposition to the good’. Kant's Religion is a crucial text in this regard, articulating a sophisticated account of his moral philosophy while at the same time offering a robust defence of his own unique philosophy of religion. Why, then, I ask in conclusion, has this remarkable text spawned a legacy of such divergent interpretations? My own belief is that these interpretations have failed to recognise that the text represents the culmination of both Kant's moral and religious philosophies which are, ultimately, inseparable. Kant's account of the cultivation of moral character, and of the pursuit of virtue, is inconceivable apart from his own faith in the fundamental goodness or original innocence of human nature. Only by understanding Kant's moral philosophy as inherently religious, and his religious philosophy as inherently moral, can we fully appreciate his unerring conviction – articulated in the Religion– that the human being, ‘despite a corrupted heart … always possesses a good will, [and] there still remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed’Footnote 45. This is the essence of Kant's moral religion.
