Kant's view that there is a propensity to evil in human nature has been thought to be both internally inconsistent and in tension with his other philosophical commitments. This essay provides an interpretation of the propensity to evil to defend Kant from these objections. I argue that the propensity to evil is the choice of the evil fundamental maxim. I then assess Kant's claims that the propensity to evil is universal and (...) inextirpable given this interpretation. I conclude by proposing a new interpretation of why Kant deliberately employs religious language in developing his account of the propensity to evil. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that human nature tends to be corrupt from the very outset of our moral life. In Sections II and III of the First Piece of Religion, Immanuel Kant approaches this theme of the corruption of human goodness in a more direct way. Although our predisposition is good, he argues that all human beings must have a propensity or original inclination that points us in the opposite direction. In Section II, he argues that, if it exists, then (...) its status must be more than just that of an accidental or optional feature of human experience; this propensity must be inevitable. Section III explains how even people who appear to be good may be concealing an evil heart, if we understand the concept of evil in a philosophically appropriate manner. Human evil arises as a perversion of an originally good predisposition. (shrink)

In Book I of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant offers an explanation of freedom and moral good and evil that is different from that offered in the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. My primary goal in this paper is to analyze and elucidate this new theory. My secondary goal is to contrast this new theory with the older one that it is replacing. I argue that the new theory, which centers on the idea that (...) evil involves a sort of misprioritizing, enables Kant to get around two problems associated with the older theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a quasi-transcendental argument to justify Kant’s infamous claim “man is evil by nature.” The cornerstone of my reconstruction lies in drawing a systematic distinction between the seemingly identical concepts of “evil disposition” (böseGesinnung) and “propensity to evil” (Hang zumBösen). The former, I argue, Kant reserves to describe the fundamental moral outlook of a single individual; the latter, the moral orientation of the whole species. Moreover, the appellative “evil” ranges over two (...) different types of moral failure: while an “evil disposition” is a failure to realize the good (i.e., to adopt the motive of duty as limiting condition for all one’s desires), an “evil propensity” is a failure to realize the highest good (i.e., to engage in the collective project of transforming the legal order into an ethical community). This correlation between units of moral analysis and types of obligation suggests a way to offer a deduction of the universal propensity on behalf of Kant. It consists in tracing the source of radical evil to the same subjective necessity that gives rise to the doctrine of the highest good. For, at the basis of Kant’s two doctrines lies the same natural dialectic between happiness and morality. While the highest good brings about the critically acceptable resolution of this dialectic, the propensity to evil perpetuates and aggravates it. Instead of connecting happiness and morality in an objective relation, the human will subordinatesmorality to the pursuit of happiness according to the subjective order of association. If this reading is correct, it would explain why prior attempts at a transcendental deduction have failed: interpreters have looked for the key to the deduction in the body of Kant’s text, where it is not to be found, for it is tucked, instead, in the Preface to the first edition. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that is the (...) “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of evil, presented most fully in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, has been consistently misinterpreted since he first presented it. As a result, readers have taken it to be a mess of inconsistencies and eccentricities and so have tried to mine it for an insight or two, dismissed it altogether, or sought to explain how Kant could have gone so wrong. In this work, I provide an interpretation of Kant’s theory of evil that (...) renders it consistent and plausible. The main problem Kant tries to solve with his theory of evil is the problem of willful immorality: how can someone who sees her moral obligations as overridingly authoritative willingly (and so culpably) transgress them? Kant’s answer is that we do so by indulging various “moral fantasies” – ways of reconceiving the moral law or one’s status in relation to it. By entertaining, e.g., the fantasy that one is exempt from the moral law’s commands (“the exceptionalist fantasy”), or that one cannot live up to them (“despondency”), or that one need only to live up to society’s standards rather than moral demands (“the adequacy fantasy”) – one persuades oneself that the duty the moral law demands one to perform is only optional. Moral fantasies appeal only because of the presence, in everyone, of the “propensity to evil,” which makes the moral law’s commands seem less authoritative, thereby strengthening one’s sensuous desires. As a result, moral fantasies thereby diminish the urgency of moral obligations, and so tempt us to entertain them. Scholars of Kant have missed this explanation of wickedness because they have restricted their attention to the Religion, a work whose gnomic statements on evil are difficult to interpret when isolated from the larger context of Kant’s thinking. Assaying Kant’s thinking on immorality from the mid-1780s to the late 1790s shows that Kant’s main concern with evil was not so much its nature, but its very possibility. Evaluating the Religion in this context reveals it to be a fruitful resource for explaining the moral psychology of immorality, a problem we still deal with today, and that is possibly. (shrink)

How to make sense of Kant's theory of radical evil is a controversial problem, for the solution of which three approaches have been attempted: (1) the anthropological, (2) the transcendental, and (3) the quasi‐transcendental. This article aims at developing a new quasi‐transcendental approach to radical evil, and its main innovation consists in reinterpreting the propensity to evil as a potential for moral evil, whose nuanced modality (i.e., potentiality) lies between full actuality and logical (empty) possibility. (...) This evil potential inherent to our species' nature can be actualized by individual Willkür in one's evil Gesinnung. Thanks to this reinterpretation, not only the compatibility of radical evil with individual freedom will be convincingly demonstrated, because the potential for evil only strongly pushes rather than necessitating individuals to do evil, but also Kant's bold statement “the human being is by nature evil” becomes easily confirmable, because even a single individual's illegal action provides sufficient empirical evidence to a regressive argument for the transcendental precondition for evil in his species' nature. (shrink)

In the second edition Preface of Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason Kant responds to an anonymous review of the first edition. We present the first English translation of this obscure book review. Following our translation, we summarize the reviewer's main points and evaluate the adequacy of Kant's replies to five criticisms, including two replies that Kant provides in footnotes added in the second edition. A key issue is the reviewer's claim that Religion adopts an implied standpoint, described using (...) transcendental terminology. Kant could have avoided much confusion surrounding Religion, had he taken this review more seriously. We therefore respond to three objections that Kant failed to address: how the Wille–Willkür distinction enables the propensity to evil to be viewed as coexisting with freedom of choice; how moral improvement is possible, even though the propensity to evil is necessary and universal; and how a ‘deed’ can be regarded as ‘noumenal’.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.The Implied Standpoint of Kant's Religion: An Assessment of Kant's Reply to an Early Book Review of Religion Within the Bounds of Bare ReasonVolume 18, Issue 1Stephen R. Palmquist and Steven Otterman DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415412000295Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. The Implied Standpoint of Kant's Religion: An Assessment of Kant's Reply to an Early Book Review of Religion Within the Bounds of Bare ReasonVolume 18, Issue 1Stephen R. Palmquist and Steven Otterman DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415412000295Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. The Implied Standpoint of Kant's Religion: An Assessment of Kant's Reply to an Early Book Review of Religion Within the Bounds of Bare ReasonVolume 18, Issue 1Stephen R. Palmquist and Steven Otterman DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415412000295Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

To perfect human beings with an innate propensity for radical evil is a formidable task. Kant explicitly says that the propensity for evil is not eradicable; it is rooted in human nature, specifically in the human power of choice-making. The task is to reorient the natural order of choice-making, to the moral order that takes the moral law as its supreme principle. I explicate the role of a specific capacity of the human subjective side of judging (...) in this process; namely, of ‘mind’ in its sense as Gemüt. While human willing and choice-making are subject to the influence of sensuousness, Gemüt is a capacity of sensibility that allows the human subject to enjoy the feeling of being pleased in the fulfillment of duty. Its four specific aesthetic preliminary concepts of responsiveness to concepts of duty – moral feeling, conscience, love of humanity, and respect for ones... (shrink)

Kant’s general mode of argument in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, especially his defence of human nature’s propensity to evil, is a matter of considerable controversy: while some interpret his argument as strictly a priori, others interpret it as anthropological. In dialogue with Allen Wood’s recent work, I defend my earlier claim that Religion employs a quasi-transcendental mode of argument, focused on the possibility of a specific type of experience, not experience in general. In Religion, Kant (...) portrays religious experience as possible only for beings with a good predisposition and a propensity to evil. Kant’s theory of the archetype and his theory of symbolism illustrate the same mode of argument. Taking Religion as a sequel to the third Critique more than the second, my perspectival interpretation makes room for a robust view of unsociable sociability without the absurd deception of regarding it as the source of human evil. (shrink)

This paper examines Fichte's proof of evil in §16 of the System of Ethics. According to the majority of commentators, Fichte was mistaken to consider his proof Kantian in spirit (Piché 1999; Kosch 2006, 2011; Dews 2008; and Breazeale 2014). For rather than locate our propensity to evil in an act of free choice, Fichte locates it in a natural force of inertia. However, the distance between Kant and Fichte begins to close if we read his concept (...) of inertia, not as a material force, but as a tendency to resist the work of agency and autonomy. There are, I argue, both textual and conceptual reasons in support of a figurative interpretation. In the course of presenting these reasons, I also uncover an important insight guiding Fichte's analysis of evil in the System of Ethics: namely, his claim that we can never fully step back from ourselves in reflection. In the concluding sections of the paper, I argue that Fichte's insight may solve a particular skeptical threat facing recent Kantian accounts of normativity. (shrink)

Kant argues that we have a duty to perfect ourselves morally and promote the happiness of others. He also argues that we have an innate propensity to evil. Our duty to perfect ourselves sug...

On one common reading of Kant, emotional states that he calls feelings, desires, and inclinations are thoroughly non-cognitive and play no positive role in the moral life, which is instead about subduing our sensible nature through a discipline of reason. Against this common reading, this paper argues that Kant actually holds a weak cognitivist view of at least some emotions, according to which emotions are responses to judgments – or to what Kant calls maxims – that are about what makes (...) an action right or wrong. Moreover, this paper also argues that a full understanding of Kant’s view of emotions and their role in the moral life requires assessing their relation to his theory about the radical evil of human nature, because he holds that emotions can be responses to the fundamental maxim that reflects our propensity to prioritize self-love over the moral law. Even emotions that are not directly corrupted by evil in this way must be seen in the context of Kant’s view that the moral life is essentially a struggle against the propensity to evil in human nature. So rather than reading Kant as a non-cognitivist about emotion, this paper reads him as a weak cognitivist whose suspicion of emotion reflects the significance he assigns to the human propensity to evil. (shrink)

Schelling’s views of evil in Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom is usually thought of as a radicalization of Kant’s argument for the propensity to evil in human nature in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. In this paper, I argue that Kant does not provide a full transcendental deduction for the ground of evil in human nature because this would give a rational reason for there to be evil, Schelling provides a (...) theological–metaphysical reconstruction of Kant’s argument by providing a non-rational ground for evil and the difference between Kant and Schelling lies in how they conceive of the actualization of the ground of evil—through intelligible deed or protohistorical choice—which has repercussions for how they think of conversion. (shrink)

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant claims that rational beings should want to have no inclinations. But in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, he asserts that the inclinations are good in themselves. While many commentators hold that Kant simply wrote hyperbolically in the Groundwork and the second Critique, I argue Kant was sincere, and changed his mind about the worth of the inclinations between the second Critique and the Religion. (...) This is because he changed his mind about the source of immorality: whereas in the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason Kant took our inclinations to be tempters, starting in “Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” and concluding in the Religion, he posited a self-imposed propensity to evil as the source of immorality. Kant’s reason for changing his mind about the source of immorality was partly theological: if our inclinations were to blame for immorality, then God would also be to blame for creating us with them. The only way God could not be to blame is if our immorality were self-imposed. But Kant also concluded that looking for theoretical explanations of our immorality – whether theological or naturalistic – was itself problematic: such explanations ended up exonerating us for our immorality. Because they had this effect, I contend that Kant saw the offering of such exculpating theoretical explanations as itself motivated by immorality. This understanding of Kant makes sense of the approaches he takes in both “Miscarriage” and Religion. (shrink)

This paper uses Paul Ricœur’s analyses of ideology to argue for the mitigation of the possibility of political evil within the political paradox. In explicating the paradox, Ricœur seeks to hold in tension two basic aspects of politics: its benefits and its propensity to evil. This tension, however, should not be viewed as representative of a dualism. The evil of politics notwithstanding, Ricœur encourages us to view the political order as a deeply important part of our (...) shared existence. By thinking past the distorting function of ideology to the legitimating and integrating functions that Ricœur calls more basic than distortion, a mode of thought that is often at the heart of political evil, ideology can be used to mitigate that very evil. Keywords: Ri cœur, “The Political Paradox,” Ideology, Political Violence, Justice. Résumé Cet article s’appuie sur les analyses ricœuriennes de l’idéologie dans le but de montrer que l’idéologie est susceptible de contribuer à une atténuation du mal politique inhérent au paradoxe politique. Dans son explicitation de ce paradoxe, Ricœur cherche à mettre en relation tensionnelle deux aspects fondamentaux de la politique: ses avantages et ses maux. Cependant, cette tension ne devrait pas être interprétée comme l’expression d’un dualisme. En dépit du mal inhérent au politique, Ricœur nous encourage à voir l’ordre politique comme une partie profondément importante de notre existence partagée. Si l’on régresse en-deçà de la fonction de distorsion de l’idéologie vers ses fonctions légitimantes et integratrices, c’est-à-dire vers ses fonctions les plus fondamentales, il apparaît en effet que l’idéologie, tout en étant souvent au cœur du mal politique, peut néanmoins être utilisée pour atténuer ce mal. Mots-clés: Ricœur, paradoxe politique, ideologie, violence politique, justice. (shrink)

In Part One of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Kant repeatedly refers to a “proof” that human nature has a necessary and universal “evil propensity,” but he provides only obscure hints at its location. Interpreters have failed to identify such an argument in Part One. After examining relevant passages, summarizing recent attempts to reconstruct the argument, and explaining why these do not meet Kant's stated needs, I argue that the elusive proof must have a transcendental form (...) (called quasi‐transcendental because Kant never uses “transcendental” in Religion). With deceptive simplicity, the section titles of Part One, viewed as components in an architechtonic system of religion, constitute steps in just such a proof. (shrink)

An enduring source of skepticism towards Kant’s practical philosophy is his deep conviction that morality must be understood in terms of universality. Whether we look to Kant’s fundamental moral principle (the Categorical Imperative) or to his fundamental principle of right (the Universal Principle of Right), universality lies at the core of the analyses. A central worry of his critics is that by making universality the bedrock of morality in these ways, Kant fails to appreciate the importance of difference in individual (...) lives, societies, and legal-political institutions when these are realized well. Below I argue that Kant’s philosophy neither advocates moralized hyper-reflective, alienating ways of being nor seeks to justify Kant’s own and others’ prejudices in the name of morality’s universality. To see this, we need to understand both Kant’s account of human nature – of the predisposition to good and the propensity to evil – and how Kant’s theory of freedom sets the moral framework within which important non-moralizable concerns of human nature are accommodated. We can then appreciate the ways in which Kant sees both unreflective and reflective normative elements as working together as an integrated whole in emotionally healthy, morally good human beings, historical cultures, and legal-political institutional systems. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim at relating passions to evil in Kant's philosophy. I begin by explaining the difference between affects and passions in the text Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Kant claims that both affects and passions are illnesses of the mind, because both affect and passion hinder the sovereignty of reason. I show that passions are worse than affects for the purpose of pure reason. Second, I relate affects and passions to the degrees of the (...) propensity to evil in the Religion. I analyze the idea of an ethical community as a way to overcome the evil, which goes beyond political and anthropological solutions suggested by Kant. (shrink)

This paper shows ways to develop, integrate, and transform Kant’s and Arendt’s theories on political evil into a unified Karendtian theory. Given the deep influence Kant had on Arendt’s thinking, the deep philosophical compatibility between their projects is not surprising. But the results of drawing on the resources left by both is exciting and groundbreaking with regard to both political evil in general and the challenges of modernity and totalitarianism in particular.

본 논문의 목표는 칸트의 『이성의 한계 안에서의 종교』에 관한 선행 연구에서 덜 주목받았던 “자기애Selbstliebe” 개념을 중심으로 『종교』에 제시된 악의 이론을 명료하게 하는 것이다. 칸트의 악의 이론을 이해하기 위해 자기애 개념에 주목해야 할 이유는 다음과 같다. 『종교』에서 인간의 악은 “인간 본성 안에 있는 선으로의 근원적 소질”이 타락하여 “인간 본성 안에 있는 악으로의 성벽”이 발현됨으로써 생겨난다. 여기서 “선으로의 소질”과 “악으로의 성벽”에서 핵심을 이루는 것이 바로 자기애라는 개념이다. 자기애는 한편으로는 세 개의 “선으로의 소질” 중 두 개의 이름이자, 다른 한편으로는 “악으로의 성벽”의 원천이기 때문이다. (...) 본 논문은 칸트의 악론에서 자기애의 의미와 역할을 밝힘으로써, 특히 자기애가 어떻게 해서 “선으로의 소질”의 다른 이름이자 “악으로의 성벽”의 원천일 수 있는지를 밝힘으로써 칸트의 악의 이론을 명확히 할 것이다. (shrink)

A crucial issue in normative ethics concerns the morality of lying. Kant defends the view that the duty to not lie does not allow for any exceptions in practical judgments: it never is a person’s right or duty to lie. Many people abhor this view. Kantians have tried to make sense of Kant’s view (and save Kantian moral philosophy) by suggesting Kantian interpretations that are less strict. I reject the attempts to nuance the strictness of Kant’s view. I break new (...) ground by arguing that Kant’s view is best made sense of by taking his strict stance seriously. I focus on his doctrine of virtue account against lying. Kant is not always strict on the interpretation of duties. As regards other duties he does leave (limited) room for exceptions. The strictness of the duty to not lie therefore is a special case intrinsically connected to key aspects of his fundamental philosophy. My explanation of the doctrine of virtue account starts out by focusing on the inner lie. For Kant each and every inner lie is problematic because being truthful is a condition and an integral part of the moral Denkungsart; i. e., way virtue manifests itself in the empirical world. Hence, an inner lie must be interpreted as the destruction of freedom and personhood. Kant’s doctrine of virtue view on the inner lie also implies a strict view on the outer lie. Developing this implication requires the analysis of Kant’s view on human self-knowledge and their propensity to evil. (shrink)

Against the charge that Kant's doctrine of radical evil is inconsistent and alien to his practical philosophy, my aim is to show its necessity within the critical system. First, I undermine the alleged vacuity of Kant's notion of evil by showing that, already in the Groundwork, an evil will is the necessary conceptual correlate of a good will. "Good" and "evil" characterize the agent's form of willing and represent the source of value of right and wrong (...) actions. Then, I show how the doctrine of radical evil derives from Kant's notion of evil. That evil lies at the level of an individual Gesinnung is the result of Kant's radicalizing the use of transcendental freedom. That there is a propensity to evil in the whole species is the result of Kant's naturalizing the principles of his moral psychology. Although Kant is not clear about this distinction, the consistency of his doctrine depends on indicating that an "evil Gesinnung" and the "propensity to evil" are not equivalent concepts. Rather, they refer to different units of moral analysis, the individual and the whole species, and represent a failure to comply with different types of moral obligation: the duty to realize the good and the duty to realize the highest good. The correlation between units of moral analysis and types of obligation explains the isomorphism that Kant detects between them, as well as their logical independence, without which the individual's choice of Gesinnung would be analytically contained in the species' choice of moral nature . Finally, to account for the problem of moral self-constitution I argue for the necessity of assuming a transcendental volitional structure, the unity of acknowledgement or "I will". At the different levels of analysis, this structure organizes the will's manifold intentions according to unifying principles that allow it to recognize them as its own. Although Kant does not mention it, the "I will" is a necessary assumption to account for the continuity of choice and for its possible imputation to an agent. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a quasi-transcendental argument to justify Kant’s infamous claim “man is evil by nature.” The cornerstone of my reconstruction lies in drawing a systematic distinction between the seemingly identical concepts of “evil disposition” (böseGesinnung) and “propensity to evil” (Hang zumBösen). The former, I argue, Kant reserves to describe the fundamental moral outlook of a single individual; the latter, the moral orientation of the whole species. Moreover, the appellative “evil” ranges over two (...) different types of moral failure: while an “evil disposition” is a failure to realize the good (i.e., to adopt the motive of duty as limiting condition for all one’s desires), an “evil propensity” is a failure to realize the highest good (i.e., to engage in the collective project of transforming the legal order into an ethical community). This correlation between units of moral analysis and types of obligation suggests a way to offer a deduction of the universal propensity on behalf of Kant. It consists in tracing the source of radical evil to the same subjective necessity that gives rise to the doctrine of the highest good. For, at the basis of Kant’s two doctrines lies the same natural dialectic between happiness and morality. While the highest good brings about the critically acceptable resolution of this dialectic, the propensity to evil perpetuates and aggravates it. Instead of connecting happiness and morality in an objective relation, the human will subordinate morality to the pursuit of happiness according to the subjective order of association. If this reading is correct, it would explain why prior attempts at a transcendental deduction have failed: interpreters have looked for the key to the deduction in the body of Kant’s text, where it is not to be found, for it is tucked, instead, in the Preface to the first edition. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of the propensity to evil and its relation to Kant's claim that the human race is universally evil. Unlike most of its competitors, the interpretation presented here neither trivializes Kant's claims about the universal evil of humanity nor attributes a position to him that is incompatible with his repeated insistence that we are blameworthy for actions only when we could have acted differently. This interpretation also accounts for a number of (...) otherwise bewildering claims in the Religion and makes sense of the analogy Kant draws between the propensity to evil and addiction. (shrink)

Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil: moral and natural. The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war, torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous agents in (...) cyberspace, a new class of interesting and important examples of hybrid evil has come to light. In this paper, it is called artificial evil and a case is made for considering it to complement ME and NE to produce a more adequate taxonomy. By isolating the features that have led to the appearance of AE, cyberspace is characterised as a self-contained environment that forms the essential component in any foundation of the emerging field of Computer Ethics. It is argued that this goes some way towards providing a methodological explanation of why cyberspace is central to so many of CE’s concerns; and it is shown how notions of good and evil can be formulated in cyberspace. Of considerable interest is how the propensity for an agent’s action to be morally good or evil can be determined even in the absence of biologically sentient participants and thus allows artificial agents not only to perpetrate evil but conversely to ‘receive’ or ‘suffer from’ it. The thesis defended is that the notion of entropy structure, which encapsulates human value judgement concerning cyberspace in a formal mathematical definition, is sufficient to achieve this purpose and, moreover, that the concept of AE can be determined formally, by mathematical methods. A consequence of this approach is that the debate on whether CE should be considered unique, and hence developed as a Macroethics, may be viewed, constructively, in an alternative manner. The case is made that whilst CE issues are not uncontroversially unique, they are sufficiently novel to render inadequate the approach of standard Macroethics such as Utilitarianism and Deontologism and hence to prompt the search for a robust ethical theory that can deal with them successfully. The name Information Ethics is proposed for that theory. It is argued that the uniqueness of IE is justified by its being non-biologically biased and patient-oriented: IE is an Environmental Macroethics based on the concept of data entity rather than life. It follows that the novelty of CE issues such as AE can be appreciated properly because IE provides a new perspective. In light of the discussion provided in this paper, it is concluded that Computer Ethics is worthy of independent study because it requires its own application-specific knowledge and is capable of supporting a methodological foundation, Information Ethics. (shrink)

Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil:moral (ME) and natural (NE). The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war,torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous agents in (...) cyberspace, a new class of interesting and important examples of hybrid evil has come to light. In this paper, it is called artificial evil (AE) and a case is made for considering it to complement ME and NE to produce a more adequate taxonomy. By isolating the features that have led to the appearance of AE, cyberspace is characterised as a self-contained environment that forms the essential component in any foundation of the emerging field of Computer Ethics (CE). It is argued that this goes someway towards providing a methodological explanation of why cyberspace is central to so many of CE's concerns; and it is shown how notions of good and evil can be formulated in cyberspace. Of considerable interest is how the propensity for an agent's action to be morally good or evil can be determined even in the absence of biologically sentient participants and thus allows artificial agents not only to perpetrate evil (and fort that matter good) but conversely to `receive' or `suffer from' it. The thesis defended is that the notion of entropy structure, which encapsulates human value judgement concerning cyberspace in a formal mathematical definition, is sufficient to achieve this purpose and, moreover, that the concept of AE can be determined formally, by mathematical methods. A consequence of this approach is that the debate on whether CE should be considered unique, and hence developed as a Macroethics, may be viewed, constructively,in an alternative manner. The case is made that whilst CE issues are not uncontroversially unique, they are sufficiently novel to render inadequate the approach of standard Macroethics such as Utilitarianism and Deontologism and hence to prompt the search for a robust ethical theory that can deal with them successfully. The name Information Ethics (IE) is proposed for that theory. Itis argued that the uniqueness of IE is justified by its being non-biologically biased and patient-oriented: IE is an Environmental Macroethics based on the concept of data entity rather than life. It follows that the novelty of CE issues such as AE can be appreciated properly because IE provides a new perspective (though not vice versa). In light of the discussion provided in this paper, it is concluded that Computer Ethics is worthy of independent study because it requires its own application-specific knowledge and is capable of supporting a methodological foundation, Information Ethics. (shrink)

I don’t know whether undead beings exist. I also think it is an open question whether anyone is evil in, say, the way bad guys are depicted in supernatural horror films and serial killer movies. I do think it’s nevertheless puzzling that the undead are frequently portrayed as evil in that way. I’m inclined to think that if we were to stumble across any undead they would be less likely to be evil than any random live person (...) we stumble across. Consider this a call for some undead understanding. I am going to approach these conclusions in a roundabout way. First, I’ll try to sketch something of an ontology of the undead, an account of their nature and variety. Then, I’ll show how these considerations should change how we think about the undead and their purported propensity for evil. (shrink)

The notion of radical evil plays a more important role in Kant's moral theory than is typically recognized. In Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, radical evil is both an innate propensity and a morally imputable act – a paradoxical status that has prompted commentators to reject it as inconsistent with the rest of Kant's moral theory. In contrast, I argue that the notion of radical evil accounts for the beginning of moral responsibility in Kant's (...) theory, since the act of attributing radical evil to one's freedom is an inauguration into the autonomous stance.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Kant on Radical Evil and the Origin of Moral ResponsibilityVolume 18, Issue 1Irene McMullin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415412000283Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Kant on Radical Evil and the Origin of Moral ResponsibilityVolume 18, Issue 1Irene McMullin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415412000283Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Kant on Radical Evil and the Origin of Moral ResponsibilityVolume 18, Issue 1Irene McMullin DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415412000283Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have used “situationist” findings in social psychology to criticize character-based ethical theories. After showing how these criticisms apply, prima facie, to Kant’s moral theory, I lay out a Kantian response to them. Kant admits the empirical reality of situation-dependence in human actions but articulates a conception of “ought implies can” that vindicates his character-based moral theory in the face of rarity of character. Moreover, he provides an interpretive framework for the situation-dependence of human motivation in (...) terms of humans’ “propensity to evil.” He also provides a framework for highlighting empirical bases for moral hope, a framework that makes it possible to see lack of character as something human beings can overcome. And he outlines a “moral anthropology” that develops something akin to what Mark Alfano calls “moral technologies,” but in Kant’s case, these technologies focus on cultivating character as such rather than merely good behavioral outcomes. (shrink)

In ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’ Kant presents his thesis that human nature is ‘radically evil’. To be radically evil is to have a propensity toward moral frailty, impurity and even perversity. Kant claims that all humans are ‘by nature’ radically evil. By presenting counter-examples of moral saints, I argue that not all humans are morally corrupt, even if most are. Even so, the possibility of moral failure is central to what makes us human.

This article argues that Kant’s famous theory of ‘radical evil’, according to which there is a natural propensity for evil as well as good in all human beings, has precedent in the medieval Franciscan intellectual tradition. In the early thirteenth century, members of this tradition, inspired by its founder Alexander of Hales, developed a novel account of free will, according to which the will is capable of choosing between equally legitimate options of good and evil. In (...) affirming this, early Franciscans departed from the longstanding tradition of Augustine, for whom free will can only choose the good, since evil is merely a privation of the good that limits human freedom. By the same token, they anticipated the Kantian contention that freedom entails the ability to choose between good and evil maxims. (shrink)

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is one of the great modern examinations of religion's meaning, function and impact on human affairs. In this volume, the first complete English-language commentary on the work, James J. DiCenso explains the historical context in which the book appeared, including the importance of Kant's conflict with state censorship. He shows how the Religion addresses crucial Kantian themes such as the relationship between freedom and morality, the human propensity to evil, the (...) status of historical traditions in relation to ethical principles, and the interface between individual ethics and social institutions. The major arguments are clearly and precisely explained, and the themes are highlighted and located within Kant's mature critical philosophy, especially his ethics. The commentary will be valuable for all who are interested in the continuing relevance of religion for contemporary inquiries into ethics, public institutions and religious traditions. (shrink)

Establishing a precise definition of moral innocence is a difficult task. Ordinarily philosophers explore the necessary and sufficient conditions of a term or concept in order to determine its meaning. Doing so with “moral innocence” proves difficult because the concept is mutable. The term is used in varying contexts to refer to ignorance, naiveté, sexual inexperience, legal and moral culpability, noncombatants in war, and moral purity. For our present purposes, we can exclude the contexts of law and war because they (...) are too specialized to aid us in identifying the commonalities present in the more general uses of the term. Once we take the other common uses into consideration—ignorance, naiveté, and sexual inexperience—a shared feature surfaces. Each of these conditions of character or states of being is a mode of immaturity. Now we are impelled to ask: what are the qualities of this immaturity? More specifically, what are the features of moral immaturity? To answer this question, the first section of this chapter argues that moral innocence ought to be interpreted in terms of illusion and inability. The innocent hold certain illusions about the moral order that make them unable to engage in practices constitutive of the moral community. Specifically, the morally innocent falsely believe that a life of moral purity—that is, a life devoid of wrongdoing—is possible to achieve. This illusion is based on the following three elements characteristic of an immature and rudimentary understanding of moral interaction: the belief that human nature has only a propensity for goodness; the belief that following ethical rules is sufficient to avoid transgressing moral values; and, the inability to see oneself as a perpetual source of wrongdoing. The subsequent sections establish why each of these elements hinders the development of a realistic and mature moral acumen. We will proceed by examining the thought of two figures in the history of philosophy who have not previously been associated with the notion of moral innocence, and yet through the present analysis and interpretation can provide insight into its nature. First, Immanuel Kant’s theory of radical evil demonstrates that the human propensity to evil is so pervasive that it is, practically speaking, unavoidable. Therefore, to believe that one can avoid acting upon temptations to evil is self-deception. The final section engages in a thorough analysis of Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy and interprets it in a new way as a theory of moral maturity. The morally mature individual is one who questions ethical rules and who, through self-reflection, recognizes herself as a potential source of wrongdoing. As a result of these arguments, we will identify rule-questioning, self-reflection, and locating wrongdoing in terms of one’s own agency as essential features of moral maturity. We will determine the essential characteristics of moral innocence by examining its positive attributes before establishing it as a negative counterpart to moral maturity. (shrink)

We can distinguish the evil person in two ways. One is to pick out some trait, or narrow cluster of traits, and argue that individuals are evil if they possess those traits to a sufficiently extreme degree. Call theories that characterize evil in this manner extremity views. The second method takes evil to consist in being vicious, not just in one respect, but thoroughly or consistently. Call this the consistency approach. Thus understood, evil persons lack (...) any significant moral virtues, having no “good side.” According to stronger versions of the consistency theory, evil persons lack morally redeeming qualities of even the most modest sort. They are moved and motivated little or not at all, or even perversely, by morality and the good. In this chapter I will defend such a view of evil character. Naturally, even consistency theories grant that evil involves a kind of extreme viciousness. But this is not the sort of extremity that requires having particular traits to an extraordinary degree, beyond those needed to lack virtues or redeeming qualities. Consistency theorists could require extreme vices in addition to those implied by the consistency requirement, but I will not do so. What about extremity views? Extremity of vice in the present sense concerns the degree to which someone possesses a given vice. If a person’s viciousness consists in cruelty, then that individual earns the title of evil by having cruel propensities to the highest degree: tending to perform many cruel acts, and tending to perform the cruelest acts. The extremity method appears to be the standard approach among commentators in this area. For example, Laurence Thomas claims that to have an evil character is to be “often enough prone to do evil acts” (1993, p. 82). Someone commits an evil act if the individual “delights in performing a harmful act that has a certain moral gravity to it . . . and if the person is not animated by understandable considerations” (p. 77). Similarly, John Kekes has argued that evil persons are those who are.... (shrink)

This article provides a summary and some replies to points offered in the Kantian Review Roundtable discussion of my recent book Kant and Religion. The main themes are as follows: Kant’s project in the Religion; religious thinking as symbolic; the rational interpretation of revelation and of religious symbols; Kant’s moral argument for religious faith; the ‘psychological’-moral argument; Kant’s thesis that human nature contains a radical propensity to evil; evil and human sociability; evil and freedom; divine forgiveness (...) and the sinner’s self-acceptance; Kant’s Religion as a subject of philosophical controversy. (shrink)

In a note introduced into the second edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794), Kant assigns a systematic role to the General Remarks at the end of each Part of his book. He calls those Remarks, “as it were, parerga to religion within the boundaries of pure reason; they do not belong within it yet border on it” (RGV 6:52). As Kant sees them, the parerga are only a “secondary occupation” that consists in removing transcendent obstacles. This (...) paper is skeptical of Kant's view. It proposes an alternative account, according to which the parerga are essential to our moral education, since they force human reason to confront its own limitations and resist the urge to take refuge in spurious religious beliefs. That urge, I argue, is linked to the propensity to evil, and uses religious orthodoxy to undermine moral religion. By clipping our dogmatic wings, the parerga encourage reason to face its own dialectical tendencies and direct its speculative interest to immanent practical use. This redirection counteracts the debilitating effects of the propensity to evil and plays a key role in our moral regeneration. To consider the parerga “derivative,” as Kant himself does, is therefore a grave mistake. (shrink)

On the one hand, Kant seems to suggest that moral weakness is merely expressed at the level of following maxims. On the other hand, he addresses moral weakness as the first grade of our propensity to evil, which implies that moral weakness is also expressed at the level of adopting maxims. There is still a lack of clarity in the literature concerning how the relationship between these two aspects is to be understood, and a proper account of the (...) nature of the maxims of the morally weak has yet to be offered. Drawing on my earlier interpretation of moral strength, I shall propose a reading of Kant's account of moral weakness that consistently unifies both aspects. On my interpretation, the morally weak agent lacks the moral strength that he ought to acquire through the continuous exercise of his power of self‐control; he therefore fails both to set himself particular moral ends in adopting his maxims and to follow his maxims by realizing such ends. His intention to do what the moral law demands is overly general: It does not set a particular moral end, which is what virtue requires. (shrink)

Resumo: O objetivo do presente artigo é analisar o problema da fraqueza da vontade no quadro conceitual da filosofia moral kantiana. A fim de realçar uma característica da filosofia kantiana relevante para a posição conceitual do problema, servimo-nos do contraste com as análises de Donald Davidson sobre o fenômeno da fraqueza da vontade. Depois de evidenciado o modo como o fenômeno pode ser admitido no sistema kantiano, procuramos defender uma hipótese quanto ao modo como ele poderia ser aí explicado. Trata-se (...) da hipótese de que uma derivação desatenta e negligente a partir da Lei Moral poderia tornar compreensíveis os diversos estágios da maldade em sentido amplo do ser humano, e de que os dois primeiros estágios poderiam ser considerados correspondentes ao fenômeno usualmente chamado de fraqueza da vontade.Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to examine the problem of weakness of will in the conceptual framework of Kantian's moral philosophy. In order to present a feature of Kantian's philosophy which is important for the theoretical placing of the problem, I draw on the contrast with Davidson's analyses of the phenomenon of weakness of will. After indicating the way in which the phenomenon can be admitted in the Kantian system, I try to defend a hypothesis about the way in which it could be explained in this system. It is the hypothesis that an inattentive and negligent derivation from the Moral Law could explain the different stages of the evilness in broad sense of the human being, and that the two first stages can be judged correspondent to the phenomenon usually called weakness of will. (shrink)

Some of the greatest harms perpetrated by human beings—mass murders, for example—are directly caused by a small number of individuals, yet the full force of the transgressions would not obtain without the indirect contributions of many others. To combat such evils, Larry May argues that we ought to cultivate a sense of shared responsibility within communities. More specifically, we ought to develop a propensity to feel ashamed of ourselves when we choose to be associated with others who transgress. Grant (...) that we ought to assume greater moral responsibility for contributing to harms that we do not directly commit. My goal is to challenge May’s claim that we should move towards a shame culture, and to argue that we ought to focus on cultivating empathy-based care and guilt instead. An established research program spearheaded by June Tangney has shown that individuals who are disposed to feel shame are more likely to hide from scrutiny, blame others, get angry, and become aggressive. Cultivating shame, in short, is a recipe for increasing antisocial behavior. Policies that promote feelings of empathy-based care and guilt, however, seem better designed to achieve the desired result, namely, minimizing the harms caused by groups. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant's Theory of Virtue: The Value of AutocracyRobert B. LoudenAnne Margaret Baxley. Kant's Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi + 189. Cloth, $85.00.Back in the early 1980s, Anglophone philosophers began to seriously explore the nature and role of virtue in Kant's ethics. This development itself was the result of a confluence of three other phenomena: (1) the growing influence (...) of virtue ethics within contemporary ethical theory; (2) the simultaneous publication of the first two complete English translations of Kant's important late work, The Doctrine of Virtue (Tugendlehre); and (3) repeated claims made by virtue ethicists that Kant had denied the importance of virtue for ethical theory.Anne Margaret Baxley's book, Kant's Theory of Virtue, is the most informative and comprehensive discussion of the nature and role of virtue in Kant's ethics currently available. Making careful use of the relevant Kantian texts (including not only Kant's published works but also lecture transcriptions from his ethics courses and some of his unpublished notes and reflections on ethics and religion), an important text by Friedrich Schiller (Über Anmut und Würde), one of Kant's early Romantic critics, as well as a wide swath of contemporary [End Page 142] secondary literature written by virtue ethicists as well as Kant scholars, Baxley demonstrates incisively that virtue, far from being neglected by Kant, is vitally significant to his ethical theory.Baxley's distinctive approach to Kant's conception of virtue is signaled in her subtitle: The Value of Autocracy. Autocracy—understood here as rational self-rule over sensibility—is, Baxley holds, "the overriding metaphor throughout Kant's treatment of virtue as a character trait, and it provides the key for understanding his particular conception of virtue" (52). This accent on autocracy results in a somewhat sterner Kantian virtue ethics than others have argued for. As Baxley herself notes, "[A]t first glance, autocracy looks as if it amounts to a rigid, repressive form of self-rule, one requiring the suppression or wholesale extirpation of sensible feelings and inclinations" (49). In an effort to show that first appearances are in this case deceiving, Baxley stretches the metaphor of autocracy (or, as she puts it, "reconstructs" Kant's claims about virtue) into the following three-pronged theory:[A]utocracy involves containing feelings and desires at odds with duty (the containment model), but it also involves maintaining feelings and inclinations to accord with moral concerns (the maintenance model), as well as cultivating feelings and inclinations that promote morally good ends (the cultivation model).(173; see also 126–36)Strictly speaking, however, when Kant himself uses the term ‘autocracy' (‘Autokratie') in discussing virtue (and he actually only does so once in his published writings—other terms such as ‘moral strength' [‘moralische Stärke'] and ‘courage' [‘Tapferkeit'] are used much more often), it refers exclusively to what Baxley calls the containment model, not the maintenance model or the cultivation model. Autocracy, Kant states in the Tugendlehre, "comprises a consciousness of the capacity to become master of one's inclinations that oppose the law" (6.383). Nevertheless, even if Baxley is asking the metaphor of autocracy to carry a bit more weight than Kant intended, her own reconstruction of Kant's theory of virtue is very well articulated and defended. And she is certainly correct in holding that Kantian virtue, correctly considered, entails not merely containing those feelings and desires that are opposed to duty, but also maintaining and cultivating those that are conducive to the moral life.Three important, interrelated aspects of her account that deserve highlighting are the following:Virtue and radical evil. Kant's account of radical evil, as presented in part 1 of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, forms an integral but underexplored component of his theory of virtue, and his belief in the existence of a universal human propensity to evil is the clearest example of how his understanding of virtue differs from the more familiar Aristotle-inspired accounts favored by contemporary virtue ethicists. As Baxley correctly emphasizes, on Kant's view virtue is "a corrective... to our propensity to evil... (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed analysis of how, according to Kant, the moral badness of some third parties’ actions can be established with certainty (by anyone, not only by the agent’s own conscience or by God). This account helps clarify why Kant affirms that some forms of wrongdoing (of which there are a “multitude of woeful examples”) can be demonstrated to be immoral, while excluding the possibility of proving the moral goodness of any action. The paper concludes by arguing that (...) the possible certainty of judgements imputing immorality to actions of others is not rational but rather moral. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against two prevailing views of Kant’s Religion. Against commentators such as Michalson and Quinn, who have argued that Kant’s project in Religion is riddled with inconsistencies and circularities, I show that a proper understanding of Kant’s views on grace reveals these do not exist. And contra commentators that attribute to Kant at best a minimalist conception of grace, I show that Kant’s view of it is remarkably robust. I argue that Kant works with three different (...) conceptions of grace. These are: a) grace and the God within, b) grace and the transformation of the fundamental orientation, and c) grace that can be laid hold of; the first and the last play a significant role in his philosophy of religion. (shrink)

How do we care well for a human being: ourselves or another? Non-Kantian scholars rarely identify the philosophy of Kant as a particularly useful resource with which to understand the full complexity of human care. Kant’s philosophy is often taken to presuppose that a philosophical analysis of good human life needs to attend only to how autonomous, rational agents—sprung up like mushrooms out of nowhere, without a childhood, never sick, always independent—ought to act respectfully, and how they can be forced (...) to interact rightfully. Questions involving aspects of human life captured by what Eva Kittay aptly phrased “the fact of dependency” (1999) —such as our vulnerable, fragile, and embodied social natures, asymmetrical care relations, and deep systemic injustices—are therefore commonly thought to be beyond the grasp of Kant and of Kantian philosophy. Against this historically prominent understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy, below I engage and draw upon recent Kant scholarship which shows both the inadequacy of such rationalist readings and the fruitfulness of using Kant’s practical philosophy to enhance our understanding of human care relations. After situating my approach in the existing, relevant secondary literature on Kant’s human agent, I explore key features of Kant’s accounts of human nature and the highest good. I pay special attention to his proposal that our human nature comprises reflective and unreflective aspects and patterns that we (ought to) strive to develop, transform, and integrate in wise ways through our faculty of desire. In addition, I emphasize the dangers that our ineradicable propensity to do bad things (evil) poses for our projects of self- and other- care. I proceed by outlining how Kant’s account of moral (ethical and legal) responsibility for self and others is developed through his theories of freedom, that is, through his theory of virtue (virtuous internal freedom with its account of perfect and imperfect duties) and his theory of right (rightful external freedom with its account of innate, private, and public right). On the conception I am advancing, we are pretty messy, fragile, and vulnerable beings whose projects of caring are difficult, ongoing, and complex. On the one hand, we (should) strive to care for ourselves (by striving to manage and heal badly functioning parts and by developing, transforming, and integrating immature or distinct parts of ourselves into good wholes) and for others (assisting them in their projects of management and healing and of developing, transforming, and integrating themselves into good wholes) in ways that are both respectful and attentive to the particular people we are—people with lives of our own to live—and the kinds of relationships we share. On the other hand, we should, and can, be forced to interact rightfully, meaning interaction consistent with one another’s basic (innate, private, and public) rights and, hence, contribute to reform projects that improve our inherited, imperfect legal-political systems with regard to care relations. Bringing Kant’s philosophy into dialogue with care theorists, I conclude, advances the insights of both traditions by showing one way to arrive at a multifaceted, yet unified account of human care relations where our embodied, social as well as our rational natures are given due consideration. (shrink)

The covid-19 pandemic and the increasingly polarized political situation in many countries today have highlighted the significance of various humanly natural intellectual mistakes, cognitive biases, and widespread inferential errors. This essay examines, at a philosophical meta-level, the relation between our natural epistemic errors and the kind of humanly unavoidable transcendental illusion analyzed by Immanuel Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic of the First Critique. While both kinds of illusion are usually primarily discussed in an epistemological context, my approach is not exclusively (...) epistemic. Rather, my main argument extends the broadly Kantian critique of reason – as a critical via negativa focusing on what is epistemically “wrong” about us, as the kind of cognitive agents we human beings naturally are – into a pragmatically enriched investigation of “the negative” as constitutive of the human condition, that is, our lack of sufficiently critical epistemic and ethical capacities, including our propensity to both cognitive error and moral evil. Our being inescapably inclined to manifest such negativities in our epistemic and ethical lives, and our insufficient awareness of doing so, are, arguably, “transcendental facts” about us, to be critically examined in terms of a Kantian-cum-pragmatist philosophical anthropology. This significantly enriches our picture of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:163 HUME'S THEORY OF MOTIVATION In this paper I shall defend a Humean theory of motivation. But first I should like to examine some of the standard criticisms of this theory and some alternative views that are currently in favour. Both in the Treatise and the Enguiry Hume maintains that reason alone never motivates action but always requires the cooperation of some separate, and separately identifiable desire-factor in order (...) to bring about action. What are Hume's grounds for this view? In the Treatise. Hume writes: 'Tis obvious, that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry 'd to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction.... 'Tis from the prospect of pleasure or pain that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object.... This passage suggests that the way we (and Hume) know about the presence of the separate desire factor which he claims is always needed to motivate our every purposive action is by being directly aware of some desire-feeling, by introspection, each and every time we act. There is however a familiar objection to this argument: no doubt we sometimes are aware of a feeling of desire when we act, e.g., in cases where we are motivated by strong emotions. But much of the time when we act calmly or casually, after having deliberated 'in a cool hour', or when performing routine and trivial acts, we are not directly aware of any desire-feeling at the time of action. 164 Hume is not unaware of this objection -- in reply to it he invokes his notorious doctrine of the calm passions. He writes: 'Tis natural for one, that does not examine objects with a strict philosophic eye, to imagine, that those actions of the mind are entirely the same, which produce not a different sensation, and are not immediately distinguishable to the feeling and perception. Reason, for instance, exerts itself without producing any sensible emotion; and except in the more sublime disquisitions of philosophy, or in the frivolous subtilities of the schools, scarce ever conveys any pleasure or uneasiness. Hence it proceeds, that every action of the mind, which operates with the same calmness and tranquillity, is confounded with reason by all those, who judge of things from the first view and appearance. Now 'tis certain, there are certain calm desires and tendencies, which, tho' they be real passions, produce little emotion in the mind, and are more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation. These desires are of two kinds; either certain instincts originally implanted in our natures, such as benevolence and resentment, the love of life, and kindness to children; or the general appetite to good, and aversion to evil, consider 'd merely as such. When any of these passions are calm, and cause no disorder in the soul, they are very readily taken for the determination of reason, and are suppos'd to proceed from the same faculty, with that, which judges of truth and falshood. Their nature and principles have been suppos'd the same, because their sensations are not evidently different. (T 417) The most obvious application of this argument would be to cases of cool, seemingly passionless 165 deliberation: e.g., in the course of planning the family budget I set aside funds for the children's education. A cursory inspection (or recollection) of the contents of my conscious mind at the time of acting would reveal to me some purely rational considerations that I had in mind at the time. I had some thoughts at the time whose contents are (roughly) expressible in such words as "If I don't put aside so much per month over so many years we will never be able to see them all through university." But cursory introspection or recollection would not detect any separately identifiable desire-factor present to my conscious mind at the time. Considered philosophical examination, Hume assures us, will reveal one, a 'calm' one -- in this case calm 'kindness to children'. Less obviously, the calm-passions argument, most naturally applicable to cases of deliberation... (shrink)

Kant's “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” seems an odd element in Kant's oeuvre. Parts of it seem like scholastic theology or an arbitrary effort to reconcile the Kantian philosophical system with the doctrines of Christianity1. One of the most troubling notions is that of radical evil. Not only is the motivation for introducing the notion unclear, it is also difficult to grasp the line of argumentation, and furthermore accept its conclusion that there must be an innate (...) class='Hi'>propensity for evil in human nature. The vague introduction of the concept of grace exacerbates the puzzlement even further. Nevertheless, I claim that the notions of radical evil and grace form a significant addition to Kant's conception of moral life lacking in his earlier works in ethics, Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. I contend that the depiction of human moral life is not exhausted by the consciousness of duty and the endless pursuit toward virtue. Moral life is characterized also by the ongoing introspection of character accompanied by the hope for moral transformation as manifested by the notions of radical evil and grace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Hume on Personal Identity and the Indirect Passions Robert S. Henderson Scholarly reflection on Hume's "doctrine" ofselfand personal identity continues to focus on the sections "Of Personal Identity" and the "Appendix" toA Treatise ofHuman Nature. To answer the question of why we have so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successiveperceptions which make up experience, Hume says that we must distinguish betwixtpersonal identity, as it (...) regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves. He considers only the former in these sections. Towards the end of the personal identity section he writes that our identity with regard to the passions serves to corroborate that with regard to the imagination, by the making our distant perceptions influence each other, and by giving us a present concern for ourpast or future pains or pleasures (T 261). In the advertisement to the Treatise Hume says that the subjects of the understanding and passions make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves (T xii). In light of the importance Hume attaches to the distinction, and since there are many indications that the Treatise should be read as an integral whole, it is surprising that so little attention is given to what he says of personal identity in the other books. As the title suggests, this paper concentrates on the second part of the distinction and especially on the discussion ofthe indirectpassions in Book II of the Treatise. This is not to suggest that self does not play an important role elsewhere in Hume's science ofman; for example, it is selfwhich experiences the impression ofwill and the direct passions. However, the indirect passions have a particularly important part to play in ascriptions of personal identity and this justifies the present investigation. II We can safely predict that personal identity as it regards our passions will not be the idea??some philosophers whose views of self as having the philosophical (strict) relation ofidentity Hume has rejected in "Of Personal Identity." The relationship between thought and passion to which he draws attention suggests that the idea of selfin this context has a relation to the positive suggestions in that earlier section of why Volume XVI Number 1 33 ROBERT S. HENDERSON we do speak meaningfully of the identity of the self. We are able so to speak because ofarelationship which is felt to exist between a person's distinct and changing perceptions. The relationship has to do with the discovery by memory of the connection of a person's perceptions through the association ofideas by resemblance and causation (T 261). Examination of the idea of self to which Hume makes frequent reference in Book II requires some review ofthe method ofthe Treatise. Perceptions make up human experience. Perceptions are either impressions or ideas which derive from impressions. Hume describes the indirect passions as secondary or reflective impressions and these stem from original impressions or from their ideas. He distinguishes between direct andindirect passions. Directpassionsarise immediately fromgood or evil, frompain orpleasure (T 276). Examples are joy, hope and fear. Indirect passionsproceed from the same principles, but by the conjunction ofother qualities (T 276). That is, the indirect passions not onlyhave a cause (an impression which excites them), but also an object (to which the passion directs our view when excited). We shall see that a significant quality of the indirect passions is the relation of these impressions to their objects, which are either one's own or another's self. In Book II of the Treatise Hume examines the indirect passions: love, hate, pride and humility. These passions are evaluations of persons; of selfin the case of pride and humility, and of another in the case of love and hatred. Evaluation of persons is a central feature of Hume's moral philosophy: To have the sense ofvirtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration (T 471). We shall see that the indirect passions in particular make an important contribution to the answer ofHume's original question ofthe source?? owe propension to ascribe an identity. Ill... (shrink)

Vale a pena voltar a analisar a relação entre o mal e a religião em Kant. Mas este artigo aborda a problemática prévia a esta questão, isto é, a própria questão do mal tal como Kant a apresenta na primeira parte do livro de 1793, A religião nos limites da simples razão. Depois da introdução que elucida o espanto dos primeiros leitores deste livro, procura-se, na base da análise hermenêutica dos textos, verificar a articulação entre a disposição originária para o (...) bem e a propensão para o mal. Encontra-se em seguida a aporia da relação entre o desejo e a realidade do mal: de onde provém o desejo do mal moral? Será preciso, no itinerário desta resposta, elucidar o conceito de natureza, bem como a relação com a interpretação kantiana do pecado original. A conclusão volta a introduzir a questão da liberdade na compreensão do mal, numa espécie de tensão pós-kantiana entre moral e metafísica. ///Il convient de réanalyser la relation entre le mal et la religion chez Kant. Le présent article aborde cependant une problématique préalable á celle-ci, á savoir la question meme du mal telle que Kant la présente dans la première partie du livre de 1793, La religion dans les limites de la simple raison. Après l'ntroduction qui rappelle 1'étonnement des premiers lecteurs de ce livre, on essaie, sur la base d'une analyse herméneutique des textes. de discerner l'articulation entre la disposition originaire pour le bien et la propension au mal. On rencontre ensuite l'aporie entre le désir et la rélité du mal: d'où vient le mal? Sur l'itinéraire de cette réponse il faudra éclaircir le concept de nature, ainsi que l'interprétation kantienne du péché originel. La conclusion réintroduit la question de la liberté dans la compréhension du mal, en une sorte de tension post-kantienne entre morale et metaphysique. /// The relation between evil and religion in the philosophy of Kant deserves e renewed analysis. The approach this article takes, however, is to begin by treating a prior problematic: the question of evil as it is presented in the first part ot Religion within the Limits of Simple Reason (1793). After an introduction which recalls the astonishment of the work's first readers, we shall attempt to discern the articulation between the originary disposition towards the good and the propensity towards evil. We discover, thus, the problem between desire and the reality of evil: what is the origin of evil? The answer implies a clarification of the concept of nature and the Kantian interpretation of original sin. The conclusion reintroduces the question of freedom in the understanding of evil, reflecting thereby the post-Kantian between morals and metaphysics. (shrink)