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Kant, Skepticism, and Moral Sensibility Kant, Skepticism, and Moral Sensibility by Owen Ware A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto Copyright c 2010 by Owen Ware � Abstract Kant, Skepticism, and Moral Sensibility Owen Ware Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2010 In contrast to his rationalist predecessors, Kant insists that feeling has a pos- itive role to play in moral life. But the exact nature of this role is far from clear. As much as Kant insists that moral action must proceed from a feeling of respect, he maintains with equal insistence that the objective basis of acting from duty must come from practical reason alone, and that when we act from duty we must exclude sensibility from the determining grounds of choice. In what way, then, is respect for the law a feeling? And what place does this feeling have—if any—in Kant’s ethics? The aim of my dissertation is to answer these questions, in part through a close engagement with Kant’s second Critique. I provide a close reading of his claim that our recognition of the moral law must effect both painful and pleasurable feelings in us, and I argue that these feelings, for Kant, are meant to explain how the moral law can figure into the basis of a maxim. By showing why our recognition of the law must be painful from the perspective of self-love, but pleasurable from the perspective of practical reason, Kant is able to show how our desires can acquire normative direction. On my reading, then, the theory of moral sensibility we find in the second Critique addresses a rather troubling form of skepticism: skepticism about moral motivation. ii In the course of defending this claim, I provide an alternative reading of the development of Kant’s project of moral justification from Groundwork III to the second Critique. Against a wide-spread view in the literature, I suggest that what changes between these texts is not a direction of argument (from freedom to morality, or morality to freedom), but a methodological shift toward the concept of human sensibility. In the later work, I argue, Kant develops a novel approach to moral feeling from the perspective of the deliberating agent; and this in turn clears room in Kant’s ethics for a new kind of a priori knowledge—namely, knowledge of what the activity of practical reason must feel like. The broader aim of my dissertation is thus to put Kant’s work on meta-ethics and moral psychology in closer proximity. iii Acknowledgements While writing this thesis, I have received an enormous amount of help from many people, in many different ways. For this I am deeply thankful. I was fortunate to meet Paul Franks soon upon his arrival at the University of Toronto. Much of what I am presenting here—especially Kant’s “dialectical” relationship to skepticism—is a result of his mentoring. Paul has an unusual talent for knowing what I want to say even before I know how to say it. This thesis owes much to his encouragement. Sergio Tenenbaum and Arthur Ripstein first introduced me to Kant’s ethics. The clarity and rigour they bring to the exposition of Kant’s thought has been, for me, something of a “regulative ideal.” Sergio is a tireless conversation partner, and I am truly grateful for his willingness to meet on short notice and discuss obscure passages from Groundwork III. Arthur helped shape my project at the beginning, and my ideas on Kant’s theory of moral sensibility—particularly as they differ from Heidegger’s—owe to his acute suggestions. Over the past two years I have benefitted from a number of individuals. Steve Engstrom was kind enough to give me detailed feedback on my early work on Kant. Barbara Herman also gave me much encouragement, and my work on the reflexive character of “feeling” in Kant is largely the result of a single conversation with her. More recently, I have had the pleasure to share ideas with Bob Stern, and his recent work on Kant’s relationship with moral skepticism has had a major impact on my thinking. The philosophical community at the University of Toronto has been incredibly supportive. In particular, I would like to thank Don Ainslie, Phil Clark, Rebecca Comay, Bob Gibbs, Gupreet Rattan, Ulrich Schlösser, and Jennifer Whiting. Each iv offered me a different philosophical perspective and helped me navigate my way through the Continental-Analytic divide. During the 2009-2010 year I was a grad- uate fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, which offered me a great place to work, drink espresso, and share ideas with a wonderful group of people. The So- cial Sciences and Humanities Research Council also supported me with a Canada Graduate Scholarship from 2006 to 2009, for which I am grateful. I thank my parents, Anne and Grahame, for their love and support. As always, my greatest debt is to Leah Harms. Her love has sustained me throughout the years. This thesis is dedicated to her. v for Leah ... vi “The highest ground of morality must not simply be inferred from the pleasant; it must itself be pleasing in the highest degree. For it is no mere speculative idea; it must have the power to move.” — Kant. vii Contents Introduction 1 I The Problem 23 1 What Moral Question? 24 1.1 Preliminaries ................................. 25 1.2 Empirical Skepticism ........................... 26 1.3 From Metaphysics to Critique ....................... 30 1.4 Transcendental Skepticism ......................... 32 1.5 A Good (Human) Will ........................... 35 1.6 Deduction or Defence? ........................... 38 1.7 The “Fact of Reason” ............................ 44 1.8 Looking Ahead ............................... 48 2 Freedom and Rational Agency 53 2.1 Preliminaries ................................. 53 2.2 Acting Under the Idea of Freedom .................... 56 2.3 The Standpoint of Theoretical Reason .................. 60 2.4 Happiness and Rational Heteronomy .................. 62 viii 2.5 The “Hidden Circle” ............................ 65 2.6 “Raw” Transcendental Idealism ...................... 68 2.7 The World of Understanding as an Archetype ............. 73 3 The Moral “Ought” 84 3.1 Preliminaries ................................. 84 3.2 The Intelligible Ground of the World of Sense ............. 86 3.3 Intuition and Practical Sensibility ..................... 92 3.4 The Case of the Mafioso .......................... 96 3.5 Actually or Possibly Motivating? .....................100 3.6 Looking Ahead ...............................104 4 Moral Feeling 110 4.1 The “Aesthetic” of Pure Practical Reason ................112 4.1.1 Ectypal Nature ...........................117 4.1.2 The Typic ..............................118 4.1.3 The Causa Noumenon .......................121 4.2 Life, Desire, Feeling .............................125 4.3 Heidegger’s Mistake ............................128 4.4 Hegel’s Challenge ..............................131 4.5 The “Harmony” of Duty and Inclination ................135 5 Humiliation, Elevation 144 5.1 Preliminaries .................................144 5.2 The Dialectic of Respect ..........................149 5.3 Completing the Experiment ........................159 5.4 Two Objections ...............................160 ix 5.5 Moral Enthusiasm ..............................162 5.6 Closing Remarks ..............................169 Abbreviations 175 Bibliography 178 x List of Figures 5.1 Kant’s Dialectic of Respect .........................158 xi Introduction Nobody can or ever will comprehend how the understanding should have a motivat- ing power; it can admittedly judge, but to give this judgment power so that it becomes a motive able to impel the will to performance of an action—to understand this is the philosophers’ stone. — Kant (LE 27:1428). ... it had better have a footing in the heart’s desire. — Bernard Williams (1996). Preliminaries If we have learned anything from Kant’s ethical theory, it’s that we cannot ground moral principles on a settled view of human motivational capacities. Ethics must precede psychology. But that is not to say ethics must do away with psychology. Once we understand the demands that moral reasons place on us, we can better understand the psychological conditions of moral choice and action. Ethics can teach us psychology. It can teach us what we must be capable of as human beings. In a trivial sense Kant’s ethics is rationalist. It grounds moral principles on reason. How this position differs from ethical rationalists in the tradition—like Samuel Clarke or Christian Wolff—is a question we need not raise here. But one problem Kant shares with his rationalist predecessors is a problem of motivation. 1 2 If moral principles have their seat in reason, how can those principles move us? Reason does not seem equipped with motive force, and yet this is what Kant and other rationalists are committed to saying. Reason must be capable of directing our choices. It must be practical in the sense of action-guiding. But how reason can be practical, how it can guide action, is precisely the mystery. And many have found this mystery so baffling that—like Hume—they have demoted reason’s role in deliberation to that of a slave, a “slave of the passions.” Kant may not have been aware of Hume’s skepticism about practical reason, but he was aware of the motivational problem in its general form. He also pro- posed different ways of responding to it. The most well-known response comes from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), in the final section.1 Kant recognized that there is something deeply mysterious about the claim that reason can be practical. The source of the mystery is that if reason is to move sensible beings like us, it must be able to instil a feeling of pleasure in us, pleasure in conforming our actions to reason. This is the only way moral action would be possible for human beings, since Kant acknowledged that we are only capable of forming choices on the basis of feelings.
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