Alexander T. Englert’s The Reality of the Ideal is a philosophically ambitious, historically informed, and systematically innovative study of Kant’s doctrine of the highest good. Instead of seeing the highest good as an embarrassment for Kant’s ethics or as a dispensable appendage to his moral theology, Englert offers a powerful reinterpretation and defence not only of its place in Kant’s thought, but in our moral experience of reality as intelligible.

The guiding thesis of The Reality of the Ideal is that Kant’s highest good is best understood as a practical ideal, whose primary function is not to guide moral action but to serve as an epistemic standard that enables contemplation of the world as morally intelligible. As Englert notes, this interpretation departs from a dominant scholarly consensus, which is to see the highest good as serving to promote rational moral deliberation and action. In contrast, Englert reframes the aim of the highest good: the real philosophical question is not how the highest good guides action, but what it means for a Kantian ideal to be ‘practical’ in the first place.

To answer this question, the first part of the book (chapters 1–4) takes up Kant’s distinction between ideas and ideals. Englert argues that practical ideas function as rules that regulate willing and action, and thus have a ‘moral’ function. Practical ideals, by contrast, are individuated, perfected wholes determined by such rules, which do not command action. Their function is thus not moral but ‘epistemic’: they serve as standards of comparison that provide the background conditions of intelligibility and ground moral judgement. To say that the highest good is a practical ideal rather than a practical idea is to say that the highest good does not enter directly into deliberation about how to act morally in particular circumstances. Instead, the function of the highest good is epistemic: it provides us with a standard by which to judge the moral imperfection in ourselves and in the world. This further enables our awareness of moral progress or regress, and our sense that morality belongs to reality rather than floating free of it. Without such an ideal, moral experience would lose its depth, coherence, and aspirational structure.

The second part of the book (chapters 5–7) is taken up with a historical evaluation of the development of Kant’s conception of the highest good, arguing that it underwent critical changes from the first to the third Critique. Englert sees this developmental story as necessary to explain apparent inconsistencies across Kant’s texts.

The third and final part of the book (chapters 8–10) culminates in an account of the highest good as grounding the construction of a Kantian worldview. Reason has an unavoidable need for systematic coherence, and the highest good alone can unify morality, nature, and purposiveness into a single intelligible order. In this sense, the highest good is practical not because it guides action, but because it orients judgement, hope, and self-understanding. Its reality is not empirical or spatiotemporal, but transcendental: it is a condition of the possibility of moral experience and of experiencing the world as normatively intelligible at all. This is a bold and elegant thesis. There is much to agree and disagree with in such a systematic and ambitious book. In this limited space, I will raise two points of disagreement. First, I believe that the book creates too sharp a separation between the epistemic and action-guiding roles of the highest good, and will suggest that the highest good can have double, overlapping functions. Second, I wish to suggest that Englert has too rosy a picture of the world of the highest good. He sees the highest good as the maximum of happiness in relation to virtue. But if we see the highest good as a concept of justice, then a world of the highest good would have to include not only the flourishing of the virtuous but the suffering of the wicked.

The first and systematic issue I wish to raise concerns the main thesis of the book: that the highest good functions as an ideal, which guides judgement, rather than as an idea, which guides action. Englert’s conceptual distinction between guiding action and guiding judgement is important and necessary. But I question whether that distinction maps onto the idea-ideal distinction; and whether the distinction between guiding action and guiding judgement amounts to an opposition, especially in relation to the highest good.

To begin where Englert begins, by examining Kant’s terminology of idea and ideal, Kant distinguishes between an idea, such as virtue, and an ideal, such as a sage. As Englert points out, ideas and ideals are concepts of reason that share several features: they are concepts that extend beyond appearances, they contain no congruent objects of experience, and nonetheless they possess objective reality (7). However, Kant believes that there is an important distinction between them: ‘I call the ideal … an individual thing which is determinable, or even determined, through the idea alone’ (KrV A568/B596).Footnote ¹ Englert takes Kant here to mean that an ideal, while determined by an idea, has a radically different practical function than the idea. According to Englert, an idea guides action while an ideal (an individuated idea) guides judgement.

In making this distinction between ideas and ideals, Englert acknowledges that he is seeking to ‘correct Kant’s word choice’ (12). For Englert finds at least two problems with Kant’s terminology. First, Kant does not often hew to his own distinction, and uses ideas and ideals interchangeably, in a ‘sloppy’ manner (9). Second, Kant uses ‘idea’ to refer to two different functions, to guide action and judgement, while using ‘ideal’ to refer just to the function of guiding judgement. Kant’s attribution of a double meaning to ideas, and of a single meaning to ideals, leads Englert to suspect a lack of linguistic rigour in Kant’s terminology. So Englert proposes that Kant really meant to treat an idea as action-guiding, and an ideal as judgement-guiding.

As an interpretative principle, I wish to allow, with Englert, that even such great thinkers as Kant can be sloppy, linguistically or conceptually. But, in this case, I think it makes sense to adopt an innocent or surface-level reading and allow that Kant means what he says: that ideas have both action- and judgement-guiding functions. How, then, would we know when Kant means to refer just to their judgement-guiding function? Would it not be better, then, for him to use the term ideal, which, according to Englert, designates only that precise judgement-guiding function? I wish to suggest, however, that Kant treats ideals, just as much as ideas, as having the double function of guiding action and judgement. This would suggest that he believes that practical action and judgement are intimately related. It would thus have been unnecessary to have strictly distinguished between ideas and ideals when he wished to evoke the double function of guiding action and judgement. For then, either concept would do. The only time he would need to use the term ‘ideal’ would be to designate the full individuation of an idea.

Englert well shows that Kant uses ‘idea’ to refer to both the action- and judgement-guiding functions. So my task is to provide reasons for thinking that Kant’s usage of ‘ideal’ has a similar double function.

Textually, if we examine the passages Englert cites to support his reading of the ideal as judgement-guiding, we will find Kant also saying that ideals are action-guiding. Consider the ideal of the sage, which is fully determined by the idea of virtue. In discussing this, Englert cites these two passages: ‘[W]e have in us no other standard for our actions than the conduct of this divine human being, with which we can compare ourselves, judging ourselves and thereby improving ourselves, even though we can never reach the standard’ (A569/B597; quoted p. 15); and ‘[Practical ideals] provide an indispensable standard for reason, which needs the concept of that which is entirely complete in its kind, in order to assess and measure the degree and the defects of what is incomplete’ (A569-70/B597-8; quoted p. 15). The conclusion Englert immediately draws is: ‘Thus, a practical ideal offers a standard for estimating and measuring the degree of imperfection in copies. It does not tell us how to act here and now’ (16). This, however, creates an opposition between ideas and ideals, and between action- and judgement-guiding, that is absent in the quotations. For while both quotations indeed show that Kant believes that ideals guide judgement, the first quotation indicates that he believes that they also guide action: the ideal of the sage provides a standard ‘for our actions … thereby improving ourselves’. Moreover, a sentence or two before these quotations, Kant writes that ‘not only ideas but also ideals … have practical power … grounding the possibility of the perfection of certain actions’ (A569/B597). I see no reason to treat Kant’s terminology as imprecise here. If so, it is warranted to conclude that Kant sees ideals, just as ideas, as having double functions in guiding action and judgement.

Assuming this surface reading of the text, what might explain why Kant sees both ideas and ideals as each having a double practical function? It is instructive to note the four-step logic articulated in the quoted passage: The sage provides us with (1) a standard for our actions, (2) with which we can compare ourselves, (3) judging ourselves and (4) thereby improving ourselves. Ideals provide standards for our actions for standards enable comparisons; comparisons guide judgement; and judgement guides action: hence, standards help us act better and, thus, improve. As the logic indicates, while the double functions are conceptually distinct, Kant treats them as complementary and inextricable from one another in practical life. In short, individuated normative standards (ideals) guide actions. Likewise, an idea such as the moral law is a normative standard, albeit not in individuated form. It therefore also guides action by guiding judgement.

Applying this reasoning to the concept of the highest good enables us to understand why Kant could sometimes describe it an idea and sometimes as an ideal: both concepts indicate that the highest good is both action- and judgement-guiding. Indeed, the concept of the highest good, as the matter (object or end) of a good will that is formally determined by the moral law, would seem to be necessarily action-guiding. But that need not mean that it is only action-guiding. For one essential way the highest good guides action is by making the world morally and rationally intelligible: by making the world appear as a home for morality, it makes rational and moral action intelligible. From this perspective, we can see that, for Kant, rational agency presupposes intelligibility – not merely at the level of maxims, but at the level of the world in which action unfolds. If agents were convinced that the world is fundamentally indifferent or hostile to moral reason, their capacity to see themselves as rational agents would be undermined.

From this perspective, the epistemic and moral roles of the highest good are not competitors but mutually reinforcing. If so, this would require us to modify Englert’s thesis to allow that if the highest good functions as an ideal it can also function as an idea; and that both function to guide actions via judgement. That claim would not reduce the importance of Englert’s emphasis on the ideal as enabling contemplation; and it would help make sense of the way ideas function in conjunction with ideals. Englert’s own account gestures in this direction, especially in his discussion of worldview and coherence, but his insistence on separating the contemplative from the action-guiding function risks obscuring this deeper unity. This criticism challenges only the binary form of Englert’s main thesis, even while it bolsters his animating insight about the ambition of Kant’s practical project, as manifested in his conception of the highest good: morality in general, and the highest good in particular, orient our lives as a whole.

A second issue I wish to raise concerns Englert’s conceptualization of the highest good. Englert rightly emphasizes that the highest good consists in the proportional relationship between virtue and happiness, yet he does not explicitly describe the highest good as a concept of justice. This neglect has important ramifications.

Englert depicts the highest good as a normative ideal of ‘a logically possible maximum of goodness’ (xv), which is a world with a ‘maximum of perfection, marked by everyone doing their duty and flourishing’ (53). A world that maximizes moral perfection and happiness certainly sounds desirable. Yet there are reasons to think this is not Kant’s picture of the highest good.

Consider three possible scenarios: (1) a world constituted exclusively by virtue, happiness, and their proportionate relationship; (2) a world constituted exclusively by wickedness, suffering, and their proportionate relationship; and (3) a mixed world, which includes virtue and evil, happiness and suffering, but is constituted by the proportionate relationship between moral merit and desert. Each of these is a just world, in which justice is understood as strict proportionality between desert and merit. But not all just worlds designate the world of the highest good. Englert assumes the highest good designates the first kind of world, yet there are reasons to think that only the third world best captures Kant’s concept of the highest good.

First, Kant conceives of perfect justice as fundamentally punitive or retributive rather than remunerative: ‘in the judgment of our own reason, the claim that divine justice makes upon us is … that of punitive justice. – For there is no place for reward (praemium, remuneratio gratuita) in justice toward beings who have only duties and no rights in relation to another’ (MS 6: 489). Divine justice is punitive for we merit no reward for merely doing our duty. This introduces a crucial asymmetry that Englert’s account does not fully accommodate. Kant insists that we do not deserve happiness merely for doing our duty. As finite beings who never fully discharge our obligations, we cannot strictly merit reward. By contrast, the suffering of the wicked can exhibit strict justice, since punishment stands in direct proportion to guilt. Were God to distribute happiness that does not conform to moral worth, God could no longer be described as just; and the resulting world can no longer be seen as moral: i.e., as a highest good. As a result, there is a normative asymmetry between the happiness of the virtuous and the suffering of the vicious: only the latter clearly instantiates justice in Kant’s strict sense.

Following this logic, one might be led to the disturbing conclusion that the highest good designates the second world, containing nothing but wickedness and proportionate suffering. Yet since this would be contrary to the end of creation (MS 6: 488), Kant relies on the logic of imputation to argue that even when those striving for virtue are not fully worthy, God ‘makes up for their incapacity to satisfy this requirement on their own’ (RGV 6: 141). Happiness is distributed in strict accord with moral merit, but that merit is imputed, not actual.

Only the third, mixed just world can account both for the fact that Kant treats divine justice as punitive, while also relying on the logic of imputation to explain how God can justly distribute happiness to those who do not, strictly, deserve it. Yet the third world maximizes neither virtue nor happiness, but the relationship of proportionality, i.e., justice. The maximally just world of the highest good would thus contain both evil and suffering (proportionately related) and virtue and happiness (proportionately related).

Recognizing this ‘darker’ side of the highest good complicates Englert’s otherwise illuminating account. The highest good renders the world intelligible not by promising a world containing only virtue and happiness, but by assuring agents that their moral fates are not arbitrary. This assurance may take the splendid form of happiness in response to virtue, but it may also take the sobering form of punishment proportionate to wickedness. If the highest good answers Kant’s question ‘What may I hope?’, it would seem that moral hope designates not a world free of evil, but one in which the wicked, just like the virtuous, get their just deserts. This may not be a concept of justice that we may wish to adopt, but it is one that Kant may have accepted.