The essays in this volume stem from a Kantian-star-studded conference held in honour of Karl Ameriks, whose work on Kant has had a profound (and overwhelmingly positive) impact on contemporary Kant scholarship. All the essays connect to themes in Ameriks’ work, though it would be a challenge for any serious Kant scholar to avoid connection with Ameriks’ work. In this review, I will summarize each of the chapters, offering a few questions along the way.
In the first essay, Eric Watkins analyses Kant’s claim that the good will is the sole unconditioned good. Watkins’ discussion is motivated by two textual puzzles. Late in Section II of the Groundwork, Kant claims that lawgiving has an unconditioned worth. That seems to imply that the good will is not, in fact, the only unconditioned good, and that it is not even unconditioned, since lawgiving’s worth explains the goodness of the good will. The second textual puzzle comes from Kant’s claim (in Section III of the Groundwork) that the unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative is incomprehensible, which threatens to compromise the rationalist spirit of Kant’s project. After a discussion (engaging with Rae Langton’s influential article) of how unconditioned goodness relates to intrinsic goodness and being valued as an end in itself, Watkins suggests that the will’s unconditioned goodness consists in its goodness not metaphysically depending on or being explained by the goodness of anything else. That is consistent with its existence depending on the worth (which could be either good or bad) of lawgiving, thereby solving the first puzzle. For the second puzzle, Watkins suggests (drawing on the Logic) that comprehension requires cognizing through conditions, from which it then trivially follows that we cannot comprehend the unconditioned. Kant’s view then allows morality to be thoroughly intelligible. I found Watkins’ discussion illuminating and often persuasive. His solution to the second puzzle, however, seemed incomplete. In the passage Watkins considers, Kant calls our inability to comprehend the unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative a limitation of our reason. That sounds like more than the trivial claim that we cannot cognize the unconditioned through conditions, since it is not a genuine limitation to be unable to do the logically impossible.
In ‘Universal Law’, Allen Wood argues that neither the Formula of Universal Law (FUL) nor the Formula of the Law of Nature (FLN) is supposed to provide a universal criterion of right action. Hence, Wood claims, the many alleged counterexamples to FUL and FLN are irrelevant to Kant’s purposes. Instead, FUL and FLN are supposed to provided canons of judgement that are solely meant to correct certain common moral mistakes. These are mistakes in which an agent wonders whether a particular action is consistent with some general, antecedently recognized duty, such as the agent who wonders whether suicide would be contrary to his duty to himself. Wood rests this interpretation on three main premises: (a) Kant’s general theory of judgement precludes him from providing a simple, action-guiding rule, (b) in the Groundwork, Kant uses FLN and FUL only for cases having the specific structure Wood describes, and (c) FUL and FLN test particular maxims, and so are incapable of informing an agent about general duties. Wood’s interpretation (which, as he acknowledges, resembles that of Barbara Herman) has much to be said for it. However, that interpretation makes it hard to see why Kant would (in both the Groundwork and the second Critique) claim that FUL is the fundamental law of practical reason. Such a fundamental law would seem meant for more than correcting common mistakes in agents who already understood their general duties.
In ‘Understanding Autonomy’, Stephen Engstrom addresses a worry similar to Wood’s, but takes a quite different approach. He argues that understanding how the will, for Kant, involves practical knowledge can help address the worry that basing the moral law in autonomy would make the moral law either arbitrary or empty. Engstrom emphasizes the importance of Kant’s identification of the will with practical reason, and the importance of seeing practical reason as involving knowledge. He then spells out the form of rational knowledge, which involves self-conscious, unified representation, in which some representation ‘is determined by another, and where the subject of knowledge is aware of the judgment’s universal validity’. For example, knowledge that a stone has grown warm involves an implicit supposition that any other subject in similar conditions would also find the stone to be growing warm. Because of this supposed universal validity, this form can be understood as legislative. Practical knowledge involves this form, now in the context of representing the subject as the cause of some effect, and hence can be called self-legislative. If we focus on this rich notion of the form of the will, Engstrom suggests, it becomes easier to see how a moral law arising from the will’s self-legislation could be neither arbitrary nor empty. Engstrom in effect suggests that those sceptical of Kant’s approach to grounding morality in autonomy should direct their challenges to the details of Kant’s understanding of practical knowledge. I am unsure whether sceptics will find that understanding compelling, but Engstrom’s reading may bring us closer to the real core of Kant’s ethical views.
In ‘The Principle of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory’, Pauline Kleingeld draws attention to a previously unappreciated shift in Kant’s moral theory. In the Groundwork, Kant puts autonomy at the centre of his moral views – the Principle of Autonomy being one formulation of the categorical imperative. Yet in the Metaphysics of Morals, talk of autonomy has largely disappeared, and the Principle of Autonomy makes no appearance. Kleingeld offers a fascinating explanation of this change, namely, that as Kant’s views in political philosophy developed, he came to see the legitimacy test for political and moral laws as being less analogous. In the Groundwork, Kleingeld argues, Kant understood autonomy as an agent herself giving laws to all rational agents (not primarily to oneself), with the implication that others could be subject to a law even though they had not actually consented to it. At that time, Kleingeld claims, Kant held that the same was true in a political context. An enlightened despot could legitimately make laws without the actual consent of subjects, so long as those laws had the right form. Yet, in the 1790s, while his moral views remained roughly the same, Kant came to believe that political lawgiving required actual consent (albeit through representatives). Kleingeld’s account is illuminating in many respects, not least in shedding light on how Kant understands autonomy in the Groundwork.
In ‘Evil and Practical Reason’, Lucy Allais offers a partially speculative reconstruction of Kant’s account of human evil. Her aim is to give a non-trivial, Kantian account of why all humans have a propensity to evil. Allais suggests that evil arises from two sources: (1) the need to see oneself as a unified agent who respects others’ humanity and (2) living in conditions of injustice where one cannot treat others rightfully. Our drive to see ourselves as unified agents in such conditions therefore pushes us towards moralized self-deception. For example, if we are the beneficiaries of an unjust system, we will feel pressure to falsely believe that we were entitled to those benefits. What is perhaps most striking about Allais’ account is how it appeals to a priori morality to explain moralized self-deception. As Allais herself notes, however, Kant claims that we cannot ultimately understand evil. It might be a cost to her account as an interpretation, therefore, that it makes evil comprehensible. On the other hand, few of Kant’s readers have seen his claim about the mysteriousness of evil as a virtue of his view. Allais’ account might thus be seen as a welcome amendment to Kant’s views.
In ‘Freedom as a Postulate’, Markus Willaschek addresses an important puzzle about Kant’s views on freedom in the second Critique. On the one hand, Kant says we cognize our freedom through the ‘fact of reason’, which suggests that we know that we are free via knowing that we are subject to the moral law. On the other hand, Kant also claims that freedom is a postulate of practical reason, which suggests that we merely believe, but do not know, that we are free. Most recent interpreters have downplayed Kant’s talk of freedom as a postulate in order to allow us knowledge of freedom. Willaschek, however, argues that, according to Kant, we know neither that we are subject to the moral law nor that we are free. Willaschek’s argument hinges on developing a non-factive understanding of practical cognition. Though the textual basis for this non-factive reading is somewhat limited, Willaschek’s interpretation has the significant advantage of explaining why Kant does not seem to provide an argument for the postulate of freedom (in contrast with the postulates of God and immortality), namely, that the argument was already made in the discussion of the fact of reason.
In ‘The Struggle for Freedom: Freedom of Will in Kant and Reinhold’, Paul Guyer considers the worry, presented by Henry Sidgwick and others, that Kant’s identification of the will with the source of the moral law (practical reason) makes immoral choices impossible. After arguing that the history of this worry is more complex than usually thought, Guyer argues that Kant was never vulnerable to it, since he was always committed to the distinction between the power of choice and reason as a source of principles (even if he only made the explicit distinction between Wille and Willkür in the 1790s). In support of this, Guyer points to passages in the Critique and Section II of the Groundwork where Kant emphasizes that humans do not always do as they ought to do. Section III of the Groundwork does, Guyer grants, seem to say that the moral law governs all our choices; however, Guyer argues that this is an anomaly in Kant’s writings, and that Kant drops this idea even before the end of Groundwork III. Guyer concludes by considering a striking passage in the Metaphysics of Morals where Kant states that freedom of choice (Willkür) cannot be defined as the capacity to choose for or against the law. Following a suggestion by Ameriks, Guyer suggests that Kant is merely making a point about the proper definition of freedom, not denying that we have such a capacity of radical choice.
In ‘The Practice of Self-Consciousness: Kant on Nature, Freedom, and Morality’, Dieter Sturma offers a sketch of a Kantian view that explains humans’ relation to both reasons and causes without the costs of dualist metaphysics. Sturma is particularly concerned to avoid the dualism Kant seems to invoke in the resolutions to the Antinomies in the first Critique. Drawing on the Transcendental Deduction and the ‘fact of reason’ passage in the second Critique, Sturma describes a theory of self-consciousness in which human life is defined by our being guided by reasons within the realm of causes. These reasons and causes are understood in terms of irreducible laws. Hence, Sturma takes Kant to be a nomological realist. Sturma’s brief but rich discussion raises a number of questions. To my mind, the most pressing one is why we should take the Deduction to be concerned with reasons (in the contemporary sense), though Sturma is not alone in reading it that way.
Béatrice Longuenesse’s ‘Kant’s Multiple Concepts of Person’ takes up themes closely related to those in Willaschek’s and Sturma’s chapters. She focuses on Kant’s claim in the Third Paralogism that the concept of a person is necessary and sufficient for practical use. Longuenesse suggests that this claim reflects Kant’s conviction that we must suppose ourselves to be noumenally free in order to see ourselves as morally responsible. However, she claims, this was a mistake on Kant’s part, one which stemmed from a ‘paralogism of pure practical reason’. The paralogism in question began with analytic features of the representation ‘I ought’, and illicitly draws a metaphysical conclusion. Longuenesse suggests that this is a mistaken move from a first-personal standpoint to a more objective third-personal one. Her final proposal is optimistic, however: Kant also has a notion of a person as an empirical being with self-consciousness and moral self-awareness, and this notion is one that can fare well in contemporary discussions. The case for this final point struck me as limited, however. While Kant does think empirical aspects are important to humans’ personhood, he also seems to think that personhood requires non-empirical features. These latter features would not obviously fit within many contemporary philosophical frameworks.
In ‘We are Not Alone: A Place for Animals in Kant’s Ethics’, Barbara Herman offers a subtle discussion of a difficult question: can Kant’s ethics make room for direct moral concern for non-human animals? After critically reviewing Allen Wood and Christine Korsgaard’s proposals on this topic, Herman suggests that we can take Kant’s point to be that we have a self-directed duty to maintain our natural tendency to respond to suffering as such. If we did not have a corresponding duty, Herman claims, we would become vulnerable to a certain form of moral weakness, e.g. finding it easy to discount other people’s suffering by appealing to differences between them and us. Of course, we do not naturally respond to the suffering of all non-human animals. However, Herman suggests, this is where another duty may come in with regard to the natural world. That duty, on Herman’s reading, is about finding the beauty of the world a good in itself, which lets us feel at home in the world. This then fits into what Herman sees as our primary duty, namely, to create a moral habitat for ourselves. This interpretation does not yield any simple, precise prescriptions for interactions with non-human animals, but Herman denies that we should expect anything like such prescriptions. One question for Herman would be why the duty with regard to the natural world was not sufficient on its own here, since non-human animals are part of the natural world.
Robert Pippin’s ‘The Dynamism of Reason in Kant and Hegel’ aims to identify a point of continuity between Kant and Hegel, with the hope of shedding light on Hegel’s views. Pippin claims that the notion of reflective judgement in the third Critique captures the general features of spontaneous faculties in Kant: being self-determining and purposive. For Kant, Pippin holds, reason has a thoroughly conative character, not limited to moral motivation. This dynamic character of thought, he claims, is likewise central to Hegel’s Logic. There, Pippin holds, Hegel takes the basic act of predication to be the fundamental element of making sense of anything, and Hegel proceeds by deriving content from how this act of predication self-determines. Puzzling though this sounds, he notes, this approach is not fundamentally different from Kant’s. The main difference emerges, Pippin claims, in that Hegel takes the dynamics of spontaneity to be driven by internal contradiction, whereas Kant does not. Pippin’s discussion raises interesting questions for those (like Allais, Sturma and Longuenesse) who are interested in naturalistic appropriations of Kant, since it is not obvious how the notion of a dynamic reason would fit into a naturalist framework.
The volume concludes with ‘Once Again: The End of All Things’, in which Karl Ameriks aims to shed some light on Kant’s late essay of the same name. Ameriks’ focus is Kant’s puzzling invocation of ‘noumenal duration’ there in the context of immortality. This notion appears incoherent by Kant’s own lights, since a central part of Kant’s idealism involves denying that noumena have any temporal properties. Ameriks suggests that what Kant has in mind is not a literal temporal property of noumena, but rather a fundamental, noumenal feature of people. This feature is the capacity to infinitely proceed towards greater holiness, and provides the ground for variations in a person’s phenomenal, temporal character. At the same time, Ameriks acknowledges, Kant often seems to claim more than this. He suggests that this is because Kant’s idealism was always better grounded in the case of space than in that of time.
As a whole, these essays offer a thoroughly enjoyable collection of ideas and arguments that illuminate both the richness of Kant’s thought and the many (often subtle) ways that Ameriks’ work has advanced our understanding of that richness.
