Kant's Justification of Ethics

Owen Ware's excellent new monograph brings together several recent papers to construct a systematic picture of Kant's aims and methods in his two most foundational works of practical philosophy: The Groundwork and the second Critique. In doing so, Ware argues (convincingly to my mind) that the transition between the Groundwork and the second Critique does not represent the dramatic reversal in Kant's thought that many scholars have found in these texts. Rather, on Ware's interpretation, both works represent different parts of Kant's attempt to develop a systematic ‘justification’ for the foundations of ethics. As this indicates, Ware's discussion is organised around the question of the justificatory ambitions of Kant's foundational ethical works. Thus, in his book, Ware's aim is to ‘understand the basic structure of Kant's project of moral justification, with a focus on his foundational arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law’ (p. 4). In doing so, Ware locates Kant's ‘justification of ethics’ between two more extreme alternatives. The first of these is represented by what Ware calls ‘ambitious strategies of justification’—strategies, that is, which attempt to ‘derive a substantive account of moral requirements and their normativity’ from a ‘minimal set of premises’. Like most recent interpreters of Kant's practical philosophy, Ware rejects attempts to read Kant as pursuing this sort of ‘ambitious’ justificatory project—a project that he associates (with somewhat varying degrees of plausibility) with philosophers such as Nagel, Korsgaard, and Velleman

Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy

• Kant's Reason

  Kevin Schäfer, Karl Schafer•Kant's Reason•2023

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