Abstract
After decades of vigorous debate, many contemporary philosophers in the Kantian tradition continue to believe, or at least hope, that morality can be given a firm grounding by showing that rational agents cannot consistently reject moral requirements. In the present paper, I do not take a stand on the possibility of bringing out the alleged inconsistency. Instead I argue that, even if a successful argument could be given for this inconsistency, this would not provide an adequate answer to “the normative question” (i.e., “why should I be moral?”). My defense of this claim emerges from a defense of a claim about Kant, namely, that he did not attempt to answer the normative question in this way. After carefully articulating Kant’s answer to the normative question, I argue that his answer to this question contains a lesson about why we should not embrace the approach that is popular among many contemporary Kantians.
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Notes
A ‘rational commitment’ is to be contrasted with an ‘existential commitment’ where the former indicates that a claim is implicit in what I have done, or can be derived from what I have said, and the latter indicates that I have given something a prominent place in my life projects. One is rationally committed to propositions, but existentially committed to principles, ideals, and causes.
Gewirth (1991, p. 82) gives his supreme moral principle the name “the principle of generic consistency, and explicitly connects it to “the principle that human beings ought to be treated as ends in themselves.”
My discussion here resonates well with points Korsgaard makes in Creating the Kingdom of Ends. See especially p. 92–94.
As Kant puts it: the moral law “checks the opinion of his personal worth (which, in the absence of agreement with the moral law, is reduced to nothing)” (Kant 2004, p. 67).
Plato and Kant both tried to show that it is better to be just/moral, even if “scourged, racked, [and] bound,” than to be unjust/immoral and rewarded with all of the comforts of the material world. Both tried to show this by describing what justice/morality and injustice/immorality are “in themselves, and how they inwardly work in the soul.” Both suggested that the just/moral man is one who is free in virtue of having the higher, rational part of his nature in control of the lower, animal part of his nature, while the unjust/immoral man is in a state of slavery to the lower, animal part of his nature. The just/moral man is his “own master and own law,” while the unjust/immoral man is ruled by the appetites/inclinations. Lastly, both tied their accounts of justice/morality to a metaphysical realm of pure being. For Kant this takes the form of obeying an a priori law of reason and being in harmony with all rational beings in a supersensible kingdom of ends; for Plato it is a matter of imitating “the divine order” of “true being.” (Republic (Plato 2000), pp. 34, 113, 165)
See footnote 1 above for more on these two kinds of commitments.
The distinction I am making here resembles T.M. Scanlon’s distinction between “substantive” and “formal” accounts in What We Owe to Each Other (Scanlon 1998).
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Powell, B.K. Kant and Kantians on “the Normative Question”. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 9, 535–544 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9033-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9033-7