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Naturalism and Realism in Kant’s Ethics In this comprehensive assessment of Kant’s metaethics, Frederick Rauscher shows that Kant is a moral idealist rather than a moral realist and argues that Kant’s ethics does not require metaphysical commitments that go beyond nature. Rauscher frames the argument in the context of Kant’s nonnaturalistic philosophical method and the character of practical reason as action-oriented. Reason operates entirely within nature, and apparently nonnatural claims – God, free choice, and value – are shown to be heuristic and to reflect reason’s ordering of nature. The book shows how Kant hesitates between a transcendental moral idealism with an empirical moral realism and a complete moral idealism. Examining every aspect of Kant’s ethics, from the categorical imperative to freedom and value, this volume argues that Kant’s focus on human moral agency explains morality as a part of nature. It will appeal to academic researchers and advanced students of Kant, German idealism, and intellectual history. frederick rauscher is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He is the editor and co-translator of Kant: Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy (with Kenneth R. Westphal, Cambridge, 2015), co-translator of Notes and Fragments (with Paul Guyer and Curtis Bowman, Cambridge, 2005), and editor of Kant in Brazil (2012).
Naturalism and Realism in Kant’s Ethics Frederick Rauscher
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107088801 © Frederick Rauscher 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2015 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Rauscher, Frederick, 1961– Naturalism and realism in Kant’s ethics / Frederick Rauscher. – 1 [edition]. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-08880-1 (Hardback : alk. paper) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. 2. Ethics. 3. Naturalism. 4. Realism. I. Title. B2799.E8R38 2015 170.92–dc23 2015020982 ISBN 978-1-107-08880-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents Acknowledgments Citations of Kant’s writings page vi viii Introduction 1 Part I Laying the ground 7 1 Moral realism and naturalism 9 2 The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy Part II Practical reason in nature 3 The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 4 The transcendental status of empirical reason Part III Morality beyond nature? 50 79 81 107 147 5 “God” without God: the status of the postulates 149 6 From many to one to none: nonnatural free choice 180 7 Value and the inexplicability of the practical 209 Postscript: Kant’s naturalist moral idealism 241 Works cited Index 250 258 v
Acknowledgments I thank first and more than anyone else my spouse Delores and my children Konrad, Bennett, and Audrey for their love and support as I spent long days working on this book over too many years. Without their patience this book would never have been finished. This book is for them. Numerous colleagues and students have helped me to shape my ideas and I here want to particularly thank several people who most generously commented on this book as it was being drafted. Darlei Dall’Agnol pushed and prodded me into better explaining and defending my views both in conversations and through his published criticisms. I greatly benefited from conversations and exchanges with Oliver Sensen and Patrick Kain. All three of them, along with Paul Guyer, also kindly read parts of the final manuscript. Robert Louden and an anonymous reviewer for Cambridge University Press provided extensive comments that helped me to improve my presentation and arguments. I am deeply grateful to them all, as well as to those who helped me in earlier years when some of this material was published in independent papers. I am also indebted to Cambridge University Press editors Hilary Gaskin and Rosemary Crawley for their guidance in this project. I am grateful to Michigan State University for a research leave and Intermural Research Grant that allowed initial work on the book, and a sabbatical that allowed me to complete it. In between, I was grateful to have many opportunities to present my work, resulting in quite a different book than originally conceived. The Federal University of Santa Catarina, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, the Federal University of Pelotas, the Federal University of Pernambuco, the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana, the State University of Campinas, and the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Pisa University in Italy, the Philipps University in Marburg and the University of Siegen in Germany, the University of Illinois, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Western Michigan University, and Michigan State University in the United States all provided opportunities either directly or by hosting conferences for me to present this work in various stages of development. I am indebted to the many vi
Acknowledgments vii contributors to discussions at these events who have stimulated my thought and caused me to deepen my interpretation. I wish also to thank the original publishers of material reproduced here. With the exception of “‘God’ Without God”, which forms the content of Chapter 5 with little alteration, these papers have been excerpted and/or modified. In most cases, only parts of the paper are included in the book, even scattered over several chapters. Part of Chapter 4: “Freedom and Reason in Groundwork III” in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, edited by Jens Timmermann (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 203–23. Part of Chapter 2: “Why Kant’s Ethics is A Priori – and Why It Matters”, in Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants: Akten des X Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Band 3, hrsg. Valerio Rohden, Ricardo Terra, Guido de Almeida, and Margit Ruffing (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 2008), pp. 347–57. Chapter 5: “‘God’ Without God: Kant’s Postulate” Kant e-Prints Série 2, v. 2, n. 1, jan.–jun., (2007), pp. 27–62 [www.cle.unicamp. br/kant-e-prints/] Part of Chapter 4: “Reason as a Natural Cause”, in Moralische Motivation. Kant und die Alternativen, edited by Heiner F. Klemme, Manfred Kühn, and Dieter Schönecker. Reihe Kant Forschungen Band 16. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006), pp.97–110. Parts of Chapters 1 and 3: “Kant’s Moral Anti-Realism”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 477–99. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3: “Kant’s Two Priorities of Practical Reason”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 6 (3) (1998): 397–419. Parts of Chapters 2 and 4 were originally published in Portuguese as “Razão prática pura como uma faculdade natural” [“Pure Practical Reason as a Natural Faculty”], translated by Milene Consenso Tonetto, Ethic@ 5 (2006), pp. 173–192 [https://periodicos.ufsc. br/index.php/ethic/issue/view/1453] Part of Chapter 7 was originally published in Portuguese as “Os limites externos da filosofia prática e as limitações da Dedução na Fundamentação III”, translated by Kariel Giarolo, Studia Kantiana 14 (2013): 127–41 and in German as “Die äußerste Grenze aller praktischen Philosophie und die Einschränkungen der Deduktion in Grundlegung III”, in Kants Begründung von Freiheit und Moral in Grundlegung III: Neue Interpretationen edited by Dieter Schönecker, (Münster: Mentis Verlag, 2015), pp. 217–31.
Citations of Kant’s writings Quotations from Kant use the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant when available. I have modified the translation in some cases. When the material is not included in the Cambridge Edition, the translations are my own. All references will be given parenthetically in the text. References to Kant’s writings except the Critique of Pure Reason will be to their volume and page number in Kants gesammelte Schriften, 29 Vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter [and predecessors], 1902–). References to Critique of Pure Reason are taken from the edition Kritik der reinen Vernunft edited by Jens Timmermann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998) and identified by page numbers for the first and/or second editions, cited as “A” and “B”. These page numbers are given in the margins of the Cambridge translation. viii
Introduction Among the first conceptions I had of Kant’s philosophy, provided second- or third-hand when I was in college before I had studied him enough to be able to judge it, was the tale that Kant had divided the world into two separate realms, that of appearances in space and time, constituting nature, and that of things in themselves eerily existing not in space and time, constituting morality. This neat division seemed like a tidy way of dealing with the potential conflict between our moral lives and the scientific world view. As I learned more about Kant, it became clear that the ontological division was not that simple and that whatever it was, it did not map onto the nature/morality division. The proper understanding of these issues became a lasting puzzle. This book is an attempt to solve that puzzle by showing what morality is and just how nature and morality relate to one another in Kant. I have two main goals. The first is to show that Kant’s ethics is fully compatible with a metaphysical naturalism, meaning that no property or entity outside of empirically real nature in space and time is needed. The second is to determine the extent to which Kant is a moral realist, which can be decided only through a detailed look at the nature of Kant’s ethics and its specific elements. I will conclude that the most plausible interpretation is that Kant is a moral idealist (the term I prefer to “anti-realist” or “constructivist”) rather than a realist, although given the resources in his philosophy, he could have been a realist in a limited sense. Part One, “Laying the Ground,” sets the stage for the detailed assessment by providing definitions of metaphysical naturalism and moral realism and by showing how ethics fits into Kant’s philosophical project as a whole. This part is crucial for the overall project because it assesses the inadequacy of some ways of approaching realism and naturalism, and provides an explanation for the particular approach I take. The review of Kant’s philosophical project importantly shows the way in which transcendental philosophy allows for a metaphysical naturalism and the way in which the claims of practical reason are prima facie not ontological. While some readers are familiar with these basic positions, the details and conclusions I draw here bear specifically on the particular topics in later chapters and form the foundation of their arguments. 1
2 Introduction Chapter 1 provides a definition of realism in terms of the independence of some moral principles, properties, or objects from the moral agent. I argue that this is a better definition for use in assessing Kant than one focused on the truth of moral claims because the real issue between realists and idealists is not whether Kant’s morality claims objective validity but how to understand Kant’s a priori moral law, the nature of practical reason, and autonomy in relation to moral agency. I treat moral agency in two ways: as actual agents in nature (empirical) and as the necessary conditions for the possibility of any moral agent at all (that I label “transcendental” in reference to the transcendental method of justification). This distinction allows for Kant to be both an idealist and a realist at different levels, and provides the complexity necessary to resolve the multi-faceted issue. I then turn to naturalism, which is divided into methodological and metaphysical naturalism. The former would claim that the only proper methodologies for finding knowledge are those of the natural sciences; Kant rejects this in light of his use of a priori concepts and his transcendental method. I explain metaphysical naturalism, which claims that the only entities that exist are those determined by the natural sciences, in relation to Kant’s own conception of nature as consisting of matter studied by physics (and less strictly also by chemistry and biology) and thinking nature studied by empirical psychology (and related disciplines). A metaphysically naturalistic Kantian ethics would hold that nothing beyond the entities in space and time, physical and mental, is needed for morality. The chapter concludes with a list of the eight elements of Kant’s ethics that need to be assessed as realist or idealist: particular ends, particular duties, absolute value, the highest good and the postulates, moral obligation, the moral law itself, pure practical reason, and free choice. Thus, the task of the remainder of the book is to assess these elements in terms of the transcendental and empirical levels of realism and the possible limitation to nature in space and time. Chapter 2 examines the nature of Kant’s philosophy overall in order to place morality in its proper context and show how that framework affects realism and naturalism. I note that Kant insists that philosophy aims at systematically organized cognitions, with the overall aim at the essential ends of human reason. Each part requires a domain and further subdivision into parts in accordance with a system. I look at several broad divisions of philosophy in Kant – critique/system, pure/empirical cognition, and theoretical/practical, and note how they interrelate. I show how the method of transcendental argument provides Kant with a general way to defend ethical claims without resorting to a non-natural metaphysics. Transcendental argument justifies the use of a priori cognitions by cognizers in nature as part of their empirical cognitive systems. In looking at various ways to construe the theoretical/practical distinction, I show that the domain for practical philosophy is free acts understood from the perspective of agents engaged in deliberation. With these foundational issues settled, the detailed work can begin.
Introduction 3 Part Two, “Reason in Nature,” focuses on practical reason to show that reason can exist within nature, and within the empirical minds of empirical moral agents. The elements of Kant’s ethics that are tied directly to reason’s systematization of free acts through the moral law, I show, are fully explainable within nature. Practical reason functions in action to guide behavior and to that extent, operates independently of any concerns for ontological commitments. Human beings experience the obligatory force of the moral law for finite rational beings in the guise of the categorical imperative when engaged in the actual process of deliberation before action. Practical reason is itself part of nature as an empirical faculty of mind that would be validated through transcendental argument, and in this way, empirical reason is the timeless transcendentally free faculty that causes agents’ actions. This aspect of Kant’s ethics would allow for transcendental idealism and empirical realism. In Chapter 3, I note that Kant worked with two different conceptions of the priority of practical reason. His direct discussion of primacy gives a strong role to theoretical reason in confirming metaphysical demands of the practical in what I call “the priority of belief.” In many other places, however, Kant also insists on an independence of the moral agent in practice from any theoretical concerns. I call this independence of moral action from theoretical concerns “the priority of action.” I take this latter to express the genuine priority of practical reason as guiding moral agents in deliberation for free acts – what ought to be – without concern for ontological claims – what is. These points together culminate in my interpretation of the fact of reason as the actual awareness of the categorical imperative in empirical agents, providing a ground for the practical perspective that would need to be defended using transcendental analysis. I see the fact of reason more as an act of reason in prescribing the moral law to agents during deliberation as a categorical imperative. This provides a metaphysically naturalistic aspect of morality that is also strongly idealist. I regard Chapter 4 as the key chapter in the book. I show that pure practical reason, as the source of the moral law, is the most important element in Kant’s ethics. I take seriously Kant’s claims that reason is a cause, and even a natural cause, by identifying an empirical faculty of reason that would be part of the natural ontology provided by a robust empirical psychology. This faculty of reason is also a timeless transcendentally free cause, as Kant stresses in the Third Antinomy, in virtue of its unchanging structure that produces the categorical imperative to systematize free acts, themselves understood as decisions by the empirical power of choice determined within nature by empirical reason. Such a view is transcendentally idealist, since the validity of the moral law is justified as a product of reason, which itself constitutes the very possibility of any moral agent at all, and simultaneously, an empirically real view, since reason and its laws would be valid independent of each and every actual empirical agent. I note that Kant falls short of endorsing this view
4 Introduction when he denies that the moral law can be subject to a transcendental deduction and when he limits his claim to the practical point of view. Kant would then be an empirical moral idealist about reason and the status of the moral law. The final part of the book, “Morality Beyond Nature?,” looks at God, free choice, and absolute value. These elements of Kant’s ethics represent apparently non-natural entities or properties and cannot be understood in the same metaphysically naturalistic way that reason itself can, that is, they cannot be an actual part of nature operating as the empirically real manifestation of the transcendental conditions of moral agency. Instead, I show that God and free choice have a role through the postulates that comprehends them as concepts created by reason without reference to the purported non-natural object or property but only with an immanent reference as aids to moral action. I argue that value for Kant cannot be an independent property of objects either within or outside nature, but is merely a part of the order imposed on nature by practical reason. I then link that order back to the status of practical reason itself. Chapter 5 argues that Kant’s conception of a postulate has much more in common with the general nature of ideas of reason than it does with any claim to existence. I trace Kant’s development of the notion of a postulate along with the similar notions of transcendental hypothesis, idea of reason, and belief. I show that the idea of the highest good has no ontological implications of its own and focus on the postulate of God, since the same solution will also hold of the postulate of immortality. The postulate of God, I show, is supposed to have immanent reference, that is, to empirical agents’ moral lives, rather than transcendent reference, that is, to a being in itself. In the practical point of view, empirical moral agents operate with the concept of God for certain purposes but relate it only to the ought, not to the is. Chapter 6 assesses the most difficult problem for a naturalist interpretation of Kant ethics: freedom of the will as the freedom of the power of choice in making a decision uncaused by anything in nature. I have two strategies in this chapter. I first show that Kant insists that free choice is needed for two reasons related to ought-implies-can and moral responsibility. Both reasons require only one non-natural choice, not a multitude as some commentators prefer. This single timeless choice of the entirety of one’s phenomenal character is the best interpretation of his claims about freedom, timelessness, distinct causality, and the intelligible character in relation to free choice. While still unnatural, it is at least the minimal non-natural interpretation. Second, I argue that stressing the status of freedom as a postulate, which Kant himself does not, allows for a naturalistic interpretation of this choice as a concept merely playing a heuristic role in moral life. The final chapter moves from value in particular to the status of the practical point of view, or moral experience more broadly, in general. I reject the possibility of any non-natural, intrinsic value property and instead show that
Introduction 5 the value of humanity as an end in itself is nothing more than the highest rank in the order of ends that reason imposes on nature through the categorical imperative. The intelligible order of things is not an order of intelligible things but a rational ordering of natural things. I draw together Kant’s various discussions of this direct application of the moral law to experience as a moral world. This is the way that practical reason applies to nature within the practical point of view. Culminating this chapter is a look at the limits to practical reason that Kant reveals in Groundwork III, where he admits that reason’s own structure that requires both systematic connection and unconditional explanation is responsible for the claim that there is a necessary moral law, and holds, in language similar to that of the Third Antinomy, that reason, the source of morality, is itself ultimately incomprehensible. In a postscript, I review the particular assessments I made regarding the eight elements of Kant’s moral theory laid out in Chapter 1. I pull together the features of my interpretation of Kant as a metaphysical naturalist. The various claims about transcendental and empirical realism and idealism are arranged into their basic sets and the core interpretive points that ground the main disagreement set out. I have identified a Kantian transcendental moral idealism that is also an empirical realism, thus dissolving some of the realist/constructivist disagreement. I show, however, that Kant is himself hesitant to endorse this transcendental validity for morality and, particularly in light of the priority of the practical point of view as an agent-perspective rational ordering of nature with no ontological claims of its own, that the more appropriate conclusion is that Kant was an empirical moral idealist. A brief word about my methodological approach. I am not providing a strictly exegetical work. There are passages in Kant’s writings that are inconsistent with elements of my interpretation, but I would argue that the same is true of all interpretations of Kant given his own inconsistent use of terminology and the diverse contexts in which he applies the same terms. The purpose of this book is not merely historical but is aimed at assessing Kant’s ethics in light of twenty-first century concerns about naturalism and realism. My work is reconstructive in that I pursue the philosophical implications of Kant’s positions to sometimes make connections that Kant himself does not explicitly make. I believe that all of my claims are consistent with Kant’s general philosophical aims, methods, arguments, and conclusions, and nearly always with his particular stated positions. Given the novelty of Kant’s philosophy, the complexity of the issues he raises, the vast range of his project, the transformations of some of his positions over time, and above all, the requirement of the interpreter to go beyond merely quoting texts in order to explain a great philosopher’s work in ways relevant to the present, no comprehensive interpretation can offer more than that.
Part I Laying the ground
1 Moral realism and naturalism My study aims at providing an interpretation of Kant’s ethics that cuts across the issues of realism and naturalism. I see these two issues as closely connected. One cannot resolve the question of whether and to what extent Kant was a moral realist without resolving questions about the metaphysical status of the elements of Kant’s ethics. These elements, such as the status of reason itself, the nature of value, and freedom of the will, relate to the conception Kant has of the limits of human experience and legitimate claims that go beyond experience. This concern in turn raises the issue of nature as a limit for experience. Whether ethics goes beyond nature is in this way tied to the issue of realism. The reverse is also true: When asking about whether Kant’s ethics is compatible with naturalism, one has to start with a conception of nature in Kant and then turn to the particular elements. One would expect that anything in nature would count as real for Kant, and on the empirical level, that is true of objects and of mental states and faculties. Questions arise, however, about how to place in nature the distinctive perspective of the practical and its distinctive role in determining what ought to be rather than what is. And since Kant also invokes a transcendental level of analysis, some elements of the experience moral beings have in nature might be ideal in the same sense that space and time and the categories are ideal. A detailed understanding of what might be real and what ideal, and in what senses, will help to resolve the issue about whether morality requires more than is available in nature. Both the term “naturalism” and the term “moral realism” need to be specified and adapted to the peculiarities of Kant’s philosophy. Contemporary philosophical work on these issues does not always approach these issues in a way amenable to Kant’s critical philosophy. Kant’s different conceptions of the sciences and his transcendental idealism inform his understanding of nature. His use of the terms “realism” and “idealism” in both empirical and transcendental senses, and the very nature of his critical philosophy as largely subject-centered, do not easily map onto discussions of realism in terms of objective facts or empirical properties of human nature. My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, I will provide an analysis of definitions of moral realism and nonrealism with a focus on how well they 9
10 Laying the ground can account for the peculiarities of Kant’s general philosophical approach. I use the term “nonrealism” to capture all alternatives to moral realism until their particular characteristics are defined in this chapter. The analysis of realism I adopt stresses the independence of elements of morality from moral agency as such; I contrast realism with idealism. I examine the transcendental and empirical levels of realism and idealism in Kant and show where my approach differs from the typical emphases in constructivism. Second, I will examine the meaning of “naturalism”. I stress that my aim is limited to showing that Kant’s ethics is compatible with a metaphysical naturalism, understood in Kant’s own terms as including both the physical and the mental. He rejects methodological naturalism. In fact, his methodological antinaturalism will play an important role in my interpretation. Third, I will identify the particular elements of Kant’s moral theory that can be interpreted as real or ideal, natural or nonnatural. This taxonomy will illuminate the point that inquiring whether Kant is a moral realist or naturalist is not a simple yes-or-no question. On different levels and about different elements, Kant holds realist as well as idealist views. Further, by highlighting particular issues, this taxonomy will push the debate beyond mere terminology to the concrete differences among Kant interpreters. Defining moral realism and moral idealism Philosophy over the past three decades has included extensive discussion of the nature of moral realism and its alternatives.1 The issue entered the Kantian literature with John Rawls’ John Dewey Lectures in April 1980, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory”,2 which also introduced the term “constructivism” into the literature on Kant’s practical philosophy.3 Rawls’ intention was not simply to provide an interpretation of Kant’s ethics along constructivist lines but mainly to present Kantian constructivism as a general moral theory alongside utilitarianism, intuitionism, and perfectionism.4 Kant commentators 1 2 3 4 Some of the earliest contributions to the debate are collected in (Sayre-McCord 1988a). My discussion will invoke contributions to the debate about moral realism in general only when doing so is useful for understanding the particular debate within Kant circles. The Dewey Lectures were published in (Rawls 1980) and reprinted in (Rawls 1999b, pp. 303–58). Larry Krasnoff traces the first use of the term “constructive” in moral theory to a review by Ronald Dworkin in 1973 (reprinted in [Dworkin 1978, pp. 150–83]) of John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice. Rawls did not use the term “constructivism” in A Theory of Justice but soon adopted it to describe his own theory. See (Krasnoff 1999). Since constructivism was introduced by Rawls, one might think that it can be applied in political philosophy in addition to moral theory. In this book, I exclude directly political principles in favor of moral ones, broadly speaking. For work on the political use of constructivism, which draws more directly on Rawls’ own work in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism rather
Moral realism and naturalism 11 soon took up this suggestion with greater or lesser attention to historical claims about Kant’s own theory.5 Since that time, Kant commentators have almost exclusively characterized the discussion of the question of moral realism as a choice between the alternatives of moral realism and moral constructivism, effectively lumping together all possible nonrealist interpretations of Kant as constructivist. While doing so, these same commentators have generally bemoaned the lack of specificity of the term “constructionism” and have attempted to define or refine it using various taxonomies they present. Rarely do these taxonomies match precisely; still more rarely do they cross-reference or incorporate one another. The result is that much philosophically interesting work on the issue of moral realism in Kant is scattered in individual articles in isolation from one another. Moral realism is one of those issues about which philosophers spend much of their time simply defining the terms of the debate. There is no clear consensus on what “realism” actually means, and many acknowledge that that the meaning of “realism” has shifted along with the philosophical tide.6 According to this last view, some theories which would have counted as antirealist fifty or hundred years ago would count as realist today. Even this admission seems too optimistic since it assumes that there is a general consensus at any given time. A popular definition Two problems beset the task of defining moral realism. One is that various metaethical theories differ in their interpretation of key terms such as “truth” and “validity”, “objective” and “subjective”, “obligatory” and “permissible”. Disagreement about these key terms allows various different theories to claim to present moral realist positions although they vary widely with one another. The debate over moral realism also suffers from the connotation of one of the central terms of the debate: “antirealism”. As an “anti”, the latter connotes that one is opposed to some positive claim rather than that one is giving a positive claim of one’s own. In ethics, this tendency is exaggerated by the moral import of the terms involved. To deny moral realism seems to imply a lessening of the claims or values of morality itself. For this reason, I and others prefer the more 5 6 than his particular interpretation of Kant, see (O’Neill 2002), (O’Neill 2003), (Bagnoli 2014), and (Kaufman 2012). Two of the earliest Kant commentators to employ the language and method of constructivism are Thomas Hill (Hill 1989) and Onora O’Neill (O’Neill 1989). They were soon followed by the most influential constructivist after Rawls, Christine Korsgaard (Korsgaard 1996b). The intense debate about moral realism in Kant began in the wake of Korsgaard’s book. See, for example, (Railton 1996).
12 Laying the ground positive-sounding term “idealism” and still other theorists, “constructivism” over “antirealism”. These two problems are highlighted by a famous illustration of this bias toward supporting moral realism. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord suggests that one might want to be able to say that “the Nazis were really bad”, but might feel unable to make such a strong claim without a theory of moral realism behind one.7 Moral idealism is then saddled with the burden of being implicitly equated with a rejection of any kind of validity to moral claims. An analogous claim regarding objects would illustrate the fallacy in this attitude: A traditional early modern realist about objects might be one who holds to the existence of objects independent of human perception of them; a traditional idealist about objects might hold that objects are nothing more than collections of sense data. Someone who rejected idealism about objects on the grounds that it really cannot be about objects would simply be begging the question about the definition of “object”, as if the idealist were denying the existence of objects entirely rather than identifying them as collections of sense data. In the same way, someone who thinks that saying that the Nazis were really bad requires moral realism is begging the question about the definition of “bad”. A moral idealist can easily make essentially the same claim as “the Nazis were really bad” when the claim is stated in some non-question begging sense such as “bad without qualification”. Sayre-McCord himself offers a definition of moral realism that has gained traction. He claims that “realism involves embracing just two theses: (1) the claims in question, when literally construed, are literally true or false (cognitivism), and (2) some are literally true”.8 Many recent Kant commentators writing on the issue of moral realism either use his definition or assess one much like it, generally critically.9 According to his definition, a theory is not realist if it either (a) denies cognitivism, in which case it is some kind of noncognitivist theory, or (b) denies that there are any moral truths, in which case it is some kind of error theory. As these commentators note, Sayre-McCord’s definition does not adequately capture the crux of the debate regarding Kant’s metaethics. Prima facie, Kant is neither a noncognitivist nor an error theorist. Constructivists and other nonrealists allow that in Kant there are moral claims that bear truth or falsity. Under this definition, they would count as realist theories. Sayre-McCord’s 7 8 9 (Sayre-McCord 1988b, p.1) credits the illustration to Philip Gasper. Sayre-McCord does not take the illustration to be more than a caricature and subsequently discusses ways that nonrealism can capture moral condemnation. It is still useful as a caricature. (Sayre-McCord 1988b, p. 5). Paul Formosa (Formosa 2013) and I (Rauscher 2002) cite Sayre-McCord’s definition directly. Others who also note that this sort of definition does not really settle the issue of realism and idealism include Jochen Bojanowski (Bojanowski 2012), and Sharon Street (Street 2010).
Moral realism and naturalism 13 definition casts too wide a net. It makes every single possible moral theory that allows for moral truth into a realist theory. It co-opts the use of truth claims in a moral theory so that any kind of nonrealist theory is seen to deny validity to morality. Using the analogy with realist and idealist definitions of objects again, both the traditional realist and idealist hold that there are truths about objects, yet they have quite different conceptions of what those objects are. Similarly, a moral realist and a moral nonrealist can hold that there are moral truths, yet they can have quite different conceptions of what constitutes the bearer of those truths. Roughly speaking, the kind of definition Sayre-McCord provides equates “real” with “true” and places the fault line between moral realism and moral idealism precisely atop the fault line between acceptance and denial of moral truth. Kantians should be skeptical that this perfect correspondence does justice to Kant’s theory, which, incorporates transcendental idealism yet affirms moral truth. Sharon Street phrases this point with regard to constructivism in general: “if we understand realism this way, then metaethical constructivism counts as a brand of realism – as indeed do an extremely wide range of views, including even a simple subjectivism according to which what’s good for a person is whatever that person thinks is good”.10 She is right to stress the overextension of the term “realism” to any moral theory that offers some criterion for truth. In particular, if Kant has a theory of moral truth that can be understood as subject-dependent, perhaps even only dependent upon a certain kind of activity of subjects, then it would be peculiar to count his theory as realist although it would contain a criterion for judging certain moral claims as true or false. The basis of the truth or falsity would seem to make a great deal of difference in our view of whether a theory should count as real. This kind of definition of realism centered on truth claims is more suited to consequentialist than Kantian moral theories. Because consequentialists hold to the priority of the good over the right, they tend to take moral facts primarily as facts about some good to be attained rather than some formal laws of right; for a consequentialist, the content of laws that express right is derived from the conception of the good to be attained. One can picture how accepting the truth value of claims about the good can make one a realist in a more metaphysical sense by noting that goods are taken to be independent of the belief that they are good; those who deny this independence are expressivists and those who deny that there are any goods are error theorists. Right, on the other hand, has a more ambiguous connection to belief. It is possible to conceive of moral agents who are so constituted that, in a roughly Kantian way, their practical cognitive 10 (Street 2010, p. 370).
14 Laying the ground faculty both produces the moral law as rational and produces belief in it. The truth value of the moral facts, here the criterion for right, would not be independent of rational belief in moral agents. This kind of Kantian view would open up space between the denial of the truth of some moral facts (expressivism and error theory) and the affirmation of moral facts on some independent basis. Thus, consequentialists might be more inclined to be satisfied with the kind of definition that Sayre-McCord offered while Kantians ought to be skeptical of its value. A better definition In order to move beyond this problem, a conception of the proper division between realism and nonrealism more appropriate for Kantians should include a metaphysical dimension, as some Kant interpreters recognize.11 I offer the following definitions that are more appropriate for Kantian ethics: Moral realism: The moral principles, properties, or objects of the world are independent of the transcendental or empirical moral agent. Moral nonrealism: The moral principles, properties, or objects of the world are dependent upon the transcendental or empirical moral agent.12 11 12 Paul Formosa labels realism that excludes only noncognitivists and error theorists a “weak sense of moral realism” that “amounts to nothing more than a claim about the truth of some moral judgments” in contrast to a “strong realism” that holds that what makes the moral judgments true or false is “an independent moral order” (Formosa 2013, p. 172). The weak sense of moral realism accords with the kind I have just criticized. Formosa is correct in noting the need for a stronger, more meaningful sense of moral realism. This “strong sense” requires ontological independence. Richard Boyd offers a definition that identifies a requirement for independence from “our moral opinions, theories, etc”. and also claims that ordinary moral reasoning is a reliable method for obtaining moral knowledge (Boyd 1988, p. 182). The difficulty with Boyd’s definition is the vagueness included in his “etc.”. Allen Wood alludes to Boyd’s definition in his first book on Kant’s ethics as “the most agreed-upon sense” of the term “moral realism” (Wood 1999, pp. 157, 374, n. 4) but claims (quite emphatically) in his second book on Kant’s ethics that he does not endorse Boyd’s own type of “Cornell Realism” as the proper way to construe realism in conformity with that definition (Wood 2008, p. 295, n. 8). I offered a similar set of definitions in (Rauscher 2002, p. 482). There I used the term “moral idealism” while here I use “moral nonrealism”; the latter term broadens the definition’s scope to include anyone who rejects moral truth such as error theorists and expressivists. I will focus my argument on idealism as I proceed. I also used the term “moral characteristic” while here I am clearer in using “moral principle, property, or object”, the original intent of the former term; there is no change in meaning accompanying this clarification in terminology. Finally, I formerly used the term “human mind” while here I say “transcendental or empirical moral agent”; this change is intended to allow for the different levels of realism or nonrealism at the empirical and transcendental levels and reflects a shift in my analysis over the past decade. I am very grateful to Darlei Dall’Agnol for his criticisms of my earlier approach and for many discussions in which we have attempted to find the best Kantian position on moral realism. Some of his concerns are in (Dall’Agnol 2012b) and are discussed in my reply (Rauscher 2012).
Moral realism and naturalism 15 These definitions define the difference as metaphysical since both the term “moral principle, property, or object” and the relation of “independence” are metaphysical. Very roughly, they are intended to put the onus on the moral nonrealist to prove that there are no essentially moral principles, properties, or objects, or if one wants to phrase it differently, no moral truth that would correspond to any principle, property, or object, such that the principle, property, or object would be a part of the cosmos were moral agents qua moral subjects not to exist. By “nonrealism” I mean all possible alternatives to moral realism, including expressivism, error theory, the constructivist views that are not realist, and idealism, to be explained later in this chapter. A moral principle, property, or object is not the same as a principle, property, or object required for morality. The difference between a moral principle, property, or object and a principle, property, or object required for morality is that the latter consists of principles, properties, or objects which are not solely moral, the former of principles, properties, or objects which are solely moral. Moral principles, properties, or objects are to be understood as exclusively involving moral normativity or value. For example, the human mind may be an object required for morality, but because it can play a role in other areas not pertaining to moral normativity or value, such as theories of qualia, it is not a moral object. An individual’s being good, however, is a moral property, since this characterization can play no role except in situations involving moral normativity or value or those derivative upon it such as descriptions of morally good persons. For definitional purposes, moral properties and objects are not limited to a particular metaphysics. As examples of moral principles, properties, or objects, consider the following: Good, evil, bad, rightness, wrongness, justice, value, moral law. As examples of principles, properties, or objects required for morality, consider the following: The existence of minds, pragmatic or technical means–ends principles, and so on. Of course, particular moral theories might differ regarding which specific principles, properties, or objects are solely moral rather than more general principles, properties, or objects, and whether the solely moral principles, properties, or objects are separable from the more general principles, properties, or objects. In Kant, we might legitimately question whether freedom of the will, agent causality, or the existence of God count as moral properties or objects or as simply properties or objects required for morality. I will treat them as moral properties or objects and include them in my arguments in this book. The term “independent” invokes a metaphysical separation between the moral agent qua agent and whatever moral principles, properties, or objects are at issue. I do not intend to hold that the moral principles, properties, or objects are to be independent of all moral agents in existence but rather independent of the individual moral agent or particular type of moral agent
16 Laying the ground (to be specified) as a moral subject. There is no quick route to idealism through a claim that morality depends upon the existence of any moral beings at all. Thus, if moral agents themselves were to have independent intrinsic value as objects of consideration for a moral agent who is the subject facing a moral decision, that value would be real because it would be independent of the moral agent qua subject. Similarly, if moral value were to reside in satisfaction of desires for moral agents in general and that moral value had a justification beyond simply moral agents considering satisfaction of their own desires to be good, the value of desire satisfaction would be real. Because moral agents are not passive, dependence on mental activity is included.13 This emphasis on moral agents qua subjects rather than objects is extremely important for a Kantian theory that places much weight on the practical point of view or the structure of moral agency. A divine command theory or any theory that grounded moral laws on something independent of moral agents would be realist on this account, as would any theory that held that there are values independent of moral agents’ acts of valuation or capacity of valuation. A moral theory that depended solely on contingent facts about particular persons, such as a theory referenced in the quote from Street earlier that the good for a person is merely whatever that person happens to think is good for her, would not count as realist. An error theory would be nonrealist because it denies that there are any moral principles, properties, or objects. I use the phrase “transcendental or empirical moral agent” in order to invoke two possible levels of assessment of moral agency. The transcendental moral agent would be the subject of an assessment of the conditions for moral agency as such. In Kant, such an assessment would be transcendental, in other kinds of theories conceptual. The description of the transcendental moral agent would be valid for all possible moral agents. The empirical moral agent would be the subject of an assessment of the particular mental structure of human and similar beings as moral agents. This approach, which looks not at a 13 Jochen Bojanowski cites my earlier definition but claims that his “moral idealism”, which he takes to be a third alternative between moral realism and moral antirealism in Kant, does not utilize the sense of dependence he sees in my definition”. The idealism I want to ascribe to Kant holds not that the good depends on the human mind, but that its existence depends on selfaffection in human cognizers” (Bojanowski 2012, p. 4). I hope that my clarification here adequately shows that, as I had always intended and as is clear from the position I detail in my earlier paper, the kind of dependence on the human mind can include mental activity such as decision-making, reflection, and self-affection. Bojanowski hints in the claim quoted here that he might mean that the meaning of the term ‘good’ is dependent upon something besides the human mind while the existence of good depends upon self-affection; because he does not utilize semantic terminology, this attribution is speculative. Later in his article, he holds that practical cognition precedes normative facts, which implies that the meaning of the term “good” is also the result of practical activity (Bojanowski 2012, p. 13).
Moral realism and naturalism 17 transcendental moral agent but at a humanlike agent in particular, is empirically informed, including facts about the existence or types of desires, the actual capabilities of the agent such as a capacity for free choice amid various possible determinants of action, the access the mind has to any moral facts, and so on. This approach is both empirical and conceptual in Kant in the application of practical principles and ideas that are not derived empirically. It is not the equivalent of anthropology. The description of the empirical moral agent in Kant would be valid only for moral agents sharing the particular moral characterization at issue. Of course, at the empirical level, moral agents may instantiate the transcendental moral agent, but whether they do, what the latter consists of, and precisely what the relationship between them is depends upon the nature of Kant’s transcendental/empirical distinction (to be discussed later on) and the success of particular philosophical arguments. The scope of the “empirical” agent in my argument is essentially restricted to “humanlike” and should be taken to refer to the relevant characterization of the moral nature of human beings, not to similarity to human beings in morally irrelevant ways. In Kant, a humanlike moral agent could be defined roughly as a finitely rational being capable of a pursuit of happiness, conscious of the categorical imperative, and capable of choosing between following that imperative or not. From now on, I will use the terms “human moral agent” and “empirical moral agent” to refer to all humanlike beings. I stress the human moral agent in order to emphasize that dependence upon some particular type of existing moral agent is at issue. A comparison with more general mental features is useful. Some features of the human mind14 such as the ability to sense only a particular portion of the electromagnetic spectrum are certainly contingent and not a necessary feature of universal sensibility; other organisms can see ultraviolet light or respond to magnetic fields. Kant holds that space and time must be considered dependent in some way on the human mind and are not conditions for experience for all possible minds. Arguably, a similar variation is possible in theory with regard to mental processes more closely related to morality. Supposing that various other types of mental organization were differently instantiated in different species – and here one must imagine something like a mind without memories or one determined immediately by emotion – the particular parts of that mental organization that were unique to one species might, on some theories, ground moral truth for 14 Human moral agents would have human minds. When I use the term “mind”, I do not intend to invoke any Cartesian substance; rather, I intend to be agnostic about the true nature of minds. At the same time, I limit this to the human mind as we generally experience it and conceive of it. If it were to turn out that the true nature of human minds were that they are parts of God’s mind, a resulting morality could be realist. I take this possibility as incompatible with Kant’s theory.
18 Laying the ground them.15 Were there some general theory that showed that only one type of mental organization could possibly exist, or that morality could be grounded only in some particular core of mental functions that all possible moral agents must exhibit, then those moral principles, properties, or objects would be characteristic of both the empirical human and the transcendental moral agent. To prove this identity is Kant’s goal. The aforementioned discussion makes clear an error in equating realism with objectivity. Objectivity can coincide with nonrealism provided that the minds in question are all structured in such a way that they necessarily produce the same ideas. An analogy can be made with the question of color perception. Simply because our color qualia may be ideal and phenomenal colors may not inhere in objects independent of the human mind, does not mean that the color qualia we perceive are not objective. There might be some necessary causal connection between our physical sensations and our mental perceptions. We might have a particular mental faculty which provides for the objectivity. This objectivity is nonetheless not universal for all possible sensible beings but restricted to beings with the particular kind of physical and mental constitution we have. This objectivity lacks a transcendental foundation. For morality, objectivity can be preserved even when nonrealism is accepted, provided that the theory explains how the structure of the human moral agent dictates that all humans share the same moral properties and objects at the empirical level or how the structure of 15 As an example of this kind of variation, consider Sharon Street’s ants (Street 2012, pp. 53–54). She supposes for the sake of argument that a species of intelligent, conscious ants could exist. Because of the complex genetic relationships among ants, all female ants share seventy-five percent of their genetic code with one another while only one, the queen, is able to reproduce. There are relatively few male ants. Survival of the colony relies on individual ants sacrificing themselves to protect the queen to ensure the existence of future generations. Street imagines that a female worker ant would exhibit a value system to reflect these facts, valuing the survival of the queen above her own survival and not seeing herself as intrinsically valuable. Street offers this as a counterexample to the Korsgaardian/Kantian claim that all reflective beings who are capable of valuing anything must value themselves as ends in themselves. I take this example to illustrate my point that some kind of organism with a sufficiently different kind of nature could have a different kind of moral system. I would like to make two observations about this thought-experiment. First, it is extremely unlikely that such intelligent ants, or similarly genetically related social beings with the same behavioral patterns, would evolve. Such complex intelligence in animals requires a great deal of investment in the rearing of offspring and a great deal of relative mass devoted to the brain. Given the costs of producing and maintaining a functioning intelligent adult, it would be nearly impossible for a species to mass-produce them to such an extent that they could be easily expendable in such menial ways as providing a live bridge for others of her kind. Still, as Street notes, the point is not the plausibility of such a species actually evolving but the fact that the conceivability of the species provides a counterexample to Korsgaard’s argument that all creatures capable of valuing must value themselves the most. Second, it is interesting to note that human beings sometimes think the same way that Street’s ants do. Soldiers or others who willingly sacrifice themselves for their nation are a case in point. This puzzling kind of altruism, which cannot be explained either as inclusive fitness (near genetic relations such as offspring or cousins) or as reciprocal altruism appears to have no genetic basis. For an attempt to explain such behavior, see (Kitcher 1993).
Moral realism and naturalism 19 the transcendental moral agent dictates that all possible moral agents share the same moral properties and objects at the transcendental level. Transcendental and empirical realism The term “realism” in Kant has a vital twofold significance largely overlooked in the realism debate: Kant’s distinction between, on the one hand, transcendental idealism or realism and on the other hand, empirical idealism or realism. This distinction does not appear in the contemporary general debate about realism in moral theory because it applies to Kantian but not consequentialist theories. Most of contemporary Kantian ethics does not even employ Kant’s transcendental/empirical distinction, presumably taking it to be an ontological claim about the real versus apparent nature of objects that is not relevant to ethics beyond a discredited theory of free will. These Kantian moral theorists appropriate Kant’s discussion of a practical point of view without linking it to transcendental idealism. Interpreters of Kant’s own moral theory who operate without the distinction have incomplete models of Kant’s moral realism or idealism.16 In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant differentiates between the transcendental and empirical senses of realism and idealism. The four resulting possibilities – transcendental idealism, transcendental realism, empirical idealism, and empirical realism – work roughly as follows in relation to space: Transcendental idealism is the claim that all objects in space are mere appearances and not things as they are in themselves because the space in which they exist is only a form of our intuition. Transcendental idealism allows objects to be empirically real, that is, directly knowable by the empirical subject in an objective order in space. Transcendental realism holds that space is something given in itself independent of human intuition and hence, that things as they are in themselves are spatial. But this transcendental realism leads to empirical idealism, that is, that empirical objects in space are not directly accessible to the empirical mind because space exists independently of human intuition (B69–71, A369–70). Kant, of course, is a transcendental idealist with regard to time as well as space. The transcendental ideality of space and time means that objects as they are in themselves are not spatiotemporal and cannot be experienced by human beings, who are limited to experiences provided in intuition. Human beings are able to know only appearances, that is, empirically real objects. But the possibility that other objects exist that are not spatiotemporal remains. 16 This criticism holds for my earlier work as well (Rauscher 2002), but I do approach the transcendental/empirical distinction without a comprehensive treatment in (Rauscher 2006b) and with a better but still incomplete treatment in (Rauscher 2006a).
20 Laying the ground Kant’s argument for the transcendental ideality of space is given through a transcendental exposition of the concept of space as a basis for the a priori truths of geometry (B40–41). To be able to function as the basis for a priori truth in geometry, space as an outer intuition “has its seat merely in the subject”. Similar reasoning holds for the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding: They are held to have their transcendental ground as necessary conditions for the synthetic unity of apperception (B159–60). Transcendental idealism thus takes these crucial formal features of experience to depend upon the subject in a transcendental but not empirical sense. The transcendental/empirical distinction is relevant for morality because we can take certain aspects of experience like objects in space to be dependent upon the transcendental subject although they are in some sense independent of the empirical subject. There is use for this distinction in practical philosophy. Just as objects in space are really independent of the subject in an empirical sense but dependent on the subject in a transcendental sense, there might be moral principles, properties, or objects that are really independent of the moral agent in an empirical sense but dependent on the moral agent in a transcendental sense, making Kant an empirical moral realist but a transcendental moral idealist. Or some moral principles, properties, or objects might be transcendentally real, that is, entirely independent of the transcendental moral agent, in which case, Kant would be a transcendental moral realist.17 For this overall transcendental/empirical distinction to work in practical philosophy, the concept of empirical experience, or the everyday experience of human beings, must be understood to have a practical dimension in addition to the theoretical dimension provided in the analytic of the first Critique. Given Kant’s interest in anthropology as a natural level at which we can understand human beings as moral beings, a practical dimension of experience in Kant is at hand. Kant discusses our consciousness of ourselves as moral in relation to our moral predisposition in the Anthropology (7:324). Even in the less obviously empirical works, Kant discusses everyday moral experience. He begins the Groundwork by invoking common moral cognition or beliefs actually held 17 One might be further tempted to conclude that a transcendental moral realist would have to be an empirical moral idealist, in which case, some moral principles, properties, or objects would be not directly known in experience. As with Kant’s claim that with regard to objects in space, a transcendental realist ends up as an empirical “skeptical” idealist, this translates into an empirical moral skepticism. Suppose that the moral value of a rational agency were understood to be transcendentally real, that is, independent of the transcendental moral agent qua agent. The empirical moral agent might have no transcendental justification for a recognition of this moral value, since it is independent of that moral agent considered transcendentally. Hence, on the empirical level, an empirical moral agent might need another argument that would show the actuality of those moral values. For an argument along these lines, see (Sensen 2011, pp. 18–20).
Moral realism and naturalism 21 by people (4:393); in the second Critique, he takes his project not be a replacement of an old principle of morality with a new one but a philosophical justification of it through a new formulation (5:8, ftn.). In other words, he is not denying that the principle of morality is part of the actual experience of human beings. Moral duties and values are experienced by human beings in nature, that is, human beings as appearances. Given the possibility of empirical moral experience, the controversial interpretive issue relevant to current purposes is whether morality would be empirically real or empirically ideal, that is, independent of or dependent on the empirical moral agent. In order for this empirical/transcendental distinction to apply to ethics, we have to be able to identify transcendental arguments for the necessary conditions for a moral agent. Kant attempts to provide a deduction of the moral law in Groundwork III and later discusses a deduction in the Critique of Practical Reason. Although Kant does not identify them as such, these deductions have been treated by commentators as transcendental.18 If it is proper to consider them as transcendental deductions, then they might be understood as the basis for claims that the moral properties and objects are dependent on the transcendental moral agent. Further, one might be tempted to treat Kant’s derivation of the value of humanity as a kind of transcendental deduction (as Korsgaard does without using that term19), even though Kant never calls it a deduction. Understanding these issues requires a look at the nature of Kant’s philosophy in general and practical philosophy in particular. Chapter 2 will examine these issues in detail. The importance of this discussion of the empirical/transcendental distinction is that there can be two levels of possible moral realism or idealism. At the transcendental level, one might ask whether moral principles, properties, or objects are dependent or independent of some possible transcendentally identified moral agent, that is, an idealist might argue that autonomy of the will as pure practical reason might be a transcendentally ideal ground for the categorical imperative, or a realist might argue that humanity as an end in itself should be understood as a transcendentally real value independent of the transcendental moral agent. There is a third option besides moral transcendental realism and idealism: There might be no transcendental justification for morality at all. If human moral experience is dependent upon some contingent features of the human moral agent and cannot find any transcendental basis, Kant’s ethics would be empirically ideal but would have no transcendental status, in the 18 19 See, for example, the articles by John Rawls, Henry Allison, and Barbara Herman in (Förster 1989). See (Korsgaard 1996a, p. 123). Recently, Robert Stern has endorsed a version of her transcendental argument (Stern 2011a).
22 Laying the ground same way that color sensations are empirically ideal and have no transcendental status (B44–45). At the empirical level, an empirical realist might argue that the transcendentally ideal ground for the law might be compatible with the empirical reality of duties such that those duties are not dependent upon the empirical moral agent but only the transcendental moral agent. This distinction might prove useful in dissolving some strong disagreements about whether the categorical imperative is independent of rational moral agents. The effect of the transcendental/ empirical distinction on the realism/nonrealism debate can come only after a look at the nature of philosophy in Kant in Chapter 2. Allow me to briefly note the importance of the distinctions made so far. A standard definition of moral realism has been shown to be inadequate in capturing the elements peculiar to Kantian ethics. A definition that stresses the role of the metaphysical independence of moral principles, properties, or objects from either the transcendental or empirical moral agent serves better. Kant’s moral theory – the target of discussion in this book – will be subjected to a more appropriate definition that illuminates the genuine fault line between Kantian realism and Kantian nonrealism in terms of independence or dependence on the moral agent. The independence or dependence appears at two possible levels when Kant’s transcendental/empirical distinction is applied. If there is a transcendental dependence of all moral principles, properties, and objects upon the transcendental moral agent, Kant would be a transcendental moral idealist; if the transcendental justification of morality requires that some moral principles, properties, or objects be independent of the transcendental moral agent, then Kant would be a transcendental moral realist. A similar distinction would operate at the empirical level of everyday moral experience with reference to the empirical moral agent. The conception of the human moral agent and the status of Kant’s justificatory arguments for morality will have to be determined in detail in order to resolve this dispute. This fourfold division crossing empirical/transcendental and real/ideal is still too stark a choice for interpreting Kant. There can be interpretations that hold Kant to be a transcendental realist regarding some moral principles, properties, or objects and a transcendental idealist regarding others. No one takes Kant to be a realist about every moral principle, property, or object and few take him to be a complete idealist. Philosophically, it is more fruitful to avoid slapping a blanket identification on Kant as one or the other and instead to assess all aspects of Kant’s moral theory in light of the issue. I will devote a later section of this chapter to listing the various kinds of moral principles, properties, or objects that are raised in the literature. Before that, however, I will evaluate various conceptions of constructivism to show how they fit into the realism/nonrealism debate I have just characterized.
Moral realism and naturalism 23 Comparison with constructivism No single definition of “constructivism” garners universal or even wide acceptance. Kantian moral realists tend to treat all opponents as constructivists, but some identify themselves otherwise.20 The positions are further complicated because some constructivists label themselves moral realists while others seem to reject realism.21 And “constructivism” itself is an unfortunate term to use when discussing Kant’s philosophy because he had a particular meaning for the term in his theoretical philosophy that conflicts with its use by contemporary Kantians in ethical theory.22 In this section, I will first review two possible general types of construction, showing which ought to be taken as 20 21 22 Robert Stern labels the debate about Kant’s moral realism “the constructivist/realist controversy” (Stern 2012, p. 119). Paul Formosa’s very title makes the assumption: “Is Kant a Moral Constructivist or Moral Realist?” (Formosa 2013). Although I have described my position as idealist and never as constructivist, I have been lumped with others as a constructivist several times (Kain 2006, Stern 2011b), (but see Dall’Agnol 2012b for a notable exception). Karl Ameriks, in contrast, is to be praised for his argument against two “nonrealist” interpretations of Kant, those of J.B. Schneewind and Charles Larmore, in which he does not see them primarily as constructivist (Ameriks 2003). In part, this is due to their differing conceptions of moral realism. The most famous of the selfproclaimed constructivist realists is Christine Korsgaard, who distinguishes Kant’s “procedural moral realism” from metaphysical realism, which she calls “substantive moral realism” (Korsgaard 1996b, p.35) or “objective realism” (Korsgaard 1996a, pp. 278–282). She claims that “procedural moral realism is the view that there are answers to moral questions; that is, that there are right and wrong ways to answer them”. Substantive (or objective) moral realism further holds that there are moral facts or truths which account for the right answer to those questions. This claim implies that any method of answering a question about right and wrong counts as a procedure. She seems to confirm this a few pages later when she claims that substantive realism, which holds that moral facts are true in virtue of something independent of the moral agent, is a version of procedural realism. This understanding of procedure would be itself too broad. The universality of the term “procedure” when taken to include any method of answering questions makes it useless when trying to find something distinctive about proceduralism. Her description would encompass a procedure of logical deduction from a set of statements, which is of course one way to try to find right or wrong answers. She later characterizes constructivism as a form of problem solving, making it appear that all attempts to find answers to practical problems are constructivist, although without invoking the term “procedure” (Korsgaard 2003). In these statements, Korsgaard effectively erases any meaningful distinction between finding an answer and creating an answer. Any attempt to answer moral questions by reference to independently existing moral facts would still count as constructivist. Hence, Korsgaard is not a good source for an account of the distinctiveness of a procedure for construction. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he distinguishes philosophy from mathematics when noting that concepts are constructed in mathematics but not constructed in philosophy (A713–16/ B741–44). To construct a concept is to “exhibit a priori the intuition corresponding to it”. Only mathematics can construct concepts because philosophical concepts cannot be represented in intuition. A mathematically constructed concept is a specification of the universal, for example, the properties of triangles in general, in a particular, say, a specific triangle drawn on paper or in the imagination, because the concept already contains a pure intuition that needs to be exhibited. Philosophical concepts, in contrast, are not constructed because they do not contain any pure intuition but only “nothing but the synthesis of possible intuitions which are not given a priori”
24 Laying the ground paradigm, before showing how my approach is situated in relation to constructivist theories. At its most general level, a constructivist theory claims that some particular moral principles, properties, or objects such as norms, values, or moral facts, are derived from some other particular principles, properties, or objects, whether purely moral, for example, a highest value, or not, say, rationality itself, through a procedure of some sort.23 Rawls initially used the term “procedure” in A Theory of Justice as a way to understand the process by which individuals would determine principles of justice by means of the original position.24 Constructivists who had studied with Rawls adopted the term, and even Onora O’Neill, who sharply differentiates her constructivism from Rawls’, sometimes characterizes her position this way.25 Yet the specific procedures they invoke are not of the same type. I see two general types of constructivism in the literature. I will suggest that the one that is closest to the approach I have to moral idealism ought not to be considered to construct anything. Thomas Hill offers a Rawlsian understanding of the nature of a procedure in what he calls a “procedure of construction”. In this type, moral principles (for Hill, the target of construction) are valid “just in case and because they would be endorsed by all members of an appropriately defined initial choice 23 24 25 and hence can relate to objects in intuition only synthetically and discursively (A719–20/ B747–48). In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes an analogous claim with regard to the practical in a discussion of how to separate the doctrine of happiness from the doctrine of morals. He suggests that making this distinction requires the care and precision of a geometer. “A philosopher, however, has greater difficulties to contend with here (as always in rational cognition through mere concepts without construction of them) because he cannot put any intuition (a pure noumenon) as its basis” (5:92). Presumably, Kant is making an analogy between the pure intuition used in geometry with any pure conceptual space (noumena) that would be used in practical philosophy. Practical philosophy cannot construct its concepts in a pure conceptual space but must show how they affect actual human beings in their actual decisions. To resolve this, Kant suggests that practical philosophy can use a method similar to a chemist who adds alkali to a certain solution in order to separate the acid from the remainder of the solution. The experiment that Kant suggests is that in a particular person awareness of the moral law will similarly separate considerations of advantage from rational considerations in the person’s mind, allowing for a focus on moral motivation. For a thorough examination of this particular analogy, see (Rohden 2012). Like other claims stemming from reason, for example, the concept of a soul, the moral law is not constructed in Kant’s sense of the term. Sharon Street believes that inclusion of a procedure is not a necessary element of constructivist views (Street 2010, p. 366). Constructivism is better characterized as a metaethical theory that stresses the practical point of view. Ultimately, I agree that theories that stress the practical point of view are superior theories, but I hesitate to label them as “constructivist” and instead use the term “idealist”. Street defines a constructivist position in terms of the justification of some moral judgments by reference to another set of moral judgments (Street 2008, p. 208). (Rawls 1999a, p. 17). O’Neill does not generally describe her position as proceduralist but has used the term (O’Neill 1989, p. 216, n. 10). Korsgaard uses the term quite prominently when she characterizes her position as “procedural realism” (Korsgaard 1996b, p. 35).
Moral realism and naturalism 25 situation”.26 I will call this the “decision procedure” type of constructivism. The crucial element of this definition is the requirement that a decision in an initial situation, one that provides some material the agents may use while deciding, is used to determine the result. This kind of procedure could produce various kinds of moral principles, properties, or objects, not merely principles, from some other set of moral or nonmoral principles, properties, or objects. O’Neill’s discussion of the construction of principles by agents seeking agreement is another example.27 An exemplary mainstream definition that stresses the role of choice stemming from an idealized process of deliberation is given by Carla Bagnoli. As a “metaethical account” – an account of whether there are any normative truths and, if so, what they are like – constructivism holds that there are normative truths. These truths are not fixed by facts that are independent of the practical standpoint, however characterized; rather, they are constituted by what agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice.28 The crucial characteristic of the decision procedure is that it entails some ability to make a decision, whether real or hypothetical, on the part of the participants.29 A procedure of this kind differs from a procedure in which the creation of the moral principles (or norms or values) conceptually precedes any capability for agents to make decisions. In other words, this type of model of a construction procedure requires that the agents in the hypothetical or real situation can be conceived as capable of making a decision to endorse or reject the outcomes of the procedure. Neither agency itself nor any prerequisites for agency can be constructed through a decision procedure because one needs agents in order to make decisions in the first place. 26 29 27 28 (Hill 2012, p. 78). (O’Neill 1989) and (O’Neill 2002). (Bagnoli 2011). Paul Formosa calls actual constructivism “all the way down” because it involves actual willing by individuals either collectively as a culture or individually. Hypothetical constructivism is “not all the way down” because both the content and the authority of the procedure itself are “laid out” rather than the subject of some actual choice (Formosa 2013, pp. 173–74). Formosa does not provide any example of an “all the way down” constructivist but suggests that a model would be someone who takes moral norms to be embodied in cultural practices but nonetheless subject to the “individual or collective” act of will. This characterization is problematic because if the norms are embodied in the cultural practices, they are not the result of any direct acts of will at all. If he means that the acts of will are those of an agent independently endorsing the cultural norms, then his characterization would not capture the spirit of constructivism in particular but would be applicable to any acts of an agent who faces the question of whether to subject himself or herself to moral norms. Formosa does not discuss actual procedures in the remainder of his article but defends a “not all the way down” reading of Kant. An example of an “all the way down” constructivism might be what Andrews Reath calls the “Principle of Individual Sovereignty” in which each particular will is subject only to laws it actually legislates for itself. Reath and Patrick Kain cite problems with this view on its own grounds and as an interpretation of Kant and the two philosophers to whom they attribute this view, Robert Paul Wolff and Rüdiger Bittner, do not themselves take it to be Kant’s view. See (Reath 2006, pp. 97–98), (Kain 2004, pp. 262–65), (Wolff 1974), and (Bittner 1989).
26 Laying the ground A kind of constructivism that alleges to construct moral principles, properties, or objects on the basis of agency itself is thus the second kind of constructivism in the literature. What I will call the “nature of agency procedure” allows for the generation of norms, laws, or values by means of the expression of the nature of moral agents conceptually prior to their ability to choose anything. This procedure does not involve conscious endorsement, whether real or hypothetical, by agents but is simply the product or characteristics of a particular kind of active being. Korsgaard’s attempt to ground the categorical imperative on rational beings’ very ability to make reflective decisions is one example of this kind of procedure. Although she has claimed to construct agency itself, the actual procedure she offers is one in which she takes rational agency as the starting point from which she then draws out the categorical imperative and moral value.30 The main question asked is about which moral norms are intrinsically tied to the nature of free agency itself. Certainly, the agents might later reflect on their situation and endorse the results of the activity, but this reflective endorsement is not the source of the construction. 30 Korsgaard’s position is more ambiguous than stated here. She sometimes describes her position as one of a constitution of agency, but when giving details, she shifts to a constitution of agents as particular individuals who use their ability as agents to make choices that define who they are (Korsgaard 2008, p. 109). It seems clear that she does not construct agency as such but uses agency to construct other elements of her moral theory. She also sometimes argues that the categorical imperative is a result of a decision by an agent to be a certain kind of person, for example, one committed to the kingdom of ends or to egoism (Korsgaard 1996b, p. 101). At other times, she insists that acceptance of the categorical imperative is a requirement stemming from the “reflective structure of human consciousness” and thus not a result of a decision by such an agent (Korsgaard 1996b, pp. 103–04). The former approach is what I call “decision procedure” and the latter “nature of agency procedure”. Some opponents of constructivism claim that Korsgaard’s constructivism is not only not a genuine alternative to moral realism, it is also not even a metaethical claim. Nadeem J.Z. Hussain and Nishi Shah argue that Korsgaard’s constructivism makes no metaethical claims but is better described as making claims in normative ethics or moral psychology (Hussain and Shah 2006). Allen Wood hints that “no distinctive metaethics or metaphysics of value” is implied by the procedural account of practical reason but does not offer details (Wood 2008, pp. 282–83, n.3). I find these charges difficult to accept. Korsgaard and other constructivists might not have offered a clear and internally consistent metaethics, but they have made some metaethical claims. The constructivist insistence, for example, that value is itself not a real property of objects or persons but results merely from a particular practice guided by reason is a claim about the nature of value itself rather than about what particular things are of value, the former being a metaethical and the latter, a normative claim. The difference between holding that value is a real but nonnatural property of objects and holding that value is merely a projection onto objects is metaethical since both can identify precisely the same objects as being of value. And if expressivist theories that tie moral claims to emotions operate at a metaethical level, why should not a theory that ties ethical claims to a particular conception of moral agency or to the determinations of a particular mental faculty? Not only can the metaphysical question differentiate constructivism from other metaethical theories, some have also claimed that constructivism makes distinctive epistemological metaethical claims (Bagnoli 2012).
Moral realism and naturalism 27 I believe that the nature of agency procedure is the better constructivist procedure. It is, however, lacking much of a procedure. It derives moral principles, properties, or objects from the nature of a particular kind of being or kind of activity, and such moral principles, properties, or objects can better be viewed as intrinsic to that kind of being or components of that kind of activity rather than something created by it. The term “constructivism” is roughly applicable because the moral principles, properties, and objects are conceptually derived from the nature of moral agency, but they are not constructed in any procedure that involves choices. As a nonrealist view, the nature of agency model is very promising. Recall that the claim to moral nonrealism requires that all moral properties and objects be dependent upon the moral agent. The nature of agency approach treats this dependence as inherence in the structure of the moral agent. It allows the debate to focus on the kind of mind that transcendental or empirical moral agents have. As this book proceeds, my main argument will emphasize the nature of the agency approach. I prefer to use the term “idealism” rather than “constructivism” to describe this view in order to sharply differentiate it from the decision procedure oriented kind of constructivism that relies on the choices of agents. The terminology to be used in the remainder of this book can now be fixed. Since no interpreters take Kant to be offering either an error theory or expressivism, I will not use the broad term “nonrealism” in reference to Kant. I will also avoid the term “constructivism” in my interpretation except in reference to others who identify themselves as such since at best it is ambiguous among the two types I have identified. For my focus on the nature of agency, I will use the term “idealism”. The question to be answered is whether and to what extent Kant is a moral realist or moral idealist. Metaphysics and naturalism Kant himself does not emphasize naturalism as a topic of philosophical discussion and as a result does not provide detailed explanations and justifications for his rare uses of the term.31 In some ways, my examination of Kant 31 Kant rarely uses the terms “naturalism” or “naturalist” at all, and even less in ways which would define a philosophical program related to contemporary understandings of the term. The few occurrences fall into three types, which correspond to metaphysical naturalism, methodological naturalism in knowledge claims, and method in theology. a. The first type metaphysical use of the term “naturalism” occurs most clearly in the Prolegomena in a discussion of the cosmological ideas: “The cosmological ideas, through the manifest inadequacy of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in its rightful demands, serve to deter us from naturalism, which would have it that nature is sufficient unto itself” (4:363).The idea of a naturalist as taking nature to be “sufficient unto itself” provides a picture which accepts
28 Laying the ground might seem to be anachronistic because of this lack of attention. But this issue is important in that it highlights the lack of metaphysical commitments in Kant’s moral theory. By framing my interpretation in naturalistic terms, I am able to highlight what I take to be a central characteristic of Kant’s metaethics, namely, the importance of the practical standpoint as an action-oriented facet of experience that is largely indifferent to theoretical claims about ontology. Kant is generally taken to require some strong metaphysical commitments, or at least commitments that lead to metaphysical claims, in his moral theory: Freedom of the will most prominently, God and immortality, moral value claims, a conception of pure rational agency and the resulting need for a view of the self as other than merely appearance. Many contemporary ethicists inspired by Kant shy away from these claims, particularly the roles of God, immortality, and the metaphysics of persons-in-themselves. These metaphysical commitments are largely, though certainly not fully, out of favor in contemporary philosophy. Much contemporary work does stress the practical no entities other than those required by the natural sciences. This meaning is also implied in Kant’s use of the term in one of his earliest works. The terms “naturalism” and “naturalist” occur in the 1755 Universal Natural History four times (1:222, 1:223, 1:224, 1:239) without definition, but in context, their meaning is one who considers nature sufficiently explained without recourse to divine causes. b. The “naturalist of pure reason” is mentioned in the Prolegomena and the Critique of Pure Reason in a way related to method, but quite different from any contemporary definition. In the Prolegomena, the naturalist of pure reason is defined as “he who trusts himself, without any science, to decide in matters of metaphysics” (4:314). The discussion in the Critique of Pure Reason accords with the Prolegomena’s definition. In the very final page of the Critique, Kant’s discussion of the history of pure reason turns to the question of method: “The naturalist of pure reason takes as his principle that through common understanding without science (which he calls ‘sound reason’) more may be accomplished with regard to the most sublime questions that constitute the task of metaphysics than through speculation” (A855/B883). Kant apparently offered this definition of “naturalist” in his lectures on logic as well; the Dohna-Wundlacken Logic of 1792 quotes him as saying “A naturalist is one who acquires cognitions that do not constitute a system. Metaphysics and morals are the hobby horses of such people” (24:783). The methodological naturalism Kant rejects – the “naturalist of pure reason”– is far removed from contemporary definitions of methodological naturalism because this naturalist is said to reject rather than accept science. c. A few of the references concern theology. In the 1788 essay “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy”, Kant notes that his explanations follow natural science so carefully that he is assumed to be a naturalist (presumably in the first sense) by one reviewer but rejects that label as more properly belonging to theological discussions (8:178). The term appears in the Religion, where Kant defines a naturalist as one who “denies the reality of any supernatural divine revelation” (6:154), and in the Conflict of the Faculties, where naturalism is defined in religion as “ecclesiastical faith without the Bible” (7:60). Graham Bird (Bird 1995) also canvasses Kant’s use of the term, but lists only the occurrences of “naturalism” and not “naturalist” as well. John Zammito (Zammito 2008) refers to Bird’s paper for the list of Kant’s uses of the terms but provides a different summary of their meaning. Zammito sees Kant as associating naturalism with two “impulses”: First, a claim that nature is “ontologically self-sufficient”, and second, the use of common sense or “healthy reason” in place of “abstruse philosophical reasoning” (Zammito 2008, p. 545).
Moral realism and naturalism 29 standpoint, but there has not been a thorough argument that Kant’s ethics as he himself presents it in full does not require any ontological commitments. The clearest way to frame this issue is in terms of a metaphysical naturalism. The relations between the claims about the practical standpoint and claims about realism and idealism also make a discussion of naturalism a good topic to pursue for the light it sheds on the nature of Kant’s idealism in ethics. “Naturalism” is a relatively recent term in philosophy, although what the term signifies has been part of philosophy for millennia. My discussion of the term here is limited to the goal of providing a conception of naturalism appropriate for an assessment of whether Kant can be considered a naturalist in his ethics. Many aspects of the contemporary debate about naturalism in philosophy will be left out of this discussion.32 I leave it to others who come to different conclusions about the definition or viability of naturalism to evaluate Kant on their own terms; however, I believe that my definitions capture the kind of naturalism that is of most concern to Kant.33 Naturalism prioritizes the sciences over philosophy or any other discipline, and it does so in two ways, metaphysically and methodologically.34 By “metaphysical naturalism”, I mean the type of naturalism which accepts as real only entities studied by the sciences. By “methodological naturalism”, I mean the type of naturalism which accepts as sound only the procedures for acquiring knowledge used in the sciences. Since Kant perhaps more than anyone in the history of philosophy since Plato is responsible for the inclusion of the a priori as a central element of philosophy, it is clear that Kant rejects methodological naturalism.35 The transcendental method is also at odds with a methodological naturalism. My 32 33 34 35 I argue in detail that Kant can be conceived as a naturalist to a large extent, encompassing not only physics and chemistry but also the social sciences, in (Rauscher 2009b). For recent discussions of naturalism, see (Ritchie 2008) and (De Caro and Macarthur 2004 and 2010). Joel Smith and Peter Sullivan see three types of naturalism: Ontological (i.e. metaphysical), methodological, and epistemological, which holds that knowledge is a natural phenomenon, but they admit that the last is closely related to the first two and can be understood for the most part in those ways (Smith and Sullivan 2011, pp. 10–14). Mario de Caro and David Macarthur initially follow the division into ontological (metaphysical) and methodological naturalism before suggesting a third type of naturalism, “semantic naturalism” which claims that only the concepts employed by the natural sciences are genuine concepts (De Caro and Macarthur 2004, pp. 3–7). I believe that this semantic naturalism can be understood in terms of methodological naturalism and will not pursue it as a distinct form of naturalism in relation to Kant. Kant has been interpreted semantically by others, although not as a semantic naturalist. See (Loparic 2005) and (Hanna 2001). Michael Friedman has characterized “philosophical naturalism” as a two-pronged thesis, both prongs of which are methodological: First, the rejection of a priori knowledge, and second, the placement of philosophy among the empirical natural sciences. Friedman devoted his 1996 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association to his argument that naturalism so understood “has reached the end of its useful life” (Friedman 1997, p. 7).
30 Laying the ground interpretation will argue that the methodological antinaturalism in Kant’s ethics does not require a metaphysical antinaturalism. Chapter 2 will look in detail at Kant’s methodology in philosophy as a whole as well as in ethics in particular. The limits of the sciences set the terms for metaphysical naturalism. The naturalist ontology is tied to entities studied by the sciences, in particular, physics. In order to specify this more precisely, one must be able to identify the sciences and explain how their own domains are determined. That requirement in itself is a methodological issue, but it is also possible simply to take “the sciences” to refer to whatever the particular accepted sciences are. Contemporary naturalism generally centers on the ontology provided by physics. This can lead to questions about the value and possibility of pursuing other disciplines that cannot be reduced to, or at least supervene on, the entities and properties required by physics. For my purposes, it is sufficient to identify the precise sciences and their objects as Kant understood them and the resulting metaphysics of nature, for my project is determining whether Kant’s ethics requires any nonnatural metaphysics on his own terms. The importance of specifying what Kant means by “nature” is seen when reviewing previous work on naturalism in Kant. Work on Kant and naturalism Graham Bird published the paper “Kant and Naturalism” in 1995 to defend Kant against the view that Kant could not accept naturalism. Although Bird suggests that the term “naturalism” is unhelpful, he takes Kant to have the view that I am calling metaphysical naturalism: “It is not that there really are two distinct realms, a natural, empirical, realm and a nonnatural, transcendent, realm of things-in-themselves; rather there is just one realm, empirical reality, and a conceptual apparatus which tempts us to transcend it”.36 John Zammito raised the issue a dozen years later in his “Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered” in a discussion that placed Kant’s methodological 36 Bird follows this remark with a claim that Kant’s approach is acceptable to a naturalist or antinaturalist, although by those terms he is referring to the methodological approach as well in which the scientific approach needs a philosophical supplement (Bird 1995, pp. 406–08). Bird is responding to a claim by John Skorupski that Kant’s transcendental idealism is an antinaturalism. Part of Bird’s complaint against Skorupski is that “naturalism” is ill-defined. Despite a vague definition of naturalism, Skorupski sums up his own view that Kant cannot be one quite well in this passage: Whatever else is obscure about Kant’s transcendental idealism, one thing is clear – it involves the rejection of naturalism . . . The great cultural influence of Kant’s Critique stems from this: that it upstages the natural attitude – the perspective of common sense and its outgrowth, science. If Kant is right, the natural attitude cannot give the absolute truth about the world and our situation in it. (Skorupski 1990, p. 7) Skorupski clearly takes transcendental idealism to be a methodologically antinaturalistic thesis.
Moral realism and naturalism 31 antinaturalism, in the form of a priori reasoning, in historical context as a reaction not only to Hume but also to the common sense theorists in Germany. Zammito takes Kant’s transcendental idealism not to be “metaphysically innocent” but to involve such a strong role for reason’s own self-activity that it appears to move beyond a metaphysical naturalism through determining its objects through its own nature. “There is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kant’s transcendentalism”, he concludes.37 Zammito and Bird do agree that a metaphysical naturalism for Kant would be one limited to empirical reality.38 Konstantin Pollok more recently argued that Kant cannot be a naturalist, either methodologically or metaphysically.39 He understands metaphysical naturalism in relation only to the mathematical sciences, thus excluding Kant’s empirical psychology, and then invokes causal closure to argue that Kant restricts causal explanation to physical explanation. Pollok focuses on the Third Antinomy in claiming that Kant requires a different causal explanation other than physical causality to account for the actions of the mind. The problem with this approach is that in excluding the objects of empirical psychology from nature, Pollok applies a restriction that Kant himself did not use because Kant did consider inner sense to be a part of causally determined nature even if he did not think that psychology could rise to the level of a science, as I will explain later on in this chapter. Work specifically about naturalism in Kant’s ethics is rare. An article with the promising title “Kant as Ethical Naturalist” from the early 1970s is disappointingly limited to the claim that specific duties cannot be derived directly from the categorical imperative but must involve knowledge of human nature; it offers no general definition of naturalism in Kant.40 More recently, Paul Guyer offered a reading of Kant’s ethics that argued that the precritical Kant had a naturalistic understanding of morality; Guyer does not define “naturalism” at all, but it appears that he had in mind the use of a psychological account of action, which can include both methodological and metaphysical naturalism.41 37 38 39 40 41 (Zammito 2008, pp. 540, 551–52).The difference between Bird’s claim that Kant is compatible with metaphysical naturalism and Zammito’s that he is not, lies in their understandings of the role of reason and transcendental methodology, a topic I will cover in Chapter 2. Another discussion of naturalism in Kant that cuts across the metaphysical/methodological divide is given by Sami Pihlström, who presents a naturalistic pragmatic account of transcendental philosophy in (Pihlström 2001). (Pollok 2013). The article was appropriate for its time since before the 1980s, much of the literature on Kant’s ethics limited itself to the Groundwork even to the extent that Kant’s four examples of specific duties provided in the explanation of the categorical imperative were misunderstood as actual derivations (Dye 1978). Guyer’s essay (Guyer 2007b) offers some textual support for his claim that Kant’s precritical ethics considered this naturalistic approach, but as Henry Allison notes in his comments to the essay, it does not reflect Kant’s more consistent precritical position that does not rely on a psychological foundation (Allison 2007).
32 Laying the ground Darlei Dall’Agnol offers an assessment of the Kantian metaphysical naturalism that I presented in an earlier paper. He takes a metaphysical naturalist to be one who asserts that there are no facts besides natural facts.42 Regarding my claims about ethics, he objects that Kant insists upon the nonnatural freedom of a noumenal self and the nonnatural fact of reason. In my particular discussions in later chapters, I will assess these specific points, but here I will point out that the criteria for determining what counts as a natural fact would be dependent upon a prior understanding of nature itself: If morality is part of nature then moral facts are natural facts. And I will show that a moral fact derived from a priori methodology can be perfectly consistent with metaphysical naturalism when moral facts are understood to not make ontological but only normative claims. The most direct discussion of the possibility that Kant is a naturalist in ethics comes from Allen Wood in his commentary on Guyer’s article.43 Wood focuses on ethics but first provides some discussion of naturalism in general; unfortunately, his explanations fail to pinpoint acceptable criteria for a metaphysical naturalism. He provides what he calls an acceptable “pious” sense of naturalism: “A naturalist is someone who rejects a supernaturalist view of the world”. By itself, this definition is unhelpful because it fails to specify any particular criterion for delimiting the natural from the supernatural. Wood provides some examples of what he takes to be supernatural – God or gods, Cartesian immaterial substances, Platonic Forms, incorporeal monads, and noumenal selves – that suggest an ontology, but others – “vague talk about ‘transcendence’” or “disgusting touchy-feely ‘spirituality’” – appear to relate to attitudes rather than ontology. He does firmly assert that for a naturalist, “there is only matter and the void”. One might take this kind of naturalism to preclude nonscientific approaches to knowledge claims, in particular those which might have ontological implications. But Wood argues that since the current sciences cannot answer and are not “even close to solving” certain traditionally philosophical problems such as consciousness, normativity, and agency, philosophical views on these matters ought not to be dismissed as “outdated superstitions”.44 This allowance leaves space for a philosophical 42 43 44 Dall’Agnol (Dall’Agnol 2013) is responding to several papers of mine, in particular the paper “Kant as Metaphysical Naturalist” (Rauscher 2009b) but also a paper on the postulates (Rauscher 2007), which forms the basis of Chapter 5, and “Pure Practical Reason as a Natural Faculty” which was published in Portuguese (Rauscher 2006a), parts of which appear in Chapter 4. He identifies the scope of my claim too broadly to encompass a complete metaphysical naturalism instead of one limited to ethics. The quotations that follow are taken from (Wood 2007, pp. 472–74). This claim is puzzling in light of Wood’s rejection of supernatural ideas that are used in place of natural explanations. He admits that there is some “mystery” in life and even allows that pious naturalists ought to respect and tolerate supernatural ideas. He holds that philosophers ought to
Moral realism and naturalism 33 nonnatural methodology but does not in itself preclude philosophical claims with supernatural ontologies. The lack of a specification of the scope of the natural is a weakness in Wood’s approach when applied to Kant. Wood takes “noumenal selves” as an example of a supernaturalist ontology, so we can conclude that Wood takes a two-world transcendental idealism to be nonnatural. Yet, he takes the human rational will to have value as an end in itself as part of a “realist metaphysics of value” that is “entirely compatible with naturalism in the pious sense”, casting doubt on the claim that the metaphysics of his naturalism is only “matter and the void”. I will have much more to say about the metaphysical status of moral value in Chapter 7. At this point, I conclude only that Wood’s discussion of naturalism is insufficient to specify the parameters of naturalism in Kant. None of the previous discussions of metaphysical naturalism in Kant are specific enough to provide the kind of ontology needed for the assessment of a naturalistic ethics. In what follows, I will show how metaphysical naturalism in Kant should be specified. Specifying Kant’s nature Kantian metaphysical naturalism will be limited to entities in space and time subject to deterministic law and whatever properties of those entities that can be understood to depend on the entities in space and time, even if those properties are not themselves subject to deterministic laws. This naturalism will encompass objects of both outer and inner sense in such a way that the human mind in empirical consciousness will be comprehensible in a naturalistic empirical psychology.45 To be very clear: I am not here arguing that Kant holds to metaphysical naturalism in his overall philosophy, although I think that such a reading has merit.46 The aim of this book is limited to laying out the 45 46 be interested in them, at least to the extent of seeing which can be made “intellectually respectable”. Yet at the same time, Wood denounces those who hold supernatural beliefs “for which there is no proof or evidence” and even claims that people who take the mystery of life to open the way for such ideas as guilty of “intellectual self-contempt”. This dichotomous approach would need to be grounded on a criterion that can be used to distinguish intellectually respectable from nonrespectable supernatural ideas; I doubt that any methodological naturalist could provide such a criterion. There appears to be no naturalistic way for Wood to distinguish philosophically acceptable explanations that operate without reference to nature and philosophically unacceptable beliefs that do the same (Wood 2007, pp. 472–73). I argue at length for this position in (Rauscher 2009b). Here, I provide a very short summary of the main points. There is a plausible interpretation of Kant to that effect given by Graham Bird in The Revolutionary Kant and elsewhere. Bird offers a methodological understanding of transcendental idealism in which Kant’s critical project is seen as opposed to traditional philosophy by employing a critical method to evaluate knowledge claims made in nature. Bird stresses the empirical reality of objects in space and time and holds that Kant does argue for the
34 Laying the ground elements of Kant’s ethics that under a plausible interpretation would be compatible with a metaphysical naturalism. Physics is the quintessential natural science for Kant (Natural Science, 4:472) and consists of cognitions of corporeal nature, that is, spatiotemporal objects. Cognition of these spatiotemporal objects requires both concepts and intuitions. The objects themselves are not limited to actual intuitions and empirical concepts but are objects of possible experience. Possible experience as the subject matter of physics cannot be equated with actual intuitions, since possible experience includes (1) objects of possible intuitions which have not occurred (the matter of possible experience), and (2) a priori principles of the understanding which govern all possible intuitions (the form of possible experience) (B147–148). The principles of the understanding are clear, at least, relative to anything else in Kant: He clearly delineates what they are in his table of categories (A80/B106) and corresponding table of principles (A161/B200). The scope of possible intuitions is less clear. The way to identify possible intuitions is given by Kant’s discussion of the postulate of actuality when Kant allows that “magnetic matter” is actual although we can have no direct intuition of it, where he concludes that “Thus wherever perception and whatever is appended to it in accordance with empirical laws reaches, there too reaches our cognition of the existence of things” (A226/B273). Magnetic matter is part of possible experience because its existence is dictated by empirical laws applied to particular perceptions of the behavior of iron filings.47 47 existence of any transcendent objects. He cites many earlier commentators with similar “revolutionary” views that differ in their particular interpretations, among them Henry Allison (Allison 2004), Arthur Collins (Collins 1999), and Paul Abela (Abela 2002a) (for his complete list, see (Bird 2006,p. 776, n 18)). Allison does not see Kant as a metaphysical naturalist, at least with regard to agent causation (see especially [Allison 1997]), but Abela does think that Kant’s ontology need not extend at all beyond the empirically real to any things in themselves, at least for theoretical purposes (Abela 2002a, pp. 292–93). Collins takes Kant to be an empirical realist and tries to dispel the belief that Kant is an idealist of any ontological kind. Bird’s book does not use the term “naturalism” to a great extent but does embody metaphysical naturalism nonetheless (Bird 2006, pp. 83–92). Two discussions that hold that Kant provides arguments against metaphysical naturalism in the antinomies are (Falkenburg 2004) and (Pollok 2013). Otfried Höffe also argues that Kant provides a critique of naturalism but limits his discussion to methodological issues (Höffe 2010, pp. 188–191). Paul Abela interprets this passage as an admission by Kant that there can be “hidden truths” truths which are inquiry transcendent that would “remain outside the set of truths that would emerge even at the end of inquiry” (Abela, 2002a, p. 238). He must be operating with a crucial assumption, namely that the laws of nature which we use to posit these unobservable entities are not themselves part of the inquiry, even the ideal “end of inquiry” which for Kant would equal the rules and concepts of the understanding ideally systematized by reason using its regulative ideas. He states this assumption in the following way “It relates instead to the formal structure of the regress itself as we extend it, counterfactually, to the desired point” (Abela, 2002a, p. 239, emphasis mine). Abela is here advocating a position in which the laws of nature applied to our perceptions are merely a subset of some greater set of possible perceptions which could, in
Moral realism and naturalism 35 In Kant’s thought, the laws of physics cannot explain chemicals, organisms, human social systems, and minds. They are not susceptible to mathematization, and some are also not susceptible to testing or mechanical laws. All are, however, studied by some form of investigation according to some of the other requirements for natural law such as systematization, the use of the categories, and the inclusion of higher level concepts. Proper scientific causal laws are limited to those of physics and other sciences that could in the future be mathematizable such as chemistry (4:470–71). The entities of physics in space (moving in time) provide the ontological foundation for other sciences that view the properties or arrangements of matter from different perspectives, for example, biology describes organisms using teleological principles but without claiming that organisms are more than material entities. The discipline of history – which can be used to exemplify the social sciences – also relies on teleological laws. This is confirmed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment when Kant devotes part of the discussion of the teleological power of judgment to the study of organisms which exhibit internal purposiveness (biology) and part to the study of beings who exhibit external purposiveness (history) (5:425f).That the social science disciplines also include teleological reasoning does not affect the ontological status of their objects in nature any more than it would for biology. Further, although Kant denies them the status of a natural science (4:471), he does not deny that the subject matter of these social sciences is both determinate and part of empirical nature. Empirical psychology and, more broadly, anthropology (for simplicity, I will focus on empirical psychology), are particularly important for this book since morality involves the mental faculties of will, choice, and reason. Unlike the social sciences, which rely on outer behavior, empirical psychology describes that part of nature that is revealed only through inner intuition. While Kant does not deny that mental states could in principle be instantiated in physical states of the brain, he does not think that such reductionism is useful or even possible in explanation (7:119, B420). Still, mental states as such, like material states, are subject to deterministic relations even though we are unable to know any deterministic laws describing them. This is clear regarding empirical psychology in several places. In the first Critique, Kant divides what he calls “immanent physiology”, or the study of nature as the sum total of the objects of the senses, into physics and psychology, the objects of outer and inner sense, respectively (A846/ B874), and adds that empirical psychology can use the a priori principles formal terms, connect to the laws of nature but which in fact do not, at least from the perspective of the end of human inquiry.
36 Laying the ground derived from pure philosophy (A848/B876).48 The quasi-scientific status of empirical psychology is also shown in Kant’s discussion of the regulative use of the ideas of reason in which he uses “sensation, consciousness, imagination, memory, wit, the power to distinguish, pleasure, desire . . . even understanding and reason” as examples of the way that reason’s regulative principles can aid the cognitions of the understanding by relating and perhaps uniting causal powers (A648–49/B676–77). This use importantly allows that mental faculties themselves are proper subjects for empirical psychology since the faculties of will, choice, and reason function in ethics as well as empirical psychology. The determinism among mental phenomena is most clearly stated in the second Critique when he notes that causal determinations “may be internal and they may have psychological instead of mechanical causality, that is, produce actions by means of representations and not by bodily movements; they are always determining grounds of the causality of a being insofar as its existence is determinable in time and therefore under the necessitating conditions of past time” (5:96). This ontology is important for assessing whether ethics could be metaphysically naturalistic. To the extent that ontological requirements of morality are explainable through empirical psychology or any of the other disciplines, they are metaphysically naturalistic. The following chapters will examine particular aspects of Kant’s ethics to show that their ontology fits within these bounds of nature. In some cases, such as practical freedom, the requirements of morality need no more than empirical psychology. In other cases, such as the justification of the categorical imperative, the validity of empirical reason is defended transcendentally in a way that has no ontological implications beyond empirical psychology. In still further cases, the apparent invocation of nonnatural entities such as God or properties such as freedom of choice will be shown not to assert their actual existence outside of nature under certain interpretations. In all these cases, a crucial factor is that morality is a part of practical philosophy rather than theoretical philosophy and is subject to a different philosophical perspective that avoids direct existence claims. The elements of Kant’s ethics When I defined moral realism in terms of the independence of moral principles, properties, or objects from the moral agent, I noted that it is possible to claim that Kant was a realist about every moral principle, property, or object (although no interpreters actually do make that claim) or about none. Many variations lie between these two extremes. Here I will identify and discuss the 48 For a discussion of this relation between the transcendental psychology of the first Critique and empirical psychology, see (Schmidt 2008).
Moral realism and naturalism 37 particular moral principles, properties, or objects in Kant’s theory that constitute the material for the realism/idealism debate; they will also serve as the elements to be incorporated into a metaphysical naturalism. This analysis will contribute two things to setting the stage for my later arguments: First, sharpen the focus of the debate between realism and idealism on the one hand and naturalism and antinaturalism on the other hand in order to unearth the specific interpretive points in Kant at issue, and second, reveal some of the particular grounds for both realist and nonrealist claims in order to begin assessing their strength. A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. The value of particular chosen ends Particular moral duties or norms Value of humanity as end in itself The highest good and the postulates of practical reason Moral obligation The moral law itself Practical reason itself Freedom of choice A. The value of particular chosen ends should be uncontroversially understood as idealist. Subjective ends such as drinking wine, listening to jazz, running a marathon, and pursuing a career have value only because some valuing beings confer value upon them. Kant lays this relation out in the Groundwork when he says “The ends that a rational being intends at his discretion as effects of his actions (material ends) are all only relative; for only their mere relation to a specially constituted faculty of desire on the part of the subject gives them their value” (4:427, modified). Moral realism about the value of particular ends would require that the value is independent of the agent, whether it be the agent’s choice, set of beliefs, or nature. Hence the value of these particular ends must be empirically idealist. At the transcendental level, one must abstract from the particular content of the chosen ends and simply treat them as possible contingent choices of agents capable of setting and pursuing ends. The particular ends operate at the empirical level and clearly fall within the ontology of nature as understood through empirical psychology. The ability of agents freely to set and pursue ends is a further matter treated in (H). This idealism is of little direct import in the debate about Kant and moral realism since no Kant interpreter understands the value of particular ends as real. But it does offer a toehold for the idealist, who can point to Kant’s justification – the relation to something in the subject – to emphasize the role of the subject in value. B. Particular duties or norms are distinguished from the categorical imperative. No one doubts that Kant intends for particular maxims to be tested using the first formula and subsequent formulas that include the term
38 Laying the ground “maxims” such as the formula of autonomy (at 4:432) and the formula of the kingdom of ends (at 435–36), both of which can be understood to carry the emphasis on maxims over from the formula of universal law. The formula of humanity can also provide a basis for the adoption of particular duties or norms. They can be abstracted from their source in the categorical imperative itself (F). The duties are distinct from the moral law or categorical imperative itself for a very good reason: They depend in part on empirical information about the nature of human beings as a particular kind of finite rational being.49 Each of the four examples Kant provides in the Groundwork requires some empirical information about human nature: Human beings are susceptible to death, cannot read one another’s minds, have latent talents that require development and practice, and lack complete self-sufficiency. Many particular principles and duties are generated through an application of purely rational considerations from the moral law combined with empirical information. Kant has room in his theory for different particular kinds of finite rational beings to have different particular duties based upon different empirical natures. A realist about these particular duties would have to admit that they are not themselves a priori in that they rest on information that is itself independent of the a priori categorical imperative.50 But because they rest on human nature in general, the realist might argue that these duties are empirically real even though transcendentally ideal. Thomas Hill and Andrews Reath view these particular duties as constructed because they can be said to result from a decision procedure to determine which particular duties human beings would themselves derive (hypothetically) using the categorical imperative. Hill provides a constructivist account of the 49 50 Kant’s work in anthropology is in part aimed at determining these particular duties on both the species and the cultural levels. Robert Louden and Allen Wood both devote significant attention to the application of anthropology to the derivation of particular duties in Kant (Wood 1999, pp. 193–320) (Louden 2000). The Kantian moral realist Allen Wood acknowledges that our actual duties as provided in the published Metaphysics of Morals are not entirely a priori but are “derived from” the categorical imperative as applied to human nature in general (Wood 1999, pp. 195–96). In order to act in accordance with the value of humanity, for example, we would need to know what particular kinds of human ends there are that might or might not accord with the more abstract value of humanity. He thus allows a distinction between two levels of moral law: The pure moral law itself and the set of particular duties that result from the application of that moral law to empirical information about human nature. He does note that this position of Kant’s differs from that provided in the Preface to the Groundwork, where a metaphysics of morals was limited to the pure moral law, and all empirical information about human nature was part of anthropology. See also (Wood 2008, p. 60), where he holds that the particular rules and duties “result” when the pure law and values “are interpreted” in the light of human nature and even particular cultural or historical circumstances and are not the result of a “rigorous deductive procedure” so not contained in the moral law itself.
Moral realism and naturalism 39 derivation of particular moral rules or norms from the categorical imperative treated as a given.51 Similarly, Reath offers an interpretation of particular duties as constructed while the categorical imperative itself is not.52 This is the “decision procedure” type of constructivism in which the duties depend upon some particular, in this case, hypothetical activity of empirical moral agents. It is wrong to understand these particular duties as optional, as a decision procedure sometimes suggests. In both Hill’s and Reath’s accounts, the hypothetical agents are not given leeway in determining the particular principles or duties at stake once the particular information about human nature, historical or cultural setting, and the like are introduced as the basis for the decision in addition to the categorical imperative. Since those things are empirically real, the duties could be empirically real as well. But since for both Hill and Reath they depend upon a hypothetical decision of the agent, they would be empirically ideal. Under the nature of agency interpretation that I take, these duties would be empirically real because they would follow directly from the nature of empirical moral agents. Their empirical reality, however, is crucially dependent on the empirical reality of the moral law itself (F). If it were to turn out that the moral law itself is empirically ideal, then these particular duties would be as well because they are derived from it. Similarly, these duties could be comprehended within a metaphysical naturalism if the categorical imperative is as well. C. The value of necessary ends, in contrast to particular contingent ends discussed in (A), is a matter of great controversy in the debate about moral realism in Kant. There are two kinds of necessary ends: The ends that are also duties presented in the Doctrine of Virtue, namely the happiness of others and one’s own perfection (6:385–86), and humanity as an end in itself as first explained in the Groundwork (4:428–9). The ends that are also duties of virtue can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, to the extent that the necessary ends of virtue are specific ways in which Kant fleshes out the value of humanity as an end in itself, they can be assumed to have the same realist or idealist status as the latter. 51 52 Hill details his constructivism in his chapter “Kantian Constructivism as Normative Ethics” (Hill 2012, pp. 71–92). His version of constructivism centers on Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue rather than the Groundwork. He takes the Doctrine of Virtue to begin with a general conception of the value of persons and to lay out principles that human beings would adopt in order to create a society that incorporates that value. Only the principles, not the value of persons, is constructed. Reath presents his position in (Reath 1994). Patrick Kain correctly argues that any position such as Reath’s does not entail that the particular duties are in any sense optional to empirical agents in (Kain 2004). The duties are based on human nature rather than on any kind of preferences any particular agent or all particular agents may have within the decision procedure situation.
40 Laying the ground Kant makes this connection in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue when he connects ends that are also duties with the necessary end corresponding to the categorical imperative (6:385). On the other hand, to the extent that one treats the particular application of these necessary ends of virtue as a shorthand for the particular ends that one chooses to actualize or particular duties of virtue, they would have the same status as the duties and ends just discussed in (A) and (B), and thus real or ideal in the same sense. Some have argued that the necessary ends of virtue ought to be seen as having this status rather than being extensions of the value of humanity as an end in itself, but I believe that it is more appropriate to consider them as having the same status as the value of humanity as an end in itself.53 The value of humanity as an end in itself serves as one of the main points of disagreement between realists and their opponents. I will devote a large part of Chapter 7 to this topic but here would like to make a general 53 Formosa and Wood both take this option, for different reasons. Formosa classifies these two necessary ends of virtue along with the particular ends that human beings choose as their own, calling all of them ends “with conditional and nonabsolute worth” in contrast to humanity as an end in itself which has unconditional and absolute value (Formosa 2012, p.9). On his account, these two necessary duties of virtue have the status of chosen ends as in (B) and would be treated as constructed in the same way. His reason is that the necessary duties of virtue are wide duties and thereby do not have to be the basis of every act. But this reason is insufficient to make these ends conditional. Formosa is conflating the happiness of others and one’s own perfection as necessary ends to adopt in general with the particular ends that we may adopt in particular actions that will implement those necessary ends in various ways. This is the import of calling them wide duties. The categorical imperative demands that the two ends be adopted and to that extent they are of unconditional and absolute value. But Kant recognizes that many particular maxims can honor these ends. A duty of wide obligation does not allow human beings to reject the necessary end but only to act on some maxim or other that might further one’s own perfection or the happiness of others: “a wide duty is not to be taken as permission to make exceptions to the maxim of actions but only as permission to limit one’s maxim of duty by another” (6:390).Thus these two necessary ends of virtue are not conditional and of nonabsolute value. Wood holds that empirical information about human nature is used to determine which ends we ought to set as moral beings and identifies them as the ends which are also duties, although elsewhere he allows that one’s own perfection and the happiness of others are “ends of pure reason” as opposed to simply ends of reason; Wood also connects the concept of perfection to happiness in that part of perfection is being able to use one’s developed talents (Wood 1999, pp. 195, 326–28). Wood is not clear about the status of the general ends that are also duties. He appears to treat them as kinds of ends rather than generalized ends that we ought to adopt (Wood 2008, p. 167). In adopting any particular end that is, for example, of the kind that promotes the happiness of others, we would need to use empirical information as Wood says. On Wood’s account, the necessary ends of virtue would have the same status as particular duties that require empirical information as in (A) and be subject to the kind of constructivism that Hill suggests. But Kant holds in the second Critique that the concept of happiness – not the conception, or particular content of what things count as happiness, which is clearly empirical – is an a priori concept relevant for all finite rational beings and not dependent upon human nature (5:25). Since the concept of happiness is a priori, the two necessary ends of virtue are also a priori, do not rely on information about human nature, and can be understood as having the same status as humanity as an end in itself.
Moral realism and naturalism 41 assessment of the relation the value of humanity has to the debate about realism and naturalism. Kantian realists generally hold that the value of humanity as an end in itself is independent of and conceptually prior to the categorical imperative and even serves as the ground of the categorical imperative. Idealists and some constructivists in contrast hold that the value of humanity is derived directly from the categorical imperative, in which case, the reality or ideality of the value of humanity depends upon the status of the moral law itself (F). Alternatively, some constructivists claim that the value of humanity is dependent upon a conception of agency necessarily adopted by agents as such; without the existence of that particular kind of agency there would be no need for the value of humanity or any value at all.54 This view sees a parallel between the construction of moral value and the construction of the categorical imperative itself rather than seeing the former as derived from the latter. Its success or failure would be tied to the success or failure of the parallel claim about the categorical imperative to be discussed in (E) later on. Value is often understood as a property of objects; in the case of the value of humanity, a property of finite rational beings, but more broadly speaking, objects or mental states could possess intrinsic value. A value property could be understood at either the transcendental or empirical level. If value were known to be an intrinsic property of some beings or things-inthemselves independently of the nature of moral agency, then value would be transcendentally real. An example would be if God were to have created some beings with intrinsic value. This value would be a constraint on the conception of rational agency itself. In this case, the value would ground the very possibility of a moral law. Alternately, if absolute moral value were known only as a requirement of moral agency, namely, that in order for moral experience to be possible there must be something of value independent of the particular moral agents, then it could be empirically real but transcendentally ideal. This conception of value would be limited to the kind of thing that is compatible with the demands of the categorical imperative, namely, humanity. Rational beings possessing humanity would have value as an intrinsic property. It would still, however, not fit into a naturalist framework because empirically there would be a value property of some beings in nature that does not figure in Kant’s conception of nature. A third option is a transcendental and empirical ideality of value 54 I say “that particular kind” of agency in order to allow that a constructivist could hold either of two alternatives. First, a constructivist might hold that there is only one possible kind of agency, free rational agency, as Korsgaard does (Korsgaard 1996b). Second, a constructivism might hold that it is possible for other kinds of agencies to exist which might not require the same moral values or the moral law.
42 Laying the ground that would be fully compatible with metaphysical naturalism. The empirical ideality of the value of humanity, I will argue, consists of an objective ordering of ends by reason such that humanity is always to be treated as a limiting end for maxims, whatever subjective contingent end the empirical moral agent would be pursuing. This ordering by reason would be based on reason’s own needs and not on any intrinsic value property in human beings and so would be compatible with a metaphysical naturalism and an empirical ideality of value. D. The highest good is an object of pure practical reason that, Kant argues, requires the postulates of God and immortality for its realization. Kant understands the highest good as an idea of reason that serves as an archetype of a perfectly just and virtuous world to be attained. As such, it is not an object that exists empirically or as a thing-in-itself (except to the extent that it is actualized by moral agents through their actions). Realists and idealists would agree that the idea of the highest good is dependent upon the existence of finite, rational moral agents for whom the highest good serves to satisfy both their obligation to be moral and their desire for happiness. Perfectly rational agents are not in need of the highest good because they have no independent desire for happiness. As an idea, the highest good is dependent upon the moral agent. The realization of the highest good itself would be brought about through the actions of moral agents and of God. Actions of moral agents depend empirically upon them and are thus empirically ideal.55 God would, in contrast, seem to have a transcendentally real status. Two of the three postulates of practical reason – immortality of the soul and the existence of God – are postulated because they are needed for realization of the highest good. (Freedom, the third postulate, underlies the categorical imperative itself and has no relation to the highest good.) These postulates are what I called earlier “principles, properties, or objects required for morality” rather than purely moral principles, properties, or objects; but because they play a role in Kant’s moral theory, they have been incorporated into the realism/idealism debate, with discussion focusing on the existence of God. The realist holds that the postulate requires that God exist, while an idealist can hold that human beings are required to believe in God as a distinct being but that God need not exist. The most extreme idealist would hold that the postulate not only does not require that God exist, proper comprehension of the function of the postulate shows that it does not involve human beings believing that God as a distinct being exist but that the idea of 55 Treating the highest good as an object to be actualized by human beings is constructivist in the different sense of bringing an idea to fulfillment. For a discussion of the highest good as something for human beings to create over the course of history, see (Reath 1988).
Moral realism and naturalism 43 God be used for immanent purposes. This last is the position I argue for in Chapter 5. A metaphysical naturalism, of course, would preclude any role in morality for the immortality of the soul or the existence of God. E. Moral obligation is the fifth area of Kant’s ethics at issue. One can distinguish the obligation from the other elements of a duty because one might be able to identify a value or acknowledge a moral law without being obligated to uphold or follow them. Two examples would be an amoralist and a cultural relativist: Each might recognize that there are values or laws without accepting any obligation. (I am not concerned with the plausibility of these positions.) The realism or idealism of moral obligation in Kant depends upon whether it is the result of some procedure or in some other way can be separated from the moral law, value, or practical reason itself.56 If it cannot be separated, then obligation is inherent in them and the realism or idealism of obligation would depend upon the real or ideal status of the moral law or practical reason.57 In particular, if the finite will can be conceived in a way that allows it to obligate itself to the categorical imperative, then obligation would be idealist. Some constructivists hold that obligation is a matter of an autonomous act of will in giving the law to itself. One might tie obligation to the nature of the finite rational will. This is successful in presenting an idealist conception of obligation only if the nature of the finite rational will is understood as idealist, since it grounds obligation in the nature of our finite will. Realists and idealists can agree that obligation is tied to the nature of the human finite rational will; the dispute is only about whether a Kantian theory should take the finite rational will as real or ideal. And this question cuts to the heart of the nature of practical reason and practical philosophy itself. Whether practical reason itself is realist or idealist is the deeper question and will be noted in a few paragraphs under (G). Obligation is not considered to be a natural relation, making it difficult to see how a metaphysical naturalism would work. Unlike value as a property that purported to exist within objects or rational agents, obligation is a relation between an agent and a set of duties and ends. The duties and ends themselves, both necessary and contingent, could lie within nature as 56 57 Robert Stern offers a way to distinguish obligation from the moral law. Stern, who takes a realist position regarding value and law, argues that moral obligation is idealist because “we give the content of morality its obligatory form, in so far as this depends on our limitedness as finite creatures”. (Stern 2011, p. 90) Patrick Kain argues that because obligation is tied to our rational will, it must be understood as real rather than as constructed (Kain 2004). In Chapter 3, I argue that obligation is similarly a product of reason, but in the guise of the commanding nature of the categorical imperative as a fact of reason. Obligation for either of these views is tied to the status of the faculty of reason. I will show in Chapters 4 and 7 that reason should be understood as not transcendentally real.
44 Laying the ground explained in (A)–(D). Kant recognizes that the obligatoriness of duties and ends is a practical rather than a theoretical matter. To see how obligation can be understood within nature, one must understand the fundamental difference between theoretical and practical philosophy as concerning what is and what ought to be. Once the lack of ontological significance of this practical relation is understood, particularly in reference to the fact of reason, a metaphysically naturalistic interpretation of obligation is not only plausible but also demanded by the nature of Kant’s philosophy. I will make that argument in Chapters 2 and 3. F. The moral law itself, abstracting from obligation tied to it, is connected on the one side to the categorical imperative and the fact of reason and on the other to the nature of pure practical reason, which will be treated independently in (G). Kant allows that a rational being can “act in accordance with the representation of laws” (4:412). Human beings represent the moral law as a categorical imperative, and their immediate awareness of the categorical imperative is the fact of reason. A metaphysical naturalism would stress this representation of the moral law within nature understood using empirical psychology. A nonnaturalism would insist that the moral law is more than simply the representation of it in finite moral agents and would look to an understanding of law that would make it valid with a broader scope outside of nature. If God legislates the moral law not by creating it, since it would stem from pure practical reason, but by promulgating it, then the moral law would have a nonnatural basis. This option refers back to the postulate of God (D). Another option for the nonnaturalist would be to claim that in a more limited way, pure practical reason itself must be understood as independent of nature, a subject for (G). At the very least, however, the awareness of the categorical imperative in empirical consciousness provides a basis for a metaphysical naturalism, and only further conditions for the categorical imperative would make it nonnatural. A transcendental realist would also refer to God or to some way in which pure practical reason would exist or be valid independently of the transcendental conceptions for moral agency. Realists about the moral law point out that Kant denies that the moral law has any author but is instead part of the nature of reason itself, or even the nature of things in general.58 The transcendental idealist position would allow that reason is the source of the moral law but claim that reason is limited to a condition for the possibility of moral agency. This latter topic is a subject for (G).59 58 59 (Kain 2004). It is also worth noting that there are some constructivist positions that give a different origin to the moral law than the faculty of pure reason. One strand of Christine Korsgaard’s constructivism centers on the construction of the moral law itself. (Korsgaard’s position has shifted over
Moral realism and naturalism 45 The categorical imperative in empirical consciousness could be understood as empirically real or ideal. As a fact of reason, the awareness of the categorical imperative is in the empirical mind of the actual moral agent. If there is also a transcendental justification for the categorical imperative, then it would be empirically real because it is valid independent of particular moral agents. But if it has no transcendental justification, then it would be empirically ideal. The subjective nature of obligation, the enumeration of particular duties, and in general, the experience of morality would remain the same. I will examine the reasons in favor and against this interpretation in Chapters 3 and 7. G. Practical reason itself, the source of the moral law, is perhaps the core topic for this book. A realist about practical reason would hold that it discloses to moral agents some facts about the world itself independent of those moral agents. A transcendentally real reason would disclose something about the nature of things in general because things in general would be fundamentally rational. Morality would then be transcendentally real independent of the transcendental moral agent. But if, as I argue Kant holds, practical reason itself is constitutive of and restricted to moral agency, then a transcendental idealist position about pure practical reason is warranted. This position limits the existence of the faculty of reason as well as its scope to only those beings capable of moral agency. I will examine the basis for moral agency throughout the book, but the discussion of the nature of practical philosophy in Chapter 2 will show that the domain of practical reason is free acts, so that practical reason is valid only for those beings. On the empirical level, practical reason would be empirically real, that is, independent of the empirical moral agent, if the empirical agent can know that she meets the conditions of transcendental moral agency. Kant provides reasons to support this identification when talking about the priority of the practical over theoretical concerns, the inevitability of the fact of reason, and his arguments for the categorical imperative. But he also hesitates to allow that a transcendental deduction for morality is possible, time. I am referring here to her arguments in The Sources of Normativity (Korsgaard 1996b).) Her approach, as discussed here, takes as its basis a view of agency. If an agent asks not merely what she should do on the basis of her desires but the broader question of what she should do overall, the agent is driven by a process of reflection to find the answer that she ought to act only in ways that could count as laws, and hence she has formulated for herself the categorical imperative. Korsgaard claims that rational agency itself requires the categorical imperative but not that it stems directly from reason, as might, for example, the law of the excluded middle. Without the active reflection of agents, there would be no categorical imperative. In my argument in the following chapters, I will show that the moral law is a direct product of reason, so I reject Korsgaard’s type of construction of the moral law.
46 Laying the ground and he generally speaks of the practical as a point of view or even as consisting of ideas. I will examine these issues in most of the chapters that follow, but Chapters 4 and 7 provide the most direct discussion of the empirical realism/idealism issue. Perhaps the most extreme form of idealism would hold that reason itself is constructed through human activity and has no correlation with any independent structure or preexisting truths. Onora O’Neill offers this type of account.60 When a plurality of individuals are faced with the problem of interacting with one another in an attempt to reach an agreement in the absence of some preestablished authority, they must construct some authority to guide them. Any authority that they choose that is based upon some imposition of standards upon some members of the group by others does not reflect the agreement of each. To allow each to have a say in their search for agreement, they would have to set a standard that allows for the free agreement of each person. This would be reason itself whose results are, as Kant says in the Discipline of Pure Reason, “never anything more than the agreement of free citizens” (A738/B766). The formalization of the idea of free agreement in turn is expressed in the categorical imperative that demands universality of treatment respecting the voice of each. O’Neill holds that authority of reason is constructed in this way because it is derived from the choice of agents simply to seek agreement without reliance on any preexisting authority.61 Since Kant has connected reason with the agreement of free citizens, there is no prior conception of reason. To derive reason from freedom in this way, one must have a libertarian conception of freedom in Kant. Kant presents two competing conceptions of freedom, one libertarian and one rational. The libertarian conception, in which the free will is undetermined by anything, features prominently in his discussions of responsibility for moral decisions; its clearest formulation comes in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in the discussion of the choice of a fundamental maxim (6:21–25). The rational conception, in which a free will is a will that is determined by the moral law, appears prominently in Kant’s arguments in the second Critique that a free will and the moral law as a determining ground reciprocally imply one another (5:28–29). Kant interpreters disagree about the relation between these two conceptions of freedom and the nature of 60 61 O’Neill makes this argument particularly in (O’Neill 1989, pp. 3–50) and (O’Neill 2002). Another aspect of her argument is that any kind of agreement at all that does not accept some kind of preexistent authority is governed by the categorical imperative, making it the supreme principle not merely of practical philosophy but also of theoretical philosophy. I take this to mean that practical reason has primacy over theoretical reason not merely in being authorized to accept certain claims that cannot be proven by theoretical reason (the postulates) but to trump claims of theoretical reason in action, as discussed in Chapter 3.
Moral realism and naturalism 47 each, but here it is important to note that a claim that practical reason is constructed by the free actions of human beings requires the libertarian conception. I will argue that a first-person freedom of deliberation for Kant is vital to the foundation of practical philosophy but that at the same time it is not transcendentally justified. Kant’s conception of freedom is multifaceted, and the transcendental justification of freedom holds for reason and rational action rather than for free choice, although he does allow for a postulate of freedom related to free choice. Still, this freedom of choice does not ground actual deliberation; empirically, human beings can consider themselves rational with a greater justification than they can attribute to themselves a free choice. To say that reason itself is ideal is to make a claim about the nature of practical reason and, further, the nature of philosophy as a whole. It delves into the heart of Kant’s claims about philosophical method itself. O’Neill’s interpretation, although incorrect as an account of the nature of reason, identifies the core of Kant’s philosophical project as a human-centered endeavor, not merely in the familiar sense in which Kant is delineating the basis of human knowledge and its limits but also in the broader sense in which Kant comprehends that philosophical project itself as a part of the active life of human beings who must confront the world from their perspective. To be able to judge whether one can claim that reason itself is constructed, or real, or ideal, one must examine the nature of philosophy and reason in Kant. H. Freedom of choice is the final controversial element to be examined. Kant’s moral theory emphasizes freedom. I differentiate the freedom of the faculty of reason to provide the moral law from the freedom of the faculty of choice to make decisions as the specific way in which I discuss Kant’s Wille/Willkür distinction. The freedom of reason is a part of the discussion of the nature of practical reason, but the freedom of the faculty of choice is a distinct issue. The second kind of freedom is much more directly at issue in metaphysical naturalism and it plays little part in the realist/idealist debate. My Chapter 6 will examine the place of the freedom of the faculty of choice in Kant’s overall moral theory and provide a metaphysically naturalistic interpretation that stresses its status as a postulate. Whatever its specific metaphysical status, the freedom of choice ought to be considered as ideal rather than real because it is a property of moral agency itself. Moral idealism is perfectly compatible with a libertarian conception of agency. A realist might argue that actual freedom of choice would have to be true of all moral agents and would thus fall outside the boundaries of moral idealism understood as prioritizing the moral agent as subject. A moral realist might further argue that this freedom is the ground of the value of moral agents as objects that must
48 Laying the ground be respected by moral agents as subjects. If this point is conceded, then the issue would be settled by a determination of whether freedom of choice is an actual nonnatural property of moral agents or whether it has some lesser status that precludes it from being an actual property of moral agents. Precisely that lesser status, I will argue, is given to freedom of choice as a postulate of practical reason. These eight aspects of morality – the value of particular chosen ends, particular duties, the value of humanity, the postulates, moral obligation, the categorical imperative, practical reason, and free choice – are each topics in the debate about Kant’s realism and naturalism. All except the first two can be understood at either the transcendental or empirical level. Answering the question about whether or not Kant is a moral realist or metaphysical naturalist turns out to be so multifaceted that no one participant in the debate so far has provided a comprehensive answer. Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have set out the parameters for determining whether Kant is or is not a moral realist or a naturalist. I rejected a definition of moral realism that encompasses every moral theory that allows for moral truth as inappropriate for Kant interpretation. The definition of moral realism I advocated is one that draws the line between realism and nonrealism in terms of the independence of moral principles, properties, or objects from the moral agent. I introduced the term “moral idealism” to cover those theories that claim that there is moral truth but that truth is dependent upon the moral agent. Moral agency must be assessed at both the transcendental and empirical levels. The general nature of moral agency itself, if justified by a kind of transcendental argument that moral experience is possible only with this kind of moral agent, operates at the transcendental level. Any moral principles, properties, or objects that would be independent of the transcendental moral agent would be transcendentally real; the others transcendentally ideal. Transcendental ideality would still allow for empirical reality, so independent evaluation of the nature of empirical moral agency would be required to resolve the debate at the empirical level. I then assessed two different models of constructivism, the “decision procedure” view that constructs moral principles, properties, or objects from a choice made in some kind of ideal situation, whether hypothetical or actual, which assumes that agents are already conceived in such a way that they can make choices, and the “nature of agency” view that derives moral principles, properties, or objects from a conception of agency prior to and as a ground for the capacity of agents to make choices. I take this latter approach but label it “idealist” as a more accurate term than “constructivist”.
Moral realism and naturalism 49 I then turned to naturalism, dividing methodological from metaphysical. Kant clearly rejects the former but, I will argue, allows for the latter in his moral theory. After reviewing some work on naturalism in Kant, I define a Kantian naturalism as limited to entities and properties in space and time, both physical and mental. Proper scientific causal laws are limited to those of physics and other sciences that could be mathematizable such as chemistry. The entities of physics in space (moving through time) provide the ontological foundation for other sciences that view the properties or arrangements of matter from different perspectives, for example, biology and history both use teleological explanation. Empirical psychology falls short of being a proper natural science but does nonetheless describe the part of nature that is revealed through inner intuition. Mental states, like material states, are subject to deterministic relations even though we are unable to know any deterministic laws describing them. A robust empirical psychology will ground the ontology needed for the metaphysically naturalistic morality I will advocate. Finally, I looked at a series of particular elements of Kant’s moral theory that might be susceptible to realist or idealist interpretations and that need to be addressed in relation to metaphysical naturalism. They point to several main points of focus for the argument I will present. The value of particular chosen ends has already been shown to be empirically ideal in this chapter. Particular duties have already been shown in this chapter to be transcendentally ideal, with their empirical reality standing or falling depending upon the general empirical status of the moral law. The absolute value of humanity and the related issue of the nature of the moral world posited by reason will be the subject of Chapter 7. The existence of God as a postulate of practical reason used for immanent purposes is the focus of Chapter 5. Moral obligation in relation to the fact of reason and the nature of the primacy of practical reason are the key parts to the idealistic interpretation given in Chapter 3. The origin of the moral law in practical reason, the transcendental status of the faculty of pure reason itself, and its place in nature form the content of Chapter 4. The conception of practical reason itself in Kant is given in Chapters 2 and 3 but runs through most of the chapters. Freedom of choice is a difficulty for metaphysical naturalism and secondarily for idealism and is the subject of Chapter 6.
2 The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy The work of the previous chapter on realism/idealism and metaphysical naturalism point toward the need to examine the nature and methodology of Kant’s philosophy in order to see how it might determine the ontology required for ethics. The empirical/transcendental distinction, the nature of moral agency and the status of reason itself, and the ontological status of moral principles, properties, and objects will all depend on their place in Kant’s philosophy as a whole. This chapter will show that the very broad strokes of Kant’s philosophy – the topic and structure of philosophy as a whole, the transcendental method, and the practical/theoretical distinction – provide a key basis for resolving the particular issues about naturalism and realism. The broadest questions that one might ask about Kant’s ethics (indeed, about any ethical system) are these: what is ethics? Why does existence have a normative component? What is the nature and scope of morality? What kinds of beings partake of it? Why is there any such thing as ethics at all? This last is a twofold question. It is not only asking about the existence and nature of ethics, that is, whether there is good or right or value. The question “what is ethics” also asks about the philosophical study of those aspects of the world such as good and right and value. Why should the study of ethics have a place within philosophy instead of some other discipline? How does it differ from other elements of philosophy? Is there a distinct methodology for ethics? To what kind of philosophical treatment is it susceptible: justification, application, explanation? The broadest question about Kant’s philosophical ethics is really about what kind of inquiry ethics is and whether such inquiry is possible. The particular subject matter of ethics will in part determine and in part be determined by ethics as philosophical inquiry. To ask about the very possibility of a philosophical study of something is itself the hallmark of Kantian philosophy. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to determining whether and how metaphysics itself is even possible (Axii); the Prolegomena is even clearer in making this question a centerpiece of the structure of the book, devoting the entire third part and the conclusion to the question of how metaphysics is possible (4:327, 4:365). 50
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 51 Regarding practical philosophy, Kant is less clear. The Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason, where Kant famously claims that the question is not whether or how pure practical reason is possible but whether there is such a thing (5:3), seems to put practical philosophy on a footing different than that of the theoretical philosophy of the first Critique and Prolegomena. As I will show here, however, this apparent difference is a result of the very nature of ethics as a philosophical study. This chapter will look at the place that practical philosophy has in Kant’s conception of philosophy as a whole. The chapter will first examine the basic nature and subject matter of philosophy in the first section in order to frame the closer examination of practical philosophy. This first section will show that Kant saw philosophy as ultimately an activity of reason geared toward reason’s own ends. Philosophy’s structure is multifaceted, and the most important distinctions within philosophy will each be treated in turn in the other sections. The second section will show that the critical task of philosophy is to be distinguished from the more positive system of metaphysical cognitions and principles. The special feature of critical philosophy is the use of transcendental deduction as a method in discerning legitimate uses of reason and other faculties. The transcendental method will be shown to have minimal ontological import. The third section sifts through Kant’s various explanations of the difference between theoretical and practical philosophy in order to determine the proper subject matter of ethics. The contrast between theoretical and practical will be shown to have some ontological implications in itself. Free acts, not any particular set of ends, constitute the domain of the practical. The ontology of their transcendental basis will be determined in the following chapters. What is philosophy? Kant discusses the nature of philosophy itself in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” in the first Critique. Philosophy is “the system of all philosophical cognition” (A838/B866). Two terms are key to this definition: first, “cognition”, and second, “system”. Cognition can be either historical, from what is given, or rational, from principles. If one merely learns about a philosophical system from a textbook, Kant says, one does not have rational cognition. For rational cognition, one must comprehend the cognitions from “the universal sources of reason”, namely, principles (A836–7/B864–5). Instead of the rote learning of historical cognition of philosophy, rational cognition involves the active creative work of reason itself. Among rational cognitions, philosophical cognition is defined as “cognition from concepts” in contrast to mathematical cognition from construction of concepts (A837/B865).
52 Laying the ground Philosophy, then, is cognition drawn from concepts. Philosophical cognition is the result of this activity of philosophizing.1 A “system” of cognition is a distinct characteristic of philosophical method. Philosophy cannot merely be a collection of cognitions; it must be an organized arrangement of cognitions. Kant lays out two characteristics of such a systematic organization: Under the government of reason our cognitions cannot at all constitute a rhapsody but must constitute a system, in which alone they can support and advance its essential ends. I understand by a system, however, the unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea. This is the rational concept of the form of a whole, insofar as through this the domain of the manifold as well as the position of the parts with respect to each other is determined a priori. (A832/B860) The systematic organization of cognitions must conform to an idea which determines first, the domain2 of that system – where it fits externally in comparison to other systematic organizations of cognitions and what might be beyond any possible cognition – and second, the internal composition of that system – how the particular cognitions which constitute that domain are to be arranged vis-à-vis one another. This twofold organization is done in accordance with an idea, which itself must stem from reason; any other kind of organization would have to be empirically based and contingent and would constitute a “technical” but not an “architectonic” unity (A833/B861).3 Kant clearly held that theoretical cognition is subject to this method even at the critical level. The very first paragraph of the Transcendental Analytic in the first Critique uses precisely the language of an “idea of the whole” that leads to a “division of concepts” that then have “connection in a system” (A64–65/ B89–90, Kant’s emphasis). Yet, one might think that this organizational structure does not apply to ethics, for in the section of the Critique of Practical 1 2 3 The contents of the Architectonic chapter parallel the first pages of Kant’s lecture on Philosophical Encyclopedia (29:5–45), with the exception of the definition of philosophy in relation to the highest ends of human beings. This material does not appear in the textbook which Kant used for the course (Feder 1769). Information on Kant’s textbooks is taken from (Naragon 2006). I use the English term “domain” for various German terms that Kant uses with the same meaning: Umfang in the first Critique (A832/B860) and Gebiet in the third (5:174–76). In the discussion of the latter, Kant contrasts a domain determined by our cognitive faculties with a broader territory (Boden) that includes all areas where cognition is possible for us, including empirical cognition. Although Kant does not use the term “idea” here in establishing a domain, he does claim that the domain is determined by the legislative power of the concepts and corresponding faculty of cognition (reason or understanding). Here, I follow Paula Manchester (Manchester 2008), who shows how Kant’s discussion of architectonic is intended primarily to stress the active nature of reason itself as providing the structure for its own investigations. This active organization replaces the passive scholastic organization that stems from historical cognition. Manchester also provides a thorough discussion of previous views of the Architectonic that associate it more with merely providing an architecture or structure within which reason would operate.
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 53 Reason suggestively entitled “Doctrine of the Method of Pure Practical Reason”, he states that method for practical reason differs from method in theoretical reason in that the former concerns application of the moral laws to human beings. The doctrine of the method of pure practical reason cannot be understood as the way to proceed (in reflection as well as in exposition) with pure practical principles with a view to scientific cognition of them, which alone is properly called method elsewhere, in the theoretical (for popular cognition needs a manner but science a method, i.e., a procedure in accordance with principles of reason by which alone the manifold of a cognition can become a system). Here the doctrine of method is understood, instead, as the way in which one can provide the laws of pure practical reason with access to the human mind and influence on its maxims, that is, the way in which one can make objectively practical reason subjectively practical as well. (5:151) In this paragraph, Kant holds that the method for pure practical reason concerns what is done with the pure practical principles in motivating human beings to action and providing means for adoption of the correct maxims. But the paragraph goes further than this to suggest that there is, in fact, no method for collecting together practical principles, a claim which would entail that there is no system of pure practical reason but only an aggregate of particular moral principles. This further claim, however, does not reflect Kant’s actual practice, given, for example, that he devotes his Metaphysics of Morals to the task of delimiting a system of ethics based upon the categorical imperative. As this chapter develops, I will show that Kant does apply the requirements for a systematic organization to ethics. The domain of philosophy Philosophy as a whole is a system of rational cognition from concepts, and thus the systematic organization of rational cognition must be organized by reason in such a way that it has both a domain and an internal structure. The domain would be related to philosophy’s guiding idea, which has often, Kant hints, been mistakenly neglected in place of mere systematic unity of rational cognition as such; this is the scholastic concept of philosophy that has no further purpose or end. The true ideal concept of philosophy, which Kant calls the cosmopolitan concept, “is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason” of which the highest is the “final end” (Endzweck) or “vocation” of human beings (A839–40/B867–68).4 4 As an ideal, Kant’s definition of philosophy has a limitation: there is as yet no such complete science. Kant claims that philosophy ought to be understood as the archetype against which attempts to philosophize are compared. Actual philosophical practice ought to approach this ideal philosophical cognition. (A838/B866)
54 Laying the ground This guiding thread for philosophy provides a broad domain for philosophy insofar as virtually all cognitions can be related to the final end of human beings, given that human practical deliberation and its resulting actions can benefit from knowledge and skill related to any possible action. One might think that it is problematic that some of these cognitions would be empirical even though reason itself operates a priori. Kant does in fact allow for reasoning based upon empirical principles as part of “empirical philosophy” in contrast to cognition from pure reason (A840/B868). Cognition by reason from empirical principles is still cognition by reason. The domain for philosophy is identified as all cognition related to the essential ends of human reason, provided that cognition is derived from principles. In only one other published work does Kant provide such an allencompassing definition of philosophy.5 The Jäsche Logic, which was based on Kant’s course lecture notes and not written personally by Kant, uses the same language as the Architectonic in distinguishing the scholastic concept from the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy, the latter of which is “the science of the final ends of human reason” (9:23), elaborated as “the science of the relation of all cognition and of all use of reason to the ultimate end of human reason, to which, as the highest, all other ends are subordinated, and in which they must all unite to form a unity” (9:24).6 But since choice of ends and thereby, the activity of reason are involved, Kant also calls philosophy “a science of the highest maxim for the use of our reason” (9:24, see also Metaphysic L2 28:533). The ultimate end of human reason should not be confused with the ultimate end (Endzweck) of the existence of the world, a topic that Kant discusses in light of his teleology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (5:434–36). It is possible for human reason to have one end and the existence of the world another. Further, reason as an activity can possess its own ends or goals that 5 6 Kant does offer less sweeping definitions of philosophy. In the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he defines philosophy excluding logic as “principles of rational cognition of things by means of concepts” (logic is said to consist of principles of the form of thinking in general) (5:171); the First Introduction similarly calls it the “system of rational cognition through concepts”(20:195). The Groundwork, accepting the ancient Greek division of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics, simply treats philosophy as “rational cognition” (4:387). In Kant’s lectures on ethics, he generally started with a simple division of philosophy into two parts without defining philosophy as such (e.g., Collins 27:243), but the notes from his winter 1793 course do offer a definition similar to that of the Groundwork and Judgment (Vigilantius, 27:479). Kant’s course lectures on logic generally contained the same distinctions, although without the connection to the final ends of human beings; the textbook Kant used matches the absence of final ends ((Meier 1752), which is available in Band 16 of Kants gesammelte Schriften). The Vienna Logic (24:797–800), for example, does not provide discussion of system or the definition of philosophy.
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 55 are intrinsic to that activity7, whereas any final end of the existence of the world depends upon the supposition that the world has a supreme cause that acts for ends. Without that kind of teleological view, there could be no ends for things that are not themselves active as human reason is. A mere mechanical explanation of the world does not invoke any ends at all. The activity of reason is self-sufficient for producing ends while the existence of the world is not. Finally, reason itself with its ends might provide human beings with the conception of the ultimate end of the existence of the world for them to use in interpreting their experience. The ultimate end would then be a product of reason and not something in any way inherent in the world itself. The identification of the domain of philosophy as the ultimate end of human reason does not provide the content one might hope for, namely, an identification of the ultimate end of human reason. Kant identifies this end in the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason as the determination of “what is to be done” (A800/B828).8 The ultimate end of reason is thus moral. Since philosophy also has the study of morality as one of its two main topical divisions, this is another way of saying that the practical has primacy over the theoretical. I will examine the nature of that priority in Chapter 3. Before that must come the identification of precisely what counts as practical philosophy later in this chapter. The structure of philosophy In addition to the domain, philosophy would have to have an internal structure which also stems from the idea of a final end for human beings. Kant offers five ways of dividing philosophy as a whole: logic and object-directed philosophy, critique and metaphysics, theoretical and practical, pure and empirical, and the three (or four) main questions of reason. A. Logic and object-directed philosophy: Logic is separated from the remainder of philosophy because, although it consists of cognition from principles, it has no object of its own in contrast to nature as the object of theoretical metaphysics and freedom as the object of practical metaphysics. Logic is instead a study of the rules of thought or the formal aspects of cognition. The Preface to the Groundwork is clear in calling logic a science 7 8 The issue of any goals or interests of reason is more complicated than I am presenting it here. Pauline Kleingeld argues that Kant’s claims about interests of reason cannot be taken merely metaphorically (Pauline Kleingeld 1998). Axel Hutter stresses the centrality of interests in Kant’s entire philosophical project (Hutter 2003). Kant initially identifies the ultimate end of human reason with three objects: freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God (A798/B826). He then subordinates them to “their more remote aim”, which is the determination of duties. I will discuss the relation between God and moral duties in Chapter 6 about the postulate of God.
56 Laying the ground of the “universal rules of thinking in general, without distinction of objects” (4:387), and the Jäsche Logic declares logic to be the science of the necessary laws of thought regarding all objects in general and thereby to be “a science of the correct use of the understanding and reason in general” (9:16). This division does not itself have any implications for understanding the methodology of practical philosophy and will not receive particular treatment as I proceed in the analysis of Kant’s methodology. B. Critique and metaphysics: Putting logic aside, pure philosophy, which excludes the empirical, is divided into the propaedeutic task of critique and the systematic presentation of pure cognitions in metaphysics (A841/ B869).9 The critical task is intended only to defend the possibility of certain a priori cognitions or principles and to exclude the possibility of others. Any actual cognitions or principles thus defended are part of the system of philosophy. This division is clear in the contrast between Kant’s three Critiques and two systematic metaphysical works, the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and the Metaphysics of Morals (itself divided into Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right and Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Virtue, thus paralleling the volume on natural science). At the end of the Preface to the third Critique, Kant declares “with this I bring my entire critical enterprise to an end” and points to the work on metaphysics as his other task (5:170).10 The division between critique and metaphysics is crucial for understanding Kant’s metaethics, since critique provides the transcendental framework for ethics and helps to establish what ethics in general is. C. Theoretical and practical: Again putting logic aside, one can divide philosophy into theoretical and practical (Judgment, 5:171) or speculative and practical (A841/B869) or, as the Greeks called them, physics and ethics (Groundwork 4:387). One might think that Kant intended this division to apply only to the systematic metaphysics, but he applies them to the task of the Critiques as well as in the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason (5:3). Kant’s most famous division is also deceptively complex. 9 10 For another examination of the Architectonic chapter that stresses the difference between Critique and system, see (Kinnaman 2008). Kant’s division is problematic in a few other aspects: the Groundwork appears to hover in a no man’s land between critique and systematic metaphysics. The titles of its sections indicate transitions from and to various approaches to morality, including “philosophical moral rational cognition”, “metaphysics of morals”, and “critique of pure practical reason” (4:393, 446). Although commentators generally place the book as a foundational part of the metaphysics rather than a critique, the third section is nonetheless often treated as if it were a kind of critique in its discussion of the limits of practical philosophy and its inclusion of a deduction, which is compared to the parts of the second critique that replace a deduction with the fact of reason. Karl Ameriks, for example, features extensive discussion of the Groundwork in a line with the Critiques in his book Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Ameriks 2003). The Prolegomena presents the results of the Critique of Pure Reason in an analytic rather than synthetic form and thus, has a tenuous critical identity.
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 57 He offers four different characterizations of the difference between theoretical and practical philosophy. Because these characterizations reveal important methodological considerations concerning the specific domain for the practical, I will devote extensive space to them later in this chapter by comparing them in detail. D. Pure and empirical: Another division of philosophy is between cognition from pure reason and rational cognition from principles derived empirically (A840/B868). Philosophy had a wide scope in the centuries leading up to Kant and included what today are considered natural and social sciences, so to identify part of philosophy as based on empirical sources was not unusual. To count as philosophy the sciences must still use principles that reason can identify and work with. Empirical information from which no rational principles could be derived would not count as philosophy. Empirical philosophy, then, is still rational philosophy rather than an exclusively empirical study. E. The questions of reason: In two publications, Kant divides the interests of reason into a set of questions: What can I know?; What ought I to do?; What can I hope?; and What is the human being? In the Canon, Kant includes only the first three questions and then quickly assigns the first to speculative (theoretical) and the second to practical reason, with the third consisting of both (A805/B833). In effect, then, this division reduces to the theoretical/practical division. In the Jäsche Logic two decades later, he claims that the first question belongs to metaphysics, the second to morals, the third to religion, and the fourth to anthropology, which itself can also be seen to subsume the first three questions as well (9:25). He appears to correlate the first three questions with three tasks for the philosopher: (a) determining the sources of knowledge, which would presumably correlate with theoretical metaphysics, (b) determining the use of knowledge, which would correlate with morals, and (c) determining the boundaries of reason, which might correlate with a philosophical approach to religion (the term “boundary” (Grenze) invokes Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason11), or with the project of critique in general, or more narrowly with the transcendental dialectic and teleology as they relate to religious questions of the soul, free will, and God. One might also be tempted to align the first three questions with the three Critiques and the last with the published Anthropology; however, the topics covered by the questions extend to other works as well. Further, if anthropology is to encompass the three prior questions, then it is not a distinct subdivision within the structure of philosophy. The explanation of the four-question division is in the end too vague to be helpful in dividing philosophy’s domain, while the three-question division simply reduces to the theoretical/ 11 In a letter to Carl Friedrich Stäudlin on May 4, 1793, Kant repeats these four questions and explicitly identifies the Religion as completing the answer to the third question (11:429).
58 Laying the ground practical dichotomy.12 In the end, despite its fame, this division of philosophy is unhelpful, and I will not discuss it further in this book. These five ways of providing an initial division of philosophy do not correspond to one another. Leaving aside the questions that summarize philosophy, the others work variously in parallel or perpendicular to one another. How do these various ways of distinguishing the tasks of philosophy provide its internal structure, particularly in relation to ethics? The justification for this structure rests on the requirements for fleshing out the demands of morality. First, the separation of logic from the remainder of philosophy provides the basis on which any investigation by reason may progress. Second, the work of critical philosophy is needed to develop the particular limits and foundations for further systematic work. Third, the division into practical and theoretical is necessary because the practical must be informed by the theoretical in order to know how to implement practical ends. Finally, to determine the particular moral duties that form the vocation of human beings, the pure must be separated from the empirical so that reason can properly identify pure duties that will ground all particular empirically-informed duties. These explanations of the structure of philosophy, excepting the first about logic, will receive more attention in direct relation to the practical in each of the remaining two sections of this chapter. One section will cover both the critique/system and pure/ empirical divisions, the second, the practical/theoretical. The nature of the transcendental method and ontology The divisions of philosophy into critique and system on the one hand and pure and empirical on the other hand are related. Kant is particularly concerned about the division between pure and empirical philosophy as this passage from the Architectonic shows. It is of the utmost importance to isolate cognitions that differ from one another in their species and origin, and carefully to avoid mixing them together with others with which they are usually connected in their use. What chemists do in analyzing materials, what mathematicians do in their pure theory of magnitude, the philosopher is even more obliged to do, so that he can securely determine the proper value and influence of the advantage that a special kind of cognition has over the aimless use of the understanding. (A842/B870) 12 Axel Hutter suggests that another difference between the two sets of questions is that the task of uniting the questions together belongs to the third question in the Critique of Pure Reason but the fourth in the Logic. He claims that since the unification by anthropology in the Logic is weaker than that of the Critique, Kant loses genuine systematic connection among the questions. I believe that Hutter is reading too much into the short presentation in the Logic and that Kant’s fourth question does not exclude the third from combining the first and second (Hutter 2003, pp. 88–90).
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 59 The philosopher must be careful to distinguish the a priori from the a posteriori. Kant’s rejection of any empirical basis for philosophy, any philosophy based solely on a posteriori cognitions, is not a complete rejection of empirically derived knowledge but a separation of empirically derived knowledge from a priori. The study of nature and the study of morals will both have their pure and empirical parts. The pure parts, metaphysics, are the distinctive contribution of philosophy as the cognition from concepts which have an a priori origin. The critical transcendental method is used in the determination of pure as opposed to empirical cognitions. In what follows, I will summarize the transcendental method in a way that I hope is not controversial. Then I will show how it can relate to a metaphysical naturalism and the empirical/transcendental levels of moral realism. Transcendental method in general That philosophy requires a priori claims is central to Kant’s philosophical framework and needs little elaboration. A priori cognition is defined by Kant as that which occurs “absolutely independently of all experience” (B3) and which involves “necessity and strict universality” (B4). A merely empirical approach, one which draws all its cognitions from experience, could not conclude that the cognitions are true necessarily and universally. But knowledge from concepts alone must be true necessarily and universally for the domain governed by those concepts, in this case experience. When Kant distinguished pure and empirical philosophy, he was distinguishing principles known a priori from those known a posteriori. He makes this same kind of distinction using different terminology when he contrasts historical and rational cognitions, the former from what is given, the latter from principles (A835–6/B863–4). Only rational cognition is such that it could have arisen from reason alone. Kant puts it this way in the late essay “What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany?”: “If all knowledge is of empirical origin, then . . . transcendental philosophy is itself an absurdity”. (20:275). Critical philosophical method must focus on a priori rather than a posteriori cognitions. This role for the a priori lies at the basis of Kant’s critical project. Since philosophy as a discipline is characterized by the use of reason, and any claims by reason to knowledge of its own would be a priori, Kant holds that philosophy is in need of a critique in order to determine the possibility, validity, and extent of reason’s a priori claims. Critique exhibits a unique method: the transcendental argument.13 13 The method of a transcendental argument is controversial inside and outside Kant scholarship. I will not enter into the details of this work but will only offer a relatively non-controversial account of its nature and role. Within Kant studies, see (Förster 1989). In contemporary
60 Laying the ground Transcendental philosophy is taken to be the study of the ability of reason or the understanding to have pure cognitions rather than any direct claim about the nature of objects themselves. Kant is clear about this in the Mrongovius lectures on metaphysics given in the winter semester of 1782: “Transcendental philosophy . . . does not say something a priori of objects, but rather investigates the capacity of the understanding or of reason to cognize something a priori” (29:784, modified). Since it focuses on the faculties of understanding and reason rather than objects, transcendental philosophy does not itself make any direct claims about objects. Only the pure cognitions themselves are claims about objects. A few pages later, Kant expands this to clarify that the pure cognitions of reason or understanding are themselves not transcendental and are to be distinguished from empirical cognitions not by being transcendental but by being a priori (29:786). The transcendental is defined in terms of determining the possibility of certain a priori cognitions. The pure cognitions themselves, presumably, may be offered for this investigation regardless of their own particular metaphysical status or origin, that is, their actuality. They are cognitions which human beings can possess already in experience, or which are embodied in experience. The transcendental investigation of these concepts asks not whence human beings possess these concepts but rather on what basis the concepts are valid a priori. Kant makes this point in the Critique of Pure Reason when he stresses the difference between the task of tracing the actual generation or source of a concept from the justification of its validity (A85–87/B117–119). He praises Locke for having paved the way for the investigation of the origin of concepts from experience. This origin might serve to explain the possession of empirical concepts, but one cannot find the justification for a priori concepts this way “for in regard to their future use, which should be entirely independent of experience, an entirely different birth certificate than that of an ancestry from experiences must be produced” (A86/B119). Empirically derived concepts can have no a priori validity. The possession of a concept is here argued to lie on an entirely different plane from the justification of that concept. Whatever the “occasional causes of their generation”, concepts do not receive their validity from those causes. Rather, the validity of concepts is a result of considerations of an entirely different type. Kant summarizes these two types of considerations of concepts: “I therefore call the explanation of the way in which concepts can relate to objects a priori their transcendental deduction, and distinguish this from the empirical deduction, which shows how a concept is acquired through philosophy, a good collection is (Stern 2003). A seminal modern paper on the topic is (Stroud 1968). For an argument that there is nothing distinctive about the transcendental method, see (Pihlström 2004).
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 61 experience and reflection on it, and therefore concerns not the lawfulness but the fact from which the possession has arisen” (A85/B117). Transcendental philosophy abstracts from any empirical manifestation or source of a concept to ask instead about its justification. The transcendental deduction of an a priori cognition or principle, then, will show that it is necessary for experience yet not derived from experience. The method of transcendental deduction is not restricted to concepts necessary for the very possibility of experience in general. A transcendental deduction is one which assesses and justifies the conditions necessary for the possibility of some specific kind of experience, using the term broadly. Although he does not identify them as “transcendental”, this is how Kant understands a deduction when he discusses the role of deductions for the moral law (4:447,454, 5:46–7), for aesthetic judgments (5:279–80, 5:289–90), and for property (6:249–250). The experience at issue in the first Critique’s transcendental deduction is the cognition of objects of experience, or as described in the Prolegomena, the possibility of natural science (4:275 and 4:294–96). The range of other sorts of experiences whose conditions of possibility could be the subject of a transcendental deduction is not explicitly limited by Kant. In the first Critique, a priori concepts which can relate to objects of experience are specified, but this stricture is violated in the discussion of a transcendental deduction of the moral law in the second Critique and other deductions. We can assume that Kant restricts transcendental deductions to what can be known absolutely a priori, whether it is a concept for an object, a moral law, a manner of judgment, or a property relation. Regardless of the kind of pure a priori cognition or principle, Kant is clear that they cannot be derived empirically. A transcendental justification cannot be based upon derivation from experience, but it can justify the validity of cognitions or principles of the understanding or reason as they are used in experience. Just as space and time are empirically real but transcendentally ideal, a priori cognitions and principles can be understood as transcendentally ideal (dependent upon the faculties of the subject) yet empirically real (formal elements of experience governing empirical objects). Take the pure concepts of the understanding, in particular causation, as paradigmatic. Kant argues in the transcendental deduction that a necessary condition for experience is the transcendental unity of apperception, that is, that all intuitions be synthesized into one whole; cause and effect is one of the ways in which this synthesis is exhibited. But the concept of cause and effect is one that we can meet with in experience. The physical sciences make synthetic a priori causal claims; to that extent, we are “in possession of” universal and necessary principles such as causation (Prolegomena 4:295). Kant’s transcendental justification of the causal relation is intended to show how pure natural science is possible. He does not deprive physics of these claims in order to shift
62 Laying the ground them to philosophy when providing their transcendental justification; he instead confirms their a priori validity. Since appearances in space and time are empirically real, as we have already seen, the causal relations among appearances are also empirically real. They are transcendentally ideal in the sense that they receive their justification not by being derived from experience but from being proven as necessary elements of an objective, empirically real experience of nature. As Kant puts it in the Mrongovius lectures: “consideration by pure reason of the nature and possibility of such a pure cognition of reason is transcendental, e.g., the concept of cause and effect is pure but not transcendental, but the consideration of the possibility of such a concept is transcendental”(29:786). Since the pure concepts are valid in space and time, they fit in with an ontological naturalism. They are cognitions which human beings can possess already in nature, or which are embodied in nature. The transcendental investigation of these concepts asks not whether human beings possess these concepts but rather on what basis the concepts are valid a priori. Human beings in nature may possess these concepts empirically as part of the empirical mind studied by psychology. That is, the actual empirically real agent will possess and employ a cognitive system that contains these pure concepts. In order for a cognitive system to be able to represent to itself an objective nature, it must be able to unite intuitions in accordance with causal relationships. This requirement can be understood as the possession of a concept, as in natural science’s study of nature, or as simply the functioning of the cognitive system itself in its uniting of various sensations under causal laws. These are two sides of the same coin since Kant himself identified concepts with functions (A68/B93). The pure cognitions themselves and the faculty that employs them can be part of nature. In contemporary terms, we can say that humans can have evolved these faculties in response to their natural environment. The passages I just quoted are consistent with the a priori cognitions of reason corresponding to the actual, pre-existing structure of nature itself. The a priori necessary cognitions can stem from (or be embodied as functions in) human cognitive faculties that have themselves evolved partly in response to the matching objective ontology of nature. Nature can itself, for example, be governed by necessary causal relations on its own, independent of the existence of any being who might evolve. And beings who evolve to cognize causal relations in nature certainly evolve this ability in part, at least, in response to the actual causal relations in nature. There are obvious evolutionary advantages to cognizing an existing structural feature of the environment. That these cognitive faculties have evolved seems to make them empirical, and contingent, rather than transcendental and necessary. But this is Kant’s key insight: these transcendental arguments show the necessary conditions for any possible organism that might evolve an ability to represent an objective
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 63 experience. The a priori necessity of representing nature as having causal relations is not dependent upon nature having causal relations but is an independent necessary condition of any being representing any objective experience. It is true that nature itself necessarily has causal relations, but that necessity neither results from nor grounds the subject’s a priori necessary representation of causal relations; at most, the one parallels the other in that they are the mirror images of the results of the transcendental deduction of the conditions of experience. The transcendental arguments reveal that certain structures of mind are necessary for certain types of organisms. The actual evolution of these cognitive structures is an empirical matter; their transcendental necessity is not. The transcendental level justifies the necessity of the concept for the cognitive structure of a being representing any possible experience; its empirical manifestation is a product of the actualized cognitive structure. Even though that cognitive structure evolved in response to the causal structure of nature, it is still pure because the transcendental justification shows that no other possible cognitive structure could evolve to provide such objective experience. Barry Stroud has presented a view of transcendental argumentation that rejects the kind of claim I am making. Roughly, my view of the ontology of transcendental argumentation is like that of P.F. Strawson in his influential The Bounds of Sense, in which he provides a two-world interpretation of transcendental idealism, rejects it as “disastrous”, and instead distinguishes the positive results of Kant’s transcendental considerations as a metaphysics of experience.14 Stroud, in reaction to the use of transcendental arguments by Strawson (although not in reference to The Bounds of Sense) and others, contended that transcendental arguments require transcendental idealism: since transcendental arguments concern the necessary requirements for the subject of experience to be able to represent an objective experience, these a priori requirements can be shown valid only as requirements for experiences of that particular kind of subject, not as requirements for objects as such.15 I do not want to enter into a detailed debate about his position since others have offered criticisms of Stroud on this matter.16 I have three brief responses to any objection that could be put to my claims about transcendental argumentation and naturalistic metaphysics on this basis. First, it is abundantly clear from the passages I quoted from Kant that 14 15 16 Strawson calls transcendental idealism “disastrous” at (Strawson 1966, p. 21). Stroud phrased his conclusion in terms of the beliefs of agents that x is a feature of the world they experience; I am phrasing it in terms of the structure of the subject’s cognitive system (Stroud 1968). Robert Stern provides a thorough assessment of Stroud’s objections, as presented both by Stroud and by others, in (Stern 2000, pp. 43–65). Stern concludes by accepting some of Stroud’s objections but holding that some forms of transcendental argumentation is acceptable.
64 Laying the ground he did hold to an empirical realism about transcendental claims, so there is reason to believe that he would accept the account I have given in terms of evolutionary development of the cognitive systems in question within the empirical realm of nature in space and time. Second, as I discussed in Chapter 1, I follow Graham Bird in his claim that transcendental philosophy is a set of claims about the empirical world that is compatible with metaphysical naturalism.17 Third, even if Stroud were correct and my account could not hold of objects in nature, it would still be applicable to the use of transcendental arguments in ethics, since (as will be shown later in this and also in subsequent chapters) there are no independent objects to which moral claims would refer. Allow me to put these matters into the terminology I introduced in the previous chapter. The concept of cause is transcendentally ideal because it is transcendentally justified as necessary for a certain kind of subject of experience, namely experience of an objective order of objects in any possible nature. There is no requirement that causality be transcendentally real, that is, a necessary feature of all possible objects. Only objects that are to be able to form the basis for an objective experience must be governed by causal relations. On the empirical level, causation is empirically real as a relation among objects in space and time. The empirical subject must employ causal functions and concepts in order to be able to represent those empirically real objects as experience. The actual cognitive faculties that employ causality are then comprehensible through empirical psychology as a part of the ontology of nature. The transcendentally ideal concept of causality is both empirically real and comprehended within metaphysical naturalism. Transcendental method and ethics Now the divisions in philosophy between critique and system on the one hand and pure and empirical, on the other hand are clearer and their application to ethics can be considered. In ethics, the critical approach attempts to justify the 17 (Bird 1995). In contrast, David Bell understands transcendental idealism methodologically and argues that it is a “re-description” of reality in a way that construes objects in accordance with the awareness we may have of them, that is, their appearance (Bell 2001). Empirical realism, in contrast, accepts that objects exist independent of any subjective awareness of them, and naturalism would be a claim that only empirically real objects exist. Bell argues that appearances are incompatible with naturalism because as phenomena they are not items in the natural world or subject at all to the laws of nature. Phenomena are instead a “primitive”. Bell problematically separates appearances – the subject of the transcendental analysis – from empirical reality as if the transcendental analysis did not provide the ground for the scientific analysis of empirical objects. The problem with his conception is apparent when considering the transcendental ideality and empirical reality of space and time in which the transcendental arguments for the necessity of space and time as pure forms of intuition are to guarantee their empirical reality with regard to all empirical objects.
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 65 pure principles of morality on the basis of their relation to the transcendental moral agent (the specifics of which have yet to be determined). To the extent that moral principles, properties, and objects are dependent upon the moral agent, they can be said to be transcendentally ideal. Those arguments will be carefully examined in subsequent chapters. At the same time, these moral principles, properties, and objects might be considered empirically real to the extent that they are taken to be independent of the empirical moral subject. The theoretical conceptions of the subject of experience at the transcendental level and the empirical reality of objects and their properties in space and time, one must keep in mind, will not be directly transferable to morality. Morality is not a physical relation among spatiotemporal objects so the same sense of empirical reality is impossible. The equivalent conception of empirical moral experience will be determined. And the use of critical transcendental method is different in the moral case: Kant flirts with a transcendental deduction in the Groundwork but then denies its possibility in the Critique of Practical Reason. The subject of morality at the transcendental level will also need to be determined. Thus, Kant’s application of the critical transcendental method will be modified for morality. Pure and empirical moral principles seem much easier to distinguish. Kant decries moral theories that base the determination of right on happiness, which can be specified only empirically. Pure moral principles must be a priori. That practical reason possesses and uses both pure and empirical practical principles in moral experience is a parallel that follows from the comparison but is not obvious to readers of Kant. The pure and empirical divide is based upon whether the principles used by reason are derived from reason itself, in which case, they are pure, or derived empirically and assessed by reason, in which case, they are empirical. My goal is to show that the methodological divide between pure and empirical principles does not correspond to any ontological divide between things-in-themselves and appearances in nature; rather, morality is experienced by human beings in nature in the form of awareness of particular duties and the general categorical imperative as well as the implementation of moral duties through action in space and time. I earlier noted that Kant uses an analogy to a chemical experiment to explain that the task of critique in practical philosophy is to separate the pure moral elements from the empirical (e.g., 5:92–93). Merely identifying some moral principles as pure does not preclude them from being part of empirical moral experience and at the same time, justified transcendentally. He makes the same analogy to chemistry in the final section of the second Critique, the “Conclusion” in which he invokes his famous image of “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (5:161). He offers the hope that morality can advance by using a method based upon the method of the recent sciences, the “maxim of carefully reflecting beforehand” so that particular events in
66 Laying the ground nature, such as the fall of a stone, are “resolved into their elements and the forces manifested in them” (5:163). This is applied to ethics by a similar reflection on “the moral dispositions of our nature” encountered in experience: We have at hand examples of reason judging morally. We can analyze them into their elementary concepts and, in default of mathematics, adopt a procedure similar to that of chemistry – the separation, by repeated experiments on common human understanding, of the empirical from the rational that may be found in them – and come to know both of them pure and what each can accomplish of itself; and in this way we can prevent on the one hand the errors of a still crude, unpracticed appraisal and on the other hand (what is far more necessary) the leaps of genius by which, as happens with the adepts of the philosopher’s stone, without any methodical study or knowledge of nature visionary treasures are promised and true ones are thrown away. In a word, science (critically sought and methodically directed) is the narrow gate that leads to the doctrine of wisdom. (5:163) Although the description of the proper method is here extremely sketchy, it requires that we already have pure moral principles in our moral experience. In the Preface, Kant explicitly allows that humans can encounter a pure cognition in experience: “We say that we cognize something by reason only when we are aware that we could have known it even if it had not presented itself to us as it did in experience; hence rational cognition and cognition a priori are one and the same” (5:12). These passages are supported by others in which Kant claims that we are conscious of morality, most directly when in the second Critique , he tries to work out the starting point for our “cognition of the unconditionally practical” (5:29) given that freedom and the moral law reciprocally imply one another. He rejects freedom because we can neither be immediately conscious of it nor derive it from experience. Our immediate “consciousness” of the moral law is instead the entry point to the practical. He then asks: But how is consciousness of that moral law possible? We can become aware of pure practical laws just as we are aware of pure theoretical principles, by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us and to the setting aside of all empirical conditions to which reason directs us. (5:30) Kant holds that we have consciousness (Bewußtsein) and are aware (bewußt) of the moral law because reason prescribes it to us. This claim is central to understanding Kant’s “fact of reason”, which will be covered in Chapter 3. Empirical consciousness of the moral law and the general awareness of moral principles in moral experience do not yet make them empirically real. If the moral duties are products of the empirical moral agent, they would have to be considered empirically ideal, that is, dependent upon the human mind. But if they are grounded in something other than the empirical moral agent, they could be considered empirically real. Kant’s division between pure and empirical as two kinds of principles with different grounds points to the possible
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 67 ground for an empirical realism of moral principles. If the moral principles are understood as pure because they are grounded in reason, then the status of reason itself will determine whether these principles are empirically real or ideal. If reason can be shown to have its independence from empirical moral agents, then moral principles would have empirical reality. The possible transcendental ideality of moral principles would similarly depend upon whether reason can be conceived as independent of the transcendental moral agent. The importance of these observations lies in their ontological significance. Our awareness of the moral law and moral principles is in empirical consciousness. Empirical consciousness is the subject matter of empirical psychology, which is part of the theoretical study of nature. Kant believes that causal determinism is true of empirical psychology, even if we are unable to know any of the causal laws. Moral principles should, then, be available for use in causal explanations of human beings in nature. Further, if the moral principles are available in empirical psychology, the faculty that causes us to be aware of them by prescribing them to us could be included in empirical psychology. If so then there is a strong basis for a claim that reason as well as moral principles are empirically real and subsequently for a robust conception of moral experience that includes the role of practical reason in actual agent deliberation and causal determination. In addition to these systematic connections, this picture is supported by some direct textual evidence such as the identification of “a causality of reason in the determination of the will” as “one of the natural causes” (A803/B831) and the claim that “a rational being has the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws” which would have to be in the empirical mind (4:412). If moral principles are available to moral agents through moral experience, there is reason to call them empirically real. In addition, if the agent’s moral actions are caused by reason in a way that can be understood in empirical psychology, then the property of rational causation of moral agents would be empirically real as well. In both cases, they could be understood as transcendentally ideal as well if the transcendental conception of moral agency also required them. Kant also provides reasons for casting some doubt on this robust understanding of moral experience as an empirical moral realism. He claims that we are never aware of the actual causes of our actions (Groundwork, 4:407). Also, he sharply separates a “genuine self” that acts on the basis of reason from an appearance of the self that is determined by desires and inclinations, suggesting that reason can play no part in appearance (Groundwork, 4:457). And he strongly rejects any attempt to explain freedom using psychological determining grounds in time (Critique of Practical Reason, 5:96). In these cases, Kant appears to be denying any kind of empirical realism for moral explanations of action. Kant need not be denying empirical realism for our awareness of moral
68 Laying the ground principles in our moral experience; he is denying that freedom can be part of the empirical world. The difference between these two pictures reflects the tension in Kant regarding the ontological implications of his moral theory. Kant is pulled in two directions by different moral concerns. On the one hand, he must account for the everyday experience of morality that human beings, qua natural beings, experience. On the other hand, some of Kant’s moral commitments, particularly but not exclusively freedom of choice, seem incomprehensible as part of the causal determinism in nature. The task of the remaining chapters in this book is to show how all of Kant’s moral commitments are explainable in a naturalist ontology. The practical/theoretical distinction and the domain for ethics This chapter began with the claim that the question “what is ethics?” is the most basic question one can ask about any moral theory. Kant’s answer as developed so far showed that ethics can be understood as a part of philosophy, which itself has as its domain: rational cognition aimed at the ultimate end of reason itself. It is important to keep this basic approach in mind, since philosophy as the activity of reason in pursuit of reason’s own ends emphasizes subjectivity, and the dispute between moral realism and moral idealism rests on the relation of moral principles, properties, and objects as dependent on the subject. In the preceding section, I showed that through its critical method, philosophy focuses on the faculties of reason and the understanding to defend the possibility of pure rational cognition using transcendental arguments. I suggested that the ontology of the subject who employs pure rational cognition could be understood in some way as empirically real. Making out the practical analogue to the theoretical empirical reality of objects in space and time is left to be developed in detail. A big step in that direction comes from the division into theoretical and practical as the most important distinction in philosophy. In this section, I will show that Kant has several different characterizations of the distinction that can have different connotations but essentially the same denotations. The characterization of practical philosophy will also identify its domain as free acts. The practical/theoretical division One must be aware that Kant uses the term “speculative” and “theoretical” nearly interchangeably and even on the rare occasions when he distinguishes them, he is not consistent. Kant contrasts the practical in different places with either the speculative or the theoretical or both. I will treat speculative and theoretical reason as interchangeable, usually using the term “theoretical”.
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 69 Similarly, Kant uses the language of theoretical and practical reason in making the division between theoretical and practical philosophy. Since philosophy is the activity of reason, discussing them together is unproblematic. Further, theoretical reason and practical reason are, for Kant, not two separate faculties but one and the same faculty of reason. Kant uses the terms “theoretical reason” and “practical reason” as short for the different uses by one faculty. He makes this clear in the second Critique when he says “it is still only one and the same reason which, whether from a theoretical or practical perspective, judges according to a priori principles” (5:121; see also 4:391). In the many different passages referring to theoretical reason, speculative reason, and practical reason, Kant clearly means to refer to those uses of one faculty of reason. Any mention of practical, speculative, or theoretical reason ought to be taken to mean these uses or aims. Given these clarifications regarding the apparent identity of theoretical and speculative reason, and the real meaning of the different “faculties of reason” as different uses of one faculty, the contrast between practical reason and speculative reason becomes approachable. Kant appears to present four different explanations of the contrast. A. Is/ought: Perhaps most famous contrast between the two is that the speculative aim of reason is to discover what is, while the practical aim of reason is to tell us what ought to be (A633/B661; A802/B830; A806/B834; A845/ B873). B. Nature/morality: Reason in its speculative use is said to investigate nature, while reason in its practical use investigates morality. Kant presents such a contrast when identifying a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals (A841/B869; 4:387–8; 5:54–5; 5:170). C. Given/creating: The third contrast between speculative and practical reason lies in their relation to whatever objects they consider, not necessarily in the objects themselves. Specifically, practical reason is said to create its objects, while theoretical reason concerns objects somehow given to it (A550/B578, 5:15; 5:54–55; 5:89). D. Knowledge/action: Speculative reason concerns knowledge while practical reason concerns the determination of the will to action. Not the objects but the method and purpose of application of reason’s powers and principles is the difference (A327/B384; A365; A475/B503; A803/B831; A841/B869; 5:19–20; 5:45–6, 5:89). Kant’s first way of contrasting speculative and practical (A), using the is/ought dichotomy, fails to clarify his intended meaning and actual use of the contrast. The fame of this definition is rivaled only by its obscurity. The meaning of the “is” is fairly straightforward. It is important to keep in mind that whatever the practical turns out to be, it will not include ontological claims. But what does it
70 Laying the ground mean to say that something “ought to be?” What is the nature of that which ought to be? In one way, this contrast falls under (C), for Kant says that the object which ought to be is the moral world which is created by practical reason through human actions (A808/B836). This moral world which ought to be is created only to the extent that practical reason is actualized in the moral agent’s acts. In another way, the is/ought contrast is like (D) because practical reason is to determine our actions in accordance with that which ought to be (A802/B830). The ought in this sense has meaning only as an imperative commanding the will to action. Because of this ambiguity, I will not treat Kant’s references to “is” and “ought to be” as comprising a distinct meaning of the difference between the practical and speculative, although it remains important as a summary of their fundamental difference. The contrast between the sets of objects of nature and morality (B) is more successful as a characterization of Kant’s intended meaning and use of the contrast but by itself, insufficient to explain the unique characteristics of the practical. This contrast can be construed in two ways related to different characterizations of “object”, first as sets of things and second as subject matter. In the first, one would assign the theoretical to one set of substantial objects, perhaps appearances, and the practical to another, perhaps things in themselves. Besides being limited by relying on a two-world interpretation of transcendental idealism, this simple kind of contrast also does not fit Kant’s overall theory. The two uses of reason cannot have completely different sets of objects because they share concern with at least some of the same objects. On the one hand, God, immortality of the soul, and freedom of the will, can be approached, Kant says, both speculatively and practically (A796/B824; 5:4–5), and, on the other hand, the human power of choice is treated, as he says in the First Introduction to the third Critique, as free in practical philosophy and as a cause in “theoretical philosophy as cognition of nature . . . the practical part of a philosophy of nature” (20:197). Further, Kant himself stated that speculative and practical reason concern the same set of objects of possible experience. As I noted in the first section of this chapter, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he distinguished the concepts of domain and territory: the domains of speculative and practical differ in that they each legislate different sets of concepts, but their territories are identical because both sets of concepts concern the objects of possible experience as appearances (5:174). The difference between speculative and practical cannot lie in distinguishing any corresponding sets of things, because these sets are coextensive or at least overlap. Alternatively, the set of objects in (B) can be understood as different domains construed not as substantial objects but as merely different subject matters. In the Collins lectures on metaphysics, Kant insists that theoretical and practical have distinct objects: “Practical philosophy is practical not by form, but by the object, and this object is free acts and free behavior” (27:243, Kant uses the
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 71 latinate Object rather than Gegenstand). The object of practical philosophy is not any kind of substantial object but is instead said here to be free acts, which as noted in the previous paragraph have their effect in nature and can be understood in relation to natural causes. The free acts, however, are a different subject matter than objects in nature. This interpretation is the better way to construe (B), but it also turns out by itself not to be specific enough to be helpful since it merely says that they have different domains, one nature and the other morality, without characterizing the basis on which to separate them. The quote identifies morality as “free acts and free behavior” which will be identified as the domain after more assessment of the nature of the practical. The third contrast (C) does not itself specify a domain but only a relation between reason and its objects that can ground a division of subject matter. Theoretical reason is given its objects by intuition while practical reason creates its objects. They could both concern the same things in appearance provided that those objects are subject to both kinds of relations. Practical reason can be said to create objects in two ways: in the first way, practical reason does not actualize its objects; that is, it does not create those objects as empirical objects, but creates the concept of that object (in some cases, these are the ideas of reason18); in the second way, practical reason does actualize its objects in the empirical world. Only in the second way can practical and theoretical reason relate to the same objects in different ways. In the Dialectic of the second Critique, Kant identifies the objects created by practical reason as actions in the sensible world and the highest good, which is the final end of our right acts (5:134). In particular, the performance of actions by the will creates objects in the realm of appearances that are then subject to theoretical reason, which is given the effects of the will in appearances to integrate into knowledge of nature. Regarding both objects of practical reason – our right acts and the highest good – practical reason can be said to create the concepts of those objects. Through the categorical imperative, moral agents conceive of the right acts they ought to perform. Likewise, in conceiving of the highest good, practical reason creates the concept of happiness necessarily connected with virtue (5:110–111). But using these concepts, practical reason seeks to actualize right acts and the highest good in the world; these activities create practical objects corresponding to those concepts. Particular right acts of course occur in the empirical world and are thereby actualized. The highest good, 18 I use the term “concepts” to discuss that which reason can create because the particular actions guided by practical reason would be understood in conceptual terms. Certainly, any empirical ends that would be the goals of actions in accordance with practical reason would be conceptualized as well. When Kant labels the concepts of reason as “ideas” in the Critique of Pure Reason (A311/B368), he is not considering practical reason and relations to actions at all. Some of the concepts of objects to be created by practical reason are ideas, in particular, the highest good.
72 Laying the ground Kant says, is practical, that is, “to be made real through our will” (5:113). Practical reason creates not only the concepts of right acts and the highest good, it also then uses them as a guide in specific actions in the sensible world which perhaps work toward but do not fully actualize the highest good. The claim that practical reason creates its own objects resembles the claim of constructivists that various principles, properties, or objects are constructed. Of the specifics mentioned by Kant, the actualization of the idea of the highest good would have to be constructed in an obvious and unimportant sense of being the result of actions which themselves are of course created as empirical events in another non-controversial sense. The concept of the highest good is created by reason when finite rational agents look for a way to reconcile their moral obligations with their desire for happiness. As such, it stems from the nature of moral agency rather than any decision procedure and is not constructed. Besides the idea of the highest good, the postulates of practical reason are ideas created by practical reason (irrespective of the status of their objects). The fourth contrast (D), between knowledge and action, is not about objects or relations to objects but about two different ways that reason can comport itself. This contrast is related to the previous one because reason’s creation is done in part through action and reason’s being given its objects through intuitions provides reason with material to comprehend. The comparison is not perfect since knowledge can involve creation by reason of speculative ideas in order to aid the understanding’s cognitions (A702/B731) and Kant sometimes talks of “practical cognition” (5:20). The key difference is that in both knowing and action, reason has principles or ideas such as the moral law or the idea of God, but it uses them for different purposes. The two purposes relate to the is/ought dichotomy already discussed. This contrast between the theoretical and practical fits best with the domain of philosophy as a whole and also best justifies the internal division within philosophy that provides its basic structure. Philosophy is identified as “the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason”, of which the highest is the final end of human beings (A839–40/B867–68). To reach those ends, reason must prescribe actions, but in order to act rationally, reason must know the world in which it acts. Theoretical philosophy provides knowledge essential to the actions governed by practical philosophy. The basic division of philosophy into theoretical as knowledge and practical as action stems from the domain of philosophy as a whole. This result meets Kant’s requirement for a rational system of knowledge in which one idea determines the position of the parts a priori (A832/B860). I will show here that this fourth contrast also best fits with the identification of the specific domain of practical philosophy as free acts. Action is the fundamental characteristic of practical philosophy. Still, the other three contrasts, each also reflect aspects of the practical even if they are not fundamental. In focusing on
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 73 action, practical reason creates certain concepts as well as rules for free action. Actions are viewed as created rather than given and so not initially identified as part of nature to be known; hence, they can be considered as the distinct objects (as subject matter) of morality as opposed to given objects in nature to be cognized. At the same time, actions do occur in nature and are secondarily integrated into the causal series in nature as something given through experience. Qua actions to be performed, they embody the “ought” rather than the “is” of theoretical philosophy. Free acts as the domain of ethics Kant identified free acts as the domain of ethics, that which is to be systematized. He does insist upon the systematization of ends in the kingdom of ends in Groundwork II, and the systematic relation between virtue and happiness as part of the highest good in the Critique of Practical Reason, but neither of these constitutes the complete domain of the practical. The most explicit argument that Kant gives for the claim that free acts constitute the domain of ethics is in his course lectures on ethics. He apparently always began his lectures on practical philosophy by distinguishing the practical from the theoretical (Powalski 27:96; Collins 27:243; Kaehler 3; Mrongovius 29:597; Vigilantius 27:479). For simplicity, I will refer to the Collins lectures of 1784–85, which provides the clearest formulation of the distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy and the domain of the latter, but the other lectures and even the Groundwork Preface make the distinction and at least hint at the domain. The initial definitions Kant provided for the theoretical/practical distinction on the first day of his Collins ethics course provides a fair summary of Kant’s view of the division:19 All philosophy is either theoretical or practical. Theoretical philosophy is the rule of knowledge, practical the rule of behavior in regard to free choice. The difference between theoretical and practical philosophy is the object. The one has theory for its object, and the other practice. (Collins, 27:243) 19 When reading Kant’s lectures, one must always be wary that Kant sometimes follows his textbook closely, so attributing to Kant any structural and definitional passages from the lectures without checking the text as its possible source is risky. In this case, the distinction clearly stems from Kant himself because the textbook he was using, Alexander Baumgarten’s Initia philosophia practicae primae, begins by discussing practical philosophy as a part of philosophy without distinguishing theoretical philosophy by name; neither does Baumgarten define the domain of practical philosophy as Kant does: for Baumgarten, “philosophy” in general is “the science of our knowledge of the properties of things”, and “accordingly practical [philosophy] is the science of our knowledge of the obligations of human beings” (19:9).
74 Laying the ground Kant describes the practical as “the rule of behavior in regard to free choice”. This reveals the link between the nature of practical philosophy and freedom. But the specific conception of freedom is not obvious and must be examined. The passage mentioned here claims that theoretical and practical philosophies have distinct objects. Kant goes on to clarify that to say that they have distinct objects contrasts with a distinction one might make in which theoretical and practical philosophy differ only according to form. That is, given a single object of study, theoretical philosophy can relate to it in one particular manner, namely, finding “concepts of the objects”, while practical philosophy can relate to the same object in another manner, namely, “exercising knowledge of the objects” (27:243). Kant gives the example of theoretical and practical medicine, the former presumably consisting in knowledge of health and bodily conditions, the latter in application of that knowledge to maintain or alter the state of health. Both share the same object. But this difference according to form is not what Kant intends by his distinction. Rather, he insists that theoretical and practical have distinct objects (Object): “Practical philosophy is practical not by form, but by the object, and this object is free acts and free behavior. The theoretical is knowing, and the practical is behaving” (27:243). The contrast with theoretical philosophy provides the support for a characterization of freedom at issue. Theoretical philosophy is about knowing what exists. The practical must have a distinct object, so its object must be other than knowing what exists. The practical must concern behavior. But since the behavior at issue cannot be known – for then, it would be the object of theoretical philosophy – the behavior in question cannot be understood empirically, as an event whose causes can be known. A study of causes of behaviors would fall under psychology as the theoretical science or knowledge of the mind. Practical philosophy must abstract from possible particular causes of behavior. It must look at an act not as something to be known but as something to be decided. But this is the same as saying that all possible choices are open in deliberation as possible courses of action. The individual must view herself as not constrained by any determinant of her decision-making. Kant puts it this way in the Collins lecture: If I abstract from the particular matter in hand, the philosophy of behavior is that which gives a rule for the proper use of freedom, and this is the object of practical philosophy, without regard to particulars. So practical philosophy treats the use of free choice, not in regard to particulars, but independently of all of them. (27:243) By looking at behavior independent of all particulars, practical philosophy is looking at free choice independent of any and every particular object that could determine acts. This conception of freedom serves as the domain of practical
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 75 philosophy. Here the direction Kant’s argument takes can be seen; I had earlier noted that the domain of a science could be an empirical concept (as matter for physics), but now that option is precluded for the domain of practical philosophy. The specific meaning of free choice must still be clarified. As a starting point for ethics, one cannot assume that it can be dependent on theoretical philosophy, so the nature of free choice must be internal to practical considerations. This view of freedom is the nature of the free power of choice facing decisions for actions from a perspective abstracted from any consideration of determination in nature. An outline of an argument in a Reflection most likely from the mid-1770s that Kant labels “Metaphysical Concept of Morality” begins with this same conception of freedom of the power of choice: We do not abstract the concept of freedom from experience. When we want to act, we consider the prospective action as completely problematic with regard to the present moment, and the ought is a condition of the consensus of the prospective action with reason, which is thus not at all in a pre-determined interconnection with appearances, i.e., with nature. (R6854; 19:180) Freedom is here considered as the apparent indeterminacy of the outcome of reflection and decision from the point of view of the reflecting individual. Kant’s language is reminiscent of his argument from the Collins lecture in which he held that human beings must see themselves as free from determination by any particular empirical ground in deliberation. This conception of freedom is also similar to the famous claim in the Groundwork that “to every rational being having a will we must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which alone he acts” (4:448). This is an agent-perspective conception of freedom. This agent-perspective conception of freedom is independent of any metaphysical claims regarding a proof of freedom. It merely functions as a description of the agent’s viewpoint in decision-making, roughly that the process of reflecting and deciding is open-ended and within the control of the agent. Without this assumption, agents would not experience their deliberation as deliberation. As Kant puts it, “One cannot possibly think of a reason that would consciously receive direction from any other quarter with respect to its judgments, since the subject would then attribute the determination of his judgment not to his reason but to an impulse” (4:448). There is an extremely important consequence of this reliance on the agentperspective conception of freedom for comprehending the nature of practical philosophy as a whole, and subsequently for resolving some of the issues about moral realism in Kant. First-person freedom does not entail actual independence from causal necessitation. Actual independence would have to be shown by a different kind of argument, namely, a theoretical argument. The relation between first-person freedom, which might be illusory but is inescapable as a practical
76 Laying the ground self-ascription, and actual freedom, which would need independent verification, is crucial for understanding the nature of practical philosophy. Human beings, then, experience their decision-making deliberation as firstperson freedom. A natural fact about human beings is that they face decisions about what they ought to do and that their own conscious deliberation appears to them to determine their actions. Causal explanations in anthropology or psychology do not substitute for deliberation. Nothing empirical can be understood by the agent as controlling her deliberation. These factors allow Kant to derive the requirement that any moral law to be used in that deliberation must be a priori. Given that the domain of practical philosophy is free acts understood as free, deliberative decisions seen from the perspective of the agent, some aspects of Kant’s methodology in ethics and its relation to metaphysics are clear. First, free acts understood from the agent perspective have no ontological status. I had said earlier that the difference between theoretical and practical as a difference between what is and what ought to be is vague, but that it was clear that there would be no ontological claims given by the practical. With the domain of ethics understood as agent-perspective free action, the lack of ontological conclusions is seen as twofold: not only is there no object involved that can be said to exist, there is also a priority of the agent’s perspective over any theoretical understanding even of the nature of action. This priority will form the core of Chapter 3. Second, the relation between the systematization of the contents of this domain and the transcendental method can be specified. I earlier argued that Kant’s transcendental method would have a place in ethics. Now I can say that the transcendental argumentation in practical philosophy is directed toward finding the conditions under which free actions will be possible considered in an agent-perspective manner. The transcendental condition for free action in the deliberation of agents will be the availability of some nonempirical basis upon which the agent can make a choice without having to consider that agency as determined by empirical desires and inclinations. That non-empirical basis will be pure practical reason itself, the subject of Chapter 4. Concluding remarks At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that the broadest questions one might ask about any ethical theory include “why is there any such thing as ethics at all?” Kant’s answer can now be seen. Only because free acts that must be understood in a first-person perspective exist must there be a science that attempts to systematize that domain. If no such free beings existed, there would be no ethics – and correspondingly no philosophical study of ethics.
The place of ethics in Kant’s philosophy 77 In order to identify ethics, I looked at the even broader question of the methodology and subject matter of philosophy as a whole. Philosophy requires systematic organization of cognitions related to a particular subject matter or domain. Philosophy’s own domain is the essential ends of human reason. That domain will be systematically organized, and I identified five possible ways that an initial division of philosophy will begin that systematicity. I discussed three of those in detail. The division between critique and system on the on hand and the division between pure and empirical cognition on the other hand worked together, as the transcendental method used in critique separated the pure from the empirical, laying the ground for the system of pure cognitions. I showed that this transcendental method is compatible with metaphysical naturalism. The third division I examined was that of theoretical and practical philosophy. The main meaning of that divide is the difference between knowledge and action, and a closer look at Kant’s identification of the specific domain of the practical as free acts seen from the agent’s perspective fit with that characterization. The coming chapters will now employ the specific subject matter of ethics and its relation to transcendental method in order to answer in more detail the main questions of this book.
Part II Practical reason in nature
3 The priority of the practical and the fact of reason The practical possesses so much more importance than the speculative or theoretical for Immanuel Kant that he claims in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that the true value of all the efforts of the latter pursuits lie in their usefulness as guardians of morality as the final end of the world (5:442–3). We have also seen that in the Critique of Pure Reason, he identifies the domain of philosophy with a practical aim. His related famous claim in the Critique of Practical Reason that practical reason has primacy over speculative reason (5:119–121) declares that, while the two uses of reason cannot reach conclusions that contradict one another, the former may be entitled to make metaphysical claims that the latter must accept. I will show in this chapter that Kant’s thought contains two distinct conceptions of the priority of the practical, one explicit and one implicit, and that attending to this distinction will reveal an important point about any possible practical ontology. Once I have shown the value of this distinction I will apply it to an interpretation of the fact of reason. I will show how the fact of reason, which I identify as the experience of the commanding nature of the categorical imperative, arises in actual situations in which moral agents face moral choices. The fact of reason fits in this way with the nature of practical reason as concerned with free acts understood from the agent-perspective. I will apply this understanding of the fact of reason to the two kinds of priorities for practical reason. Two priorities of practical reason A close analysis of Kant’s use of the priority of the practical will reveal that Kant offers the two independent conceptions of priority. The first, his explicit doctrine as revealed in the section “On the Primacy of Pure Practical Reason” in the Critique of Practical Reason, I will call “the priority of belief”. The priority of belief makes the following claim: when reflecting upon the conditions of human morality, one’s concern is with reconciling the metaphysical claims, the postulates, arising from the presuppositions of the practical use of reason with the limitations on speculative claims detailed in the critique of the speculative use of reason. To say that the metaphysical claims of the practical 81
82 Practical reason in nature have priority is to say that reason may insist on these postulates although speculative knowledge can neither confirm nor deny them. The second, implicit conception that emerges when Kant discusses particular examples of practical action, I call “the priority of action”. The priority of action involves the following claim: when acting, humans are confronted with the categorical imperative as a command obligating them to act in certain ways. To say that the practical has priority is to say that speculative metaphysics is irrelevant to practically oriented action, so that even a speculative denial of the postulates would not affect practical reason. Kant’s discussions of the relation between practical and speculative in fact contain these two conceptions. I will argue that the former and not the latter conception actually relies on a higher priority of theoretical reason. I will also argue that the latter conception, Kant’s implicit view, is the only one that genuinely asserts the priority of the practical and best fits with his conception of the nature of practical reason as discussed in my previous chapter. The priority of belief In analyzing the concept of priority, one must first note that Kant never directly claims that practical and speculative reason contradict one another. The nature of priority cannot lie in holding some proposition P (asserted as true by practical reason) to be true and holding some proposition not-P (asserted as true by speculative reason) to be false. Kant holds that a condition of the existence of reason is that it never contradicts itself, and since speculative and practical uses of reason are one and the same faculty of reason, one can never be in a position to choose between rival claims to the truths of P and not-P (5:120). The basis for a need for priority lies elsewhere in what Kant calls the interests of practical and speculative reason. Kant defines “interest” of a faculty of the mind as “a principle that contains the condition under which alone its exercise is promoted” (5:119). He says that the interest of the speculative use of reason “consists in the cognition of the object up to the highest a priori principles” while the interest of the practical use of reason consists “in the determination of the will with respect to the final and complete end” (5:120). These interests match the contrast between speculative and practical as knowing and acting (the determination of the will). As principles, these interests are known through concepts1 and would constitute a priori goals of the uses of reason. These interests as goals mean that speculative reason is furthered only when working toward the highest 1 See A300/B356–7 for Kant’s definition of “Prinzip”.
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 83 possible knowledge of objects and practical reason is furthered only when actually determining the will to its proper actions. These interests themselves do not conflict with one another, Kant says, but do make different assertions about “certain theoretical positions” (5:120), namely, the reality of the objects freedom, immortality, and God. (Here I simply discuss the postulates without specifying the precise status that they have; in Chapter 5, I will present an argument that they make no ontological claims about actual objects.) Speculative reason can neither prove nor disprove the reality of these objects; practical reason requires their reality as a condition of the possibility of morality itself. If speculative reason has priority, then practical reason’s claims can be ignored by our theoretical faculty and not integrated into our set of beliefs about our experience. If practical reason has priority, then speculative reason must attempt to integrate belief in these objects into our greater set of beliefs about our experience.2 The priority of practical reason ought then to consist of practical reason’s interest in determining the will trumping speculative reason’s interest in knowledge of objects. What exactly is the nature of practical reason’s claim about certain objects that requires its interest to take priority over speculative reason? For there to be a need for priority, it appears that one of the two following options holds: either practical reason creates objects not already considered by speculative reason that speculative reason must not ignore but integrate into its set of cognitions about the world, or practical reason must require of speculative reason agreement with some assertion not already made by speculative reason about certain objects already considered by speculative reason. First, determination of the will to action could create new objects that then would themselves be subject to the speculative use of reason. This option, however, does not appear possible in Kant’s account. There is of course the 2 Paul Abela argues that the proper understanding of the primacy of the practical is one that avoids what he calls the “integrationist model” in which one of speculative and practical reason – whichever is said to have primacy – is required to integrate the relevant products of the other (Abela 2002b). He discusses the paper on which this chapter is partly based, so I will respond here. On my account, the priority of action is not integrationist in this sense, and I take it to be just as much Kant’s view as the priority of belief. Nonetheless, Abela chooses to discuss my account of the priority of belief – including the higher priority of theoretical reason it implies – as representative of my view because in that article, I label it as Kant’s “official” position (In this book, I drop that label and use only “explicit” and “implicit” for the two views). The priority of belief is integrationist, as Abela notes. He fails to stress that the integrationist need in my interpretation is based on the need of theoretical reason to know. In the process of trying to know what comes before it, it must try to find consistency among the principles and concepts and objects because consistency is a mark of a set of true propositional claims. I do not think that all of Kant’s discussions of practical reason include the integrationist claim but only those that include such a role for theoretical reason, and only because of the nature of theoretical reason. The priority of action is not integrationist.
84 Practical reason in nature obvious sense in which reason creates new objects through particular acts of will that result in actions and alterations in the sensible world, but they are unproblematically incorporated into the knowledge of nature as events in space and time. The priority of practical reason concerns its postulation of freedom, immortality, and God. For practical reason to require priority, it must be the case that freedom, immortality, and God do not already fall under the interest of speculative reason; otherwise, practical reason cannot be said to create these objects. But Kant himself admits in many places that freedom, immortality, and God are already objects of speculative reason (B395n; A798/B826; 5:3–4; 5:134). Indeed, the Dialectic of the first Critique concerns these objects approached theoretically, as the triad soul, world, and God. It cannot be the case, therefore, that the priority of the interest of practical reason lies in its creation of some objects not already subject to speculative reason. The second possible conflict between the interests of the two uses of reason is that determination of the will to action presupposes some speculative assertion neither presupposed nor proved by the speculative use of reason, yet pertaining to objects of speculative reason. In this case, freedom, immortality, and God are to be subject to the interest of speculative reason; practical reason adds only the assertion that we as moral agents must believe in these objects. Speculative reason must then integrate this belief into its system of cognitions. This latter understanding of the conflict between the two interests of reason is Kant’s explicit position. Kant concludes that speculative reason must yield to the demands of practical reason and take up the assertion of certain postulates – freedom, immortality, and God – for integration with other beliefs and cognitions (5:121). The priority of belief is thus Kant’s explicit position given in the section of the second Critique on the primacy of practical reason. This conception of priority, however, seems at odds with Kant’s discussion of the nature of the distinction between speculative and practical. Determination of the will to action, which is the interest of the practical use of reason, seems tenuously connected to the notion of belief. Further, Kant does not describe the priority of the practical in terms of the creation of new objects. Hence, Kant cannot have in mind the contrast between practical and theoretical as either given/ creating or knowledge/action. Kant’s explicit doctrine must presuppose a higher priority of speculative reason as reason’s interest in knowing about given objects.3 Kant is operating with an unstated assumption that reason must have interest in certain objects, 3 Marcus Willaschek has interpreted the primacy of the practical and the theoretical more narrowly (Willaschek 2010, pp. 173–75). Drawing on the material in Kant’s second paragraph of the section on primacy, he understands the primacy of speculative reason only in terms of setting the
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 85 namely, the objects of the postulates, not for determining right acts but for understanding the relation between right acts and the rest of our experience. Hence the postulates appear not as determinants of right acts in the process of deliberation but only when reflecting on the nature of morality, the fact that right acts do occur, and the fact that agents believe those acts ought to occur. And for this reflection, Kant must be assuming that speculative not practical reason is at work, and hence that there is a higher priority of speculative reason. This assumption is a theoretical, not practical, assumption. Moral agents require knowledge of the non-impossibility of the existence of God, freedom, and immortality, in order to understand how their right acts can be related to their experience as a whole. The acts themselves are still determined by practical reason alone. One might instead construe this situation as confirming the priority of practical reason. If practical reason is the use of reason that demands acceptance of its postulates by speculative reason, then one can claim that practical reason has priority, because speculative reason is constrained to modify its set of beliefs in order to incorporate the postulates of practical reason. In this way, practical reason would have priority even concerning beliefs. I believe, however, that such a relation nonetheless reveals the priority of speculative reason in carrying out the incorporation of all beliefs into one whole. First, these objects (the postulates) are themselves also objects of speculative reason in the Dialectic of the first Critique. Thus, speculative reason is forced to deal with their possibility as well as their possible integration into a complete set of beliefs already on purely theoretical grounds, so practical reason does not have priority in solely insisting that speculative reason consider these objects. Second, practical reason cannot demand that speculative reason accept beliefs that the latter has already determined to be false, since then integration of all beliefs would fail as the postulates turn out to be inconsistent with other results of speculative reason. Since it is speculative reason that does the required integrating of beliefs and that could presumably reject beliefs stemming from limits to what the practical can assume for its purposes. This fits Kant’s text at that point but does encompass the larger issue that arises after the speculative is constrained to incorporate practical reason’s beliefs. The larger priority of the speculative lies in its interest in knowing everything, which includes the relation between the beliefs of practical reason and the knowledge speculative reason already has at hand. The primacy of practical reason does not entail a surrender by speculative reason but only that speculative reason must incorporate non-speculative content. Nathan Rotenstreich also notes as I do that Kant’s view of the priority of practical reason seems to rely on a higher priority of theoretical reason (Rotenstreich 1965, p. 130). He argues that the postulates involve the validity of existence claims and hence must be theoretical. He does not, however, specifically link this claim to the interest of speculative reason in knowledge of objects but focuses on his claim that validity is a theoretical category. Rotenstreich also uses his analysis to reject Kant’s claims about priority of the practical rather than to search for Kant’s other conception of priority as I have.
86 Practical reason in nature practical reason should they have proven false on purely speculative grounds, speculative reason can be said to have priority. This priority of speculative reason is exhibited in other passages in Kant’s works on ethics, revealing that Kant must have understood that speculative reason has interests in many issues that arise from practical activity. Kant notes the interests of the theoretical in some seemingly practical issues such as freedom in several places, although nowhere does he emphasize it. In the Groundwork, he quite explicitly contrasts the interest of speculative reason with the lack (in this case) of interest of practical reason in the question of freedom: “The settlement of that controversy [about freedom] does not belong to it; instead it only requires of speculative reason that it put an end to the discord in which it entangles itself in theoretical questions, so that practical reason may have tranquility and security from the external attacks that could make the land on which it wants to build a matter of dispute” (4:456–7). Kant implies here that the question of freedom needs to be answered for indirect practical purposes, namely, the defense of morality from outside attacks, rather than the direct practical interest, namely, any use of the idea of freedom to determine the will to right acts. And the type of reason that is to answer the question of freedom is speculative not practical. Speculative reason’s interest in knowledge includes “put[ting] an end to the discord in which it entangles itself” regarding the possibility of freedom. But the role of speculative reason’s interest in knowledge about issues such as freedom raised in the investigation of practical philosophy is not limited to serving indirectly any practical purpose of defending morality from outside attacks. Rather, Kant says in the Preface to the Groundwork, speculative reason has its own interest in knowing what it can about human morality: “A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive of speculation – for investigating the source of the practical principles that lie a priori in our reason – but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly” (4:389–90, modified, emphasis mine). Notice that speculative reason itself is said to have interest in investigating issues, in this case, the source of the moral law, which we might otherwise assume belong exclusively to practical reason. The second Critique contains some passages making similar points. Kant notes, for example, that speculative reason concerns itself with certain concepts raised by the practical: “it is practical reason which first poses to speculative reason, with this concept [of freedom], the most-insoluble problem so as to put it in the greatest perplexity” (5:30). Speculative reason is put in difficulty because it must integrate beliefs required by practical reason with its other beliefs. This integration is a speculative not a practical issue, a problem of comprehensive and coherent beliefs not of direct determination to action.
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 87 Because it involves a higher priority of speculation, the explicit position of the priority of belief has the following benefit: it supports Kant against the traditional complaint by his critics that the postulates cannot be required as presuppositions of right action without making them into part of an agent’s set of motives and thus requiring the heteronomous motive of an expectation of happiness.4 Although this objection does not have much traction for Kant interpreters today, it is illuminating to examine it in detail because it reveals the role of the theoretical in the postulates. The objection centers on Kant’s claim that belief in freedom, immortality, and God is required by the interest of practical reason in order to support belief in the possibility of the highest good. The interest of practical reason is identified by Kant as determination of the will to action. Hence, one seems forced to conclude that belief in freedom, immortality, and God are required for determination of the will to action because they are required for the possibility of the establishment of the highest good. The highest good, of course, involves providing each moral agent with the amount of happiness she justly deserves. The highest good is the state that combines supreme virtue with supreme happiness. If a moral agent requires, as a requirement for the determination of her will to action, belief in the highest good as an actual future state brought about by freedom, immortality, and God, then that moral agent’s will is being determined, at least in part, by the motivation of the happiness that is guaranteed in the highest good. Since this belief is part of the required set of expectations of the agent, according to the objection, it can be said to be part of the agent’s set of motives. In other words, the objection states that priority of belief in the postulates and the highest good violates Kant’s demand that moral agents must act from the motive of duty alone. My analysis of the priority of belief points to the best response to this objection. Given the explicit view of the priority of the practical as actually requiring a higher priority of the speculative, Kant can claim that belief in the actuality of freedom, God, and immortality is not required by practical reason for its own interest of determining the will to action but only required by speculative reason in attempting to integrate right acts into its knowledge of the world to fit its interest in knowledge. This point lies behind Kant’s otherwise abstruse explanation of the “moral necessity” of belief in the existence of God: It is well to note here that this moral necessity is subjective, that is, a need, and not objective, that is, itself a duty; for, there can be no duty to assume the existence of anything (since this concerns only the theoretical use of reason). Moreover, it is not to be understood by this that it is necessary to assume the existence of God as a ground of all obligation in general (for this rests, as has been sufficiently shown, solely on the autonomy of reason itself). What belongs to duty here is only the striving to produce and promote the highest good in the world, the possibility of which can therefore be 4 See, for example, (Beck 1960, pp. 242–44) and (Wood 1970, pp. 38–68).
88 Practical reason in nature postulated, while our reason finds this thinkable only on the presupposition of a supreme intelligence; to assume the existence of this supreme intelligence is thus connected with the consciousness of our duty, although this assumption itself belongs to theoretical reason (5:125–6). To assume the existence of God is not a duty because one cannot have duties to believe theoretical matters but only to perform actions. The only duties one has are those that follow directly from the autonomy of reason, namely, the duties required by the categorical imperative (5:30–33). Since these duties involve working toward the realization of the highest good, one can be said to have a duty to further the highest good. But any belief in an actual realization of the highest good involves the theoretical claim that God exists. Practical action implies belief in God but does not confirm the existence of God. One can be said only implicitly to believe that God exists because one’s actions, when analyzed, are seen to require the existence of God for the realization of their ultimate aim. But even this conclusion reveals the higher priority of theoretical reason because even this conclusion involves not determination of the will to right acts but reflection on the determination of the will to right acts. What Kant calls the moral necessity of belief is a product of theoretical reflection not a prerequisite to action. Since it is not a prerequisite to action, belief in the postulates is not a motive to action. Kant can thus avoid the problem some see in his linking the highest good to moral action because the link is theoretical rather than practical and thus independent of the determination of the will to right acts. The priority of belief, Kant’s explicit version of the primacy of practical reason, thus actually involves a higher priority of speculative reason. Only when reflecting on the circumstances and aims of moral action does one ask about the prerequisites for realization of the highest good. This reflection, itself speculative, finds reason integrating concepts related to human moral action with other theoretical matters. The priority of action Since the priority of belief actually involves a higher priority of the theoretical, genuine priority of practical reason over speculative reason can occur only in the other conception of priority, the priority of action. The priority of action better captures the interest of practical reason in determining the will to action because only the priority of action involves use of the categorical imperative. In acting, humans are aware of the categorical imperative as a command obliging them to act in certain ways by adopting certain maxims. To say that the practical has priority is to say that the results of speculative reason are irrelevant to the determinations to action of practical reason.
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 89 The priority of action, although never directly stated by Kant, seems to lie behind many passages he uses to support various arguments. At times, he separates the practical approach to action from any theoretical issues arising from an attempt to integrate a conception of action with other beliefs and cognitions. At other times, when he offers examples of right or wrong acts, he consistently treats them independently of the theoretical considerations involved in the priority of belief. When acting, all these passages seem to say, a moral agent simply does not need to know whether or not speculative reason precludes the possibility of freedom, God, and immortality. A review of these passages will show that Kant’s thought did possess the essential elements of the priority of action. Kant hints at the priority of action in several places. In the Antinomy chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, he describes the irrelevance of theoretical considerations for the practical task of “doing and forbearing”: If a human being could renounce all [architectonic] interests . . . such a person would be in a state of ceaseless vacillation. Today it would strike him as convincing that the human will is free; tomorrow, when he considers the indissoluble chain of nature, he would side with the view that freedom is nothing but self-deception and that everything is mere nature. But now if it came to be a matter of doing or acting, then this play of merely speculative reason would disappear like the phantom images of a dream, and he would choose his principles merely according to practical interest (A475/B503). The practical purposes of action trump speculative considerations of the possibility of freedom. When faced with a moral decision, the agent makes his choice only according to the practical interest of determining the will to action and not according to any concepts or beliefs of speculative reason. Kant does not say here that an agent would stop reversing positions by settling on one position within speculative reason; rather, it appears that the agent stops speculating at all. A similar passage in the Canon states that the question of freedom of the will does not concern “the practical sphere . . . it is rather a merely speculative question, which we can set aside as long as our aim is directed to action or omission” (A803/B831; see also 5:172). His opening paragraph in the Critique of Practical Reason also seems to assert this priority of the action: “If as pure reason it is really practical, it proves its reality and that of its concepts through the act, and all subtle reasoning against the possibility of its being practical is futile” (5:3, modified). The reality of pure practical reason is proved not theoretically but in instances of its use. Practical reason is here given priority because its actual use in action trumps any speculation regarding its possibility or impossibility. Theoretical rationalizing is “futile” when practical reason asserts its priority in action. Note, however, that in these passages, Kant does not replace a theoretical basis for inquiry into the possibility of freedom with a practical demand for belief in freedom as the basis for theoretical inquiry. Had these passages taken
90 Practical reason in nature that approach, they would accord with Kant’s explicit doctrine of the priority of belief. Rather, in both cases, Kant asserts that the theoretical questions become irrelevant from the standpoint of the moral agent faced with a decision. The agent “would choose his principles merely according to practical interest”, and practical reason “proves its reality and that of its concepts through the act” independent of “futile” speculation. The agent would decide on an action taking into account the dictates of the categorical imperative, not any beliefs she might hold, because the categorical imperative and not any set of theoretical concepts is the means by which practical reason determines the will to action. The priority of the practical as a priority of action also lies behind Kant’s famous claim from the third section of the Groundwork that “Every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is just because of that really free in a practical respect, that is, all laws that are inseparably bound up with freedom hold for him as if his will had been validly pronounced free also in itself and in theoretical philosophy” (4:448). In this passage, unlike the two quoted earlier, Kant attributes to the moral agent, an assumption of freedom: when a rational being faces moral actions, she must assume that her decision is free rather than determined by conditions beyond her control. But, Kant says, her assumption that she is free suffices for the practical reality of her freedom. As long as she considers herself as free, she is justified in treating herself as if she were free in her decision. She is not, however, postulating freedom in any theoretical sense. Kant intends here to distinguish freedom as valid for theoretical philosophy from freedom as sufficient for the practical interest. Several examples Kant uses to illustrate various aspects of his moral theory also illustrate the priority of action. In the Critique of Practical Reason, after arguing that freedom and the moral law reciprocally imply one another, Kant offers the example of a man commanded by his sovereign to provide a false deposition who recognizes his freedom to refuse this immoral command. “He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him” (5:30). This person recognizes his freedom “without hesitation” when confronted with his sovereign’s command to provide a false deposition. And later, after reviewing the possibility of a noumenally free decision underlying the entirety of one’s phenomenal character, Kant turns to conscience to show that our moral experience of placing blame on ourselves is in agreement with this conclusion; since conscience involves no theoretical reflection but “is in perfect agreement with” the results of theoretical reflection on the possibility of freedom (5:98), conscience must be connected with practical reason rather than theoretical reason. But it appears that conscience does not require any confirmation of the possibility of freedom by the theoretical reason, rather, it independently confirms the results of
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 91 theoretical reflection. The practical interest of conscience in determining responsibility for acts has priority over theoretical reflection about our practice of determining responsibility for acts.5 Given these examples of the priority of practical reason as an independence of determination of the will from theoretical considerations, one wonders whether the Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals are, in fact, works of practical reason. In my previous chapter, I noted that the theoretical/practical divide is not limited to philosophy’s systematic metaphysics of nature and of moral but can be seen to extend to the critical level as well. Admittedly, Kant himself is not consistent in whether he treats critical philosophy as itself divisible into theoretical and practical. He sometimes claimed the Critiques to be critical but not theoretical or practical, particularly in the First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment (20:195). Certainly, the third Critique does not fit into that division except in the very broad sense that all philosophy ultimately has a practical aim. The Critique of Practical Reason, then, might be critical only and neither practical nor theoretical. But such a conclusion would confuse two different concepts: reason and philosophy. When in these passages, Kant contrasts critique on the one hand with the theoretical and practical on the other hand, he explicitly distinguishes critique from the system of philosophy that is divided into theoretical and practical philosophy, the metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals, respectively. He claims that his critical works are works of reason, which itself has only speculative and practical uses. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is clear in his insistence that critique is performed by reason itself (Axi-xii). Reason as a faculty still has speculative and practical interests, which result in theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and critique. In this sense, the critical works, as I will show, can be seen as works of speculative reason. To the extent that a critical work is aimed at knowledge, it is speculative. To the extent the work is aimed at determining free acts, it is practical. Kant offers compelling reasons to view the second Critique and the Groundwork as themselves partly theoretical. Kant did sometimes describe his works in moral theory as meeting a practical need. To be practical, the second Critique and the Groundwork would 5 An anonymous reviewer of this book suggests that one might take these examples as evidence for the theoretical claim of freedom, under the principle that ought implies can, and that thus, these examples are not limited to action. I discuss the kind of freedom associated with “ought implies can” in Chapter 6. Here I will point out that the kind of evidence in these examples remains at the first-person practical level. The agent judges that he can do the required deed. The agent’s practical belief that he ought to do x does not provide evidence for a theoretical claim that he can; rather, the principle of ought implies can would only lead the agent to believe that he can. Any inference from ought to can from the agent’s perspective must retain that practical status.
92 Practical reason in nature have to contribute to the determination of the will to action. Kant provides precisely this account of the aims of the Groundwork when he says at the end of its first chapter that the common human reason, while generally accurate in its moral reasoning, can sometimes err due to the mixture of inclinations with rational motives. “In this way common human reason is impelled, not by some need of speculation (which never touches it as long as it is content to be mere sound reason) but on practical grounds themselves, to go out of its sphere and to take a step into the field of practical philosophy” (4:405). The passage from the Preface to the Groundwork that I quoted earlier also confirms this practical role alongside a speculative role (4:389–90). At least the Groundwork, then, is to clarify the source of the moral law in order to sharpen the ability of common human reason to allow itself to be determined by practical reason. The Critique of Practical Reason, however, is a different type of book that does not concentrate on detailing the moral law itself but rather focuses on theoretical issues that arise from the fact of human morality. The theoretical nature of the second Critique itself is manifest in two ways: first in the occasional particular references to its theoretical nature, and second in Kant’s general pronouncements about the soundness of common moral practice. One example of the first case appears after Kant reviews the possibility of a noumenally free decision underlying the entirety of one’s phenomenal character. As I have already noted, Kant immediately turns to conscience to show that our moral experience of placing blame on ourselves is in agreement with this conclusion (5:98). Kant first provides a theoretical argument based upon concepts provided by the practical use of reason, then turns to conscience, which independently agrees with the results of these theoretical considerations. A similar, although much more concise, approach is given in the first paragraph of the Preface that I also quoted earlier and in which Kant calls on experience to confirm the existence of pure practical reason (5:3). Note that in both of these examples, the moral agent immediately recognizes her freedom without any need for theoretical reflection. Kant does not first present the examples as providing puzzles that cause the moral agent to reflect upon the possibility of freedom, then provide his theoretical argument about the conditions for freedom. He instead first presents a theoretical argument with its own conclusions, then presents examples drawn from experience in which the same conclusions are independently demanded by practical reason in action. This shows that the main argument in the second Critique is theoretical, albeit concerning the practical use of reason, rather than practical in the sense of action-guiding. The discussion of the moral necessity of freedom also provides support for the claim that the Critique of Practical Reason is a work of speculative reason (5:30). We are given moral laws by pure practical reason, and this moral law then reveals freedom to us. The problem of freedom is given to the speculative
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 93 by the practical: “it is practical reason which first poses to speculative reason, with this concept [of freedom], the most-insoluble problem so as to put it in the greatest perplexity” (5:30). Noting that a large part of the second Critique as well as the third section of the Groundwork involve discussions of precisely the issue of freedom, one seems justified in labeling both of them works of speculative philosophy. Further support of this view appears when Kant points out in the Preface to the second Critique that his readers can understand some perplexing and problematic concepts from the first Critique, which reappear in the second, by comparing their old with their new employment (5:6–8). The concept of freedom in particular, he says, is comprehended this way; Kant even advises the reader to pay close attention to his discussion of freedom in the final section of the Analytic (“Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason” 5:89–106). These discussions by Kant of how the reader can comprehend the proper relation between the practical and the theoretical are themselves theoretical, based on a need to integrate beliefs and cognitions, rather than practical, designed to determine the will to action. The second support for the claim that the Critique of Practical Reason is itself a work in theoretical not practical philosophy comes from Kant’s discussion of the relationship between his work on ethics and common moral practice. In many places, Kant praises the sufficiency of the common view of morality (Bxxxii–iii; 5:35). Human moral agents do not require any new principle of morality and they are not ignorant of their duty as it stands (5:8n). Moral agents need very little help from philosophy in realizing the practical interest of determining their wills to right acts. Kant’s primary purpose in writing his works on ethics, then, is not to further that practical interest but to explore the theoretical issues related to ethics. Despite the theoretical nature of much of Kant’s moral theory, some of the objects treated in those works, namely right acts and the highest good, remain objects of practical reason. The postulates of freedom, immortality, and God are in contrast, first objects of speculative reason and are so treated in the Critique of Pure Reason. Recall that one difference between theoretical and practical reason lies in that theoretical reason is concerned with given objects while practical reason creates its own objects. This emphasis on the relation means that it is possible for theoretical reason and practical reason to relate to the same objects. Now recall that practical reason demands that certain actions occur through the obligatory force of the categorical imperative. The actions thus created and the goal of those actions, the highest good, are created by practical reason. But it does not follow that these objects are of concern to practical reason alone. The most obvious case is that once the actions have been performed, they are part of nature to be understood theoretically in accordance with natural laws. And once practical reason has created the idea of the highest good, it is within the scope of theoretical reason to attempt to
94 Practical reason in nature explain its possible relation to other objects. Hence the concept of the highest good, while created by practical reason, could be considered an object for theoretical reason. In fact, I claim, this is precisely what occurs in Kant’s investigation of morality and precisely the nature of the Critique of Practical Reason. The second Critique is not demanded by the interests of practical reason but only by the interests of theoretical reason. Practical reason’s sole concern is with the determination of actions. At least some of the works or parts thereof that we regard as Kant’s practical philosophy, therefore, are themselves works of theoretical philosophy about the practical use of reason. Given that Kant was more a reflective philosopher than an active agent in world or local affairs, we might expect as much. The philosophical issues surrounding a practical point of view are treated theoretically by Kant. But, ironically, one of those theoretical results may be an understanding of the priority of the practical as the priority of action, Kant’s implicit doctrine, which allows practical reason to function independently of any results of theoretical reason. Action and the nature of the practical Given that Kant had two different senses of the way in which practical reason has priority, it is legitimate to call both of them “Kantian”. The priority of belief preserves the unity of reason at the cost of denying genuine priority to the practical; the priority of action preserves genuine priority of the practical at the cost of denying the necessity of a unity of reason. Adopting either will therefore have both positive and negative consequences for interpreting Kant. Both capture elements of Kant’s philosophy. The interpretation I will give shows that they can be reconciled even if they do not fit at all points. This result has implications for the realism/idealism debate, given that the priority of action places so much emphasis on the perspective of the moral agent. The two views are reconcilable in an interpretation of Kant that stresses the nature of the practical as concerned only with questions of free action, of determining what moral agents ought to choose, and not with ontological questions at all. The work in my previous chapter detailing the nature of practical reason bears fruit here. Practical reason’s focus on action rather than knowledge shields it in practice from any ontological concerns. Practical reason itself is exhibited only in the moment of decision. As Kant puts it in the second Critique’s Preface, “If as pure reason it is really practical, it proves its reality and that of its concepts through the act, and all subtle reasoning against the possibility of its being practical is futile” (5:3, modified, my emphasis). The phrase “through the acft” translates “durch die Tat”, which could also be translated as “through the deed”. Whether the precise act is that of a moral agent deciding upon an action or the act of reason as a call to follow
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 95 a certain principle (to be discussed in the next section), the key point is that practical reason operates in agent’s actions. Practical reason arises when the agent is pondering a decision to act and thus within the agent-perspective understanding of free acts as the domain of ethics. Any and every concept or idea that practical reason brings to bear on that decision must be understood from the practical point of view of determination to action and not from the theoretical view centered on knowledge of what is. The agent’s perspective, so to speak, is framed by the action of practical reason. This agent-perspective lies at the heart of moral experience. Theoretical reason enters the practical picture only when the agent steps back from that perspective and reflects upon it. This is the step in the priority of belief in which the demands of practical reason are given to theoretical reason in order for the latter to incorporate them into a theoretical comprehension of experience. What is given to theoretical reason, then, is (in addition to the action as event in nature) the fact that agents do take up a certain perspective that is determined at least in part by practical reason. Theoretical reason is not given a set of objects such as God that it must then incorporate into the ontology of the world but is given a set of principles and ideas that practical reason uses in determining action. I will discuss this issue in relation to the nature of the postulates directly in Chapter 5. Theoretical reason does not obtain any ontological claims from practical reason but only the principles and ideas that constitute the agent-perspective. There is, then, no possible clash between the ontology provided by theoretical reason and that demanded by practical reason because the latter demands no ontology. At the heart of Kant’s moral theory, then, is the claim that practical philosophy must be separated from theoretical philosophy. The basis of his claim that moral theory must seek an a priori moral law – surely a touchstone of Kantian morality – lies in the nature of morality as practical philosophy concerned with a rule for free action in contrast to and without reference to theoretical philosophy concerned with knowledge of what exists. This basis must always be kept in mind when assessing particular claims in Kant’s ethical theory. In general, one must always be skeptical about anything that looks like an existence claim in Kant’s practical philosophy. Another way to see the importance of this interpretation is that Kant simultaneously allows one type of naturalism while rejecting another type. He rejects, quite clearly, a methodological naturalism that would base morality on something empirical, such as an empirically derived claim about human nature. The agent-perspective view on decision-making precludes anything other than a priori practical principles. No particular empirical fact about human beings, or about the human environment, or about nature at all, can serve as a basis for investigation into the ultimate principle of morality. This ultimate principle of morality, then, must be a priori
96 Practical reason in nature rather than a posteriori, and must be a necessary moral law rather than just a contingent practical principle. While insisting on this methodological anti-naturalism, however, Kant also shows that any resulting morality must not make existence claims; Kant thereby at least allows for a metaphysical naturalism. The domain of the practical must be sharply distinguished from that of the theoretical, and only the theoretical is allowed to be about knowing what exists. Kantian morality, then, must be prima facie compatible with a naturalistic metaphysics. These rather broad conclusions are quite general and could be misinterpreted. The separation does not mean that practical philosophy never concerns things that exist. Such a conclusion would be absurd, since practical laws govern human beings, who exist, in their relations with each other and with things, which exist. On the one hand, Kant himself insists that morality must be applied to human beings as they exist in nature (this is the study of “practical anthropology”, 4:388). Here, however, knowledge from theoretical philosophy as a study of human beings in nature is brought into the practical from outside, so to speak, in order to provide the material needed to apply the pure a priori ethics to actual human beings in nature. On the other hand, however, the parts of his pure moral theory that are not borrowed from an empirical study of nature yet appear to make existential claims – I am thinking in particular of the postulates of freedom, immortality, and God – must be capable of being interpreted in a way that avoids any existence claims. The interpretation I have just given will be fleshed out in more detail. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to show how the best interpretation of Kant’s “fact of reason” fits with the role of the priority of action. The fact of reason and agent-perspective The interpretation of the fact of reason will deepen the discussion of the difference between the empirical and transcendental agent introduced in Chapter 1. Empirical agents exist in nature as individuals who undergo a moral experience. As in Kant’s examples, they are faced with particular decisions regarding moral (and of course non-moral) situations. From their agentperspective, they must consider themselves able to make that decision freely, that is, they act under the idea of freedom. The priority of action holds that this perspective is self-validating and need not concern itself with the metaphysical question of whether the agent really is free. The transcendental moral agent is the conception of agency that results from a transcendental deduction of morality, the description of the a priori conditions for there being empirical moral agents. This agent need not be a transcendent being who in some way exists and acts independently of nature in space and time unless such a nonnatural ontology of agency is required by the specific a priori conditions of
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 97 moral agency as such. The transcendental agent could simply be a conception of the necessary structure of a moral agent in nature, including any requirements for the faculties of will or reason as well as the necessary structure of nature (or of human moral experience) that would allow for such agency if there is to be a valid, objective morality at all. I place the fact of reason squarely in empirical moral agency. I will argue that the fact of reason is the awareness of the categorical imperative that expresses moral obligation by its nature as a command. It is an aspect of the agent-perspective on free decisions.6 Thus, the fact of reason is experienced by agents within the practical perspective and falls squarely within the confines of the priority of action: when faced with a moral decision, an empirical moral agent feels the obligation to act in a certain way and does not question the nature, source, or validity of that categorical imperative from within that perspective. Upon reflection, when agents take up the questions of the nature, source, or validity of the categorical imperative, they then consider the nature of the moral law, freedom, and other issues that would explain that part of moral experience. In this reflection, they are in effect asking about the transcendental moral agent, working within the broad theoretical framework that, as I argued earlier in this chapter, motivates large parts of the Critique of Practical Reason and parts of the Groundwork. The nature of the transcendental moral agent is a practical concern in the framework of the priority of belief. To show that this interpretation of the fact of reason in particular and the surrounding issues in general is correct, I will first discuss the nature of the categorical imperative and its relation to the moral law in order to show that Kant differentiates morality as humans experience it from a hypothesized real morality. The difference between the moral law and the categorical imperative will be shown to rest on the status of pure practical reason itself and its less pure realization in human beings. Second, I will examine the nature of the fact of reason directly. I will partly endorse the interpretation that stresses the Latin root of the word Faktum used by Kant as a deed rather than a static fact. I will argue that understanding the term to refer to our consciousness of the categorical imperative as an immediate command of reason properly incorporates both the sense of fact and the sense of deed. Third, I will show the way in which this interpretation of the fact of reason paves the way for an empirically idealist interpretation of Kant’s ethics but also still allows for a transcendental level of moral agency that would ground a transcendentally ideal interpretation. In both cases, I suggest that a naturalist ontology would be sufficient to capture these 6 Pauline Kleingeld offers a very similar interpretation that stresses the agent-perspective, calling it “radically agent-based” (Kleingeld 2010, p. 72). With some minor differences, we share this general interpretation. The largest difference is the way that I relate the interpretation to the empirical/transcendental division.
98 Practical reason in nature elements of Kant’s ethics. Finally, I will examine the kind of freedom that the fact of reason is said to reveal to us. Categorical imperative and moral law Although the fact of reason plays an extremely important role for Kant, he never clearly defined it, forcing commentators to attempt to elucidate it in light of different, even conflicting, references.7 I will argue here that the fact of reason consists of the categorical imperative as our consciousness of the moral law. This definition involves Kant’s distinction between the moral law as such and the categorical imperative. Kant discusses this distinction in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork. The moral law holds for purely rational beings who would use it as the sole principle of action because they lack any other possible determinants for action. Purely rational beings have no sensuous impulses, so would always act rationally. They would conceive of the moral law not as a command but as a description of their principle of action. We, humans, however, can guide our actions not only using laws of reason but also by incorporating sensuous needs and desires. Unlike purely rational beings, we do not automatically guide our action according to the moral law. We humans encounter the 7 The initial assessment in English is by Lewis White Beck in his Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Beck 1960, p. 166f), where he quotes four passages from the text and concludes that the fact is either consciousness of the moral law, the moral law itself, or autonomy. Beck cites additional passages from the second Critique and further identifies four additional references to the fact of reason after the second Critique that, he says, fall in line with the earlier ones. See also (Beck 2002). Darlei Dall’Agnol quotes eleven passages in which Kant mentions the fact in the Critique of Practical Reason and concludes that it has a family of meanings (Dall’Agnol 2012a, p. 115). Other commentators identify a single meaning for the fact of reason, generally taking it to be the consciousness of the moral law. Dieter Henrich takes it to be simply “the demand of the good” (Henrich 1994, p. 83); Henry Allison, the consciousness of standing under the moral law (Allison 1990, pp. 231–39); John Rawls, that in our common moral consciousness we acknowledge the authority and direction of the moral law (Rawls 1999c, p. 102); Guido de Almeida, the consciousness that finite rational beings have of the moral law as a categorical imperative (De Almeida 2012, p. 147). Two quite different understandings of the fact are given by Marcus Willaschek, to be discussed later on, and Ian Proops, who argues that the fact is both the moral law itself and our consciousness of it, although he stresses the former (Proops 2003). What makes Proops’ interpretation different is that he interprets Kant’s German term Faktum in light of a legal proceeding in which the factum (the Latin term) is the thing identified as the matter for a legal judgment, as opposed to the juris which is the legal basis for the judgment. Kant uses this terminology in the Critique of Pure Reason, in his discussion of the difference between the possession of a concept such as causality and the justification for that concept, the latter being the subject of the transcendental deduction (A84–87/B116–19). Proops’ claim is weakened when one notes that in the second Critique, Kant uses the German term rather than the Latin term, a difference from the first Critique and at odds with his normal practice in discussing legal terminology. Pauline Kleingeld also rejects Proops’ reading on the basis that it does not fit with Kant’s own direct explanation of the fact and that it cannot explain the passages in which Kant describes the fact in active terms (Kleingeld 2010, pp. 64–65).
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 99 moral law in the guise of the categorical imperative (5:32), a command to guide our behavior according to rational form alone. In the Groundwork, Kant uses the phrase “Act only . . .” when formulating the categorical imperative to emphasize its status as a command. He sharply divides the conception of the purely rational will, all of whose actions would always conform to the autonomy of the will, from the will that is in the world of sense whose actions are subject to the “ought” (4:454). Only in the latter case is there a synthetic a priori proposition, he says, allowing the reasonable conclusion that the former is an analytic proposition describing a purely rational will.8 To reinforce the point, Kant compares the distinction between the conception of a purely rational will on the one hand, and a rational and sensible will, on the other hand to the distinction between the pure concepts of the understanding, “which by themselves signify nothing but form of law as such”, from their application to sensible intuitions in a priori synthetic propositions about nature. Just as there is an analytic proposition “Every effect has a cause” and a synthetic proposition “Every event has a cause”, there is an analytic principle, “Pure rational will acts autonomously” and a synthetic principle “The human will ought to act autonomously”. There are good philosophical grounds for this division between categorical imperative and moral law as well. We experience the categorical imperative as an obligation; it is not merely an intellectual awareness of a principle. Any principle that describes purely rational behavior, however, would be merely something we would understand intellectually because, as sensible rational beings, we do not experience the decisions of our will as always determined by reason. This phenomenological difference is reflected in the difference between categorical imperative and moral law. Put in another way, the categorical imperative is part of the agent-perspective when faced with a decision but the descriptive principle of the behavior of a pure will is not.9 Human beings experience the moral law as a categorical imperative: this I claim is the fact of reason. Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, for example, from consciousness of freedom (since this is not antecedently given to us) and because it instead forces itself upon us of itself as a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition, either pure or empirical (5:31). The categorical imperative, as a command, presents itself to us as obligatory. We experience the call of moral obligation in the guise of the categorical 8 9 A similar division is given with regard to a holy will (4:439). This way of differentiating the moral law from the categorical imperative expands on (Beck 1960, p. 121). Allison also employs this distinction, see (Allison 2011, pp. 274–83).
100 Practical reason in nature imperative. How this happens and what precise status the fact has requires more explanation of the meaning and function of the fact of reason. Fact and act The precise way in which this imperative strikes us in our moral experience is as a command. We take commands to issue from some authority, and this case is no exception. The authority is assumed to be reason; hence, the fact of reason is a command of reason of which we are conscious. We also understand commands as acts, and since reason provides the command, we can ascribe this act to reason. The fact of reason, then, can be understood as having a twofold significance as our actual conscious awareness of an act of command by reason. The term that Kant uses, Faktum, allows for this meaning. Every translation of the Critique of Practical Reason into English simply translates the term Faktum as “fact” without even mentioning the availability of an alternative translation of the term as “act” or “deed”. The German term Faktum at the time was a germanization of the Latin term factum, and was allowed to have two meanings (both related to the Latin term): “fact” and “deed”.10 Kant uses the Latin term “factum” in the Metaphysics of Morals and throughout his Reflections and lectures on ethics and natural right as equivalent to the German Tat, which is best translated as “deed” (6:224), although at 6:371, he equates Factum with Tatsache (fact). In the second Critique, had Kant meant “fact” in the sense of a piece of knowledge, he likely would have used the German “Tatsache” instead of Faktum. Marcus Willaschek has argued convincingly that the meaning “deed” or “act” makes more sense than “fact” in many of the passages in which Kant uses the term in the Critique of Practical Reason.11 These passages tend to discuss reason as “announcing itself” (5:31), “giving” (5:31), “forcing itself” (5:32), and “determining the will” in relation to “dynamic laws that can determine its causality” (5:42). At least in these passages, it is better to understand the Factum of reason as an act of reason in providing the moral law. Particularly strong evidence comes from a quotation from the Critique of Practical Reason in which Kant uses the terms Tat in a way equivalent to the use of Faktum: “For, if as pure reason it is really practical, it proves its reality and that of its concepts through the act [die Tat], and all subtle reasoning 10 11 Neither the word Faktum nor Factum appears in the Grimm Brothers dictionary. Duden indicates that the term Factum (or Faktum) was first used in Germany in the seventeenth century, and that it had meanings corresponding both to “fact” and to “deed”. Kleingeld cites Zedler’s Universallexikon from the mid-century in noting that “deed” was the preferred meaning (Kleingeld 2010, pp. 62–63). See (Willaschek 1992, pp. 174–193). The discussion of the “Factum of reason” appears separately as well in (Willaschek 1991).
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 101 against the possibility of its being practical is futile” (5:3, modified). These considerations at least ought to put the translation of “Factum” as “fact” in doubt, and provide compelling evidence that Kant intended the term to refer in some way to the activity of reason. To see the entirety of Kant’s use of Faktum as deed, however, would leave out the important element of our awareness in the discussion of the Faktum. Pauline Kleingeld suggests interpreting the Faktum as “consciousness of the fundamental law (of pure practical reason), a consciousness that reason produces in agents” rather than a fact as something alien confronting the moral agent; the Faktum is a fact generated by a deed. She gives an analogy comparing the fact of reason to a decision by a king or a painting by Rembrandt: the act results in a thing that individuals can become aware of as a product of that act.12 I agree that consciousness is necessary and believe that Kleingeld has provided the best interpretation of the Faktum of reason yet, but I think that she still separates the conscious awareness from the act of reason too much. My distinction between the moral law and the categorical imperative allows for a deeper connection between the senses of “fact” and “deed”. A moral agent’s awareness of the categorical imperative is not the result of an act of reason, it is an act of reason in commanding us to act a certain way. There is no lag between the generation of the command to act so that one’s maxims can serve as practical laws and the awareness of the categorical imperative. They are the same thing within the agent-perspective. In moral experience, when the agent is faced with a free decision with moral implications, reason acts in pressing the agent with the categorical imperative as a command.13 Unlike the decision of a king or painting by Rembrandt that can be known well after the actual deciding or act of painting, the awareness is simultaneous with the deed. A better analogy, and one that illustrates what I take the status of the fact of reason to be as a kind of deed, would be to watching a dance by a ballet dancer because the result that one is aware of is inseparable from the current action of the dancer. One can still remember the dance later, but the phenomenal experience of the memory is different from the experience of the performance. Analogously, the experience of the obligatory force of the categorical imperative during moral deliberation is different from the later memory of that experience. The Faktum of reason is the direct experience of the categorical imperative. 12 13 (Kleingeld 2010, p. 65). David Sussman also interprets the Faktum as a deed rather than a fact in saying that the Faktum is not merely revealing a metaphysical truth about the moral law, but that “pure reason declares the law to be binding, and, in this declaration, somehow makes it so” (Sussman 2008, p. 68). He does not identify it with the categorical imperative as I do.
102 Practical reason in nature The best interpretation of the Faktum of reason, then, is that of the consciousness of the categorical imperative as a command being issued by reason to an agent caught up in the process of deliberation. Seeing the Factum of reason as awareness of this deed of reason instead of a static fact fits the philosophical function of the Faktum. Kant introduces the Faktum after presenting and resolving the two “problems” of finding the property of the will that makes it determinable by mere lawgiving form, the solution being freedom, and of finding the law to determine a free will, the solution being lawgiving form. Kant concludes that “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other” (5:29), a claim Henry Allison has deemed the “reciprocity thesis”.14 Without an independent basis to ground either side of the reciprocity, neither freedom nor law can be justified. Kant is faced with a circle15 (although he does not use that term). When the Faktum is seen as the awareness of the categorical imperative as a command in moral experience, it is clear how Kant is able to find a way to justify both moral law and freedom despite the limits of their reciprocal derivation. The circle is broken by invoking the practical experience of reason’s commanding us in the categorical imperative. This practical perspective is within the agent’s perspective. Given the assessment earlier in this chapter of the nature of the practical/theoretical divide and my claim that the priority of action emphasizes the practical point 14 15 See (Allison 1986) and (Allison 1990, pp. 201–213). In a part of the article from which part of the current argument is drawn, I even call it a “vicious circle of mutual dependence” (Rauscher 2002, p. 490), prompting Patrick Kain to object that there is no vicious circle and even if there were, my invocation of the categorical imperative as the fact of reason would merely substitute a circle from categorical imperative to freedom and back for the circle from moral law to freedom and back (Kain 2006, pp. 453–54). Kain claims that Kant avoids any circle by distinguishing between freedom as the ratio essendi of the moral law and the moral law as the ratio cognoscendi of freedom (5:4 note), but that is precisely the way in which I claim that Kant avoids the circle as well. Our conscious awareness of the categorical imperative as a command of reason in our moral experience is immediately known, prompting us to ask for an explanation of it, which leads us to the conclusion that only a free lawgiving on the part of pure practical reason could be the basis for any valid moral imperative, hence our awareness of the categorical imperative is the basis on which we make a knowledge claim about freedom. But as part of this claim, we understand the nature of pure practical reason as providing the principle for action of purely rational beings, that is, the moral law, which would be the basis for the categorical imperative for us imperfect rational beings, hence we see the freedom of pure practical reason as the basis for a possible moral law. Further, such a solution does not deny that there is a circle if the derivation is restricted to the material Kant provides in Problems I and II on 5:28–29. Nowhere in the statement of those problems does Kant invoke the ratio cognoscendi claim. Only in the Remark does Kant raise the additional question asking “from what our cognition of the unconditionally practical starts” (5:29, emphasis in original), asking, in effect, for an entrance to the circle and then providing it immediately with the consciousness of the moral law soon identified as the fact of reason. Problems I and II by themselves constitute a circle of derivation even if the addition of the fact of reason allows for them to be justified using that independent consideration.
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 103 of view from the agent-perspective, the fact of reason can be understood within that perspective as an unquestioned contribution to moral deliberation. The agent views herself as subject to the categorical imperative and her will as having the capacity to be determined by the categorical imperative to action. The moral agent, when faced with a situation that demands action, is simply aware of the call of the categorical imperative. The agent at that time and qua agent cannot doubt the validity of the imperative since it is experienced as an undeniable command. The possibility for doubting the validity of the categorical imperative comes only when the moral agent is not faced with a situation that demands action, and thus when the moral agent in not directly involved in moral deliberation and is not caught up in the agent-perspective. At this time, the agent engages in theoretical reflection about moral deliberation itself, and the experience of the categorical imperative is subject to philosophical examination. The priority of belief is applicable at this point since this reflection involves a higher priority of theoretical reason. Our experience of the categorical imperative can cause us to ask in reflection about its ultimate source. One possible source is pure practical reason, that is, the categorical imperative might be derived from the moral law as a particular instantiation for finite sensuous and rational beings. But it is also possible – before completion of the philosophical reflection – that the experience of the categorical imperative does not have its source in pure practical reason; it might, for example, merely stem from empirically conditioned reason (5:15). In the first case, the explanation of the categorical imperative will invoke transcendental considerations about rational agency as such. In the second case, our awareness of the categorical imperative in our experience stands on its own as a practical fact about empirical agency. Because the categorical imperative might not stem from pure practical reason, Kant is impelled to investigate its source. The status of the categorical imperative will depend upon the status of its source, if any, discovered during the investigation conducted in the Critique of Practical Reason and elsewhere. My next chapter will look in some detail at the ways in which Kant attempts to explain the nature of reason, both empirical and transcendental, in order to provide a justification for the categorical imperative upon reflection. It needs no justification in practice. The fact of reason is ideal rather than real at the empirical level because it has no ontological status outside of the agent-perspective. It is the agent’s conscious awareness of the categorical imperative. At the transcendental level, the fact of reason must be understood in relation to the broader understanding of the nature of reason itself. If Kant is able to defend the claim that the possibility of moral experience depends upon a certain kind of moral agent, and that this agent must experience the moral law as a categorical imperative, then the fact of reason has transcendental justification. But since the fact of
104 Practical reason in nature reason at this level is not extended beyond the transcendental conception of moral agency, it would be transcendentally ideal. At both levels, then, the fact of reason as the consciousness of the categorical imperative is ideal rather than real. The fact of reason is also compatible with a naturalist ontology. Provided that empirical psychology is able to include in its descriptions of a moral agent, the consciousness of the categorical imperative, there is no non-natural ontology required. The fact of reason, of course, is not an empirical fact (5:31). It is not based on any intuition or other empirical experience but is simply forced upon us by reason. By this, I understand that consciousness of the moral law as a categorical imperative cannot be understood as normative except from within the agent-perspective. It would be in principle possible for empirical psychology to include as a matter of fact that an agent made a decision on the basis of a certain representation of a law (4:412) without empirical psychology including the normativity or obligatory force of that representation for the moral agent. The next chapter will provide more detail on the relation between empirical and pure reason to show how they are able to be comprehended in a naturalist ontology. Fact of reason and the status of freedom The fact of reason “leads directly to the concept of freedom” (5:30). Freedom is the “ratio essendi of the moral law”, the basis for the existence of the moral law, but freedom is known only by means of the moral law (5:4). These claims are often taken to mean that in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant uses the fact of reason as an epistemological basis for revealing the objectively real truth that human beings are free.16 Freedom is known to be true on the basis of the practical fact of reason. Kant uses language that appears to support this interpretation. He says “freedom is real” (5:4), a moral agent “cognizes freedom within him” (5:30), and freedom has “objective and . . . undoubted reality” (5:49). In these and similar cases, however, Kant is not as firm in his assertions as it seems at first glance. In the three instances just quoted, each is placed within a context that either limits the referent or stresses the practical approach that, as has been shown, is concerned with the determination of free acts rather than knowledge of what is. When he says that freedom is real, he immediately identifies it as “this idea” and earlier in the sentence, “the concept 16 Karl Ameriks provides this analysis in (Ameriks 1982, pp. 203–220). He couches this interpretation in terms of a relation to Groundwork III in which Kant’s attempt to provide a deduction of the moral law by first proving that we are free falls short. Kant is then said, in the second Critique, to reverse the order of proof and begin by asserting the moral law as an undeniable premise, from which Kant is then able to assert that we really are free as a metaphysical claim, as though we have practical insight into what theory cannot prove.
The priority of the practical and the fact of reason 105 of freedom”; the concept is also linked to the concepts of God and immortality so that those concepts, not the objects corresponding to them, obtain “objective reality” (5:3–4). The moral agent who cognizes freedom within himself does so at the moment of decision when faced with the demand by his prince to provide false testimony; the agent is caught in the agent-perspective from which the agent must believe his decision is freely made (5:30). And it is not freedom but the “concept of freedom” (my emphasis) that is said to have “objective and, though only practical, undoubted reality” (5:49). This latter sentence contains several caveats: not freedom itself but only its concept is what is at issue; its reality is “undoubted” (unbezweifelte), implying that the belief in the concept of freedom is inescapable rather than that freedom is itself real; and most important, that the concept has only practical reality. This quick look at three passages is by itself insufficient to show that freedom is not an objectively real property of human beings. There is, however, also evidence that Kant intends freedom to be seen merely as an assumption taken up for practical purposes. Of all the intelligibles, Kant says, only freedom has reality for us “only insofar as it is a presupposition inseparable from that law”, which he glosses to “on behalf of that law and of the use of pure practical reason”, implying that this reality of freedom is only from the agent-perspective when confronted with the moral law when using practical reason (5:70). Freedom is identified as one of the postulates of practical reason (5:132, see also 5:4–5) and is subordinate to the moral law that is itself also declared a “practical postulate” (5:46), clearly in a less technical sense than Kant uses the term in reference to immortality, freedom, and God, but nonetheless something to be taken up only in a practical point of view. When one takes into account the larger context of Kant’s practical philosophy, the freedom that is revealed by the fact of reason should be understood in relation to the two priorities of practical reason. Under the priority of action, the fact of reason is experienced by a moral agent from the agent-perspective when faced with a decision. If freedom is understood in this way, it too would be valid only from the agent’s perspective and not be an ontological claim. Under the priority of belief, freedom would be tied to the fact of reason when the agent is later reflecting upon her experience. In this case, the immediacy of the disclosure of freedom through the experience of the fact of reason is lost. Reflection upon the awareness of the categorical imperative would raise the question of how such an imperative is possible, and freedom would be the answer derived from analysis performed from speculative grounds. This kind of analysis is provided by Kant in the second Critique, to be sure, but freedom in this sense must be understood as one of the presuppositions for a practical claim. The fact of reason discloses freedom to us as a practical postulate. Kant often uses the term “freedom” by itself, although he also identifies freedom of
106 Practical reason in nature the will (Wille) directly (e.g., 5:28–29). The Wille, however, is identified as a practical reason in the Groundwork (4:412), and practical reason’s determining the will through the moral law is what constitutes its freedom. In order to understand freedom of the will, it is necessary to determine the status of pure practical reason such that it is able to determine a free will. Concluding remarks While the previous chapter viewed practical philosophy from the perspective of philosophy in general, this chapter has examined practical philosophy directly. I showed that Kant’s famous claim that the practical has primacy over the theoretical can be understood in two different ways. The priority of belief understands the practical as raising certain possible beliefs, the postulates in particular, that stem from reflection on our moral lives and presenting them to theoretical reason, which in turn is tasked with integrating those beliefs into its own claims about the world. This task reflects a higher priority for theoretical reason because part of its goal is to understand human experience; reflection on practical experience presents theoretical reason with content it then tries to incorporate into overall comprehension of experience. I argued that even the Critique of Practical Reason can be seen as a work of theoretical reason examining the nature and use of practical reason. The priority of action, in contrast, gives the practical independence from any possible theoretical claim that might cast doubt on the practical. When faced with deliberation about a choice for action, agents decide as if they are free and using the categorical imperative of which they are conscious without requiring any theoretical confirmation – indeed, even if there were theoretical disconfirmation, Kant sometimes allows. This sense of priority is, I argue, operative in the discussion of the fact of reason. I take the fact of reason to be the awareness of the categorical imperative as a command issued by practical reason during deliberation. Agents do not question the categorical imperative when deliberating but may later, upon reflection, ask themselves for explanation and justification. At that point, the experience of the practical becomes the subject matter for theoretical investigation. The need for freedom, for the moral law as a principle (and the conception of pure rational agency itself), for the highest good, and for the postulates arise through that theoretical reflection but are still practical claims because they are based on practical experience. The priority of action also gives a general indication of how Kant’s moral theory is idealist both at the transcendental and empirical levels, since practical experience is understood from the perspective of the moral agent. The following chapters will provide more details about specific practical claims, starting with Chapter 4 about the status of the moral law and practical reason itself.
4 The transcendental status of empirical reason The previous two chapters discussed the place of the practical in Kant’s philosophy as a whole and the specific nature of the practical. Practical philosophy is about free acts understood from the agent-perspective (Chapter 2). The only method for systematizing those free acts is through an a priori moral law. Moral duties must not be derived empirically. Yet the nature of Kant’s transcendental method allowed that even pure duties could be found in empirical moral experience; their justification would be priori. A closer look at the nature of practical reason (Chapter 3) showed that there are two main ways of understanding it: in relation to action and in relation to belief. In the first, practical concerns do not need any confirmation by theoretical reason; in the second, the task of understanding the place of the practical in experience falls ultimately to theoretical reason. I identified the fact of reason with human empirical consciousness of the categorical imperative in moral experience complete with its normative commanding nature and argued that it is compatible with moral idealism at both the empirical and transcendental levels. This picture is overly simplistic, however, since the transcendental method of justification itself might show that morality requires some non-natural metaphysics, or even transcendental realism. By that, I mean that some moral principle, property, or object is independent of the transcendental moral agent. It is possible that a conception of reason itself or God would have to exist independent of moral agents themselves. The identification of the practical with the agent-perspective does not by itself preclude this non-natural metaphysics. This chapter will examine this issue more closely with a focus on practical reason. I believe that the Wille as reason, not will (as Willkür or faculty of choice), is the core faculty in Kant’s ethics, and that understanding its relation to the transcendental and empirical levels is crucial for determining whether Kant’s ethics should be considered ideal or real. Philosophy is a product of the activity of reason in determining and pursuing its fundamental ends. The categorical imperative is grounded in reason and duties stem from reason. The value of humanity itself is based upon reason, either as a product of the categorical 107
108 Practical reason in nature imperative (idealism) or as independent value of rational beings as ends in themselves (realism). Kant calls his second Critique the Critique of Practical Reason, not the Critique of Will or Critique of Choice. And most importantly, when Kant discusses the requirements for a free will, he does so by invoking reason as the source of laws for the will in the two most important discussions of freedom prior to the second Critique, namely, the Third Antinomy and Groundwork III. This chapter will begin with an analysis of the Third Antinomy to show that Kant’s ethical theory is centered on the defense of reason as a basis for justification of the moral law. The dual levels of empirical experience and transcendental moral agency become even more important when reason’s causal role in moral acts is understood. The second section will show that the Groundwork also emphasizes the validity of reason as the main issue in ethics. The third section assesses the nature of transcendental freedom of reason as a faculty within nature. Finally, the fourth section argues that Kant could have been a transcendental idealist and moral realist regarding reason but that he holds back from such a claim. The conceptual focus of this chapter will be the nature of transcendental freedom of reason.1 I will argue against an ontological reading of transcendental freedom in the practical in favor of one that holds that reason is free by virtue of its structure within the sensible world. I will use the term “structural” to signify this non-ontological conception because it stresses the independence of the structure of reasoning itself from natural causal determination. This freedom of reason is distinct from freedom of choice (Willkür), which is an independent conception of freedom applying to a different faculty. The Wille/Willkür distinction has become standard in interpreting Kant’s ethics. 1 Kant had many different kinds of freedom, and for many different faculties. Lewis White Beck identified five concepts of freedom with their own internal variations, and he did not even include political freedom. The five identified by Beck are (1) an empirical, psychological, comparative conception that provides a basic distinction between voluntary and coerced action, (2) moral freedom, or the ability to act on the moral law, which Kant says requires transcendental freedom, (3) freedom as spontaneity, used for imputation and implying that the decision had no external cause, (4) transcendental freedom, or a causal force independent of causality in nature, and (5) postulated freedom, a two-perspective view that Beck finds the most plausible Kantian conception of freedom (Beck 1987). Beck also emphasizes the dual character of freedom in the Wille/Willkür distinction. He correlates Wille with the lawgiving in the conception of autonomy and Willkür with the initiation of a new causal series in the conception of spontaneity (Beck 1960, p. 177). I disagree with Beck’s insistence that “we must never suppose that there are two faculties related to each other in some external, coercive way. There is only one, but it has prima facie two kinds of freedom” (Beck 1960, p. 180). Even while a famous and widely cited work on freedom in Kant – Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Freedom – uses the singular, its author acknowledges “the bewildering number of ways in which Kant characterizes freedom and the variety of distinctions he draws between various kinds or senses of freedom” before announcing his focus on transcendental freedom (Allison 1990, p. 1).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 109 Translations into English of Kant’s works now generally render them as “will” and “choice” or “faculty of choice” respectively. Unfortunately, this device leaves the unsuspecting reader to associate what in English is generally called the problem of freedom of the will with Kant’s term “Wille”. Since the problem of freedom of the will is generally understood in terms of a free choice, it is preferable to associate that problem with Kant’s term “Willkür”; Chapter 6 will look specifically at the problem of freedom of the will in relation to the Willkür. The faculty of Wille is identified by Kant as “nothing other than practical reason” (Groundwork, 4:412) and as the lawgiving capacity of rational beings (Metaphysics of Morals, 6:226). My interpretation stresses this legislative role. Since, as I will show, Kant identifies this legislative role specifically with reason (Vernunft) in the Third Antinomy and the Groundwork, I prefer to identify the legislative faculty as reason. In what follows, I will stress reason but will continue to use the translation “will” when Kant uses the term “Wille” and use “reason” only for Kant’s “Vernunft”. Reason in nature in the Critique of Pure Reason Despite the fact that Kant’s most famous work is entitled Critique of Pure Reason, Kant does not provide any coherent definition of pure reason. Reason is identified as the faculty of principles (A299/B356). He sometimes discusses the pure as opposed to empirical use of reason, implying that there is one reason applied to different subject matters (A563/B591). Other times, he contrasts empirical reason as appearance with reason in itself (A549/B577). I want to contrast empirical and pure reason by showing that empirical reason is the embodied faculty of reason in appearance and pure reason is the transcendentally free structure of reason considered independently of its empirical manifestation. The Critique of Pure Reason in general and the Third Antinomy in particular include claims that reason itself is a cause that must be conceived as part of nature but also as transcendentally free. In this section, I will argue that the Third Antinomy’s discussion of freedom centers on reason rather than on the faculty of choice. I will show the evidence that Kant has a place for reason in nature and offer an interpretation that best shows how reason can be both a natural cause and have transcendental freedom. In the solution to the Third Antinomy, Kant highlights the causal power of reason as a faculty necessary for morality. “Now that this reason has causality, or that we can at least represent something of the sort in it, is clear from the imperatives that we propose as rules to our powers of execution in everything practical”(A547/B575). There are in general two different possibilities for understanding the causal relation of reason to these particular actions in nature. First, reason could have some status that makes it independent of natural
110 Practical reason in nature causality yet causing the particular empirical actions as appearances in nature. Second, reason could exist within nature subject to natural causality as a faculty of the agent in nature causing particular actions of that agent in nature, thus describable entirely in terms of natural causality. In the first case, the causal relation would seem to be a non-natural relation between the thing-initself and appearance; in the second case, it would be a natural relation among appearances. Kant’s solution to the Third Antinomy holds the former relation to be transcendental freedom, and he certainly holds reason to be a transcendentally free cause, but I will suggest that even the transcendental freedom of reason can be understood as metaphysically naturalistic although methodologically anti-naturalistic. I will argue that reason is a cause, understood as having two types of causality, and that it is in both cases a natural faculty of human beings in nature. Let me be clear about the point I am making: it is not controversial that reason acts as a cause, but it is controversial that reason in nature is that cause. Reason and choice Empirical reason acts through motives to cause particular decisions of the empirical faculty of choice, or Willkür. Kant describes the relation between motives of reason and the human faculty of choice in two well-known places in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Solution to the Third Antinomy (A534/ B562) and in the Canon (A802/B830). The human faculty of choice, like animal faculty of choice, is immediately affected by sensations. Since animals are affected only by sensations and have no other possible determinants to their actions, the decisions of their faculty of choice are necessitated.2 Human beings, however, are also affected by representations of reason, or motives. These representations “depend on reason” and yield laws that are imperatives, an implication that the categorical imperative is among these representations. Kant also refers to these representations as “motives that can only be represented by reason”. The human faculty of choice is thus not necessitated by sensations because it is able to act on motives instead of only on sensations. Kant calls this sense of freedom from necessitation by sensations “practical freedom” (there are, of course, other senses of the term “practical freedom” in other contexts). It is important to note that while human faculty of choice is not necessitated solely by sensations, it is not necessitated solely by motives of reasons either, for were it so, human beings would be perfectly rational, holy beings (5:32). 2 Kant sometimes discusses animals’ actions as determined by instinct. See, for example, R7199 (19:272).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 111 It is understandably common to interpret this sense of practical freedom as an ability of the human faculty of choice to decide upon courses of action without any determination by natural causes. Indeed, Kant claims as much in the discussion in the Solution to the Third Antinomy, where the human faculty of choice is said to have a causality to begin a series of occurrences independently of natural causes (A534/B562). But one might, without denying the importance of transcendental freedom as an independent causality for the human faculty of choice, instead read Kant’s description of the human faculty of choice as describing the empirical causality of sensations and motives in appearance. Such a reading is suggested by Kant’s remarks in the Canon where he describes practical freedom “as one of the natural causes, namely a causality of reason in the determination of the will” (A803/B831). On this reading, while the human faculty of choice is not causally necessitated solely by sensations or solely by motives, it is causally necessitated by the combination of sensations and motives. By analogy, if I throw a die, it is not necessary for the resulting number to be odd, and it is not necessary for the resulting number to be even, but it is necessary for the resulting number to be either odd or even. My reading of Kant’s claims about the determinants of the human faculty of choice is that it is not necessarily determined by sensation, and it is not necessarily determined by motives, but it is necessarily determined by either one or the other. Kant says as much in this passage from the Mrongovious lectures on Morals: If this free will is nevertheless to be necessitated, the necessitation must be practical or per motiva. Motiva are all representations of the understanding, or of reason, that determine the will. They are set in opposition to the stimuli, and are called incentives of the soul (elateres animi). If the motiva are to necessitate, the stimuli cannot do so; only free choice can be necessitated per motiva. (29:611–12, modified) The human faculty of choice at issue, of course, would have to be the empirical faculty of choice in space and time, and the faculty of reason at issue would be empirical reason. These two faculties in nature would be understood as the empirical correlates of a transcendentally free faculty of choice and a transcendentally free pure reason. A twofold distinction arises in this picture of Kant’s moral psychology: (a) the faculties of reason and choice are two faculties necessary for morality, with reason legislating the categorical imperative and the faculty of choice deciding particulars in light of it, and (b) both of these faculties have empirical manifestations in appearance but also require transcendentally free counterparts. Giving these empirical faculties their proper place in understanding, Kant’s ethics will show that there is room for a naturalistic interpretation of Kant’s ethics in which the motives of empirical reason determine the empirical faculty of choice.
112 Practical reason in nature Reason in the Third Antinomy That Kant’s Third Antinomy has freedom of the will as its content is a common assumption that, like many common assumptions, is imposed from without rather than being drawn from the text itself. Kant does, of course, rely on the Third Antinomy in his defense of freedom of the will. He correlates the Third Antinomy – in fact, the antinomies in general – with freedom of the will when noting the importance of the Dialectic for practical philosophy (Bxxix– xxx, A798/B826). But this correlation does not show that the Third Antinomy is about freedom of the will any more than it shows that the Paralogisms chapter is about the immortality of the soul, with which the Paralogisms are likewise identified for practical philosophy. The Third Antinomy is about causality. Kant’s intention is to prove that there must be another kind of causality besides natural, a kind of causality he calls “freedom” immediately at the opening of the antinomy in the thesis statement (A444/B472). The Third Antinomy is broader than, and opens the way for, a belief in the freedom of the will as its practical import. There is a further reason to minimize the claim that the Third Antinomy is about freedom of the will. Freedom of the will in the first Critique rests upon reason.3 This is clear even in the preface to the second edition when Kant asks readers to draw the conclusion that transcendental freedom is necessary for the origin of the moral law: “Now suppose that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in the strictest sense) as a property of our will, citing a priori as data for this freedom, certain original practical principles lying in our reason, which would be absolutely impossible without the presupposition of freedom” (Bxxviii–xxix). Kant here mentions freedom of the will but clearly relates this freedom to reason as the source of the moral law. Hence, the project of showing how reason can be conceived as transcendentally free supports any claim that the will could be free.4 3 4 Many of the issues I raise in my discussion of Kant’s critical works are treated by Henry Allison in (Allison 1990). Unlike many commentators on Kant’s ethics, Allison recognizes the importance of some conception of freedom for reason itself in addition to the problem of the freedom of the will. I will note my specific disagreements with Allison – particularly regarding the nature of transcendental freedom – in some of the following notes. In general, he equates Kant’s use of the term “reason” in the Third Antinomy with a more expansive rational behavior, so that behavior based on maxims is seen as the causality of reason (Allison 1990, p. 33). He also takes the freedom of reason to consist in acts of judgment made on rational grounds rather than, as I do, the principles of reason themselves. Practical spontaneity is then assigned to judgments, not the faculty of reason as the source of a priori principles (Allison 1990, p. 36f). Here, I largely concur with Keith Ward when he notes that the Third Antinomy is solved by conceiving of reason as the faculty which, as “changeless and eternal”, is the transcendentally free source of free actions. Ward uses the term “noumenal freedom” rather than “transcendental freedom”. See (Ward 1972, pp. 75–7). We differ in explaining the status of that changeless and eternal reason.
The transcendental status of empirical reason 113 There are several places in the solution to the Third Antinomy that make it clear that reason is the key faculty under discussion. When asking how human beings are able to attribute to themselves more than just an empirical character, he answers “in regard to certain faculties, he is a merely intelligible object . . . we call these faculties understanding and reason” (A546–47/B574–75). Neither will nor a faculty of choice is mentioned. Reason provides greater support for this claim than the understanding because the understanding is linked to empirically conditioned powers while reason relates to objects only through its own ideas. In the very next paragraph, Kant singled out imperatives as evidence that reason must have causality. Now that this reason has causality, or that we can at least represent something of the sort in it, is clear from the imperatives that we propose as rules to our powers of execution in everything practical. The ought expresses a species of necessity and a connection with grounds which does not occur anywhere else in the whole of nature. (A547/B575) This discussion of reason as a cause will be taken up in my next section, but for now, the key point is that reason is specifically cited for its role in practical determination to action. Kant continues in his discussion by saying that “reason does not give in to those grounds which are empirically given” (A548/B576); it is at least possible for us to assume that “reason actually does have causality in regard to appearances” (A548–49/B576–77) and there is “a certain causality of his reason” (A549/B577); that “reason is the cause of producing” actions and that “the ideas of reason have actually proved their causality in regard to the actions of human beings as appearances” (A550/ B578); asks “could reason’s action then be called free” and answers in part by invoking the fact that “pure reason, as a merely intelligible faculty, is not subject to the form of time” (A551/B579); and among many other occurrences in the following pages, “Reason is thus the persisting condition of all voluntary [willkürlich] actions under which the human being appears . . . every action, irrespective of the temporal relation in which it stands to other appearances, is the immediate effect of the intelligible character of pure reason; reason therefore acts freely” (A553/B581).5 Even the discussion of freedom in the solution to the Third Antinomy that seems most focused on the decision of the agent actually reveals this causal 5 Although this last passage clearly identifies reason as the freely acting intelligible, it is sometimes used in support of very different claims. Eric Watkins, for example, quotes this passage up through the semi-colon but omits the last four words (“reason therefore acts freely”) and instead concludes that “Kant . . . refrains from attempting to explain which particular intelligible character we might be able to impute to things in themselves on the basis of the empirical characters that cause the particular actions we perceive in the sensible world” (Watkins 2005, pp. 327–28). On the same page, he similarly overlooks Kant’s claim in R5611 that “the activities of reason” are not appearances by taking the reference to more generally apply to things in themselves.
114 Practical reason in nature power of reason. Near the end of his discussion, Kant offers the example of the malicious liar to show the way that the freedom he has discussed has an empirical use. The malicious lie, we are told, can be traced back causally to bad upbringing, a wicked natural temper, and so on. These determining causes seem to fully explain the lie. Yet, Kant says we blame the agent despite all of this empirical explanation. This blame attributes the cause of the lie to a lack of causation by reason: “This blame is grounded on the law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that, regardless of all the empirical conditions just named, could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is” (A555/B583). Further, Kant says, we transfer blame from the agent to reason: “now, in the moment when he lies, it is entirely his fault; hence reason, regardless of all empirical conditions of the deed, is fully free, and this deed is to be attributed entirely to its failure to act”. This attribution of blame to reason for its failure to act is at odds with blaming an agent for making the wrong decision. And the active way that reason “could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person” rather than a claim that the agent could have chosen to act out of reason also reveals that the key faculty under discussion in the solution to the Third Antinomy is reason rather than free choice. Reason as a natural cause I will now discuss in more detail the nature of empirical reason.6 In particular, I will show the plausibility of a robust conception of empirical reason that allows reason to be an entirely natural cause within appearances. A non-naturalistic interpretation of Kant’s discussions of reason, as well as the faculty of the understanding and other active faculties, is that they exist only in things in themselves and not in appearances, but that reason and the other active faculties have effects in appearance. But there is also a place in Kant’s metaphysics to count reason as among the appearances in space and time. Things in themselves can have counterparts in the world of sense as they appear. Certainly, if reason is to be considered to be a thing-in-itself or faculty in something-in-itself, then it can have a counterpart as appearance or as part of 6 Empirical reason is not directly mentioned by Kant very often. This term “empirical reason” can be and certainly was at times used by Kant as shorthand for empirical use of reason, as opposed to a pure use. The earliest use of the term I have found is in R4582, dating from 1772–75, in which it is listed alongside pure reason and practical reason in theological matters: “The need of reason to cognize a highest being is that of a necessary hypothesis of the employment of reason: (1) of pure reason; (2) of empirical reason (both are speculative); of practical reason” (17:601). A slightly earlier note from 1771 asks “what are the appearances of reason? (Subjectively determined general cognitions)” (R4375; 17:525). In R4582, Kant appears to be discussing the empirical use of reason, but in R4375, he is certainly asking about the existence of reason in appearances.
The transcendental status of empirical reason 115 some being’s appearance. This is the sense of “empirical reason” at stake here. Kant even describes the task of the Critique of Practical Reason as taking for granted that there is empirical practical reason and asking whether a corresponding pure practical reason can exist and be related to empirical actions. One of Kant’s notes made in the 1780s on a loose piece of paper rather than in his textbooks, and thus presumably made in preparation for the Critique of Practical Reason rather than in preparation for his lectures, stresses this point: “The critique of practical reason has as its basis the differentiation of empirically conditioned practical reason from the pure and yet practical reason and asks whether there is such a thing as the latter” (R7201; 19:275–76). In the Solution to the Third Antinomy, he holds that an empirical manifestation of reason is necessary in order for reason to be understood as a cause at all. Kant identifies the causal power of reason, at least in part, with the application of a rule: Thus every human being has an empirical character for his power of choice, which is nothing other than a certain causality of his reason, insofar as in its effects in appearance this reason exhibits a rule, in accordance with which one could derive the rational grounds and the actions themselves according to their kind and degree, and estimate the subjective principles of his power of choice. Because this empirical character itself must be drawn from appearances as effect, and from the rule which experience provides, all the actions of the human being in appearance are determined in accord with the order of nature by his empirical character and the other cooperating causes. (A549/B577) The empirical character of the human power of choice is linked to a causality of reason by means of a rule. Kant defines the “character” of a cause as “a law of its causality without which it would not be a cause at all”, and specifies that an empirical character would be a natural law or laws that connect actions as appearances with other appearances (A539/B567). The rule, then, that connects the decisions of the power of choice with its causes would be a law that explains how those decisions arise in nature through other appearances. This rule links “rational grounds” with “the actions themselves” and thereby holds rules of reason to be empirical causes of actions. The role of rules is important for empirical reason, but not complete. I take a complete description of reason to require some metaphysical claim about a faculty of reason as something over and above all the particular relations and principles that might be called rational. A faculty of reason would explain, through its structure or through its activities, the generation and application of the particular relations and principles. Reason is the faculty of principles, Kant says, and he interprets that to mean that reason also is the faculty of derivation from principles, or what we might call today logical reasoning (A299–300/ B356–57). By referring to particular relations and principles, I mean things like logical rules and axiomatic principles (if there are any), all of which I am
116 Practical reason in nature calling “the rules of reason”, To speak rather loosely, a complete description of reason would include the rules of reason and the faculty that houses them. Kant’s insistence that reason has an empirical character might be nothing more than a claim that the rules of reason must be capable of empirical manifestation; it certainly is at least that. The question I am asking regarding reason in nature, then, could be sharpened to ask whether the faculty that houses these rules must be in nature or in things in themselves. The passage I just quoted about the causality of reason in appearance as a set of rules falls short of requiring that reason as source of the rules exist in nature. The rules themselves are “exhibited” in the “effects” of reason in appearance. It is compatible with this claim that reason in itself is a non-natural free source of the rules that are exhibited in appearance. Reason would be the cause of these rule-governed appearances without itself being appearance, hence without being in nature. In the Prolegomena’s discussion of the Third Antinomy, Kant appears to state the stronger claim that reason as the faculty containing the rules, in addition to the rules themselves, exists in appearance: “We have in us a faculty that not only stands in connection with its subjectively determining grounds, which are the natural causes of its actions – and thus far is the faculty of a being that itself belongs to appearances – but that also is related to objective grounds that are mere ideas, insofar as these ideas can determine this faculty, a connection that is expressed by ought. This faculty is called reason” (4:344–45). The faculty of reason is said here to stand in connection with subjectively determining grounds as natural causes. More specifically, reason is said to be a faculty of a being in appearances. Given this positive reference to an empirical reason, the possibility of such a faculty in Kant’s system must be admitted. While stating that reason is a faculty in appearance, here in the Prolegomena as well as in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant insists that reason cannot be understood only as empirical reason. There must be an intelligible (A551/ B579), or intellectual (Prolegomena, 4:344), or pure (A551/B579) reason as well that is not subject to the form of time and cannot be considered part of appearance. In this passage from the Prolegomena, he characterizes it as reason providing objective grounds expressing the “ought” of moral obligation. Later, I will look more closely at the status of non-empirical reason; here, it is necessary only to note that Kant holds that reason has both empirical and intelligible characters. But how full is the empirical character of reason? Can a description of reason as a faculty in nature be a complete description of reason? One reason to hold that empirical reason must be more than just the rules of reason relates directly to empirical causal relations. Reason’s empirical character has been identified at least with rules as causal laws that explain actions. Recall that the work of empirical reason at issue is determination of the power
The transcendental status of empirical reason 117 of choice to action in lieu of determination by sensible impulses. To assume that some rules or laws of reason can be postulated that provide causal explanation of some decisions of the power of choice is to assume that something is the cause of those decisions according to those rules. That is, laws link causes to effects; and natural laws link causes in nature to effects in nature. If the decisions of the empirical power of choice are the effects in nature, what are the causes in nature? The causes could not be sensible impulses by definition; this means they cannot be anything originating outside the mind. Since they cannot be sensible impulses, they must stem from within the empirical mind. This is the equivalent of saying that these causes cannot themselves have any sensible content but must be constituted by form alone. The categorical imperative is an example of this sort of rule of reason. Since these causes must be capable of being represented merely formally, as formal rules or principles, their source must be empirical reason as a faculty in nature, in space, and time, as studied by empirical psychology. Empirical reason would have to be considered not only a collection of rules of reason but also some empirical faculty capable of causally effecting change in accordance with those rules. As empirical, it would itself be the effect of previous natural causes, but nonetheless, it would have a place in nature as part of the set of natural causal determinants of particular actions. To say that empirical reason is a faculty in nature is not necessarily to equate it with a spatiotemporal piece of material nature, as if one could identify certain sections of the brain in a CT scan and declare their causal relations to be the causality of reason. Kant would not rule this possibility out, but he thought that a search for the link between thoughts and their physical location or instantiation was a hopeless quest. Instead, empirical reason should be studied by empirical psychology without reference to its status in nature as material or immaterial. And as I showed in my first chapter, empirical psychology describes part of nature. Some might object that there can be no faculty of reason in nature because nature is constituted by intuitions synthesized by the understanding, and only the effects of a faculty of reason and not the faculty itself appear in inner intuition. This objection is misguided, as explained in my first chapter while discussing Kant’s conception of nature. Admittedly, only the effects of such a faculty would appear in inner intuition. But Kant does not limit nature as a set of objects to intuitions; instead, nature is constituted by whatever can be linked to intuitions using natural laws. Empirical reason is still a part of nature, as appearance, because it would be used to explain thoughts in inner sense as part of a natural description of the mind in empirical psychology. As a faculty, empirical reason would be one of the powers of the mind postulated to explain particular appearances in inner sense. Human beings would not experience empirical reason itself but would experience the effects of empirical reason,
118 Practical reason in nature particular thoughts that would require the existence of this faculty for consistent and comprehensive explanation of these appearances in nature. Two other possible objections deserve discussion. In the Solution to the Third Antinomy, just after his discussion of empirical reason, Kant appears to hold that when reason is held to be the cause of actions, it cannot in any way be considered part of nature but must be considered as an alternative cause to natural causes. He contrasts the causality of ideas of reason with “empirical causes” and insists that reason must be independent of the conditions of time, thus not in nature. There are two variations of this reasoning, one focused on practical reason, the other on reason in general. It is important to look at these arguments to determine whether they preclude the strong sense of empirical reason I am advocating that would include a representation of the categorical imperative in empirical consciousness as the natural cause of some actions. First, Kant argues that reason as practical cannot itself have an empirical character in nature as a natural cause. But if we consider the very same actions in relation to reason, not, to be sure, in relation to speculative reason, in order to explain them as regards their origin, but insofar as reason is the cause of producing them by themselves – in a word, if we compare them with reason in a practical respect – then we find a rule and order that is entirely other than the natural order. For perhaps everything that has happened in the course of nature, and on empirical grounds inevitably had to happen, nevertheless ought not to have happened. At times, however, we find, or at least believe we have found, that the ideas of reason have actually proved their causality in regard to the actions of human beings as appearances, and that therefore these actions have occurred not through empirical causes, no, but because they were determined by grounds of reason. (A550/B578) Kant can be taken to present the following argument here: Reason as cause provides ideas that themselves reflect a normative rule and order regarding what ought to happen. This normative rule and order is different from the rule and order of nature, in other words, nature is not what it ought to be. Because the normative rule and order is other than the natural order, any idea that expresses a normative rule and order cannot be a natural cause in the natural order. The argument is ambiguous between an incompatibility of the content (the order) with the order of nature and an incompatibility of the normativity (the ought) with the order of nature. Either way, this argument does not show that reason cannot be in nature. Suppose, on the one hand, the argument relies on a non-natural content in the idea. The content of a representation in inner sense may be incompatible with the natural order, but the idea itself may be part of that natural order. It is entirely conceivable to have a representation in inner sense whose content is incompatible with the natural order (for example, a dream in which I am speaking with the living Immanuel Kant) yet which as representation is entirely within the natural order. Suppose, on the other hand, that the argument
The transcendental status of empirical reason 119 relies on a claim that the normativity of the idea is non-natural. But mere normativity is not non-natural; the existence of desires shows that representations in nature can contain both preferences for certain outcomes and a moving force beyond themselves. Thus, it appears that an idea of reason can exist in nature even though it may represent normative preference for a non-natural order. Empirical reason, then, can include a representation that provides a moral order, namely, the categorical imperative. Note that this conclusion is different from saying that empirical reason can be the only source of a representation of the categorical imperative. To allow that the categorical imperative can exist in empirical reason is not the same as allowing that it can be justified by empirical reason. Justification of the categorical imperative can still require pure practical reason. A second objection that might be given to show that Kant has no room for empirical reason is that he repeatedly attributes spontaneity to reason and other faculties. Henry Allison makes this point central to his interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom7. Spontaneity of the faculties of understanding and reason involves judgments (which Allison calls “takings”) and creation of ideas (which Allison calls “framings”). These together imply that the faculties of reason and understanding must be understood as involving deliberation and justification, which in turn cannot be simply understood in natural causal terms. This “epistemic spontaneity” is mirrored by a practical spontaneity, in which decisions of the power of choice for particular actions cannot be understood in natural causal terms but must be understood in terms of an “incorporation” of one’s incentive into one’s maxim. The incorporation requires rational deliberation and spontaneity of the agent. Hence, rationality and agency can be understood only in terms of an intelligible character of the agent as spontaneous. The requirement of spontaneity is so strong that, he says, “we cannot both deny such a character and affirm our status as rational agents”, that is, rational agency can be understood only in terms of non-natural spontaneity of reason and will. For present purposes, the important point is that Allison’s argument would preclude the possibility of an empirical reason, for rationality could be understood only as spontaneous and different from the causal order of nature. Allison’s position has generated much debate in the literature.8 Here, I will focus only on one claim: namely, that Allison’s interpretation reads too much into the requirement for epistemic spontaneity. Kant does hold that reason must be spontaneous, but this spontaneity need not involve elaborate transcendentally free deliberation independent of natural causal relations. Empirical deliberation may proceed according to causal laws in nature precisely because 7 8 (Allison 1990, p. 35ff). The quotation later in my paragraph is from (Allison 1990, p. 41). See some of Allison’s replies in (Allison 1996, pp. 109–42).
120 Practical reason in nature some of those causal laws are psychological rules of reason. If the resulting conclusion is correct, it is in part because the deliberation utilized rules of reason that are themselves justified, even though the deliberation might have been entirely determined as a series of events in nature in the mind. What is required for the justification of those rules of reason themselves is a separate issue. Here, transcendental freedom for reason would be required. But this justification need not involve any extended deliberation. It may result from the timeless nature of reason itself. I will say more about this in the next section. Reason as a transcendentally free cause Reason as transcendentally free in the Third Antinomy In understanding the solution to the Third Antinomy, one must keep in mind Kant’s claim that the Thesis has proved not that a single cause (Ursache) is necessary but that a non-natural type of causality (Kausalität) must exist (A444/B472). Indeed, a review of the argument for the Thesis shows that Kant does proceed this way. At least one instance of an Ursache of the proper Kausalität must exist to avoid the contradiction that would result were all causality merely natural. Kant then announces that “We are now permitted also to allow that in the course of the world different series may begin on their own as far as their causality is concerned” (A450/B478). Whoever gave Kant that permission was in error, since the argument (if successful), strictly speaking, has shown only that one cause of that type would be necessary and one normally cannot make an argument from a single instance to other similar particulars. But for the sake of argument, let us allow that if there must be at least one cause of a type of causality, then further causes of that type could be invoked if other reasons call for them.9 Freedom as a type of causality should be understood as the causality of reason in determining the will as power of choice to action, conceived alongside the natural causality of empirical reason but as a different type of causality that also exists in nature. I will show that there is no metaphysical conflict with holding that reason is a cause in both types of causality, each understood for different purposes. The requirement for reason to be a transcendentally – that is, justifiable under a transcendental argument – free cause does not entail that reason is a transcendent – that is, existing outside nature – cause. A transcendentally free reason can exist in 9 Watkins also stresses that Kant is working with a different type of causality but still gives this an ontological reading rather than seeing both types of causality as attributed to beings in nature (Watkins 2005).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 121 nature just as other transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience such as causal relations can exist in nature. That the transcendentally free causality Kant discusses in the Third Antinomy is supposed to be an alternative kind of causality among objects in nature is, in addition to fitting the philosophical function of practical freedom, supported by some direct evidence in the text. An overlooked passage in the solution to the Fourth Antinomy describing the solution to the Third Antinomy is very clear. After clarifying that the necessary being required by the Fourth Antinomy would not be a member of the series of empirically conditioned beings in the world of sense, Kant contrasts that metaphysical claim with a claim that the transcendentally free cause in the Third Antinomy is part of the series of conditions in nature: Hence this way of grounding an unconditioned existence [in the Fourth Antinomy] would be distinguished from the empirically unconditioned causality (of freedom) in the previous article in that in the case of freedom, the thing itself as cause (substantia phaenomenon) would nevertheless belong to the series of conditions, and only its causality would be thought as intelligible, but here the necessary being would have to be thought of as entirely outside the series of the world of sense (as an ens extramundanum) and merely intelligible; this is the only way of preventing it from being subjected to the law of the contingency and dependency of all appearances. (A561/ B589, emphasis in original) Only the causality of freedom and not the thing that possesses the causality of freedom would be intelligible; the object possessing transcendentally free causal power is an object in nature.10 Kant makes a similar point in a passage in the solution to the Third Antinomy when he defines “intelligible” and relates it to a different kind of causality: “I call intelligible that in an object of sense which is not itself appearance” and states that “one can consider the causality of this being in two aspects, as intelligible in its action as a thing in itself, and as sensible in the effects of that action as an appearance in the world of sense. Of the faculty of such a subject we would accordingly form an empirical and at the same time an intellectual concept of its causality” (A538/B566, partly my emphasis). The causality, not the being, is understood as intelligible yet as attributable to the object of sense. Admittedly, Kant uses the term “thing in itself” here, and there is some justification for the metaphysical claim that Kant intends to discuss a non-natural being. But the evidence I presented earlier that ties freedom to reason suggests that it is worth looking at an interpretation that identifies the transcendentally free causality as some kind of causality of reason. 10 Henry Allison notes this passage but interprets it to mean that the intelligible character is assigned to a being “with a phenomenal side” instead of recognizing that Kant intends the entire being to be phenomenal and only the causal relation to be intelligible (Allison 2012, p. 29).
122 Practical reason in nature In the Canon, Kant revealed this need for the possible transcendental freedom of the faculty of reason when he admitted that practical freedom can exist within sensible nature while transcendental freedom deals with the non-sensible status of the faculty of reason as well as with the origin of actions: We thus cognize practical freedom through experience, as one of the natural causes, namely a causality of reason in determination of the will, whereas transcendental freedom requires an independence of this reason itself (with regard to its causality for initiating a series of appearances) from all determining causes in the world of the senses, and to this extent seems to be contrary to the law of nature, thus to all possible experience, and so remains a problem. (A803/B831, emphasis mine) The question of transcendental freedom arises when the status of the faculty of reason itself is questioned about its ability to begin a series of appearances through its causality. And “with regard to its causality” – not the entire faculty of reason itself – is to be independent of determining sensible causes. Transcendentally, free causality is tied to the intelligible character of reason, which ought not to be equated with a transcendent reason. Kant introduces the idea of an intelligible character as opposed to the sensible character. The “character” of a cause is defined as “a law of its causality without which it would not be a cause at all” (A539/B567). An agent’s actions in appearance are said to have “an intelligible character, through which it is indeed the cause of those actions as appearances, but which does not stand under any conditions of sensibility and is not itself appearance”. This causal relation does not stand under conditions of time, so no action would arise or perish in it as intelligible. As intelligible, then, it would not change, yet it would have causal effects in the world of sense in time. “Thus freedom and nature, each in its full significance, would both be found in the same actions, simultaneously and without any contradiction, according to whether one compares them with their intelligible or their sensible cause” (A541/B569). Kant looks for “a faculty that is only intelligible, in that its determination to action never rests on empirical conditions but on mere grounds of the understanding” (A545/B573). As I have noted, human beings count themselves as intelligences because they experience the effects of the understanding and, above all, reason (A546–47/ B574–75). The understanding with its a priori concepts and reason with its ideas appear to exhibit “spontaneity” because these concepts and ideas cannot be understood as arising from sensible causation. The ideas and concepts cannot be represented as sensible themselves. Hence, individuals must view themselves as intelligences in order to believe that their reason is valid.11 To view oneself as an intelligence is simply to take oneself to possess valid cognitive faculties. 11 In contrast, Ameriks takes this passage to be evidence that Kant retained “pre-critical” rationalist views about freedom into the early 1780s. Freedom is taken to be a property of the
The transcendental status of empirical reason 123 The causal power of reason on the sensible will is, importantly, a timeless cause since reason itself is timeless. Many passages in the solution to the Third Antinomy point this out: “Pure reason, as a merely intelligible faculty, is not subject to the form of time . . . The causality of reason in the intelligible character does not arise or start working at a certain time in producing an effect” (A551/B579). “For since reason itself is not an appearance and is not subject at all to any conditions of sensibility, no temporal sequence takes place in it even as to its causality” (A553/B581). Reason “does not alter (even if its appearances, namely the way in which it exhibits its effects, do alter)” (A555–56/B583–84). And “reason is present to all the actions of human beings in all conditions of time, and is one and the same, but it is not itself in time, and never enters into any new state in which it previously was not” (A556/B584). The causal condition that lies in pure reason is a timeless, persistent condition that is able to influence the sensible will to action. Kant does not describe it as different for different individuals, as individual free choices certainly would be. This general, time-independent, determinant of human sensible choices must be the moral law itself understood as the pure structure of reason itself applied to the circumstances of possible human free choice. Pure reason can be a cause of actions in the sensible world by dictating that they ought to occur. Reason as a faculty can be understood as providing a structure for experience, specifically, a structure for systematic and consistent actions. Pure reason as timeless structure The previous sub-section showed that in the Critique, Kant is concerned with the transcendental freedom of reason with regard to its causality. This subsection will show the kind of transcendental structure that pure practical reason exhibits, in particular in relation to the moral law. The following section will discuss whether Kant is justified in attributing transcendental freedom to pure practical reason by means of that structure. It is first useful to review Kant’s few descriptions of reason in general in the Critique of Pure Reason. Reason combines its logical use, where reason abstracts from content, and a real use as a faculty in which it “contains the origin of certain concepts and principles, which it derives neither from the senses nor from the understanding” and “itself generates concepts” (A299/ B355). The real (or “transcendental”) and logical uses of reason are combined in his definition of reason as “the faculty of principles” (A299/B356). He implies that this definition entails that reason’s principles rest on thought alone soul to think and act independently of determination in nature, and the faculties of reason and understanding are evidence that human beings have immaterial souls that can think and act freely (Ameriks 1982, p. 190).
124 Practical reason in nature or contain in themselves universals according to concept alone. Hence, the principles of reason do not directly apply to experience but only indirectly provide the concepts that can unify other concepts into a system. Reason in general, as described in the first Critique, operates by generating principles that can then systematize other concepts. The importance of this definition is that Kant recognizes that the faculty of reason generates and creates both concepts and principles, but with a systematic purpose in mind. Not just any kind of concept is generated for any reason. Only principles or concepts that can systematize or unite other, more particular, concepts are generated. The only way that reason, as a faculty, can perform this particular function is if reason possesses a particular kind of structure. The structure of reason would be the highest level functional relations for producing systematic connection and consistency among possible concepts. Its structure generates particular principles and concepts. The main principle of pure reason given in the first Critique exhibits this origin: that principle is that “when the conditioned is given, then so is the whole series of conditions subordinated one to the other, which is itself unconditioned, also given” (A307–08/B364). The structure of the faculty of reason is one that connects particulars to universals, which however are considered themselves particulars in relation to still further universals. This systematic structure is reflected in the principle that when the conditioned is given, the unconditioned is also given. One can say that reason generates this principle because of its structure. It is an a priori principle dependent upon no content from experience. Reason, then, has a structure that generates principles. Pure practical reason is that structure of reason generating a principle for systematic considerations of a practical kind. In Chapter 2, I showed that practical philosophy must be organized around an idea that provides its domain and allows for a systematic organization of that domain. The domain of practical philosophy is free acts (understood from the agent-perspective). The systematic organization of free acts is done through the moral law. The moral law provides the formal structure for free actions, and this structure is embodied in rational relations themselves and thus in reason itself. Kant begins the Critique of Practical Reason by noting that a practical law, one that is valid for every rational being, would be one whose ground “pure reason can contain within itself” (5:19). He notes on the next page that a rule that is to be necessary can “arise” [entspringen] only from reason (5:20). This generation of a necessary rule by reason is its lawgiving or legislation: “it is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another” (5:21). Reason alone, considered as what is common to all rational
The transcendental status of empirical reason 125 beings apart from any of the particular conditions that distinguish these particular rational beings, is the structure of that faculty. This structure of pure practical reason that generates the moral law is the autonomy of reason in morality. In the second Critique, Kant claims that the moral law expresses the autonomy of pure practical reason because it is a “lawgiving of its own on the part of pure and, as such, practical reason” (5:33). Autonomy is the independence of practical reason, which is equivalent to the will (4:412) from determination by anything outside itself. The moral law is determined by the structure of reason, so in one sense, reason is not free because it simply subsists with the structure and its corresponding moral law; I believe that this is the sense that Kant has in mind when in the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that Wille is neither free nor unfree. Reason is considered independent of determination by laws of nature because, in this sense, there is no determining ground for reason at all (6:213). It is fair to say that for Kant, autonomy of pure practical reason in generating the moral law is the transcendental condition for their being any morality for freely acting, rational beings. This transcendental structure is essential for Kant’s ethics. It is familiar to everyone who has studied Kant’s ethics in its guise as the autonomy of the will as opposed to the heteronomy of all other foundations for ethics, and the arguments that the moral law is based on form alone as opposed to any content. It is expressed through Kant’s insistence that the moral law be a priori and thus necessary rather than a posteriori and thus contingent. (I will say more about autonomy in relation to moral value in Chapter 7.) This reason must be transcendentally free in its causality, that is, “an independence of this reason itself (with regard to its causality for initiating a series of appearances) from all determining causes of the world of the senses”, to which Kant adds that this independence “seems to be contrary to the law of nature” (A803/B831). The transcendental freedom of reason itself is here understood to be the ability of the faculty of reason to begin a new causal series in nature independently of the prior causal series in nature. There are many places where Kant seems to take transcendental freedom of the faculty of reason to require an ontologically distinct realm of things in themselves independent of appearances in nature in space and time. But a closer consideration of this issue shows that Kant does not in fact require transcendental freedom to be understood as ontological independence of the faculty of pure reason from nature, and that transcendental freedom can be met within a metaphysically naturalistic ontology. Independence from causation in nature does not mean independence from existence in nature. There are two ways in which something (A) can be “independent from determination” by something else (B). First, A may exist apart from B in such a way that B never has any contact with A. I will call this “transcendent” independence or freedom. An example of this sort of
126 Practical reason in nature independence from determination is when an ill person is quarantined so that other persons will not receive the infection; another example is when protective parents prevent a child from having any contact with another child they consider to be a bad influence. This is the idea behind transcendent freedom of reason: reason is said to exist as a thing-in-itself (or in things in themselves) independent of spatial and temporal nature so that spatial and temporal phenomena are incapable of, so to speak, contacting pure reason and thus incapable of determining its principles. The second way that A can be “independent from determination” by B is that A may exist in contact with B but consist of such a structure that B is unable to alter A. This is structural independence. A clear example lies in a sealing wax mold used on hot wax applied to an old parchment letter. The mold itself has contact with the wax while remaining unchanged by the wax. Because of the relative malleability of the wax and rigidity of the mold, on the one hand, the wax is not capable of changing the mold at all. The mold, on the other hand, is capable of determining the shape of the wax. It itself is timeless and unchanging relative to the wax. And yet, when the mold is used to give shape to the wax, it plays a part in the efficient causal determination in time of the shape of the wax on the parchment. The causal explanation of the resulting wax on the parchment requires use of the mold as one of the causes. The shape of the wax on the parchment can also be understood independently of the efficient causality and in terms of the form alone that the wax now has that reflects the timeless structure of the mold. This is the idea behind the structural freedom of reason: reason is said to exist in nature but as an unalterable structure of thinking that then processes empirical inputs in a manner independent of – and unchanged by – that empirical input. Empirical reason plays a part in the causal determination of action as part of the efficient causality of sensible impulses and motives of reason operating in the empirically real mind (as described by empirical psychology). To the extent that empirical reason determines the empirical power of choice to action, a moral agent’s choice is practically free. Reason in this way acts as a natural cause. Now this “structural” conception of the freedom of human cognitive faculties is entirely metaphysically naturalistic. Human cognitive faculties are conceived as existing in the empirical self as appearance, thus immanently and not as any transcendent entity. But their validity is defended through transcendental arguments for the necessity of the a priori cognitions, concepts, ideas, or judgments they provide. These faculties can be understood as having a particular structure or even essence that provides for the actual generation of their pure cognitions (etc.), and this structure can be seen as existing in nature understood by empirical psychology (as part of the mind, i.e., inner sense, or the brain). But the structure itself is necessary for any being who is going to be
The transcendental status of empirical reason 127 capable of whatever experience is at issue. This transcendental argument is independent of any particular manifestation of these faculties, so the structure expressed through its resulting pure concepts or principles is a priori relative to all of experience. Here it is important to note a possible objection to this account. In the sealing wax analogy, it is true that the sealing wax mold is not determined by the sealing wax. But it is determined by something else, namely, whoever made the sealing wax mold itself. It is contingent because there is no necessity that a sealing wax mold be used simply because sealing wax is used; one could simply drip sealing wax onto the folded parchment. The particular mold used in this instance, and even the very existence of molds in general for sealing wax, is contingent. By analogy, the actual structure of reason, like the particular pattern on the mold, could have arisen as a contingent feature because it is prima facie possible that some other faculty could have operated instead of reason as an alternative to sensible impulses in the causal determinants of actions. It even seems possible that reason might not have existed in nature at all: the structure of reason does not need to exist in order for agents to act at all because they can act on the basis of sensible impulses alone. The question may still be raised whether that particular natural cause is anything more than merely one efficient cause among many, as Kant puts it in the Canon, “whether that which with respect to sensory impulses is called freedom might not in turn with regard to higher and more remote efficient causes be nature” (A803/ B831). Empirical reason might itself be merely a product of natural causes without transcendental justification and have no more special status than an instinct. The question can be raised whether reason ought to be considered to have a particular structure that deserves to be singled out from other empirical causes and deemed to be a distinct kind of causality as well. I will discuss this issue in the following sub-section. Here, let me quickly say two things: first, Kant claims that we view our reason as the source of a priori claims that themselves could not originate from sensible experience but that arise from the nature of reason itself, so isolating reason from other possible faculties as necessary rather than contingent has a basis; and second, actual knowledge that reason’s principles are really legitimate and that reason as a faculty must exist requires a transcendental deduction, which Kant argues is not possible in practical philosophy; so in the end, Kant does not claim to know that reason must exist in order for human beings to act. Another worry must be considered here. When the transcendental structure of reason is embodied in a particular individual, it is identical with the particular empirical reason of that individual. All particular judgments are subject to causal determination by prior causes in nature. Does this not mean that the judgments are mere events in nature that, as such, lack truth? No. Particular judgments can have causal antecedents in nature and still follow the
128 Practical reason in nature proper structure of reason. There is no more a problem with human beings embodying valid judgments than there is with computers calculating; in both cases, a transcendental requirement for a particular type of logical or rational process is embodied in the being without being dependent upon that instantiation.12 When exercising their proper mental functions, human beings can reach true conclusions, or in ethics, make valid judgments, as natural beings acting within the chain of natural causation. Transcendental structure of reason, one might say, identifies particular parts of the chain of natural causation as bearers of validity. Whether a judgment is determined in accordance with laws of nature or not, what makes the judgment valid is if it follows the proper procedure for judgment which is determined transcendentally. That proper procedure can be embodied in nature just as easily as not. The structural freedom of reason shows how it is independent of causation in nature without being a thing existing outside nature. It is true that the particular instantiation of reason in a particular individual human being in nature is the product of natural causation, and is thus contingent. The existence of any particular individual, and thus the existence of any particular instantiation of the faculty of reason, is thus the contingent result of causal forces in nature. But the structure of reason itself is independent of the individual. Reason produces the moral law because of its structure, which is determined independently of any and every particular instantiation. The timeless character of pure practical reason is understandable on this structural account. Pure practical reason is not subject to time. The structure of reason does not change, does not arise or cease, does not have any particular duration. In particular individuals, of course, embodied in their particular empirical reason, this structure does operate in time, but without being dependent, qua structure of pure practical reason, on any prior causes in nature. This transcendentally free reason can in this way also be understood as “initiating a series of appearances” (A803/B831) as demanded by the thesis of 12 Corinna Mieth and Jacob Rosenthal raise this issue but do not go far enough in recognizing its import. Since, they say, an electronic calculator operates according to both the laws of nature and the laws of mathematics, there is a clear way in which one and the same result (in this case, a mathematical conclusion) is the result of two kinds of laws without contradiction (Mieth and Rosenthal 2006, pp. 272–73).They take Kant to reject this kind of double understanding of processes that are ontologically in nature. They quote the following passage from the Groundwork in which Kant raises a possible contradiction between freedom and nature: “It would, however, be impossible to escape this contradiction if the subject who seems to himself free thought of himself in the same sense or in the very same relation when he calls himself free as when he takes himself to be subject to the law of nature with regard to the same action” (4:456). Yet precisely in that passage, Kant allows that different relations could be at work in a being understanding itself as free and as naturally caused in the same action, and the different causal relations of an empirically determined causality and a transcendental free causality. This is exactly the kind of view I am attributing to Kant. Mieth and Rosenthal recognize that the view is plausible but do not attribute it to Kant.
The transcendental status of empirical reason 129 the Third Antinomy (A50/B478). The solution to the Third Antinomy requires that both thesis and antithesis be true, so some events are determined in the series of natural causes and effects in time and are also understood as the initial spontaneous beginning of a new series. In the resolution of the Third Antinomy, Kant identifies those events as decisions of the empirical power of choice determined by reason. Because reason is timeless as a certain kind of structural relation among concepts, it has no preceding state that would have been different and from which it, qua reason itself, would have arisen. (This cannot be said of individual manifestations of reason in particular individuals which, as an empirical faculty of an organism, would have come into existence and developed with the emergence and growth of that organism.) When a particular moral action is attributed to reason as a cause, this timeless structure of reason that has generated the moral law as a categorical imperative is viewed as the spontaneous cause, even as simultaneously, the categorical imperative itself is understood in terms of the fact of reason as existing in the empirical agent’s conscious mind. A different type of causality, rational causality, is at work in addition to the deterministic causality of natural psychological causal forces. That empirical reason exists in the empirical mind as described by empirical psychology does not prevent that faculty of reason from being understood in terms of its structure. As Kant had clarified in his discussion of the Fourth Antinomy, “in the case of freedom, the thing itself as cause (substantia phaenomenon) would nevertheless belong to the series of conditions, and only its causality would be thought as intelligible” (A561/B589). The transcendentally free causality of pure practical reason in providing the moral law is a timeless cause that can be understood to begin a series of effects in nature from a practical point of view. Moral agency is delineated by the relation an agent has to the structure of reason. To be a moral agent is to be capable of having the decisions of one’s empirical power of choice in nature determined by pure practical reason through its empirical manifestation as empirical reason. The particular structure that reason imposes on decisions is the systematic determination of the conditions for the free actions of all moral agents. The moral law as a description of the activities of purely rational agents provides the idea of such a systematic union; the categorical imperative, as the fact of reason, is the manner in which the human empirical power of choice experiences the obligation to conform one’s actual decisions as much as possible with that moral law by opting to resolve deliberation in favor of the principles of reason. This last decision is understood from the agent’s perspective; from the theoretical account given in empirical psychology, it would be seen as the motive of reason rather than the impulses of sensibility determining one’s power of choice.
130 Practical reason in nature This section has shown that pure practical reason as a faculty possesses a timeless structure that generates the moral law. Reason as a faculty in general is a set of formal relationships and laws to provide systematic connection among concepts. Pure practical reason provides the formal systematic basis for decisions, namely, that they be based on law-like principles that systematize free actions. There is thus a transcendental basis for the moral law and a reason to attribute transcendental freedom to pure practical reason. The transcendental freedom of reason had been defined in the Canon as “an independence of this reason itself (with regard to its causality for initiating a series of appearances) from all determining causes of the world of the senses” (A803/B831). The structural account of the freedom of reason that I have provided here meets all the criteria that Kant offers for transcendentally free causation in moral actions. The transcendental freedom of reason cannot be proved While Kant’s conception of morality includes this transcendental structure, he also denies that it can be proved to be real. This denial sets up a complicated situation for determining the extent to which Kant is a moral realist. A later section will assess realism and idealism about reason in detail. This section will show why Kant insists that the picture of morality involving a transcendentally free faculty of reason providing an a priori moral law cannot be proved. The end of the solution to the Third Antinomy contains Kant’s own limitation on the conclusions to be reached. Freedom, he says, has not only not been shown to be real; it has also not even been shown to be possible. The reasons he gives anticipate the reasons he provides in both Groundwork III and the second Critique to limit the status of claims about freedom. First, “from experience we can never infer something that does not have to be thought in accord with the laws of experience” and second, “from mere concepts a priori we cannot cognize anything about the possibility of any real ground or any causality” (A558/B586). The first reason stresses that the kind of transcendental freedom shown in the Third Antinomy is part of the minimal explanation of experience in accordance with the laws of nature. This reasoning does not preclude transcendentally free causality from existing in nature, but as a distinct kind of causality, it cannot be proved from any empirical data. The second reason limits the status of transcendental freedom to a purely conceptual level, a limitation that likens it to a transcendental idea, the status of which will be part of my next chapter on the postulates. In the second Critique, Kant denies that the moral law is subject to a transcendental deduction. Unlike the categories of the understanding which are susceptible to the transcendental proof of their necessity for experience, the moral law has no proven transcendental role in experience. He makes this
The transcendental status of empirical reason 131 argument in the section of the Critique of Practical Reason called “On the Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason”, where he discusses the moral law: The exposition of the supreme principle of practical reason is now finished, that is, it has been shown, first, what it contains, that it stands of itself altogether a priori and independent of empirical principles, and then what distinguishes it from all other practical principles. With the deduction, that is, the justification of its objective and universal validity and the discernment of the possibility of such a synthetic proposition a priori, one cannot hope to get on so well as was the case with the principles of the pure theoretical understanding. For, these referred to objects of possible experience, namely appearances, and it could be proved that these appearances could be cognized as objects of experience only by being brought under the categories in accordance with these laws and consequently that all possible experience must conform to these laws. But I cannot take such a course in the deduction of the moral law. For, the moral law is not concerned with cognition of the constitution of objects that may be given to reason from elsewhere but rather with a cognition insofar as it can itself become the ground of the existence of objects and insofar as reason, by this cognition, has causality in a rational being, that is, pure reason, which can be regarded as a faculty immediately determining the will. (5:46) Kant denies the possibility of a transcendental deduction of the moral law because of its lack of possible object in experience. The transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding proceeded with the assumption that there are objects of possible experience to be synthesized; the categories constitute the rules for synthesis. Kant describes this as reference to objects (Gegenstände) of possible experience as appearance. Since the moral law is not concerned with objects, a deduction cannot be given in the same way. Kant implies that the moral law instead reverses this relationship, being itself the ground of the existence of objects, that is, the basis for decisions of the will to perform certain actions that bring about certain ends, including the highest good. Kant’s concern here is not that the structure of reason in producing the moral law is itself a transcendental structure, but rather the concern is that there is a strong enough basis to prove that human beings in fact possess this reason. He expresses this point by noting at the beginning of the paragraph that “the exposition” of the supreme principle is finished. That is, if there is to be a supreme transcendental principle of morality, the categorical imperative is it. (He makes the same kind of argument at the end of the second section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [4:444–45].) What he admits he has not shown is that this moral law is actually possessed by, that is, really valid for, human beings. This division between laying out what the transcendental structure provided by a faculty would be on the one hand, and providing a transcendental
132 Practical reason in nature deduction of that faculty on the other hand, mirrors the distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason between the metaphysical and transcendental deductions of the categories. The metaphysical deduction provides and defends the list of pure concepts of the understanding but does not prove that they are necessary for experience; the transcendental deduction proves that these pure concepts as a set are necessary for experience but does not explain their details (B159). The categories themselves are in essence the structure of the pure understanding, and that structure is known prior to its transcendental deduction. What the structure of the pure understanding is, is not in question in the transcendental deduction. In the same way, the structure of reason necessary to legislate the moral law is not questioned in the passage I quoted. Reason in Groundwork III The interpretation of the importance of reason and the nature of its transcendental freedom in the first Critique holds for Groundwork III as well. In Groundwork III, Kant is not concerned with individual choice but with the faculty of reason. He asks whether we as empirical moral agents are also justified in attributing to ourselves a transcendental conception of moral agency centering on a valid faculty of reason. In this section, I will defend this reading of Groundwork III.13 The argument Kant provides in Groundwork III is primarily a justification of reason’s ability to provide valid law and not an argument for free human moral action in any sense other than its determination by that valid law. Once Kant can justify this legislative power of reason, he can defend the human obligation to will maxims that conform to the categorical imperative, and will have secondarily defended freedom of the will as the empirical power of choice able to follow reason. He will have defended the obligation human beings have to try to make their actions conform to the rational dictates of morality, and to that extent, will have shown that it is the responsibility of human beings to attempt to make their actual world conform as closely as possible to a perfectly rational world. 13 The interpretation of Groundwork III presented here builds on the work of several other interpreters while not claiming the full endorsement or agreement of any of them. I am indebted in particular to the work of Marcus Willaschek, which has been discussed in my previous chapter in relation to the fact of reason (Willaschek 1992), Julio Esteves’s argument that Kant does not invoke theoretical arguments in Groundwork III and that his claims are fully compatible with the Critique of Practical Reason (Esteves 2012), Corinna Mieth and Jacob Rosenthal’s interpretation of the nature of the freedom of reason itself in relation to justification (Mieth and Rosenthal 2006), and Jens Timmermann’s assessment of freedom of the will that shows it as merely a capacity to be determined by principles of reason rather than a free choice among open possibilities (Timmermann 2003).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 133 The freedom of reason The paragraph “Freedom Must be Presupposed as a Property of the Will of All Rational Beings” (4:447–48) sets out Kant’s minimal explanation of freedom of the will. By “minimal”, I do not mean that in this section, Kant does not prove freedom but merely claims that human beings presuppose – or act “under the idea” of – freedom (although, of course, this is part of Kant’s argument); rather, I mean that the freedom Kant claims all humans must presuppose is not freedom in particular judgments themselves but merely freedom of reason to determine its own principles that are then used in judgments. His paragraph raises the issue that I have argued is the central topic of the solution to the Third Antinomy. The key argument of the passage is as follows: Now I assert that to every rational being having a will we must necessarily lend the idea of freedom also, under which alone he acts. For in such a being we think of a reason that is practical, that is, has causality with respect to its objects. Now, one cannot possibly think of a reason that would consciously receive direction from any other quarter with respect to its judgments, since the subject would then attribute the determination of his judgment not to his reason but to an impulse. Reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independently of alien influences; consequently, as practical reason or as the will of a rational being it must be regarded of itself as free. (4:448) Others see this as the claim that Kant is discussing freedom of judgment here, that is, a transcendentally free particular act of the power of judgment independent of any causal determination according to the laws of nature.14 It is thought that if my judgment is determined in accordance with the laws of nature, then it is determined only by “an impulse” or some previous efficient cause in accordance with the laws of nature. Were my judgments or choices determined by an impulse, I would have no reason to ascribe validity to them. I must assume, then, that the particular judgment I make is not determined by impulses. This approach concludes that every rational being must assume she is free in making particular judgments or moral decisions. But in focusing on particular judgments as acts, this approach makes too broad a jump.15 The passage does not require that Kant’s focus is on particular 14 15 Henrich stresses the importance of the freedom of judgment in reasoning (Henrich 1975, p. 65). Allison discusses “epistemic spontaneity” as part of Kant’s argument for the freedom of decision for the will in relation to a judgment (“practical spontaneity”) and more recently in terms of a distinction between the space of reasons and the space of causes (Allison 1990, pp. 222–23) and (Allison 2011, pp. 307–08). Mieth and Rosenthal provide an excellent critique of the standard approach to this question. They note that there are five different ways that one can discuss freedom, the first of which is freedom as rationality. Freedom as rationality entails that one’s deliberations and judgments are in accord with reason. Mieth and Rosenthal note that that this allows these deliberations and
134 Practical reason in nature acts of judgment; it can instead be seen as discussing the principles of the faculty of reason as the basis for judgments. There is no gap for Kant to fill if his argument about freedom concerns not a transcendentally free power of choice or decision but only a transcendentally free power of reason to produce the moral law. Kant does not attribute freedom to the particular act of judgment but only to reason itself. The judgment is not free but is determined: “the subject would then attribute the determination of his judgment not to his reason but to an impulse” (4:448, my emphasis). Reason cannot consider a judgment valid unless the cause of the judgment is a principle of reason. Attribution of the determination need not exclude other causes. If I attribute a particular move to a chess-playing computer, I can claim that it chooses its moves because of the causal network of electronic impulses, but I attribute these moves to the rational principles of chess strategy and tactics. There is no contradiction in allowing both a role in the resulting move. When I then make a move, I similarly attribute my move to those same principles of chess strategy and tactics, but I can also, without contradiction, assume that my judgment is the causal product of chemical and electrical events in my brain.16 Note that in this passage, Kant also claims that we think that “reason . . . has causality with respect to its objects”. The objects in question are the judgments made in accordance with the principles of reason. To attribute a judgment to reason is to attribute a causal role to reason itself as the basis for the judgment. Particular judgments are causally determined, not transcendentally free in the way the standard reading assumes. Instead of the judgment being free, “reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independently of alien causes . . . it must be regarded of itself as free”. This is to say that, in making a judgment, I used valid principles of reason. The question left at the end of this argument is simply whether the attribution of freedom to reason as the author of laws and principles is merely an inescapable but unwarranted assumption of rational beings, or whether it can be independently justified. This is another 16 judgments to be simultaneously caused by impulses in accordance with the laws of nature, a point I invoke in the earlier text. But they do not attribute this dual-causality to Kant as I do (Mieth and Rosenthal 2006, pp. 272–73). This might seem similar to the “anomalous monism” interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom offered by Ralph Meerbote, drawing on the work of Donald Davidson, which treats reasons for actions as different explanatory devices than appeal to causes (Meerbote 1984). Explanations of human actions in this view can be made in two ways: first, using scientific laws that describe causal processes, and second, using descriptively different explanations offering reasons. The second kind of description of actions is understood independent of the first, although both are taken to refer to the same objects and events. The explanation I am giving here differs from Meerbote’s in that I take “reasons” and the faculty of reason to be part of empirical psychology, and hence part of the explanation of human actions in accordance with natural laws. The part of the judgment that I claim must be understood as independent of causal determinism in nature is the faculty of reason itself, which is invoked in particular judgments but which is identical in each of those judgments.
The transcendental status of empirical reason 135 way of stating the question that Kant posed at the end of Groundwork II, namely, whether the moral law is itself possible. At this point in Groundwork III, Kant could simply present a further argument for the possibility of a free reason in order to resolve the issue. But before attempting to do that, he stresses the importance of the upcoming argument. The first four paragraphs of the section entitled “Of the Interest Attaching to the Ideas of Morality” (4:448–450) focus on the question of obligation. Having shown that rational beings unavoidably attribute an as-yet-unproved freedom to themselves (and hence attribute the moral law to themselves), he recognizes that mere self-attribution is not enough to provide obligation. “But why, then, ought I to subject myself to this principle, and do so simply as a rational being?” he asks (4:449). Perfectly rational beings act rationally without any interference from impulses. But human beings are not perfectly rational beings, and instead find our actions determined by sensibility. Why should human beings not simply allow their actions to be determined by sensibility? Why take any interest in the moral law? If the moral law is merely something human beings assume for themselves, there appears to be no reason to take it as binding. Put another way, if human beings merely assume that they are free, that is, possess a reason that can produce independently valid principles, then what guarantee is there that these alleged principles of reason really are valid? Kant concludes “It seems, then, that in the idea of freedom we have actually only presupposed the moral law, namely the principle of autonomy of the will itself, and could not prove by itself its reality and objective necessity” (4:449). On what grounds, he asks, is the moral law binding? This consideration leads Kant to admit to “a kind of circle” in his argument. The way that he describes this circle is telling: he notes that he has shifted from talk of “efficient causes” to talk of “the order of ends”: It must be freely admitted that a kind of circle comes to light here from which, as it seems, there is no way to escape. We take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends, and we afterwards think ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves freedom of the will: for, freedom and the will’s own lawgiving are both autonomy and hence reciprocal concepts, and for this very reason one cannot be used to explain the other or to furnish a ground for it. (4:450) When he says “take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes”, Kant is referring to the claim we make that our reason is independent of impulses. When he then says that we “think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends”, he implies that from the lack of efficient impulsive cause, we assume that we are free in the use of our reason to legislate the moral law for ourselves. But why is this categorical imperative really valid? Merely our assumption that we are governed by reason is insufficient. Hence, the problem that we have
136 Practical reason in nature only so far ascribed freedom to ourselves. Our mere assumption that we are subject to the moral law is not enough to show that we are actually subject to the moral law. There would have to be some additional basis for the claim that we are rational beings and can then assume that reason freely provides its own principles. Reason and the intelligible The circle can be escaped only if there is an independent way to affirm that we can legitimately take ourselves to be rational. This will affirm the validity of the moral law, and thus affirm the reality of autonomy or freedom of the will, its ability to act on the basis of the moral law. It will confirm that the order of efficient causes in nature is not the source of the categorical imperative, but that a different source of the categorical imperative is available. This is the path Kant takes to escape the circle – by invoking the intelligible world as the view that human beings take themselves as rational and therefore as subject to the moral law provided by reason. The circle problem is declared resolved a few pages later when Kant says: for we now see that when we think of ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it and cognize autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality; but if we think of ourselves as put under obligation we regard ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding. (4:453) His solution invokes the “world of understanding” (identical to the intelligible world and the intellectual world) that allows for autonomy of the will. The crucial question to answer, then, is what Kant means by the intelligible world and how it makes us free. This would explain how Kant takes himself to avoid the circle and defend the validity of morality beyond a mere self-ascription. (I will show in Chapter 7 that later in Groundwork III, Kant indicates that the result is actually a modified kind of self-ascription.) The main characterizations of the intelligible world in the Groundwork concern “pure activity” in the human mind as revealing something about how humans are in themselves. One is tempted to equate this idea of pure activity with a human being as a non-natural thing in herself and claim that we can have a direct awareness of this activity.17 But Kant’s language is less direct: he claims that our experience of what appears to be pure activity – which he defines as “what reaches consciousness immediately and not through affection 17 Henrich, for example, emphasizes that Kant’s argument for the consciousness of our freedom depends on his crucial “two-world doctrine” so that the consciousness of our freedom depends upon the claim that our will belongs to a world other than the sensible world (Henrich 1975, p. 98).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 137 of the senses” (4:451) – allows us to regard ourselves as not completely defined by our sensible nature. But it does not furnish us with any positive characterization of what a human being would be in herself. The nature of what the self might be independent of sensible intuitions is still incomprehensible: a human being must count himself “as belonging to the intellectual world, of which however he has no further congnizance” (4:451, my emphasis after comma). He warns in the next paragraph against those who want to give content to this “invisible” self because they can only “make it an object of intuition” and hence of sensation. Given Kant’s warning, it is important to focus on precisely the extent to which human beings must consider themselves as “intelligible” rather than sensible. The particular nature of the non-sensible, apparently active self is not any active awareness of free choice but the more limited awareness of a use of the faculties of understanding and reason. In language from Groundwork III, nearly identical to that quoted from the Third Antinomy earlier, Kant cites understanding and especially reason as the faculties a human being appears to possess: Now, a human being really finds in himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason. This, as pure self-activity, is raised even above the understanding by this: that though the latter is also self-activity and does not, like sense, contain merely representations that arise when we are affected by things (and are thus passive), yet it can produce from its activity no other concepts than those which serve merely to bring sensible representations under rules and thereby to unite them in one consciousness, and without which use of sensibility it would think nothing at all; but reason, on the contrary, shows in what we call “ideas” a spontaneity so pure that it thereby goes far beyond anything that sensibility can ever afford it, and proves its highest occupation in distinguishing the world of sense and the world of understanding from each other and thereby marking out limits for the understanding itself. (4:452) Human beings experience of the uses of their faculties of understanding and, especially, reason causes them to attribute self-activity to themselves. Only to that extent can a human being attribute “membership in the intelligible world”, that is, only as a being that apparently possesses the faculties of understanding and reason that themselves provide concepts and ideas that are not comprehensible through sensation. No kind of choice or decision or judgment but only the faculties of understanding and reason are ascribed to the intelligible world. As in the Third Antinomy, Kant stresses reason as the source of laws for human behavior. Given the attribution of reason to the self along with the already accepted sensibility, a human being can view herself as “belonging” to two “worlds”: in one sense, she recognizes that she is a sensible being and is thus subject to the laws of nature. In another sense, she believes herself to be a rational being and thus, subject to the constraints of rational moral law on her
138 Practical reason in nature behavior. The intelligible world is understood in terms of the possibility that reason itself determines the actions of a being in the sensible world. At this point, the circle is avoided because Kant has a reason for individuals to attribute reason to themselves. The awareness of ideas and principles of reason provides a basis for the attribution of reason to ourselves, since there is no other explanation of how these ideas and principles can be valid. Hence, we are beings who may believe that they possess reason. But we cannot understand how such governance by reason – in particular with regard to our own decisions in the will – is possible. We cannot even confirm independently of the apparent use of reason that we are rational beings. Nonetheless, we now have a reason to assume that the moral law is valid, and that it can govern our actions. We affirm autonomy of the will – its capacity to be governed by the rules of reason – and equally affirm the validity of the moral law based in reason. That Kant takes reason to be the key faculty whose freedom to provide a valid moral law is at issue is also supported by some language later in Groundwork III. The final paragraph raises the characteristic of reason that it always pushes its cognition until it finds necessity. In the final paragraph of Groundwork III, Kant applies this to the practical use of reason, which demands “absolute necessity, but only of laws of actions of a rational being as such” (4:463). The third section of the Groundwork as a whole has been a search for this absolute necessity of the moral law, not merely the conditional claim that if there is a moral law binding on human beings, it is the categorical imperative, but the unconditional claim that in fact there is such a binding moral law. In the previous section, “On the Extreme Boundary of All Practical Philosophy”, we can find a more specific explanation of relation between freedom and the necessity of the moral law. Thus the question, how a categorical imperative is possible, can indeed be answered to the extent that one can furnish the sole presupposition on which alone it is possible, namely the idea of freedom, and that one can also see the necessity of this presupposition, which is sufficient for the practical use of reason, that is for the conviction of the validity of this imperative, and so also of the moral law. (4:461) The validity of the categorical imperative depends upon the possibility of freedom. The kind of freedom that concerns Kant must be one that could provide validity to the categorical imperative. A standard approach to Groundwork III would identify this freedom as the freedom of the will as a power of choice in determining the action of a non-natural person in herself independent of sensible causation. A look at Kant’s previous paragraph, however, shows that the standard understanding of this freedom is misplaced. In that paragraph, Kant notes that the causal relation of freedom is not one of a choice by the will of a person in herself to sensible effects but of “a causality of reason to
The transcendental status of empirical reason 139 determine sensibility in conformity with its principles” (4:460). This emphasis on the causality of reason itself through its principles is again reminiscent of the Third Antinomy solution. The causal relation is between reason as a cause, through its principles, and the decision of the will as effect.18 I have provided a brief reading of Groundwork III that stresses the validation of reason rather than choice in the will. My aim has been to show that Kant’s claims in this purely moral work match those in the Critique of Pure Reason. Our experience of the ideas and principles of reason, in particular of the categorical imperative, cannot be readily explained using the sensible world alone. We attribute a distinct kind of justification to reason (one that is ultimately inexplicable, as I will discuss in Chapter 7). Reason and moral realism The position I am advancing here would, under a certain restriction, make Kant an empirical moral realist. If one can identify a transcendental structure of pure practical reason that all deliberative rational beings must possess, then one has a basis for a moral principle that would be independent of the empirical moral agent. The structure of reason that produces the principle is independent of the existence of any particular moral agent that embodies the structure. A similar conception of Kant’s moral theory is one advanced by many moral realists, one in which the moral law is not constructed by moral agents but that exists independently of them because it stems from the nature of reason or of the will.19 But there is also reason to attribute to Kant only an empirical moral idealism. This section will lay out the interpretive options. The discussion is limited to reason and the moral law; other moral issues such as God, freedom of choice, and moral value will have different factors in assessing whether they are transcendentally real or not; Part Three will examine those issues and the postscript will tie all elements of Kant’s ethics into the same framework used here. 18 19 Strictly speaking, the causal relation is between reason as a cause and the feeling of respect as an effect. The feeling of respect can then be understood as a purely natural cause of a decision of the will (4:460). The relation between a timeless idea and a sensible feeling operating at a particular time in the human mind remains. Patrick Kain is a clear example. In (Kain 2004), he lays out Kant’s position regarding the authorship and legislation of the moral law. Human beings can be seen to legislate the moral law, as can God, because to legislate means only to place someone under an obligation to obey the law. But the law is not itself created by either individual moral agents or by God; rather, the law itself has no author. It is given by the nature of reason itself (Kain 2004, p. 288). Allen Wood also makes Kant a moral realist in part on the basis of an objective conception of rational will that is independent of the existence of any particular rational agent and that creates a moral law valid for all rational beings whether they are aware of it or accept it (Wood 1999, p. 157). But I will show in the following text that Wood also hesitates in a way that allows for a moral idealist interpretation.
140 Practical reason in nature Three options Moral realism or idealism regarding reason and the moral law could be either transcendental or empirical. As I defined these terms in Chapter 1 on realism, the transcendental distinction between moral realism and moral idealism concerns whether the transcendental conception of the moral agent requires any principles, properties, or objects independent of the conception of moral agency itself. This transcendental conception is the result of philosophical work examining the necessary conditions for there to be any moral agents at all. If all the principles, properties, and objects required for morality can be said to be dependent upon the conception of the moral agent, then morality would be transcendentally ideal. If, however, one or more principles, properties, or objects were required for morality and had to be conceived independent of the moral agent, then morality would be transcendentally real. The empirical reality of morality could follow from either transcendental reality or transcendental ideality of morality. Empirical reality considers whether the actual principles, properties, or objects required for morality as part of the transcendental assessment of morality would exist independent of actually existing moral agents. An empirical moral idealism would hold that all principles, properties, and objects required for morality are entirely dependent upon the moral agent qua moral subject. Empirical moral idealism would actually preclude a transcendental realism (this is one way in which these terms are not used in the same sense that Kant uses them with regard to objects in space, for Kant takes transcendental realism to imply empirical idealism [B69–71, A369–70]). Here the aspects of morality under discussion are the categorical imperative, the moral law, and the faculty of reason that generates them. The issue is whether practical reason itself must be considered transcendentally and empirically real, transcendentally ideal but empirically real, or only empirically ideal. Since reason is the source of the moral law it, will have the same status as reason. The categorical imperative is tied both to the fact of reason qua experience, which is empirically ideal, and to reason if reflection upon the fact of reason can provide justification for its validity. The strongest interpretation one can give to the claim that reason has a transcendental structure is transcendentally realist. A necessary condition for moral agency would be that the moral agent is subject to a law that holds independent of the structure of moral agency, and thus is independent of the transcendental moral agent. This interpretation would entail a conception of reason that somehow exists “in the nature of things” and not merely as the wills or reasons of moral agents.20 20 I take this phrase from Patrick Kain, who holds to this view (Kain 2004, p. 303).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 141 The transcendental ideality of reason is the claim that the conception of moral agency requires that the moral agent use reason and its principles in deliberation before decision-making but that practical reason has no place outside of the context of moral agency. Practical reasoning is simply the a priori formal structure of reasoning in deliberation when one attempts to choose freely, that is, without accepting determination from non-rational elements such as desires or sensible impulses. This transcendental idealism still allows for an empirically real morality. An empirically real reason would have a basis independent of the individual moral agent. My metaphysically naturalist interpretation of reason has already shown that the faculty of reason can exist in nature within individual minds as described by empirical psychology. The transcendental justification of that principle provided by that reason is valid whether or not the moral agent is individually aware of it or personally acknowledges it. The conception of reason is thus independent of the particular moral agent and to that extent, could be called empirically real. In this way, Kant can be interpreted as an empirical moral realist because of the conception of reason that transcends the empirical moral agent.21 A third alternative interpretation is also available. It sees Kant as an empirical moral idealist who provides no transcendental status to reason and sees the categorical imperative only as an idea and a sense of obligation in the empirical agent without further validity. All moral principles, properties, and objects (here, as earlier, restricted to reason and the products of reason) would depend upon the empirical moral agent. In this interpretation, all of the transcendental structure attributed to reason and the moral law that results from it would be 21 Kain admits that the conception of realism that stresses reason as the source of the moral law independent of any particular moral agents does not rule out what he calls “global constructivist anti-realism” that relies on the nature of Kant’s transcendental idealism’s restrictions on the validity of a priori synthetic judgments (Kain 2004, p. 261). The position of the transcendental ideality of reason can be understood in terms of a global view. He offers only a very brief objection to global anti-realism and takes a global anti-realism based on transcendental idealism to require that morality would then, like the categories, have to be valid in nature in space and time. He takes this to imply an empirical realism. To this extent, his reasoning is correct. However, he then limits the understanding of nature in space and time to restrict all comprehension of objects in nature in moral ways. He objects that causal determinism in spatiotemporal nature would preclude “the empirical reality of autonomy”. My explanation of the structural account of transcendental freedom of reason shows that the autonomy of reason can describe an empirically real faculty of reason. He also objects that morality cannot be limited to beings in nature because morality is supposed to be valid for all rational beings, not simply those who share our forms of intuition. It is true that the moral law would be valid for all rational beings, but in the same vein, the pure concepts of the understanding would be valid for any possible experience. In both cases, they are in practice limited to nature in space and time if, as naturalists would claim, there are no other forms of intuition and our ontology is restricted to nature in space and time. Validity for hypothetical beings and for hypothetical nonspatiotemporal existences does not translate to actual existence restrictions, and the global idealist position would still be valid for all possible rational beings.
142 Practical reason in nature only ideas held by empirical moral agents as part of a practical perspective. They would have no actual transcendental status – that is, they would not be confirmed as transcendentally required but only pictured as such from a certain point of view of the empirical agent, the way that Kant’s admission that no deduction of the moral law is possible, the identification of the fact of reason with a conscious experience in the empirical agent, and the nature of practical philosophy in general as directed only at determination to action and not to ontological conclusions, point in this direction. There are reasons in favor and against each of these interpretations. In the next three sections, I will evaluate each as interpretations of the role of reason in Kant’s ethics, given the structural account of pure practical reason that I argued for earlier. Transcendental moral realism The strongest interpretation of the role of reason in Kant’s ethics places it independent even of transcendental moral agency. I think that such an interpretation would make Kant into a traditional rationalist and should be rejected. If reason were to be understood as transcendentally real and independent of the conception of the rational moral agent (or more generally, the conception of rational beings), it would have to be valid in itself for all possible existences and for all possible beings in all possible worlds. This independent and universal reason would have to include the theoretical as well as the practical since there is only one reason with two different uses. In other words, reason would have to have absolutely universal applicability. The ideas of reason would have to be understood to correspond to actually existing properties and objects. A soul and God would have to be confirmed as actual based on the mere ideas of them produced by reason’s search for the unconditioned. All possible worlds would be rationally structured and all ideas of reason would have to be correct. Such use of reason would violate Kant’s restrictions on reason.22 Giving reason an independent transcendentally real status violates the strictures on reason that Kant so carefully argues for in the first Critique. A further difficulty is ontological. If reason is supposed to exist independently of the transcendental moral agent, then under an ontological reading of transcendental idealism, it would have to exist independently of human beings in themselves as ultimately real beings existing ontologically prior to their appearances in space and time, since on an ontological reading, these beings in themselves would be the transcendentally real moral agents. Further, a deus ex machina solution identifying God as the locus of reason independent of moral 22 I discuss the immanent rather than transcendent validity of the ideas of reason in (Rauscher 2010).
The transcendental status of empirical reason 143 agents would not work since God would also be a moral agent. I have always been puzzled by a claim that there can be a faculty like reason independent of the existence of beings with that faculty. There are two ways that reason could be independent of rational agents: first, by being embodied in the things that exist as their rational structure and second, by existing abstractly as a kind of relation of thoughts. The first option, I have already rejected in the previous paragraph because it would violate Kant’s critical restrictions on reason. The second option is essentially identical to the transcendental ideality of reason as structure and so does not work as an ontological alternative to the conception of reason as restricted to moral agency. The transcendental conception of moral agency with regard to reason thus points to a transcendentally ideal morality. Transcendental idealism and empirical moral realism I believe that the interpretation that makes Kant a moral transcendental idealist and empirical realist would fit some of Kant’s and most of contemporary Kantian intentions better, and that this version of realism regarding the faculty of reason and its principles is quite plausible as a philosophical position and interpretation of Kant. The reasons that point to a transcendentally idealist and empirically realist view begin with a look back at Kant’s claim that no deduction of the moral law is possible. I believe that Kant is mistaken in denying that a transcendental deduction can be given for the moral law. Kant had argued that there was no empirical object in morality and so no possible empirical confirmation for any possible deduction. It is true that the moral law has no objects of experience for which it can serve as the transcendental basis, and thus, a transcendental deduction could not proceed in the same manner as the theoretical transcendental deduction of the categories. But Kant does not have to deny that there is a kind of object for which the moral law is a basis, namely the experience of a free rational agent deliberating courses of action. No empirical object is involved in this deliberation, only a decision about free action. The moral law could be seen as the necessary basis for any rational deliberation at all.23 I believe that some sort of transcendental argument about the conditions for agency is what Kantian realists must strive for. If such an argument is successful, it still fits within a naturalistic framework. The transcendental justification of the moral law would mean that for a particular kind of experience to be possible – in this case, any kind of deliberative decision-making 23 I take Christine Korsgaard to have attempted something like a transcendental deduction in this sense in (Korsgaard 1996b). Robert Stern provides a positive assessment for a Korsgaardian transcendental argument for morality in (Stern 2011a).
144 Practical reason in nature seen as free from the agent-perspective – a certain foundational a priori structure is required – in this case, the moral law stemming from the structure of reason. One could broadly understand this to provide transcendental conditions for the evolution of any species of conscious deliberative agents. The transcendental structure itself does not depend upon the existence of any particular species to embody it; morality is independent of the existence of particular beings. And it would not be a mere accident that human beings evolved to possess this structure of reason, for any organism that is to evolve the capacity for deliberative decision-making must possess this same structure of reason. By analogy, any organism that is to evolve with the capacity for representing an objective experience would, according to Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories, have to embody a cognitive structure that processes causal relations. The transcendental validity of the moral law does not depend upon the empirical minds of rational beings any more than the validity of causality depends upon the existence of particular human beings, although similarly, if any organism is to evolve that could have objective experience, it would be a priori restricted to certain structures in its cognitive system that would be able to process sensations in causal relations and thus embody the category of causality. Moral beings and cognizers embody these different principles and concepts but do not make them. The moral law would retain its necessity amid the contingency in nature. It is true that the fact that a particular individual thinks about the moral law is contingent as a result of the evolutionary and developmental processes explained earlier. Of course, the existence of any particular individual and even the entire species is contingent. The contingency of these particulars does not detract from the necessity of the moral law itself considered as a transcendental condition for moral agency. No reflective, conscious, acting, rational being could have any other moral law, since the moral law arises due to the nature of the structure of reason itself. This picture of Kant as a transcendental moral idealist and empirical moral realist within the ontology of nature is quite appealing. Yet, that conclusion would also face the following difficulty as an interpretation of Kant. Rather than proving that human beings really do have pure practical reason, he allows only the admission of the fact of reason as a fact that human beings experience the categorical imperative. Pure practical reason, as he says in the Preface to the second Critique, cannot be proved except by “what it does” in actually determining the will; that is to say, in our practical subjective experience of decision-making, we feel the obligatory power of the categorical imperative as the fact of reason and interpret this experience in light of a claim that we possess pure practical reason as the only explanation of the source of the categorical imperative. This is not an objective proof that would rise to the level of cognition; it is only a practical belief that remains at the subjective level of the first person. It forms the essence of the practical
The transcendental status of empirical reason 145 perspective that, as part of practical philosophy, has no ontological commitments but is geared only toward determining free actions. The difficulty in interpreting Kant as a transcendental moral idealist and an empirical moral realist, then, is in his refusal to affirm that human beings can be cognized objectively as beings with pure practical reason. We might be required to believe that morality is transcendentally justified, but that is different from a claim that it really is transcendentally justified.24 Empirical moral idealism The third possible interpretation would make Kant simply an empirical moral idealist. Practical reason and the moral law would have no transcendental status at all and no meaning outside the empirical moral agent. We can believe but we cannot prove that we are rational beings. Although it is clear that Kant believes that human beings possess reason, he does not make this belief an objective theoretical cognition. This point concerns the distinction between the practical “ought” and the theoretical “is” in Kant. Practically, human beings conceive themselves as possessing the transcendental structure of reason that demands consistency, uniformity, universality, and the like. Theoretically, however, human beings cannot prove that they are obligated to the moral law (the failure of the deduction). We can believe that there is a moral law, that is, that there is a transcendental structure of pure practical reason. But we cannot prove that simply because human beings possess pure practical reason, they are obligated to follow its dictates. Obligation is a practical rather than a theoretical matter, a matter of ought rather than is. This empirical moral idealism is not simply based upon the lack of success of a deduction. The positive aspect of this view is that human beings’ moral lives are simply constituted by the perspective they take when faced with action. As an inescapable perspective, it would not be relative to individuals or cultures but would be species wide (and extend to any other species with similar mental structures). As empirically ideal, the moral perspective would not be objective. With no deduction to prove that only this point of view is legitimate for active deliberative beings, the possibility would remain that other kinds of deliberative 24 Allen Wood brushes over this important distinction. He claims that his interpretation of Kant’s deduction of the moral law “draws no distinction between our having to take ourselves, from a practical standpoint, to be capable of judging according to objective reasons, and there actually being such reasons for us to judge according to . . . [and] between taking ourselves (from a practical standpoint) to be capable of setting ends with objective worth and there really being objective worth for those ends to have . . . [and] our taking ourselves (from a practical standpoint) to be responding to moral requirements that are unconditionally obligatory and the actual existence of such categorical requirements” (Wood 1999, p. 381, note 30).
146 Practical reason in nature beings would have other possible determinants of behavior besides just desires and reason. This possible relativism would not be itself part of the practical view but would only become apparent when one steps aside from practice and reflects theoretically on the nature of this moral perspective. From within the moral perspective, no deduction is necessary. I will say more about this perspective in Chapter 7 in a discussion of the nature of the objective order provided by reason. I conclude these observations about the relation of reason and the moral law to moral realism, then, with the following alternatives. If, on the one hand, there is a way to confirm that the transcendental structure of moral agency has more than simply the status of a set of subjectively held but unconfirmable beliefs as part of the practical point of view, then Kant must be a moral transcendental idealist and empirical realist. The structure of reason would be known through a transcendental argument but the existence of reason depends upon the contingent existence of particular deliberative beings. If, on the other hand, morality is nothing more than the practical point of view that human (and similar) beings must adopt, and there is no guarantee that it has any further validity, then Kant must be considered a moral empirical idealist. Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have presented the core of my interpretation of Kant’s ethics. I argued that reason as the source of the moral law is the most important faculty for Kant’s ethics, more important than the power of decision in the power of choice. I showed that reason has a place in nature as empirical reason. The Third Antinomy’s emphasis on the free timeless causality of reason was understood in terms of the structure of intelligible reason itself. Transcendental freedom does not require any non-natural entities but is simply the manner in which the structure of reason can be understood, and can function as a rational cause, independently of determination by alien causes. Reason’s role in morality, and transcendental freedom itself, can be understood within a metaphysically naturalistic framework. I concluded by arguing that the role of reason in Kant’s ethics would fit with a transcendental moral idealism and an empirical moral realism best, although elements of Kant’s thought also point toward only an empirical moral idealism. The next few chapters will examine other parts of Kant’s moral theory to show how they fit within the metaphysically naturalist framework and moral idealism.
Part III Morality beyond nature?
5 “God” without God: the status of the postulates The two previous chapters looked at the lack of ontology in the primacy of practical reason and the status of reason within nature, showing that they are compatible with both a metaphysical naturalism and moral idealism. This chapter will argue that the postulates of practical reason – particularly belief in God – can readily be understood in a metaphysically naturalistic framework. The argument will also thereby reject any realism about God. I will show that Kant had two different tendencies in his discussions of the postulates, one of which focuses on God as an object and the other on the concept of God. (In this chapter, I will generally use the term “concept” in discussing the idea of God, any transcendental hypothesis about God, and the postulate of God; I intend this term in its broad sense in which concept is usually contrasted with object.) The latter aspect of his discussion of the postulates, I claim, provides a basis for the naturalistic interpretation. I also argue that Kant’s final conception of the postulates in the Opus Postumum reflects this concern with concept over object. Along with the idea of the highest good and as a precondition of its realization, Kant offers the postulates of immortality of the soul and the existence of God. His arguments have often been rejected by commentators, mainly on the basis that the kind of rational hope for happiness Kant stresses is not really required for moral obligation, thus undermining the practical nature of these postulates; although recently more positive attention has been paid to them and to Kant’s philosophy of religion in general.1 I will not assess the 1 In Chapter 3, I showed how the priority of belief clarifies the way in which moral obligation is independent of the postulates. For an early example of traditional criticism of Kant’s argument for the postulates, see (Beck 1960, p. 274f.). A defense of Kant’s argument can be found in (Wood 1970, p. 129f.). In the past dozen years, a plethora of work on Kant’s philosophy of religion has appeared, generally stressing an interpretation that takes Kant to be religious and his philosophy to require adherence to Christian doctrine. In general, I think that this interpretation overemphasizes the extent to which some of Kant’s positions require religion. My chapter will provide an example of the kind of language that Kant uses in his philosophy that weakens their claim. Further, Manfred Kuehn has shown convincingly that Kant had no strong personal religious beliefs (Kuehn 2001). For a philosophical defense of a Kantian atheism, see (Denis 2003). 149
150 Morality beyond nature? validity of those arguments; rather, for purposes of argument, I will assume that something in Kant’s moral theory does require the postulate of God. Instead, this chapter will assess the status of the postulate of the existence of God to see just how it is compatible with a naturalistic metaphysics. I will argue that the postulate of the existence of God is best understood as the claim that rational beings must hold in their minds some particular concept or other that functions as a bridge to satisfy the systematic demands of practical reason, yet that does not, and is not intended to, refer to any existing object.2 2 In some ways, my argument is similar to the famous “as if” interpretation of Kant offered by Hans Vaihinger a century ago. Based on ideas he developed around 1875, Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als-Ob was very influential; it went through at least six editions in the dozen years following its publication in 1911, including an abridged “Volksausgabe” (people’s edition) in 1923 (Vaihinger 1911) and (Vaihinger 1923). In brief, Vaihinger offered a philosophical system in which human life is structured by a set of assumptions and ideas which are themselves “fictions” but which help human beings survive and thrive. He held that many mathematical concepts such as the point and line, physical concepts such as the atom, juridical concepts such as rights, moral concepts such as freedom of the will, and of course the practical concept of God are all fictions. Vaihinger discusses fictions as resulting from the teleological and organic structure of thought (the psyche) in a world which is itself mechanical not teleologically organized. The psyche finds it very useful to employ certain concepts which help it to fulfil the purpose of navigating the organism through its life; these concepts are purposeful functions (zweckmässige Funktionen) (Vaihinger 1911, p. 2). The concepts do not themselves correspond to actual objects in nature (or outside nature for that matter) but as part of the system of thought they function to guide the organism successfully. Vaihinger describes this relationship as follows: Objective events and being may be what they will, nonetheless it must be stressed that they do not consist of logical functions [. . .] Their purposiveness manifests itself precisely in this: the logical functions, though they operate according to their own laws, still always manage to coincide with being (Vaihinger 1911, p. 10, 12). One might summarize this reference relation as follows: individual fictitious concepts do not correspond with reality, the functional system which they help to constitute does. This functional system would consist of non-fictitious concepts glued together, as it were, by the fictitious concepts.Vaihinger’s theory is not presented as a straightforward interpretation of Kant. He presents the philosophy of “as if” as his own, inspired by Kant (and others). Vaihinger does, however, present what he calls “historical confirmations” that focus mainly on Kant but also include Nietzsche and some other figures. His discussion of Kant does not claim to be an objective analysis of Kant’s actual philosophical statements, proving that Kant really always held the theory of “as if”. Rather, Vaihinger admits that he selectively chose passages from Kant which reveal this tendency in Kant and excluded passages which contradict this interpretation, for example, (Vaihinger 1911, p. 639). His point is that, as a philosopher, Kant was presenting the kernel of the “as if” theory without himself fully developing it, indeed even without realizing the full potential of this theory. One must keep this in mind when considering objections to Vaihinger’s theory, and correspondingly to the interpretation I present. For this reason, one ought to reject the charges against Vaihinger raised by Erich Adickes in his book-length attack on Vaihinger’s Kant interpretation, Kant und die AlsOb-Philosophie (Adickes 1927). For all its academic rigor and thorough review of Kant’s writings, published and unpublished, Adickes’ argument boils down to the claim that Vaihinger’s Kant is not the historical Kant (Adickes 1927, p. 291). If the standards for assessing Vaihinger’s view of Kant are strict historical accuracy, then Vaihinger himself would admit that his theory is inadequate because it does not capture Kant’s complete historical view. Vaihinger does, however, note that some of Kant’s arguments point toward a theory of fictions, even if Kant himself did not fully develop it. Vaihinger is, as it were, looking at the Kant that might have been had the historical Kant followed a path that he saw, and even mapped, but did not fully traverse.
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 151 To interpret the postulate of the existence of God merely in terms of nature in space and time is to interpret it as not requiring attribution of the actual existence to God. Rather, the concept “God” is held in the mind of a moral agent without affirming the existence of any independent being matching that concept. Instead, the moral agent uses the concept of God, qua concept in relation to other concepts, for the practical purpose of furthering morality.3 Certainly, by the end of his career as evidenced by the Opus Postumum, Kant had clearly come to such a position. For example, he writes in one of his last notes to himself, “The idea of that which human reason itself makes for the universe is the active representation of God. Not as a particular (personality) substance outside me but a thought in me” (21:154). Human beings are said here to create the concept of God, and we comprehend this concept only as a thought in us, not as a separate substance outside us. This chapter will show that this conception of the postulate of God is implicit in Kant’s earlier discussions of the postulates of practical reason. I argue that it is the position Kant was working toward throughout his philosophical development, and that it best serves the purpose of the postulate. To reach this result, I will trace Kant’s conception of a postulate in three main stages: prior to the Critique of Practical Reason, in the Critique of Practical Reason, and after the Critique of Practical Reason. Before the Critique of Practical Reason This first section will show that prior to his direct work on the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant had not firmly conceived of practical postulates as distinct from theoretical ideas and hypotheses. It will also show that Kant had a tendency to treat postulates as well as ideas and hypotheses as abstracting from ontological claims in favor of their use for some particular purposes. 3 My interpretation bears some resemblances to Vaihinger’s; the differences will become apparent as my argument proceeds. I would like to mention a few key differences here. First, unlike Vaihinger, I stress that this theory of fictional concepts is for Kant mostly practical; I think that Kant’s theoretical philosophy of nature uses fictions only in the regulative use of reason, but not in physics or mathematics themselves. Kant is an empirical realist about both pure and empirical concepts of the understanding. Second, I try to be clearer about the possible referential relations between fictitious concepts and objects and the sense of immanence Kant employs. Third, I take the fictions to be a priori and not merely part of the empirical psyche. Finally, I do not use the term “fictions” but stick with Kant’s terminology. Peter Byrne advocates a similar interpretation of the postulate but offers a more comprehensive view of Kant’s use of the idea of God overall. He convincingly argues against the realist view of Kant’s religious claims and in favor of a subjective, anti-realist view. In particular, he stresses that Kant’s critical philosophy precludes any traditional metaphysical view of God and of religious language (Byrne 2007).
152 Morality beyond nature? Early conception of a postulate Kant’s use of the term “postulate” first comes in his early metaphysical works where it applies to theoretical claims.4 Kant was certainly exposed to the term from its use in Meier’s Logic textbook, where §315 says: Unproven judgments are either judgments after due consideration [Erwägungsurtheile] or judgments made in the moment [Übungsurtheile]. The former are axioms [Grundurtheile](axioma) but the latter are postulates [Heischeurtheile](postulatum).5 The precise German term “Heischeurtheile” means “a judgment on demand”, which relates the term to the Latin postulatum, which means a demand or request. Thus, the meaning of the term “postulate” that Kant employs is that of an unproven claim required by a particular context. This is confirmed in Kant’s own notes to his copy of the Meier textbook in the latter half of the 1770s, where he comments on this very section: A postulate is actually a practical immediately [crossed out: necessary] certain proposition. But one can also have theoretical postulates for the sake of practical reason, namely, a theoretical hypothesis that is necessary from the point of view of practical reason, such as that of the existence of God, of freedom, and of another world. Practical propositions are objectively certain; subjectively, they can only become practical insofar as that hypothesis serves as their ground. (R 3133, 16:673) At this time, Kant had not yet distinguished practical postulates as such from other kinds of postulates. He uses the terms “postulate” and “hypothesis” interchangeably, showing that he had not finalized any special or distinct role for what will become the postulates of practical reason. For example, in R4113, written sometime from about 1765 to 1775, Kant notes that the idea of God is a “necessary logical ideal”, the “necessary hypothesis of the natural order” and the “necessary hypothesis of the moral order” (17:421). “Hypotheses” are seen as serving both theoretical and practical purposes (see also R4582, 17:601, and R4928, 18:30). The postulate is also construed as a concept that must be held by the mind in order to play some sort of functional role while the existence of any object corresponding to that concept is not claimed. However, this suggestion is made not with regard to a practical but with regard to a theoretical proof of God; theoretically, only a concept of God is attainable, practically, proof of the object of that concept is also attainable. In a Reflection from the early 1770s, Kant distinguishes between the need for a concept and the need for its proof; however, the proof in question is a moral proof necessitated by the experience 4 5 For example, see the Inaugural Dissertation, 2:402, for the postulate of pure time, and 2:418, for the postulate that “nothing material at all comes into being or passes away”. The text of Meier’s Logic is reprinted in Kants gesammelten Schriften, here 16:668.
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 153 of moral order rather than any purely a priori reflection in pure reason as part of an explanation of the theoretical “pure concept of possibility”: The transcendental concept is necessary, not the transcendental proof; in that one sees that one cannot make heterodox claims without any ground. The necessity of the divine being as a necessary hypothesis either of pure concepts of possibility or of experience in this world, and the latter as hypothesis of morality. Absolute necessity cannot be proved. The proof of the existence of God is not apodictic but hypothetical sub hypothesi logica und practica [under logical and practical hypotheses]. A hypothesis that is necessary in relation to the laws of pure reason is originaria [original], a hypothesis that is necessary in relation to experience is conditionalis sive relativa [conditional or relative]. The first is necessary, the second necessitated; the former originaria, the latter subsidiaria [subsidiary], e.g. suppletoria[supplementary] for explanation of order in the world. (R4580, 1772–75, 17:600) This moral proof is one that is said to be necessitated rather than necessary, that is, required for some particular empirical circumstances rather than purely a priori. The moral order in the world must be explained using a transcendental hypothesis, yet that hypothesis remains conditional upon or relative to the alleged moral order in the world. For theoretical purposes, only a transcendental concept of God is allowed, but no proof. When a proof is available, then, it is only contingent upon a certain empirical fact. In the Critique of Pure Reason Even in the Critique of Pure Reason itself, the term “postulate” is used theoretically, occurring most often in the name of the three modal principles of the understanding, the “postulates of empirical thought”.6 He also calls reason’s search for the unconditioned in the Dialectic, a “postulate of reason” (A498/B526). There is no hint of Kant’s later special status of practical postulate (although there is a relation to the nature of “belief” in the Canon of Pure Reason, which will be discussed later on in this chapter) The term “hypothesis”, however, is restricted to theoretical claims. The section “The Discipline of Pure Reason with Regard to Hypotheses” is worth a detailed look. Hypotheses, as Kant defines them, are not merely any kind of 6 Paul Guyer has argued that the use of the same term “postulate” here and in the second Critique is not accidental, and that the practical postulates Kant gives in the second Critique must be understood in terms of the postulates of empirical thought, in particular that in practical postulates, the concepts must be understood as possessing real possibility, not merely logical possibility (Guyer 2000, pp. 333–71). This claim reads too much into the use of the same term. The different status of the postulates of practical reason and the postulates of empirical thought are clear in their being assigned to practical reason, the practical point of view of the “ought”, and empirical thought, the theoretical point of view of the “is”.
154 Morality beyond nature? groundless assertion. They “must be connected as a ground of explanation with that which is actually given and consequently certain” (A770/B798). That which is actually given in experience must always conform to the conditions of possible experience, our reason cannot conceive of the possibility of things in any other way. Hypotheses must be connected to experience; in this way, they are like the “hypotheses” and “postulates” Kant noted in R3133 that cannot simply be freefloating assertions but must arise in particular situations to resolve particular problems. Still, transcendental hypotheses, like ideas of reason, do not themselves represent objects of cognition. Here is how Kant describes the ideas of reason before contrasting them with transcendental hypotheses: The concepts of reason are, as we have said, mere ideas, and of course have no object in any sort of experience, but also do not on that account designate objects that are invented and at the same time thereby assumed to be possible. They are merely thought problematically, in order to ground regulative principles of the systematic use of the understanding in the field of experience in relation to them (as heuristic fictions). If one departs from this, they are mere thought-entities, the possibility of which is not demonstrable, and which thus cannot be used to ground the explanation of actual appearances through an hypothesis. (A771/B799) Ideas of reason merely ground the regulative principles of reason as heuristic devices. Kant provides the example of the idea of reason of the soul, into which one cannot have any insight in concreto, yet that allows one to think the unity of powers of the mind (A771–72/B779–800, compare A672/B700f). It must at least be possible for there to be a unity of the powers of the mind. The ideas of reason thus have a positive use. Transcendental hypotheses, however, do not even rise to this level of positive use: they cannot provide any ground of explanation of appearances. A transcendental hypothesis is one in which “a mere idea of reason would be used [directly] for the explanation of things in nature” as opposed to the regulative use of the idea of reason, in which the idea is used only to guide inquiry in nature and thus indirectly relate to things in nature. The discussion of the use of transcendental hypotheses offers two important further points. First, Kant claims that the genuine use of transcendental hypotheses is merely negative, as a defense against unwarranted attacks on particular philosophical positions. And second, transcendental hypotheses are themselves never fully endorsed but only offered defensively in particular contexts, for particular purposes, and for a particular length of time. Suppose, first, that one finds oneself discussing the nature of the soul and is faced with someone who claims that experience in nature offers strong indication that our mental life is all physically based. In this context, Kant says, one may offer the following transcendental hypothesis in defense: That all life is really only intelligible, not subject to temporal alterations at all, and has neither begun at birth nor will be ended through death, that this life is nothing but a mere appearance, i.e. a sensible representation of the purely spiritual life, and the entire
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 155 world of the senses is a mere image, which hovers before our present kind of cognition and, like a dream, has no objective reality in itself; that if we could intuit the things and ourselves as they are we would see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures with which our only true community had not begun with birth nor would not cease with bodily death (as mere appearances), etc. (A779–80/B807–08) This transcendental hypothesis, which sounds eerily like a strongly ontological interpretation of transcendental idealism, is certainly an extreme form of defense against a materialist theory of mind. Note that it has no direct explanatory power for anything empirical: that is, empirical experience in nature is left phenomenally the same. The transcendental hypothesis makes no claim to cognize any particular part of nature. This hypothesis is merely negative, serving as a defense against an unjustified claim to knowledge. The second and most important part of this passage is yet to come. Kant continues immediately by noting that the person who makes this claim does so without actually believing the hypothesis. we do not know or seriously assert the least thing about all of this which we have here pleaded against the attack, and it is all not even an idea of reason but merely a concept thought up for self-defense . . . he who turns such hypothetical countermeasures against the pretensions of his rashly negative opponent must not be considered to hold them as his own genuine opinions. He abandons them as soon as he has finished off the dogmatic self-conceit of his opponent. (A780–81/B808–09) The hypothesis, then, is not asserted as true. It is not part of the world-view of the person who makes this claim. It is asserted as not-impossible. The person makes this claim only for a particular purpose without actually asserting the truth of the claim. The particular purpose is the main point for the claim. As Kant sums it up, “Thus one sees that in the speculative use of reason hypotheses have no validity as opinions in themselves, but only relative to opposed transcendent pretensions” (A781/B809). These two differences between ideas of reason and transcendental hypotheses should not obscure the similarities. An important similarity to keep in mind is that both concern concepts that we “cannot have insight into in concreto” (A771/B799, modified). Kant notes this with regard to the example he gives of a transcendental hypothesis. He says strongly “We do not know or seriously assert the least thing about all of this”. He also notes that it remains wrong to extend the principles of possible experience to the possibility of things in general; that is, it remains wrong to apply the categories and principles of the understanding beyond the boundaries of possible experience in nature (A781/ B809). Hence transcendental hypotheses cannot be affirmed in any detail. A transcendental hypotheses, then, is not a reference to an object at all. If anything, it is a placeholder, that is, it serves to highlight a lack of concrete theoretical knowledge of objects in nature. This is to say, the transcendental hypothesis has the function of pointing out to an opponent a lack of complete
156 Morality beyond nature? support for the opponent’s claims. That is how the transcendental hypothesis is able to be used as a defense. Since the hypothesis is never affirmed as such, and in fact cannot ever be affirmed because not known in concreto, its meaning is equivalent to its function. Its work is merely negative, to remind the dogmatic opponent that he is making a claim that transgresses over the boundaries of experience and thus over the boundaries of knowledge. No one’s ontology is extended by this claim. It is meant to remind others of the limits of their ontology. I think this is the best way to understand transcendental hypotheses in Kant. I also think that this is how Kant ought to have, and eventually does, understand the practical correlate of transcendental hypotheses, namely the postulates of practical reason. But Kant does not reach this sort of conclusion right away. Rather, he explains practical ideas in a way that makes them stronger than theoretical ideas. Within the discussion of transcendental hypotheses, Kant says that “in regard to its practical use reason still has the right to assume something which it would in no way be warranted in presupposing in the field of mere speculation without sufficient grounds of proof” (A776/B 804). Thus, the negative element of transcendental hypotheses is not at issue for practical hypotheses. There will be further, positive reasons to affirm something about the practical hypotheses. The positive reasons, of course, will turn out to be related to the need for the realization of the highest good. The canon of pure reason The first Critique never uses the term “postulate” to describe a moral claim and seems to restrict the term “hypothesis” to theoretical claims. Still, moral claims that will later be called postulates of practical reason are raised in the “Canon of Pure Reason” chapter. The Canon is a rich resource for assessing the state of Kant’s concerns in both ethics and systematic issues; its importance comes in part from the fact that when Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, he planned no further critical works before turning to his “metaphysics of morals”. Thus, the Canon contains what Kant considered before 1785 as the important critical discussion of ethics in its broader relation to epistemology, metaphysics, and his critical system. The focus for the present topic is rather limited: the status of the concept of God as a belief rather than a hypothesis. To what extent does Kant claim that belief in God is a claim that the concept “God” refers to an actual object? And to what extent does Kant provide good reasons for claiming any difference between the practical and the speculative uses of the concept “God”. Only reason in its practical use, Kant claims, can have a canon, or “the sum total of the a priori principles of [its] correct use” (A796–7/B824–5). The whole of the Critique up to this point, Kant claims, shows that speculative
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 157 reason has no correct use and thus cannot have a canon. (This claim goes too far, even if one accepts that the negative use of transcendent concepts just described does not count as a correct use; for the ideas of reason do have a correct and positive regulative use.7) The only legitimate use of reason then must be practical. Kant defines the practical use of reason as “everything that is possible through freedom” (A800/B828). In Chapter 2, I showed that the practical is defined as the rules for free action and free behavior, and as determining what ought to occur as opposed to what is in existence. The practical, then, concerns moral laws, “and thus these alone belong to the practical use of reason and permit a canon”. The concept of God, then, is permitted because of its relationship to the moral law. Presumably this means the following: If there is a moral law stemming from reason, then some other concepts or ideas of reason are so tied to it that they must be affirmed. That is, one would have reason to use the concept “God” if reason already provides moral laws that somehow demand that the concept “God” be invoked; this relationship is exhibited in Kant’s arguments in the second Critique. Kant initially does not present the problem this way in the Canon but instead reverses their relationship: “These [three problems of freedom, God, and immortality], however, have in turn their more remote aim, namely, what is to be done if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world”(A 800/B828). Such a statement implies that the existence of God and immortality are to be used as determinants of the moral law itself or our motivation to follow it.8 Kant states the proper relationship when asking his three famous questions that summarize philosophy. “What may I hope” or alternatively “if I do what I should, what may I then hope?” is the link between morality and God (A805/B833). Roughly speaking, this reverses the previous conditional. Here is the proper Kantian formulation, for only on this basis can we start with the moral law and proceed to God. Kant admits that the question he focuses on, “what may I hope”, is “simultaneously practical and theoretical, so that the practical leads like a clue to a reply to the theoretical question and, in its highest form, the speculative question” (A805/B833). One might object that the canon for practical reason is misplaced, since it is now a canon that mixes together some elements from the practical (namely, determination of our duties) with some elements of the theoretical (determining causal relations and effects, in this case, happiness). 7 8 See my explanation of the positive role of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason, covering both the Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason (Rauscher 2010). Henry Allison points out that this is a view that Kant ultimately abandoned. Allison identifies it with the claim that the existence of God and immortality are necessary as motivations to follow the moral law (Allison 1990, p. 67). Strictly speaking, the sentence is ambiguous between determining one’s duties (“what is to be done”) and looking for motivation toward those duties, but as Allison points out, the general context favors the claim about motivation.
158 Morality beyond nature? The relation between these two elements lies at the core of the interpretive controversy over the postulates: determining whether the practical element stressing action and abstracting from ontology or the theoretical element stressing ontology should predominate. The theoretical question, of course, is whether God exists. But even here in the Canon, there are indications that Kant does not require there to be an independent being “God” as substance. And since theoretical reason is at work, it seems as if Kant ought to invoke some of the same concerns that arose in the discussion of transcendental hypotheses, in particular, the way that the concept or idea of reason would not itself be affirmed but only entertained for the function of making some other claim, or defeating a claim made by another. Indeed, Kant hints at this status, although he does not clearly state it. This comes in the following section of the Canon, “On having an opinion, knowing, and believing”.9 For the most part, this section presents belief in God as belief that there is an object matching the concept “God”. While denying that human beings have any knowledge that there is a God, Kant argues that human beings inescapably believe that there is a God. He contrasts knowing as taking something to be true on the grounds of both objective and subjective sufficiency on the one hand, with believing something to be true on the grounds of subjective sufficiency but objective insufficiency on the other hand. Belief in God, then, appears to be a “taking to be true” that there is a being God matching the concept “God”. But a closer look reveals some concerns on Kant’s part to weaken this interpretation. To see this, it will help to focus on the definition of “conviction” as subjective sufficiency, which leads to the issue the nature of the practical relation that lies at the basis of belief. Kant explains subjective sufficiency as “conviction”, and defines “conviction” this way: “If it is valid for everyone merely as long as he has reason, then its ground is objectively sufficient” (A820/B848) and contrasts this with “persuasion”, which is not based on reason but on “the particular constitution of the subject”. Insofar as a human being’s reason is the basis of the “taking to be true”, then, the human being believes something on a subjectively sufficient basis. But it does not have objective sufficiency, for then it would be knowledge. Kant defines “objective sufficiency” as “certainty (for everyone)” as opposed to “conviction (for myself)” (A822/B850). Why would conviction, 9 This section of the Canon can be interpreted as either a general explanation of levels of assurance in theoretical claims, as in (Chignell 2007), or as mainly concerned with the practical (Stevenson 2003). Given its place in the Canon, I take Kant to be using this section to explain the peculiar status of practical beliefs.
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 159 based on reason shared by everyone rather than the “particular constitution of the subject”, not be a taking to be true “for everyone” but only “for myself”? The only way that validity can be universal among humans as rational beings yet subjectively sufficient only for oneself is if the proposition in question arises from something universally shared yet private. Reason as a faculty is, we assume, universally shared among human beings – but it cannot be their mere possession of reason as a cognitive faculty that is private, for our understanding is another cognitive faculty that is private in this same sense, yet Kant does not thereby claim that the cognitions of the understanding are merely subjectively sufficient. There must be some private relation between the individual and his reason, a relation that cannot be shared with others although it can be assumed to be experienced by others, that lies at the basis of this subjective sufficiency. Indeed, that is exactly what Kant means. He argues that the “practical relation” is the only possible basis of belief, as opposed to knowledge or opinion (A823/B851). This “practical relation” is an “aim” for some end. The only end that grounds belief in God, of course, is a moral end, which Kant identifies as “that I fulfil the moral law in all points”, which, in combination with “all ends together” in a consistent system, requires that there be a God (A828/B856). Kant is tying belief in God to the relation a person has to obligation. He denies that this belief in God can be justified to anyone objectively, instead placing its basis firmly in an individual’s perspective: Of course, no one will be able to boast that he knows that there is a God and a future life; for if he knows that, then he is precisely the man I have long sought. All knowing (if it concerns an object of reason alone) can be communicated, and I would therefore also be able to hope to have my knowledge extended to such a wonderful degree by his instruction. No, the conviction is not logical but moral certainty, and, since it depends on subjective grounds (of moral disposition) I must not even say “it is morally certain that there is a God”, etc., but rather “I am morally certain” etc. That is, the belief in a God and another world is so interwoven with my moral disposition that I am in as little danger of ever surrendering the former as I am worried that the latter can ever be torn away from me. (A828–29/B856–57) My moral disposition, that is the relation between my will (or choice) and the moral law originating in my own reason, is the sole basis of belief in God. As such, this relation is individual, depending as it does on each individual’s own choices. Kant notes in the following paragraph that an individual who was indifferent to morality, that is, whose will did not take up a relation of obligation to follow the law of reason, would not have this conviction, and for such an individual, the existence of God would be a merely speculative rather than a practical question. Kant’s minimization of belief is perhaps clearest in his claim that the effect the concept of God would have on a person’s moral disposition is
160 Morality beyond nature? what constitutes the belief. He claims that a belief has even less – not more, as one might expect – weight than a transcendental hypothesis. Kant says, If here too I would call merely theoretically taking something to be true only an hypothesis that I would be justified in assuming, I would thereby make myself liable for more of a concept of the constitution of a world-cause and of another world than I can really boast of; for of that which I even only assume as a hypothesis I must know at least enough of its properties so that I need invent not its concept but only its existence. The word “belief”, however, concerns only the direction that an idea gives me and the subjective influence on the advancement of my actions of reason that holds me fast to it, even though I am not in a position to give an account of it from a speculative point of view. (A827/B855, long emphasis mine) Here Kant claims that a transcendental hypothesis will take a previously given concept and “invent” (erdichten) only its existence. With a belief I am not in possession of the appropriate concept to any degree of distinction, let alone am I in a position to claim that an object exists matching that concept. Instead, the belief is a functional relation between the idea (or concept) and the advancement of my actions. The belief has the following peculiar relation between idea and, as it were, its referent: the idea refers not to an object but to somehow to the individual’s moral disposition. The belief functions to strengthen the moral disposition. That Kant offers these limitations on belief at least suggests that it is not appropriate to interpret his conception of belief, the equivalent of a postulate in the first Critique, as a straightforward assumption on the practical side of what could not be proved on the theoretical side. The nature of belief is rather something different than simple assertion that an object exists to correspond to a concept. We see that there are two noteworthy elements to Kant’s theory of the practical postulate of God in the period before and in the Critique of Pure Reason. First, Kant at least sometimes assumed that theoretical and practical hypotheses were essentially alike. He thought that both of them operated along similar lines, falling short of proof but instead satisfying reason by the introduction of concepts. Second, Kant, perhaps simultaneously, argued that the practical offered a different, or stronger, kind of hypothesis that he will later call a postulate. When he developed this difference in the first Critique in the Canon as a theory of belief, he hinted that beliefs were not directed toward objects but toward the subject holding the belief. These elements, when put together, indicate that Kant had a way to develop his theory of postulates as concepts that do not refer to objects but that nonetheless play a necessary functional role in our practical lives. He still insisted, however, that the postulates did more than just that, as we will see in the next section.
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 161 In the Critique of Practical Reason The doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason is explained in its fullest in the Critique of Practical Reason.10 There are two contradictory tendencies as Kant further develops his conception of the postulates. First, there is a tendency to claim that practical reason does in fact affirm exactly the same propositions that remain unproved by theoretical reason; in particular, there is a stress on the existence of God as something practical reason not only may assume for its own ends but also as something it can force theoretical reason to accept. Second, in the other direction, there is a tendency to stress the interest of practical reason and the function of the postulates for moral purposes along with a minimization of their cognitive content.11 It is first useful to note that Kant himself was worried that readers would misunderstand the status of the postulates. He notes in the “Preface” to the Critique of Practical Reason that this second Critique does not have the problem the first Critique had in introducing new and strange terminology. The second Critique will even “approach popularity” in its topics and thus ought to be relatively well understood (5:11). However, Kant added a footnote to this paragraph to try to deal with what he obviously thought might be new terminology that would be misunderstood regardless. Here is what he says there about the term “postulate”: But the expression, a postulate of pure practical reason, could most of all occasion misinterpretation if confused with the meaning that postulates of pure mathematics have, which bring with them apodictic certainty. The latter, however, postulate the possibility of an action, the object of which has been previously theoretically cognized a priori with complete certitude as possible. But the former postulate the possibility of an object itself (God and the immortality of the soul) from apodictic practical laws, and therefore only on behalf of a practical reason, so that this certainty of the postulated 10 11 I skip over some Reflections from the period between the first and second Critiques. In R6099 (18:451–53), Kant says that a postulate is more than a hypothesis, and that this is because morality is more than just pragmatic. R6109 (18:456–57) and R6111 (18:458–59) both stress that God is a postulate not mere hypothesis, and that this is due to the inescapable moral interest rather than just the contingent pragmatic interest. These can be taken to mean that postulates are like hypotheses, except that instead of merely offering them temporarily for defense, they are held in the mind as a kind of constant support for morality. See also R6283 (18:549–50). My conclusion parallels that of Markus Willaschek, whose detailed look at the postulates of practical reason also stresses the importance of the concept over the object: as he phrases the point, “the practical extension of our cognition by the postulates does not concern the existence of God, freedom, and immortality, but only the ‘objective reality’ of our concepts of God, freedom, and immortality” (Willaschek 2010, p. 191). My chapter was originally published as an article (Rauscher 2007) before his article was published and I am largely leaving it intact because my analysis puts the postulates in the context of the course of Kant’s entire career, even though Willaschek provides more detail about the postulates in the second Critique.
162 Morality beyond nature? possibility is not at all theoretical, hence also not apodictic, i.e., it is not a necessity cognized with respect to the object but is, instead, an assumption necessary with respect to the subject’s observation of its objective but practical laws, hence merely a necessary hypothesis. I could find no better expression for this subjective but nevertheless unconditional rational necessity. (5:11n) Kant’s attempt to clear things up, as is often the case, only makes them more obscure. The postulates are said not to postulate an object itself but to postulate “the possibility of an object”. Yet possibility of objects is a theoretical matter, not a practical determination. Further, Kant holds that the postulate is “a necessary hypothesis”, thereby using a term, “hypothesis”, that as we have seen, he had specifically contrasted with moral belief in the first Critique (A827/B855), although one that he had also used to refer to both theoretical and moral claims about God in his Reflections. Kant also tries in this passage to explain the nature of the necessity involved as not a necessity with respect to the object but a necessity with respect to the subject, in fact with “the subject’s observation of its objective but practical laws”, which he calls a “subjective rational necessity”. Kant’s attempt to clear up what he must have thought was a confusing explanation of the postulates does not itself shed much light on them. The more detailed argument about the postulates comes in the “Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason”, beginning with his introduction of the term in a discussion of the immortality of the soul (5:122) and continuing through the end of the Dialectic (5:148). I noted earlier that there are two tendencies in this discussion. The first is the tendency, easily recognized, to describe the postulates as claiming on behalf of practical reason the existence of objects that theoretical reason itself could neither prove nor disprove. Kant’s definition of “postulate” shows that the theoretical concepts appear to be at issue: a postulate is “a theoretical proposition, though one not demonstrable as such, insofar as it is attached inseparably to an a priori unconditionally valid practical law” (5:122). The bulk of section VI, “On the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason in General” is devoted to showing how the postulates of immortality, freedom, and the existence of God give “objective reality” to the related or identical concepts from the Dialectic of the first Critique (5:132–133). This tendency is also certainly quite strong in section III “Primacy of Pure Practical Reason”, where Kant claims that the primacy of practical reason entails that it can insist that speculative reason “must accept these propositions and, although they are transcendent for it, try to unite them, as a foreign possession handed over to it, with its own concepts”, implying that speculative reason must accept the postulates as being of like kind with theoretical concepts (5:120). And of course there is the abundant use of the term “exists”, both in reference to the immortal soul and God (see, for example, 5:122 and 5:124). In fact, on face value, it appears that this tendency to treat the postulates as the practical
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 163 replacement for an existence claim regarding transcendent entities is central to Kant’s intentions.12 “God” as a subjectively posited concept Yet Kant has another, opposite tendency in his description and analysis of the postulates, one that limits or negates these existence claims and instead presents the postulates as a merely subjective cast of mind that functions for moral purposes.13 I want to begin my discussion of this other tendency with a revealing passage that is often overlooked14, yet which is of the highest importance in understanding the nature of the postulates. In the penultimate section of the Dialectic in the second Critique, “On Assent from a Need of Pure Reason”, Kant tries to respond to the concern that some might have that the postulate is a command to believe something, which he says is an absurdity (5:144). In order to show that in fact the postulate is not commanded but merely assented to, he makes a startling concession: I said above that in accordance with a mere course of nature in the world happiness in exact conformity with moral value is not to be expected and is to be held impossible, and that therefore the possibility of the highest good on this side can be granted only on the presupposition of a moral author of the world. I deliberately postponed the restricting of this judgment to the subjective conditions of our reason so as not to make use of it until the manner of its assent had been determined more closely. In fact, the impossibility referred to is merely subjective, that is, our reason finds it impossible for it to 12 13 14 Patrick Kain highlights many such passages in his argument that the postulates of practical reason require a realist interpretation of Kant’s ethics. He acknowledges that Kant does not prove the existence of God to any satisfactory extent but only proves “the rational indispensability of believing that they are really possible and real” (Kain 2006, p. 459). Kain notes that “Kant’s failure to prove that such supersensible objects are real does not entail that he is committed to anti-realism about them, nor does the possibility of skepticism”. In this, he is correct. The idealist interpretation of the postulates that I am presenting does not rest upon any fallacy of that kind, on any move from lack of proof of God to the claim that the postulates do not require God to exist. Instead what is important is that the actual status of the nature of belief is given immanent rather than transcendent reference, that belief is related to the content of the concept rather than the object, and that it is only from the practical point of view that abstracts from ontological claims that such beliefs are considered. The arguments I present in this chapter attest to those positive considerations that buttress a naturalist, idealist interpretation of the postulates. Adina Davidovich relatedly notes that the function Kant assigns to the postulates would stand even if God were not to exist. Not God’s existence but only belief in God’s existence is required for practical purposes. She makes this claim: “[E]ven if God does not actually exist, and we only believe in the existence of God, the practical consequences for obedience to the moral law are the same. Therefore, a postulate of practical reason does not have to be known to be true, and probably does not even have to be true, in order to serve its practical purpose” (Davidovich 1993, pp. 20–1). Guyer and Willaschek note the importance of this claim (Guyer 2000, pp. 366–67) and (Willaschek 2010, p. 192).
164 Morality beyond nature? conceive, in the mere course of nature, a connection so exactly proportioned and so thoroughly purposive between events occurring in the world in accordance with such different laws, although, as with everything else in nature that is purposive, it nevertheless cannot prove – that is, set forth sufficiently on objective grounds – the impossibility of it in accordance with universal laws of nature. (5:145, modified) Kant himself here weakens a crucial step in his argument for the postulate of God. The existence of God had been postulated in order to serve as the ground of the correspondence of happiness and virtue precisely as the means to ensure that this correspondence is possible (5:124–25). Kant now concedes that it is possible that nature itself in accordance merely with its own natural laws would provide the correspondence (recall that these natural laws will include laws regarding human behavior). “Objective grounds” for this possibility cannot be ruled out, although human beings’ reason cannot fathom how this possibility might be conceived in any detail, hence, Kant claims, there are “subjective grounds” for human reason to reject the possibility. Still, the possibility is a live option objectively even if not subjectively for our reason. Kant calls the existence of two possible objective explanations of the possibility of correspondence between virtue and happiness “this irresolution of speculative reason”. Both options are genuine. Both allow for the possibility of the highest good. Notice how Kant describes these two options as equal before he invokes a deciding factor in tipping the balance toward the side of God rather than nature: The command to promote the highest good is based objectively (in practical reason); its possibility in general is likewise objectively based (in theoretical reason, which has nothing against it). But as for the way we are to represent this possibility, whether in accordance with universal laws of nature without a wise author presiding over nature or only on the supposition of such an author, reason cannot decide this objectively. Now a subjective condition of reason enters into this, the only way in which it is theoretically possible for it to think the exact harmony of the realm of nature with the realm of morals as the condition of the possibility of the highest good, and at the same time the only way that is conducive to morality (which is subject to an objective law of reason). (5:145) Both options are “way[s] we are to represent this possibility”. Thus there are two ways that human beings can conceive in the abstract the single possibility of the highest good: one purely in accordance with natural laws (although without the details that are apparently beyond our reason) and one invoking God. Either of these two possibilities will fulfill the function of explaining the possibility of the highest good. Kant claims that human beings are constrained to represent this function by using the postulate of God because this postulate is the only one of the two conducive to morality and because this is the only way theoretically possible for human beings to represent this function. Although he does not spell this reason out, presumably Kant means to invoke something about the way that the concept of God is subjectively
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 165 comprehensible to reason in a way that the highest good in accordance with mere laws of nature is not. Theoretical reason cannot provide any details on how nature might itself bring about the highest good. The concept of God would thus be more “conducive” to morality by being more amenable to human cognitive faculties – a subjective consideration – not by being more likely by any objective standards.15 This concession by Kant near the end of his discussion of the postulates helps to illuminate the arguments earlier in his discussion and shows a tendency to minimize the theoretical, existential claims that appear in the postulates in favor of a functional, purely practical relation. I will look at this with regard to two aspects: first, the source of the concept of God as constructed by practical reason, and second, the discussion of reference to the subject rather than the object. Before turning to those issues, there is Kant’s denial of theoretical and synthetic knowledge of the concept, and the corresponding insistence that the concept is entirely created by practical reason. Kant denies that we have any theoretical knowledge of the concept and denies that we have any synthetic knowledge of the object at all, except to grant that the concept somehow does correspond to some object. In this complicated passage, Kant takes great pains to argue that nothing about the object of the postulate is known or even claimed for theoretical purposes besides the mere existence of something that somehow corresponds to the concept – and Kant seems reluctant to allow even this concession: Since nothing further is accomplished in this by practical reason than that those concepts are real and really have their (possible) objects, but nothing is thereby given us by way of intuition of them (which can also not be demanded), no synthetic proposition is possible by this reality granted them . . . Now they receive objective reality through an apodictic practical law, as necessary conditions of the possibility of what it commands us to make an object, that is, we are instructed by it that they have objects, although we are not able to show how their concept refers to an object, and this is not yet cognition of these objects; for one cannot thereby judge synthetically about them at all or determine their application theoretically . . . There was therefore no extension of the cognition of given supersensible objects, but there was nevertheless an extension of theoretical reason and of its cognition with respect to the supersensible in general, inasmuch as theoretical reason was forced to grant that there are such 15 For a discussion and detailed rejection of the arguments Kant gives that an atheist would have insurmountable difficulty with moral incentives related to the highest good, see (Denis 2003). She suggests at one point that an atheist might in fact be able to picture a non-theistic manner for the supreme virtue to correspond to happiness, although she does not invoke Kant’s distinction between subjective and objective comprehensions of possibility that Kant mentions at 5:145 (Denis 2003, pp. 210–11). For an analysis that defends Kant’s claim, see (Kielkopf 1997).
166 Morality beyond nature? objects, though it cannot determine them more closely and so cannot itself extend this cognition of the objects. (5:134–35) Kant appears in this passage to be denying that any theoretical cognition of an object is possible, that is, that beyond a claim that some object exists that bears some reference relation to the concept, nothing can be known about the object. He claims even more than this, perhaps without recognizing the import of his claim, when he asserts that “no synthetic proposition is possible”, for the existence claim itself would be a synthetic proposition. If indeed no synthetic proposition is possible, then even the existence of an object cannot be asserted of that concept. I think it is possible that Kant intends to allow only some existence claim regarding “the supersensible in general” rather than regarding any specific supersensible object directly corresponding to the concept.16 To put this more clearly: Kant might mean that theoretical reason must concede only that there is some supersensible object that can fulfill the function assigned to the practical concept, without conceding that the supersensible object must be precisely that captured in the practical concept. “God” as created by practical reason There is another side to this coin: not only is it true that theoretical reason cannot have any synthetic cognition about an object corresponding to the concept in the postulate, it is also true that the concept itself stems from practical rather than theoretical reason. This point is, like many dealt with here, unclear in Kant. We have seen how he has claimed that the postulates are theoretical propositions, and how they correspond to the theoretical ideas from the Dialectic of the first Critique. These considerations point toward the claim that practical reason borrows the concepts for the postulates from theoretical reason. The concepts, then, in all their detail, would be those constructed by theoretical reason for theoretical purposes. Practical reason would only have to locate those concepts in order to postulate the reality of objects matching them. But this understanding is misleading. Kant argues that practical reason itself constructs the concept of God used in the postulates. There remains for reason only one single procedure by which to arrive at this cognition [of God], namely, as pure reason to start from the supreme principle of its pure practical use (inasmuch as this is always directed simply to the existence of something as a result of reason). And then, in its unavoidable problem, namely that of the necessary direction of the will to the highest good, there is shown not only the necessity of assuming such an original being in relation to the possibility of this good in the world but – what is 16 Allen Wood argues that Kant cannot possibly mean to deny the synthetic claim of existence (Wood 1970, p. 148f). But Wood’s insistence is based on an assumption that Kant must understand the postulates to be asserting the existence of a transcendent substance. I am arguing that this assumption is unwarranted.
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 167 most remarkable – something that was quite lacking in the progress of reason on the path of nature, a precisely determined concept of this original being. (5:139) He explains that theoretical reason, by using a posteriori teleological reasoning about God as a cause of nature, can infer a concept only of an imperfect God, powerful but not omnipotent, wise but not omniscient, and so on. Practical concerns, in contrast, require a concept of God with the highest perfections; omniscience, for example, is required in order for God to know all possible conduct and even all possible inner dispositions of moral agents (5:140). Practical reason itself creates the concept of God, and only after creating it does it find a similar concept at work in theoretical reason. Kant concludes that “the concept of God, then, is one belonging originally not to physics, that is, to speculative reason, but to morals” (5:140). It is important that the concept of God (as well as the other postulates) stems from practical reason. Practical reason creates the concept of God for its own purposes. The concept fulfils a certain function, namely to provide, in some detail, an explanation of the possibility of the highest good. We have already seen that Kant admits that, objectively, it is possible that nature itself, without recourse to anything supersensible, could be the ground of the possibility of the highest good. Subjectively, however, reason creates the concept of God in order to satisfy itself that the highest good is possible. The concept is not borrowed from theoretical reason. Not only is the function of the concept practical, the very concept itself is practical. Theoretical reason plays no direct role in the generation of the postulates. “God” as immanent not transcendent The way in which practical reason is autonomous with regard to the postulates leads to the second aspect of the functional nature of the postulates, namely, Kant’s claims about the “immanent” or “practical” reality for the postulates, where he even claims that reference is not to any object but to the subject. He claims that the postulates of God and immortality are immanent rather than transcendent in two places in the Critique of Practical Reason:17 But is our cognition really extended in this way by pure practical reason, and is what was transcendent for speculative reason immanent in practical reason? Certainly, but only for practical purposes. For we thereby cognize neither the nature of our souls, nor the intelligible world, nor the supreme being as to what they are in themselves, but have merely unified the concepts of them in the practical concept of the highest good as the object of our will, and have done so altogether a priori through pure reason but only by means of the moral law, and, moreover, only in reference to it, with respect to the object it commands. But how freedom is even possible and how this kind of causality has to be 17 Earlier in the second Critique, he held that freedom is “immanent” practically although “transcendent” theoretically (5:105).
168 Morality beyond nature? represented theoretically and positively is not thereby seen; that there is such a causality is only postulated by the moral law and for the sake of it. (5:133) Theoretical reason was forced to grant that there are such objects, though it cannot determine them more closely and so cannot itself extend this cognition of the objects (which have now been given to it on practical grounds and, moreover, only for practical use); for this increment, then, pure theoretical reason, for which all those ideas are transcendent and without objects, has to thank its practical capacity only. In this they become immanent and constitutive inasmuch as they are grounds of the possibility of making real the necessary object of pure practical reason (the highest good), whereas apart from this they are transcendent and merely regulative principles of speculative reason, which do not require it to assume a new object beyond experience but only to bring its use in experience nearer to completeness. (5:135) In these two passages, Kant contrasts “immanent” with “transcendent”. Further, in the first passage, Kant also holds that the postulate is “only in reference to the moral law”. Kant’s use of the term “immanent” here can be explained in part by reference to some of the Reflections from earlier periods. In several Reflections from the 1770s and into the mid-1780s, Kant uses the term “immanent” to refer to nature in space and time and thus to what can be known, and “transcendent” to refer to what goes beyond it and thus to what cannot be known (R5639, 18:276, 1778–1788; R6154, 18:470, 1783–84). At one point in a draft of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, he contrasts “immanent” principles, which restrict themselves to appearances, to “transcendent” principles, which stem from “the spontaneity of pure reason” to give a unity beyond appearances (R4757, 17:703–04, 1775–77). The First Critique also fits this use of “immanent” when, in the Dialectic, Kant says “We will call the principles whose application stays wholly and completely within the limits of possible experience immanent” (A295–96/B352). The meaning of “immanent” that can be drawn from these Reflections and applied to the second Critique is roughly as follows: something immanent is something that refers to appearances, that is, to nature. Given this meaning of “immanent”, Kant’s use of the term to describe the postulate seems puzzling. How could the concept of God ever be something that refers to appearances? In both passages, Kant notes that the immanence attributed to the postulate “God” is in its relation to highest good as the object of practical reason that duty commands us to try to create. Our moral duties, of course, apply to human beings as living in nature in space and time, that is, in appearance. The postulate of God is immanent, then, in its relation to the actions of human beings in nature as they strive to create the highest good, keeping in mind that the possibility of this highest good is for them – subjectively – represented by the concept “God” created specifically for this purpose by practical reason itself. I think this is what Kant means by this key sentence from one of the passages referred to earlier: “For we thereby cognize neither
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 169 the nature of our souls, nor the intelligible world, nor the supreme being as to what they are in themselves, but have merely unified the concepts of them in the practical concept of the highest good as the object of our will, and have done so altogether a priori through pure reason but only by means of the moral law, and, moreover, only in reference to it, with respect to the object it commands (5:133, my emphasis). We “unify” the concepts of God and of the other postulates together with the concept of the highest good in order to complete in our minds a picture of the possibility of the latter. But this is done not by claiming that the concept of God corresponds directly to any object, but rather that the concept is merely functioning to sustain our hopes in the highest good as a result of our action in accordance with the moral law, or as Kant says “in reference to” the moral law. The concept of God merely functions as a support for the moral law, and thus in reference to it, and to the immanent moral life human beings live in nature, rather than to any object that might be God as a transcendent being.18 One might still wonder how a mere concept can function to satisfy reason’s need to conceive of the possibility of the highest good since, of course, only an actual God and not the mere concept would be capable of bringing about the highest good.19 But this is the same kind of question as asking in the theoretical sphere how a concept of God could create the teleological order in the world, the parallel situation in the Appendix to the Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant there denies that we suppose the existence of God in itself but use the concept only in relation to an explanation of the world, albeit a necessary one. “And that shows clearly that the idea of that being, like all speculative ideas, means nothing more than that reason bids us consider every connection in the world according to principles of a systematic unity, hence as if they had all arisen from one single all-encompassing being” (A686/B714). I am claiming that Kant’s postulate of God can be understood in the same way. Reason uses the concept as a means for approaching the world in a particular way. In the theoretical case, the approach is in regard to systematizing our experience; in the practical case, it concerns moral action. But in both cases, the actual existence of a being corresponding to the concept is not posited.20 Marcus Willaschek phrases this well when he says with regard to the postulates: “the practical extension of our cognition by the postulates does not concern the existence of God, freedom, and immortality, but only the 18 19 20 Here, I will note that there is yet another strain to Kant’s discussion in the second Critique about God. He says, at one point, that the postulate is not a theoretical cognition of the existence of God but a personal desire that there be a God (5:143). This strain is discussed in detail by Drew Pierce in (Pierce 2004) where he argues that the postulate of God should be interpreted as a claim that we “ought to believe” in God. I owe this objection to Burt Louden. I discuss this connection in detail in Rauscher 2010.
170 Morality beyond nature? ‘objective reality’ of our concepts of God, freedom, and immortality”.21 The concepts perform the function of providing a way to picture the cause of something in human experience without endorsing that whatever would match the concept really exists and really operates as that cause. After the Critique of Practical Reason The period after the Critique of Practical Reason reveals that of these two tendencies in Kant’s thought about the postulates, he finally clarifies his preference for the functionalist, non-ontological interpretation. Nearly all commentators22 are in agreement that in the Opus Postumum, Kant affirms that the concept “God” used for practical purposes does not refer to an independent being, God. This is his final position, one that I have tried to show is implicit in his prior work23. But the journey from the Critique of Practical Reason to the Opus Postumum is also marked by some of Kant’s most direct discussions of religion, in particular the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where Kant advocates religious belief and practice to a degree that quite clearly appears to require a commitment to the existence of God. I will show that even in the Religion, the tendency toward making the postulates practical functions rather than theoretical existence claims is evident. In the 1790s The Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason at the very least contains evidence that Kant recognizes that the concept of God is constructed by practical reason and ought to be understood to have practical and not theoretical significance. This footnote stresses the idea of God. 21 22 23 (Willaschek 2010, p. 191). Here, the most famous exception is Erich Adickes, who in his book against Vaihinger declares that Kant was always a theist and that the apparent denials of the existence of God as a postulate in the Opus Postumum concern not the existence of God but are discussions only of the origin of the human idea of God (Adickes 1927, p. 273f). Patrick Kain, while admitting that in the Opus Postumum, Kant takes the position that God as a postulate is merely an idea and not an independent substance, claims in contrast to my position that this view “both confirms and qualifies” Kain’s interpretation of Kant’s postulate prior to that time in which “reason leads us to believe in God’s actual existence” (Kain 2005, p. 137). Kain interprets Kant as earlier insisting on the existence of God, and discounts the elements I have highlighted. The non-ontological passages in the Opus Postumum would confirm his reading only if it were clear that the Opus Postumum position is new, which is not supported by that material. There is no smoking gun in which Kant either admits or denies that his position is different from his earlier views. In contrast, I emphasize the philosophical importance of these elements and read Kant’s position in the Opus Postumum as fundamentally consistent with his earlier position, in that I take Kant to have finally resolved the tension in his original position in favor of the postulates as not involving existence claims.
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 171 So far as theoretical cognition and profession of faith are concerned, no assertoric knowledge is required in religion (even of the existence of God), since with our lack of insight into supersensible objects any such profession can well be hypocritically feigned; speculatively, what is required is rather only a problematic assumption (hypothesis) concerning the supreme cause of things, whereas with respect to the object toward which our morally legislative reason bids us work, what is presupposed is an assertoric faith, practical and hence free, that promises a result for the final aim of religion; and this faith needs only the idea of God which must occur to every morally earnest (and therefore religious) pursuit of the good, without pretending to be able to secure objective reality for it through theoretical cognition. Subjectively, the minimum of cognition (it is possible that there is a God) must alone suffice for what can be made the duty of every human being. (6:153–54, ftn.) In this passage, Kant invokes the contrast between the mere idea of God and the existence of God corresponding to that idea. He holds that only the idea is required for moral purposes, with one small addition, namely that the “minimum of cognition” that it is possible for God to exist is required. Kant is still holding on to the claim that the idea must at least possibly correspond to reality, although he does not require the idea to be thought actually to correspond to reality. Even given this minimal theoretical aspect, in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, the practical import of the concept of God, as well as other related religious concepts and doctrines, is stressed over any theoretical implications. In fact, Kant even argues that the practical effect of some doctrines requires that their theoretical details be ignored. For example, in a long footnote regarding theoretical consideration of an afterlife, Kant comes very close to mocking the idea of hell as punishment (6:69–71). He argues that on the one hand, eternal punishment in hell would seem by many to be too harsh a punishment for a finite amount of evil, so evil doers might expect easy escape through last-minute conversion and divine mercy. But on the other hand, a finite duration of punishment in hell would seem to some as survivable and tolerable as a tradeoff for a certain amount of pleasure obtained by evil means in this life. After discussing this and related matters for two pages, Kant concludes that it is better to simply ignore these issues: “if, instead of [extending it to] the constitutive principles of the cognition of supersensible objects, into which we cannot in fact have any insight, we restricted our judgment to the regulative principles, which content themselves with only their practical use, human wisdom would be better off in a great many respects, and there would be no breeding of would-be knowledge of something of which we fundamentally know nothing” (6:71). The point Kant is making is that the detailed tenets of religion might not survive theoretical scrutiny, and that if their moral effect depends upon their theoretical truth, then morality will be harmed. Instead, Kant holds, we should use religious tenets as, in essence,
172 Morality beyond nature? regulative principles for our moral duties, principles we hold in our minds only to the extent necessary for them to aid our moral duties. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant notes that any duties we might think we have toward God are really duties to ourselves: This idea [of God] proceeds entirely from our own reason and we ourselves make it, whether for the theoretical purpose of explaining to ourselves the purposiveness in the universe as a whole or also for the purpose of serving as the incentive in our conduct. Hence we do not have before us, in this idea, a given being to whom we would be under obligation; for in that case its reality would first have to be shown (disclosed) through experience. Rather, it is a duty of the human being to himself to apply this idea, which presents itself unavoidably to reason, to the moral law in him, where it is of the greatest moral fruitfulness. In this (practical) sense it can therefore be said that to have religion is a duty of the human being to himself. (6:443–4) The idea of God, rather than “a given being” here is said to be of importance, and only because the idea can be applied to the moral law (Note also that Kant puts theoretical and practical purposes on the same footing as both holding to the idea of God without holding to God’s reality.). Later in the book, Kant stresses that we “abstract” from the existence of God when utilizing the idea of God in philosophical morals: “The formal aspect of all religion, if religion is defined as the ‘sum of all duties as divine commands’, belongs to philosophic morals, since this definition expresses only the relation of reason to the idea of God which reason makes for itself; and this does not yet make a duty of religion into a duty to God, as a being existing outside our idea, since we still abstract from his existence” (6:487). In morality, we abstract from the existence of God while nonetheless utilizing the idea of God. I think this kind of relationship can be understood only as a functional relationship in which the concept of God is, qua concept, playing a role in human moral life. The functional role of the postulate of God and the consequent limitation of this postulate to the concept qua concept, is also evident in some of the unpublished notes and drafts Kant wrote in the 1790s prior to the Opus Postumum. There is a reintroduction of the idea of “as if”. This reflection from his notes for lectures on Logic, most likely from the 1790s, can be taken as paradigmatic of this line of thought: One cannot obtain or prove objective reality for any theoretical idea except that of freedom alone, and only because it is the condition of the moral law whose reality is an axiom. The reality of the idea of God can be proved only through this and thus only with a practical purpose, i.e. act as if there is a God, thus it can be proved for this purpose. (R2842, 16:541) The dating of this Reflection itself shows that Kant could have held these views as early as 1776, but certainly, he held them in the 1790s because this point is included in Kant’s Logic book edited by Jäsche (9:93). Certainly in the 1790s, Kant has established to his own satisfaction that the idea of God is valid
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 173 only for the practical purpose of defending the possibility of the highest good, and here he expresses this position with the hypothetical “act as if there is a God”, not the assertoric “act because there is a God”.24 This position accords with the position Kant laid out in his unpublished draft essay “What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff?”, written sometime in between 1793 and 1795 but not published until after his death. He claims there that the moral arguments for God, immortality, and freedom are not proof of their truth, nor of any “objective teaching as to the reality of their objects, for in regard to the supersensible this is impossible; instead, it is merely an injunction, subjectively and indeed practically valid, and in this respect sufficient, so to act as though we knew that these objects were real” (20:298). Regarding whether this also involves existence claims, Kant is less clear. He adds to the “as if” discussion a claim that we “voluntarily grant them objective reality”, but only a few paragraphs later claims that they have “reality in a subjective context” but are not “knowledge of the existence of the object corresponding to this form” (20:299–300). He also claims that the practical proof is “thus really not a proof of God’s existence absolutely (simpliciter) but only in a certain respect (secundum quid), namely in relation to the final end which the moral man has and should have, and thus with reference merely to the rationality of assuming such a being; whereby man is then enabled to accord influence upon his decisions to an idea which he frames for himself, on moral principles, exactly as if he had drawn this idea from a given object” (20:305). A proof “in relation to” something, “only in a certain respect” but not “absolutely” does not sound like a proof of anything but only a subjective expression or need, and Kant’s gloss on this claim that we take the idea of God that we have framed for ourselves and allow that idea to influence our behavior. The idea that human beings construct the concept of God in practical reason is further discussed in the “Progress” essay. Kant notes that sometimes “we forget that these ideas have been arbitrarily framed by ourselves, and are not derived from the objects” (20:300). This review of Kant’s writings in the 1790s shows that before the Opus Postumum, Kant was making claims that were major elements of the view that we have only an idea of God and do not also affirm a being, God. Let us now briefly assess his final position in the Opus Postumum. 24 There is a similar comment, “Practical idea as regulative principle, to act as if there were a God and another world”, in a draft headed “the whole of critical philosophy” that Kant wrote in November or December 1797 (R6358, 18:683), although later in that same Reflection, Kant seems to indicate that God is to be understood in terms of a metaphysics of the supersensible (18:685).
174 Morality beyond nature? In the Opus Postumum Virtually all of the passages cited from the Opus Postumum in this regard are from the years 1800 and after, appearing in what is known as the first Konvolut (21: 3–158). They are among the very last thoughts Kant set down in writing. The position that Kant works out in these writings is a complex review of the nature of his transcendental philosophy. In part, he seems to be simply toying with some of the ideas that Fichte and Schelling had published; but in part, he appears to be genuinely attempting to restate the transcendental idealism he had earlier worked out as a unified system of ideas. I will not attempt to do anything more here than focus on a few aspects of the concept of God that appear in this last stage of Kant’s thought. I will show that the position that I have claimed is implicit in Kant’s earlier philosophy is stated clearly in the Opus Postumum. Three aspects are treated: first, the nature of the concept of God as a mere idea without any claim to correspondence to a substance; second, the practical rather than theoretical use of this concept; and third, the creation of the concept by reason. Kant frequently in these notes identifies God with an idea or concept. In fact, in one note, Kant first wrote “God is a personal being”, then inserted the phrase “the concept of” to get “God is the concept of a personal being” (my emphasis on Kant’s insertion), and then further adds “Whether such a being exists is not asked in transcendental philosophy” (21:45). We have already seen earlier that Kant treats the concept of God as a useful concept without an object. As he states this position clearly in the Opus Postumum, he adds two new elements. First, he claims that all of transcendental philosophy is merely a set of ideas without existential import: Transcendental philosophy is the system of ideas in an absolute whole (21:80) [. . .] System of pure philosophy. First part – Transcendental philosophy. what we make as objects for ourselves. Second part – what nature makes as objects for us. (21:118) All ideas of reason are treated the way that I have interpreted the postulate of God. This ought not to be surprising, given the earlier discussion of theoretical hypotheses as well as the regulative use of the ideas of reason. The idea “God” is but one idea that reason has created to use merely as an idea without any assertion about God’s existence. It is true that Kant also uses terms to describe God that might seem to have existential import. He calls God the highest cause (21:19), a person (21:30), and a highest being (21:33). Yet, at the same time, he says that God is a “thought object” and that in philosophy, it is necessary to derive the predicates contained in that concept analytically “whether or not there may [be] such a substance” (21:32). In the context of these claims, it is clear that Kant does not intend for these predicates to have to apply to
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 175 any really existing God but that they have the transcendental function as part of an idea of reason. Kant also identifies this idea of God with pure practical reason itself. Here, Kant is thinking about the concept of God as a lawgiver. He equates God not as a substance but as “the highest moral principle in me . . . God is moral/practical reason legislating for itself” (21:144–5). By equating God with the selflegislation of reason, Kant clearly abandons any conception of God as substance and instead identifies God with the functioning of pure practical reason. Such a conception conforms to the earlier claims that only the idea of God is necessary, and that it functions within practical reason as a confirmation of the possibility of the highest good. To say that God is “pure practical reason itself” in its moving forces is to admit that the idea of God is all that is needed, and all that is meant, when postulating God. The second aspect I want to show in the Opus Postumum is the moral or practical nature of the idea of God. Obviously, the identification of God with pure practical reason’s self-legislation is strong evidence in this direction. But Kant also stresses the moral function of the idea of God: Difference between unconditioned and conditioned duty of practical reason. The former has God as originator – God is thus not a substance to be found outside me but merely a moral relationship in me. (21:149) In these notes, Kant discusses God in terms of the motivating force of the categorical imperative. We human beings create the concept of God in order to provide ourselves with a concrete idea of the power and authority that we accord to the moral law. This reason for postulating God is different from the reasons that Kant gave in the arguments in the Critique of Practical Reason.25 God in the second Critique is needed to serve as a representation for the possibility of the highest good. Here in the Opus Postumum (as in some of Kant’s other writings and his course lectures), God is seen as the legislator posited as commanding us to obey the moral law.26 25 26 Eckart Förster argues that Kant’s focus on God not as a being but a concept is made possible by an important change in Kant’s conception of the highest good. In the Opus Postumum, Kant views the highest good not as an objective relation among the totality of beings in the world but a subjective state of a particular being. The highest good no longer is a result to be achieved beyond human efforts, so no independent God as substance is required. I think Förster is reading too much into Kant’s lack of discussion of the highest good (Förster 2000). There is one passage in this series that does discuss the highest good: That philosophy (doctrine of wisdom) is called “worldly wisdom” in German is relevant, for wisdom, the science of wisdom, aims at the final end (the highest good). – Now this wisdom, in the strict sense, can only be attributed to God, and such a being must be given at the same time all power; for without this the final end (the highest good) would be an idea without reality; so the proposition: there is a God is an existential proposition” (21:149). I admit that this passage is evidence against my interpretation, in that Kant claims that there is existential claim regarding God
176 Morality beyond nature? The third aspect that I wanted to show in the Opus Postumum passages is the way that Kant discusses the concept of God as a creation of reason. This is perhaps the most important aspect for understanding the real intent of Kant’s doctrine of the postulates. For here, Kant not only shows that the postulate of God is a concept without reference to an object, he not only shows that this concept functions for human beings for moral purposes, but he also shows that it is essential to the core of Kant’s ethics, the autonomy of reason, that the concept of God is one created by reason for its own purposes. Here is one of Kant’s clearest statements of this claim: Transcendental philosophy is the consciousness of the capacity of being the originator of the system of one’s ideas, in theoretical as well as in practical respect [to the right of this sentence:]. Ideas are not mere concepts but laws of thought which the subject prescribes to itself. Autonomy. (21:93) Reason prescribes certain laws of thought to itself. These laws are the ideas of reason. Kant quite clearly here identifies ideas of reason not with concepts purporting to refer to objects but instead with laws that prescribe how reason must think. Here in the Opus Postumum, we see that autonomy is understood to extend to every aspect of the moral, including the ideas that reason requires to support morality, namely, the postulates. The idea of God is given by reason to itself for its own purposes. These moral purposes are intrinsic to reason, and thus the ideas reason creates are not arbitrary but necessary. Kant stresses this point in a passage that comments on a definition of God: The concept (thought) of such a being is not an ideal (fictive) but a necessary [one] emerging from reason in the highest standpoint of transcendental philosophy. It is not a fiction (arbitrarily constructed concept, conceptus factitius) but one necessarily given by reason (datus). There is a God. – For there is a categorical imperative of duty before which every knee shall bend in heaven as on earth etc. and whose name is holy, without the assumption of a substance being permitted which would represent this being for the senses. (21:64) Reason creates the concept of God as a necessary correlate to its practical functions. It does not choose to create this concept any more than it chooses to legislate the categorical imperative. The nature of the transcendental philosophy is that reason has its own framework that guides human beings in their lives without directly providing human beings with knowledge about reality. related to the highest good. I do not think that this passage alone overturns my claim, since it is also at odds with virtually every other passage regarding the concept of God as a mere idea in the Opus Postumum and it can be minimized like similar claims in the second Critique. Like me, Förster does not think that the passage I quoted is problematic for the general claim that Kant does not treat the concept of God as involving any existential claims (Förster 2000, pp. 144–45).
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 177 Among Kant’s last written words, then, we find the culmination of his doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason in a system of transcendental philosophy. God is not seen as a substance; rather, God is an idea created by reason for moral purposes. This position is the realization of tendencies that were already included in Kant’s earliest discussion of a postulate. He always considered some concepts or ideas to be held only for particular purposes, and used for those purposes without affirmation of any existence claims regarding them. Certainly in the presentation of his moral doctrine regarding the postulates, Kant appears to make existence claims. But at the same time, he insists on the immanent, practical use of the concept of God qua concept. Realism and God; idealism and “God” At the beginning of this book, I noted that my purpose is to show that Kant’s ethics is compatible with a metaphysical naturalism. By “metaphysical naturalism”, I mean the view that nature in space and time, understood by Kant to range over inner as well as outer sense, provides our ontology. Philosophy has a different methodology than the sciences, but it remains within their ontology. In this chapter, I have shown that Kant had a naturalistic metaphysics available to him for his doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason, which on the face of them appear to demand a non-natural metaphysics. But this interpretation of the postulates also shows the fault lines between moral realism and moral idealism in Kant. The role of God in the discussion of Kant’s moral realism or idealism is generally overlooked.27 There is discussion of God and Kant’s theory of religion among Kant interpreters and philosophers of religion and theologians, of course, but most of the discussion of Kant’s moral realism or idealism centers on aspects of Kant’s theory that contemporary philosophers accept as still operative in the contemporary debate in moral theory, and for most participants, religious claims related to morality are not part of that conversation. For some readers, then, the issue would appear unimportant. It is not. By showing that the postulate of God is plausibly understood in a non-ontological way, I have shown how Kant’s moral idealism incorporates properties and objects that would appear to require an independent existence outside the moral agent. Chapter 4 on reason showed that the key faculty for morality, pure practical reason, defines the transcendental conception of the 27 Patrick Kain is a notable exception. Kain shows how Kant regarded God as a legislator, not an author (creator) of the moral law in (Kain 2004) and how Kant took human beings to be required to believe in God in order to represent God as the author of the divine commands (Kain 2005). John Hare, who presents a modified divine command theory based on the weakness of human nature, is another exception (Hare 1996) and (Hare 2001). Both Kain and Hare offer realist accounts.
178 Morality beyond nature? moral agent. This aspect of morality is, so to speak, within the moral agent. Chapter 6 will continue that topic with a look at the freedom of choice of a moral agent. Moral agency also entails a relation to things that appear to some to be outside the moral agent herself: in particular, God in the present case and the value of humanity in other moral agents. It is natural to assume a realist stance with regard to these things, since God as an object is independent of the moral agent, and the value of humanity would be a property of other moral agents and so independent of the moral agent as subject. When I defined moral realism and moral idealism, I distinguished between the principles, properties, and objects required for morality and moral principles, properties, and objects. Since God could play a role in non-moral areas such as explaining the creation of the universe or the ground of truth, God would be an object required for morality. That is to say that the mere existence of God does not entail moral realism because even were there no such thing as morality at all, God would still exist. However, this assessment is incomplete because the existence of God necessarily includes the existence of justice and good, and other moral principles and properties as part of the nature of God. These would be, in my classification, moral properties of the object God and their existence independent of the moral agent as subject would entail moral realism. God as an existing being would be transcendentally real as independent of the transcendental moral agent. That is, if the postulate about God entails that God is a really existing being, then God would have to be independent of the moral agent even if the existence of God is considered a transcendental condition for morality. Even given my previous chapter’s argument that the moral law stems from reason which in turn can be understood only as the existing reason of particular moral agents considered to have a certain structure, the reality of God would still be needed. Since God is also considered to be rational, God’s reason would also contain the structure that produces the moral law and thus, the moral law’s existence would not be dependent simply upon the (finite) moral agent. The argument I have given in this chapter provides an idealist understanding of the postulate in which the postulates do not require anything independent of the moral agent. This interpretation understands the postulate as about the concept “God” rather than the being, God. In order to make the moral demand of the fact of reason coherent with other aspects of the agent’s self-conception as a happiness-seeking being, a moral agent is required to believe that the highest good is possible. In order to picture how the highest good is possible, a moral agent creates the concept “God” as, as it were, the placeholder for “that which makes the highest good possible”, recognizing however that the highest good might be possible in accordance with nature alone. This concept is not intended to refer to any actually existing being. Rather, the moral agent uses
“God” without God: the status of the postulates 179 the concept only immanently as part of the practical purpose of determining the agent’s free actions. This idealism holds both transcendentally and empirically. The transcendental conception of the moral agent includes the set of concepts that such a moral agent would employ as part of the determination of the agent’s actions. As a concept alone, “God” would not exist independent of the transcendental moral agent and no actual God is required. Empirically, the situation would also hold and no actual God is required. Note that in neither of these cases am I denying that God exists. The actual existence or non-existence of God is outside the scope of the postulates, which instead must be understood merely in terms of the concepts employed. Concluding remarks The explanation of the postulates that I have advanced in this chapter supports both a metaphysically naturalist and a morally idealist interpretation of Kant’s ethics. I have traced the role of postulates, hypotheses, and ideas in Kant’s philosophy from the pre-critical works through the Opus Postumum. He always had a conception of an immanent use of certain kinds of concepts that would purport to have non-natural objects. The immanent use of ideas of reason and transcendental hypotheses in the Critique of Pure Reason provide the pattern that, I claim, lies behind his discussion of the postulates in the Critique of Practical Reason. The text contains passages that appear to require that moral agents must hold that God exists, but other passages stress that the only reference for the postulate is immanent rather than transcendent. Certainly, the uses Kant later makes of the idea of God in his moral theory conform to the stress on immanent use and lack of transcendent reference. The Opus Postumum most clearly includes the kind of view I take to have been at least implicit in the rest of his corpus. The argument I have given to show that Kant does not require an actual God as referent for the idea would hold as well for claims to the immortality of the soul. Chapter 6 will tackle the more complicated issue of how to understand Kant’s insistence on freedom of choice (or will) in a metaphysically naturalistic and morally idealistic way.
6 From many to one to none: non-natural free choice This chapter will assess Kant’s metaphysics of choice in order to see the extent to which what is usually referred to as “freedom of the will” is compatible with a metaphysical naturalism. The previous two chapters already showed that the faculty of reason and the postulates can be interpreted within a metaphysically naturalistic ontology; the following chapter will do the same for moral value. My approach to freedom of the will as choice mirrors my approach to reason. Regarding reason, I showed that there is an empirical faculty of reason in human beings in nature, one studied by the science of empirical psychology. I then considered Kant’s transcendental arguments that pure practical reason must be transcendentally free in order to legislate the pure moral law without the influence or determination from any causal sources in nature. I argued that for this requirement, Kant does not need to postulate that pure practical reason exists as a transcendent thing in itself (or a property of a thing in itself) ontologically distinct from nature; rather I showed that Kant’s transcendental method allows him to identify pure practical reason with the structure of reason determined philosophically but existing within nature. The transcendental freedom of reason is not a nonnatural freedom. This current chapter asks the questions: is there a counterpart to the distinction between pure and empirical reason in Kant’s conception of the power of choice? To what extent would a nonnatural power of choice be needed for ethics? Is there a way to understand Kant’s views on freedom of the will without recourse to nonnatural objects or abilities? This chapter has two goals. First, abstracting from my naturalist interpretation, I want to show that Kant’s conception of free choice is not as metaphysically demanding as many assume. I call this part of my argument “many to one” because it shows that the metaphysics of free choice requires only one instance of a nonnatural free act that explains each and every empirical instance of an agent making a moral decision, instead of many particular acts, each corresponding to a particular empirical decision. I will show that even when Kant is insistent that the freedom of choice of the moral agent be free in a nonnatural way, he requires only one nonnatural free act rather than a multiplicity. Individual choices of the empirical power of choice in nature are 180
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 181 deemed free not as distinct occurrences of a nonnatural causality but in collective reference to only one timeless free choice. The single timeless free choice is nonnatural and would explain how all of the particular free choices in nature, themselves determined in accordance with natural causality, can be deemed “free” in a transcendental sense. The second goal is to reduce from “one to none” the number of actual nonnaturally free acts required by Kant’s ethics, thereby providing a completely metaphysically naturalist interpretation of free choice. I do this by invoking my interpretation of the postulates from Chapter 5. Although for my overall interpretive project, only the latter goal is necessary, the first goal plays an important role in understanding the nature of freedom in Kant. It shows that Kant’s moral theory does not have extensive metaphysical commitments precisely in the area most often thought to require commitment to an ontological interpretation of transcendental idealism, or even a nonontological incompatibilist conception of moral agency in which we conceive of every particular act as independently free. To that extent my first goal does contribute to my project. This chapter will first lay out the land regarding the power of choice. I will defend the “power of choice” (Willkür) as a focus for the discussion of free will, for there are passages in which Kant uses the term “Wille” for will understood as a power of choosing, or at least beginning, actions. Further, both will and choice must be compared to reason, both pure and empirical. I will show that Kant has a compatibilist conception of freedom in nature which counts the power of choice as free when it is determined by concepts of reason. I then look at Kant’s reasons for thinking that a transcendentally free choice is needed. These two reasons concern the relation between ought and can, and the conditions for moral responsibility. I argue that in both, only one free act is needed rather than many. I then discuss the resulting metaphysical requirements for a free power of choice and their naturalist interpretation. I will take as central to his position the picture found in the Critique of Practical Reason and further explained in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that there is only one free choice independent of nature to show how this one nonnatural act grounds the freedom of each empirical act in nature. The final, and much shorter, section will argue that even this one nonnatural free choice can be reduced to zero when it is understood in terms of the merely heuristic role of the postulates. This argument is not as simple as it may seem because Kant in fact rarely identifies freedom as a postulate and clearly gives it a different status than that of immortality and God. Freedom is said to be a prerequisite for the moral law, whereas immortality and God are prerequisites for the highest good and are not directly required for action from duty. I argue that by carefully distinguishing the priority of action from that of belief, freedom can also be understood as heuristic like the other two postulates.
182 Morality beyond nature? Will and choice in nature In Chapter 4 on reason I briefly discussed the difference between the faculty of practical reason (Wille) and of choice or decision (Willkür). Here I will review that distinction and apply it more particularly to choice. I will also explain the difference between what I call the “many” and the “one” in enumerating free acts of choice. Even with the distinction between “will” and “choice” at hand in the English translations and corresponding distinct terms stemming from the Latin “voluntas” and “arbitrium” in the Romance language translations, there is still some philosophical confusion because Kant often appears to assign the same function, making decisions which begin the process of action, to both faculties. This is indicated in part by noting that he sometimes uses just one or the other of these terms for sustained discussion of freedom in morality. For example, on the one hand, the Third Antinomy uses the term “Wille” neither in the exposition of the thesis and antithesis nor in the solution to the Third Antinomy but instead uses “Willkür” almost a dozen times to indicate an ability to choose.1 On the other hand, the Groundwork includes only two occurrences of “Willkür” (4:428 and 4:4512) while using “Wille” throughout to indicate the human ability to make decisions. One would have expected both terms to be used in roughly the same proportion in these discussions of the human moral decisionmaking framework had Kant a firm distinction between them in mind. There are also instances where Kant defines both terms similarly. Wille is defined in the Groundwork as a capacity to act either according to principles or “subjective conditions (certain incentives)” (4:412–13) just as the Willkür is defined as affected by “moving causes of sensibility” (A534/B562), and in both cases the faculty in question is said to be objectively necessitated by the moral law and subjectively contingent in its action. The human Wille is contrasted with a pure Wille that always follows the moral law while the human Willkür is contrasted with an animal Willkür that always follows natural law, but in both cases whichever faculty is at issue is squarely placed in the middle as a faculty of decision affected by both the moral law and sensible incentives yet necessitated by neither uniformly. 1 2 In Kant’s notation in his own copy of the A edition of the first Critique he does mention the Wille twice in the margins of the solution to the Third Antinomy, first saying that the will is the faculty of desire in a being with reason and that it is a pure will when pure reason has causality (23:41, at A538/B566) and second in reference to the specific phrase “reason has causality” remarking “i.e. is the causality of its objects. This causality is called the Wille. But in transcendental philosophy one abstracts from the Wille” (23:50, at A547/B575). And of these two, one of them (4:451) does not even appear to mean “Willkür” as faculty of choice but is more closely related to “willkürlich”, or “voluntary”: “Vorstellungen, die uns ohne unsere Willkür kommen” (“representations which come to us involuntarily”)
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 183 While Kant’s own use of the terms in the 1780s does not consistently allow for a distinction between the two terms, commentators generally agree that Kant appears to have a firm distinction between Wille and Willkür in mind in 1797s Metaphysics of Morals.3 There he defines and applies his terminology in the preface to define Willkür as “a faculty to do or refrain from doing as one pleases . . . [i]nsofar as it is joined with one’s consciousness of the ability to bring about its object by one’s action”. Wille is defined as “the faculty of desire whose inner determining ground, hence even what pleases it, lies within the subject’s reason” (6:213). In the end, then, Kant distinguished Wille and Willkür in terms which equate Wille with practical reason as the source of the moral law – one possible ground determining choice to action – and Willkür with latitude of decisionmaking in doing or refraining as one pleases – the actual determination of action. I will not take up the details here of exactly how this distinction is foreshadowed in Kant’s earlier writings, nor will I attempt to further disentangle Kant’s terminology. Here I assume that this distinction captures the basic structure of Kant’s ethics in which Wille as reason provides a moral law for Willkür as the power of decision. For the remainder of this paper, I will use the English terms “will”, “power of choice” or simply “choice”, and “reason” in my discussion to translate “Wille”, “Willkür”, and “Vernunft”, respectively, and note when Kant’s use of “Wille” appears to refer to reason instead of choice when it is otherwise not clear. To the extent that Wille is free, it is so as reason, the freedom of which has been shown to concern its structure independent of natural causes. In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant says that Wille is neither free nor unfree. By this he does not retract the picture of reason as independent of determination by laws of nature but rather emphasizes that there is no determining ground for reason at all (6:213) since it is merely concerned with providing law as practical reason (6:226). This denial of freedom does have consequences for understanding autonomy, as I discussed in Chapter 4 on reason, because the 3 Allison reviews the distinction in (Allison 1990, pp. 129–36) but does not emphasize the dual ontology for Willkür that gives it an empirical role in nature and a nonnatural transcendentally free existence independent of nature. This approach forces him to gloss many passages in which Kant talks about the empirical Willkür. For example, forgoing his normal practice of leaving the term “Willkür” untranslated, he even draws attention away from Kant’s admission that there is a distinct phenomenal Willkür when he quotes from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: “Some have tried to define freedom of Willkür as the power to choose between the alternatives of acting with or against the law (libertas indiffereneiae). But freedom of Willkür cannot be defined in this way, although choice [Willkür!-FR] as phenomenon gives frequent examples of this in experience”. (Allison 1990, p. 133, quoting 6:226). Allison also rejects Kant’s empirical psychological account of action determined in accordance with natural causality as studied by empirical psychology, claiming that Kant rejects freedom of the empirical character. Practical freedom is instead, for Allison, not to be understood in terms of natural causality at all.
184 Morality beyond nature? law is something that simply stems from reason and is not freely chosen; autonomy cannot be understood in terms of any kind of choice. Freedom of the power of choice, the kind of freedom related to decisionmaking, is what must be analyzed here. Kant places human freedom of choice at least in part in nature, referring to the human ability to act as beings in space and time in a way similar to animals but not necessitated in the manner that animals are. In order to find out what Kant requires of freedom outside of nature, we must first see what he allows as (one form of) practical freedom within nature. One of the best known descriptions of this practical freedom is in the solution to the Third Antinomy: It is especially noteworthy that it is this transcendental idea of freedom on which the practical concept of freedom is grounded, and the former constitutes the real moment of the difficulties in the latter, which have long surrounded the question of its possibility. Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility. For a power of choice is sensible insofar as it is pathologically affected (through moving causes of sensibility); it is called an animal power of choice (arbitrium brutum) if it can be pathologically necessitated. The human power of choice is indeed an arbitrium sensitivum, yet not brutum but liberum, because sensibility does not render its action necessary, but in the human being there is a faculty of determining oneself from oneself, independently of necessitation by sensible impulses. (A533–4/B561–2) Here the human power of choice (Willkür) is described as “pathologically affected through moving causes of sensibility” but not “pathologically necessitated” by these moving causes as animals are. In order to be pathologically affected, the power of choice must be empirical. Practical freedom, as opposed to transcendental freedom, is a function of the empirical character. The definition of practical freedom hinges upon the ability humans have to avoid necessitation by sensuous impulses by acting according to motives of reason; it crucially does not exclude necessitation according to empirical rational motives. Humans are practically free by virtue of a faculty that allows action outside of sensible necessitation. What is important for this conception of practical freedom is whether, in saying that the power of choice must be independent of necessitation by sensible impulses, Kant is identifying all determination according to laws of nature, including psychological laws, as necessitation by sensible impulses. I showed in my earlier chapters that he has available to him a robust empirical psychology that includes an empirical reason that provides principles that can determine the decisions of the empirical power of choice. When Kant is conceiving the power of choice as independent of determination by sensible impulses he allows it to be determined by inner motives or principles of reason or representations of laws and still to be considered free
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 185 in a practical sense. Take this passage from the 1792 Dohna metaphysics lectures. Kant defines, as is typical, stimuli with sensitive impulses and motives with intellectual. We are affected by stimuli but not determined. Whoever is determined by motives is free, for he acts according to the laws of his own reason according to spontaneity and not according to receptivity. Will is the faculty of desire insofar as it is affected by representation of a rule . . . The free power of choice is called pure if it is determined merely by the representation of the law, by the form of conformity to the law. . . The capacity for determining oneself through pure representations of reason is freedom. (28:677, modified) Here representations of a rule are taken to determine the free power of choice, which is free when determined by motives. Representations, of course, can occur only in the mind in inner sense. Thus, the empirical power of choice is affected by stimuli and motives. To the extent it is determined by the motives, it is free. For similar claims, see 29:898–99 (Mrongovius, 1782), R1021 (15:457–58, 1773–79) and R1054 (15:470, 1785–88). The power of choice is, on this picture, a natural faculty. It exists in human beings as appearance. The determination of the power of choice thus occurs within the causal nexus of nature. But all of this still means that human beings are determined in accordance with laws of nature as described in empirical psychology. Kant calls this freedom because of the role of principles and ideas. Kant uses the term freedom to refer to the ability human beings have to act in accordance with principles and ideas as opposed to instinct and sensible impulses. In a Reflection from the mid1770s Kant even uses the term “blind” (“blinde”) to refer to the determination of the power of choice by sensible impulses: “Power of choice is either blind or free power of choice (brutum oder liberum). . . The blind power of choice is that which is necessitated and determined through impulses (stimulos)” (R1028, 15:460). This word “blinde” is the same word Kant uses in the first Critique at A51/B75 when he says “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”. And just as Kant distinguished animal from human power of choice, he also distinguished animal from human cognitive faculties. Animals do not have reason or understanding but do have the ability to connect representations of outer sense – they have no inner sense – “according to laws of sensibility” as Kant says in his lectures on metaphysics (28:276, see also 28:690 and 29:879). The link is this: animals do not have concepts or principles, humans do, and these concepts or principles make knowledge and rationally determined action possible. If human beings but not animals can act according to concepts or principles as representations of laws, then the human power of choice is the one that decides upon actions based upon principles rather than directly based upon mere sensible impulses of nature.
186 Morality beyond nature? The mere sensible impulses of nature are “outer causes” (R6931, 19:209) or “instincts” (R7220, 19:289, 1780s) or “stimulus” (Powalski, 27:123) or “inclinations” (R6931 19:209, 1776–78). But human beings are capable of guiding their behavior according to principles rather than these mere animal impulses.4 Decisions based upon principles are deemed free because they stem from empirical reason, even though empirical reason is within the causal nexus of nature. That same reason considered as a structure independent of natural causal determination is transcendentally free. Even if Kant ultimately believes that practical freedom is insufficient for morality, he has still at least provided a picture of human action, which completely incorporates it into nature. This view is sufficient for the practical perspective of the moral agent (A803/B831). Moral agents are able to view their decisions in general as determinable by reason rather than only by sensible impulses. For mere practical purposes of determining oneself to action in reference to a moral law, this compatibilist conception of freedom is sufficient by itself. Kant, of course, did not believe that this sort of compatibilist freedom is sufficient for a complete explanation of morality. He famously dismissed Leibniz’s related notion as the “freedom of a turnspit” (5:97). The rejection of this compatibilist, naturalist freedom of choice must have grounds other than that of identifying and justifying right acts. The following section will provide those grounds and ascertain whether these grounds require there to be many or only one nonnaturally free act. I will also examine the metaphysics of his deeper conception of freedom for the power of decision of the faculty of choice. First, a word about the enumeration of the free decisions of the power of choice. When I claim that I want to reduce the number of nonnatural free decisions from “many to one”, I mean to refer only the transcendentally free acts of the power of choice. The freedom of reason has already been accounted for. The practical freedom of empirical choice has also already been accounted for in a compatibilist, naturalist way. The remaining question for my naturalist interpretation is simply what the nonnatural free decisions of the power of choice would be and how many there are. The transcendentally free decision would be, like reason, timeless. Exactly how that timeless choice relates to particular choices in time is the issue. Some commentators claim that every individual decision of the power of choice is 4 My account of the empirical power of choice is relatively short and only a sketch. A more extensive explanation of Kant’s empirical psychology in its relation to the human power of choice in nature is Patrick Frierson, “Kant’s Empirical Account of Human Action” (Frierson 2005). Frierson emphasizes Kant’s determinism through the role of causal laws that can be attributed to individual empirical character. See also his book (Frierson 2003) for discussion of the empirical elements of Kant’s discussion of motivation.
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 187 transcendentally free of itself, resulting in a multiplicity of nonnaturally free acts. At the extreme this amounts to a denial of a genuinely determined decision of the empirical power of choice in nature in favor of a view that natural causality is to be understood in terms of an epistemic limitation, so all decisions of the power of choice are free in a nonnatural sense.5 The more moderate version would identify particular decisions of the empirical power of choice determined in accordance with natural causality in some way with particular transcendentally free decisions.6 Others have the same picture that I am advocating of a single transcendentally free decision.7 This single transcendentally free decision would take place independent of nature but would lie at the base of all particular naturally determined decisions of the empirical power of choice. This relation is possible because the timeless decision ontologically precedes all the particular empirical decisions in time in nature. This strongly antinaturalistic ontology is the aim of my “many to one” argument. Later I will try to turn that one into none by showing how even that kind of strong picture can be naturalized. From many to one In this section I will argue for my claim that only one transcendent free choice is required. In a sense, this section provides the content of the postulate of freedom in relation to free choice. I will first look at the two reasons Kant gives for insisting on free choice in morality – ought implies can and moral responsibility – and then examine the metaphysics of just one free act that Kant uses to explain them both. Many to one: ought implies can One reason Kant is often taken to insist upon nonnatural freedom of decision in the power of choice is that he holds that ought implies can, understood as the claim that if human beings are morally obligated to do something, then they 5 6 7 Henry Allison is the most famous proponent of this view. I have discussed his view elsewhere in this book and will do so later in this chapter. Regarding timelessness, he says that strictly speaking the transcendentally free decision is not timeless but merely independent of the conditions of time, meaning independent of causal determinism in nature (Allison 1990, pp. 51–3). Hud Hudson offers such a view that interprets Kant as offering a token-token identity between transcendentally free acts and the corresponding natural occurrences of these acts (Hudson 1994). Ralf Meerbote’s invocation of anomalous monism functions in a similar way (Meerbote 1984). Allen Wood accepts the single, timeless decision as the basis of an intelligible character, which is the basis of the empirical character exhibited in each particular action (Wood 1984). My account in this chapter adopts his general approach.
188 Morality beyond nature? have the ability to do it despite any natural causal determination that would appear to make the action impossible.8 Kant states the basic claim that “ought implies can” in several places.9 In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant offers the example of a man threatened with execution unless he falsely testifies against an innocent person. Kant asks whether he would resist this injustice. “He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it and cognizes freedom within him, which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him” (5:30). It appears that the range of free actions must be quite wide if every action we ought to do is an action we must be free to do. Consider as an extreme case a drug addict who ought to stop ruining humanity in her own person by quitting the habit: “ought implies can” would indicate that despite the irresistible urges to continue the drug, she is free at all times to refuse to take it because she has a power to overrule the causal determinism in nature that otherwise would cause her to continue the drug. One could apply this to the agent independently on each occasion on which she succumbs to her addiction, because on each occasion her empirical Willkür is determined by the sensible impulses caused by the addiction rather than by reason as it should be. In order for the agent to be obligated to act against the addictive impulses, she must be able to act against those impulses despite their necessary determination of her actual decision. The consequences for Kant’s theory of freedom, however, are not as severe as they first appear. There are two different ways to understand the freedom associated with “can” in “ought implies can”. First, one can hold that for every particular action that one ought to perform, one actually has the separate and individual freedom to perform that action in spite of all other natural causation opposing it, including other acts and the character of the same agent. Even 8 9 Robert Stern has recently argued convincingly against a claim that “ought implies can” in general and particularly that Kant has a different meaning (Stern 2004). What Stern calls the “strong” interpretation of “ought implies can” gives priority to the “can” in claiming that the ought should be restricted on the basis of the actual abilities of agents (whether particular or considered in general). This strong interpretation would thus make the “can” controlling over the “ought”. For example, if a study of human nature were to show that it is impossible for an individual to be able to calculate or act upon a utilitarian standard, then no such standard could be obligatory for human beings. Instead of this interpretation of “ought implies can”, Kant is shown to hold to the interpretation that prioritizes the “ought” such that the moral law is determined a priori and then applied to human beings. Whatever the moral law dictates is understood to be within the capacities of human moral agents. This is the proper interpretation of Kant’s claims, and it shows that “ought implies can” implies a nonnatural ability to act in accordance with moral law regardless of the limitations of natural causality. Stern collects eleven passages from Kant’s published works in (Stern 2004, pp. 53–5) but does not include the passage I cite here (he makes no claim to comprehensiveness).
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 189 given the causal determinants in nature as it is in time before and at the moment of decision, the agent is still able to do what she ought to at that moment. I will call this the “particular” interpretation. Second, one can hold that each person is free to have made their entire set of actions (along with the related natural causation) different, thus changing not only the particular action but all associated natural causal antecedents, their other acts, and their character.10 I will call this the “general” interpretation. I will show that Kant intends the general rather than the particular interpretation, and later argue that this interpretation fits with his other less expansive requirements for nonnatural freedom. One can understand this in terms of the individual’s causal efficacy in nature based upon character. The individual’s empirical character causes certain actions in nature. Particular actions determined by the empirical character that violate the moral law are subject to the “ought implies can” principle, so the agent must have the ability to refrain from those particular actions even though they are determined to occur in accordance with that agent’s empirical character. The “particular” interpretation would claim that the agent has the current and operative ability to refrain from such an action despite its determination by the empirical character. The “general” interpretation would claim that the agent has the ability to have had a different empirical character such that the alternate empirical character would have refrained from that action. There would be a single nonnatural decision that results in the entire empirical character of an agent throughout her lifetime. This empirical character then operates as part of the laws of nature to determine each particular action, but in relation to the single nonnatural decision is understood as contingent and thus within the agent’s control. Before turning to an assessment of Kant’s references in the published works, it is useful to examine a very clear presentation of this view in an exchange of letters Kant had with Jacob Sigismund Beck. The question of whether and how “ought implies can” is raised in a letter Beck wrote to Kant on May 31, 1792: I would feel myself freed from a burden if you would kindly show me the emptiness of this question: Can’t one imagine the moral law commanding something that might contradict its typus? In other words, can’t there be activities that would be inconsistent with a natural order but that nevertheless are prescribed by the moral law? It is a merely problematical thought, but it has this truth as its basis: the strict necessity of the categorical imperative is in no way dependent on the possibility of the existence of a natural order. Yet it would be a mistake to account for the agreement of the two as accidental. (11:340) 10 This should not be overblown to make the agent responsible for all the past causal antecedents of her actions, which given Kant’s strict necessity in natural causal law would be vast. Wood offers the correct response to objections of that sort (Wood 1984, p. 92).
190 Morality beyond nature? Beck is asking Kant whether in fact all actions that ought to be performed, that are commanded by the moral law, can be performed, that is, are compatible with the natural order. Kant replied to this question about a month later: As for the question, ‘Can there not be actions incompatible with the existence of a natural order but which are yet prescribed by the moral law?’ I answer, Certainly! If you mean, a definite order of nature, for example, that of the present world. A courtier, for instance, must recognize it as a duty always to be truthful, though he would not remain a courtier for long if he did. But there is in that typus only the form of a natural order in general, that is, the compatibility of actions as events in accord with moral laws, and as in accord too with natural laws, but only as regards their generality, for this in no way concerns the special laws of any particular nature. (11:348, July 3, 1792) Kant’s reply is to suggest that the “can” involved in ought implies can is a general ability, that is, that such actions are not incompatible with the concept of natural laws in general. The implication is that specific circumstances in which those natural laws apply, and even the specific “natures” of particular substances within a natural order, may actually contradict the requirements of the moral law, even if that moral law is compatible with natural laws in general. The example he gives of the honest courtier illustrates the point. A courtier, which we might say is the natural concept of a permanent flatterer to royalty, is subject to the moral command not to lie. But the natural order in which the courtier exists is one which requires lying as part of the job of flattering royalty. Without lying, there could be no courtiers. The particular natural order, which includes courtiers, then, is inconsistent with the moral ought. Ought in this case does not imply an empirical can, for by definition a courtier cannot always tell the truth. There can be no honest courtiers. Nonetheless the courtier ought to be honest. One might object that the courtier, qua courtier, may be unable consistently to tell the truth, but qua human being is certainly capable of telling the truth. But that would be to misunderstand Kant’s point. His point is that certain particular natural laws may be inconsistent, and thus make impossible, certain moral commands within that particular natural order. If the natural order is changed, in this case, if the profession of the courtier is disallowed or abandoned, then of course the command may be followed. Given that allowance, it might be incumbent upon the individual to resign his courtiership, and even to attempt to change the particular natural order that includes courtiers, but these presuppose that the person is being understood not qua courtier but qua human being. There is a difference between the claim “Courtiers cannot always tell the truth, although they ought to” and “Human beings employed as courtiers cannot always tell the truth, although they ought to”. The first is true because the individual in question would cease being a courtier by definition, the second false – false, at least, on the assumption that no other special law of
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 191 the particular natural order prevents it. However, in both cases the person as courtier is still subject to the moral law and is still obligated to tell the truth, because that moral command, although inconsistent with the particular natural order, is consistent with natural order in general. The case of the honest courtier can be generalized to include the special laws of any particular natural order, and this is what makes Kant’s discussion here so important. Moral obligation must be in accord with the general laws of nature but need not be in accord with the particular natural order, or particular natural laws, or particular natures of particular substances. The categorical imperative determines what ought to be the case, which actions ought to be performed, not by basing its assessment on the particular natural order of things but on the general idea of consistency with laws of natural order in general. Only then does this picture of how things ought to be get applied to the particular natural order experienced by human beings. The “can” of “ought implies can” here is the general “can” of an entire order of nature rather than a particular “can” of individual actions. This more general sense of order is used in the Critique of Pure Reason when Kant discusses the malicious liar in the solution to the Third Antinomy. Here he discusses the alternative in which the liar refrains from lying in terms of an entirely different empirical character caused by a different intelligible character (although Kant refers to this in terms of reason’s intelligible character): [One can ask] only: Why has it [reason] not determined appearances otherwise through its causality? But no answer to this is possible. For another intelligible character would have given another empirical one; and if we say that regardless of the entire course of life he has led up to that point, the agent could still have refrained from the lie, then this signifies only that it stands immediately under the power of reason, and in its causality reason is not subject to any conditions of appearance or of the temporal series; the difference in time might be a chief difference in appearances respecting their relations to one another, since these are not things in themselves and hence not causes in themselves, but it makes no difference to action in its relation to reason. (A556/B584) To say that the liar could have refrained from lying is to say that if reason had had a different intelligible character, that would have determined the particular action in nature differently through a different empirical character. The empirical character as a whole is seen as the result of a timeless intelligible character, and any change in actions from the natural order would have required a different natural order constituted in part by a different empirical character, which could result only from a different timeless intelligible character. To be sure there are passages in which Kant suggests that “ought implies can” holds for each particular action. In the Metaphysics of Morals, for
192 Morality beyond nature? example, he says of a moral agent: “he must judge that he is capable of resisting and conquering by reason not at some time in the future but at once (the moment he thinks of duty): he must judge that he can do what the law tells him unconditionally that he ought to do” (6:380). Kant’s use of the phrase “at once” indicates application to the action at hand, and extends to every particular action when it is at hand. And a similar reference to a particular action is given in the Vigilantius lecture on metaphysics of morals: “For no man is in position to determine in advance whether, in casu dato [in the given case], he will despise all physical evil and absolutely speak the truth; he knows only that he ought to obey the categorical imperative; he must therefore also be able to, and for this a ground must be present, not an immediate consciousness”. (27:503). The Latin phrase “in casu dato” refers to the specific particular action in question. In both of these passages Kant insists that in the particular case of action facing the agent, the agent ought to obey the moral law and thus that he can do that. Yet even faced with these passages referring to the particular action, the general sense of “can” Kant uses in the passages previously mentioned is applicable. The moral agent Kant describes must be aware that it is possible for him to follow the moral law in the action in question. If this particular course of nature is such that he is determined within it to violate the moral law instead, then in one particular understanding of the term, he “cannot” do so. Yet it remains possible that the particular course of nature could have been different consistent with the general laws of a natural order. In that more general sense, the agent “could” have performed the action. (Still, one wants to claim that the agent must be responsible for the action; responsibility and imputation will be treated in more detail in the next section, here the focus is on the type of freedom needed for “ought implies can”.) One wants to claim that the agent himself has the causal power to perform the action. If to say that the agent “can” perform the action is just to say that the particular course of nature were different consistent with the general laws of a natural order, then there must be some sense in which the agent has the causal power to determine the particular course of nature or even alter it so that the agent performs the action. Only then is the agent said to have the required causal power with the ability to perform the action he ought to perform. For this, a nonnatural ability to determine the particular order of nature within the general restrictions on natural order is required. The principle “ought implies can” has been shown to imply not an ability to alter the particular course of nature as it is, has developed, and will causally determine a particular act, but instead an ability to have chosen a different course of nature so that the particular course of nature will causally determine a particular act. This is the “general” interpretation rather than the “particular” interpretation of the nonnatural ability to freely cause actions. Somehow, then, it
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 193 must be within the individual’s power to determine her empirical character so that this empirical character determines the actions that the individual ought to perform.11 This section has discussed the requirement for freedom based upon the claim of “ought implies can”. By showing that Kant can be understood using the “general” interpretation of the principle that we can do what we ought to do, the power to determine one’s empirical character can be concentrated in a single act. The agent does not require the power to intervene in each and every particular action in order to be able to say with regard to each and every particular action that she can do what she ought to do. The agent may instead have the single power to determine her agency in general, as expressed by her empirical character, so that she can be said to have the power to determine each and every particular action. How this nonnatural ability would relate to the particular actions an agent does take, and how it is related to transcendental idealism, will be discussed after the following section assesses Kant’s other main claim that individuals must have nonnatural freedom of choice, namely for moral responsibility. Many to one: moral responsibility Traditionally one argument for a need for freedom of the will is that praise and blame would be inappropriate for actions not within the power of the agent to have avoided. Surprisingly Kant is relatively silent about this aspect of freedom. He certainly does sometimes invoke the language of praise and blame when discussing transcendental freedom, for example in the solution to the Third Antinomy when a malicious lie is explained as arising from natural causes. “Now even if one believes the action to be determined by these causes, one nonetheless blames the agent” and assumes that the agent could have acted otherwise (A554–55/B582–83). He offers similar language in other places (5:30, 5:95–96, 5:98). But considering the vast amount of writing Kant devoted to the issue of freedom, he pays very little attention to the issue of responsibility. 11 Eric Watkins has suggested something akin to this picture. In his reading, Kant’s concept of causality involves causal powers of objects, or as he puts it, the natures of individual things, that then are codifiable into laws of nature. Individual agents choose their own natures: “to say that personal agents freely choose their own natures is simply another way of saying that personal agents are responsible for their noumenal [intelligible] and empirical characters, which is consistent with what common sense dictates, namely that we be at least partially responsible for our characters” (Watkins 2005, p. 336). The nature that an individual chooses determines her empirical character, the law of her own causality in nature. Because individuals are thus responsible for creating some of the laws of nature, they are capable of doing what they ought to do to the extent that such capability is dependent upon their own individual natures (they cannot violate other laws of nature).
194 Morality beyond nature? Several important points must be noted about these discussions of moral responsibility. First, Kant provides an empirical account of moral responsibility for actions. Despite using the term “blame” (“tadeln”), Kant does not link imputation to the intelligible character alone. He adds a footnote to his discussion in the Third Antinomy in which he claims that “imputations can be referred only to the empirical character” and will never be completely fair on this account because the true cause of our actions “remains entirely hidden from us” (A551/B579). His explicit discussion of punishment and reward are, rather, based on empirical considerations such as whether a person was drunk, or in a rage, or a child, and distinguish legal from ethical imputation. A good example is in the Moral Collins lectures of 1784–85 (27:288–98) where nothing like transcendental freedom is mentioned. Kant discusses the “degree of freedom” (27:291, see also R6812, 19:169) detailing the subjective conditions for degrees of imputation including knowledge and ability to act. Blame in morality has several levels, and Kant appears to be satisfied with an empirical level of imputation of responsibility for actions, at least as one coherent and justifiable practice of reward and punishment. A second point is that Kant’s discussions of individuals becoming conscious of their own freedom because they blame themselves for actions always involve an individual who has done something wrong, or is faced with the prospect of doing something wrong, becoming aware that he could have done the right thing instead (A554–5/B582–83, 5:30, 5:95–96, 5:98). Kant, never to my knowledge, provides an example of a person who performs the right action praising himself because he recognizes that it is possible that he could have performed the wrong action instead. Always the action performed by the moral agent is the wrong action, and the moral agent realizes that he could have instead performed the right action. The implication is that the agent is free when performing the wrong action. This pattern is inconsistent with Kant’s usual claim that only actions caused by reason are free, but as I will show it is consistent with his claims about the nonnatural power of choice. A third important point is that Kant sometimes places responsibility not on the agent’s choice or anything else specific about the agent but instead on reason itself. Kant’s emphasis on reason as the ground of free actions lies at the root of this tendency, as I evaluated at length in Chapter 4. This emphasis on reason is most prominent in the Third Antinomy. Reason is said to have causality with respect to appearances (A547/B575, A548–9/B576–7, A551/ B579) through its imperatives that it imposes on individuals. One might interpret this minimally, as I did, as simply the faculty of reason possessing transcendental freedom to legislate the moral law, which individual moral agents then become aware of in their deliberative processes. Reason is seen as having a structure that generates the moral law independently of any causal determination in nature. But in these passages Kant appears to attribute an
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 195 active causal power to reason as if it were a substance itself. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this section from the solution to the Third Antinomy about the liar recognizing that he could have performed the right action instead of the wrong one places the responsibility on reason not on himself: This blame is grounded on the law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that, regardless of all the empirical conditions just named, could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is. And indeed one regards the causality of reason not as a mere concurrence with other causes, but as complete in itself, even if sensuous incentives were not for it but were indeed entirely against it; the action is ascribed to the agent’s intelligible character: now, in the moment when he lies, it is entirely his fault; hence reason, regardless of all empirical conditions of the deed, is fully free, and this deed is to be attributed entirely to its failure to act. (A555/B583, emphasis mine) The act of the agent is described as an act of reason, which could have determined the agent’s act differently. Reason is “a cause”, which is “fully free” and “this deed is to be attributed entirely to its failure to act”. The agent is responsible for the lie because reason could have instead seen to it that the agent tells the truth; ultimately, then, reason is responsible. These passages stressing the action of reason and reason as cause make sense only if they are seen as taking reason not as an independent being in itself but as an empirical faculty that does actually cause the empirical decisions of an agent’s faculty of choice.12 Reason could cause some of the actions of rational beings, but does not always determine the actions of moral agents. This conception would, however, not solve the problem of blaming particular agents. For if blame is placed on reason rather than the agent, the agent ought not be punished because the transcendental power of reason is beyond her 12 Allison considers but rejects such a view of reason as a cause. First, he correctly recognizes that Kant does not advocate the choice of an intelligible character in the first Critique (the intelligible character explains the empirical character, but nothing explains the intelligible character), so rejects interpretations of the Third Antinomy that attribute such a view to Kant (Allison 1990, p. 51). However, second, he goes on to interpret the Third Antinomy in terms of his own “Incorporation Thesis”, which is based primarily upon the position Allison draws from the Religion. Allison uses this later reference to incorporation to overrule the plain statements of Kant’s Third Antinomy that reason itself is the cause. Allison states that he wants to “construe all of this in such a way that it does not commit Kant to the view that reason is literally a causal power and to the conception of a timeless noumenal agency, which seems to be inseparable from this commitment”, so he tries to avoid anything that would make reason an efficient cause (despite such language from Kant even outside the Third Antinomy, for example, A317/B374). In order to do that Allison interprets Kant’s discussion of reason simply as the legislating of the laws to a power of choice that itself either incorporates them into its maxim or does not in a transcendentally free manner. The freedom of choice is spontaneous and the “genuine causal factor” of an action. This interpretation itself cannot be squared with the text of the Third Antinomy in which Kant discusses intelligible causality only of reason.
196 Morality beyond nature? control. Evil actions are freely decided upon only because reason could have instead caused the right action to have occurred. There is no corresponding claim that good actions are freely decided upon because some transcendental cause could have caused the wrong action to be taken. As I have interpreted the Third Antinomy’s emphasis on reason in Chapter 4, this causal power of reason is understood in a nonontological way. Reason is an efficient cause in nature as part of the set of psychological determinants of an individual’s empirical power of choice. The empirical faculty of reason is the empirical character of reason. Transcendentally reason functions as a spontaneous cause because the very structure of reason itself, which is the intelligible character of reason, is the ground of the moral law, the representation of which in the empirical mind is reason as a natural cause. The topic in this chapter provides a different aspect of that relation. If reason as intelligible cause is the ground of reason as empirical cause, Kant appears to be arguing, then any transcendental responsibility for actions determined by empirical reason lies in the structure of reason itself (empirical imputation, as already mentioned, is a complex of empirical factors). This conclusion raises the question of the sense in which reason can be responsible for anything. Indeed, it is inexplicable why reason acts as it does and not in some lesser or greater way. Kant offers this admission of a fatalism about the course of nature and agnosticism about reason in the paragraph immediately following the malicious lie discussion. The key is that we cannot ask why reason is what it is or why it causes only what it causes: “one cannot ask: Why has reason not determined itself otherwise? But only: Why has it not determined appearances otherwise through its causality? But no answer to this is possible” (A556–57/ B584–85). With this admission, Kant appears to have abandoned any attempt to explain transcendental moral responsibility for actions. Both right and wrong actions occur in the empirical world not because the agent chose to do those actions but because reason has determined the empirical course of nature in such a way that they occur. But then moral responsibility seems entirely divorced from the agent. Kant might have wanted to take this route in order to avoid difficulties with assigning an atemporal nature to moral agents for purposes of assigning moral responsibility. The result, however, is that he has avoided moral agents as well. This is an aspect of the well-known Sidgwick problem, which dates back to Kant’s time as an objection raised against Kant by Karl Leonard Reinhold.13 I will not add anything to this discussion beyond noting that this problem for moral responsibility arises because Kant appears to hold that the only transcendentally free cause which can be postulated is reason, not simply that the 13 The details of Reinhold’s and Sidgwick’s objection and a critique of the standard manner in which Kant is defended are discussed by (Fugate 2012).
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 197 will is free only when it is acting rationally. In order properly to attribute moral responsibility, one wants instead there to be a transcendentally free choice by the agent, not a transcendentally free causal power of reason. Perhaps because Kant realized this problem, or perhaps because of other reasons unknown to us, Kant does offer such a conception of a transcendentally free power of choice. I will discuss this transcendent freedom of the agent as presented in the Critique of Practical Reason, which I take to exemplify this conception of freedom for moral responsibility. He introduces this passage with the claim “one must recall what was said in the Critique of Pure Reason or follows from it” as a solution to the clash between freedom and natural necessity (5:97). Indeed, Kant invokes the Third Antinomy to the extent that it explains how it is possible for there to be such a thing as transcendental freedom independent of natural causation. This insistence by Kant appears to require an ontological interpretation of the Third Antinomy in which the moral agent’s power of choice, and not simply the faculty of reason, in some way has an existence independent of her existence in nature. Kant goes so far as to call empirical, compatibilist freedom “a wretched subterfuge” (5:96) and “at bottom . . . nothing better than the freedom of a turnspit, which, when once it is wound up, also accomplishes its movements of itself” (5:97). After arguing for the insufficiency of empirical practical freedom, Kant determines that genuine freedom requires independence from the mechanism of nature. Here instead of claiming that reason is free from the mechanism of nature and thus that reason is the free cause of moral actions, Kant stresses the existence of the moral agent as a thing in herself independent of nature. The free cause which is independent of nature is not reason but is the moral agent “as a thing in itself” who “views his existence insofar as it does not stand under conditions of time”. He goes on: in this existence of his nothing is, for him, antecedent to the determination of his will, but every action – and in general every determination of his existence changing conformably with inner sense, even the whole sequence of his existence as a sensible being – is to be regarded in the consciousness of his intelligible existence as nothing but the consequence and never as the determining ground of his causality as a noumenon. So considered, a rational being can now rightly say of every unlawful action he performed that he could have omitted it even though as appearance it is sufficiently determined in the past and, so far, is inevitably necessary, for this action, with all the past which determines it, belongs to a single phenomenon of his character, which he gives to himself and in accordance with which he imputes to himself, as a cause independent of all sensibility, the causality of those appearances. (5:97–98) Here Kant limits this freedom to rational beings, but not to their reason (or to reason itself independent of them). The moral agent is said to give himself his character, which appears as his phenomenal existence in nature. His creation of his character is the basis of the legitimacy of imputation of actions to him in
198 Morality beyond nature? nature. Kant stresses this point in the following paragraphs of this section of the second Critique, even admitting that this noumenal character might be evil: [Some people] show from childhood such early wickedness and progress in it so continuously into their adulthood that they are taken to be born villains and quite incapable of improvement as far as their cast of mind is concerned; and nevertheless they are so judged for what they do or leave undone that they are censured as guilty of their crimes . . . This could not happen if we did not suppose that whatever arises from one’s choice (as every action intentionally performed undoubtedly does) has as its basis a free causality, which from early youth expresses its character in its appearances (actions); these actions, on account of the uniformity of conduct, make knowable a natural connection that does not, however, make the vicious constitution of the will necessary but is instead the consequence of the evil and unchangeable principles freely adopted, which make it only more culpable and deserving of punishment. (5:99–100) Here Kant argues that moral responsibility is attributed to the agent as a thing independent of nature in space and time. Reason is not seen as constituting the nonnatural free cause of moral actions; in fact, the free nonnatural cause mentioned is “the evil and unchangeable principles freely adopted” that result in the single phenomenon of the person’s empirical character in nature. The transcendent free adoption of these principles is the ultimate basis of moral attribution. Despite his invoking empirical considerations or the causality of reason, moral attribution after all does require for Kant the postulation of a free nonnatural ability to decide upon principles for action. But as with the claim about the need for a transcendent causal power to serve as the “can” in the principle “ought implies can”, this freedom need not be distinct for each moral action. The free transcendent choice that Kant thinks is involved in moral attribution is the choice not of actions but of principles, presumably maxims. One principle or maxim can of course serve as the basis for a plurality of particular actions. So here again it appears that the transcendentally free power of choice need not be understood as a plurality of transcendent free decisions, but just one. Transcendental freedom of choice in Kant is not a series of independent free transcendent decisions but a single free transcendent decision of the power of choice that has as its effect the entirety of the empirical character of the individual. This conception reduces the nonnaturalistic requirements of Kant’s theory considerably. The next section will explain how Kant ultimately describes this single free transcendent choice and how it can be understood in a metaphysically naturalistic way. The one transcendentally free decision The previous sections looked at the reasons Kant gives for requiring a free choice. This section will argue that, as a metaphysical claim on its own, it is best not to interpret transcendent freedom of choice as allowing that every
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 199 individual decision of the empirical power of choice can also be nonnaturally free, as if there were a multitude of independent free choices underlying the actions of the self in appearance. Rather, only one nonnaturally free decision is possible because the free transcendent decision is said to be timeless. I take Kant’s discussion of the power of choice in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to reveal the way in which Kant intended the one free transcendent decision by an agent to relate to many empirically determined decisions. His topic in the first section of that book is the universal human propensity to evil, his own take on the Christian concept of original sin viewed within a philosophical conception of religion; however, the metaphysical relations at work can apply equally to the choice of one’s entire phenomenal character as Kant describes it in the second Critique. He explains a propensity by relating two senses of the term “deed”: “By ‘the nature of a human being’ we only understand here the subjective ground – wherever it may lie – of the exercise of the human being’s freedom in general (under objective moral laws) antecedent to every deed [Tat] that falls within the scope of the senses. But this subjective determining ground must, in turn, itself always be a deed [actus] 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)” (6:21). Kant takes there to be two different levels of choice at work. First is the level “within the scope of the senses” and the second is the subjective determining ground of each of those empirical deeds. The second, he goes on to say, is “antecedent to every use of freedom in experience” from the earliest youth throughout one’s life (6:22). The relation between Tat and Actus maps clearly onto the empirical or phenomenal character on the one side and the single act of freedom that creates that character from the second Critique as described in my previous section on the other side. The transcendentally free human power of choice grounds all particular decisions by means of a maxim. Each empirically determined decision of the power of choice, of course, would have a maxim as a subjective principle operating in the empirical mind. The ultimate subjective determining ground would be, in a sense, a maxim of maxims. This Kant calls the disposition, “the first subjective ground of the adoption of the maxims [which] can only be a single one, and it applies to the entire use of freedom universally” (6:25). The relationship between these two levels of maxim is hierarchical. Each particular empirical maxim is adopted in reference to the transcendentally freely chosen maxim: “Now, the term ‘deed’ [Tat] can in general apply just as well to the use of freedom through which the supreme maxim (either in favor of, or against, the law) is adopted in the power of choice, as to the use by which the actions themselves (materially considered, i.e., as regards the objects of the power of choice) are performed in accordance with that maxim. . . The former is an
200 Morality beyond nature? intelligible deed, cognizable through reason alone apart from any temporal condition; the latter is sensible, empirical, given in time (factum phenomenon)” (6:31). The single supreme maxim is freely chosen in a transcendentally free way, and each particular empirical deed in time that reflects that maxim can be understood as free ultimately only as a reflection of the supreme maxim. Kant argues, in essence, that the power of choice must be understood as choosing actions in nature and as having chosen a general course of action independent of nature. Kant states this problem in terms of the source of human propensity to evil. The propensity to evil, that is, the consistent placing of selfinterest above the moral law, must have a free origin. Physical propensity, that is, the consistent decisions of the sensible power of choice in nature, is not free. Thus the propensity to evil must have some other free source. The free source would have to be a decision independent of nature. There are two corresponding understandings of the term “deed”. There is only one deed independent of nature, and that is the fundamental choice to follow the moral law or to instead prioritize self-interest. This deed is the decision which formulates one’s highest maxim. Then there is the understanding of the word “deed” that applies it to the particular application of that highest maxim to actions. These deeds in appearance are referred to as free, although presumably determined according to laws of nature, because they can be traced to a nonempirical origin in the single transcendent deed which formulates one’s highest maxim.14 Combining the views presented in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Religion results in a plausible account of how Kant can understand the freedom of the power of choice at two levels in such a way that it requires only one nonnaturally free choice. The single act of choosing one’s character reverberates, as it were, throughout all of the appearances of one’s self in nature. The single phenomenon of one’s empirical character can be traced to a single nonnatural free decision. This nonnatural freedom is not needed at every particular instance as an independent explanation of each particular action. Rather, one such free act suffices to serve as the ground for all particular actions in nature. The transcendent self need not be conceived as involved in a multitude of free decisions that correspond with a multitude of empirical decisions. 14 Later in the Religion Kant speaks of a “revolution in the disposition” of a moral agent, referring to an alteration of the fundamental stance one takes toward morality, the choice to change one’s fundamental disposition from self-love to duty (6:47). If understood as a genuinely independent second free transcendent choice this account appears to be incompatible with my interpretation. It is also incompatible with Kant’s account in the second Critique when he talks about the single phenomenon of one’s character and Kant’s account earlier in the Religion of a single inexplicable fundamental maxim that must ground all others. If one does allow a revolution in one’s fundamental maxim, then one’s unity of character is also threatened in the way I discuss later. For these reasons I do not think that Kant’s position on a revolution in character can be taken to be any more than an idea of reason we hold as support for our efforts to improve ourselves morally. I do not think it forms part of his metaphysics of free choice.
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 201 There is a more directly philosophical reason for holding that only one free transcendent choice is possible for Kant. The unity of identity of an individual dictates that only one ultimate choice be posited per individual. A moral agent’s empirical character is “a single phenomenon”, and hence has a unity. The unity of that character must stem from a single cause, that is, there must be a single decision that results in the single result. Other kinds of causes, such as the concurring causal power of God in creating nature as a whole, would of course be allowed. But the relevant cause, the decision of the power of choice, can be only one. To see why, assume for a minute that there is more than one such cause. Transcendent choices of this kind are decisions that have no explicable basis, that is, they are themselves the ultimate explanation and cannot be traced to any other ground. They are, in effect, unrelated to one another, for if they were related to one another, that relation would be their ground. If there is more than one such ultimately inexplicable decision, any unity of character would be merely random since the independent decisions might conflict with one another; were every particular empirical action to have such a corresponding nonnaturally free intelligible choice, the odds of lack of unity approach certainty. Even if they did not conflict, there would only be a contingent unity of character since if there were something that necessitated the consistency of these decisions, it would be a ground of the decisions, but no grounds are allowed for them. Kant’s conception of the intelligible character as a transcendent cause of the empirical character seems to require a unity that does not come about merely contingently. Thus, in order to have a unity of character, only one transcendent free decision is allowed. This single nonnatural decision is by itself incompatible with metaphysical naturalism; however, it does at least show that the strong sense of empirical reality can be given to nature in space and time as a causal system can be preserved even with the admission of nonnatural freedom. One need not conceive of nature as mere appearance, existing only as representations, with ontological priority given to things in themselves. There is no need to assume that every act in nature has a distinct transcendent cause, or that transcendently free beings reflect upon all the particular circumstances of particular acts in nature. The freedom that Kant requires is provided by a general decision that is conceived to occur independently of and in some sense prior to all particular acts. One is reminded of Plato’s Myth of Er in which individuals are said to have an opportunity before birth to choose a life, but after they choose that life they were condemned to live it out without change.15 Just as Plato’s myth 15 Henry Allison also notes that this interpretation of Kant’s conception of freedom resembles the Myth of Er (Allison 1990, p. 139). He then offers a nonmetaphysical interpretation that he thinks will avoid the problem. My approach is different because when I maintain the ontological priority of nature in space and time, I see no room for a transcendental freedom of the faculty of choice in nature.
202 Morality beyond nature? functions to provide a way to picture that which is in itself inexplicable, Kant’s invocation of the single transcendent free decision functions as a way to picture the inexplicable ultimate free source of moral decisions. One might conceive of Kant’s single nonnatural act of the power of choice in this way without diminishing the reality of nature, just as one can conceive of God existing independent of and prior to nature without diminishing its reality. The metaphysical cost for a naturalist, one who wants to limit ontology to nature, is large but less than if one had to deny the independent reality of nature and its causality in space and time. This account satisfies the two arguments reviewed in the previous section that nonnatural freedom was necessary with a minimum of nonnatural ontology. First, the principle of “ought implies can” can be defended in relation to a single free choice in allowing that each individual moral agent can be taken to have complete control over her empirical character in nature through the single free intelligible choice. This single intelligible choice is made entirely independent of nature, abstracted not only from the conditions of time but considered to be itself timeless as part of a being in herself. Since this intelligible choice creates the intelligible character – the fundamental maxim of that individual – and the intelligible character is then reflected in the empirical character – the particular maxims that individual chooses using her empirical power of choice – and since the empirical character is part of the causal chain in nature that determines that she will perform certain actions rather than others, this intelligible choice can be understood to have determined the particular empirical course of nature for that individual. The nonnatural, timeless decision to adopt a fundamental maxim is subject to the ought and is conceived to be entirely determined by the agent: the agent can, conceivably, choose any particular fundamental maxim (although since Kant’s discussion is framed in terms of a universal human propensity to evil, he takes all to have a fundamentally evil maxim). In our actual experience, of course, when an agent is faced with a particular decision, the ought applies to the actual maxim she adopts. Empirically she cannot act in any way other than as determined by nature, but the picture allows the agent to recognize that it would have been within her power qua intelligible, nonnatural power of choice to have determined herself in a way that would have caused her to act otherwise, so in a transcendental sense she could have acted as she ought. The second argument requiring a nonnatural freedom is even more straightforward. Agents are held responsible for empirical actions they perform although those actions are determined in accordance with laws of nature in two ways. First on the empirical level Kant provides empirical conditions for imputation that invoke particular kinds of natural causes. One might
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 203 object that this empirical imputation assigns praise and blame to decisions or actions outside the agent’s causal power since they are themselves determined in accordance with laws of nature. This is the empirical character, which is itself integrated into the causal nexus of nature. Kant can justify this imputation by reference to the single nonnatural decision that forms the intelligible character and that is said to ground the particular decisions of the agent’s empirical power of choice. Transcendentally the agent is responsible for all particular deeds in reference to this one intelligible deed even though each particular deed is empirically determined in her power of choice in nature. Thus it is a valid interpretation to hold that Kant accepts that there is only one nonnaturally free decision by the power of choice. He has a good philosophical reason to do so, given his conceptions of things in themselves in relation to nature. The unity of the empirical character is a result of the unity of the intelligible character, itself determined by a single timeless free decision. For moral purposes regarding the practice of praise and blame (moral attribution) as well as for determining the application of the principle “ought implies can”, we can conceive of any particular act performed by an individual as causally determined in nature yet as a reflection of the single nonnatural choice. Every particular act performed by an individual is traced to her intelligible character, a timeless principle that is the transcendent cause of that individual’s entire existence in nature. From one to none: freedom as a postulate The interpretation I have given shows that the transcendental freedom of the power of choice can be understood to consist of only one nonnatural act of the person in herself that results in the entirety of the person’s empirical character and thus all of her actions in nature. For moral responsibility and because ought implies can, we are required, for moral purposes, to assume that somehow ontologically prior to our existence in nature we ourselves each made a decision regarding what kind of person we will be morally. This short section will suggest that even this requirement is susceptible to a metaphysical naturalism. Since freedom of the will is one of the three postulates of pure practical reason in the Critique of Practical Reason along with immortality of the soul and the existence of God (5:132), it is susceptible to the same interpretation I gave of the postulate of God in Chapter 5. Kant rarely discusses the postulate of freedom of the will and the ambiguity of “Wille” allows that Kant might be referring to the freedom of pure practical reason as source of the moral law. In this section I am
204 Morality beyond nature? assuming that one can read Kant’s postulate in reference to the freedom of choice.16 In this interpretation the postulate is a concept that is held in the mind for practical, immanent purposes yet is not taken to have any object as referent. The postulates are limited to concepts in the mind that are not intended to be existential claims about independent, nonnatural objects. I will not repeat the detailed arguments I provided in Chapter 5. In essence one can consider the claims postulated for practical purposes as concepts which function to support moral life without ontological implications. Kant explains this relation as referring to the moral law and only for its own sake in the Critique of Practical Reason (5:133). For the issue at stake here, the single free transcendent act of a nonnatural power of choice can be understood as a mere concept that human beings possess in order to picture for themselves the inexplicable claim of ultimate responsibility for action (Kant calls it “inscrutable”, “unerforschlichen”, 6:21). In the same way that the concept God functions as a kind of placeholder for any solution for the moral requirement that the highest good is possible, the concept of a nonnaturally free decision functions as a placeholder for any solution to the moral requirements of ought implies can and of moral imputation. No claim to the reality of any nonnatural cause is made in the postulate, and thus this claim is compatible with a metaphysical naturalism. Freedom, however, appears to have a different status than the other two postulates of immortality of the soul and the existence of God. In the preface to the second Critique Kant says that freedom is real and that it grounds the possibility of the other two postulates: Now, the concept of freedom, insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure 16 Consider that the kind of freedom referenced in the postulates as the ground of the moral law might not refer to the freedom of the faculty of choice but instead to the transcendental freedom of reason. The claim that freedom functions as the cornerstone of speculative as well as practical reason cannot refer to the freedom of choice to act for or against the law because that kind of freedom has nothing to do with speculative reason. Instead the transcendental freedom of reason, which Kant does at times refer to using the term “Wille” and that I discussed in Chapter 4, is what makes the moral law possible by showing that the structure of reason itself provides principles and ideas and is valid independently of laws of nature. This transcendental freedom of reason would be able to ground both practical and speculative reason. To say that this freedom of reason is proved real through the moral law is to say that the fact of reason as our experience of the categorical imperative is bound up with a claim of its validity. To the extent that the fact of reason is acknowledged, the freedom of reason is acknowledged as well. This account is compatible not only with Kant’s discussion of the fact of reason in the second Critique (and Chapter 3) but also with Kant’s insistence in the solution to the Third Antinomy that it is reason’s active role in producing ideas and principles that provides the basis for a claim to the transcendentally free intelligible character of reason.
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 205 reason, even of speculative reason; and all other concepts (those of God and immortality), which as mere ideas remain without support in the latter, now attach themselves to this concept and with it and by means of it get stability and objective reality, that is, their possibility is proved by this: that freedom is real, for this idea reveals itself through the moral law. (5:3–4) Kant goes on in the next paragraph to differentiate freedom from God and immortality in that the first is a condition for the moral law while the latter two are conditions only for an object of a will determined by the moral law (the highest good). Being a condition for the moral law itself means that the requirement does not arise upon reflection after the fact of a moral decision as immortality and God do but is intrinsic to the moral decision itself. Immortality and God arise only upon the further step of reflection upon the place of morality in the greater scheme of things, a step that lies outside the inner context of decision making under the moral law. These considerations give freedom a different status than the other postulates. Freedom’s reality is proved though the moral law, freedom is itself a condition for the moral law, freedom grounds the objective reality of God and immortality, and freedom even functions as the cornerstone of pure reason as a whole. Despite the identification of freedom as a postulate, then, it appears that it might not be possible to interpret it merely heuristically. I think that even with this special status freedom is best interpreted in roughly the same manner as immortality and God. The nature of practical philosophy itself as I showed in Chapters 2 and 3 supports such a reading with regard to freedom. The subject matter of practical philosophy is free acts considered from the agent’s perspective as free decisions. When faced with actual decisions, the moral agent in nature does not question whether her decisions are free but must view herself as free in the process of deliberation. The agent does not think about any kind of freedom and in the moment of deliberation does not have any need for the nonnaturally free power of choice. Since practical reason is supposed to concern the ought rather than the is, there need be no ontological claim at work. That point, however, is valid only under the “priority of action” aspect of the primacy of practical reason. The primacy of practical reason, I showed in Chapter 3, has two different kinds of meaning in Kant’s philosophy. The priority of action stresses the role of practical reason in determining the agent to right acts. I take this to be operative in Kant’s examples of particular agents, and in relation to freedom it is exemplified by the agent-perspective on deliberation. When deliberating, moral agents always act under the idea of freedom and while in the grip of the activity of deliberation cannot consider their decisions as predetermined. Acting under the idea of freedom in this way has no ontological implications.
206 Morality beyond nature? But the status of freedom is different under the second meaning of the primacy of practical reason, which I call the “priority of belief”. The priority of belief holds that when reflecting upon the conditions of human morality one’s concern is with reconciling the claims, that is, the postulates, arising from the practical use of reason with the limitations on speculative claims allowed by the first Critique. I argued that the priority of belief actually operates under a higher priority for speculative or theoretical reason because it attempts to incorporate the concepts raised by practical reason into a coherent world view. The agent-perspective assumption of freedom in practice has no place here. Freedom is instead raised as a condition for the existence of the moral law when one later reflects on the nature of the moral experience and determines its conceptual requirements. This origin of the concept of freedom, however, is the same as that of the other two postulates. All three would arise upon reflection after the moral experience. Since I showed in Chapter 5 that the postulates are to be considered valid not as referring to any objects but only held as concepts in support of morality, freedom can have that status provided that it can be seen as stemming from reflection upon moral experience in a similar way. My interpretation of the fact of reason allows for this. The fact of reason is our experience of the categorical imperative and helps to constitute our moral experience. When faced with it in actual decision-making we do not question either its validity or our ability to choose to follow it – this is our stance given the priority of action. But upon reflection on that moral experience we can ask both questions: what would make the categorical imperative really valid, and whether we could freely choose whether or not to follow it. Our answer can recognize that the categorical imperative would not be possible were it not for the transcendental freedom of reason and its normative force for us would not be coherent were it not for the transcendental freedom of choice. But since these answers are wrapped up in the question of attempting to understand our experience of the categorical imperative, we can even say that our claim that freedom is a condition for the moral law is postulated on behalf of our experience of the categorical imperative. The “reality” of freedom proved by the moral law is simply the practical recognition that in order to make the experience we have of the fact of reason coherent with our entire worldview we would need to use the concept of freedom. But the demand to make our experience coherent still rests on the status of that experience. And the status of that practical experience is from an agent perspective. The transcendental freedom of the power of choice is held as a concept “for immanent purposes” rather than taken to refer to an actual property of moral agents. The nonnatural free decision of the power of choice, then, is subject to the same naturalist interpretation as the other postulates.
From many to one to none: non-natural free choice 207 Concluding remarks This chapter has assessed the ontological requirements for the free power of choice in Kant in order to offer a metaphysically naturalistic interpretation of Kant’s moral theory. In addition to the compatibilist view of freedom in nature that emphasizes the decisions of the empirical power of choice, Kant insists on a transcendental understanding of freedom of the power of choice. I looked at two reasons he offers – the principle that ought implies can and the requirement of moral responsibility – and showed how both can be interpreted to require only one nonnatural transcendentally free decision. Instead of a metaphysics that requires a nonnatural transcendent free choice for each particular act, Kant requires only a single act to ground the character that then determines all the particular acts performed during one’s lifetime. I examined the interpretations of this single transcendentally free act that best fit with metaphysical naturalism. Instead of a focus on how any particular individual action can be independent of determinism in nature, the focus on freedom of choice for the metaphysically naturalist Kant ought to be on how one’s overall character can be understood to be independent of determinism in nature. I think that such an emphasis makes Kant’s moral theory less burdened with metaphysical difficulties than alternative interpretations that focus on the transcendental freedom of each particular act distinctly from every other act. The single-free-act interpretation allows for a view of nature not unlike a traditional view in which an independent, timeless God creates the whole of nature, which then exists as real and as causally closed (other than that act of creation). The multiple-free-act interpretations face the difficulty of explaining how the allegedly timeless transcendentally free cause of the free choice of the agent in herself is related to the temporally situated natural causal chain of the empirical agent in nature while still retaining actual empirical determinism as a real property of a real nature in space and time. More particularly, they must explain how a timeless agent in herself can be affected by temporally situated sensations and desires in nature in a way that preserves the timelessness of the free agent while individuating the free decision to that exact context in nature. The interpretation of Kant as requiring only a single timeless act vastly simplifies this metaphysical relationship. One still has to picture the near divine power of an individual agent making a single general choice of what kind of person to be, but once that admission is made, nature in space and time would be seen as real and causation according to laws of nature entirely valid for all events in nature include decisions made by the empirical human power of choice. This single nonnatural act is itself still not compatible with metaphysical naturalism. The naturalist has available a way to avoid such an ontology by stressing that freedom of the will is a postulate of practical reason. The
208 Morality beyond nature? postulate of the transcendentally free power of choice is not meant to have ontological implications. This status for the postulates fits in with Kant’s emphasis on the practical point of view. Although freedom is given a status distinct from that of the other two postulates, I showed that the difference does not preclude the interpretation of the postulates as immanent rather than transcendent, and as meant only as conceptual support for moral practice rather than as ontological claims.
7 Value and the inexplicability of the practical The postulates of God, immortality, and freedom of choice have in the past two chapters been shown not only to be fully compatible with a metaphysical naturalism but also to be best understood using moral idealism. This chapter will examine the nature of moral value in particular and moral experience in general. These matters concern the ways in which morality frames our phenomenal experience as spatial and temporal beings in nature. The discussion of value will show that value is not a property of anything independent of the moral agent but an ordering of nature by reason. The status of this ordering, and with it moral experience in general, will be shown to be the ultimately inexplicable product of reason that fashions the idea of an unconditioned in morality for its own purposes as in theoretical philosophy it fashioned the ideas of soul and God as representations of the unconditioned. My review of the various elements of Kant’s ethics that individually needed to be assessed in terms of realism or idealism included two kinds of value. The value of subjectively chosen ends has already been seen as fully compatible with both metaphysical naturalism and empirical moral idealism, since the value of these contingent ends stemmed only from the choice of the empirical moral agent to pursue them. The value of humanity as an end in itself, however, appears not to depend upon the empirical moral agent. The categorical imperative in the formula of humanity commands moral agents always to treat humanity as an end in itself. Reason offers no option to moral agents regarding the value of humanity as it does regarding the value of freely chosen ends. I will argue that, despite the necessity and objectivity characteristic of absolute value, the proper understanding of the value of humanity is in terms of moral idealism, and that it is compatible with metaphysical naturalism. This chapter will provide in the first section a direct discussion of the nature and status of absolute value in Kant. I will show that one version of the argument from autonomy succeeds in showing that Kant must reject value realism. Since value must not precede the autonomous moral law, it must not be any intrinsic property of things. I will also argue that there is no place in Kant’s philosophy for any intrinsic value properties. Moral value is both transcendentally and empirically idealist. My second section will look in more 209
210 Morality beyond nature? detail at the order of reason. To say that humanity has absolute value is to say that the order that reason imposes on moral agents’ choices includes the requirement that humanity is a limiting condition when choosing subjective ends. I look at Kant’s terms “intelligible world” and “moral world” to show that they mean the moral order that reason imposes as a formal ordering of the objects of nature. Moral experience is understood in terms of the formal rather than material view of nature. My third and final section looks at the ultimate limits that Kant places on the intelligible order of reason by focusing on the topic of the outer boundary of practical philosophy given in the last sections of Groundwork III. I conclude by summarizing the final status we ought to understand practical reason to have as a faculty that we human beings use as part of the first-person view of experience. Realism and idealism about moral value The highest value in Kant is the value of humanity, said to be an end in itself. There is dispute over precisely what Kant means by humanity,1 but I will largely forgo entering into those disputes and simply refer to humanity as of absolute value. This section will argue that the absolute value of humanity is not an intrinsic property but is best understood as dependent upon the order of ends imposed by pure practical reason and so conforms to moral idealism rather than moral realism. I will first look at the relation between value and autonomy before showing that moral value cannot be an intrinsic property of objects but instead is an order imposed by reason. Finally I cap off the section with a discussion of transcendental idealism of value in relation to empirical realism. Autonomy and value A contentious argument in support of the moral idealist’s claim that even the absolute value of humanity must be a product of rather than a basis for the moral law is based on the nature of autonomy.2 Kant divided all moral theories 1 2 A few examples suffice to show the scope of the debate. Christine Korsgaard holds that it is rational nature, specifically the ability to define ends for oneself (Korsgaard 1996a). Allen Wood takes humanity to be the human capacity for pragmatic reasoning (Wood 2008) (See also footnote 5 to this chapter ). Paul Guyer advocates freedom over rationality as the ultimate value for Kant (Guyer 2000). Richard Dean argues that humanity is the good will as the only thing good without qualification (Dean 2006). I believe that the argument I make about the status of the general concept of absolute value in Kant is compatible with most of these and other particular conceptions. In the discussion in the text I will note when my claims appear to apply differently to different conceptions of humanity. I made this claim very succinctly in (Rauscher 2002, p. 496). For two responses to this argument, see (Stern 2012, pp. 121–22), who finds it too sketchy, and (Dall’Agnol 2012b, pp. 16–19), who
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 211 into the autonomous and the heteronomous depending on whether the will is a “law to itself” or whether some “property of the objects of volition” is the basis of the law of the will (4:440). Autonomy is the autonomy of reason considered as a faculty that is structured so that it produces the moral law of its own.3 Because of this focus on the nature of reason considered as such, autonomy so understood is a transcendental not an empirical conception; individual choice with leeway would be an empirical conception of autonomy. The issue here is whether autonomy understood in this transcendental sense can be the basis for a claim that the absolute value of humanity must be a result of determination by the moral law (transcendental idealism of value) or may precede it (transcendental realism of value). The argument from autonomy for interpreting Kant as a moral idealist stresses that any basis for morality independent of pure practical reason as the will of a transcendental moral agent would have to count as heteronomous and could not be Kant’s position.4 Since only rational agency is left as the possible basis for the moral law, and idealism is defined as the claim that all moral principles, properties, and objects are dependent upon the moral agent, the proper interpretation of Kant’s moral theory is idealistic. 3 4 thinks it misunderstands the nature of reason (my direct response to the latter is (Rauscher 2012)). The argument is also presented specifically in relation to value by Robert Johnson (Johnson 2007, pp. 140–41), who compares it to a Euthyphro-style argument. Others who stress autonomy as precluding independent criteria for right include (Schneewind 1997), (Reath 2006), and (Sensen 2013). By autonomy Kant does not mean individual leeway in choosing what laws to follow or even individual power in obligating oneself to the law. There is no individual leeway – the moral law is taken to express the structure of reason itself and obligation accompanies the categorical imperative by means of its imperatival form as the fact of reason. Robert Stern argues that autonomy can be understood in terms of obligation. He argues that Kant could be a moral antirealist by taking moral obligation to be autonomous. He argues that obligation is idealist and autonomous because the concepts of duty and obligation apply only to finite, sensible moral agents. For perfectly rational agents there is no obligation because all of their actions are automatically determined by pure practical reason. Finite, sensible moral agents are obligated in virtue of their finitude, not by any kind of choice whether to obligate themselves but simply by their nature. Stern takes Kant to be a value realist but to allow for this kind of anti-realism for obligation (Stern 2011b, pp. 89–91). But this is a strange limitation for anti-realism. Human beings are taken to have in common with purely rational agents their reason, and thus in virtue of their rational nature all rational agents are subject to the moral law. For we finite sensible rational agents there is simply another added aspect to our natures, namely, the matter of adding sensible incentives and not of adding anything moral. The manner in which finite moral agents are subject to the moral law, namely through duty and obligation, stems from their nature. And the manner in which purely rational agents are subject to the moral law, namely as sole determinant of their actions, also stems from their nature. Why should one kind of conception of a moral agent ground an anti-realist claim while the other grounds a realist claim? If the nature of a particular kind of moral agent grounds an anti-realist claim in one case, it ought to in both. Henry Allison makes this claim as well when he analogizes autonomy and heteronomy to transcendental idealism and transcendental realism (Allison 1990, pp. 99–100).
212 Morality beyond nature? Those who advocate this defense of an idealism about value stress that any absolute value of humanity as an end would count as a “property of the objects of volition” (4:109) for these purposes and thus be heteronomous rather than autonomous. Realists can respond by claiming that the value of humanity as an end in itself is not an object of this sort because it is not something to be sought or attained by the will the way that happiness is, thus autonomy, the will being a law to itself, is compatible with that law recognizing the intrinsic value of humanity as a limiting value.5 The realist response recognizes that the term “object of volition” at stake here can mean two different things. First, it can mean the particular object or goal to be created or attained in action, such as cooking and consuming a meal.6 Kant apparently has this conception of an object in mind when he denounces heteronomous moral principles as those that embody the principle “I ought to do something because I will something else” (4:441). They are all based upon some goal, understood as itself valuable to the agent, to be attained by adherence to a moral principle: self-love, the pleasure of moral feeling, obedience to God, or even the attainment of individual perfection on the basis of a (vague) concept of it in reason, as he lists them in the Groundwork (4:442–43). A second meaning of the term “object of volition” is that the will would have to treat certain objects as limitations on its actions.7 Here the object of volition is not merely what is desired but is anything that is the 5 6 7 Allen Wood goes further by claiming that autonomy is based on the absolute value of humanity, the idea being that the value of humanity as the rational will itself is what obligates moral agents to submit to the dictates of this rational will valued in itself: “The idea of autonomy identifies the authority of the law with the objective value constituting the content of the law. It bases the law on our esteem for the dignity of rational nature, which makes every rational being the moral legislator” (Wood 2008, p. 106). If the argument for value idealism based on autonomy is successful, as I will advocate, then both the moderate realist position that autonomy does not preclude an independent absolute value and the more extreme realist position of Wood that autonomy necessitates an independent absolute value would be shown false. I will not offer a separate refutation of Wood’s position. I would like simply to point out that one might doubt that absolute value of humanity is autonomy as Wood here suggests. Elsewhere in the same book, citing Kant’s Anthropology lectures and his Religion, Wood identifies humanity as an end in itself as the absolute value with pragmatic and not moral reasoning, although Wood glosses this by arguing that humanity in this sense is coextensive with the capacity to give oneself moral laws (Wood 2008, pp. 88–9, 94). Robert Johnson separates what I am treating as one kind of object into two kinds: those to be produced by the will and those to be realized in action. He takes humanity to be an end of the second kind because he thinks we can realize humanity by realizing our wills as good wills, or as he also describes it, actualizing what is only potential (Johnson 2007, pp. 145–46). I do not think these two ought to be differentiated because in both cases the ends are brought into existence through the action decided upon by the human power of choice. The claim that humanity can be considered an end to be realized is also irrelevant in this context because the value of humanity, its being a “good”, would not be based upon the action that realizes humanity in particular situations. Johnson lists this as his second of three types of objects of the will and recognizes that in this sense humanity would be an object of the will (Johnson 2007, p. 146). Johnson correctly argues
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 213 content of the deliberation by the will, including the means that might be used to attain chosen ends. An agent might have a particular reason to avoid certain means. A desire to fulfil a promise to save the last piece of cake for someone would limit an individual from using that cake to offer food to a third person. Kant appears to have this conception of humanity in mind when in the formula of humanity moral agents are obligated always to treat humanity in a certain way, as an end, no matter what any other end they might be pursuing (4:429). In this second understanding of “object of volition” humanity is not so much to be promoted or enlarged as it is to be recognized and taken into account. If the argument for moral idealism based on autonomy proceeds by using the first sense of “object of volition”, then it will not succeed. Certainly Kant never identifies the good of humanity as some good to be produced. Kant provides what he takes to be a comprehensive list of all possible kinds of objects as a determining ground of the will not only in the Groundwork as cited earlier but also in the second Critique as well (5:39), and humanity as an end in itself is not a part of either of these lists.8 But since this kind of end is not the only possible understanding of the term “object of volition”, the argument fails to exclude the other kind of end as a value independent of the categorical imperative. Further, some interpretations of humanity that might be understood as taking humanity to be such a value treat it as something to be promoted in the sense that our actions ought to enlarge the existence of humanity, understood as freedom or as rational nature, because of its value; in this way they make Kant into a kind of quasiconsequentialist.9 If humanity functioned as an object of the will in this sense it would obviously violate the principle of autonomy because it would set out an object to be promoted, a good, prior to the categorical imperative in precisely the way that Kant attributes to heteronomous moral principles. 8 9 that the value of humanity understood in this sense need not precede the moral law but can issue from a command of reason. Oliver Sensen suggests that this lack of inclusion of the absolute value of humanity in Kant’s list of ends (which Sensen identifies here in terms of the good) is evidence that Kant cannot have thought that humanity can function as a value grounding the categorical imperative (Sensen 2011, p. 16). This leap is too quick. Kant’s omission of the value of humanity from these lists means that humanity would not be the type of end to be created or attained through action, but it is still possible that humanity could be a different kind of end grounding the categorical imperative in a different way. There are other reasons to reject the latter claim that I will discuss. I take Paul Guyer, who sees absolute value as freedom (Guyer 2000), and David Cummiskey, who understands Kant’s valuing of rational nature to allow for a consequentialism (Cummiskey 1996), to offer interpretations of this type. Their conceptions of value are not precisely equivalent to the kind of goods that human beings seek and that Kant condemns as the foundation for heteronomous moral principles. But there is a sense that the good they identify as humanity is to be produced. Their conception is similar to Johnson’s claim (see footnote 6 to this chapter) that humanity might be understood as something to be realized.
214 Morality beyond nature? I take this consideration to be a reason to reject any interpretation that makes Kant into some kind of quasi-consequentialist. The absolute value of humanity has to be understood as the second kind of end, a limitation on the deliberations and decisions of moral agents.10 Realists about value can offer this interpretation as a way to argue that humanity is an end that does not violate autonomy, because not an end to be attained, yet is not derived from the categorical imperative. The argument from autonomy to moral idealism can proceed, however, by arguing that even this kind of limiting value as the basis of the moral law would violate autonomy. Rather than being heteronomous by being a characteristic of an object of volition as something for the will to produce or create, the value of humanity as a limiting condition that precedes the moral law would fail to be autonomous because it prevents the will, as pure practical reason, from being a law to itself. If any independently existing value puts a limitation on the formulation of the moral law, then reason fails to be autonomous. The way that value realist interpretations of Kant understand the value of humanity, it does put a limitation on the formulation of the moral law. Allen Wood offers precisely that kind of realist interpretation of the role of the value of humanity in relation to the formulation of the moral law: “In the most complete or universal formula of the moral law, [the formula of humanity], this value is developed into the ground of moral legislation itself”.11 Wood appears to separate this claim from a relatively innocuous claim that the value of humanity serves as a “motive” to follow the categorical imperative.12 If the value of humanity is to function as a motive to follow the categorical imperative and does not determine the content of that imperative, it would not violate autonomy. Humanity as a ground of legislation would violate autonomy by placing something as a limit to the legislation of reason. This is a difficult point to grasp because the value of humanity is said to be necessary for all rational beings just as the categorical imperative is. Both are a 10 11 12 Wood makes this point as well by differentiating the ends to be produced, which are the subject of the moral law, and the objective end of humanity, which he takes to ground the principle of morality (Wood 2008, p. 85). (Wood 2008, p. 85, my emphasis). A motive to obey the categorical imperative is consistent with autonomy, just as the feeling of respect as an empirical motivation to perform right acts is consistent with the purely formal rational origin of the moral law. He describes this relation as “the fundamental principle expresses, or in turn rests on, a fundamental value” but he also describes it in terms of a motive for the categorical imperative (Wood 2008, p. 55). Humanity can function as that motive because it is the end that rational beings qua rational beings have already as their subjective end – subjective because it is the end of each particular rational being rather than reason itself – and rational agents are thus already able to consider it in relation to their maxims for actions. Humanity is not an objective motive until reason declares it to be (4:428–29). In a footnote to this passage Kant defers defending his claim that humanity has this objective status until Groundwork III (the final section of this chapter will examine the status of Kant’s claims in Groundwork III).
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 215 priori and both stem from the nature of reason. Kant’s argument for the formula of humanity rests on the claim that one cannot have a categorical imperative without a necessary end. There are, however, different ways to understand the necessity of the end. First, “necessary” does not imply “independent of the agent” in a transcendental sense. Kant’s conception of the a priori – necessary and universal – transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason separates necessity and independence from the transcendental subject of experience. In parallel to this claim, Kant’s requirement that there be a necessary end does not dictate that the end exists independent of the moral agent. Second, the necessity of the end can have two possible scopes: a necessary end of maxims and a necessary end of the moral law itself. These two different scopes for the necessity of the end allow for the categorical imperative itself to be merely formal (4:416) while at the same time this formal categorical imperative can command an end for maxims. A look at Kant’s summary of the formulas of the categorical imperative indicates that Kant intends the necessary end to be an end for maxims: he says that “all maxims have, namely . . . a form, which consists in universality, . . . a matter, namely an end, and in this respect the formula says that a rational being, as an end by its nature and hence as an end in itself, must in every maxim serve as the limiting condition of all merely relative and arbitrary ends” (4:436, first and last emphases are mine). The final result is precisely that one’s maxims are limited by the value of humanity as an end in itself. The way that the value of humanity functions is not as the legislative basis for the formulation of humanity that a priori limits the ability of reason to formulate the categorical imperative itself, (which would violate autonomy). Rather, the very fact that reason is legislating a categorical imperative raises the issue of the need for some corresponding end that would operate in relation to maxims, and reason determines that this end is humanity as a property of rational beings. Another consideration in rejecting Wood’s claim that the independent value is prior to the determination of the moral law is to note that Wood stresses Kant’s argument for the principle of humanity, which is just one formula of the categorical imperative, over the broader context of Kant’s initial argument for the categorical imperative as such in Groundwork I and Groundwork II up through the first formulation at 4:421. But if one reads the argument for the principle of humanity in light of Kant’s more general claim about the merely formal nature of the categorical imperative, one can see that the value of humanity is not understood as the basis for formulating the moral law but only as a consequence of reason’s legislation of that law. In that argument Kant stresses that the categorical imperative concerns merely the form and not the matter of action (4:416) and requires only conformity with law and not any condition limiting law as such (4:412, 4:420–21). It is not clear why Kant
216 Morality beyond nature? would think that he is able to formulate the categorical imperative without any reference to any end valuable in itself yet in a manner sufficient to derive and state the categorical imperative if, as Wood has it, the categorical imperative is grounded on this independent value in itself. Only after Kant has formulated the categorical imperative does he then claim that the will requires an end valid for all rational beings as a “motivating ground” for the will’s selfdetermination (4:427). Kant holds that “practical principles are formal if they abstract from all subjective ends” (4:427), that is to say, the categorical imperative can still be formal if it abstracts not from every end but only from subjective ends. The formal moral law can be compatible with an objective motivating ground but not a subjective incentive. It is important to keep this understanding of “ground” as motivating ground in mind when interpreting Kant’s crucial following paragraph: But suppose there were something the existence of which in itself has an absolute value, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws, then in it, and in it alone, would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, that is, of a practical law. (4:428) When Kant uses the term “ground” here, it is best to read him as meaning “motivating ground of” rather than “basis for formulating” the categorical imperative. And in that case Kant is saying that any command to a rational being to act in some particular way – in general, to adopt a maxim that can serve as a law – requires that some end be taken into consideration. Since the categorical imperative is a general command regarding the fitness of maxims, it requires a general end that reason can provide a priori. Humanity as a feature of rational beings as such is this general end. The successful argument from autonomy to the moral idealism of value rests not upon a claim that humanity would be a heteronomous end to be produced but upon a claim that it would be an a priori constraint on the legislative autonomy of reason. An independent value of humanity as the basis of the moral law would violate autonomy if that value were to be seen as shaping the actual legislation of the categorical imperative by reason. If instead the value of humanity is understood as objective, and so an end for all rational beings as such, only when reason promulgates the categorical imperative and so requires such an end as a constraint for particular maxims, then autonomy is not threatened. These considerations do not preclude some kind of empirical realism about the value of humanity. The considerations Kant employs in the Groundwork are at the transcendental level of an analysis of moral agency itself. The autonomy of reason rules out that the value can precede the legislation of the moral law but allows that the value is a precondition for the moral law’s existence: Kant says, “If, then, there is to be a supreme practical principle and,
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 217 with respect to the human will, a categorical imperative, it must be one such that, from the representation of what is necessarily an end for everyone because it is an end in itself, it constitutes an objective principle of the will and thus can serve as a universal practical law” (4:428). A possible metaphysics of value compatible with autonomy would have the transcendental ideality but empirical reality of an independent value of humanity. In the next section I will show that the very idea of an intrinsic moral value of things, including empirical things in nature, is inconsistent with other elements of Kant’s philosophy. I also give a further reason to reject a transcendental realism about value. Thus no empirically real value property is possible. The following section will show that absolute value in Kant is only a formal ordering of ends and not a property of objects. Absolute value as a nonnatural property Absolute value, I will show, is in an important way like the contingent value of chosen ends and is not an intrinsic property of objects or even of moral beings. In brief, just as contingently chosen ends have value only because particular moral agents order their ends to reflect their desires, humanity in rational persons has value only because reason orders ends according to its moral law. Since practical reason is what defines moral agency, the value of humanity is dependent on moral agency and is thus transcendentally ideal and not transcendentally real. A transcendentally real absolute value would be intrinsic to objects as they are independently of any relation to transcendental moral agency. Certainly some of Kant’s language suggests that humanity possesses value as an intrinsic property of rational beings. Kant says that a rational being is something “the existence of which in itself has an absolute value” and “exists as an end in itself” (4:428, modified). But there is just as much textual evidence that Kant understands value as dependent upon the moral law or upon reason. He says that “nothing can have a value other than that which the law determines for it” (4:436, modified). That the former passages should be understood under the rubric of the latter passage is suggested by the sentence immediately after this last quotation, where Kant adds, “But the lawgiving itself, which determines all value, must for that very reason have a dignity, that is, an unconditional, incomparable value” (4:436, modified, my emphasis). The law determines the value of everything, including itself as a condition for the possibility of any other value.13 13 Johnson stresses that we should “take Kant at his word” that “‘nothing’ means just that, nothing” and acknowledge that the value of lawmaking that determines value is a product of the lawmaking (Johnson 2007, p. 143).
218 Morality beyond nature? Dueling passages from Kant will not by themselves resolve the interpretive issue.14 There are several reasons to hold that Kant’s understanding of the value of humanity is not a property of objects or of beings independent of the perspective of the moral agent. First, practical reason provides norms while theoretical reason concerns ontology. Second, human beings would lack knowledge of any independent value. Third, even if practical reason were to be able to determine the existence of a value property in things, it would be part of the practical point of view and not an independent ontology. Fourth, even if the thing or property of absolute value were to exist independent of a property of rational beings, the value of that thing or property would as normative not fit into the ontology of nature but would have to be part of the practical point of view. First, existence is prima facie not constituted by normative properties. The divide between theoretical and practical reason as that between ontology and normativity needs to be taken seriously as a basis for further understanding of either. Practical reason might be able to determine that rational beings ought to be treated as ends in themselves but cannot determine that rational beings really are ends in themselves. This point is both basic and controversial. My Chapter 2 on the nature of philosophy showed that the practical is concerned with determination of free actions and not with the nature of what is. Second, an independent absolute value could not exist in nature. Oliver Sensen argues against value realism in part with an epistemological argument that if value were independently real, human beings would have no access to it and it would be able to play no part in our moral lives, but his reasoning also works to show the ontological difficulty.15 The ontology of physical nature is constituted by the laws of nature applied to intuitions. Clearly absolute value is not something that human beings can sense through outer intuition. Nor could it be something that is a property of an outer object accessed through inner intuition via feeling, for several reasons: it would lack necessity and universality as a product of feeling. Feeling also reveals to human beings more about themselves than about the object because it can at best show that there is something in the object that causes us to have certain feelings; it no more reveals the relevant properties in the object any more than aesthetic feeling reveals that objects possess beauty. Without laws of nature to connect the inner intuition of feeling to any outer property of value we cannot include any value property in an ontology of nature based on inner intuition. One might be able to intuit the value of oneself through inner intuition, although Kant does not 14 15 For the assessment of relevant passages by a realist, see (Stern 2011b, pp. 26–40) and by an idealist, (Sensen 2011, pp. 21–3, 39–51). (Sensen 2011, 19–20). In my paragraph I modify and expand his approach.
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 219 claim anything like this access to value and it would not make value an independent property. Kant does seem to allow for something like a direct moral awareness for human beings in inner sense. The fact of reason is an experience of moral obligation in the guise of the categorical imperative as the activity of reason. This direct awareness, however, does not provide a way for moral agents to access value properties in nature. The fact of reason itself is not an awareness of value but of the categorical imperative. At best moral agents would be able to reason to some independent value on the basis of their awareness of the categorical imperative. I treat this possibility in more detail in the following paragraphs. Here I will note that the fact of reason is also said to be the basis for practical knowledge of freedom (“freedom is indeed the ratio essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom” (5:4)) but not value. Further, the fact of reason, as discussed in Chapter 3, is part of the practical point of view and is not intended by Kant to reveal any ontology. For these reasons value cannot be an intrinsic property of empirical agents in nature. There can be no empirical value property in nature on this basis. Lack of value in nature does not rule out the existence of an independent value of moral agents in themselves independent of nature, that is, transcendentally real as a nonnatural thing in itself, just as reason could in theory determine that there must be a God. This leads to the third overall reason that value cannot be an intrinsic property, namely that there would be no way that moral agents could know such a property through reason and it would thus be irrelevant for morality. Reason would have to know this property directly or indirectly through a proof. Direct knowledge would be either active or passive. Reason is certainly capable of direct knowledge of things that it actively creates, such as ideas and principles, but if the reason of the transcendental moral agent were to create the value, that value could not be an independent intrinsic property of anything. And if value is understood as a product of the activity of reason, it would thereby be ideal rather than real because it is dependent on reason. Reason also has no way to passively access the independent property; any passivity on the part of the moral agent, and more broadly on the part of cognitive beings like us, implies an activity on the part of the thing to be known and must come to us through the mediation of our intuition, bringing the argument back to the level of intuition and nature. So reason would not be able to directly access any transcendentally independent value property. The only mode left for reason to know about an independent value property is indirectly by proof. Kant spent a decade of his life and nearly 900 pages of text working out his arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason that reason cannot know anything by a priori proof. The best that reason can do is to create ideas a priori that can be used heuristically to help to systematize our
220 Morality beyond nature? knowledge of nature but that cannot themselves provide knowledge of any actual objects or properties of objects. The limitations on reason appear to forbid any indirect proof for an intrinsic value property. For Kant theoretical reason is unable to determine any such ontology by itself because it would extend its claims beyond possible experience. But perhaps practical reason would be able to do this. In his discussion of the postulates of practical reason Kant does claim that practical reason is authorized to insist on certain claims that are beyond the authority of speculative reason (5:120–21). I have already argued in Chapter 5 that the postulates are best understood as making no ontological claims. Later in this chapter, however, I will discuss the nature of reason’s claims about the moral order in Groundwork III and show more particularly that even if reason were to postulate, as it were, that there was an absolute value, it would still be only an idea of reason and not have any ontological import. Practical reason’s other possible proof is based on the requirements for the categorical imperative itself. The final possible way for moral agents to know through reason that there is absolute independent value is to derive it from the categorical imperative. This approach would not violate autonomy if it could be shown that the categorical imperative requires that there be some independent intrinsic value of the objects of moral concern rather than the stronger claim that the categorical imperative itself must be grounded on an independent value. The precise nature of the value that is required by the categorical imperative will preclude this option. This fourth and final main reason that there can be no independent value property centers on the precise nature of value Kant identifies in his discussion of the various formulas of the categorical imperative in Groundwork II. One must not forget that there is a difference between a property itself and any value of that property as a further property. Human beings are said to be of absolute value in virtue of their humanity. Rational beings must exist, one might say, so the value of the humanity of rational beings must lie in them. But value and humanity are still different properties. Understood as a capacity for practical freedom or for rational agency or for exercise of a good will, humanity can be said to exist as part of nature explainable completely in terms of psychological or physiological characteristics. If humanity can be specified in these ways then it is at least empirically real. Suppose even that humanity is also transcendentally real, that is, a property of moral agents as objects independent of the transcendental moral subject. Such an ontology would by itself prove nothing about any value properties. The value of humanity is an additional property. The way that Kant specifies that value is to say that humanity is an end in itself. Humanity is the characteristic of rational beings that reason identifies as of value (it is not value itself) and thus as also having the property of being ends in themselves. Kant says, “rational beings are called
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 221 ‘persons’ because their nature already marks them out as an end in itself” (4:428, my emphasis). To say that something is an end in itself is to say that it is valuable and vice versa. This value as end in itself cannot be an intrinsic property of objects. Being an end, like being a means, is not an intrinsic property of anything. Ends are only determined by beings who are able to set ends. Empirical moral agents set ends and by doing so mark them out as valuable. To say that a moral agent values something is to say that the moral agent holds it as an end (or a means to the end). Even when a moral agent recognizes herself as an end in itself she does so qua moral subject in relation to herself qua moral object. The same relation works at the transcendental level. Pure practical reason as the faculty of a transcendental moral agent holds humanity to be an end in itself; this constitutes the value of humanity. Reason does not insist that humanity is an end in itself because it has some other value. The value of humanity is just being held by reason as an end. Value as end in itself is not an intrinsic property of beings with humanity but demands a relation to practical reason. To some realists this conclusion makes Kant’s identification of humanity as having value seem arbitrary. They might say that if humanity does not already have value, then there would be no nonarbitrary reason for the categorical imperative to assign it the status of the most valuable end. Thus they would reject the entire project of examining how reason can create and assign value. I think that this worry itself is misguided and that, in fact, in two ways the charge of arbitrariness applies better to a value realist. First, if they are allowing that there is a reason for the thing of value to have that value, then their claims arbitrarily assume that it is incorrect for reason to assign value to an object based on some nonvalue properties that the object has but that it would be correct for the value itself in the object to be based on nonvalue properties. Kant always supplies reasons why humanity is of value: because the nature of rational beings marks them out as an end in itself (4:428), because humanity possesses autonomy as the ability to give laws (4:435–36), and so on. The value is based on some nonvalue properties regardless of whether reason assigns that value or it is intrinsic to the object. Since even if value is an intrinsic property to objects, it still rests on some other features that the object possesses, then why not allow reason to use the same basis for its assignment of value to the object? The value realist does not have a nonarbitrary reason to disallow reason from building value on nonvalue properties yet allow intrinsic value properties to rest on nonvalue properties. But perhaps the value realist would deny that there is any basis for the value property possessed by humanity but instead claim that value is sui generis. In this case, a second kind of arbitrariness arises. It would be arbitrary if there were no reason for humanity to have value. In particular if it were the case that humanity simply was valuable without further explanation possible, then there
222 Morality beyond nature? would be an amazing coincidence that humanity, which includes the selflegislative ability of reason, would be the value that reason is forced to recognize as the highest value. Reason would be in the state of commanding all rational beings to respect the highest value, which just happens to be an activity of reason itself. The value realist position can be described this way because the value realist in this second kind of case would be denying not only that reason is the source of assigning value but also that there is any explanation why humanity has value. And further, when the arbitrariness of intrinsic value is described this way, it makes it clear why reason’s assigning value to humanity is not arbitrary. If reason assigns value to humanity, which includes the exercise of reason, then reason is assigning value to its own manifestation. What could be more appropriate for reason to assign value to than itself? Thus there is a nonarbitrary reason for the faculty of reason to assign value to humanity. A charge of arbitrariness for the idealist claim about reason as the source of value is baseless. The tables can instead be turned against the value realist who is implicated in not having a nonarbitrary reason for the claim that humanity is of value. In the following section I explain in more detail what value is in terms of the order that reason imposes upon the empirical ends of moral agents through the transcendental order that separates ends in themselves from contingent ends. The order of reason The key to understanding what absolute value is lies in stressing that practical reason itself provides a normative order to things by means of the categorical imperative. Autonomy implies that the will, as practical reason, itself determines its own law. The law in turn determines what is of absolute value, but that means only that the actions and ends that are set by the law are ordered by reason. Value is merely the formal ranking of ends by reason through its promulgation of moral law. Kant refers to this ordering by reason as an intelligible order, the formal ordering that practical reason provides to nature through the categorical imperative. Any absolute value has to be understood in relation to this formal ordering of ends by reason. To understand this moral order of reason as a merely formal aspect one should compare it to the individual empirical moral agent’s ordering of contingent ends, such as having a certain job, eating fresh papaya, playing the piano, or helping a certain charity. Each individual moral agent chooses and ranks ends that she desires to pursue, thereby creating a subjective order among the objects and events in nature that constitute either the means for ends or those ends themselves. The value of these ends is not a property of empirical objects or events but is merely a shorthand for their place in the formal order that the agent imposes on nature: for an end to have any subjective value at all
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 223 is for that agent to include it somewhere in her hierarchy of ends, the greater or lesser value of ends is their place in that agent’s hierarchy of ends. Kant puts the point this way in the Groundwork: “The ends that a rational being proposes at his discretion as effects of his actions (material ends) are all only relative; for only their mere relation to a specially constituted faculty of desire on the part of the subject gives them their value” (4:429, modified). Kant understands value in a strictly deflationary way as simply the fact that an agent has that end and ranks it against other ends. The same conception of value works at the transcendental level for the absolute value of humanity in relation to the transcendental moral agent. Instead of the myriad of particular contingent ends of individuals, the transcendental moral agent must abstract from content and face two possible kinds of ends, necessary and contingent; the latter are simply the possible contingently chosen ends of moral agents. The necessary end is deemed by reason to be humanity. Pure practical reason imposes its own order on the objects in nature by ranking these two kinds of ends in the abstract. The ranking is simple: humanity is always to be ranked higher than any contingent end and it thus has value as an end in itself. This is the import of the formula of humanity, but one clearer place where Kant describes this is in his claim that humanity has dignity beyond all price (4:434–35). A price is fixed in relation to other objects, some of which would be considered more desirable than others and thus command a higher price. The dignity of humanity beyond all price means that nothing could be the equivalent or be above humanity in price.16 No appeal to any intrinsic value property is needed. To say that human beings are to be treated as ends in themselves is to say that when comparing various ends, there is none higher than that of humanity on the scale provided by reason. 16 Oliver Sensen has recently argued that Kant’s use of the term “dignity” reflects its traditional meaning as standing raised up above others and does not refer to any intrinsic property (Sensen 2011, pp. 143–73). Sensen makes a detailed assessment of traditional and contemporary uses of the term “dignity” and shows that the contemporary understanding of dignity as an intrinsic value possessed by human beings was not operative in Kant’s time and is not reflected in Kant’s use of the term. The traditional meaning of dignity is expressed in the sense of a particular rank that distinguishes one from others. A dignified person might avoid behavior she feels is beneath her dignity. Human beings were said to have dignity within nature in virtue of their possession of certain abilities that animals did not have, such as reason. Dignity did not indicate any intrinsic value; rather, it indicated a special status that might then make certain treatment appropriate, although the status and elevation does not require any moral valuation. Two specific examples of this nonmoral kind of elevation are the “dignity of a teacher” and the “dignity of mathematics”, both of which are terms Kant used (Religion, 6:162 and Pure Reason A464/B492). This sense of dignity is relational rather than intrinsic. Something is dignified in relation to other things that do not have the same elevated status. Nothing possesses dignity intrinsically. Kant’s use of “dignity” in his moral writings, Sensen shows, is in line with the traditional meaning and so need not indicate a reference to any intrinsic moral value. (Sensen 2009). I am indebted to Sensen’s work on dignity and value in formulating my similar conception.
224 Morality beyond nature? Reason does not recognize any preexisting value of humanity but reason assigns that value to humanity through its ordering of ends. All value, even absolute value, is thus for Kant ideal rather than real. In a transcendental sense all value depends upon the transcendental moral subject as a rational being subject to the categorical imperative imposed by reason itself. In an empirical sense, absolute value is objective in that every rational being must recognize it, but there is no independently empirically real value property in persons or objects in nature. This idealism of value is also fully compatible with a metaphysical naturalism in which the order imposed by reason is merely a formal ordering of objects and persons in nature. The order of reason is a reflection of the formal character of the categorical imperative. Through the categorical imperative pure practical reason imposes its own intelligible order on nature without adding any content to nature except the actions that reason itself causes. This order imposed by reason is the same as the order Kant cites in the Third Antinomy when he says that “reason does not give in to those grounds which are empirically given, and it does not follow the order of things as they are presented in intuition, but with complete spontaneity it makes its own order according to ideas” in particular declaring certain “actions to be necessary” and possible through the causality of reason (A548/B576). It is the same order mentioned in Groundwork III as “the idea of another order and another lawgiving than that of the mechanism of nature” (4:458). Kant also describes an “intelligible order” in the second Critique (5:42, 5:86–87, and 5:106). As an ordering of objects, this order of reason is an imposition of form onto the content of nature. The order of value is not intrinsic to nature but is determined only through reason and applies to nature. The intelligible order of things is not an order of intelligible things but an order of things in our experience, particularly in relation to rational beings. In the Canon of Pure Reason Kant defines the “moral world” as “the world as it would be if it were in conformity with all moral laws (as it can be in accordance with the freedom of rational beings and should be in accordance with the necessary laws of morality)” but which is “conceived thus far merely as an intelligible world . . . [and] is therefore a mere, yet practical, idea which really can and should have its influence on the sensible world, in order to make it agree as far as possible with this idea”. (A808/B836). This intelligible world is in essence an idea of the order of reason actualized. The formal order imposed on the content of nature would result in a fully moral world in which all of reason’s value ordering is respected and all rational beings follow the dictates of the categorical imperative. Kant calls the intelligible world an idea. I discussed the nature of ideas of reason in Chapter 5, but it is worth noting that in his initial discussion of ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant uses normative examples of ideas. Plato’s ideas were, Kant says, preeminently
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 225 practical. The examples of virtue and of a republic show that ideas can function as paradigms or standards for actions (A315–16/B371–73). Through reason these ideas can become “efficient causes (of actions and their objects), namely in morality” and thus can have real effects on the world (A317/B374). The moral world that Kant calls an idea in the Canon must be understood along these lines as archetype, but it is more than simply a model since it also includes the self-conception of moral beings as members of such a world. In the Canon the moral world is also said to include moral beings. Kant goes on to say of this moral world: The idea of a moral world thus has objective reality, not as if it pertained to an object of an intelligible intuition (for we cannot even think of such a thing), but as pertaining to the sensible world, although as an object of pure reason in its practical use and a corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, insofar as their free power of choice under moral laws has thoroughgoing systematic unity in itself as well as with the freedom of everyone else. (A808/B837) The moral world is not merely the order of ends or results of these actions but also includes the rational beings themselves united in a kind of mystical body. A full idea of a moral world, however, does not picture the rational beings outside of or independent of their places in nature but only insofar as their free powers of choice are in a systematic connection. The connection among rational beings in choosing their actions systematically in accordance with moral laws is just as formal as the lawful ordering by reason itself. Thus the conception of an intelligible world is one that also includes rational beings acting as moral agents in the world. It is clear that moral agents at least represent themselves as being members of the intelligible world when considering their actions in nature. Kant even holds that rational beings in the sensible world are also by virtue of their obligation to the moral law already members of the intelligible world as a moral world. In the second Critique Kant’s declares that “We are indeed legislative members of a kingdom of morals [Reich der Sitten] possible through freedom and represented to us by practical reason” (5:82). The moral world can be created through free acts in the sensible world; insofar as humans actually do follow the categorical imperative they actually bring about the partial transformation of the sensible world into a moral world as ordered by reason. The Critique of Practical Reason clarifies this use of the intelligible world as a partial realization of the order of reason in the sensible world by distinguishing the concepts of the archetypal and ectypal worlds. The direct application of the moral order to the sensible world provides it with the form of an intelligible world. “This law is to furnish the sensible world, as a sensible nature (in what concerns rational beings), with the form of an intelligible
226 Morality beyond nature? world [Verstandeswelt], that is, of a supersensible nature, though without infringing upon the mechanism of the former . . . supersensible nature, so far as we can make for ourselves a concept of it, is nothing else than a nature under the autonomy of pure practical reason” (5:43). The passage continues by explaining our application of the intelligible world to the sensible world as consisting of two stages: the archetype (“natura archetypa”), the idea according to which the sensible world ought to be shaped, and the ectype (“natura ectypa”), the sensible world when it receives the form of the intelligible world. Kant refers to the archetype as the original (“urbildliche”) world and the ectype as the reproduced (“nachgebildete”) world. Moral agents “confer on the sensible world the form of a whole of rational beings” (5:43). Rational agents possess an idea of the world as it would be if it were governed solely by the moral law. They then apply this idea to the sensible world in order to try to make the sensible world fit this model as closely as possible. Hence the ectypal world is the intelligible world as applied to the sensible world. The ectypal world transforms the sensible world into a moral world as far as is possible, but this is only possible as form and not as content.17 But it is still only a view of the sensible world under an intelligible, formal order. There are no material moral properties at stake here, no content that does not depend upon the formal ordering of nature demanded by the moral law and brought into existence only through the actions of moral agents. I have shown that Kant intended the intelligible world in his moral theory to apply to nature first by providing the idea of a normative order of practical reason to use as a guide for actions and second to be realized in nature to the extent that moral agents are actually able to act to bring about that order. Since the application is merely formal, no content is imposed on nature; rather, reason through the moral law provides an intelligible order of things in nature and not an order of intelligible things outside nature. Moral properties such as value are part of the formal, practical view of nature and are not found independently in nature. Just as the particular value of contingently chosen ends is not in nature but is merely an intelligible property conceived 17 Thomas Auxter argues that the ectypal world performs the function I have assigned to the archetypal world, namely, that of providing an idea of a morally perfect world to reason (Auxter 1982, pp. 63–4). His reading relies on a claim that the archetypal world as an idea of reason cannot include any sensible content and so requires an ectypal world to apply this abstract idea of moral perfection to sensibility in general. The ectypal world is therefore for Auxter not an interpretation of actual experience along moral lines but only an idea of a morally perfect world. On this reading, however, no room is left for the archetypal world as an idea of reason. The archetypal world, as a moral idea of reason excluding all sensible content, would consist merely of form and would be the categorical imperative itself (5:33), but would no longer be an idea of a world. Further, Auxter quotes but does not take into account Kant’s remark that the ectypal world “must exist in the sensible world” (5:43).
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 227 by the particular moral agent who chooses that end, the objective value of the necessary end of humanity is not in nature but is merely an intelligible property conceived by reason as a part of its determination of the categorical imperative. To say that value is an intelligible property is only shorthand for saying that an individual (for subjective value) or reason itself (for objective value) places it above other things in the order of ends each impose on nature. The transcendental moral idealist can still insist that there is a kind of empirical realism about value, although as an objective standard and not as an independent property. The basis of this claim would lie in the status of reason in moral agency. A successful transcendental argument for moral agency would show that all beings with a certain ability, such as the ability to deliberate prior to choosing to act, would have to have other certain characteristics, such as a particular structure to the deliberative process which for Kant would be at least agent-perspective freedom governed by reason through the moral law as a categorical imperative. Moral agents who are thereby necessarily governed by the faculty of reason would also thereby necessarily share the moral experience of an intelligible world, and the intelligible world and its value properties could be said to be empirically real in that sense. There would be no intrinsic value or good or right in objects, but the source of those moral properties in pure practical reason would give them a legitimacy beyond the individual empirical moral agent, even beyond all possible empirical moral agents, just as I said in Chapter 4, that one might consider pure practical reason as empirically real. The key to this transcendental structure for Kant would be that for all beings, the capacity to have moral experience would require that the being possess an objectively valid faculty of reason. The possession of objectively valid reason would be a fact in nature and the requirements of reason for value – understood as the formal ordering by reason – could be said to be empirically real as part of moral experience. That empirical reality of an objectively valid reason relies upon a successful argument for its transcendental necessity for moral agency. But as discussed in Chapter 4, Kant denies in the second Critique that a deduction that will prove the reality of the moral law is possible. Even more revealing is that even when Kant appears to have offered what he took to be a successful deduction in Groundwork III, his own reflections on it actually reveal that he neither intended nor believed that he had done any more than shown that empirical moral agents must operate with a certain self-conception that is itself ultimately inexplicable and, further, that it is only imposed by the subjective needs of human reason. This concession points to an empirical idealism for value as an objective standard as well as for other elements of moral agency, as my next section will show.
228 Morality beyond nature? Practical experience and the limits of reason The final sentence of Groundwork III ends with Kant invoking “a philosophy that strives in its principles up to the very boundary of human reason” (4:463). The long section before the final concluding paragraph is devoted to the topic “On the Outermost [äußersten] Boundary of All Practical Philosophy” (4:455, modified). Most commentators who discuss the deduction fail to extend their analysis to these final sections in any detail.18 They miss Kant’s own reflections on the status and results of the deduction. I contend that the success and scope of the attempted deduction in Groundwork III must be judged in reference to Kant’s discussion about this boundary. Specifically, I will argue that there is a strong parallel between the boundary discussed here and the boundary for legitimate knowledge in theoretical philosophy such that practical philosophy is subject to much the same limitations as theoretical philosophy, and that the limitations show that the deduction presented earlier in Groundwork III is intended to have a weaker conclusion than is usually assumed. The Groundwork III discussion of the intelligible, I will show, is not a claim about nonnatural objects but a claim about the intelligible order of things as determined by reason and the capability of human beings to conceive of themselves as part of this order in virtue of possessing pure practical reason. The world of rational beings and its laws and the freedom of human beings to be determined by pure practical reason rest not on any claims about objects independent of nature in space and time but on claims about the validity of pure practical reason understood as a faculty that produces its own order for nature. The categorical imperative is a valid moral principle if pure practical reason can be shown to be a valid faculty. But Kant refrains from claiming that the validity of pure practical reason is proved by the deduction. He instead invokes the ultimate inscrutability of the unconditional necessity of the categorical imperative and thus the practical standpoint overall. My claim regarding the section of Groundwork III on the outermost boundary of practical philosophy (4:455–63) is that it functions to provide a reminder that the deduction that has just been concluded must be understood in a limited, practical sense rather than in any kind of theoretical or speculative sense with ontological implications. Since much of Kant’s language in Groundwork III seems to invoke theoretical claims about human nature, this 18 See, for example, (Wood and Schönecker 2004, p. 198f) (Schönecker is responsible for the material on Groundwork III). Schönecker ends his analysis at the end of the Deduction (4:455). The notable exception is Henry Allison, whose recent commentary includes a thorough discussion of them (Allison 2011). I will note my agreements and disagreements with his interpretation in further notes.
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 229 caution is needed. He often asserts that human beings are members of the world of understanding (4:453) or things in themselves (4:451), or beings whose pure activity must be distinct from the sensible world (4:451). The basic argument Kant provides to escape from the famous apparent circle invokes transcendental idealism as a ground for division of the self into that which appears and that which does not appear (4:451–452). Human beings, he says, possess a purely active faculty of reason that justifies us in holding that we do not entirely belong to the world of sense but must also belong to an independent intelligible world. Kant’s section “How is a Categorical Imperative Possible?” invokes what looks like an ontological claim: “the world of understanding contains the ground of the world of sense and so too of its laws” (4:453). All these and many other passages point to a theoretical conclusion about the actual nature of human beings, an ontological claim about the nature of reality. Many commentators stress these passages in their interpretations of Groundwork III.19 The proper way to understand the deduction in Groundwork III is to see it in context. The context comes, first, from the initial sections of Groundwork III that set up the problem to be resolved; these sections receive detailed attention in the commentaries and are familiar enough to everyone to leave unexamined here. The second part of the context is in the section on the boundary of practical philosophy given after the deduction itself. Particularly the material in the last part of Groundwork III shows that the deduction is not to be understood in ontological terms but instead as an ultimately unsatisfactory defense of an idea of reason adopted as a self-conception by moral agents, namely, that moral agents possess an objectively valid pure practical reason. The term “boundary” can refer to two different things when understood from a certain perspective: an inner and an outer boundary. One can consider the atmosphere of earth, for example, to have an inner boundary where it begins as the ground and water end and an outer boundary as the atmosphere 19 Dieter Henrich sets the tone in a series of articles in which he claims that Kant seeks to provide a justification for morality he deems “moral insight” which must be “essentially ontological”. (Henrich 1994). His direct work on Groundwork III is (Henrich 1975). Dieter Schönecker makes what he calls Kant’s “onto-ethical” principle the lynchpin of his ontological interpretation of the argument (Schonecker 1999) and (Wood and Schönecker 2004). Paul Guyer sees Kant as offering a metaphysical argument (Guyer 2009), where Guyer gives a strongly metaphysical interpretation of the argument without delving into the material regarding the boundary of practical philosophy. In earlier work Guyer allows that Kant backs away from a claim that he has given a theoretical argument and instead assigns freedom the status of an idea (Guyer 2007a, p. 167). Henry Allison stands out as questioning the validity of any metaphysical reading. Allison is careful in sifting through the various claims and terminology in Groundwork III to separate what he sees as a metaphysical reading of transcendental idealism from what fits his own two-aspect interpretation. Allison admits that much of Kant’s language appears to invoke ontology while arguing that a more plausible interpretation is nonmetaphysical (Allison 2011, pp. 342–44).
230 Morality beyond nature? thins out and outer space begins. One can picture oneself rising from the sea, piercing the boundary between water and air, rising through the air, and eventually leaving air behind and entering empty space. Similarly, although a national border delimits territorial extent the same way in every location, an individual relates to that boundary differently when entering and when leaving a country, as would happen to a tourist driving through one country to reach another. The specific term used by Kant, “boundary of practical philosophy” will also refer to two different things. First, it can refer to a boundary between theoretical or speculative philosophy and practical philosophy, the conceptual division where theoretical claims leave off and practical claims begin. This I will call the “inner boundary”; Kant refers to it in paragraph 5 of the section (4:456) when he questions where the boundary of practical philosophy begins. Second it can refer to the extreme legitimate use of practical philosophy itself beyond which practical philosophy cannot venture. This latter is what Kant calls “the outermost boundary”. I will look at the inner boundary and its implications for the deduction before turning to the outer boundary and Kant’s final judgment on the deduction. The inner boundary of practical reason The general structure of Kant’s section on the boundaries of practical philosophy is this: the initial paragraphs (1–5) lay out the distinction between the nature of the practical and the speculative to show that the practical begins when ontological speculation ends and practical use of the result of speculation begins. The middle paragraphs (6–8) discuss the nature of the practical as positing an order of things different from that of nature, that is, the legitimate space for the practical beyond its beginning boundary. The final paragraphs (9–15) concern the determination of the outermost boundary and discussion of particular questions that can never be answered because they transgress the boundary.20 Kant provides an initial basis for the inner boundary in the first paragraph when he argues that there is a difference between pure concepts of the understanding, namely here causality, and ideas of reason, namely freedom. The basis is that the former can be confirmed in experience and the latter not. 20 In his commentary on the Groundwork, Allison holds that only the final third of this section concerns the boundary issue. This claim fails to take seriously the way in which the first paragraphs of this section begin the argument by setting out the distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy in relation to the use of reason. The preparation both settles the inner boundary of practical reason and lays the ground for determination of the outermost boundary as dependent upon the nature of reason and its ideas. Allison does see the middle part of this section as concerned with “the legitimate domain” of practical philosophy (Allison 2011, p. 348).
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 231 He concludes this paragraph with the claim that “freedom is only an idea of reason, the objective reality of which is in itself doubtful” (4:455). This distinction is important for two reasons. First, it immediately raises the question regarding how, and whether, the freedom discussed in Groundwork III and related ideas can be confirmed if not through experience. This issue is at the heart of Kant’s rejection of a deduction in the second Critique, and in the Groundwork Kant concludes that they cannot be confirmed but only ascribed to oneself as part of our self-conception as rational agents. Second, the identification of this freedom with an idea of reason already casts into doubt the interpretation that assumes that Kant is making an ontological claim in his deduction. In fact, looking back at the conclusion of Kant’s deduction in Groundwork III, one sees that Kant already invoked the term “idea”: categorical imperatives are said to be possible because “the idea of freedom” – not freedom itself – makes us members of an intelligible world; and that beyond our sensibly affected will we add “the idea of the same will but belonging to the world of understanding”, again not a claim that our will is actually such a pure will in any sense (4:454, my emphasis). The ideas of reason in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason were said not to have any reality of their own but to be illusory, and any positive use of the ideas would come merely from their immanent use in aiding the understanding’s task of cognizing our experience. We should expect, then, that Kant is working toward a claim that the self-ascription of freedom to our wills does not itself involve claims to reality but instead will aid in comprehending the nature of our experience as active beings. The distinction between sensibly confirmed concepts of understanding and ideas of reason, which are incapable of being confirmed, is not itself the inner boundary of the practical because speculative philosophy also uses ideas of reason. What, then, is the proper inner boundary for practical philosophy? 21 Let us compare the roles of speculative and practical philosophy to find it. As already noted, Kant presents both speculative and practical reason as ranging beyond the field of nature itself, that is, beyond the concepts of the understanding, to the realm of ideas. The boundary between the sensible and intelligible is not the inner boundary of the practical. Kant has also presented them as facing the same difficulty: the clash between freedom and natural causality. The thesis and antithesis arguments in the Third Antinomy of the first Critique exhibit the purely speculative origin of this issue; the practical origin of the issue is shown in the preceding paragraphs of Groundwork III. The appearance of this issue in both practical and speculative philosophy shows that the issue itself cannot provide the boundary. 21 Kant uses the terms “speculative philosophy” and “speculative reason”, and correspondingly “practical philosophy” and “practical reason”, interchangeably in Groundwork III.
232 Morality beyond nature? Kant also notes that both practical and speculative philosophy insist on resolving the issue, although with a difference that one might mistake for a boundary. Neither practical nor speculative reason can simply leave the problem unsolved. Speculative reason is said in Groundwork III to need to resolve the problem in order to clear the way for practical philosophy. Practical philosophy must resolve the problem in order to defend morality against the fatalist who otherwise would “chase away” moral science itself (4:456) and from similar “external attacks” (4:457). This discussion appears to introduce an asymmetry that could provide the basis for the boundary: perhaps the boundary of practical reason begins with the insistence that the clash between freedom and nature be resolved; perhaps speculative reason by itself has no interest in this matter. But this is not true: in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant insisted that speculative reason resolve the antinomies to defend reason itself from stubborn dogmatism and a hopeless skepticism (A407/B434). Further, if the insistence on solving the problem were to lie merely with practical philosophy, that fact alone could not constitute a boundary but merely be an effect of whatever it is behind the inner boundary that motivates the insistence. Even if Kant intended to claim in the Groundwork, contra the first Critique, that only practical reason has an interest in resolving the conflict, it would provide no more than a hint at the actual boundary. Kant offers another difference between practical and speculative philosophy that points indirectly toward the inner boundary: he assigns speculative but not practical philosophy the task of resolving this issue (4:456). This is not itself a boundary: Kant is quite explicit that “it cannot yet be said here that the boundary of practical philosophy begins” (4:456).22 By this he means that the task of resolving the problem is not within the boundaries of practical philosophy. One might say that this task is, however, the final geographical feature in the territory of speculative philosophy. What then constitutes the inner boundary of practical philosophy? It must concern whatever motivates practical reason to insist on a resolution to the clash between freedom and nature and also relate to the exclusive ability of speculative reason to try to resolve that clash. It must lie in the difference between the types of question asked by speculative and practical reason, and the resulting different ways that these questions can be answered. It must then be the fact that while speculative reason considers what is, practical reason asks what ought to be. Practical reason then has the motivation to resolve the 22 Jens Timmermann treats this paragraph as if Kant were questioning whether the outer boundary of practical philosophy begins here, then notes that the beginning is more appropriate (Timmermann 2007, p. 146).
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 233 issue because human beings ought to be free in order to be moral, yet it does not have the capability of resolving the issue by itself because it cannot determine what is the case. Here, then, is the inner boundary of practical philosophy. The inner boundary of practical reason in Groundwork III must be the point at which mere speculation about what is recedes and the moral ought requires the possible truth of some claim about freedom that entails overstepping the bounds of nature. This boundary begins where a self-ascription for moral purposes clashes with nature. One might say that the inner boundary of practical reason is determined by a) the line between experience as subject to concepts of the understanding and the content of ideas of reason that go beyond experience, and b) the requirements demanded by the ought. When one takes up the practical perspective of the ought in a way that results in an apparent clash with the concepts of the understanding, one has crossed the inner boundary and entered the territory of practical philosophy.23 The specific self-ascription that Kant discusses is that of an independence of reason from subjectively determined causation so that we may consider ourselves as subject to the demands of reason itself (4:457). I provided reasons for this interpretation in Chapter 4. This independence of reason would be possible only if we could consider ourselves “in a different order of things and in a relation to determining grounds of an entirely different kind” than the order of nature and its determining grounds in desires and sensible stimulations. This is precisely the order of things at stake in my discussion of value and moral experience in the first two sections of this chapter. Since the practical self-ascription of a free will (i.e., causality by reason) apparently clashes with causality in nature yet is inextricably linked to the claim that we ought to have a free will, it clearly lies in the territory of the practical. The import of this determination of the inner boundary is that it helps to explain the status of the conclusion of the deduction. When answering the question “How is a categorical imperative possible?” (4:454), Kant explains that the idea of freedom makes us members of the intelligible world, and that we use the idea of the will belonging to the world of understanding. That these are mere ideas and not actual empirically valid concepts of the understanding places them in the realm of ideas “the objective reality of which is in itself doubtful” (4:455). We human beings, for practical purposes, must think of ourselves as endowed with a free will that responds to the dictates of pure reason that itself gives the law. And the territory in which we adopt practical 23 The discussion about the inner boundary of practical philosophy concerns pure practical philosophy and not empirical or anthropological practical philosophy, which can be considered part of nature.
234 Morality beyond nature? ideas is the territory of practical philosophy. Having seen that territory from the perspective of its inner boundary, Kant turns to its other frontier: the outer boundary of practical philosophy. The outer boundary and the incomprehensibility of the practical The inner boundary shows where practical philosophy starts and to that extent provides part of the characterization of the nature of practical philosophy. The outer boundary will complete that characterization by showing the limits of practical philosophy. As limited, I will show, practical philosophy is necessarily incomplete. There are two reasons for the incompleteness of the ideas of reason for practical justification.24 First, they cannot themselves be explained and to that extent remain skeletal assertions rather than fully fleshed out justifications. Second, because they are ideas of reason, they are subject to the restrictions on reason itself regarding its search for the unconditioned. Both of these reasons point to limitations for the results of the deduction in Groundwork III. Kant identifies one aspect of the outer boundary in one sentence: “By thinking itself into a world of understanding practical reason does not at all overstep its boundaries, but it would certainly do so if it wanted to look or feel itself into it” (4:458, modified). Although we are justified on practical grounds in adopting the idea of a free will and pure reason, we do not know that we are intelligences, still less do we know how we could be intelligences. To adopt the idea of the intelligible world is not to hold to its reality. Later in the same paragraph Kant insists that the intelligible world is “only a standpoint that reason sees itself constrained to take” for practical purposes, and that the idea of the intelligible world (“the idea of another order and another lawgiving” than the natural order) is conceived under “its formal condition”, that is, law as universality of a maxim (4:458). To go beyond this mere practical standpoint as idea, and its only applicable practical use in defending the validity of reason in commanding the will to follow its formal condition of universality, is to pierce the outer boundary of the practical. Specifically, any attempt to explain how this reason and this will are possible violates the boundary. Kant’s explanation of this restriction links practical reason to speculative reason again, since both attempt to provide 24 Henrich identifies two ways that Kant presents the outermost boundary: first, as the incomprehensibility of how freedom is possible within the intelligible world, and second, as the incomprehensibility of any relation between freedom in the intelligible world and an interest in the sensible world (Henrich 1975, pp. 74–5). He admits that Kant treats these issues as identical (4:459–60) but takes them to be distinct because only one concerns the validity of and the other motivation for the moral law. But this distinction is irrelevant since Kant’s point is that nothing about the intelligible world is comprehensible, whether it relates to the sensible world or not.
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 235 ideas that cannot be confirmed by experience: “Where determination by laws of nature ceases, there all explanation ceases as well, and nothing is left but defense” (4:459). There is no possible experience that could correspond to the idea of freedom, that is, the activity of pure practical reason, and therefore no explanation of freedom is possible. The idea of freedom is only a “necessary presupposition of reason in a being that believes itself to be conscious of a will” (4:459, my emphasis). The defense consists in the assertion of ideas that are themselves incapable of any explanation.25 This identification of the outer boundary shows the limits of the Groundwork III deduction in particular but also of practical philosophy in general. Since no explanation of the ideas of practical reason can be given, those ideas must be only a partial justification for our human moral practices. These ideas can never serve to fully justify morality because there will always remain unanswerable questions about these ideas. The first of the two limitations on the deduction resulting from the identification of the outer boundary, then, is the inexplicability of the idea of a pure practical reason as a free causality. This limitation means that when the deduction invokes the concept of an intelligible world in which we would possess pure practical reason, the concept cannot be subjected to detailed analysis of how pure practical reason and free will are to be understood, nor even details about how the intelligible world could exist as such. The conclusion of the deduction is only for defense of our claim to be moral beings, not for any positive complete proof that we are such.26 The second limitation on the deduction resulting from the outer boundary is of even greater consequence. In the final paragraph of Groundwork III Kant again invokes a similarity between practical and speculative reason: both insist on absolute necessity but are unable to provide it. Speculative reason’s concern for nature raises the idea of “the absolute necessity of some supreme cause of the world” while practical reason’s concern for freedom “leads to an absolute necessity, but only of laws of actions of a rational being as such” (4:463). The difference between speculative and practical reason as a difference between “is” and “ought” is 25 26 In his extensive notes to his translation of the Groundwork into Portuguese, Guido de Almeida similarly notes the difference between a claim that it is necessary for human beings to presuppose freedom on the one hand and the possibility of that freedom which is presupposed on the other. In other words, Kant allows that practical philosophy requires us to adopt ideas that themselves refer to things that are incomprehensible and perhaps not even possible (Kant 2009, pp. 427–28). Allison describes this conclusion as an admission that Kant has shown only one necessary and not all the sufficient conditions for the possibility of the categorical imperative (Allison 2011, p. 359). I would stress that even this one necessary condition is only assumed as possible because it cannot itself be sufficiently explained.
236 Morality beyond nature? apparent here, but the similarity is more important. Both insist on absolute necessity. The import is explained by Kant as follows: Now, it is an essential principle of every use of our reason to push its cognition to consciousness of its necessity (for without this it would not be cognition on the part of reason). It is, however, an equally essential limitation of this same reason that it can see neither the necessity of what is or what happens nor the necessity of what ought to happen unless a condition under which it is and happens or ought to happen is put at the basis of this. (4:461) Practical reason and speculative reason share the property of seeking a condition for everything in their explanations. In order to find an end to this restless search, they both create an idea of something that is unconditioned, or necessary. Kant’s explanation in the Critique of Pure Reason of reason’s search for the unconditioned (A321–38/B377–96) is treated in the Groundwork as applying to practical reason as well. All of reason’s ideas are to be understood as attempts by reason to provide an unconditioned explanation for something.27 Practical reason’s idea of an absolutely necessary moral law is mentioned in this paragraph, but it is not the only practical idea that Kant considers at the time he wrote the Groundwork. Kant makes a similar point in the Naturrecht Feyerabend lecture, given summer 1784 when he was writing the Groundwork. The initial fifth portion of this lecture course, labeled as “Introduction”, provides an overview of some of the claims of the Groundwork, in particular showing the importance of freedom and the way in which universality and ends-in-themselves are applied to questions of political right. At one point early in the lecture Kant argues that in practical philosophy there must be something necessary, the necessity of which is inconceivable. But rather than an unconditioned necessary law as in the Groundwork, Kant here discusses an unconditioned necessary end: That something must exist as an end in itself and that not everything can exist merely as a means is as necessary in the system of ends as Ens a se [a being in itself] is in the series of efficient causes. A thing that is an end in itself is Bonum a se [a good in itself]. What can be considered merely as a means has value merely as a means when it is used as such. Now for this there must be a being that is an end in itself. One thing in nature is a means for another; that continues on and on, and it is necessary in the end to think of a thing that is itself an end, otherwise the series would have no end. (27:1321) 27 Allison claims that the position Kant argues for in the concluding remarks is unique to the Groundwork (Allison 2011, pp. 361–62). Allison claims that the quest for the unconditioned in practical philosophy does not appear in either the first or second Critique. Allison is overlooking the key role of the limits of explanation to the intelligible character of reason in the resolution to the Third Antinomy. As I show later on and have already discussed in Chapter 4, while Kant does not name pure practical reason as such, he does describe free causality in terms of the causality of reason and argues that the causality of reason is simply a given that cannot be questioned further.
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 237 Although Kant discusses a necessary end in the system of ends rather than a necessary law, the intent is similar.28 As in the Groundwork, Kant compares a practical necessity with a speculative concept of a necessary being as cause. Both are conclusions to which reason is drawn when considering a series of conditions. In the case of morality it is a meansends series of justifications; in the speculative it is the cause-effect series. In parallel with the Groundwork we should expect Kant to invoke the incomprehensibility of this necessity as a function of the nature of reason. Kant does precisely that: But how a being can be in itself just an end and never a means, is as hard to conceive as how in the series of causes there would have to be a necessary being. And yet we must accept both because of the needs of our reason to have everything complete. It lies in the nature of human reason that it can never have insight into something except as conditioned, never have insight into something without a ground, and there is no ground for ens and bonum a se [being and good in themselves]. (27:1321, my emphasis) In his Feyerabend lecture, then, Kant is using the same approach as in the Groundwork by showing how both speculative and practical reason, qua reason, posit something necessary and unconditioned for the sake of completeness, yet remain dissatisfied with the result because the necessary being or end is not fully explained through any conditions of its own.29 These passages from Feyerabend and the Groundwork are in fundamental continuity with the final paragraphs of the resolution to the Third Antinomy where Kant says that there can be no further question of what causes reason to have the intelligible character that it has. The two unanswerable questions regarding the causality of reason are first, “why has reason not determined itself otherwise?” and “why has [reason] not determined appearances 28 29 Paul Guyer also quotes from this passage from Feyerabend but interprets in in light of his claim that freedom is the thing valued in itself (Guyer 1998, p. 33). Without citing and probably without being aware of these passages from the Feyerabend lecture, Christine Korsgaard attributes a similar kind of reasoning to Kant regarding the way that pure reason’s search for the unconditioned is worked out in both theoretical and practical reason (Korsgaard 1996a, pp. 117, 119). She mistakenly, however, emphasizes a difference in that theoretical reason inevitably runs into antinomies while practical reason does not, which she takes to allow practical reason the liberty to use the idea of the unconditioned positively. It is true that theoretical reason runs into antinomies when it demands an unconditioned, but this is true only when the demand is to find the unconditioned in experience (taken as a transcendentally real world). Reason’s search for the unconditioned also causes it to demand an absolute subject (soul) and absolute being (God); in addition the solutions to the dynamical antinomies posit an unconditioned cause and unconditionally necessary being. The parallel between theoretical and practical is more important: the ideas of an unconditioned cause, unconditioned subject (soul), unconditioned end, or unconditioned law are all created by reason as placeholders for its own satisfaction and cannot be said to have any corresponding object in nature.
238 Morality beyond nature? otherwise through its causality?” (A556/B584). Neither question can be answered. Kant concludes that when looking for the causality of free actions we can only take one step, that is, attribute them to the intelligible cause, but we cannot discover any further condition for this causality of reason. This inquiry “surpasses every faculty of our reason, indeed, it surpasses the authority of our reason even to ask it” (A557/B585).30 These two other instances of Kant discussing the outer limits of the capacity of reason to provide a completely unconditioned or necessary basis for moral claims supplement Kant’s admission in the final paragraph of the Groundwork that reason cannot ever be completely satisfied with a claim that the moral law is itself necessary and unconditioned. Reason has only been able to “assume it without any means of making it comprehensible to itself” (4:463). This, then, is the second limitation given by the outer boundary of practical philosophy to the results of the deduction in Groundwork III. The nature of reason itself precludes any completely successful deduction of the moral law. Since the issue to be defended in the deduction is not empirical, it must be resolved by reason. But as reason it always strives for more explanation that it can provide. The ideas of reason – in the first Critique, soul, world, and God, and in the Groundwork, freedom and its connected absolute necessity of the moral law, and even the postulates in the second Critique – are merely heuristic devices to represent that which reason seeks. At some point in its attempts to answer questions about the basis for a claim, reason posits that there is an answer, represented by the idea, but can never provide a sufficient defense of that posited answer. In the case of the moral law, reason seeks to understand absolutely necessary obligation but can go no further than to posit that there is an absolutely necessary moral law. Reason can offer no further explanation for this law. Kant’s final sentence admits that “this is all that can fairly be required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason” (4:463). 30 There is one difference between this conclusion and those in Feyerabend and Groundwork. In the latter Kant makes an analogy between the practical problem of searching for a condition for a necessary end or necessary law and the speculative search for a being in itself or supreme cause of the world. In the first Critique, however, Kant makes an analogy between reason as the unquestionable free cause and space as the outer form of human intuition. (Kant makes a similar analogy between moral law and the forms of intuition in a note dated during the 1780s [R7201, 19:275].) In both cases, Kant says, we can give no reason why they and no others fill the role they do. This analogy is much weaker than the others and misleads the reader. Space is not in any sense a condition in a series whereas reason as free cause is a condition in a series of causes and effects. One is not driven by the nature of reason to ask why human beings have the forms of intuition that they do have; but one is so driven to ask for further conditions for any cause in a series. The fundamental point of the analogy, however, still holds, namely that just as there is no explanation why we have space as a form of intuition instead of some other, to us inconceivable, form, there is no explanation why we have reason as opposed to some other, to us inconceivable, faculty.
Value and the inexplicability of the practical 239 Concluding remarks At the end of Groundwork III, Kant’s final position on his achievement in the deduction amounts to a warning not to take the conclusion to be more than a practical idea that human beings can use to help to justify their moral lives, provided that they do not venture too far in their quest for that justification. Even in the place where Kant is supposed to have provided his strongest argument in favor of a theoretical proof of the reality of morality, he does not conclude more than that human moral agents must conceive of themselves as beings endowed with an objectively valid reason. Only as a self-conception, only from within the empirical moral agent’s own practical point of view is this idea even operative, and then without any ontological implications that would confirm empirical reality to the objective rationality of other moral agents. In very broad terms, we should expect no different from Kant than the restriction of morality to the empirical moral agent and thus to an empirical moral idealism. Since morality is a product of reason, we should expect that morality would face the same boundaries of explanation that theoretical knowledge faces given the limitations of reason. More important, we should be prepared to accept with Kant that reason alone cannot provide knowledge of real things, which is the same as admitting that we should not assume that the universe is fundamentally rational. The main point of the Critique of Pure Reason is that reason cannot divulge reality to us. We can be guaranteed to know the structure only of the kind of world we can experience, that is, nature in space and time. The categories of the understanding and the forms of intuition can be known to be actual structures of our experience only because they can be shown necessary for our kind of experience. They have no confirmable validity beyond that limitation. Reason can add to the empirical knowledge of the world only the systematic organization of concepts of the understanding with the caveat that this systematic organization reflects the structure of reason and not the structure inherent in the objects of experience. Reason’s limitations are greater outside the boundary of experience. Reason cannot provide knowledge of the nature of things in general nor prove one way or the other whether there is a soul, a God, or a free cause. Were the universe itself rational, were it structured by reason, then the faculty of reason would be able to confidently and correctly provide answers to these questions. But it cannot. Nor would the practical use of reason be able to provide this access to things in general or even things in our experience. Unlike the concepts of the understanding, the principles of reason do not even purport to refer to objects in nature, and so are not amenable to any empirical confirmation or any independent standard. If concepts of the understanding do not match nature, nature will so to speak push back. Reason’s moral principles govern actions
240 Morality beyond nature? not objects. There is no independent standard to determine whether the objective principle of the moral law of reason with its declaration of the absolute value of humanity fits the circumstances; there is no way to test whether the moral law matches reality, for there is no independent standard against which the moral principles of reason can be judged. (Prudential reasoning, in contrast, would have a standard, namely whether the end determined independently of reason is attained or not using the means-ends reasoning.) Morality cannot push back against reason because it is itself merely a product of reason. This status of reason and its relation to reality makes for a genuine difference between those interpretations of Kant that see him as a moral realist and those that see him as a moral idealist, even when both sides agree that the standards of morality are determined by reason. When the relation between reason and reality is severed, Kant cannot be properly understood as a moral realist. Reason provides a view of experience subjectively grounded in the nature of reason itself but not objectively grounded in any independent objects. The moral realist, particularly a moral realist about value, would have to take Kant to hold that reason can provide knowledge of reality. Thus when some conclude that the moral realist and constructivist are involved in a merely verbal dispute31 or that Kant’s ethics does not seem to differentiate between morality as an assumed standpoint and morality as real,32 they are brushing over a fundamental difference in the two interpretations. The idealist accepts as fundamental the limitations of reason shown by Kant’s philosophy, which he defined as “the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason” (A839/B867, my emphasis). 31 32 Formosa reaches this conclusion with regard to the realists’ talk of the moral law stemming from “rational nature” and the constructivists talk of the “constitution” of self-legislating beings. Just one paragraph earlier he had identified the realist discussion of the moral law as lying “in the nature of things” ([Formosa 2013, 189] quoting [Kain 2004]). When realists talk of rational nature, they tend to mean not simply a type of being that happens to exist in nature with some particular way of structuring its own experience but instead a being who is able fundamentally to discern what morality is in the universe because the faculty is not in any way arbitrary. Allen Wood admits that his interpretation of Kant’s deduction of the moral law shows that for Kant there is no difference between the actuality of the moral law and our belief in that actuality (Wood 1999, p. 381, n. 30). This admission seems inconsistent with Wood’s value realism.
Postscript: Kant’s naturalist moral idealism I have presented an argument for two closely related features of Kant’s metaethics: metaphysical naturalism and moral idealism. In this postscript I will collect together the various elements of this interpretation and point out the hinge points between the realist and idealist interpretations. In my first chapter I identified eight elements of Kant’s ethics that need to be evaluated in order to determine the extent to which Kant could be a realist; these also serve for an assessment of naturalism. They are as follows: A. B. C. D. E. F. G. H. The value of particular chosen ends Particular moral duties or norms The value of humanity as end in itself The highest good and the postulates of practical reason Moral obligation The moral law itself Practical reason itself Freedom of choice Kant as metaphysical naturalist in ethics In my first chapter, I distinguished metaphysical and methodological naturalism and limited myself to the claim that Kant’s ethics can be interpreted in a metaphysically naturalistic way. I am not claiming that Kant can be interpreted as a methodological naturalist. By “metaphysical naturalism” I mean the type of naturalism which accepts as real only entities studied by the sciences – for Kant, nature in space and time – and by “methodological naturalism” the type of naturalism which accepts as sound only the procedures for acquiring knowledge used in the sciences. Kant is clearly not a methodological naturalist because his transcendental method of inquiry and stress on a priori knowledge and principles goes beyond the more empirically constrained methods of the sciences. I am also not taking a position on whether Kant is a metaphysical naturalist in his theoretical philosophy. I believe that his transcendental method could be 241
242 Postscript used in such a way, and I have used in this book the example of the transcendental justification of causal relations in nature and the requirement that any being who would represent that nature objectively must have a cognitive system that processes sensations using causal relations. But there are also significant portions of Kant’s theoretical philosophy that involve ontological claims absent in the practical philosophy, in particular the nature of the spatiality and temporality of things. My claim is restricted to Kant’s practical philosophy. Nor am I claiming that I have presented precisely the historical Kant’s position. Given the scope of Kant’s ambitions and the inconsistent use of some of his terminology no interpretation can claim to comprehend all of Kant’s stated claims and arguments. I offer an interpretation that encompasses the main claims in Kant’s ethics and shows how Kant either did or could have, using the resources available within his practical philosophy, presented an entirely metaphysically naturalistic ethics. Relatedly, I do not make comprehensive claims about his philosophical development but only review the development of some issues to draw out some material that I think has bearing on interpreting his core critical works. I do offer a plausible and defensible interpretation of Kant’s ethics along metaphysically naturalistic lines. Given Kant’s distinction between physics and psychology as two disciplines that study matter and thinking nature respectively, his denial that the latter can rise to the level of a science, and his rejection of a reduction of the psychological to the material, it would appear that empirical psychology would not fall under metaphysical naturalism. But given Kant’s equally strong insistence that empirical psychology is a possible discipline short of proper science, his allowance of inner intuition as a source of content governed by time as a form of intuition as well as the pure concepts of the understanding, his strict empirical determinism regarding decisions considered as appearance or phenomena, I allowed that the subject matter of empirical psychology should be included in Kant’s conception of nature for these ontological purposes despite lack of epistemic access. With regard to entities, the elements of Kant’s moral theory that appear to require an appeal to things in themselves independent of nature in space and time are the transcendentally free faculty of pure practical reason itself, the existence of God and immortality of the soul as postulates, and the transcendentally free faculty of choice. The elements that appear to require nonnatural properties are the values of ends, both chosen by particular moral agents and necessary as ends in themselves. The transcendentally free faculty of pure practical reason (G) is not itself an object per se but as a faculty it would have to reside in a being, and commonly this being is understood as a person in herself independent of nature. I argue that pure practical reason can fit within nature because it is understood as the
Postscript: Kant’s naturalist moral idealism 243 same faculty of reason posited as part of the empirical mind in empirical psychology. Considered as a structure for ordering concepts and principles, reason has a transcendental justification that defends its validity in promulgating the moral law. This transcendental justification does not require any nonnatural metaphysics. The faculty of reason acts as an efficient cause through what Kant calls motives. These motives can also be understood within the confines of empirical psychology. The empirical power of choice is determined in its decision either through this faculty of reason or through sensible impulses and so too falls under empirical psychology; this is practical freedom. The naturalistic interpretation of reason grounds a naturalistic interpretation of several other elements as well. Pure practical reason is the source of the moral law itself (F) and through that law also the source of particular duties and norms (B) in combination with information about human nature. Reason is also the source of the idea of the highest good (D). Moral obligation (E) comes to human beings as the categorical imperative as a command of reason. My argument that the fact of reason is empirical consciousness of the moral law clearly places it in nature. Confirmation of the validity of that obligation would come from the transcendental defense of pure practical reason as the source of the fact of reason. The postulates of God and immortality of the soul (D) purport to refer to nonnatural entities. If Kant’s postulates are interpreted as ontological claims then this part of Kant’s theory is not naturalizable. I showed how Kant’s use of the postulate of God is more in line with his theoretical use of hypotheses and ideas than some of his declarations would suggest. The concept “God” has immanent reference to the determination of the moral agent’s actions rather than transcendent reference to a supernatural being. As concepts the postulates can be said to exist only in the empirical agent’s mind as part of a moral agent’s practical point of view. The transcendentally free faculty of choice (H) is the biggest stumbling block to a naturalist interpretation. The empirical faculty of choice in nature cannot be understood to possess transcendental freedom in the structural way that the empirical faculty of reason can be said to possess transcendental freedom. The empirical faculty of choice is still practically free in that it can be necessitated in its decision by reason in accordance with the deterministic causal relations described by empirical psychology. In order to conceive of a power of choice that is not necessitated in its decision, one has to conceive of an agent in herself making a timeless fundamental choice independent of nature that determines the entirely of the agent’s empirical manifestation, in essence a single transcendent choice. The naturalist can incorporate this need for the transcendental freedom of choice because Kant identifies it as a postulate, which have been shown to have no ontological consequences, even taking into consideration the different status freedom has relative to the other postulates.
244 Postscript With regard to moral properties, the value of humanity as an end in itself (C) would appear to be incompatible with Kant’s ontology of nature. Contingent values of particular ends (A) depend upon empirical moral agent’s desires and are thus clearly within nature because they are dependent on the empirical subject. The value of humanity, however, is often assumed to be a necessary property of the objects – rational beings – independent of the empirical subject. Kant’s ontology of nature has no place for such intrinsic moral properties. I showed that the value of humanity is dependent upon the transcendental moral subject (a being with transcendentally justified practical reason) in a way parallel to the dependence of contingent values on empirical subjects. To have absolute value is only to have the highest rank in practical reason’s ordering of ends. Practical reason issues this ranking through the categorical imperative, so the value is not inherent in objects as any intrinsic property but is only a formal framework for experience provided by reason. In these ways I have shown that Kant’s ethics is compatible with a metaphysical naturalism. I take this result to be important for two reasons. In contemporary philosophy Kantians may defend many of the claims they derive from Kant without worry that those claims are incompatible with nature as now conceived. The second and more important reason is that my interpretation shows how Kant’s concern was to defend the moral life of human beings as natural beings. Traditionally Kant has been seen as insisting upon supernatural abilities or entities in ethics – free agents in themselves independent of space and time relying on God and their own immortal soul to complete their full moral lives. Even more generally, Kant is taken to deny knowledge of supersensibles in theoretical philosophy in order to allow practical philosophy to fill this conceptual space with the supersensible entities it requires. My interpretation reduces the claims about supersensibles greatly because I show that the most important faculty for morality, practical reason, is comprehensible entirely within nature, and that the other claims to supersensibles, as postulates, are not taken to have supersensible reference at all. This points to a general interpretation of Kant as trying to comprehend the place of human beings in the universe. And it conforms to an emphasis on the human point of view and the limitations of reason, a topic that also grounds my claim that Kant was a moral idealist. Kant as moral idealist The question whether Kant is a moral realist is more nuanced than the question about naturalism. Realism operates on two levels: empirical, having to do with the existence of actual moral agents, and transcendental, a consideration of the requirements for any possible moral agent. In my first chapter, I defined moral realism and moral idealism in this way:
Postscript: Kant’s naturalist moral idealism 245 Moral realism: The moral principles, properties, or objects of the world are independent of the transcendental or empirical moral agent. Moral idealism: The moral principles, properties, or objects of the world are dependent upon the transcendental or empirical moral agent. The empirical level of realism is closely related to naturalism because it asks the extent to which the moral principles, properties, or objects are entirely dependent upon the empirical moral subject or are independently real parts of nature. I take an empirical moral realist to be restricted to the naturalist moral ontology I argue for. At the transcendental level the question is whether an analysis of the conditions for moral agency shows that any of the moral principles, properties, or objects must have an existence that is independent of whether there is moral agency at all. The transcendental moral agent is a rational being whose very reason, by nature of its structure demanding systematic organization of the particulars within any domain but also completeness to the unconditioned, generates the moral law. Practical reason seeks to determine the free acts of rational agents in a way that systematizes those free acts, understood in terms of agentperspective freedom. The moral law provides the systematic order for free acts such that they can be maximally consistent among all rational agents. This systematic order is represented as a kingdom of ends. Transcendental moral agency also requires that the moral agent be susceptible to determination by reason, be able to choose to pursue some particular ends, have some other kind of freedom in making a basic moral decision that will underlie both moral responsibility and the “ought implies can” doctrine, and try to reconcile the demands of morality with her own desire for happiness. As with naturalism, if the postulate of God (D) had a reference to a real being, it would require a realist interpretation at both the transcendental and empirical levels. My argument that the postulate has only immanent reference would preclude that need. The postulate of immortality (D) and any transcendent freedom of choice (H) might appear to require transcendental realism as well, but since they would be properties of moral agents as subjects they conform to transcendental and empirical idealism (although not to naturalism). Thus in all these cases Kant puts forward an empirical idealist conception. There should be agreement that the value of particular chosen ends (A) is empirically idealist since there is no transcendental justification for them. Their value is merely the fact that some empirical moral agent chooses them as ends and is not itself independent of the empirical moral agent. Both would also agree that some ideas created by reason such as the highest good (D) are
246 Postscript merely concepts in the minds of empirical agents (perhaps transcendentally justified). The realization of the highest good as part of the actualization of a moral world is another matter. The value of humanity as an end in itself (C) as a property of moral agents as objects must be understood as idealist at both the transcendental and empirical levels. I defended the claim that a realism about value would violate autonomy, but more importantly I showed that there was no place in Kant’s ontology for an intrinsic value property. The absolute value of ends in themselves is simply their place in the order provided by reason through the categorical imperative. This value is transcendentally ideal. At best it would be empirically real not as an independent value property but only to the extent that the order of reason could be said to be empirically real, which depends on the status of reason itself. The core element of my interpretation has to do with the status of practical reason (G). The remainder of the moral elements all depend for their status on the status of reason. If reason is transcendentally real as a cognitive faculty, the moral law (F) is likewise transcendentally real because it is embedded in the structure of pure practical reason. Moral obligation (E) is grounded in a valid reason providing the objective normative order and is expressed through the fact of reason. Particular duties or norms (B) would be empirically real to the extent that they are required by an empirically real pure practical reason, given the specifics of human nature. And even the value of humanity understood in terms of the order of reason (C) and other facets of the moral order as a moral world depend upon reason. I rejected a transcendental realism for pure practical reason, that is, the claim that a transcendental requirement for morality is that reason must exist and have validity independent of the moral agent, because it violates Kant’s general strictures on the limits of the use of reason determined through the first Critique. Reason has no validity beyond experience. I argued that Kant has a transcendental conception of moral agency that requires the moral agent to possess the faculty of pure practical reason and disallows validity of that reason beyond the limits of moral agency. Hence he provides a transcendentally ideal ethics. This transcendentally ideal conception of morality would allow for an empirical realism about the moral elements mentioned before. If reason is transcendentally justified, then those elements that depend upon reason for their validity would be empirically real because independent of the existence of any or all particular moral agents. They would not be properties or objects but principles independent of the empirical moral agent. In this way, both Kantian realists and Kantian idealists can be correct, each at one level of the understanding of morality. There are two key interpretive pivot points, however, that can cast this harmonious solution into doubt. First, Kant himself denies that there is any
Postscript: Kant’s naturalist moral idealism 247 successful deduction of the validity of morality. This by itself could still allow for a view that, although we cannot prove that morality is transcendentally valid, we must still believe that it is, and thus believe that morality is empirically real. The second point is that one can question whether Kant understands the practical point of view to be making any claims about empirical reality in light of its relation simply to the determination of action. On one side of these two pivot points is the interpretation of Kant as a transcendental idealist and empirical realist, on the other side is the interpretation of Kant as only an empirical idealist. An analysis of these points will clarify the extent to which Kant can be considered a realist at all. At the first pivot point is Kant’s denial of any possible transcendental deduction of the validity of the moral law, based upon the claim that there is no set of objects against which the moral law can be confirmed. The theoretical transcendental deduction ranges over intuitions and so the categories can have empirical reality as the structural framework for objects. Kant holds that there are no corresponding independent objects to provide this confirmation for the moral law and thus a transcendental justification for the moral law is unavailable. I argued that Kant had available to him appropriate independent objects, namely, free acts of reason themselves. Actual empirical decisions of the power of choice would have to implement the systematization provided by the moral law in order for them maximally to embody freedom understood as rationally determined decisions; systematicity among free actions would be impossible without guidance from the moral law. I also argued that such a view could ground an evolutionary account of the moral law in which any possible organism that would evolve in order to make agent-perspective, deliberate decisions would have to embody the faculty of reason to provide this moral law. In this way Kant could have provided a transcendentally ideal but empirically real pure practical reason. Since he claimed that he could not provide a successful transcendental deduction of the moral law, he would have to be interpreted as only an empirical idealist regarding reason. Another avenue is open to the realist to preserve the transcendental ideality of reason. The denial of a successful transcendental deduction provides only the epistemic conclusion that empirical moral agents could not know whether their faculty of reason was justified, but moral agents would still be free to believe that reason is justified. This would retain the transcendental ideality and empirical reality of practical reason as the ontology of morality even if it is subject to some epistemic doubt. Analogously, an agnostic would admit that God’s existence cannot be proved but would not deny that the subject of belief would be a real God. If successful, this ontological claim would retain the transcendental idealism and empirical realism of reason. As an interpretation of Kant this move is questionable because of the second pivot point: the nature of belief and the practical point of view. In a broader
248 Postscript sense Kant’s denial of the possibility of a deduction of the moral law is based on its subjectivity as guidance for action in empirical agents rather than objectivity with reference outside moral agency. Practical reason in contrast to theoretical reason is about determination of the empirical power of choice in free acts and is not a determiner of ontology. This priority of action gives morality as an empirical lived experience its own coherence that does not rely on any kind of confirmation or disconfirmation at the transcendental level as long as the moral agent is in the grip of the practical. When later reflecting on that experience, practical reason presents theoretical reason with practical beliefs for the latter to integrate into a larger set of beliefs, but they remain only concepts without objects, such as the postulate of God. In this way the practical is understood not to be a set of claims about reality such that it could be correct or incorrect in its claims about independent ontology. There is no independent ontology beyond the practical perspective that could be true or false independent of the practical perspective itself. The fact of reason as a command experienced by the empirical moral agent carries obligatory force in the grip of moral decisionmaking. Practical reason provides experience with a distinct normative order which agents actively impose on the world without any claims beyond that experience. Morality is a perspective on the world imposed by the empirical moral agent and hence is empirically ideal and does not operate at the transcendental level at all. This pivot point cuts to the heart of the difference between empirical realist and empirical idealist interpretations. From the point of view of a realist, an empirical idealist seems here to be denying that the categorical imperative is true, in effect charging the empirical moral idealist with being an error theorist. The empirical moral idealist would respond by denying that Kant’s understanding of the truth of morality requires anything beyond the experience of morality itself. The moral experience is self-validating as a practical experience. Even the quest for a transcendental deduction of the moral law is a reflection of the priority of belief, which I argued is actually a higher priority for theoretical reason and to that extent outside practical moral experience itself. Given these two pivot points between the interpretation of Kant as a transcendental idealist and moral realist on the one hand and only an empirical idealist on the other hand, I have argued in favor of empirical idealism as the better interpretation of Kant. There are also parts of Kant’s theory that could ground the transcendental idealist and empirical realist interpretation, so regarding pure practical reason and the moral elements directly dependent upon it, empirical realism is not unreasonable and one can even claim that even if he was not, Kant could and should have been a transcendental idealist and empirical realist in morality.
Postscript: Kant’s naturalist moral idealism 249 Kant’s human ethics In the United States Kant has traditionally been portrayed as the synthesizer of rationalism and empiricism, overcoming the limits of both while retaining their strength. This portrayal formed the basis of the standard survey course in early modern philosophy in which three rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were pitted against an equal number of empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) culminating in Kant’s transformational critical account. This oversimplification bears a kernel of truth, since Kant retained the empiricist limitation of knowledge to objects of sense while insisting that the concepts provided by the understanding are necessary for that experience. Less emphasized is the limitation on reason itself to an aid to the understanding, unable to provide knowledge of reality merely through a priori proofs. Knowledge of the world is limited to the scope of human experience. While there is no precise practical parallel to this theoretical work, the same general stance applies to moral theory as well if one vastly oversimplifies the range of approaches. Intuitionists and rationalists insisted that reason was able to provide knowledge of the cosmically true moral laws and values, while empiricist moral sense theories took moral beliefs as sensible experience without any kind of rational basis. Kant can be said to have worked out a theory that takes our sensible experience of morality in the fact of reason and our moral feeling of respect as a starting point but shows that it has validity in reason. The limitation on reason is that Kant retains it within the point of view of the rational agent and makes no claims to cosmic moral truth. The structure of reason causes it not just to produce systematic sets of beliefs or acts but also to seek for conditions for each of its claims, leading to the creation of ideas that act as placeholders for the ultimate unconditioned necessity that reason seeks. There may be no real unconditioned necessity either of being or of moral law or of ends, but reason creates for itself ideas to satisfy this need. Kant’s moral theory ought to be understood in terms of this dual nature of reason. Practical reason both validates and limits morality for human beings. Human moral agents find rational constraints on their action when deliberating through their awareness of the categorical imperative. Upon reflection they ask for the validity of reason’s commands and find it in the very structure of reason rather than in anything independent of it. Further reflection reveals that reason not only has no need for a ground outside itself, it also cannot even provide a complete explanation of any ground because of its very structure. Kant has provided a moral theory for active, deliberative, and natural human beings.
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Index “as if” interpretation, 155 Abela, Paul, 34, 83 Adickes, Erich, 170 Allison, Henry, 21, 34, 98–9, 102, 108, 112, 119–21, 133, 157, 183, 187, 195, 201, 211, 228–30, 235–6 Ameriks, Karl, 37, 56, 104, 122 amoralism, 43 anomalous monism, 134 anthropology, 17, 20, 35, 38, 57–8, 76, 96, 212 architectonic, 51–2, 56, 58 atheism, 149 autonomy, 233–5 and concept of God, 176 and structure of reason, 125 and value, 210–17 not arbitrary, 221–2 definition of, 210 Auxter, Thomas, 226 Bagnoli, Carla, 25–6 Baumgarten, Alexander, 73 Beck, Jacob Sigismund, 189–90 Beck, Lewis White, 87, 98–9, 108, 149 Bell, David, 64 biology, 35 Bird, Graham, 28, 30–1, 33, 64 Bittner, Rüdiger, 25 Bojanowski, Jochen, 12, 16 Boyd, Richard, 14 Byrne, Peter, 151 categorical imperative, 44–5, See also moral law and empirical reason, 119 and evolution, 143–4 and knowledge of value, 220 and particular duties, 37 and postulate of freedom, 206 and priority of action, 88–91 and rational agency, 26 258 different from moral law, 98–100 possibility of related to reason, 135–9 categories, 9, 20, 34, 59–64, 130–2, 141, 144, 155, 239, 247 causality, 31, 36, 64, See also choice, freedom of; determinism; reason, causality of different from cause, 120 timeless, 122–30 transcendentally free, 120–3 character definition of, 115, 122 empirical, 113, 115–18, 184, 186–7, 189, 191–8, 200–3 intelligible, 113, 116, 119, 122–3, 187, 191, 195–6, 201–3, 237 chemistry, 24, 29, 35, 58, 65–6 Chignell, Andrew, 158 choice, 36, See also Wille/Willkür distinction animal, 110, 184–5 definition of, 182–3 empirical faculty of, 110–11, 129, 184–6, 194 freedom of, 46–8, 112–14, 132 and domain of practical philosophy, 70–1, 73–6 and fact of reason, 104–6 and moral responsibility, 193–8, 203 and ought implies can, 91, 187–93, 202 determined by reason, 113–17, 184–6 first person, 75–6, 88–91, 205 in nature, 67, 184–6 of a being in herself, 92, 198–203 postulate, 203–6 transcendent faculty of, 110–11, 196–8 Collins, Arthur, 34 Common Sense theory, 31 consequentialism, 19 and realism, 13 and value of humanity, 213 constructivism, 11, 23–7, 72, 240 and metaethics, 26 and term “idealism”, 27
Index and value, 41 as decision procedure, 24–5, 39 as nature of agency, 26–7 compatible with moral realism, 13, 23 in mathematics, 23, 51 in political philosophy, 42 in theoretical philosophy, 23 origin of term, 10–11 seen as only alternative to realism, 11, 37 critique. See also method as division in philosophy, 56, 59–68 as project of theoretical reason, 91–4 Cummiskey, David, 213 Dall’Agnol, Darlei, 14, 32, 37, 98, 210 Davidovich, Adina, 163 Davidson, Donald, 134 de Almeida, Guido, 98, 235 De Caro, Mario, 29 Dean, Richard, 210 deduction empirical, 60–3 metaphysical, 132 of moral law, 247 of the moral law, 21, 65, 96, 130–2, 143, 145, 227–31, 234–5, 238 transcendental, 20, 45, 60–3, 132 Denis, Lara, 149 determinism, 35–6, 114–20, 187–93 and practical freedom, 111 dignity, 223 divine command theory, 16, 177 domain of ethics as free acts, 73–6, 205 of philosophy as ultimate end of human reason, 53–5, 72 required for a system, 52 separate for theoretical and practical, 70–1 duty no direct duties to God, 172 no duty to believe in God, 87 particular duties, 37–9 pure and empirical, 58 Dworkin, Ronald, 10 Dye, James Wayne, 31 empirical idealism moral, 20–2, 240, 246–8 and contingent ends, 37, 245 and duties, 37–9 and fact of reason, 103–4 and God, 177–9, 245 and moral law, 45 and necessary ends, 39–42, 246 and practical reason, 247–8 259 and reason, 45–7, 145–6, 247 and value, 224 theoretical, 19–20 empirical realism. See also metaphysical naturalism, nature moral, 20–2, 246–8 and duties, 37–9 and free choice, 201 and method in ethics, 64–8 and moral law, 45 and necessary ends, 39–42 and reason, 45–7, 71, 143–5 and value, 217–22, 227, 246 theoretical, 19–20, 30, 33, 64 and category of causality, 64 ends end in itself ultimately inexplicable, 236–7 objective or necessary, 39–42, 209, See also humanity, value of; value, absolute of human reason as domain of philosophy, 53–5 order of. See reason, order of subjective or contingent, 37, 209, 222 that are also duties, 39–40 error theory, 12–16, 27, 248 Esteves, Julio, 132 ethics as discipline in philosophy, 50 transcendental method in, 64–8, 130–2 whether systematizable, 52–3 evolution and moral law, 143–4 and non humanlike altruism, 62 and transcendental method, 62–3 of categorical imperative, 247 experience and fact of reason, 101–2 moral, 20–2, 64–8, 85, 92, 96, 98–100, 130–2, 170, 206, See also practical point of view expressivism, 13–15, 26–7 fact of reason, 32, 44–5, 96–106, 206 and awareness of value, 219 and freedom, 104–6 and metaphysical naturalism, 104 and moral agent, 103–4 and realism and idealism, 103–4 as act or deed, 100–1 as consciousness of moral law, 66–7 definition of, 100 limits empirical realism, 144 Falkenburg, Brigitte, 34 Formosa, Paul, 12, 14, 25, 37, 240 Förster, Eckart, 59, 175–6
260 Index freedom. See also reason, freedom of; choice, freedom of; will acting under idea of, 133–6 and boundary between theoretical and practical, 231 and fact of reason, 106 and primacy, 86 as idea of reason, 231 as postulate, 47, 83, 104–6, 203–6 assumed in action, 88–91 cannot be proved, 130–2 multiple meanings of term, 108 practical, 110–11, 121–2, 183–6, 197, 220, 243 transcendental, 122–30, 134, 184 Friedman, Michael, 29 Frierson, Patrick, 186 Fugate, Courtney, 196 geometry, 20, 24 God, 41, 70, 121, 142 and metaphysical naturalism, 149–50 and moral law, 172, 175, 177 and moral realism, 179 and realism, 13 as postulate, 42–4, 83, 149–50, 152–3, 203 belief in compared to opinion and knowledge, 156–60 function for action, 159–60, 163–5, 167–70 not a duty, 87, 163 subjective not objective, 158–9, 163–5, 173 concept of, 152–3 and nature, 152, 169 and religious practice, 170–2 constructed by practical reason, 166–7, 173, 176–7 equated with pure practical reason, 175 immanent not transcendent, 167–70 scope of term, 149 stems from practical reason, 165–6 Guyer, Paul, 31, 153, 163, 210, 213, 229, 237 Hare, John, 177 Henrich, Dieter, 98, 133, 136, 229, 234 Herman, Barbara, 21 highest good, 42–3, 71, 87, 94, 149, 156, 167–9, 173, 175, 245 as systematic relation, 73 not a motive to action, 87–8 possibility of natural ground, 163–5 Hill, Thomas, 11, 24–5, 38 history, 35 Höffe, Otfried, 34 Hudson, Hud, 187 humanity. See also value, absolute as end in itself, 39–42 value of, 40–2, 209–17 and arbitrariness, 221–2 assigned by reason, 223 based on natural property, 220–2 not an intrinsic property, 217–18, 220–2 Hume, David, 31 Hussain, Nadeem J. Z., 26 Hutter, Axel, 55, 58 hypothesis, transcendental, 149, 158, 171 compared to belief, 159–60 compared to idea, 153–6 compared to postulate, 162 not endorsed in use, 155–6 idea, 42, 119, 230 and boundary between practical and theoretical, 231 and domain of philosophy, 53–5 and transcendental realism, 142 as heuristic device, 154, 219, 238 compared to hypothesis, 153–6 of God. See God, concept of hell not coherent, 171 required for architectonic unity, 51–2 idealism empirical. See empirical idealism moral. See moral idealism transcendental. See transcendental idealism immortality, 42–3, 70, 83, 149, 203 independence as metaphysical separation, 15, 125 as unchangeable by another, 126–7, See also reason, structure of intelligible world, 136–8, 167, 224–7, 229, 233–5 as moral ideal, 224–5 realized in nature, 225–7 intuition, 23, 34–5, 117, 218 forms of. See also space, time Johnson, Robert, 211–13, 217 judgments, 119–20, 133–6, See also reason, freedom of Kain, Patrick, 25, 37, 39, 43, 102, 139–41, 170, 177, 240 Kant, Immanuel as reflective rather than active person, 94 religious beliefs of, 149 Kielkopf, Charles, 101 kingdom of ends, 26, 38, 73, 245
Index Kinnaman, Ted, 56 Kitcher, Philip, 12 Kleingeld, Pauline, 55, 97–8, 100–1 Korsgaard, Christine, 11, 21, 23–4, 26, 41, 143, 210, 237 Krasnoff, Larry, 10 Kuehn, Manfred, 149 Larmore, Charles, 38 logic as division in philosophy, 56, 58 Loparic, Zeljko, 29 Louden, Robert, 38, 169 Macarthur, David, 29 Manchester, Paula, 52 mathematics, 23, 31, 35, 51, 58, 66, 128, 161, 223 Meerbote, Ralph, 134, 187 metaphysical naturalism, 27, 29–33, 36, 64, 241–4 and duties, 39, 243 and empirical power of choice, 185–6 and empirical reason as cause, 114–20 and fact of reason, 104, 243 and free choice, 243 and freedom of choice, 45–7, 201, 203 and God, 149–50, 177, 243 and moral law, 243 and necessary ends, 40–2 and obligation, 43, 243 and priority of action, 96 and reason, 242–3 and structure of reason, 143–4 and transcendental freedom, 125 and transcendental method, 60–3 and transcendental method in ethics, 64–8 and value, 222–4, 244 definition of, 29 in theoretical philosophy, 33, 241 limited to ethics, 32–3 metaphysics as division of philosophy, 56 method and logic, 56 and systematic organization of cognition, 52–3 in ethics compared to chemistry, 24, 65–6 transcendental, 9, 21, 32, 59–68, 76 transcendental, 29, 107, 174 Mieth, Corinna, 128, 132–3 mind, 27 and evolution, 62–3 nature of, 17 261 moral agent and belief contrasted with opinion and knowledge, 156–60 and belief in postulates, 85 and causality of reason, 120–3 and fact of reason, 101–3 and first-person freedom, 75–6 and God, 177–9 and objectivity, 19, 64–8 and priority of action over belief, 88–91, 93–6 and reason, 45–7, 75–6 and truth, 13 as being in itself, 28, 33, 67, 136, 198–203 as subject rather than object, 15–16, 47 empirical, 16–18, 20–2, 39, 64–8, 96–8, 103–4, 114–20, 129–32, 156–60, 179, 184–6, 189, 201, 222, 239 in constructivism, 24–7 in definition of moral realism, 14 obligation tied to, 43–4 possibility of non humanlike, 18, 145 praise and blame, 193–8 purely rational, 98–100, 129 transcendental, 16–18, 20–2, 64–8, 96–8, 103–4, 130–2, 179, 211, 222–4, 245 moral anti-realism, 11, 211 problems with term, 11–12 moral idealism, 68, 145–6, 244–8, See also empirical idealism, transcendental idealism and freedom of choice, 47 and obligation, 43 and postulates, 42–3 and priority of action, 94 definition of, 14, 244 separates reason and reality, 240 use of term, 12, 27 moral law, 44–5, See also categorical imperative consciousness of, 66–7 different from categorical imperative, 98–100 possibility of deduction of, 130–2 relation to concept of God, 157–70 reveals freedom, 92, 112–13, 135–9, 188, 194, 205 stems from structure of reason, 125 ultimately inexplicable, 235–6 why a priori, 95 moral nonrealism, 11, 13, 16, 27, 38 definition of, 14 moral principle, property, or object contrasted with one required for morality, 15
262 Index moral realism, 9, 16, 68, 244–8, See also empirical realism, transcendental realism and contingent ends, 37 and freedom of choice, 47 and obligation, 43 and postulates, 42–3 and priority of action, 94 and structure of reason, 139–46 at empirical and transcendental levels, 21–2 contemporary, 9 Cornell, 14 definition in relation to moral agent, 14–18, 244 definition in relation to truth, 11–14 need to assess in parts, 22, 37 procedural, 23 relation to naturalism, 9 requires reason to reveal reality, 240 moral world. See intelligible world morality, 71 common moral practice, 93 relevance of transcendental/empirical distinction for, 20 ultimate inexplicability of, 234–8 O’Neill, Onora, 11, 24–5, 46 objectivity, 19, 144–5, 224, 227, 240 obligation, 43–4, 98–100, 135, 145, 211 ontology, 32–3, 36, 76, 142–3 and transcendental method in ethics, 65 and value, 218–20 no ontological claims in practical philosophy, 94–6 ought implies can, 91, 187–93, 202 empirical, 54, 57 practical, 44, 56–8, See also reason, practical and action, 72, 94–6 as distinct set objects, 70–1 as pragmatic use of knowledge, 74 contrasted with theoretical, 68–73 domain as free acts, 68–76 domain not empirical, 75 inner boundary of, 229–34 outermost boundary of, 228–9, 234–8 structure of, 55–8, 91 theoretical, 44, 56–8, 228, See also reason, theoretical and knowledge, 72 as distinct set of objects, 70–1 contrasted with practical, 68–73 transcendental, 59–60, 174 physics, 30, 34–5, 61, 75, 167 Pierce, Drew, 169 Pihlström, Sami, 60 Plato, 29, 201, 224 Pollok, Konstantin, 31, 34 postulate, 83, See also freedom, God, immortality and idealism, 177–9, 245 and primacy of practical reason as belief, 84–8, 93 as positing existence to theoretical concepts, 162–3 constructed by practical reason, 166–7 definition of, 152, 161–2 immanent not transcendent, 157–70, 204 theoretical use of term, 152–3, 162 practical point of view, 25, 28, 75–6, 88–91, 94–6, 101–3, 133–6, 145–6, 239, 247–8 primacy of practical reason, 81–94, 162 and integration model, 83 defined as priority of action, 82 defined as priority of belief, 81 priority of action, 82, 88–97, 102, 105, 205–6, See also reason, practical priority of belief, 81–90, 97, 103, 105, 149, 206, 248, See also reason, practical Proops, Ian, 98 psychology empirical, 31, 33, 35–7, 44, 62, 74, 95–6, 104, 116–18, 184–6, 242 moral, 26, 111 rational, 122 questions of reason, 57–8, 157 philosophy definition of, 51, 53–4, 72–3 Railton, Peter, 11 Rawls, John, 10, 21, 24, 98 naturalism, 27–36 and moral law, 44 and postulates, 42–3 contemporary, 29–30 epistemological, 29 Kant's use of term, 27 metaphysical. See metaphysical naturalism definition of, 241 methodological, 28–31, 95–6 definition of, 29, 241 relation to realism, 9 semantic, 29 nature, 30, 33–6, 71, 84, 168 empirically real, 61–3, 114–20 order of, 118–19, 152, 189–93, 233–4 reason in, 116–18, 120–3
Index realism moral. See moral realism reason, 36, 82 active nature of, 71–2, 100, 137 and system of cognitions, 51–2 as transcending nature, 122 blamed for wrong action, 194–7 causality of, 67, 109–30, 138, 194–8, 224, 237, 243 and judgments, 133–6 in nature, 109–10, 119–20 transcendentally free, 109–10, 120–30 ultimately inexplicable, 237 critical use of distinct from practical or theoretical, 91 definition of, 109, 120–3 empirical, 36, 107, 114–20, 184–6 freedom of, 47, 114–23, 130–6, 183, 203 human, 53–5, 92, 151, 164, 228, 237, 240 intelligible character of, 113, 116, 122–3, 191, 195–6, 237 interest of, 81–94, 232 one faculty with different uses, 69 order of, 42, 118–19, 152, 222–7 practical, 43, 45–7, 157, See also philosophy, practical and action, 94–6 and concept of God, 166–7, 170–1, 175–7 and empirical idealism, 145–6 and is/ought distinction, 69–70, 145–6, 232–4 and value, 218 creates it own objects, 71–2 meaning of Wille, 183–4 primacy of. See primacy of practical reason pure, 28, 57, 116, 122–30 regulative use of, 34, 36, 153–4, 157, 168, 174, See also ideas, postulates requires an unconditioned, 235–8 speculative. See reason, theoretical structure of, 108, 122–30, 139–46, 194, 196, 239, 242 theoretical, 94–6, See also philosophy, theoretical and boundary of practical, 231–3 and concept of God, 165–6 and critical works, 91–4 and is/ought distinction, 69–70, 145–6, 232–4 and value, 218 higher priority of regarding belief, 84–8 must conform to practical belief, 81–4 263 objects given to, 71–2 same as speculative, 68 Reath, Andrews, 25, 38–9, 42, 211 Reinhold, Karl Leonard, 196 relativism, 43, 146 Ritchie, Jack, 29 Rohden, Valerio, 24 Rosenthal, Jacob, 128, 132–3 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 85 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, 12–14, 255 Schmidt, Claudia, 36 Schneewind, J. B., 38, 211 Schönecker, Dieter, 228–9 science, 28, 30–2, 57, 61, See also biology, chemistry, physics social, 35, See also anthropology, history, psychology Sensen, Oliver, 211, 213, 218–19, 223 Shah, Nishi, 26 Skorupski, John, 30 Smith, Joel, 29 space, 9, 17, 19–20, 33, 35, 238 Stäudlin, Carl Friedrich, 57 Stern, Robert, 21, 37, 43, 143, 188, 210, 218 Stevenson, Leslie, 158 Strawson, P.F., 63 Street, Sharon, 12–13, 16, 24 Stroud, Barry, 60, 63–4 Sullivan, Peter, 29 Sussman, David, 101 system nature of systematic organization, 52–3, 124 structure of ethics, 52–3, 129–30 teleology, 35, 54, 57, 167, 169 theology, 28, 114, 177 time, 9, 17, 19–20, 33, 36, 113, 203 timelessness, 122–30, 146, 181, 186–7, 191, 198–203 Timmermann, Jens, 132, 232 transcendental argument. See deduction, transcendental transcendental idealism moral, 20–2, 45–7, 246–8 and deduction, 247 and duties, 37–9 and fact of reason, 103–4 and God, 177–9 and method in ethics, 64–8 and necessary ends, 39–42, 246 and reason, 143–5 and value, 211–17
264 Index transcendental idealism (cont.) theoretical, 19–20, 30, 70, 155, 174 and category of causality, 64 relation to naturalism, 30–1 transcendental realism moral, 20–2, 45–7, 107 and God, 177–9 and practical reason, 142–3 and reason, 246 and value, 41, 211–17 theoretical, 19–20 and rationalist ontology, 142–3 Vaihinger, Hans, 170 value, 33 absolute and autonomy, 210–14 and idealism, 224 as nonnatural property, 217–22 ultimately inexplicable, 236–7 as ordering of ends by reason, 222–4 of humanity. See humanity, value of of persons, 47 of subjective or contingent ends, 37, 209 Ward, Keith, 112 Watkins, Eric, 113, 193 will, 36, 84, See also reason, practical finite rational, 43 freedom of. See choice, reason identified as reason, 109, 183–4 Wille/Willkür distinction, 47, 107, 109, 182–3 Willaschek, Marcus, 84, 100, 132, 161, 163, 169 Willkür. See choice, will Wolff, Robert Paul, 25 Wood, Allen, 14, 26, 32–3, 38, 87, 139, 145, 149, 166, 187, 189, 210, 212, 214–16, 228, 240 Zammito, John, 28, 30–1