Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s ethics had a significant influence on the formation of Kant’s ethics. The extent of this influence, however, has not been sufficiently investigated by existing Kant scholarship. Filling this gap, this paper aims to reveal Baumgarten’s substantial influence on the formation of Kant’s ethics, particularly the complex ways in which Kant’s ethics retains the concept of God as crucial for ensuring that his ethics persist under the scrutiny of reason. In a systematic comparison (...) of the ethics of the two philosophers, I argue that Kant alters and yet accommodates several aspects of Baumgarten’s ethics in his own version of the system of ethics more thoroughly than has previously been perceived. More specifically, I argue, first, that Kant’s rejection of Baumgarten’s conception of “duties towards God” and his alternative notion that duties are recognized as if they were divine commands unveil his criticism of Baumgarten’s conception of how religion is situated in ethics. Second, I argue that Kant’s argument for the extension of pure reason for practical purposes discloses his critical response to Baumgarten’s optimistic assumption about the entirety of pure reason. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Bibliography.

Kant’s religious ethics is grounded in a practical philosophy where ‘God’ is subordinated to moral principles. To accomplish this goal, Kant dismantled the onto-theological groundwork of religion and the conventional method of attaching morality to God, as if morality was a consequence of religious belief. In this essay, I will show how Kant replaces the metaphysics of being with the metaphysics of morality. More importantly, I will show how Kant’s thesis of moral theism argues that the practical (...) philosophy does not end with the categorical imperative, but that Kant also thinks morality inevitably leads to religious belief. (shrink)

In this chapter, we compare Kant and James’ accounts of freedom. Despite both thinkers’ rejecting compatibilism for the sake of practical reason, there are two striking differences in their stances. The first concerns whether or not freedom requires the possibility of an open future. James holds that morality hinges on the real possibility that the future can be affected by our actions. Kant, on the other hand, seems to maintain that we can still be free in the crucial sense, (...) even if none of our actions can have any effect on the future. The second difference between them is related, and concerns the location of freedom. Kant views experience as determined by natural necessity, and locates freedom outside of it, in things-in-themselves. James, on the other hand, has a richer conception of experience than Kant, and holds that we can locate our freedom within experience alone. In the end, we contend that James has a better account of how freedom relates to our experience, but this comes at a cost. For while Kant's account struggles with the relationship between freedom and experience, it has the advantage of insulating our freedom from potential empirical challenges. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics by Daniel P. ScheidJohn J. FitzgeraldThe Cosmic Common Good: Religious Grounds for Ecological Ethics Daniel P. Scheid new york: oxford university press, 2016. 264 pp. $31.95Published shortly after the first encyclical to focus on the environment (Pope Francis's Laudato Si'), Daniel Scheid's first book is a significant advance in Christian ethics and religious (...) ecology. Scheid argues that resources in Catholic social thought and other religious traditions can move one to an appreciation of a common good that includes the "more than human world" (xiv). In particular, he "aim[s] (1) to extend Catholic social thought ecologically, and (2) to extend Catholic ecological ethics comparatively" (8).The argument begins by broadening the notion of the common good into a "Catholic cosmic common good," which "emphasizes the centrality of God, the goodness of creation, and humanity's dignified and privileged but contextualized role within the story of creation" (32). This vision is then informed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Thomas Berry. Next, Scheid widens solidarity, a virtue that (per John Paul II) involves "commit[ting] oneself to the common good" (86), into "Earth solidarity," which attends to all ecosystems and species, particularly those most impacted by environmental damage. Solidarity cannot be exercised without respecting others' rights, and Scheid contends that these include "Earth rights" of biota, abiota, and ecosystems. Finally, in order to really "test the potential for the cosmic common good as a ground for interreligious ecological ethics" (124–25), he turns to three non-Abrahamic traditions that each support, augment, and challenge elements of his vision. A Hindu dharmic ecology is theocentric and blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, Buddhist traditions are nontheistic and highlight how all are [End Page 197] interrelated, and American Indians (specifically the Lakota) condemn individualism and demonstrate certain advantages of a more spatial (rather than simply temporal) perspective.The Cosmic Common Good covers an impressive range of thought in under two hundred pages of main text. While the argumentation is intricate, the logical ordering of chapters, the repetition of important points, and some vivid examples assist the reader in following along. The case for Earth rights is especially bold and well argued; Scheid considers objections to them and shows that they can be intelligibly grounded (as prima facie and proportionately weighted) in self-governance and creaturely dignity. This is a very promising development in Catholic social thought, as recent key magisterial teachings do not explicitly affirm that animals have dignity (or rights) but limit themselves to the notion that harming animals is "contrary to human dignity" (see Laudato Si', §§ 92, 130, quoting Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2418).While the book is generally comprehensive, there are a few surprising lacunae. First, although Scheid himself recognizes that "a properly Catholic ecological ethics would certainly not dismiss the centrality of the Bible" (198n16), there is very little reference to it. The author briefly alludes to the Psalms' portrayal of the natural world (47, 181), but more integration of the Old and New Testaments would have been illuminating. And while The Cosmic Common Good makes a commendable last-minute effort to incorporate insights from Laudato Si', Francis's predecessor Benedict XVI (often dubbed "the Green Pope") receives too-short shrift. Benedict's ecological views are referenced only on one page, perhaps because they are somewhat more anthropocentric than the "Earth-centered or cosmos-centered" ethic developed by Scheid (24). Regardless, the former pope's frequent calls for environmental responsibility to the poor, future generations, and animals would surely lend some healthy support to the cosmic common good. But these omissions do not detract much from the merits of this book, which should be read "not as a definitive conclusion but as an invitation to generate greater interreligious dialogue and cooperation on an issue that demands extensive and immediate action" (11). Professional academics, graduate students, and others who are somewhat versed in the sophisticated issues Scheid raises would do well to take up his invitation. [End Page 198]John J. FitzgeraldSt. John's University (New York)Copyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name (...) for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This paper suggests a general interpretative strategy for reading Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason namely, as an attempt to find a middle ground between what Kant considers two forms of excess: the appeal to a transcendent conception of God and the denial of any claim that presupposes God’s existence. To make my case, I use the example of two contemporary thinkers (Wolterstorff and Rorty) and trace their dispute to the antinomic character of “religious reason.” Putting things this (...) way underscores the originality of Kant’s view: the wake-up call of an antinomy serves us to motivate Kant’s solution to the problem raised by dogmatic religious claims, as well as to capture what is the distinctive ethical function he reserved for religion in the critical system, i.e., the support of the non-individualistic virtues involved in shared undertakings and common pursuits. Throughout the discussion, I show the importance that radical evil had in Kant’s “constructing” the idea of God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair by Roe FremstedalVanessa RumbleRoe Fremstedal. Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 280. Hardback, $99.99. Paperback, $32.99.Fremstedal’s impressive synthesis of the anthropological, ethical, and religious dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought draws on the fruits of his earlier work, Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest (...) Good (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In each of the two volumes, Fremstedal argues for key points of agreement between Kant and Kierkegaard, and he proposes a precise and differentiated account of the way in which the anthropological assumptions of each thinker (a) undergird and shape their respective ethics and (b) pave the way for a religiosity that not only builds on but actively fortifies moral agency. The result, Fremstedal claims, is a rendering of Kierkegaard as by no means averse to the demands of systematic thought. Fremstedal’s Kierkegaard rejects the existence of “epistemic, objective evidence for or against faith” while nonetheless adducing “practical and subjective grounds” (252) for earnest ethical striving and religious faith. In addition to Fremstedal’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s debt to Kant, this book contains a finely drawn analysis of and response to the contemporary scholarship on ethical issues posed by (or to) Kierkegaard’s texts, drawing on the work of Rudd, Davenport, Helms, Stokes, Piety, and others, contributing thereby to the integration of Kierkegaardian ethics in larger discussions of moral psychology.Fremstedal’s stated aim is to provide both (i) the historical context for Kierkegaard’s authorship and (ii) a detailed consideration of Kierkegaard’s potential contribution to contemporary philosophical debates. With regard to (i), Fremstedal’s thirteen chapters offer considerably more than he is able to telegraph in the introduction. Fremstedal’s rough-and-ready appraisal of Kierkegaard’s relation to J. G. Fichte’s Ethics; his expert distillation of [End Page 513] the bearing of the Pantheism Controversy on the account of the “leap” in Postscript (173); and the alacrity with which he charts Kant’s, Jacobi’s, and Kiekegaard’s varying takes on the notion of “reason” (Vernunft/Fornuft) in its relation to “understanding” (Verstand/Forstand) all provide invaluable orientation and grist for further analysis. His discussion of the Pantheism Controversy lends support to his reading of the Postscript’s “leap” as indicating unavoidable discontinuities in “the transition from one normative domain to another” (179) rather than an espousal of fideism.What follows is a summary of Fremstedal’s central chapters on Kierkegaard’s ethics (chapters 2–9), with a particular focus on a key, contentious aspect of the former’s reading. Since the 1981 publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Kierkegaard scholars queued up to defend the Danish philosopher against MacIntyre’s claim that Kierkegaard depicts the commitment to moral existence as criterionless. In Davenport and Rudd’s anthology, Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, Peter Mehl’s essay encapsulates the standard response: “Kierkegaard is primarily concerned with providing a philosophical anthropology as a basis for a coherent and reasonable approach to moral praxis,” a concern that is hardly compatible with a conception of morality as pure subjectivism (“Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy,” in Kierkegaard after MacIntyre, ed. John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd [Chicago: Open Court, 2001], 4).Like Mehl, Fremstedal believes Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology offers the best defense against MacIntyre’s charge of irrationalism. He grounds his account of Kierkegaard’s anthropology in The Sickness unto Death, citing Anti-Climacus’s depiction of the synthesis of finitude and infinitude as establishing the “fundamental tension between facticity and freedom,... constitutive of our human nature” (20). He parses the supervening relational task placed on the self (Selvet) as twofold: (a) recognition of the conjunction of the given and the chosen in the actual self and, crucially, (b) the evaluation and ranking of the “first order” motivations and inclinations of the actual self with a view to forging a coherent self, namely, the “pure” or “whole-hearted” self that is to evade despair and guide ethical striving. (Fremstedal nods here to work by Davenport and Stokes.) Fremstedal highlights the limitations of the “given” self by reminding... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dei Filius in ContextPatrick Gorevan"On January 3, Vérot, bishop of Savannah, made his debut at the council with a common-sense but long-winded speech, laced with witting or unwitting touches of humor that pleased some but annoyed others. He asked why the council was wasting time in refuting the errors of some obscure German philosophers. It should instead focus on real issues."1This article is an attempt to help understand the (...) First Vatican Council's efforts which resulted in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, in the face of skepticism by Bishop Augustin Vérot (and others) about the need for the debate and subsequent constitution on faith and reason.The philosophers in question were not particularly obscure: Georg Hermes and Anton Günther were influential figures in the Catholic intellectual world of the mid nineteenth century, while Louis Bautain, and indeed Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, even apart from their influence in Catholic intellectual circles, were inspiring spiritual figures, founders of important and widespread religious orders which flourish to this day. Their "errors" were influential, and represented a broad flank of Christian thinking in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, in many cases demonstrating the truth of Karl Barth's remark that, in those years, "theology... retreated into the narrow regions of epistemology and ethics that Kant left for it."2 [End Page 803]Their "errors" also reflected the dialogue which Christians, haltingly and awkwardly sometimes, but unavoidably, were carrying on with the world of the Enlightenment. Hermann-Josef Pottmeyer concluded his assessment of Dei Filius by saying that the constitution was nothing less than the solemn recognition of the elements of truth in the Enlightenment.3 Pottmeyer is offering a benign assessment of the council's attitude, for the preface to Dei Filius rather speaks about problems to be solved, which had been caused or accentuated by the Enlightenment.4 Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that the Catholic semi-rationalists, ontologists, and even fideists were the ones trying to discern the truthful elements emerging from the Enlightenment.5This introductory paper will try to assess: what the semi-rationalists such as Hermes and Günther, the ontologists such as Rosmini-Serbati, and the semi-fideists such as Bautain were trying to achieve; what the maturing judgment of the Church, assisted particularly by the theologians of the "Roman School," was on their efforts; and how this prepared the ground for the Council and the constitution Dei Filius.The Role of Semi-RationalismIt is clear that semi-rationalism, the Catholic version of rationalism as it were, is one of the chief explicit targets of Dei Filius. While rationalism or a total reliance on reason for religious truth, ignoring or rejecting revelation in the process, is a bridge too far for Catholics, semi-rationalism in its [End Page 804] many forms can seem to offer a different kind of bridge, keeping Christian thought in touch with the deliverances of enlightened reason.Semi-rationalism is the view that, while the revelation of God is important and even necessary for knowledge of religious truths (either initially or for the uneducated),human reason can independently demonstrate all or almost all of the truths known through revelation. Accordingly, on this view there are no or very few divine mysteries that cannot be independently proven through reason. Semi-rationalism was especially popular among German Catholic philosophers and theologians at the start of the nineteenth century, as a way to defend Catholicism in post Enlightenment times.6Thinkers of this kind who take center stage in the mind of the fathers of the Council, and of the Church's doctrinal concern in the years leading up to Vatican I, are Hermes, based in the University of Münster, and Günther, a Bohemian who worked and taught (privately) in Vienna. To these we turn.Georg Hermes (1775–1831)Hermes was an influential priest and theologian, professor of dogmatic theology in Münster and eventually in Bonn, with a wide following among his colleagues and students. He was motivated by his exposure to Kantian thought to approach theology as an apologist. His thought is sometimes termed an apologetic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 1-21 [Access article in PDF] Turning Kant Against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics and the Duty to Community Pat J. Gehrke Communication ethics scholars afford Immanuel Kant significantly less attention than one might expect. This may be because, as Robert Dostal notes, Kant argues that rhetoric merits no respect whatsoever (223). This rejection of rhetoric, Dostal writes, is grounded in the (...) significant emphasis given to Kant's concept of autonomy (232). The focus on autonomy and, hence, rhetoricians' relative neglect of Kant's ethical theory are both connected to the separation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (hereinafter CPuR) from his subsequent ethical and moral philosophy. Kenneth Burke writes that Kant's first critique has no ethical implications, "no 'wills,' 'oughts,' 'shoulds,' or 'thou shalt nots'... nothing but an inevitable is, a description of conditions as they necessarily are for human experience" (191; emphasis in original). Such readings lose much of the richness and complexity of Kant's thought and tend instead to produce simple moral duties, such as Mike Markel's assertion that technical communicators must be truthful.Perhaps the most critical element of Kant's work lost in our focus on autonomy is his articulation of a ground for a duty to community. While Kant makes clear the importance of community for his metaphysics in the first critique (CPuR), the importance of community in Kant's moral philosophy often is overlooked. Some scholars claim that an ethical duty to community is either rejected by Kant's emphasis on the autonomy of will or simply ignored. This article combines a reading of Kant's metaphysics of experience with his moral philosophy to articulate a communication ethic grounded in community. This argument is made in three parts: first, the community of objects in experience—the Third Analogy of Experience—is an organizing principle of and a necessary condition for the possibility of all experience; second, this metaphysical principle of community is relevant [End Page 1] to community as developed in Kant's ethical writings; and finally, Kant's own work undermines the primacy of autonomy and better supports a communication ethic grounded in a duty to community.Scholars interested in Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action have special reason to take note of Kant's work. Kant is not only a figure that Habermas sees reflected in his own work, 1 but a constant point of contrast. Craig Calhoun writes that much of Habermas's own philosophy emerges by rejecting Kant's epistemology and elements of his metaphysics while still giving credence to Kantian moral philosophy (2). However, like most communication scholars and philosophers, Habermas believes that autonomy governs Kantian ethics: "Formalistic ethics (Kant) binds the criterion of generality of norms to the further criterion of autonomy, that is, independence from contingent motives" (Habermas, Legitimation 89). Since autonomy excludes or represses the contingent, if our readings of Kant give primacy to autonomy we leave little room for any notion of community as manifest in experience. In no small part, it is the criticism of Kant for privileging autonomy that has given Habermasians their break from Kantian ethics. However, if we turn to the first critique to guide our reading of the moral philosophy, there is another way to understand the role of autonomy and community in Kant's thought. By linking Kant's metaphysics with his moral philosophy, this article turns Kant away from the primacy of autonomy and uses Kant's own works to argue that autonomy is but one half of an antinomy that is organized under the principle of community. Thus, this article recuperates the possibility of deploying Kantian metaphysics and moral philosophy together as grounds for a communication ethic that privileges community and recovers the value of rhetoric.For rhetorical scholars, the resistance to the priority of autonomy may be related to the frequent expression of community through appeal to commonality, sameness, or identification. Today, feminist, race, postmodern, and poststructural communication scholars are questioning the value of commonality as a ground for ethics (e... (shrink)

Richard Rorty is famous, maybe even infamous, for his philosophical nonchalance. His groundbreaking work not only rejects all theories of truth but also dismisses modern epistemology and its preoccupation with knowledge and representation. At the same time, the celebrated pragmatist believed there could be no universally valid answers to moral questions, which led him to a complex view of religion rarely expressed in his writings. In this posthumous publication, Rorty, a strict secularist, finds in the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, (...) John Stuart Mill, William James, and George Santayana, among others, a political imagination shared by religious traditions. His intent is not to promote belief over nonbelief or to blur the distinction between religious and public domains. Rorty seeks only to locate patterns of similarity and difference so an ethics of decency and a politics of solidarity can rise. He particularly responds to Pope Benedict XVI and his campaign against the relativist vision. Whether holding theologians, metaphysicians, or political ideologues to account, Rorty remains steadfast in his opposition to absolute uniformity and its exploitation of political strength. (shrink)

This expanded edition of James Ellington's preeminent translations of _Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysical Principles of Virtue_ includes his new translation of Kant's essay On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, in which Kant replies to one of the standard objections to his moral theory, as presented in the main text of _Grounding_, that it requires us to tell the truth even in the face of harmful consequences.

Social movements driven by a combination of religious nationalism and economic fundamentalism are globally grabbing the levers of political, economic, and intellectual control. The consequence is a policy climate premised on polarization in which inequality and destruction of the natural environment are condoned. This creates demands on key academic institutions like business schools, with stakeholders who are complicit in the sustenance of these social movements. Scholars in these schools have an opportunity to respond through curricula that facilitate reflection on (...) the ideological preferences of such groups under their influence. However, stakeholders influenced by religious nationalism tend to reject the premises of liberal secular vocabulary as elitist or alien and hence suspicious. This article considers a teaching strategy to instill values of equality and respect for nature among the stakeholders by grounding curriculums in the tenets of the same religion valorized by the social movements. The consequences of such a strategy is discussed through its application to the business curriculums taught in India, where a regressive social movement with totalitarian pretensions—Hindutva—combined with neoliberalism has secured unparalleled power. Elements of this strategy could inform educators in other democratic societies facing similar challenges. (shrink)

In Kant and Virtue Ethics I argue that while Kant himself does not have a virtue ethics, a virtue ethics that is recognizably Kantian is a genuine possibility. In Chapter One I criticize Martha Nussbaum's and Gary Watson's accounts of virtue ethics, and offer my own, according to which an ethical theory is a virtue ethics just in case it takes virtue to be more basic than rightness and at least as basic as goodness. I (...) next consider and reject the arguments of three contemporary philosophers who claim that Kant has a virtue ethics. In Chapter Two I argue that neither the textual evidence Onora O'Neill adduces nor her account of maxims as life-rules supports her virtue-ethical reading of Kant. In Chapter Three I show that Nelson Potter's central argument suffers from an equivocation on its key term. In Chapter Four I argue that Christine Korsgaard is mistaken to hold that Kant offers a "motivational analysis" of rightness. In Chapter Five I argue that Kant cannot have a virtue ethics, because he believes that normative standards must be external, while virtue ethical standards are not external, and because his theory of virtue as strength of will in fulfilling one's duty fails to make virtue more basic than rightness. In Chapter Six I develop a Kantian virtue ethics grounded in autonomy. I rely on Christine Swanton's value-centered theory of virtue , according to which virtues are traits that enable their possessors to promote, express, honor and appreciate value. I argue for the value-centeredness of Kant's ethics and suggest that my Kantian virtue ethics helps us appreciate this aspect of Kant's ethics, which has been recently emphasized by Barbara Herman and Allen Wood. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to clarify Hegel's objection to the use of ideals in ethical thinking by examining his opposition to Kant's ideal of perpetual peace. I explain why Hegel believes that the ideal of peace amounts to nothing more than a moral condemnation that ignores the significance for international relations of appreciating the modern nation-state as an ethical achievement. I argue, however, that Kant's proposed federation can be grounded in the concrete ethical realities Hegel accepts as compelling and (...) uses this basis to sketch a defensible understanding of the obligating force of ethical ideals against Hegel's objections. (shrink)

This is a major new study of Kant's ethics that will transform the way students and scholars approach the subject in future. Allen Wood argues that Kant's ethical vision is grounded in the idea of the dignity of the rational nature of every human being. Undergoing both natural competitiveness and social antagonism the human species, according to Kant, develops the rational capacity to struggle against its impulses towards a human community in which the ends of all are to harmonize (...) and coincide. The distinctive features of the book are twofold. First, it focuses for the first time on the central role played in Kant's ethical theory by the value of rational nature as an end itself. Second, it shows the importance of Kant's systematic theory of human nature and history, and its implications for the structure, formulation, and application of Kant's moral principles. This comprehensive study will be of critical importance to students of moral philosophy, the history of ideas, political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

In this bold and innovative new work, A.W. Moore poses the question of whether it is possible for ethical thinking to be grounded in pure reason. In order to understand and answer this question, he takes a refreshing and challenging look at Kant’s moral and religious philosophy. Identifying three Kantian Themes – morality, freedom and religion – and presenting variations on each of these themes in turn, Moore concedes that there are difficulties with the Kantian view that morality can (...) be governed by ‘pure’ reason. He does however defend a closely related view involving a notion of reason as socially and culturally conditioned. In the course of doing this, Moore considers in detail, ideas at the heart of Kant’s thought, such as the categorical imperative, free will, evil, hope, eternal life and God. He also makes creative use of the ideas in contemporary philosophy, both within the analytic tradition and outside it, such as ‘thick’ ethical concepts, forms of life and ‘becoming those that we are’. Throughout the book, a guiding precept is that to be rational is to make sense, and that nothing is of greater value to use than making sense. (shrink)

Kant’s critical philosophy represents a rudimentary existentialism, or a proto-existentialism, in the following respects: He emphasizes human finitude, limits our knowledge, and argues that human consciousness is characterized by mineness (Jemeinigkeit). He introduces the influential concept of autonomy, something that lead to controversies about constructivism and anti-realism in meta-ethics and anticipated problems concerning decisionism in Existentialism. Kant makes human freedom the central philosophical issue, arguing (in the incorporation thesis) that freedom is inescapable for human agents. He even holds that (...) awareness of freedom leads to anxiety (as opposed to fear), and that anxiety precedes the fall into evil. In the doctrine of radical evil, he argues that human agents are always already suffering from self-deception because of this fall. In order to overcome self-deception and evil, Kant proscribes a radical self-choice in which the agent takes over himself and society by thinking independently and consistently. However, this is not only a moral issue for Kant but also something that concerns religious faith and hope, since Kant argues that we need religion to overcome not only moral evil but also despair. Although he criticizes traditional natural theology, Kant develops a practical (moral) interpretation of religion that anticipates religious Existentialism. In this context, he developed an influential critique of philosophical theodicies and a notion of the hiddenness of God that emphasizes the importance and inscrutability of evil. By doing this, and by introducing philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology as new disciplines, Kant prepared the ground for Existentialism. (shrink)

The essay collection "Kant on Proofs for God's Existence" provides a highly needed, comprehensive analysis of the radical turns of Kant's views on proofs for God's existence.— In the "Theory of Heavens" (1755), Kant intends to harmonize the Newtonian laws of motion with a physico-theological argument for the existence of God. But only a few years later, in the "Ground of Proof" essay (1763), Kant defends an ontological ('possibility' or 'modal') argument on the basis of its logical exactitude while he (...) praises the physico-theological argument for its beauty and appeal to the common sense. In the first "Critique" (1781/7), Kant replaces traditional constitutive ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological proofs with his own regulative theoretical and moral-practical religious arguments. He continues to defend a moral argument in the second "Critique" (1788). But in the third "Critique" (1790), Kant reintroduces a physico-theological besides an ethicotheological argument in order to unify the critical system of philosophy. Kant develops further moral arguments and arguments from evil in the "Theodicy" essay (1791) and the "Religion" (1793/4), and still searches for the right kind of proof for God's existence in the "Opus postumum" (1796–1804).—Part one of this volume is dedicated to an analysis of Kant's proofs for God's existence in their historical order that explains which proofs Kant favors or rejects in various periods of his thought. Part two contains a systematic classification of main kinds of proof for God's existence in Kant that outlines the argumentative structure of particular kinds of proof and discusses Kant's potential reasons for their variations and modifications. The essay collection speaks to Kant specialists, philosophers, and theologians, but introduces the topic to non-academic readers also. -/- Contributers: Uygar Abaci (Pennsylvania State University), Craig Bacon (University of South Carolina), Andrew Chignell (Princeton University), Eckart Förster (Humboldt University, Johns Hopkins University), Ina Goy (Beijing Normal University) Paul Guyer (Brown University), Graham Oppy (Monash University), Lara Ostaric (Temple University), Stephen Palmquist (Independent Scholar), Lawrence Pasternack (Oklahoma State University), Konstantin Pollok (University of Mainz), Oliver Sensen (University of Tulane), Allen Wood (Bloomington University, Stanford University). (shrink)

One of the key ethical debates in Russian religious thought, initiated by Leo Tolstoy, concerned the question of nonresistance to evil by force. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of Kant’s ethics and philosophy of religion on the course of this debate and to determine the place and significance of the arguments and considerations expressed on this issue by Semyon Frank in the early and late periods (1908 and 1940s) of his work. To this (...) end I reconstruct the general course of the debate, notably the positions and arguments of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Beginning with Tolstoy, Russ­ian thinkers introduced the original ethical content of the idea of nonresistance derived from the Gospel into the ethics of duty borrowed from Kant. The Tolstoy version of this idea was challenged mainly from two directions: from the Kantian grounding of the legitimacy of coercion and attempts to bring in styles of moral thinking other than the ethic of duty. Ilyin’s apolo­gia for the use of force in the struggle against evil prompted Russian émigré thinkers to take a closer look at Tolstoy’s ethical concept and pay attention to its positive content. On this basis Berdyaev and especially Frank create their version of the Christ-centered ethic of salvation which, in the perspective of “protecting the world against evil” includes the ethic of duty and links it with the possibility of using force, always a wrongful act, but one justified “in a situation of extreme need”. (shrink)

In this article I reevaluate Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy from a post–Darwinian perspective. Taking an evolutionary approach to human reasoning and incorporating some recent work on the science of the emotions, I argue that the Kantian bifurcation of reason and emotion, which underlies his moral philosophy, is no longer tenable. Kant's practical defense of his ethics as being the only option that can save morality from the dangers posed by naturalism is also considered and rejected. Instead, I argue that (...) an evolutionary view of reason and emotion can provide an adequate ground for morality and explore the possibility and advantages of such an ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 177-180 [Access article in PDF] Book Review How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity, by James R. Flynn; ix & 212 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $40.00. James Flynn's search for non-objective grounds for humane ideals opens with an admission that the author spent decades searching for an "ethical truth-test" by which to (...) measure ideals. This truth-test would constitute a "higher court of appeals," a nonpartisan judgment of right and wrong that would grant objectivity to the winning belief. This is the stance of Socrates and Kant. What Flynn came to realize was that the truth-tests he sampled proved to be contradictory, easily exploited, and ineffectual in convincing people of the tests' warrant. For many this collapse of ethical truth leads to relativism, and a concomitant tolerance of the values of others, however repellant one finds them. This is the stance of the postmodernists, those dedicated to "building bonfires to celebrate the demise of the Enlightenment" (p. 181). But Flynn deems the anti-truth position just as contradictory and exploitable as the truth-test position. Instead, he proposes an intermediate stance, short of objective truth but more than relativist assertion, an outlook that takes the best of truth, beauty, diversity, perfectibility, utilitarianism, and justice and casts them in a relation of trade-off and compromise.To reach this negotiation model of humaneness, Flynn must dispense with [End Page 177] three faulty beliefs. The first mistake is the objective one, that is, the reliance on ethical truth-tests (chapters 2-4). The problem lies in their grounding in "a theory of being that posits something beyond the physical universe... or that asserts that the physical universe contains something not revealed by science, such as the purposes of nature" (pp. 47-48). Plato has his Forms, Rousseau his nature, Moore his "moral goodness." The difficulty with these criteria is that, granted their existence, we know not how to apply them to human affairs. We may appeal to God to justify our actions, but in doing so "we tend to assume that God's overriding criterion of moral rectitude is similar to our own. The humane posit a benevolent God, the not so humane a stern God" (p. 72). In other words, such criteria beg the question of their use. Their transcendence of the world renders them eminently adaptable to various worldly designs, for example, when Kant reads into nature "whatever content he needs to get decisions in favor of his own principles" (p. 77).When ethical truth-tests fail in their implementation, the temptation is to reject ethical grounds altogether. Flynn terms this the "nihilist fallacy," the notion that if there is no extra-human ground for ethics, no ethical truth-test, then no ethic is justified. Flynn counters that "Even in the absence of a truth-test, people may internalize ideals and be deeply committed to them" (p. 9). They believe in those ideals not because they think they are true, but because they think they are right. Only those who believe that ethical beliefs are an epistemological matter assume that ideals must be shored up by evidence and proven to be correct. It is ironic, Flynn notes, that it is anti-epistemologists like Nietzsche who make this argument, claiming that ethical believers fail a truth-test when in fact those believers are not interested in truth-testing at all.The flip side of this nihilism is postmodernism, another ethical outlook Flynn rejects. Nihilists and postmodernists share an epistemological skepticism, treating putatively objective ideals as disguised power plays concocted to promote certain interests. They differ in how they direct that skepticism. For the Nietzschean nihilist, the interests are those of the herd and its institutions (like the Church), and so he counsels great geniuses to use lesser persons as means to their ends (pp. 127-33). For the postmodernist, the interests are those of the Western male, the naive empiricist, the imperialist, and so he counsels those privileged individuals to examine themselves... (shrink)

In this paper, I first explain Slajov Žižek’s analysis of the grounds of Kant’s categorical imperative. I show how Žižek considered the grounds of the categorical imperative to be an example of irrationalism that ran counter to the spirit of the Enlightenment, of which Kant was, ironically, a major proponent. The irrationalism in Kant’s moral law makes him vulnerable to moral skepticism. I go on to counter this interpretation by drawing from Kant’s practical philosophy. I counter the moral skeptic by (...) arguing from moral phenomenology to the existence of a reason that is independent of empirical motivations and so objectively determining. Whatever is objectively determining logically supersedes that which is based on a particular context. The moral law is rooted in the ontology of an independent faculty of reason capable of issuing a universal law. The union of ontology and ethics means that the categorical imperative is not irrational. (shrink)

Pragmatic Encroachment, Religious Belief and Practice engages several recent and important discussions in the mainstream epistemological literature surrounding 'pragmatic encroachment'. It has been argued that what is at stake for a person in regards to acting as if a proposition is true can raise the levels of epistemic support required to know that proposition. Do the high stakes involved in accepting or rejecting religious beliefs raise the standards for knowledge that 'God exists', 'Jesus rose from the dead' (...) and other propositions? Professor Rizzieri also examines whether or not knowledge and justification norms of belief and action undermine the pragmatic grounds for religious belief suggested by William James. Rizzieri argues that such norms favor an attitude of hope, as opposed to belief, under conditions of uncertainty. Finally, Rizzieri argues the connections between knowledge and rational action undermine radically externalist accounts of religious knowledge and proposes an alternative account of the justification of religious beliefs. (shrink)

Early in the Preface to Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant claims that “morality leads ineluctably to religion”. This thesis is hardly an innovation of the Religion. Again and again throughout the critical corpus, Kant argues that religious belief is ethically significant, that it makes a morally meaningful difference whether an agent believes or disbelieves. And yet these claims are surely among the most doubted of Kant's positions – and they are often especially doubted by readers who (...) consider themselves Kantians. That Kant of all people should have so cherished religion is perhaps surprising: his moral view enshrines the notion that moral worth arises solely form the “good will”, that is, from a will determined by the moral law. Kant claims to be able to deduce this law and to account for how it motivates without ever relying on religious propositions. Rather, he grounds morality in the conception of autonomy, in the absolutely free self-legislation of the moral principle. So why, after effecting this dramatic Copernican revolution in ethics, does Kant appear to backslide, insisting on the moral necessity of religious belief? (shrink)

In The Shadow of God, Michael Rosen argues that modern moral philosophy in the tradition of German Idealism is profoundly shaped by religious views these thinkers could not overcome. However, a closer look at Rosen’s critique of Kant’s and Kantian conceptions of morality raises the possibility that Rosen’s view may itself be haunted by the shadow of God. In particular, Rosen appears to believe that a moral imperative of respect for human dignity necessarily requires a religious-transcendent grounding, (...) such that there is no purely moral answer to the question of why such respect is owed. In relegating morality to an impersonal realm that alienates us from our personal understandings of the good, Rosen fails to recognize not only that Kantian morality is meant to alienate us from certain ends (e.g., racist or sexist), but that it is also meant to overcome alienation. This is because Kantian morality is not so much impersonal, as it is interpersonal: it recognizes us as belonging to a community of free and equal persons, who are autonomous when we morally reflect on, or even reject, certain ends. (shrink)

According to the prevailing opinion of the Kantian scholars, Kants critique of the traditional philosophical theology in the chapter of his Critique of Pure Reason dedicated to the ideal of reason motivated his rejection of transcendental theology in favor of a construction foundeв on postulates of reason. An examination of Kants sistematics of philosophical-theological disciplines reveals nonetheless some changeability of the borderlines of transcendental theology. This means that Kants critical arguments do not necessarily affect all kinds of trancendental theology, and (...) allows us to investigate Kants reflection of the transcendental ideal if reason as a foundation for an alternative version of philosophical ethico-theology which does not need practical postulates. In the first Critique there is no ground for such a construction, because Kant's concept of virtue remains partly naturalistic at that time. The idea of a pure aprioristic ethics of duty as expounded by Kant later furnished the needed conceptual foundation for a concept already prepared in the theory of the ideal, asserting the reality of a transcendental-practical ideal as a prototype of moral will, as humanity in its comprehensively determined moral perfection, as the realm of ethical ends, and lastly, in an anticipation of the prototypical Christology of Kant's late treatise on religion, as the divine human person within us. Compared with this version of transcendental philosophical theology Kants ethico-theology of postulates should be legitimately determined as a form of natural theology. (shrink)

Both Kant and James claim to limit the role of knowledge in order to make room for faith. In this paper, we argue that despite some similarities, their attempts to do this come apart. Our main claim is that, although both Kant and James justify our adopting religious beliefs on practical grounds, James believes that we can—and should—subsequently assess such beliefs on the basis of evidence. We offer our own account of this evidence and discuss what this difference means (...) for their accounts of religious belief. (shrink)

In Rescuing Autonomy from Kant, James Furner argues that Marxism's relation to Kant's ethics is not one of irrelevance, complementary or incompatibility, but critique. Although Kant's formulas of the categorical imperative presuppose a belief in God that Kant cannot motivate, the value of autonomy can instead be grounded by appeal to an antinomy in capitalism's basic structure, and this commits us to socialism. 'Rescuing Autonomy from Kant provides a sophisticated and persuasive critical account of Kant's moral philosophy that paves (...) the way for Marxist ethics which unites the value of autonomy with the value of human community. The book will be of particular interest to readers curious to see how a critique of Kant's moral theory undertaken from a socialist standpoint does not require a complete rejection of this theory. Instead, key elements of it can be incorporated into an alternative ethical theory that demonstrates the unethical nature of capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 151-153 [Access article in PDF] Allen W. Wood. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xxiv + 436. Cloth, $54.95. This book by Allen Wood in its first half gives us a state-of-the-art survey of traditional topics in the interpretation of Kant's ethics, and in the second half breaks new ground, and significantly widens the canon of works (...) that need to be taken account of in presenting Kant's ethics as a whole. Wood tells us that his main criticism of previous interpretations of Kant's ethics is that they overemphasize the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative, when the most promising version is the formula of humanity. One of the major contributions of this book is the detailed argument (passim, but especially Chapter IV) that the formula of humanity is the preferable one for understanding Kant's ethics in application, and the one used most in the Metaphysics of Morals.Part I takes the reader on the familiar traversal of the text of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Chapter 1 is a discussion of the topics that come up in Chapter One of the Groundwork. Chapter 2 is a coverage of the first part of Kant's Chapter Two. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, are discussions of what are usually called the first (universal law), second (humanity), and third (autonomy and kingdom of ends) formulations of the categorical imperative. The discussion of Kant's Chapter Three is brief (basically, Wood's pages 171-182).Wood comments that the proper way to expound Kant's views on ethics would be, after (1) an introductory exposition based in the Groundwork, (i.e., his Chapters 1-5) to present (2) Kant's views on "human nature and its consequences for the application of the foundational principles" (13) (his Chapters 6-9). Only then would one be in a position to "provide (3) a systematic exposition of the Metaphysics of Morals as the definitive form of Kant's practical philosophy" (13). But such an undertaking would have been too ambitious for any single book. Hence Wood's book omits part (3), though he makes significant use of the Metaphysics of Morals throughout.Wood urges his readers not to neglect his extensive endnotes (xv), where sometimes [End Page 151] important matters are discussed that could not be accommodated within the main text. In addition, in the notes one can find some fascinating passages, e.g., (1) a significant self-criticism (345, n.12). (2) Another note finds Wood saying that Andrea Dworkin borrows her views of sexuality from Simone de Beauvoir (without acknowledgment), and that Beauvoir and Sartre's views were largely anticipated by Kant. Then he adds this zinger: "These comparisons also shed light on the cogency of the condescending explanations usually offered for Kant's views on sex. For it would not naturally occur to us to attribute the views of Beauvoir or Sartre to their sexual inexperience, to the lingering effects of their excessively religious upbringing or to the puritanical attitudes characteristic of mid-century Parisian intellectuals" (397, n.11).One of the traditional topics Wood discusses is the proper formulation of maxims for evaluation by the universal law formulation. He thinks that there are bound to be some systematic failures to achieve correct results because of inadequacies of this formulation, but he discusses fairly extensively how to minimize such erroneous outcomes by correct formulations of maxims (97-107), and his discussion makes some useful contributions to this once heavily discussed topic. One might add another, almost commonsense suggestion to his: Maxims mention ends of action, as well as proposed action-kinds; since actions are thus described within maxims as means to ends, action-descriptions would include only action characteristics that are causally relevant to the achievement of the ends of actions. This reminder enables us to eliminate many irrelevant action-descriptors.Part II of the Wood book is entitled "Anthropological Applications." In this section he pursues topics that have not been central to... (shrink)

In his new book, Rossi emphasizes the prominent role of enlightened religion in the political project of establishing perpetual peace. My paper discusses Rossi’s stance on the question as to whether Kant, in his later years, moved to an immanentist conception of the highest good. Kant’s own position in this regard can arguably be better described as comprehensive, according to which an immanent and a transcendent conception of the highest good are upheld as realizable side by side. Rossi’s account looks (...) perfectly consistent with such a view. One of the reasons for such a comprehensive reading is that “immanent” and “secular” do not coincide in Kant in the first place. Seen in this comprehensive way, and while a version of the highest good ought to be realized immanently, we cannot be certain that this will indeed happen. If it does indeed happen, the immortality postulate, which Kant never abandoned, renders it rational to believe that the immanent version of the highest good is merely a step towards its transcendent realization. Affinities of Rossi’s approach to the suggestion that Kant subscribes to a political theology based on what has been called “Molinism minimally defined” will also be explored. (shrink)

The demand for bodily parts such as organs is increasing, and individuals in certain circumstances are responding by offering parts of their bodies for sale. Is there anything wrong in this? Kant had arguments to suggest that there is, namely that we have duties towards our own bodies, among which is the duty not to sell parts of them. Kant's reasons for holding this view are examined, and found to depend on a notion of what is intrinsically degrading. Rom Harré's (...) recent revision of Kant's argument, in terms of an obligation to preserve the body's organic integrity, is considered. Harré's view does not rule out all acts of selling, but he too ultimately depends on a test of what is intrinsically degrading. Both his view and Kant's are rejected in favour of a view which argues that it does make sense to speak of duties towards our own bodies, grounded in the duty to promote the flourishing of human beings, including ourselves. This provides a reason for opposing the sale of bodily parts, and the current trend towards the market ethic in health care provision. (shrink)

The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) Committee for the Ethical Aspects of Human Reproduction and Women9s Health advises against tubal occlusion (TO) performed at the time of caesarean section (CS/TO) or following a vaginal delivery (VD/TO) if this sterilisation has not been discussed with the woman in an earlier phase of her pregnancy. This advice is neither in accordance with existing medical custom nor evidence based. Particularly in less-resourced locations, adherence to it would deny much wanted one-off sterilisation (...) opportunities to hundreds of thousands of women, many of whom have no reliable contraceptive alternative. To be sure, a well-timed discussion in pregnancy about a potential peripartum TO is preferable and, if conducted as a matter of course (as the Committee appears to promote), would represent an enormous improvement on current practice. Earlier counselling has the advantage that it results in fewer women who regret having rejected the CS/TO or VD/TO option. However, there is no evidence that earlier counselling leads to a smaller proportion of regretted sterilisations. Consequently, where early TO counselling has been impossible, forgotten or deliberately omitted on pronatalist, traditional, financial, cultural or religious grounds, offering a perinatal sterilisation belatedly and in an unbiased, culturally sensitive manner is often verifiably better than not presenting that option at all, notably where high parity and uterine scars are particularly dangerous. Belated counselling, as will be demonstrated in this paper, saves many lives. The Committee9s blanket rejection of belated counselling on perinatal sterilisation is therefore unjustified. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the idea of God in the first Critique prefigures but does not imply a theism. It is in his ethical philosophy that this idea is given a theistic interpretation, and that the postulation (or fideic affirmation) of God’s existence, along with immortality, is practically justified as a condition of the possibility of the summum bonum. This paper argues that Kant’s reasoning from his initially austere conception of morality to the summum bonum and to immortality and God’s existence (...) lacks compelling logic. It also argues that Kant’s practical justification of faith, amounting to no more than the claim that practical reason explicates its own inherent need and satisfies this need by faith, fails to satisfy the demand of religious consciousness for an ontology of reason that includes an account of the grounding of reason in what it postulates. (shrink)

The idea that virtue can be profitably conceived as a certain sort of skill has a long history. My aim is to examine a neglected episode in this history — one that focuses on the pivotal role that Moses Mendelssohn played in rehabilitating the skill model of virtue for the German rationalist tradition, and Immanuel Kant’s subsequent, yet significantly qualified, endorsement of the idea. Mendelssohn celebrates a certain automatism in the execution of skill, and takes this feature to be instrumental (...) in meeting an objection against perfectionist, agent-based ethics: namely, that a virtuous person would seem to act for the sake of realising his own perfection in everything that he does, thereby taking a morally inappropriate interest in his own character. Kant rejects the automatism featured in Mendelssohn’s account, on grounds that it would make virtue mindless and unreflective. But he does not reject the skill model of virtue wholesale. Rather, he calls for considering how reflection can be embedded in the expression of certain kinds of skill, enabling him to endorse, and arguably adopt, the model on his own terms. (shrink)

According to a common caricature of Kant’s ethics, it is synonymous with the Categorical Imperative (CI) and with the sublime and clarion call of duty. But in this paper, I argue that the conjunction of Kant’s concept of duty and his idea of morality as a system of imperatives is unsustainable on the grounds that it commits him to the following two theses: (I) If an agent has a duty to D, then she must be constrained to D, and (...) (II) the Supreme Law of Morality always manifests in the form of duty for humans. I begin by examining (and rejecting) various attempts to defend these two theses. I then explore how this bears on various central aspects of Kant's thought including “ought implies can” (OIC), “ought implies able not to” (OIAN), his system of duties, and the nature of respect. (shrink)

During the 1760s and 1770s, Kant entertained a naturalistic approach to ethics based on the supposed psychological fact of a human love for freedom. During the critical period, especially in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant clearly rejected such an approach. But his attempt at a metaphysical foundation for ethics in section III of the Groundwork was equally clearly a failure. Kant recognized this in his appeal to the "fact of reason" argument in the Critique of (...) Practical Reason, but thereby gave up on any attempt to ground the fundamental principle of morality at all. So it is of interest to see how far we might now proceed along the lines of his original naturalistic approach. (shrink)

This paper addresses the role of the notion of sacrifice in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and in his account of religion. First, I argue that kenotic sacrifice, or sacrifice as ‘withdrawal’, plays a hidden and yet important role in the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Second, I focus on Kant’s practical philosophy, arguing that the notion of sacrifice that is both implied and explicitly analyzed by Kant is mainly suppressive sacrifice. However, Kant’s account is fundamentally ambiguous, as sometimes the (...) kenotic meaning of sacrifice seems to resurface, especially in the context of Kant’s discussion of the happiness of others as an end in itself. Because religious notions are regarded by Kant as necessary transitional forms (Darstellungen) to be used to make moral ideas applicable to the world, I then scrutinize Kant’s view of sacrifice as an improper symbol, and I analyze Kant’s arguments for such a dismissal and discuss the subject matter in recent literature. Finally, I examine the role of sacrifice in Kant’s account of Christ as the prototype of pure moral disposition. I conclude by arguing that Kant indeed grasped the importance of including kenotic dynamics in practical philosophy but was somehow unable or unwilling to integrate it into the formal grounding of his ethics. This tension, however, effectively provides an entry point for features that can be found in the post-Kantians. (shrink)

Our concern in this essay are the roles of religious conviction in what we call a “publicly justified polity” — one in which the laws conform to the Principle of Public Justification, according to which (in a sense that will become clearer) each citizen must have conclusive reason to accept each law as binding. According to “justificatory liberalism,”1 this public justification requirement follows from the core liberal commitment of respect for the freedom and equality of all citizens.2 To respect (...) each as free and equal requires that no one simply be forced to submit to the judgments of others as to what she must do. Laws must be justified to those subject to them — each must accept grounds that justify the law. As Kant indicated, if such a condition is achieved, each is both subject and legislator: each is subject to the law, yet each legislates the law, and so all our free and equal under the law.3 Now it would appear that if we are to justify laws to each and every person, the reasons for these laws must be “accessible to all.”4 Religious reasons, however, are not shared by everyone, and may be inaccessible to some: they would thereby seem inappropriate in public justification. On the face of it, justificatory liberals seem committed to expunging religious-based reasoning from political justification. Not surprisingly, this apparent commitment of justificatory liberalism is adamantly rejected by many citizens of faith who consider themselves liberals. These citizens embrace the traditional liberal freedoms and rights and, moreover, reject any suggestion that a legitimate polity might seek to establish a religion, much less a theocracy. Yet they.. (shrink)

I begin by querying whether ‘post-axial’ religions are cosmically optimistic, though what John Hick has in mind is forms of religious beliefs that affirm that there is life after physical death, and the possibility of final fulfilment for all. Hick accepts that ideas of this fulfilment, the ultimate goal of human striving, conflict. I query whether diverse traditions would accept that ‘the Real’ is wholly beyond their conceptions of it, and that their conception is no more authentic than the (...) conceptions held by other traditions. I reject soteriology as a criterion of choice between religions, as the criterion is either presently unverifiable or fails to pick out religions in a distinctive way. I suggest that ethics depends on ontology, or on basic views of human nature, and that Hick actually agrees with this, and in fact holds a personalist view of the metaphysical ground of ethics. This view allows various religions to apprehend aspects of ‘the Real’, but does not allow that all are more or less equally authentic. It is thus pluralistic but not totally egalitarian, though it is also not committed to the view that one tradition is wholly correct. (shrink)

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on (...) topics not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church. This new edition includes slightly revised translations, a revised introduction with expanded discussion of certain key themes in the work, and up-to-date guidance on further reading. (shrink)

Among others, four significant criticisms have been leveled against Kant’s morality. These criticisms are that Kant’s morality lacks a motivational component, thatit ignores the spiritual dimensions of morality espoused by a virtue-based ethics, that it overemphasizes the principle of autonomy in neglecting the communal context of morality, and that it lacks a theological foundation in being detached from God. In this paper I attempt to show that, when understood in the broader context of his religious doctrines and the (...) overall philosophical project of the architectonic of reason, Kant’s morality has a strong motivational component, supports the forming of a virtuous character as an essential element in a complete moral life, must be grounded in a community so as to realize peace and happiness for rational individuals, and is linked, ultimately, to a theological foundation. (shrink)

In their responses to Dr Osamu Muramoto Watchtower Society spokesmen David Malyon and Donald Ridley ,1–3 deny many of the criticisms levelled against the WTS by Muramoto.4–6 In this paper I argue as a Jehovah's Witness and on behalf of the members of AJWRB that there is no biblical basis for the WTS's partial ban on blood and that this dissenting theological view should be made clear to all JW patients who reject blood on religious grounds. Such patients should (...) be guaranteed confidentiality should they accept whole blood or components that are banned by the WTS. I argue against Malyon's and Ridley's claim that WTS policy allows freedom of conscience to individual JWs and that it is non-coercive and non-punitive in dealing with conscientious dissent and I challenge the notion that there is monolithic support of the WTS blood policy among those who identify themselves as JWs and carry the WTS “advance directive”. (shrink)

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...) of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

The paper examines the current debates regarding the grounding of human rights in a pluralistic, culturally diverse world. It analyses the challenges which come today from certain policies of human rights which instrumentalize them under the pretext of a “global war on terror” and redefi ne them in terms of democracy promotion and regime change, as well as those challenges which come from ideologies which question the core principles of human rights and provoke the so called “crisis of legitimization.” (...) The paper argues for the necessity of restoring the genuine meaning of human rights and of the role of citizens in striving for their implementation. At the heart of the analysis is Kant’s concept of human rights as freedom. With Kant as its backdrop, the paper shows that the claim that religious worldviews provide the only intelligible foundation, as in Nicholas Wolterstorff, faces serious challenges in a pluralistic, culturally diverse world. The paper then analyzes the non-religious philosophical concepts which seek to develop an account of human rights that does not depend upon controversial metaphysical or religious doctrines. It examines an account of human rights from the perspective of discourse ethics as developed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. It also analyses the concepts of human dignity and “emerging morality” by Arturo Roig and the “ethics of liberation” by Enrique Dussel. The analysis shows the ongoing relevance of Kant’s ideas and their recent development by the theorists of discourse ethics and of dialogical and democratic cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

This article examines Paul Guyer’s claim that we should attempt to ground the principle of religious freedom on the basis of Kant’s arguments for religious liberty. I problematise Guyer’s suggestion by investigating a hypothetical ‘dogmatic conflict’ between a scientifically and a religiously grounded belief. I further suggest that considering Christian Wolff’s philosophy might provide us with an approach which shares the benefits that Guyer identifies in Kant, while at the same time avoiding the issues Kant might run into (...) that result from the occurrence of the dogmatic conflict. I start by providing a background to Wolff’s philosophy and explaining the notion of the dogmatic conflict. Then I present a potential contemporary case of the dogmatic conflict and try to see how it would be dealt with based on Guyer’s proposal. Finally, I consider what a Wolffian solution would look like, arguing that Guyer’s project might benefit from considering Wolff. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on how the meritorious dimension (or latitude, Spielraum) involved in the promotion of the highest good is closely related to the constitution of an ethical community as a free, open and progressive moral society. I argue that since moral perfection and moral belief/faith as the grounding elements for the promotion of the highest good (synthesis of virtue and happiness) are not objective duties that must be promoted to a definite extent but involve a certain (...) latitude in their employment, the ethical community that emerges out of the pursuit of the highest good does not prove to be a uniform society in terms of the degrees of the pursuit of moral perfection and moral commitment of its citizens. Rather, I point out that the latitude involved in the pursuit of moral perfection and the adoption of moral belief leads to the establishment of an ethical community that emerges as an open and free society entered by its citizens freely and willfully as part of their inner self-constraint. I thus hold that in such an ethical society agents can pursue and promote the highest good not in a strictly prescribed and uniform manner but in various forms and degrees as long as they constantly progress towards a higher form of moral perfection and purer form of religious (or rational) belief/faith. (shrink)