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Kant uses the term ‘inclination’ (Neigung) throughout his practical philosophy, and the contrast between inclination and reason is central to his practical philosophy as a whole. This contrast is familiar to all his readers. Far less familiar, though, is the general understanding of inclination and desire that underwrites it. Kant provides countless examples of inclination but he never quite explains in detail what it is to have an inclination in the first place. What is it to be inclined? Tamar Schapiro argues that we need a direct answer to this question, and she provides one in the form of a ‘Kantian’ account of inclination. Her main objective is to articulate and defend an original account, one that fits into a larger theory of action and motivation. She does not claim that her view is precisely the same as Kant’s (2009: 230n.), but she consistently describes it as ‘Kantian’, and she maintains that his ‘actual view’ of inclination is ‘in line’ with hers (2009: 233).Footnote ¹ Therefore, her thought-provoking account of inclination invites comparison with what Kant actually says about the topic.

In this article I describe three important differences between their accounts. First, unlike Schapiro Kant does not think of inclinations as occurrent desires; they are tendencies or dispositions. Second, Kant does not believe that inclinations stem directly from a non-rational part of the soul, as Schapiro argues. Many of the inclinations that most interest him directly involve reason (broadly construed). This is especially true of the passions, an unusual species of inclination. Third, Schapiro holds that ‘inclinations’ always involve self-awareness and internal division, but Kant does not think this about either sensible desires or the inclinations in which they are rooted. Taken together, these differences show that Schapiro’s ‘Kantian’ view of inclination is quite unlike Kant’s. They also cast a favourable light on Kant’s original account, which has a number of advantages over Schapiro’s. The point here is not to deny the attractions of her view, particularly in comparison with its rivals in contemporary philosophy, or to insist on orthodoxy for its own sake. Instead, the point is to clarify the exegetical and philosophical downsides of treating her view as a distinctly Kantian account of motivation

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Let us begin with the main component of Schapiro’s account. In her view, an inclination is a motivational state – to be inclined is to be motivated to act (2009: 230). This means that inclinations are necessarily action-oriented, unlike many pro-attitudes (e.g. hope) and emotions (e.g. surprise). She also characterizes inclination as a type of unmotivated desire, using Nagel’s familiar term (2009: 230).Footnote ² Whereas motivated desires are those desires one has for a reason, inclinations arise from a ‘subpersonal capacity’ or ‘part of the soul’ that is ‘both agential and nonrational’ (2009: 232). When a person has an inclination for x, he responds to x not as a reason, but simply as something to-be-pursued (or to-be-avoided). This involves ‘a primitive capacity to see objects as calling for certain responses, independent of any justification’ (2009: 246) – an ‘unreflective experience of practical necessity’ (2009: 247) that accounts for the ‘motivational force of inclination’ (2009: 246). Schapiro says this is a matter of seeing the object of inclination in ‘an imperatival way’. She likens inclinations to ‘impulses’ or ‘mental itches’ that can exert an influence on the will by putting ‘proposals’ for action on the ‘deliberative agenda’ (2009: 252).Footnote ³

Schapiro illustrates this conception of inclination with many vivid examples. One can have an inclination to drink a glass of gin, run away from an angry mob, buy a new car or organize one’s closet (2009: 230). One can also have an inclination to eat a piece of chocolate cake or check one’s email (2009: 248–50). A hiker whose tongue is swollen from thirst has an inclination to drink water (2009: 246), and a compulsive who cannot seem to stop turning on whatever radio is in his presence has an inclination to turn on radios (2009: 234–55). One can even have an inclination to sway this way or that way while dancing, or shift his weight from one hip to another or scratch his nose while sitting in a chair reading a book (2009: 161). On Schapiro’s account, the person who has an inclination to run away from an angry mob, for example, has something like an unmotivated desire to flee. There may be good reasons to run away, but in being in such a motivational state, the person is not responding to those reasons. Rather, he is experiencing a more primitive impulse, characterized by a way of seeing the mob as something to-be-fled-from.

This view of inclination differs significantly from Kant’s. To see how, it is useful to distinguish between two ways of thinking or talking about ‘inclination’. On the one hand, we can think of inclinations as specific, clockable desires for this or that object or to perform this or that action. On the other hand, we can think of them as relatively general dispositions or tendencies.Footnote ⁴ Schapiro is primarily interested in inclinations in the first sense. Kant, by contrast, is primarily interested in the second sense. Having an inclination is having a particular kind of disposition or tendency rather than experiencing an itch, urge or yen. We can see this from his general remarks about inclination and from many of his concrete examples.

Consider the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant writes: ‘that determination of the faculty of desire which is caused and therefore necessarily preceded by such [practical] pleasure is called desire in the narrow sense; habitual desire is called inclination’ (MS 6: 212).Footnote ⁵ The distinction to notice is between ‘desire in the narrow sense’ (Begierde) and ‘inclination’ (Neigung). Kant also refers to the former as ‘sensible desires’ or ‘appetites’ (e.g. APH 7: 251). Presumably, he has a wide range of appetites in mind.Footnote ⁶ For example, a desire to lie in the sun, order an extra dessert or punch someone all count as desires in this sense. They are sensible desires because they are triggered by feelings of pleasure (or displeasure). More precisely, a sensible desire is caused by the pleasure one takes in the representation of some object as a thing to be attained by means of one’s own power. I might, for example, spy a piece of chocolate cake in the dessert case and take this to be something I could have by ordering it (or stealing it). I take pleasure in that representation of the cake as something I could obtain and eat, and the pleasure taken in this representation triggers a sensible desire or appetite for the cake.Footnote ⁷ The pleasure functions as what Kant calls an ‘impelling cause’ or ‘spring’ (Triebfeder) of the desire (cf. VM 29: 895). It spurs the soul’s capacity for desire (das Begehrungsvermögen) to activity. As Kant puts it, ‘desire (appetitio) is the self-determination of a subject’s power through the representation of something in the future as an effect of this representation’ (APH 7: 251). The future state of affairs in which I am eating and enjoying the piece of chocolate cake is not, of course, caused by the desire alone. My desires are not causally efficacious unless they work together with the mechanical powers of the body (KU 5: 177n.). I have to move my mouth to order the cake, for example, or move my limbs to smash the glass of the dessert case. Desires in this ‘narrow’ sense are episodes of desiring activity. They are occurrent states, akin to urges, itches and yens. When a person has a desire of this sort he wants something, and this wanting has an effect on his body (elevated heart rate, contraction of the muscles, etc.).

Inclination, like appetite, is a mode of desire. Furthermore, this mode of desire is determined by feelings of pleasure and displeasure, which is why Kant describes inclination in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals as ‘the dependence of the faculty of desire on sensation’ (4: 441n.). But what distinguishes inclinations from appetites is the fact that inclinations are habitual. There are at least three places in his published work where Kant characterizes inclination explicitly in these terms. In the passage quoted above from the Metaphysics of Morals, inclination is said to be ‘habitual desire’ (MS 6: 212). In book III of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which is dedicated to the topic of desire, he characterizes inclination as ‘habitual sensible desire (habituelle sinnliche Begierde)’ (APH 7: 251), and he uses virtually the same expression in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (RGV 6: 29). Judging from these remarks – which are nowhere contradicted by any other explicit characterizations of inclination – Kant does not think of inclinations as occurrent desires or episodes. Instead, he thinks of them as dispositions to experience such episodes. The person who has an appetite for chocolate cake wants to eat it at a particular time, but this is not an inclination. The person who has an inclination has a tendency to want chocolate cake. He is in the habit of wanting it.

Inclinations in Kant’s sense, then, are dispositions or tendencies – not impulses or urges. This interpretation fits many of his concrete examples of inclination, especially some of those that are central to his ethical thought. Consider, for instance, the ‘inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others’, which is part of the basic ‘predisposition to humanity’ (RGV 6: 27). Kant’s description of this inclination is a description of a general tendency in human psychology, not a description of particular occurrences. Unlike the claim that a person has an urge to impress someone, the claim that we have such an inclination is not keyed to any particular moment in time. Nor is it a claim about a desire for a specific state of affairs or an urge to perform a specific action. Moreover, this inclination presents a standing ethical challenge, something we must live with and manage properly, lest it morph into ‘an unjust desire to acquire superiority for oneself over others’ (RGV 6: 27). To say that human beings have such an inclination is to say they are competitive, which is a claim about general tendencies not particular impulses. The same point applies to the inclination to happiness, an inclination that occupies a good deal of Kant’s attention. On his view, happiness is ‘the entire well-being and contentment with one’s condition’ (GMS 4: 393),Footnote ⁸ and he claims that ‘all human beings have already of their own the most powerful and intimate inclination to happiness’ (GMS 4: 399). This is best understood as a claim about general dispositions. The inclination to happiness manifests itself in particular desires to perform this or that action but is not itself such a desire.

Schapiro’s account implies that inclinations occur at a particular time and their duration is relatively brief. Given this understanding, it is not true that a person has an inclination for, say, sweets if it happens to be the case that at this particular time he does not want anything sweet. In Kant’s view, by contrast, an inclination is a more or less deeply engrained tendency. To say that a person has a particular inclination is to say that he is prone to certain desires or appetites. On this account, it can be perfectly correct to say that a person has an inclination to sweets even when it is not true that he wants sweets at this particular time – just as a person can still be called competitive even in those moments when he feels no urge to score a goal or outmanoeuvre a rival. The point is that inclinations are not clockable occurrences, and so claims about a person’s inclinations are not keyed to particular moments in time. Hence the urge to check email or have a drink is not an inclination in Kant’s sense of the term.

One might object that this is only a verbal point.Footnote ⁹ What Schapiro calls ‘inclinations’ can obviously become habitual in the sense of recurring regularly. If this is right, habitual desires are mere regularities or patterns, and Schapiro’s account of inclination can easily accommodate such patterns. The urge to have a drink after work or check one’s email can occur frequently enough to count as habitual in this sense. If so, the difference described above is fairly superficial.

A number of considerations speak against this objection. If inclinations were mere regularities, then to say that a person has a particular inclination would be to offer a vague statistical claim about his patterns of desire and behaviour in the relevant circumstances. But Kant does not think of inclinations in this way. Instead, they are deeper features of our psychology that underlie and (partially) explain such patterns. As he puts it, ‘not every desire is an inclination; rather, an inclination is a persisting cause of desire according to a rule’ (VA 25: 1514; cf. APH 7: 265). Put another way, an inclination is a ‘persisting ground’ of desire (VA 25: 1114).Footnote ¹⁰ This is why it makes sense to speak of wanting something out of inclination (VA 25: 1514). The inclination is what explains the desire. In Kant’s view, for example, the desire to have a glass of gin is rooted in the inclination to drink alcohol. This inclination is itself rooted in a more general ‘propensity (Hang) for intoxicants’ found in all human beings (RGV 6: 29; cf. VA 25: 1339).Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, an urge to check email might be rooted in the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others or, more straightforwardly, the inclination to socialize. Such explanations are meant to be partial and they must be put forward with caution, since we cannot observe inclinations themselves (not even our own). The claim is not that the inclination is a sufficient cause of the sensible desire. Instead, the claim is that the inclination is a persisting ground whose activity explains why a particular cognition (the sight of the liquor cabinet, the ‘ping!’ of one’s email) gives rise to a desire to do something specific at a specific time.Footnote ¹² Of course, the full story behind any such desire will be enormously complex. It will be a story about why various biological, psychological and social factors have resulted in a particular configuration of the soul that disposes a person to respond to a particular stimulus in a particular way.

Kant’s account of ethical virtue also suggests that inclinations cannot be understood as mere regularities or patterns. If they could, we would have to say that a person who managed by dint of effort to desire x only infrequently (or not at all) had eliminated the corresponding inclination. Such a view does not fit Kant’s account of virtue. On that account, inclinations are (self-imposed) obstacles to virtue and overcoming them requires ‘moral strength of will’ (MS 6: 394, 405). But there is a difference between overcoming an obstacle and eliminating it altogether. If you eliminate an obstacle, you no longer have to struggle with it. Kant, however, denies that a person who overcomes an obstacle to virtue ceases to struggle with it. On the contrary, struggle is partly constitutive of the very idea of virtue (cf. KPV 5: 84–5; RGV 6: 28). Under normal circumstances, overcoming an obstacle in the relevant sense resembles the operation of packing a glass in bubble wrap before shipping it. We would not say that the glass is no longer fragile. But its disposition to break has been ‘masked’ by the bubble wrap.Footnote ¹³ Analogously, the person who succeeds in overcoming a particular obstacle to virtue by mastering one of his inclinations masks the effects of that inclination by blocking its influence on his thought and desires. Kant discusses a number of techniques and strategies for blocking its influence, such as preventing the flights of imagination that can trigger troublesome desires, occupying one’s attention with meaningful work, and passing time with games and the arts (e.g. VE 27: 364–5, APH 7: 152). Such strategies do not eliminate the inclination, but they help the person overcome it by eliminating some of the psychological or environmental stimuli that tend to trigger its manifestation – as when a person overcomes the inclination to drink by removing all alcohol from the house or avoiding happy hour.Footnote ¹⁴

Of course success is a matter of degree, and mastery of a particular inclination does not imply the ability to block its influence on all occasions. Some circumstances may prove to be too much, just as even a properly packed glass may break if handled too roughly. The main point is that Kant’s conception of virtue implies that inclinations remain even after the person succeeds in blocking their influence on his thoughts and sensible desires. The ‘inclination to be always on top’ (MS 6: 465), for example, may no longer manifest itself as a desire to crush one’s tennis partner or an urge to humiliate a colleague in front of the boss. But the person who recognizes that he has this inclination and resolves to block its influence must contend with it as one must contend with a standing threat. Obstacles that have been overcome do not necessarily go away, and this is why virtue requires practising for those occasions when they must be surmounted again.Footnote ¹⁵

One further consideration speaks against the idea that inclinations are mere regularities. If they were, then for any sensible desire, if that desire were to occur with sufficient frequency, there would be a corresponding inclination. To say that a person has a particular inclination would just be to say that the sensible desire occurs frequently enough. Given this way of thinking, inclinations would be keyed to specific types of objects or states of affairs. For example, the person who craves a gin every evening after work would, by virtue of wanting gin so regularly, be said to have an inclination for gin. If a cold beer were the object of his hankering, we would instead say he has an inclination for beer. Similarly, the person who wants to check his email every thirty minutes would have an inclination to do so, while the person who ignored email but found himself itching to check Facebook several times an hour would have an inclination to check Facebook. On this way of thinking, we would also have to countenance inclinations for specific types of beer, different forms of social media and so on. Such a profligate proliferation of dispositions would be absurd, and open to the ridicule heaped on scholastic metaphysics by philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Boyle.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet there is no evidence to suggest that Kant thinks of inclinations in this way. On the contrary, he typically describes inclinations in quite general and appropriately vague terms. There is an inclination for alcohol (rooted in a propensity for intoxicants) – but not a distinct inclination for gin, another for beer, another for wormwood and so on. There is an inclination to be always on top – but no specific inclinations for crushing tennis opponents, belittling colleagues in front of the boss, being president, and so on. Inclinations are multi-track dispositions, capable of manifesting themselves in a wide variety of ways, depending on the occasioning circumstances and their connections to other dispositions, propensities and so on. The point of referring to a person’s inclinations is to trace his occurrent desires to underlying tendencies. The aim is to simplify and unify what we observe in ourselves and others in order to illuminate the connection between what a person does or wants and the sort of being he is. We do not accomplish this by seeing that a person who wants to buy a fancy dress is the sort of being that wants to buy a fancy dress. Instead, we do it by seeing this specific desire as an expression of the fact that this person is the sort of being that has an inclination to better herself in the opinion of others. For Kant, this is a matter of understanding the specific desire as one particular manifestation of a deeper property of human beings (RGV 6: 26–7). Such understanding is important for anthropological investigation of the species but also for the pursuit of virtue, which requires self-scrutiny and a concerted attempt to understand the sort of being that one is (MS 6: 441).Footnote ¹⁷

In short, the impulses described by Schapiro can certainly recur frequently enough to qualify as habitual. But this does not make them inclinations in Kant’s sense. Inclinations, as he understands them, are persisting grounds of desire. In this respect, they are akin to natural instincts and propensities. Inclinations cannot be identified with statistical patterns or regularities of desire because they are part of what explains the appearance of such regularities. Furthermore, through strength of will, a person can eliminate the regularity by significantly reducing the frequency of a particular sensible desire without necessarily eliminating the underlying inclination. Indeed, Kant’s conception of virtue seems to imply that it is nearly impossible to eliminate the latter, even if one is fairly successful in blocking its effects. Finally, if inclinations were mere regularities, there would be an inclination for every sensible desire that occurs with sufficient frequency. Yet this is not Kant’s view. These considerations make it plain that the difference at issue runs fairly deep. We cannot bring Schapiro’s account closer to Kant’s by granting that what she calls inclinations can become habitual in the sense of recurring regularly. The difference between their accounts, therefore, is not merely verbal.

Kant’s own approach to inclinations has the advantage of illuminating their ethical significance and their practical role in the lives of real human agents. On Schapiro’s account, inclinations are impulses or urges that present proposals for action. Each inclination is a discrete episode in the life of the agent, and the central practical task is to respond to such an episode with a rational decision about how to act. On Kant’s account, by contrast, inclinations are more or less deeply ingrained habits of desiring, which can manifest themselves in a person’s impulses, but also in his attitudes and maxims or general policies and plans. Inclinations are not discrete episodes to be addressed one at a time, as they happen to arise. Instead, they are dispositions or tendencies to be managed or mastered over time. Some – such as the inclination to sympathize – ought to be cultivated.Footnote ¹⁸ Others – such as the passion for domination – ought to be extirpated.Footnote ¹⁹ This ongoing task structures, at least partially, the practical life of the thoughtful and ethically conscientious person. Kant devotes attention to the inclination to happiness, for instance, because he thinks it is a deeply rooted tendency in human psychology. And, like the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others, it presents a standing ethical challenge – a tendency that permeates rather than merely punctuates the practical life of the agent, who must strive not for mere happiness, but for a condition in which he is worthy of happiness. If ethics is to remain concerned with questions of virtue and character, then Kant is right to focus more on dispositions and tendencies than on discrete episodes. His focus highlights the fact that agency, as Michael Bratman has argued, is a temporally extended phenomenon.Footnote ²⁰

The main lesson here also applies to Christine Korsgaard’s view of inclination, which is the most immediate departure point for much of Schapiro’s discussion. According to Korsgaard, the free will is ‘completely self-governing, with nothing outside of it giving any laws’. When a person has an inclination, the inclination ‘comes along’ and ‘presents the free will with a proposal’ (Korsgaard 2008: 109). This is an odd way to think about inclination – as if having an inclination is like running into a friend who suggests grabbing a coffee – and it does not fit at all with Kant’s own view. For one thing, since inclinations are more or less deeply ingrained habits or tendencies to desire, they are not as detached from the agent as Korsgaard’s remark implies.Footnote ²¹ For another, while some inclinations are woven into the fabric of human nature and others are acquired over time – through exposure to particular sensations and social influences – no inclinations merely ‘come along’. Inclinations are not occurrences so they do not simply happen in this manner. Finally, the notion that inclinations present ‘proposals’ distorts what it is to be inclined. To say that a person has been presented with a proposal is to say nothing about his motivational state or what he is likely to do.Footnote ²² I can present you with a proposal for action without it having any effect on you. You may barely notice my proposal, intentionally ignore it, be baffled by it, take it under advisement, file it away for future reference and so on. The fact that you have been presented with a proposal says nothing at all about what you are disposed to do or how you are likely to react to the proposal. That is why a person might report to his boss that he had presented the proposal to the committee, and his boss might still ask whether he had tried to sell it – that is, get them excited about it or motivated to go for it. If he responds that he thought it was enough merely to present the proposal, the boss may respond that he had not done his job. Being presented with a proposal and being inclined to act on it are two different things. From Kant’s perspective, when a person has an inclination for x, his mental capacities are configured in a particular way, and this configuration is the basis or ground of sensible desires for x or things appropriately related to x. He is disposed to want x, as the notion of being inclined suggests: to have a particular inclination is to lean in a particular direction.Footnote ²³

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Let us consider a second feature of Schapiro’s account. As we have seen, she thinks of inclinations as motivational states. In her view, the best way to understand the motivational force of such states is to assume a bipartite conception of the human soul, and a strict division between these two parts. As she puts it, we should distinguish between ‘two agential capacities that jointly characterize human agents. One is a capacity to demand and offer justifications to ourselves and so to take considerations as reasons. The other is a more primitive capacity to see objects as calling for certain responses, independent of any justification’ (2009: 246). This more primitive capacity is the source of our inclinations: an inclination, she argues, is ‘the exercise of a sub-personal capacity that is both agential and non-rational’ (2009: 232). Schapiro characterizes the inclining part of the soul as the ‘inner animal’, and her account of the inner animal is based on her view of animal agency. The objects of a cat’s desires do not act on it as brute causal forces, she argues. Rather, to say the cat wants to eat its food or chase a scurrying mouse is to say that it sees the food as ‘something-to-be-eaten’ or that it sees the mouse as ‘something-to-be-chased’ (2009: 48). This does not mean that the cat has reasons to want to eat the food in its dish or chase the mouse across the kitchen. But the cat’s desires are a function of the way its world is ‘teleologically organized around its needs and interests’ (2009: 248). Schapiro argues that a part of us works the same way. A person’s inclinations should be thought of as the ‘movements’ of his inner animal. When he has an inclination for x, his inner animal goes for x. But the whole person does not necessarily follow or go along.

This aspect of Schapiro’s account of inclination is foreign to Kant’s view. Consider, first, his understanding of desire. A thorough treatment of the topic is impossible in the present context, but a few brief remarks should suffice for present purposes.Footnote ²⁴ In Kant’s view, both appetites and inclinations are rooted in a capacity for desire (das Begehrungsvermögen), which is one of the mind’s three basic capacities or powers (Seelenvermögen, Gemütskräfte) (KU 20: 245; VM 29: 877–8). These three capacities are functionally distinct, but the activity of desire always involves all three capacities. On the one hand, desire always involves the capacity for feelings of pleasure and displeasure (das Gefühl der Lust und Unlust).Footnote ²⁵ On the other, it always involves the capacity for cognition (das Erkenntnisvermögen) (KU 20: 245), which manifests itself in specific cognitive activities such as intuiting, imagining, concept formation, judging and inferring. Kant does not claim that all desiring involves inferring or judging, of course, but it does involve the basic cognitive capacity that underlies these acts. At the very least, every sensible desire or appetite for something specific involves an intuition by means of which we single out the object of our desire. Presumably, most human appetites also involve empirical concepts, by means of which those objects are classified as instances of general types. Though the details of Kant’s account are often obscure, the general point is clear: desire is a functionally distinct capacity, yet all exercises of that capacity involve the capacity for cognition in one way or another. Since inclination is a mode of desire, it follows that inclination always involves the capacity for cognition. In some cases, inclination involves ‘higher’ capacities such as the ability to make judgements and inferences.

This feature of Kant’s general account is reflected in many of his examples. He shows a great deal of interest in inclinations that could not possibly have sprung directly from a non-rational source. One example is the inclination to happiness. Happiness, he claims, is a state in which a person is content with his entire well-being, satisfied that he has everything he could want (GMS 4: 393; KPV 5: 124). We can see that the inclination to happiness directly involves the capacity for cognition. A person cannot have such an inclination unless he also has the ability to reflect on and compare successive states of his own life. To be inclined to happiness is to be disposed to want to be in a better state than you are now in or disposed to want to remain in a state you regard as better than some alternative. Kant suggests that the inclination to happiness is also bound up with comparisons we make between ourselves and other people, since we tend to judge our own state by comparing ourselves with others (RGV 6: 27). Furthermore, this rather high-level inclination will manifest itself in specific desires to do this or that only given the presence of thoughts about which sorts of actions, objects or states of affairs will bring one closer to the condition of happiness. The Prudent Shopkeeper from the Groundwork serves to illustrate this point. He wants to treat even his inexperienced customers equitably and so he sets fixed prices for his goods. But, as Kant describes him, the Shopkeeper has no ‘immediate inclination’ to treat people fairly, and he is not moved by the demands of morality (GMS 4: 397). Hence, he would not want to treat his customers equitably if he did not think it was in his interest. Such a desire presupposes thoughts about what he wants out of life, how people react to unfair treatment, basic economic principles and so on. Therefore, we should not equate the desire to treat his customers equitably with the movements of his ‘inner animal’.

For another example, recall the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others. This inclination also involves the higher cognitive faculties. It is impossible to have this inclination without also having thoughts about what others think of you and the effect your behaviour will have on their thoughts about you. Such an inclination may manifest itself, for instance, in a specific desire to buy a Patek Philippe watch. But this would not be a manifestation of the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others unless the person who had this desire also had thoughts about how other people value the Patek Philippe brand, how they will respond to him wearing a Patek, the satisfaction he will feel in response to their responses and so on. Having an inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others can be a good thing to have. It can dispose you to want to stick up for yourself, to insist on your equal standing among others and so on. But, as mentioned, it can become warped into ‘an unjust desire to acquire superiority for oneself over others’ (RGV 6: 27), which can take the form of a ‘passion’ such as the ‘hunger for honour’ (Ehrsucht) or the ‘hunger for domination’ (Herrschsucht) (APH 7: 272–3). Passions such as these can powerfully dispose a person to vices such as servility, arrogance and ridicule.

Generally speaking, Kant’s view of the passions (Leidenschaften) is incompatible with the idea that inclinations spring directly from a non-rational source. According to his unusual view, a passion is a type of inclination rather than a type of feeling or merely passive state (MS 6: 407–8; KU 5: 272n.; APH 7: 265–7). Passions, therefore, are habitual sensible desires – dispositions not impulses.Footnote ²⁶ More directly pertinent is their relation to reason. In Kant’s view, passions are ‘always connected’ with a person’s reason, which is why only rational animals can have passions (APH 7: 266). There are at least two reasons for this. First, one cannot have passions without also having the sort of representations that only rational animals are capable of having. Consider the desire for vengeance (Rachbegierde), which Kant characterizes as ‘hatred arising from an injustice we have suffered’ (APH 7: 270). To hate in this manner one must have judged that he has been wronged, and to judge that he has been wronged a person must also have judged that some right of his was violated. The desire for vengeance may be rooted in more primitive impulses that human beings share with non-rational creatures. But it makes no sense to attribute a desire for vengeance to a creature that has no concept of right and cannot judge that it has been wronged. Second, passions manifest themselves not only in occurrent desires but also in maxims or general policies of conduct, the formation and application of which require the use of practical reason. Consider the ‘hunger for possession’ (Habsucht) (APH 7: 274; VE 27: 399–404). The miser, as Kant understands him, is caught in the grip of this particular passion. His attachment to wealth is not non-rational. It is irrational. This is because the miser has made it a policy to acquire and maintain the means to good living ‘but with no intention of enjoyment’ (MS 6: 432), and his maxim is therefore self-defeating.Footnote ²⁷ The connection here between passion and reason is so intimate that Kant characterizes the passions as ‘the cancerous sores of pure practical reason’ (APH 7: 266). It is nearly impossible to cure oneself of a passion precisely because the passion corrupts and perverts the very capacity for reason that should enable one to rise above it.Footnote ²⁸

The main point here is that Schapiro’s account of inclination rests on a much cleaner and sharper distinction between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul. Kant thinks of the human soul as a system of tightly interconnected capacities or powers. The details of his view are, to put it mildly, difficult to follow, but at least one thing is clear: the operations of desire involve the capacity for cognition. It follows that inclinations cannot spring directly from a non-rational source. Inclinations are more or less deeply ingrained habits of desire, and they are woven into a person’s character together with strands supplied by the power of cognition. Many of the inclinations Kant regards as central to our practical and moral lives are inseparable from the rational and social aspects of human psychology.

One might be tempted to think that the issue here is merely verbal in another way. Perhaps Schapiro is just using the wrong term, offering a Kantian account of occurrent sensible desire (or appetite) rather than inclination in Kant’s sense. I believe the differences run deeper than this. She thinks of inclinations as unmotivated desires, arguing that they do not involve thoughts about the reasons that would justify them. Indeed, they do not even ‘engage the capacity to raise and answer questions of justification’ (2009: 256). But many of the sensible desires that interest Kant do engage this capacity, and at least some of them could plausibly be construed as motivated in Nagel’s sense (2009: 230). Hence, they are not what Schapiro has in mind.

Consider the Patek Phillipe example discussed above. We can imagine a case where a person’s desire for a Patek has nothing to do with the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others. Someone might walk into a jewellery store, see a particular watch, and want that particular watch without knowing that it is a Patek. Or he might not know that such a watch is a symbol of wealth and status. The desire is just a response to the way it glitters in the shop. This resembles Schapiro’s description of inclination in some respects. But Kant’s focus lies elsewhere – on cases where the person wants the watch because it is a Patek and because it is a status symbol. In this sort of case, the desire depends on the person’s thoughts about the Patek and how it will make him look to others. If he discovers, for example, that the watch is an easily spotted fake or that the brand is outmoded, the desire is likely to disappear.Footnote ²⁹ Note that the desire could depend on thought in at least two different ways.Footnote ³⁰ On the one hand, the person might want the watch on the grounds that it will impress people. That is, the desire might result from reasoning about how to improve or maintain his social status. He might want the watch for strategic reasons. In some cases like this, a person might not even like the way it looks. This sort of desire is motivated in Nagel’s sense. Therefore, it is not what Schapiro calls an ‘inclination’. On the other hand, the desire could depend in a different way on thoughts about the Patek brand and about how others will respond to the watch. These thoughts could function as causal antecedents rather than rational grounds. They could lead the person to want the watch somewhat mechanically, prompting the desire without being regarded by him as reasons for it. Here the desire for the watch is unmotivated in that it does not result from conscious deliberation. But it is not an ‘inclination’ in Schapiro’s sense. It does not issue directly from a non-rational source, and it seems quite implausible to believe that it does not engage at least the capacity to raise and answer questions of justification. After all, the desire was not caused by just any thoughts. It was caused by exactly those thoughts that would be appropriately articulated as reasons for wanting the watch. Furthermore, assuming, as Kant would, that the desire is rooted in the inclination to improve one’s standing, the person would cease to want the watch if he came to believe that it would not impress anyone. Maybe this is all sheer coincidence. But it seems far more likely that the desire engages the capacity for justification in some important way. Presumably, the person recognizes, however dimly or confusedly, the rational connection between the thoughts and the desire. This seems like a safe bet even if we agree that the desire does not result from conscious deliberation and even if we lack a precise understanding of how it engages the capacity for justification.

Sensible desires that depend on thoughts are quite common in Kant’s practical philosophy. The Prudent Shopkeeper would not want to set uniform prices unless he had reason to believe that this was good business. The person who is consumed by the passion for revenge would not want to do x to A unless he thought that A was the person who injured him and that by doing x to A he would make A suffer for the injury done to him. Someone caught in the grip of ambition wants a particular job because he believes it will raise his status and increase his power over others; otherwise, his inclination would manifest itself in a desire for a position that carries greater power and prestige. In some cases, the thoughts might simply the trigger the desire. In others, the agent might regard them as grounds for what he wants. But in all these cases, desire is intimately connected to sophisticated thoughts about the thoughts of other people, the likely consequences of one’s behaviour and so on. Schapiro might be able to expand her own account of motivation to include such episodes. She argues that the motivational force of inclination is a function of its non-rational nature, but that need not rule out the possibility that this force could also attach to desires that that are intimately connected to what Kant calls the higher power of cognition. But she would not call these ‘inclinations’, and she would not think of them as occurrent manifestations of underlying inclinations the way Kant does. At most, her account of motivational states that spring directly from the non-rational part of the soul would match only a sub-class of the desires at issue in his practical philosophy – say, urges grounded directly in natural instinct.Footnote ³¹

Kant’s emphasis on desires that involve the rational and social side of human psychology is one of the most attractive features of his view.Footnote ³² These are the desires of real human agents – people who help others, insist on their own rights, suck up to their superiors, envy their neighbours, despise themselves for cheating and so on. Kant lacks Schapiro’s considerable talent for examples, but I recognize real people in his discussions of inclination, and I see how his account captures something important about their desires, attitudes and overt conduct. Any distinctly Kantian account of motivation should want to emphasize this side of his work rather than focusing on our confrontations with discrete urges and impulses that have nothing to do with how we think, reason or interact with one another.

4

Let us consider one final way in which Schapiro’s account of inclination differs from Kant’s. She claims that ‘when I have an inclination, the inclining part of me takes a step forward, and the rest of me is made aware of itself as not being the source of that activity’ (2011: 154). Thus all inclinations introduce a division between the rational and non-rational parts of the soul. Indeed, internal division is constitutive of the very state of being inclined. To have an inclination or to be inclined is to be divided – distanced, in some way, from one’s inner animal. As she puts it, ‘to be in the condition of having an inclination is to be internally divided; the inclining part of me is “going for” an object, and the rest of me is aware of what that part is doing’ (2011: 154). As we can see from this remark, she also believes that inclination always involves some form of self-awareness.Footnote ³³ When a person has an inclination, one part of him goes for the object and another part of him – the part that can ask for justification – holds back, aware of the movement of his inner animal. Thanks to this movement, an item has been ‘put on the deliberative agenda’, and the person must decide what to do. Because, according to Schapiro, action requires a unified self, and a person having an inclination is internally divided, it follows that ‘in having an inclination, I am in a sense stuck’ (2011: 162). So in order to act, I will have to get unstuck. I will have to (re?)unify myself.

It is unlikely that Kant would accept either aspect of Schapiro’s claim. He never addresses the question of whether inclination necessarily involves internal division, but the basic idea seems foreign to his general view of the human soul as a system of interconnected powers. There is plenty of room in his view for motivational states that do involve internal division – for example, ambivalence or weakness of will – but there is certainly no endorsement of the idea that internal division is constitutive of inclination or any other mode of desire. Nor does there seem to be anything in his view that would commit him, unwittingly, to such an idea. Furthermore, if Kant had ever considered the possibility that all inclination involves self-awareness, he clearly rejected it. Schapiro claims that the state of being inclined involves awareness of the inclining part of one’s soul, but Kant does not believe this. On the contrary, he may even believe that we are only rarely aware of inclination’s influence. At the very least, he is deeply convinced of the prevalence and power of unconscious inclinations, and equally convinced that it is extremely difficult to bring them to the surface. This is why we can never rule out the possibility that our actions are driven by desires of which we are unaware – perhaps a ‘covert impulse of self-love’ (GMS 4: 407) – and it is why he also believes that the task of knowing one’s motivations involves ‘a descent into the hell of self-cognition’ (MS 6: 441).

Kant’s own view compares favourably with Schapiro’s in this respect. The idea that occurrent desires (‘inclinations’) always involve internal division and self-awareness is quite implausible.Footnote ³⁴ If it were true that every desire involved internal division, you would never quite just want something, at least not in the sense of simply, unequivocally or straightforwardly wanting it. Yet some of Schapiro’s own examples suggest that this cannot be right. Consider the urge to run away from an angry mob (2009: 230). Schapiro’s view implies that when you experience such an episode you are internally divided between the inner animal that urges you to run and the rational part that hangs back, assessing the reasons for doing so. We can certainly imagine cases that involve internal division. Perhaps you are torn between your desire to run and a suicidal urge to throw yourself at the mercy of the mob.Footnote ³⁵ Or it could be that you want to flee and yet also feel remorse for the act that incurred the mob’s wrath; you are divided because part of you thinks you deserve to be punished, and this thought checks your survival instinct. But these are unusual responses to mortal danger. Under normal circumstances, the person who wants to flee an angry mob just wants to get out of there. Surely nothing forestalls internal division like the fear of death. Schapiro’s thirsty hiker makes the same point. We can imagine a thirsty hiker who is internally divided. He wants water but he is training for an endurance event and must deny himself water in order to push his limits. His inner animal goes for the water bottle but the rational part of his soul holds back, weighing this desire against the reasons to soldier on without quenching his thirst. Or perhaps he is truly lost in the mountains and finds himself divided between the part of him that wants to drink and the part of him that appreciates the need to maintain a reserve in his canteen. Again, these are somewhat unusual experiences. Normally, if your throat is ‘painfully dry’ and you are ‘aching with thirst’ (2009: 246), you just want something to drink. Indeed, if you are so thirsty that you barely notice your surroundings (2009: 246), you are desperate for fluids. You are not divided in the least, and the prospect of drinking water is not merely an item on the deliberative agenda.

The second aspect of Schapiro’s basic claim generates another problem. According to her view, you are always aware of your desires. Whenever you want something, the part of you that pulls the rest of you toward the object of your desire is itself an object of awareness.Footnote ³⁶ It is certainly true that people are sometimes aware of their desires. Sometimes this is because we are looking out for them, as when a person trying to restrict his time online notices the urge to check email. Sometimes it is because a desire’s intensity forces it into view, as when a person is surprised by the powerful urge to kiss someone or give him a hug. But Schapiro claims that all inclinations involve awareness of the inclination itself, and this is very difficult to accept. If it were true, you would never be unaware of being pushed or pulled by your inclinations. None of them would be hidden from view. There would be no such thing as unconscious inclination, which is extremely difficult to accept. Furthermore, your attention would never be entirely devoted to what it is that you want because some of it would also be directed towards the part of you that wants it. For instance, you’d never be focused entirely on that piece of cake or glass of gin. Somewhere in the field of vision, even if only in the corner or at the very bottom of the frame, would be the sight of your inner animal ‘going for it’. This cannot be correct. Desire can focus a person’s attention on the desired object so intensely that everything else, including the self, recedes from view. Imagine, for instance, a person working on a particular problem who wants nothing more than to solve the problem. Under normal circumstances, for at least the time in which his desire is most intense, he will forget himself, including his inner animal, entirely.Footnote ³⁷

5

In sum, there are several crucial ways in which Schapiro’s ‘Kantian’ account of inclination differs significantly from Kant’s. She thinks of inclinations as impulses or urges stemming directly from a non-rational part of the soul. Kant, by contrast, thinks of them as dispositions or general tendencies. Inclination is a mode of desire, but having an inclination is more like having a habit than having an urge or an impulse. These are underlying tendencies, not mere regularities. Kant’s view of inclination rests on the idea that the human soul is a system of interconnected capacities and powers. The capacities for feeling, desire and cognition are basic and functionally distinct, but the activity of desire involves all three. Inclination is a form of sensible desire, and so inclinations depend on sensations of pleasure and displeasure, but they also depend on cognitive activity. Indeed, many of our inclinations directly involve sophisticated forms of thought, including those that enlist the social dimension of human nature. Both points are particularly important for Kant’s account of the passions, which are corrupt inclinations defined partly in terms of their relationship to our maxims.

Kant’s own approach has distinct advantages. It captures nicely the idea that many of our desires present standing challenges to be addressed in a temporally extended fashion – rather than one at a time, as discrete occurrences. It also captures the fact that many of our most powerful and prevalent desires directly involve the social and rational side of human psychology: not just our thoughts but also our thoughts about the thoughts of others, and our desire to influence those thoughts so that they will love us, fear us, envy us and so on. Finally, Kant’s view avoids some of the problems generated by Schapiro’s. In particular, it avoids the rather implausible idea that even our ‘brute unanalyzable urges’ involve internal division and self-awareness. A philosopher working with Kant’s account of inclination can, of course, grant the existence of such motivational states. But he or she need not mistake them for the central case, as Schapiro seems to have done. These advantages suggest that Kantians should be reluctant to embrace Schapiro’s innovations. Her view may have the resources to solve the problems I have described, but Kant’s own account avoids generating them in the first place.

Let us conclude by returning to the original question: What is it to have an inclination or be inclined? Schapiro is right to call for a direct answer. If my interpretation is on the right track, the answer is that when a person has an inclination for x, he has a more or less general disposition to experience a particular range of sensible desires under the relevant circumstances. This means that the person’s capacity for desire is disposed to a certain form of activity under those circumstances. The presence of an inclination helps explain why the person responds to those circumstances with an appetite rather than indifference or aversion. When we say that a person has an inclination for x we are attributing a general tendency, not reporting a specific occurrence or episode. Inclinations ground occurrent desires, but they should not be identified with the latter, and the condition of being inclined should not be identified with the state of wanting. It may be true that a person has an inclination for x and yet also true, at any given moment, that he feels no corresponding urge or appetite. It could be that he has had his fill for the moment, that his mind is on other things, or that he has managed to block the effects of the inclination through strength of will.

Some of our inclinations should be cultivated. The inclination to sympathize with others, for example, can aid the pursuit of virtue. So can the inclination to honour, which, when properly managed, inclines a person to stick up for himself, be averse to grovelling and so on. Other inclinations are toxic by nature. These must be extirpated or prevented from taking root in the first place. The passions, such as the hunger for domination, constitute a whole class of such inclinations. To have a passion is to be subject to an inherently debilitating form of inclination, something more akin to addiction than mere habit. For this reason, it is misleading to speak of ‘having’ a passion in Kant’s sense of the term. It seems more fitting to say that the passion has you.Footnote ³⁸