Kant's Moral Metaphysics

This volume is a collection of eleven essays, nine of which are published for the first time. (Eric Watkins's essay first appeared in 2009, and much of Andrew Chignell's contribution reproduces material covered in two of his earlier papers from 2008 and 2010.) As the title of the volume suggests, the included articles are thematically unified in that they all concern aspects of what one might call “Kant's moral metaphysics,” that is, his views about the nature of, and our access to, the supersensible as developed in the context of his practical philosophy. The book is divided into five sections devoted to the following more specific topics: moral motivation and moral metaphysics, freedom, the highest good, epistemology and the supersensible, and epistemology and religion. There is not enough space in this review to discuss the papers in detail. Accordingly, I will restrict myself to briefly summarizing each of them and to offering a few thoughts regarding the volume's “twin tasks,” in the words of the editors, of “reading Kant with an eye toward now-untimely metaphysical commitments, and reading him holistically” (5).Karl Ameriks examines the development of Kant's ethical thought in order to shed light on the “links between Kant's concerns with...reality, reason, and religion” (23). He argues that there is more continuity between Kant's precritical and critical views in ethics than other commentators have allowed, as for example, Manfred Kuehn, whose reading frames much of Ameriks's discussion. Ameriks submits that while, at the base level of his theory, Kant was always an ethical purist and objectivist and was never seriously tempted by empiricism, he also always supplemented his purism to some degree by incorporating, at a secondary level, broadly anthropological considerations. In Ameriks's assessment, far from having led Kant to modify his views in ethics, the discovery of the doctrines characteristic of transcendental idealism, especially, the transcendental ideality of space and time, enabled him to work out the metaphysical and psychological details of such a reason-based, objective ethics, most crucially by opening up a way of conceiving the possibility of (incompatibilist) human freedom. By spelling out the secondary and supplemental role of sense (broadly speaking) in Kant's account of the possibility, content, motivation, and authority of pure moral reason, Ameriks indicates that and how “the concerns of reality and religion overlap for [Kant] in these four moments” (46), which he presents as “a historically as well as philosophically oriented apology for Kant's religion” (27).Benjamin Lipscomb focuses on Kant's understanding of human moral imperfection. He proposes that Kant's views on moral imperfection, and his moral phenomenology in general, are an especially helpful and neglected “skeleton key” (51) to understanding his critical moral philosophy and how it fits into his critical philosophy as a whole. The argument proceeds by example. Lipscomb combs through the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, exploring Kant's conceptions of respect—which is the phenomenal manifestation of the determination of our will by the moral law—and of a holy will, a pure will, and an impure will, and the relations between them. The emerging picture of Kant's account of human moral failure, according to which purity is conceivable but impossible for us incurably egoistic human beings, is supplemented by a discussion of Kant's conception of radical evil in the Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, that is, of our fundamental disposition to violate the moral law, which represents another insurmountable obstacle to our purity.The second section of the book opens with Patrick Frierson's defense of the so-called two-standpoint interpretation of Kant's theory of freedom. According to this interpretation, humans are free insofar as they are thought of from a practical or deliberator's standpoint, while they are determined insofar as they are thought of from a scientific or observer's standpoint. The two-standpoint interpretation is a currently popular alternative to the so-called two-world interpretation of Kant's account of freedom, according to which (on Frierson's characterization) humans are free insofar as they exist in a noumenal world of things in themselves, while they are determined insofar as they exist in a phenomenal world of mere appearances. The bulk of Frierson's essay is aimed at responding to three related objections against two-standpoint-type interpretations that have been raised in the recent literature. First, they cannot account satisfactorily for the use of theoretical claims within practical deliberations since such a use seems to amount to a conflation of the two standpoints. Second, they lack an answer to the question of whether human beings are really free. And third, they cannot make sense of Kant's commitment to the so-called grounding thesis, that is, the claim that things in themselves ground appearances. The core of Frierson's response to these objections consists in the articulation of a version of the grounding thesis in two-standpoint terms. He concludes his discussion by raising, and then replying to, another version of the first objection, the “problem of moral anthropology,” that is, the problem that there appears to be “a tension between the grounding thesis and the importance of having an influence upon the volitional (especially moral) development of oneself and others” (107), or, more briefly, the problem that it is not clear how to make use of anthropological claims from a practical point of view. Frierson suggests that this final objection can be met by developing a richer account of the practical standpoint, which attends to the importance of character, radical evil, and our social nature in our practical deliberations.At the center of Jeanine Grenberg's contribution is Kant's intriguing claim from the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason that empirical character is a “sensible schema” of intelligible character, which she examines as a possible solution to the question of the relation between our empirical and intelligible character, and, in particular, of their unity in a sensibly affected rational being. Grenberg suggests that, just as the schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding are transcendental time determinations, the schematization of our intelligible character, or of the law of freedom, should be understood as a “particular determination of the flow of time” in the phenomenal world “via its [freedom's] noumenal idea” (127). According to Grenberg, from a theoretical point of view, there is no phenomenal experience that expresses our intelligible character in the indicated way, which forces Kant to the epistemically more humble territory of the practical. On a practical level, the temporal experience of being subject to imperatives can be identified as the desired phenomenal expression of the law of freedom.David Sussman's essay on Kant's account of rational faith is the first entry in the third section of the volume. After identifying several shortcomings with Kant's moral justification of faith as presented in the first and second Critique, Sussman argues that Kant's reflections on the moral significance of love in the Religion suggest a moral foundation for rational faith that need not conflict with either the authority or the motivational power of pure practical reason, which the earlier accounts might seem to do. Taking as his point of departure Kant's remark in the Religion that “in this end [the end of their actions] human beings seek something that they can love” (6, 7n), Sussman surmises that our commitment to morality would remain fundamentally ambivalent if we did not succeed in turning the moral law into the unifying principle of an entire human life that we can embrace joyously and wholeheartedly. And this, in turn, is possible, he speculates, only if we can represent the moral law's basic concerns in a way that engages our narrative self-understanding and allows us to sustain a teleological vision that presents us as part of the collective achievement of moving closer to realizing the highest good, that is, a state in which happiness is in exact proportion to moral worth. In this way, Sussman suggests, the practical postulates of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul can be understood as serving to establish a framework in which we can come to love morality.James Krueger examines the role of religious faith in Kant's ethics in light of secular reinterpretations, such as the ones discussed by J. B. Schneewind, Annette Baier, and Andrews Reath, in which the function of religious faith is taken over by the idea of world-historical progress, or of a merely human kingdom of ends. Krueger argues that, although the task of historical progress is an element of what our pursuit of the highest good entails, according to Kant's view, hope in the completion of this task is insufficient to motivate us to act morally, to justify and sustain our moral commitments, and to secure the intelligibility of moral action across all possible circumstances. Since the natural order takes no account of morality, and since making the natural order conform to morality is beyond our power, religious faith remains indispensable.The section on epistemology and the supersensible begins with Andrew Chignell's discussion of Kant's three solutions to (a version of) the “problem of real repugnance,” as Chignell calls it, namely, the problem under what conditions it would be rational to believe propositions about supersensible objects, despite the difficulty that the positive predicates involved in the ideas of these objects may, for all we know (theoretically), be “really repugnant” in a way that would make their objects really impossible. The first and second solutions both depend on the principle that actuality entails real possibility. According to the first solution, the needs and interests of reason that lead us to postulate the existence of certain supersensible entities at the same time provide subjective grounds for holding that these objects are actual and, thus, really possible. According to the second solution, we are capable of a special kind of practical cognition or practical knowledge of the actuality of certain supersensible entities, which, again, entails that we also practically know that these entities are really possible. The third solution turns on the symbolization of the ideas of supersensible entities, which functions as a kind of schematism by analogy, by means of which we can gain a fragmentary grasp on what it would be like for the idea to have an object and receive a sensible indication that the content of the idea is not really repugnant.Patrick Kain offers a reconstruction of Kant's conception of practical cognition, of its relation to theoretical cognition, and of the difference between practical belief and practical knowledge. Kain argues that there is a core conception of cognition that underlies Kant's account of both theoretical and practical cognition that allows for a principled distinction between practical knowledge and practical belief, a distinction that crucially depends on Kant's doctrine of the “fact of reason.” (The latter may be described as the fact, or our consciousness of the fact, that the moral law exerts authority over us, which, in turn, entails, on Kant's account, that we are free.) On Kain's view, the fact of reason plays a role in the cognition of the moral law and of human freedom that is analogous to the role that intuition plays in theoretical cognition, which enables us to achieve practical knowledge of the moral law and human freedom. By contrast, there is no intuition-analogue in the case of our practical cognition of God, for example, which explains why it falls short of counting as practical knowledge and merely amounts to practical belief. More specifically, Kain takes it to be significant that the ratio essendi of the fact of reason is “in the agent herself,” which means that “we cognize our freedom in virtue of our freedom” (224), whereas our concept of God is drawn from our conception of ourselves as moral agents, rather than from God Himself, which means that “we cognize God's existence but not in virtue of God's existence” (229).In the first essay of the final section of the volume, Lee Hardy investigates the role of common sense in Kant's epistemology of religious belief. It is Hardy's contention that Kant subscribes to a broadly dispositional account of religious belief. Hardy proposes that, on Kant's view, common human understanding naturally moves from certain experiential grounds to certain religious beliefs, in particular, to the belief in God's existence, by way of a native moral disposition, where these beliefs are fully warranted, apart from any proof or argument, just by virtue of having been generated in this way. The rational cultivation of proofs or arguments for religious beliefs is best understood as an explication of the common human understanding, which is required for their justification only in special circumstances.Eric Watkins considers three Kantian lines of argument in response to the problem of the hiddenness of God, that is, the question of why God remains hidden from us, despite his ability to make his existence obvious to all and despite the fact that his doing so would fulfill an important purpose, namely, ensuring that we accept his existence and reject false idols. The first line of argument is based on the practical consequences that would ensue if God revealed himself to us, namely, that our actions would no longer have moral worth because they would be based on hope for reward and fear of punishment by God rather than on duty, or that we could not act with morally significant freedom since our knowledge of God's existence and of the punishment that he might mete out would in effect serve as a coercive threat. The second line of argument, which comes in four versions, aims to establish that, despite his omnipotence, God is not able to make his existence known to us due to essential limitations in us. The first two versions turn on the fact that, according to Kant's theory, our experience or knowledge of any object requires both that we can think the object and that the object is given to us in intuition. Since any object that can be given to us in intuition must be (a) in space and time and (b) conditioned, God, who is neither in space and time nor conditioned, cannot be given to us in intuition and, thus, cannot be experienced or known to us. The second two versions appeal to God's perfect and infinite nature and aim to show that, due to our cognitive limitations, we cannot know or experience anything perfect or infinite as such. Watkins argues that while the first line of argument is not compelling, the two final versions of the second line of argument are quite plausible, even from an independent point of view outside the context of Kant's philosophy.Rachel Zuckert completes the lineup with her piece on Kant's account of practical fanaticism. Zuckert argues that on Kant's view the fanatical attitude is not simply the result of extreme emotion that is opposed to the claims of reason, as many of his Enlightenment predecessors held, but crucially incorporates rational ideas. Zuckert submits that there are parallels between Kant's analysis of practical fanaticism and his analysis of theoretical fanaticism in that both kinds of fanaticism involve a conflation of sensible representations with rational ideas and that both arise in concert with the aspirations of reason to gain access to the unconditioned. But since, on Kant's view, in the practical sphere it is possible for us to cognize the supersensible, his diagnosis of the error in theoretical fanaticism cannot straightforwardly be transposed to the practical case but requires some modifications. Theoretical fanatics are deluded in believing themselves to be able to cognize the supersensible through some sort of intuition. Practical fanatics misinterpret their feeling of being moved by a religious or moral idea as an experience of the object of this idea, and they take this feeling itself to have unconditional value and, thus, to be a highest good.According to the editors, this volume aspires to make a contribution to the double-pronged project of reading Kant “holistically” and “metaphysically” (1–3). Such a reading does not restrict itself to selecting narrow segments of Kant's work but offers a synoptic treatment based on the entire Kantian corpus, and moves away from the kind of metaphysically “anodyne” interpretations that have dominated Kant scholarship in the second half of the previous century, taking seriously Kant's metaphysical interests and commitments. More specifically, given its focus on Kant's practical philosophy, the volume as a whole is said to embody an argument to the effect, first, that “the discussion of Kant's practical philosophy clarifies, and is clarified by, the full range of Critical texts” (2), and, second, that interpretations of Kant's moral philosophy that present it as involving specific metaphysical, ontological commitments—as opposed to interpretations á la Rawls or Korsgaard that present it as a form of constructivism—deserve more attention than they have received so far, not least because, as the volume is supposed to show, Kant's various metaphysical claims, for example, about freedom and God, and his defenses of them “are of greater philosophical interest than has generally been acknowledged” (4). In my view, there is no question that reading Kant “holistically” and metaphysically is the only viable approach if one is interested in figuring out what Kant actually wanted to say. Kant's thinking is truly systematic, and he never loses sight of the metaphysical prize of the cognition of the supersensible. Indeed, with respect to the aspiration of offering a synoptic treatment, I would want to stress explicitly that one's interpretation of a specific element of Kant's critical philosophy can benefit immensely not only from reading it in the context of “the full range of Critical texts” but also, and in particular, from reading it in the context of Kant's precritical philosophical development. Karl Ameriks's essay in the collection, which inspects the development of Kant's ethical thought to illuminate his critical moral philosophy, provides a good illustration of a successful implementation of this In full to the for the approach to reading hope that this a But does the volume succeed in up to its the space of each and of the volume as a it would be to from this book a full of the project of reading Kant's philosophy “holistically” in the indicated an that is not even some of the in the of their to the the volume in the of the for example, by the of the Religion in the of for Kant's ethics, which can our understanding of Kant's views about moral motivation and moral imperfection, other respect to the second not all of the explicitly discuss Kant's metaphysical commitments, but all of them Kant at least to the that a metaphysically two-world reading of Kant's provides the framework in which most of the are The only in this respect is Patrick who explicitly as one of the of the two-standpoint interpretation, which he that allows one to make use of Kant's about freedom from a practical point of view making metaphysical This is opposed to the of the of the essay does serve the first task of the volume, of to Kant by an of Kant's theory of freedom with his my view, the best way to the most and of the volume is not to that the take Kant's moral seriously more specifically, to that many of them take Kant's metaphysically philosophy of religion it as an part of his critical philosophy, and, that they so with a not all of the are of the same the volume can be to Kant of all especially to who are in the of the and, more to of philosophy as well as of religion

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Metaphysics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy

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