Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy

John Rawls, Barbara Herman

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780674255784
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The premier political philosopher of his day, John Rawls, in three decades of teaching at Harvard, has had a profound influence on the way philosophical ethics is approached and understood today. This book brings together the lectures that inspired a generation of students--and a regeneration of moral philosophy. It invites readers to learn from the most noted exemplars of modern moral philosophy with the inspired guidance of one of contemporary philosophy's most noteworthy practitioners and teachers.Central to Rawls's approach is the idea that respectful attention to the great texts of our tradition can lead to a fruitful exchange of ideas across the centuries. In this spirit, his book engages thinkers such as Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel as they struggle in brilliant and instructive ways to define the role of a moral conception in human life. The lectures delineate four basic types of moral reasoning: perfectionism, utilitarianism, intuitionism, and--the ultimate focus of Rawls's course--Kantian constructivism. Comprising a superb course on the history of moral philosophy, they also afford unique insight into how John Rawls has transformed our view of this history.

KANT

KANT I

Groundwork: Preface and Part I

§I. Introductory Comments

1. I shall say very little about Kant’s life, which presents a striking contrast with Hume’s. While Hume was precocious, conceiving the Treatise in his teens and completing it before he was thirty, Kant’s major works, the three Critiques of the 1780s, matured slowly. Kant was born in April 1724 and died in February 1804, a little before his eightieth birthday. When the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, following the decade of the 1770s in which he wrote very little, he was fifty-seven years old and beginning to feel that time was short. The Critique of Practical Reason appeared in 1788 and the Critique of Judgment in 1790, with the second edition of the first Critique in 1787. This was not all in those years: the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was published in 1783, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785, and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science in 1786. In addition to all these, there were several essays important for his political philosophy: “Idea for a Universal History” and “What Is Enlightenment” both in 1784, and “What Is Orientation in Thinking” in 1786, among others. When the last Critique appeared, Kant was sixty-six and still going strong. He had yet to bring out Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), and two important essays in political philosophy, “On the Common Saying: ‘That may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice’” and “Perpetual Peace,” both in 1795. In 1798, when his last work, The Contest of the Faculties, appeared, he was seventy-four.

Another contrast is that Hume was lowland Scottish gentry who had no difficulty supporting himself, often staying at the family estate at Ninewells and eventually becoming quite wealthy from his writings and legacies to the tune of £1,000 per annum, a substantial sum in those days. Kant was a poor boy. His father was a harness maker; the family lived in the working-class section of Königsberg. At the age of eight, he entered the Pietist school the Fridericianum, which he grew to hate; for the rest of his life he regarded his years there as time in prison. He had to struggle to earn a living when he went to the university in 1740 when he was sixteen; and when he left the university in 1746 he became a Hauslehrer, or tutor, for well-to-do families near Königsberg for nearly ten years. When he returned to the university and began lecturing as Dozent in the fall of 1755, to make ends meet he lectured twenty hours or more per week, which seems to us quite incredible, on all kinds of subjects: logic, metaphysics, ethics, theory of law, geography, anthropology, and more. He didn’t reach a somewhat comfortable financial security until he became a professor ordinarius in 1770.

2. For all their differences, one of the remarkable things about Kant is his deep respect and fondness for Hume. I say it is remarkable because it’s not clear whence it arises. Almost certainly, Kant could not read English. J. G. Sulzer translated Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1755, and most likely Kant read this. He also owned a copy of some of Hume’s essays (translated 1759) that included, besides the “Natural History of Religion,” the essays “On the Passions,” “On Tragedy,” and the “Foundations of Taste.”¹ Some think that it was not until 1772, when Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth was translated into German, that Kant became aware of the depth of Hume’s criticism of the concept of causality. This work included quotations from passages in the Treatise more radical than anything in the Enquiry.² Others surmise that Kant saw I:iv:7 of the Treatise as translated by his friend Hamann before 1768 and say that this was enough for Kant to see the point of Hume’s critique of causation.³ Possibly it was in one of these ways that Kant was aroused from his alleged “dogmatic slumbers” (Prolegomena [4:260]).⁴ In any case, he was pretty wide awake by normal standards.

Whatever the source of Kant’s knowledge of Hume on causation, that alone cannot, I think, account for the following extraordinary letter he wrote to Herder in 1768 (Briefwechsel [X:74]) in which he says:

In the early unfolding of your [Herder’s] talents I foresee with great pleasure the time when your fruitful spirit, no longer driven by the warm impulse of youthful feeling, attains that serenity which is peaceful yet full of feeling, and is the contemplative life of the philosopher, just the opposite of that dreamed of by the mystics. From what I know of you, I confidently look forward to this epoch of your genius, of all states of mind the most advantageous to its possessor and to the world, one in which Montaigne occupies the lowest place, and Hume so far as I know the highest.⁵

The letter is extraordinary not only in that Kant should write this to Herder (then a young man to whom he had been close as a student) but also in that he should say this of Hume. Not because it’s not true of Hume. But how could Kant have formed such depth of appreciation? How did Kant divine Hume’s character and sensibility expressed by what I have called his fideism of nature—his happy acceptance, “peaceful yet full of feeling”? His respect and fondness for Hume is a wonderful tribute to them both. (See also KR B788–797 for Kant’s discussion of Hume as a skeptic, with his feeling for Hume expressed at B792: perhaps the “most ingenious of all the skeptics”; “so acute and estimable a man.”)

§2. Some Points about the Preface: Paragraphs 11–13

I. Today we begin our study of the first of the three topics into which our survey of Kant’s moral philosophy will be divided. These three topics are the moral law, the fact of reason, and a practical faith. We begin with the Groundwork (as I shall call it following Paton), because even though it fails to give an adequate view of Kant’s moral philosophy as a whole, it does provide a reasonably full analytic account of the moral law. It does this by elucidating the concept of morality, which Kant holds to be implicit in our commonsense judgments concerning the moral worth of actions and of the character they express.

Kant tells us in the Preface (Pref:13 [392]) that the sole aim of the Groundwork is “to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality.” He remarks that this inquiry “constitutes a whole and is to be separated off from every other inquiry.” In contrast to Hume, he holds that looking for this principle does not proceed as part of a larger science of human nature, but begins analytically by elucidating the underlying principle(s) implicit in our commonsense judgments of moral worth.

This inquiry is a separate one in the further sense that seeking and establishing the supreme principle of morality is preliminary to a critique of pure practical reason, which Kant says he hopes to write in some future work, and which he attempts on a small scale in regard to the objective reality of the moral law in Gr III.

2. Several points mentioned in Pref:11 are of great importance for Kant’s view, although their full significance will not be clear until much later.

(a) One is Kant’s saying that a critique of (pure) practical reason cannot be complete until we can show the unity of practical and theoretical reason in a common principle. He believes that “in the end there can be only one and the same reason” (Pref:12 [399]). Now there are, I believe, four connected themes concerning reason in Kant’s moral philosophy. We can state these as:

(i)	the supremacy of reason
(ii)	the unity of reason
(iii)	the equality of reason with the primacy of practical reason in the overall constitution of reason (for this equality, see KP 5:141); and
(iv)	philosophy as defense, including a defense of the freedom of reason, both theoretical and practical

Here I won’t try even to hint at what these themes mean, since they are difficult and require considerable background to state. But we shall try to understand them, and I hope their meaning and interconnections will eventually be clear. Setting out moral law as the supreme principle of morality is, as Kant says, preparatory for everything else. That is why I shall leave aside many questions about how to interpret the categorical imperative and the relations among its three formulations. Provided that we get the main essentials right, I don’t believe those questions make all that much difference. I shall note as we go on what is really essential and why.

(b) A second important point is this: Kant says (again in Pref:11 [391]) that a critique of pure practical reason is less urgent in the case of practical reason than in the case of theoretical reason. As he argues in the first Critique, theoretical reason tends to exceed its appropriate limits and thereby to fall into a kind of high-blown emptiness, which is fortunately shown in the antinomies. Were it not for those antinomies, we could easily think that we were talking sense: here is Kant the anti-metaphysician. By contrast, practical reason in matters of morality “is easily brought to a high degree of accuracy and precision even in the most ordinary intelligence” (Pref:11 [391]). This is related to the following point.

(c) Kant says (still in Pref:11 [391]) that he plans to write a critique of pure practical reason; but when this work appears, it is entitled simply Critique of Practical Reason. What happened to the adjective “pure”? The full explanation of this must wait until later when we discuss the fact of reason; but Kant’s thought is that whereas pure theoretical reason tends to transgress its proper limits, in the case of practical reason it is empirical (not pure) practical reason, prompted by our natural inclinations and desires, that tends to transgress its appropriate sphere, especially when the moral law and its basis in our person is not clear to us. Kant insists on the purity of the moral law, that is, on the fact that it is an a priori principle that originates in our free reason. He thinks that being fully conscious of the purity of the law and of its origin in our person as free and autonomous is the surest protection against our violating the moral law (see Gr Pref:6–8 [388–389]; and II:9n. [411]; 44n. [426]).

3. The above remarks are related to what Kant says in Gr I:20–22 (403–405). In I:22 (405), he discusses the need for moral philosophy. It is not needed to teach us our duties and obligations—to tell us what they are—for these we already know. He writes in I:20 (403):

We cannot observe without admiration the great advantage which the power of practical judgment has over that of the theoretical in the minds of ordinary men. In theoretical judgments, when ordinary reason . . . depart[s] from the laws of experience and perceptions of sense, it falls into unintelligibility and self-contradiction. . . . On the practical side, however, the power of judgment first begins to show its advantages . . . when the ordinary mind excludes all sensuous motives from its practical laws. . . . [O]rdinary intelligence becomes even subtle . . . and what is most important, it can . . . have as good hope of hitting the mark as any . . . philosopher, because he can have no principle different from that of ordinary intelligence, but may easily confuse his judgment with a mass of . . . irrelevant considerations.

I have cited this passage (omitting phrases here and there) to show that Kant does not mean to teach us what is right and wrong (he would think that presumptuous) but to make us aware of the moral law as rooted in our free reason. A full awareness of this, he believes, arouses a strong desire to act from that law (Gr II:9n. [411]; 44n. [426]). This desire is (what we called in Hume II:§5) a conception-dependent desire: it is a desire, belonging to us as reasonable persons, to act from an ideal expressible in terms of a conception of ourselves as autonomous in virtue of our free reason, both theoretical and practical. In his moral philosophy, Kant seeks self-knowledge: not a knowledge of right and wrong—that we already possess—but a knowledge of what we desire as persons with the powers of free theoretical and practical reason.

4. I should add in this connection that Kant may also seek, as part of his Pietist background, a form of moral reflection that could reasonably be used to check the purity of our motives. In a general way we know what is right and what is wrong, but we are often tempted to act for the wrong reasons in ways we may not be aware of. One use he may have seen for the categorical imperative is as expressing a reasonable form of reflection that could help us to guard against this by checking whether the maxim we act from is legitimate as permitted by practical reason.⁶ I say a reasonable form of reflection because one thing Kant found offensive in the Pietism he was exposed to at the Fridericianum was its obsession with the purity of motives and the compulsive self-examination this could engender. By contrast, the categorical imperative articulates a mode of reflection that could order and moderate the scrutiny of our motives in a reasonable way.

I don’t see Kant as at all concerned with moral skepticism. It is simply not a problem for him, however much it may trouble us. His view may provide a way to deal with it, but that is another matter. He always takes for granted, as part of the fact of reason, that all persons (barring the mentally retarded and the insane) acknowledge the supreme principle of practical reason as authoritative for their will (KP 5:105).

§3. The Idea of a Pure Will

1. I now turn to Pref:10 (390), which is important because here Kant explains his intentions in the Groundwork by distinguishing his doctrine of what he calls a pure will from Wolff’s account of willing as such. Wolff’s account of willing as such Kant compares to general (formal) logic, while his own account of pure will he compares to transcendental logic. What are we to make of this?

Since Kant’s explanation is a bit opaque, I try a conjecture. Just as general logic studies the formal principles of valid thought and reasoning regardless of its particular content and objects, so Wolff’s account of willing as such studies the psychological principles that hold for all desires regardless of their objects and what in particular they are desires for. Desires are treated as homogeneous, whatever their origin in our person. In this respect, the account is like general logic in leaving aside the content and origin of thought in ascertaining the validity of inferences. The account of willing as such, if this conjecture is correct, suggests a view of our person that sees desires as psychic forces pressing for fulfillment and satisfaction proportionate to their strength and urgency. The balance of these psychic forces determines what we do. A person of strong will (someone with Hume’s strength of mind) is someone whose deliberations are persistently controlled by the same strong desires.

By contrast, Kant’s account of a pure will is like transcendental logic in this way. Transcendental logic studies all the epistemic conditions that make possible synthetic a priori knowledge of objects. We find such knowledge in mathematics and in the first principles of physics; and this knowledge must be explained. Similarly, Kant thinks that pure practical reason exists and that it is sufficient of itself to determine the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• A Note on the Texts
• Introduction: Modern Moral Philosophy, 1600–1800
• Hume
• Leibniz
• Kant
• Hegel
• Appendix: Course Outline
• Index