Virtues of Freedom

Virtues of Freedom
Selected Essays on Kant

Paul Guyer

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Preface

“Virtue” is used in two senses in the title of this collection of essays on the moral
philosophy of Kant that I have written over the last dozen years, corresponding to
two of the definitions we find in the Oxford English Dictionary. One definition is that
a virtue is “A particular form of moral excellence . . . any of certain moral qualities
regarded as of particular worth or importance”; the other is that virtue is “Conform-
ity of life and conduct with moral principles; voluntary adherence to recognized laws
or standards of right conduct.” I argue throughout this book that freedom is a, indeed
the, fundamental virtue in the first of these senses, that which is of intrinsic and
unconditional worth and the source of all more particular virtues and moral obliga-
tions more generally, but also that freedom, or perhaps more precisely what Kant
calls autonomy, is an achievement, a condition of individuals and, when it is shared,
of societies, that must be attained and maintained by the voluntary adherence of
human beings to the moral law in general and to the laws that may be derived from it
for beings in the human condition, the juridical laws of the civil condition (what Kant
calls “right”), and the non-coercively enforceable laws of intra- and interpersonal
morality (what Kant calls “ethics” proper, which is thus narrower than morality as
such). What freedom need not be, although Kant believes that it is also this, is a
metaphysical condition or ability to choose between two alternative courses of action
no matter what one’s prior history would seem to entail that one will do. Kant’s
defense of freedom in this sense—which, since if it exists would exist without any
effort on the part of the individual, could hardly be called a virtue at least in the
second sense mentioned—depends on his transcendental idealism, a doctrine the
defense and even the meaning of which remain controversial more than two centur-
ies after its publication. This doctrine is the basis for Kant’s confidence that “ought
implies can,” that is, that we are always free to choose to do the right thing no matter
what our upbringing, prior choices, and so on might appear to imply. But my view is
that we can let it remain an empirical question just how far human beings are free to
preserve and promote freedom of choice and action in their intra- and interpersonal
doings while still appreciating Kant’s account of the foundation of all duties in the
intrinsic and unconditional value of getting to set our own ends free from unwar-
ranted constraint from others and even from unwarranted constraint by our own
inclinations and his account of the ways in which we can, as he says, cultivate and
strengthen our dispositions to freedom in this sense, while leaving it open whether we
can always get as far in this project as we would like. I say this in spite of the fact that
in at least one prominent place, namely the culminating Section III of his Ground-
work for the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785, his most widely read work in moral
philosophy, Kant attempts to derive the binding force of the moral law upon us from
the alleged fact of our metaphysical freedom; both in earlier works, such as his pre-
Groundwork lectures on ethics and his next major work on moral philosophy, the
Critique of Practical Reason of 1785, Kant lets the supreme value of freedom shine
forth on its own without presupposing the metaphysical claim that we always are free
vi 

no matter what, and in the Metaphysics of Morals that he finally published in 1797
(for which the Groundwork was the groundwork), as well as in his lectures through-
out his mature career, he shows how our individual duties and rights can be derived
from the general value of freedom, all without presupposing a metaphysical concep-
tion of freedom of the will. So I think it fruitful to separate discussion of the virtues of
freedom in the senses I have distinguished from discussion of the age-old problem of
freedom of the will as much as possible.
The chapters in this volume, several of which have not previously been published
and several of which have been published only in German translations, are divided
into three parts, entitled “The Value of Freedom,” “The Actuality of Freedom,” and
“The Achievement of Freedom.” By these titles I mean to suggest that the chapters in
the first part focus on Kant’s idea that freedom of choice is itself the fundamental
value promoted by morality; that the chapters in the second part are concerned
primarily with Kant’s attempt to prove that we always have the freedom to be moral,
regardless of what has gone before; and that the chapters in the third part concern
Kant’s account of the development of the virtue of autonomy in the empirical
circumstances of human life. But the chapters were written for a variety of occasions,
and in any case my interpretation of Kant has evolved over the period during which
they were written, so there are some overlaps among them, and this division into
three parts should not be taken too rigidly. It did seem to me, though, that it would
make the collection more approachable to group the chapters this way than to
present them without division. I have left the chapters largely as they were originally
written or published, although in several cases material is included that had to be cut
from a previously published version, and I have rewritten where necessary in the
hope of avoiding any contradictions or confusions among them. In a few instances
I have also added references to secondary literature that has appeared since the
chapters were first done.
Those necessary words having been said, let me say a little more about the general
argument of the work, and then a few words about what is to be found in each
chapter. My approach to Kant’s moral philosophy is based on the assumption that he
revealed its premise most clearly in lectures given around the time that he was writing
the Groundwork. In the lectures on moral philosophy recorded by Georg Ludwig
Collins in 1784–5 (although Collins was probably copying from an earlier transcrip-
tion rather than taking down what Kant was saying verbatim) Kant is reported as
saying that “Freedom . . . is the highest degree of life. It is the property that is a
necessary condition underlying all perfections. . . . the inner worth of the world, the
summum bonum, is freedom according to a choice that is not necessitated to act.
Freedom is thus the inner worth of the world” (MP-Collins, 27:344). And in lectures
on “natural right” recorded in the summer of 1784, the only known transcription of a
course that Kant gave a dozen times, he is reported as saying that “The inner worth of
the human being rests on his freedom, that he has his own will. . . . If only rational
beings can be ends in themselves, it is not because they have reason, but because they
have freedom. Reason is merely a means” (Fey., 27:1319, 1321). I take these claims to
show what Kant actually means when he says in the Groundwork that the “ground of
a possible categorical imperative” is that “the human being and in general every
rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that
  vii

will at its discretion” (G, 4:428), which leads to the “formula of humanity”: “So act
that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of every other,
always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (G, 4:429). The
equivalence is secured when Kant defines “humanity” as “the capacity to set oneself
an end—any end whatsoever” (MM DV, Introduction, section VIII, 6:392). Human-
ity is the capacity to set one’s own ends, to set them in some sense freely, free from
domination by other agents but also from domination by one’s own inclinations; but
if this is to be treated always as an end, never merely as a means, then in all self-
regarding actions one must set one’s ends in ways that do not compromise one’s
freedom to set one’s own ends on other occasions and if possible promote or expand
that freedom, and likewise in one’s other-regarding actions, by which I mean any
action that might have an impact on others, one must set one’s own ends in ways that
do not compromise their freedom to set their own ends but if anything promote or
expand that freedom. It takes reason to figure out what this constraint amounts to;
that is why Kant says in his lectures on natural right that reason is the means to
freedom. Reason is not identical to freedom, nor is it of intrinsic value, but it is
necessary in order to figure out how to maximize rather than undermine or minimize
the intra- and interpersonal use of freedom. We might thus say that while freedom is
the only thing of intrinsic and unconditional value, reason is thus first among things
of instrumental value. In his chief exposition of the concept of the categorical
imperative in the Groundwork, Kant tries to put all of this in terms of the require-
ment to avoid contradiction between our maxims and their universalization, where
the contradiction might be between our intention to act on a particular maxim and
the universalization of that maxim or between our intention to act on a particular
maxim and the more general preservation and promotion of agency, in either
case the avoidance of contradiction being the necessary condition of any form
of rationality.
If “humanity” is understood the way I propose, the normative content of Kant’s
moral philosophy quickly becomes clear. What is less clear is how he proposed to
argue for the conception of value that underlies his entire moral philosophy. In the
Groundwork he famously, or notoriously, just asserts it— “Now I say that the human
being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself . . . ”—and notes that
he puts this proposition forth “as a postulate,” to be provided with grounds in the
third section of the book. There we find an argument that draws on the doctrine of
transcendental idealism, with its distinction between how things appear and how
they are in themselves, an argument that infers that no matter how we appear to
ourselves at our deepest level we just are rational and free, and therefore do act in
accordance with the moral law. Kant thus sidesteps any problem of arguing for a
fundamental normative premise, although to do so he not only appeals to a contro-
versial metaphysical premise but also lays himself open to the objection that he
cannot explain how beings who at the deepest level are not only free but also rational
could ever commit an immoral action, an objection that was quickly put to him. In
the Critique of Practical Reason, published with the date of 1788, the year that this
objection was first published by J. A. H. Ulrich, but written in 1787, thus before Kant
could have seen Ulrich’s objection and not in direct response to it, Kant appears to
drop this metaphysical argument and instead to argue that the binding status of the
viii 

moral law is just an immediately given “fact of reason” (CPracR, 5:31) that cannot be
inferred from anything else, although it can benefit from an indirect argument
showing that no other candidate for the fundamental principle of morality can lay
claim to the universality and necessity that we expect from a moral or pure practical
law. But whether Kant really gives up the metaphysical argument of the Groundwork
is a nice question, since his key claims in the Critique of Practical Reason are that “We
can become aware of pure practical laws just as we are aware of pure theoretical
principles, by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us” and
that “the concept of a pure will” and thus freedom “arises from the first” (5:30), which
is very similar to what he argued at the key moment of the Groundwork, when he
stated that “a human being really finds in himself a capacity by which he distin-
guishes himself from all other things, even from himself insofar as he is affected by
objects, and that is reason,” which is in turn “pure self-activity”—a pure and free will
(G, 4:452). More generally, Kant seems to have remained attracted throughout his
career to a position I call “normative essentialism.” This is the position, whether it
can be understood empirically, as Kant did in the 1760s, or can only be understood
through the metaphysics of transcendental idealism, as he did after 1770, that human
beings are capable of setting their own ends and that to treat them otherwise is as it
were to deny the most obvious truth about them, the impermissibility of which needs
no explanation other than logic alone. This position is expressed as early as 1764 or
1765 when Kant writes that “In subjection there is not only something externally
dangerous but also a certain ugliness and a contradiction that at the same time
indicates its unlawfulness. . . . that the human being should, as it were, need no soul
and should have no will of its own . . . is absurd and perverse” (20:93), and present
in the Groundwork twenty years later when Kant says that “rational beings are
called persons because their nature already marks themselves out as an end in itself ”
(G, 4:428). On this account, to treat a human being, or any other free and rational
being should there be any others, whether oneself or another, as if it is not a free being
in all of its actions is to contradict its very essence; it is a logical contradiction. It may
well be, as has been prominently argued by Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard,
that the contradiction involved in any particular violation of the categorical impera-
tive should be understood as a practical contradiction, an undermining of one’s own
agency or that of another in a particular or general way, but the underlying reason
why such a practical contradiction must always be avoided is, if I am correct in
ascribing normative essentialism to Kant, that we must avoid the as it were logical
contradiction involved in acting as if something that does have its own will does not
have its own will.
I believe that Kant always remained attracted to normative essentialism, both
before his invention of transcendental idealism and after it, although he was also
often content to let the moral law in the several forms in which he presented it stand
on its own once he had shown how no other candidate for the fundamental principle
of morality could satisfy the (allegedly) self-evident constraints of universality and
necessity. Yet just what kind of freedom must be regarded as belonging to the very
essence of the human being is no easy question. The chapters in Part II are primarily
concerned with Kant’s efforts to prove that we have free will in the sense of being able
to choose either good or evil at any moment in our lives no matter what our lives
  ix

have been like hitherto and what might seem inevitable for us to choose. This is a tall
order for Kant to prove, because he has committed himself to a thoroughgoing
determinism at the phenomenal level of experience, what has come to be called
Laplacean determinism, according to which in principle the state of the universe at
any time could be predicted from its initial conditions and governing laws. His way
around this is to argue that temporality and determinism do not hold at the
noumenal level, the level of things as they are in themselves, and there we can at
least believe, on practical grounds, that our choice is free no matter what, and even, as
Kant argues in the Critique of Practical Reason, that our noumenal choice is always
the ground of our entire phenomenal character, so that if the laws of the latter need to
be different from what we think they are in order to make possible a moral choice
that seems inconsistent with everything that has gone before, well, they must be so.
This metaphysical view, fanciful as it may seem, and ultimately be, does not raise a
problem about the possibility of choosing evil, that is, choosing contrary to the moral
law, or, as Kant puts it in his 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
choosing to subordinate morality to self-love rather than vice versa, unless it is
assumed that the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal self. Unfortunately,
Kant does assume that, at least in his works of the 1780s, and it is only in Part I of
Religion that he definitively asserts that noumenal choice is completely free, so that
even having once chosen evil, we are still free to turn around and choose to be good—
good is always open to us, we are not predetermined to be either good or evil, and we
do not need divine grace to choose good. Yet that position might seem to raise yet
another problem, namely, if the noumenal is not temporal, how we can we once
choose evil but then choose good; if the noumenal does not consist of a succession of
moments, then how can we have multiple opportunities for choice? The answer to
this can only be that we can attribute to our noumenal selves everything and just
what we need for morality, that we need the possibility of multiple choices to make
sense of morality, but that noumenal multiplicity cannot really be temporal—that is
just the only way we have of talking about it, given that time is our inescapable form
of intuition, but it cannot be taken at face value.
In any case, I believe that Kant’s assertion that we are always free to do the right
thing no matter what can be separated from his theory of how we are motivated to do
the right thing insofar as we are motivated to do so, and the chapters in Part III
explore what turns out to be Kant’s fairly rich account of what I there call the
empirical etiology of moral motivation and action: the role of feelings not in the
constitution of the normativity of the moral law itself, as on moral sense theory of
the Hutchesonian variety, nor in the determination of the will to be moral in Kant’s
metaphysical theory, but in the transition from the determination of the will to the
performance of action in the phenomenal world. Here I explore the role of what Kant
refers to as the feeling of respect or moral feeling in general as well as of more specific
“aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s susceptibility to concepts of duty” such as
conscience, love of others, and self-esteem. Here I also discuss Kant’s view that
although we need to have such preconditions as a matter of nature and could not
be moved to create them out of whole cloth if we did not have some natural
dispositions in that direction, nevertheless we need to “cultivate and strengthen”
and educate these natural tendencies.
x 

Finally, by way of a conclusion I discuss the relationships among the various

conceptions of moral community that Kant deploys at different points in his works,
including the idea of a realm of ends, of the highest good, of the juridical community,
and of the ethical community. I argue that although there are significant differences
among these several concepts, they are all expressions of Kant’s basic idea that what
morality requires is that everyone be treated equally as an end, that this means
treating everyone as entitled to set their own ends insofar as that is compatible with
allowing others to do so as well, and that the greatest happiness possible in the world
is nothing other than what would result from human beings allowing each other to
set their own ends and assisting them in realizing them rather than, as is all too often
the case, interfering with the freedom of each other to set and pursue their own ends.
In this way happiness, particularly one’s own happiness, is not the motive or
immediate goal of morality, but does become what Kant calls its “object”—what
would inevitably result were morality fully realized. For all his differences with the
ancients and with the proto-utilitarians of his own time, it would have been too much
of a stretch for Kant to insist that human morality has nothing to do with human
happiness at all.
In a little more detail, here is what happens in the chapters in this volume.
Chapter 1, “Kant, Autonomy, and Modernity,” originally presented in a lecture
series on “The Modern Turn” at the Catholic University of America, organized by
Michael Rohlf, serves as an introduction to the volume. Here I ask how Kant’s
conception of the intrinsic and unconditional value of freedom differ from ancient
conceptions of the value of ataraxia or tranquility. I argue that it differs in that Kant
values our freedom to set our own ends for its own sake, not because that is a sure
path to happiness. But can Kant argue for such a conception of the value of freedom
without undermining his own distinction between our knowable phenomenal selves
and unknowable noumenal selves? That remains a question throughout this book.
Part I consists of Chapters 2–7. Chapter 2, “Is and Ought: From Hume to Kant,
and Now,” was originally presented at a conference on “Kant and the Future of
European Enlightenment” held in Greifswald, Germany under the leadership of
Heiner Klemme, and was previously published only in German. Here it serves as
an introduction to the idea of normative essentialism that I have ascribed to Kant.
I argue that contrary to what is often said, Hume did not deny that we can derive an
“ought” from an “is,” but asserted only that it must be derived from the right “is,” in
his case a description of our moral sentiments. Kames and Smith held the same view.
Kant did not reject the attempt to derive “ought” from “is,” but only the attempt to
derive it from a description of our moral sentiments. He instead sought to derive the
moral “ought” from a description of our rational essence, until he turned to the “fact
of reason” doctrine in the Critique of Practical Reason.
Chapter 3, “Freedom as the Foundation of Morality: Kant’s Early Efforts,” origin-
ally appeared in a volume of essays edited by Susan Shell and Richard Velkley on
Kant’s 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and the series of
remarks that Kant wrote in his own copy of that work, which constitute our most
extensive source for his earliest approaches to moral philosophy. I argue that in these
pages we can see Kant making a transition from a purely psychological approach to
the value of freedom to normative essentialism. In these notes written in 1764–5,
  xi

Kant introduced his characterization of the fundamental principle of morality as the

“categorical imperative” and the position that this fundamental principle expresses
the intrinsic and absolute value of freedom, but did not settle on a conclusive strategy
for the derivation of the fundamental principle of morality. We might have to reach
that verdict about his entire career.
Chapter 4, “Freedom and the Essential Ends of Humankind,” was presented as a
plenary address at the XI. International Kant Congress in Pisa, Italy, in 2010; the title
reflects the assigned subject of the session in which it was presented. In this, one of
the central chapters of the book, I develop at length the argument already suggested
in this Preface. In his lectures on ethics, Kant identified the greatest possible use of
freedom as the essential end of humankind. In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals, he grounds the categorical imperative on the status of humanity as the sole
end in itself. Since his conception of humanity is the capacity of human beings to set
their own ends freely and the command always to treat humanity in one’s own
person and that of every other as an end and never merely a means requires the intra-
and interpersonally consistent use of freedom, the two conceptions of the central
concept of morality are the same.
Chapter 5, “Kantian Perfectionism,” started out as a paper on Kant’s critique of
Christian Wolff ’s approach to moral philosophy for the 2004 First (and to my
knowledge only) International Wolff Congress, and was then reworked for a confer-
ence on “Kantian and Virtue Ethics” organized by Lawrence Jost and Julian Wuerth
at the University of Cincinnati, and published by them in a 2011 volume. Here
I argue that although Kant ordinarily criticizes perfectionism as a vacuous founda-
tion for moral theory, parasitic upon an antecedent and typically empirical concep-
tion of what is to be perfected, in the lectures on ethics he is willing to classify his own
theory as a kind of perfectionism. This is because according to him what is to be
perfected is nothing other than the will or freedom of choice itself. This form of
perfectionism is thus another way of presenting his moral philosophy of autonomy.
Chapter 6, “Setting and Pursuing Ends: Internal and External Freedom,” was orig-
inally presented at a conference on “The Moral Life” organized by the Universities of
Antwerp and Ghent, and then revised for several further presentations, including a
conference on “Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom” organized by several of my
former students including Frederick Rauscher, Jennifer Uleman, Kate Moran, and
Jeppe von Platz at Brown University in October, 2013. It is another one of the core
chapters in the book. Here I argue that all of the categories of duty that Kant
recognizes can be interpreted as duties to treat humanity as an end and never merely
as a means if humanity is equated with the capacity to set ends and the duties are
construed as conditions for the preservation or expansion of that capacity. A bipartite
interpretation of humanity as the two capacities to set and pursue ends is not
necessary; that is, we do not need to make a separate inference that we should strive
to realize our own ends or assist others in realizing theirs because of value transferred
from the setting of ends to their realization as is often presupposed; rather, it is only
rational to set an end when means to it are (reasonably) believed to be available, so
not interfering with the availability of means to ends and providing oneself and
others with means to ends are in fact ways to preserve and expand the range of ends
that may freely be set by rational agents.
xii 

Part I concludes with Chapter 7, “Freedom, Ends, and Duties in Vigilantius,” the
notes for Kant’s course on the metaphysics of morals from 1793–4, and was pub-
lished in a volume of papers on Kant’s lectures on ethics edited by Lara Denis and
Oliver Sensen. This chapter extends the argument of Chapter 6 by examining the
more detailed discussion of a number of examples of duties to self and others that we
find in these notes as compared to the often quite compressed treatments that we find
in the eventual Metaphysics of Morals of 1797.
The chapters in Part II, as I suggested, focus especially on Kant’s lifelong
grappling with the problem of free will. Chapter 8, “The Proof-Structure of the
Groundwork and the Role of Section III,” was written for a workshop in Ground-
work III by Dieter Schönecker at the University of Siegen, Germany, and published
in German translation in the volume resulting from that event. Here I am still
focused on Kant’s attempt to prove the validity of the moral law, but by proving
that we have free will and that the moral law is the only possible law of a free will.
Kant’s distinction between the analytic method of the first two sections of the
Groundwork, which determine the content of the categorical imperative, and the
synthetic method of Section III, which proves that it is binding upon us, is well
known. This chapter argues that this distinction should be understood in the
context of Kant’s insistence that transcendental proofs should employ an “osten-
sive” rather than “apagogic” method, that is, not rely solely upon arguments by
elimination but adduce positive grounds for their conclusion. The ostensive argu-
ment for the binding force of the categorical imperative actually begins in Section II
of the Groundwork, with Kant’s introduction of humanity as an end in itself, but
culminates in the claim of Section III that a “human being really finds in himself a
capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself
insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason” (G, 4:452)—an ostensive
claim if ever there were one!
Chapter 9, “Proving Ourselves Free,” originally presented as an invited plenary
address at the X. International Kant Congress in Saõ Paulo in 2005, addresses the
character of Kant’s attempted proofs of the existence of free will more generally. It
argues that all of Kant’s attempts to prove the metaphysical freedom of the will are
first-personal, that is, proofs of one’s own freedom, while the freedom that we impute
to others is actually compatibilist, known empirically, and thus our knowledge of
their motives is also merely empirical and therefore always uncertain. For this reason
Kant supposes that we should be rigorous in our moral self-appraisal, knowing our
freedom always to do the right thing, but lenient in our judgments of others—a good
result for him to reach, I suggest.
Chapter 10, “Problems with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and its
Subsequent Emendations,” was written for a volume of essays on the Groundwork
edited by Jens Timmermann. Kant’s arguments for the freedom of our noumenal
wills in both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason, in spite of
differences, raise epistemological problems about knowledge of the noumenal as
well as the question of how a will that is noumenally rational could ever will
immorally, that is, will evil. Kant tries to avert the epistemological problems in the
second Critique through his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, and tries to
sidestep the problem about the possibility of responsibility for evil in the Religion
  xiii

by relying solely on the “ought implies can” argument for the freedom of the will,
which does not presuppose that the real will is necessarily rational.
Chapter 11, “Natural and Rational Belief: Kant’s Final Words?,” was written for a
conference on “Final Chapters” organized by Robin Dillon at Lehigh University and
has not previously been published. This chapter also concerns Kant’s resolution of
his problem about responsibility for good and evil in the Religion and argues that this
solution undercuts his long-standing postulate of personal immortality; structured
once again as a contrast between Kant and Hume, it argues that Kant’s position does
not end up being as remote from Hume’s as it initially seems. That is, Kant’s doctrine
of the postulates of pure practical reason seems diametrically opposed to Hume’s
skepticism about belief in any object that cannot be experienced, such as God or an
immortal soul; but while Kant postulates personal immortality in the second Critique
as a necessary condition of the rationality of working toward the perfection of
personal virtue and in the second and third critiques postulates the existence of
God as the author of a nature in which the object of morality, the highest good, can be
achieved, his doctrine of the possibility of moral conversion at any time in the
Religion undermines his earlier argument for personal immortality, and his final
assessment of the conditions of rationality in the Metaphysics of Morals implies that
only the non-provability of the non-existence of God is necessary to make it rational
to try to be moral—a condition that Hume would agree is satisfied.
The chapters in Part III focus on Kant’s account of the empirical etiology of moral
motivation and action: the cultivation and education of virtue in the real conditions
of human life. Chapter 12, “A Passion for Reason: Hume, Kant, and the Motivation
for Morality,” my 2011 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association, continues the comparison of Hume and Kant. Hume
famously argued that reason is the slave of the passions, and sets no ends, moral or
otherwise, by itself; Kant argues that moral action must be determined by reason
alone. Their positions seem diametrically opposed. But Hume recognized that we
have a calm passion for tranquility, which mimics reason, and is a foundation of
morality, while Kant recognized that in the phenomenal world we can act morally
only if under the direction of reason we transform our innate passion for our own
freedom into an enthusiasm for the freedom of all. At the phenomenal level, the gap
between their theories is not as great as initially appears.
Chapter 13, “The Obligation to be Virtuous: Kant’s Conception of the Tugendver-
pflichtung,” was presented at a conference on the virtues organized at Bowling Green
(Ohio) State University by Fred Miller, Ellen Frankel Paul, and Jeffrey Paul, and
published by them in their journal Social Philosophy and Policy in 2010. Here I point
out that Kant distinguishes between the ethical duty to be virtuous and the duties of
virtue proper, those to promote the ends that are also duties, namely one’s own
perfection and the happiness of others. The duty to be virtuous is the duty to fulfill
the latter duties out of respect for duty, or the moral law. But can there be such a duty
without tautology or infinite regress, and when one must have a natural predispos-
ition to virtue in order to be susceptible to the concept of duty or claims of morality at
all? There can be, because the actual content of the general duty to be virtuous is to
strengthen and cultivate one’s natural predisposition to be virtuous in general as
well as one’s more specific natural predispositions to conscience, love of others, and
xiv 

self-esteem. Chapter 14, “Kant on Moral Feelings: From the Lectures to the Metaphysics
of Morals,” originally published in a somewhat abbreviated form in a volume of
critical essays on the Metaphysics of Morals edited by Lara Denis, continues the
discussion of the necessity of strengthening and cultivating the natural tendencies
to be moral. In his early lectures on ethics, Kant said that the head is necessary for
knowledge of the moral law but the heart for its execution, that is, he suggested that
moral feeling plays an essential role in the determination to be moral. In the
Groundwork, he seems to repudiate this position by making the feeling of respect a
merely epiphenomenal manifestation of the noumenal determination of the will to be
moral. But beginning with the Critique of Practical Reason, he suggests that the
feeling of respect or a broader set of “aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s suscep-
tibility to concepts of duty” play a role, not in the noumenal determination of the will
to be moral, but in the empirical etiology of moral action. In the second Critique, he
suggests that the feeling of respect plays a role in the selection of particular maxims,
and in the late Metaphysics of Morals that moral feeling in general, conscience, and
the feelings of love of others or sympathy and self-respect are all empirical tendencies
that have to be strengthened and cultivated for the effective translation of the
determination to be moral into particular actions. Finally, Chapter 15, “Examples
of Moral Possibility,” originally published in a volume on moral education edited by
Klas Roth and Chris Sturtevant, discusses the role that real examples of virtue, rather
than mere thought-experiments, can play in our moral education. Kant rejects any
role for empirical examples of human conduct in the determination of the content of
the moral law. Nor would he seem to allow for any role for empirical examples of
action in the discovery of our freedom. Yet although the moral law is in a sense innate
and our freedom to act in accordance with it may be inferred directly from it,
children undergoing moral education nevertheless need examples of moral conduct
to help them see what the moral law may require of them in particular circumstances
and in order to be really persuaded of the possibility of acting morally no matter what
the costs may be. For the latter, in particular, only real examples of moral conduct
will do, so history and biography play an essential role in moral education. I have
introduced these three chapters in a single paragraph because I regard them as
together constituting another core of this collection—to borrow Kant’s terms, per-
haps the heart of the collection alongside the head offered in Chapters 6 and 7.
By way of conclusion, finally, I offer “Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends,
the Ethical Community, and the Highest Good,” originally published in a North
American Kant Society volume Kant and the Concept of Community edited by
Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe. Many strands of his moral thought are pulled
together by a discussion of the various concepts of moral community that Kant puts
forth. The concept of the highest good is the culminating concept of each of Kant’s
three critiques and a central concept in other works as well. But his presentation of it
is ambivalent between individualistic and communalistic conceptions; whether it is a
religious or a secular concept has been controversial; and its relation to the concepts
of the realm of ends on the one hand and of a juridico-civil community or political
order on the other has been disputed. I argue that Kant’s conception gradually
evolves from an ambivalent conception to one that is clearly communalistic, a
condition of humankind that is to be realized within nature, although, in Kant’s
  xv

view, a nature whose laws are underwritten by God; that if the element of punish-
ment for the non-virtuous is omitted, as it should be, then there is nothing to
distinguish the condition of the highest good from the realization of the realm of
ends; and that the highest good may include juridical order, not as a mere stepping-
stone to a purer form of virtue, but as an ineliminable component of the highest good
that is possible in the world, for human beings as they actually are. This is all as we
should expect if the basic value preserved and promoted by reality is that of intra-
and interpersonal freedom, but that is to be realized in the natural world that human
beings inhabit and not an imaginary world inhabited by equally imaginary purely
rational beings.
I could not possibly remember and therefore thank all of those with whom I have
profitably discussed Kant’s moral philosophy over the years during which these
essays were written and the longer period—my whole career—in which I have been
working to one degree or another on the subject. I have already implicitly thanked a
number of colleagues and former students, now themselves respected colleagues, in
referring to the occasions for various of these chapters. I would certainly be remiss if
I did not also mention among those from whom I have learned so much Henry
Allison, Karl Ameriks, Dieter Henrich, Barbara Herman, Rolf-Peter Horstmann,
Patricia Kitcher, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Louden, Onora O’Neill, Jerry Schnee-
wind, and especially he with whom I so often enjoyably and profitably disagree, Allen
Wood; among recent students not already mentioned I also want to single out
Wiebke Deimling, J. Michael Nance, and Reed Winegar. To all those who have not
immediately come to mind I can only apologize.
Contents

Abbreviations xix
Sources xxi

Introduction
1. Kant, Autonomy, and Modernity 3

Part I. The Value of Freedom

2. Is and Ought: From Hume to Kant, and Now 21
3. Freedom as the Foundation of Morality: Kant’s Early Efforts 36
4. Freedom and the Essential Ends of Humankind 54
5. Kantian Perfectionism 70
6. Setting and Pursuing Ends: Internal and External Freedom 87
7. Freedom, Ends, and Duties in Vigilantius 105

Part II. The Actuality of Freedom

8. The Proof-Structure of the Groundwork and the Role of Section III 127
9. Proving Ourselves Free 146
10. Problems with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and
its Subsequent Emendations 163
11. Natural and Rational Belief: Kant’s Final Words? 185

Part III. The Achievement of Freedom

12. A Passion for Reason: Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality 201
13. The Obligation to be Virtuous: Kant’s Conception of the
Tugendverpflichtung 216
14. Kant on Moral Feelings: From the Lectures to the
Metaphysics of Morals 235
15. Examples of Moral Possibility 260

Conclusion
16. Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends, the Ethical
Community, and the Highest Good 275

Bibliography 303
Index 310
Abbreviations

The following abbreviations for Kant’s works have been used.

Anth. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

CPJ Critique of the Power of Judgment
CPracR Critique of Practical Reason
CPuR Critique of Pure Reason
Fey. Naturrecht Feyerabend
G Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
ID inaugural dissertation
IUH “Idea for a Universal History”
Kaehler Collegium Philosophiae practicae universalis una cum Ethica
MM Metaphysics of Morals
DR = Doctrine of Right, Part I of MM
DV = Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of MM
MM-Vigilantius Metaphysics of Morals transcribed by J. F. Vigilantius
MP-Collins Moral Philosophy transcribed by G. L. Collins
NF Notes and Fragments
OBS Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
Ped. Lectures on Pedagogy
PNTM On the Clarity of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals
R Reflexion (handwritten note from Kant’s Nachlaß)
RBMR Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Ri. Kant’s notes in OBS as edited by Rischmüller
TP “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory,
but it is of no use in practice”
Sources

1. “Kant, Autonomy, and Modernity.” Not previously published.

2. “Is and Ought: From Hume to Kant, and Now.” Previously published in German
translation as “Ist und Soll: Von Hume bis Kant, und nun.” In Heiner F. Klemme,
ed., Kant und die Zukunft der Aufklärung. Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter & Co., 2009. pp. 210–32. Reprinted with permission of Walter de
Gruyter & Co.
3. “Freedom as the Foundation of Morality: Kant’s Early Efforts.” In Susan Meld
Shell and Richard E. Velkley, eds, Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and Sublime and the Notes on the “Observations”: A Critical Guide.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. pp. 77–98. Reprinted with per-
mission of Cambridge University Press.
4. “Freedom and the Essential Ends of Humankind.” Kant und die Philosophie in
Weltbürgerlicher Ansicht: Akten des XI. Internationaler Kant Kongress. Berlin
and New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2013. Vol. 1, pp. 229–44. Reprinted
with permission of Walter de Gruyter & Co.
5. “Kantian Perfectionism.” In Lawrence Jost and Julian Wuerth, eds, Perfecting
Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011. pp. 194–214. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge
University Press.
6. “Setting and Pursuing Ends: Internal and External Freedom.” Not previously
published.
7. “Freedom, Ends, and Duties in the Vigilantius Notes.” In Lara Denis and Oliver
Sensen, eds, Kant’s Lectures on Ethics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015. pp. 187–204. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge
University Press.
8. “The Proof-Structure of the Groundwork and the Role of Section III.” Previously
published in German translation as “Die Beweisstruktur der Grundlegung und
die Rolle des dritten Abschnittes.” In Dieter Schönecker, ed., Kants Begründung
von Freiheit und Moral in Grundlegung III. Münster: Mentis Verlag, 2015.
pp. 111–37.
9. “Proving Ourselves Free.” In Valerio Rhoden, Ricardo R. Terra, Guido de
Almeida, and Margit Ruffing, eds, Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants:
Akten des X. International Kant Kongresses. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
Vol. 1 (Hauptvorträge). pp. 115–37. Reprinted with permission of Walter de
Gruyter & Co.
10. “Problems with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and its Subse-
quent Emendations.” In Jens Timmerman, ed., Kant’s Groundwork of the Meta-
physics of Morals: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009. pp. 176–202. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.
11. “Natural and Rational Belief: Kant’s Final Words?” Not previously published.
xxii 

12. “A Passion for Reason: Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality.” Presi-
dential Address, Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association, 2011.
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 86/2 (2012):
4–21. Reprinted with permission of the American Philosophical Association.
13. “The Obligation to be Virtuous: Kant’s Conception of the Tugendverpflichtung.”
Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2010): 206–32; also in book form in Ellen
Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds, Moral Obligation. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 206–32. Reprinted with permission of
Cambridge University Press.
14. “Moral Feelings in the Metaphysics of Morals.” In Lara Denis, ed., Kant’s
Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010. pp. 130–51. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University
Press.
German version: “Kant über moralische Gefühle: Von den Vorlesungen zur
Metaphysik der Sitten.” In Werner Euler and Burkhard Tuschling, eds, Kant’s
“Metaphysik der Sitten” in der Diskussion. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 2013.
pp. 177–210.
15. “Examples of Moral Possibility.” In Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant, eds,
Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary. London: Routledge, 2011.
pp. 124–38. Reprinted with permission of Informa Co.
16. “Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends, the Ethical Community, and the
Highest Good.” In Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe, eds, Kant and the Concept
of Community, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy 9. Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2011. pp. 88–120. Reprinted with permission of
University of Rochester Press.
Introduction
 1
Kant, Autonomy, and Modernity

1. Introduction
What is truly modern in Kant’s practical philosophy? The central idea of this
philosophy is that of the fundamental and unconditional value of autonomy, which
is defined at the outset of Section III of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
as “the will’s property of being a law to itself” (G, 4:446). So it seems natural to see
Kant’s conception of autonomy as what is most novel in his work and as his
paradigmatic contribution to the Enlightenment as a self-conscious break with past
conceptions of morality and the source of its authority. Kant himself certainly
suggested that he saw his conception of autonomy as the key to what is new in his
philosophy when, in the conclusion of the Introduction to the Critique of the Power
of Judgment, the last of his three critiques, he summed up his entire system of
philosophy as a theory of “the faculties of the soul in general, insofar as they are
considered as higher faculties, i.e., as ones that contain an autonomy” (CPJ, Intro-
duction, section IX, 5:196).
No doubt there is something right about the assumption that it is Kant’s concep-
tion of autonomy that is his distinctive contribution to modernity. But the claim
must be stated carefully, for there are certainly elements of Kant’s conception that go
back to antiquity, and that might be considered characteristic not so much of
modernity as of philosophy itself: the ideas that we should rule ourselves by laws of
reason and that by so doing we free ourselves of the dominion of our own passions, as
well as the anti-voluntaristic idea that God (if there is one) wills that we should obey
moral laws because they are rational rather than that they are binding just because he
wills them, all of which are parts of Kant’s conception of autonomy but the last of
which in particular might be taken as the defining idea of the Enlightenment, all also
go back to Plato and the Stoics. So is there anything new and modern in Kant’s
conception of autonomy? I will suggest that there is, but that it lies in the “positive”
rather than in the “negative” aspect of Kant’s conception of the fundamental value of
freedom, that is, it lies in his idea that our fundamental value is setting our own ends
as opposed to being pushed around by our passions, coupled with his idea that each
of us must recognize that every instance of such autonomy is as valuable as our own,
thus that autonomy is a universal value.
A second question that I will raise is whether there is anything distinctively
modern in Kant’s way of arguing for this position. Here I will suggest that when
Kant began thinking about the value of freedom, he appealed to essentially empirical
arguments that are continuous with ancient, especially Stoic styles of argument.
In the Groundwork, Kant replaced all such empirical arguments with an a priori
 , ,  

appeal to our noumenal nature that might be regarded as novel simply because the
ancients did not have his clear distinctions between the empirical and the a priori and
the phenomenal and the noumenal (although at least one prominent twentieth-
century Kant scholar who argued for the decisive influence of Plato on Kant’s mature
moral philosophy might well have contested this claim).1 But Kant quickly backed off
from this style of argument for the validity of the fundamental principle of morality,
presumably because for all that he was happy to argue for “practical faith” in the
noumenal agency of both ourselves and God as the necessary conditions for the
rationality of attempting to fulfill antecedently accepted moral obligations, he realized
that an a priori argument about the noumenal source of the very validity of the moral
law itself would violate the epistemological strictures of his own theoretical philosophy.
This left him with the strategy of accepting the validity of the moral law and its
consequences as a “fact of reason” that could be philosophically defended precisely
by showing that within the epistemological strictures of his theoretical philosophy it
could not be disproven (the same stance Kant takes toward the existence of God).
Perhaps we should also see this defensive and non-foundational argumentative strategy
for moral philosophy as something distinctively modern, perhaps an anticipation of
the method of “reflective equilibrium” advocated by John Rawls.
The discussion in this chapter will therefore be divided into three sections. In
section 2 I will briefly establish the ancient origins of some of the characteristic
elements of Kant’s conception of autonomy. Section 3 will describe what is distinct-
ively modern in Kant’s conception of autonomy. In section 4 I will briefly describe
Kant’s difficult path toward a new style of argument for this conception.

2. The Ancient Aspects of Autonomy

I suggested that we might take anti-voluntarism as a defining mark of the Enlighten-
ment. We find it for example in Shaftesbury, who wrote at the start of the eighteenth
century that “whoever thinks there is a god and pretends formally to believe that he is
just and good must suppose that there is independently such a thing as justice and
injustice, truth and falsehood, right and wrong, according to which he announces that
God is just, righteous and true”;2 Christian Wolff lost his position at Halle and came
into danger of losing his life for arguing that the Confucian Chinese, without belief in
God, nevertheless insisted that “reason be properly developed” since by means of it
“one must arrive at a distinct knowledge of good and evil without grounding virtue on
fear of a lord and without the hope of receiving a reward from him”;3 and as early as

1
See Klaus Reich, “Kant and Greek Ethics,” trans. W. H. Walsh, Mind, New Series 48 (1939): 338–54,
446–63, reprinted in Reich, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Manfred Baum, Udo Rameil, Klaus Reisinger, and
Gertrud Scholz (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), pp. 425–59, especially pp. 427–40.
2
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, Book I,
Part III, section 2, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 181. The Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit was first published,
without Shaftesbury’s authorization, in 1699, but then included by him in the first edition of the
Characteristics in 1711.
3
Christian Wolff, Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica/Rede über die praktische Philosophie der
Chinesen, ed. Michael Albrecht (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985), p. 45 (my translation).
 , ,   

1759 Kant endorsed Leibniz’s anti-voluntarist view that God chose this world to exist
because he recognized that it is the best among all possible worlds against Crusius’s
voluntarist view that this is the best of all possible worlds simply because God chose it
to exist.4 And in his earliest recorded lectures on ethics, the notes taken by Herder
between 1762 and 1764, Kant stated that “From the arbitrium divinum I cannot myself
obtain the relevant concepts of the good, unless the concept of the morally good be
assumed beforehand . . . the judgement as to the perfection of God’s arbitrium presup-
poses the investigation of moral perfection.”5 So there is no question that the idea that
the fundamental law or laws of morality must be capable of being recognized by
unaided human reason antecedently to any revelation of the will of God and that
any such claimed revelation must be tested against our own insight into the moral law
is certainly a characteristic idea of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment and a
lifelong commitment of Kant himself. But this aspect of the idea of autonomy cannot
be regarded as a novelty in Kant nor in the Enlightenment as a whole, for it goes back
to Plato, and for that reason can be regarded as a defining idea of philosophy itself
rather than of modernity. In the Euthyphro, the very first in the traditional ordering of
Plato’s dialogues, Plato has Socrates argue that the pious is loved by the gods “because it
is pious, but it is not pious because it is . . . loved” by them.6 Socrates argues against
Euthyphro that we can discover what is pious only through our own rational enquiry
into what is right and wrong, and have no independent access to the loves of the gods
by means of which to discover what is right and wrong; indeed, trying to determine the
will of the gods without the compass of our own insight into right and wrong will lead
only to contradiction and confusion. The idea of using our own reason to discover
what is right and wrong is virtually the starting point of philosophy.
The idea that we must regulate our conduct by the use of our reason and not be led
by our passions is also an idea that goes back to Plato and that was particularly
emphasized by the Stoics from the origins of their school in the century following
Plato. Socrates introduces the model of the tripartite soul in which reason should rule
spirit and appetite in Book IV of the Republic (439c–442d), subsequently analogizing
reason to the philosophically trained guardians who should rule the lower orders in
the just republic. “Fashioning an image of the soul in words” (588b), he compares
reason to the human being who can rule over beasts like the lion and the snake
(588c–590c), and concludes that “it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine
reason, preferably within himself and his own, otherwise imposed from without”
(590d)—at least the best-educated humans can be ruled by reason alone, without
reliance on external inducements. The early Stoics transformed Socrates’s idea of the
just soul into the idea of living in accordance with nature, where nature itself is law-
governed and its laws can be discerned by human reason. Thus Diogenes Laertius

4
See Kant, “An Attempt at Some Reflections on Optimism,” 7 October 1759, 2:29–35; see the discussion
in J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 492–7.
5
Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5 (27:9); see Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, p. 497.
6
Plato, Euthyphro 10d, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), p. 10.
 , ,  

described Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus as saying that the goal for man
is “to live in agreement with nature,” in accordance with our own nature but where
our own nature is part of nature in general: “Therefore the goal becomes ‘to live
consistently with nature,’ i.e., doing nothing which is forbidden by the common law,
which is right reason, penetrating all things.”7 Chrysippus made the continuity
between our own nature and nature in general explicit: “By nature, in consistency
with which we must live, Chrysippus understands both the common and, specifically,
the human nature.”8 And according to Arius Didymus, reported by Stobaeus, “Zeno
defined the goal thus: ‘living in agreement’. This means living according to a single
and consonant rational principle, since those who live in conflict are unhappy.”9 The
assumption is that it is our nature to be rational, so to live in accordance with our
nature is to live in accordance with reason, and our own reason can tell us what this
requires, that being above all the avoidance of internal and external conflict.
The account of early Stoicism preserved by Stobaeus also makes it clear that, as in
Plato, governance by reason means governance of the impulses. “Passion is an
impulse which is excessive and disobedient to the reason which constrains, or an
irrational, unnatural motion of the soul,”10 but in the rational person impulses are
constrained by reason, and so do not become passions. In later, Roman Stoicism, the
idea of the rule of impulse by reason to prevent the development of passion is
transformed into an image of the “happy life” as consisting in freedom from fear
and desire realized through the use of reason. Seneca’s essay De vita beata is one of
the chief texts of later Stoicism. Here Seneca writes that “The happy life . . . is a life
that is in harmony with its own nature, and it can be attained in only one way.” It
must begin with “a sound mind and one that is in constant possession of its sanity,”
accompanied with fortitude, and through the vigorous use of reason we can drive
“away all that excites or affrights us,” from which “ensues unbroken tranquillity and
enduring freedom.”11 Seneca continues: “the happy life is to have a mind that is free,
lofty, fearless and steadfast—a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond
the reach of desire . . . the happy man is one who is freed from both fear and desire
because of the gift of reason.”12 Living in accord with reason frees us from domin-
ation by our own desires, which are the source of our fears, for all our fears might be
collectively characterized as fear of the disappointment of our desires. Freed from
such fear by reason’s insight that these desires bring more trouble than pleasure, we
can live in tranquility.
The ancients thus certainly anticipated some aspects of the idea of autonomy that
seems to be Kant’s distinctive contribution to modernity: Plato pioneered the idea

7
Diogenes Laertius, VII.87–8, quoted in Brad Inwood and Pierluigi Donini, “Stoic Ethics,” in Keimpe
Alegra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld, and Malcolm Schofield, eds, The Cambridge History of Hellenistic
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 675–738, at p. 685.
8
Diogenes Laertius, 7.88, from Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson, eds, The Stoic Reader: Selected
Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2008), p. 114.
9
Quoted by Stobaeus, II.75.11–76.15, Inwood and Donini, p. 684.
10
Stobaeus II.10, Inwood and Gerson, The Stoic Reader, p. 137.
11
Seneca, De vita beata, III.3–4; from Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1938), vol. 2, p. 107.
12
Seneca, De vita beata, IV.3–V.1, Moral Essays, vol. 2, pp. 109–11.
 , ,   

that we must live in accordance with our own reason and argued that any external
claim to moral authority must be tested by the lights of our own reason, and the
Stoics developed the idea of reason’s rule over impulse or desire into a conception of
freedom, which brings a tranquility more satisfying than the fulfillment of any
particular desire could ever be. So what, if anything, did Kant add in making a
truly modern idea of autonomy?

3. Kant’s Conception of Autonomy

Perhaps the simplest answer to this question is that the ancients anticipated Scho-
penhauer, not Kant. That is, the ancient conception of freedom and its value is
negative, the idea of freedom from the fear of disappointment that comes with taking
the satisfaction of desires to be the source of happiness and the point of life, while
Kant introduces a positive conception of freedom and its value, the idea that setting
our own ends is unconditionally valuable and intrinsically satisfying and that even
while the pursuit of self-chosen ends will inevitably expose us to the frustration of
failing to realize at least some of them, the satisfaction of having chosen those ends
ourselves will outweigh such frustration. Kant’s guiding image of freedom secured
through reason is not that of simple freedom from desire and fear of frustration but
rather the idea of a framework within which individuals all of whom are equally
worthy can choose their own ends in ways that are intra- and interpersonally
consistent.
Kant did not arrive at this conception of autonomy overnight. In his earliest
surviving writings about the value of freedom, notes jotted in his own interleaved
copy of his 1764 popular book Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime,13 Kant explored Stoic and Rousseauian conceptions of the value of freedom
from domination by one’s own desires and the impulses of others, but did not yet
have a clear conception of the intrinsic value of setting one’s own ends. Some of the
most impassioned and impressive of these notes focus on the dislike of anyone who
has ever tasted freedom for domination by others, perhaps inspired by Kant’s recent
reading of Rousseau’s Du contrat sociale and Émile. For example, “what is harder and
more unnatural” than our dependence on external sources such as the air and the sun
for the satisfaction of our needs “is the subjection of one human being under the will
of another. No misfortune can be more terrifying to one who is accustomed to
freedom, who has enjoyed the good of freedom, than to see himself delivered to a
creature of his own kind who can compel him to do what he will.”14 Other notes,
which read as if they had been lifted directly out of an ancient text, emphasize the
need to avoid domination and then frustration by the untrammeled growth of one’s

13
An even earlier publication, the 1755 New Exposition of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition,
deals with conundrum of freedom of the will, but not with the value of freedom of choice.
14
Kant, Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick
Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 11; in Kant, Observations on the Feeling of
the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), p. 128. The translations of the notes in the Observations in this volume are
by Uygar Abacı, Thomas Hilgers, and Mike Nance.
 , ,  

own desires. Thus Kant writes that “It is not compatible with happiness to let the
inclinations become excessive, for since there are uncommonly many cases where
circumstances are unfavourable for these inclinations, when things are not as desired,
they become a source of oppression, misery, and worry.”15 More fully,
One could promote one’s welfare by allowing one’s desires to expand and striving to satisfy
them; one could promote one’s rectitude if one allowed the inclinations of whim and luxuri-
ousness to grow and then tried to resist them for the sake of moral incentives. But there is
another solution to these problems, namely, not allowing these inclinations to arise.16

The Stoic character of Kant’s thought at this early stage is even more unmistakable in
passages in which he essentially suggests that the solution to the problem of potential
domination by one’s own inclinations is to live in accordance with nature, that is, to
use reason to distinguish between our minimal and unavoidable but easily satisfiable
“natural” desires and our readily frustrated but also unnecessary “unnatural” desires,
and to ensure ourselves happiness by aiming to satisfy only the former. Thus he
writes that
Virtue does not at all consist in overcoming acquired inclinations in particular cases, but in
seeking to be free of such inclinations and then learning to do without them gladly. It does not
consist in conflict with the natural inclinations, but rather in making it the case that one has
none except for the natural ones, because these can always be satisfied.17
Here Kant defines virtue as freeing ourselves from unnatural inclinations and
confining ourselves to natural ones, the ready satisfaction of which in turn brings
happiness. This is an idea that could have been found in Seneca (or for that matter in
Epicurus or his followers as well).
However, we also find Kant experimenting with several further ideas in these early
notes. One idea that we find repeated several times is that the test of moral accept-
ability is that intentional actions not contradict themselves or cancel each other out if
universalized: “That will must be good which does not cancel itself out if it is taken
universally and reciprocally; on this account the other will not take as his what I have
worked upon, for otherwise he would presuppose that his will has moved my
body.”18 The idea of one person’s will moving the body of another might initially
seem like a metaphysical absurdity, and thus the idea could be that we should act only
in reciprocally acceptable ways to avoid conflict with the metaphysical character of
human nature. But whether or not the idea of one person’s will moving the body of
another is a metaphysical absurdity, it is certainly the essence of interpersonal
domination, and using reason’s criterion that an intention not contradict itself if
universalized is the means to the avoidance of such domination. A fuller exposition of
what would eventually become Kant’s formula of universal law, the first formulation of
the categorical imperative in the Groundwork, does not supply any additional context,

15
Kant, NF, p. 7; Observations and Other Writings, p. 96.
16
Kant, NF, p. 6; Observations and Other Writings, p. 93.
17
Kant, NF, p. 10; Observations and Other Writings, p. 118.
18
Kant, NF, p. 10; Observations and Other Writings, p. 110.
 , ,   

and thus seems again to suggest that the moral function of reason is to enable us to
avoid the hated domination of one person by another:
An action considered from the point of view of the universal will of human beings, if it
contradicts itself, is morally impossible (impermissible). Let me have the idea of taking
possession of the fruits of another. As I then see no person would acquire anything under
the condition that what he has acquired can be ripped from him, I would from a private point
of view want that which belongs to another, but from a public point of view decline it.19

Wanting something from a private point of view while declining it from a public
point of view might again seem like a logical impossibility, and thus it might seem as
if the point of testing our proposed actions by the criterion of universalizability is to
avoid purely metaphysical problems. But even if wanting privately what one abjures
publicly is hardly impossible, it is the essence of duplicity, by which domination of
others can be achieved, so once again it looks as if the role of reason’s test for non-
contradiction upon universalization is to assist us in the avoidance of interpersonal
domination, which we hate.
Still, thus far it looks as if Kant’s early introduction of the test of universalizability
functions primarily to explicate the role of reason in achieving freedom from
domination by others, a negative conception of freedom. If we were to amplify his
sparse remarks with an argument that we can use the test of consistency among
multiple actions to test for the conjoint satisfiability of our own desires and thus as a
way to avoid conflict among them and the frustration that would entail, we would
still be in the terrain of the ancient conception of the value of negative freedom, that
is, the tranquility that ensues upon freedom from domination by our own desires.
However, Kant begins to suggest an alternative conception of the value of freedom
in at least one of these early notes. He writes,
Since the greatest inner perfection and the perfection that arises from that consists in the
subordination of all of our capacities and receptivities to the free capacity for choice, the feeling
for the goodness of the free capacity for choice must immediately be much different and also
greater than all of the good consequences that can thereby be effected.
He adds,
Now this capacity for choice contains either the merely individual will as well as the universal
will, or it considers the person at the same time in consensu with the universal will.20

Here Kant at least hints that there is a satisfaction in making our own choices that is
distinct from any satisfaction in the realization of what we choose, and thus that our
satisfaction in exercising our freedom is not equivalent to the happiness that results
from confining ourselves to a set of readily satisfiable desires. Thus he suggests that
there is a positive and not just a negative value to freedom, a satisfaction in the
exercise of freedom as such rather than merely the tranquility that results from
avoiding unsatisfiable desires and confining ourselves to readily satisfied ones.

19
Kant, NF, p. 21; Observations and Other Writings, p. 177.
20
Kant, NF, pp. 16–17; Observations and Other Writings, p. 165.
 , ,  

He further hints that we may be able to see the universal value of such freedom, that
is, that we recognize its value not only in our own case but in the case of everyone,
from which it would follow that we would always want to act in a way that is
consistent not only with our own “free capacity for choice” but with the free capacity
for choice of everyone. However, it can hardly be said that in these early notes Kant
has spelled out this idea very fully or made explicit how an entire moral theory could
be constructed upon it.
Twenty years after he wrote these notes, however, Kant was clearly committed to
the idea of the value of freedom for its own sake and in every human being, not just
its value as a way to avoid frustration from uncontrolled desires. During the summer
semester of 1784, at a time when he was working on the Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals to be published the following spring, Kant gave a course of
lectures on Ius natura or natural right, known as Naturrecht Feyerabend, in the
introduction to which he introduced the idea of an end in itself.21 He told his
students that “It is just as necessary in the system of ends that something must
exist as an end in itself and not everything can be merely a means as it is in the series
of efficient causes that there must be an ens a se,” something that exists on its own,
and then identified this end in itself as the human being, who is “never merely a
means, because that is against his nature.” He then added that “If only rational beings
can be the end in itself, they cannot be this because they have reason, but because
they have freedom. Reason is merely a means. . . . Freedom, only freedom alone,
makes it that we are ends in ourselves. Here we have the capacity to act in accordance
with our own will.”22 Here Kant clearly indicates his intention to found his moral
philosophy and particular applications of it, such as its application to political theory,
on the idea that freedom is not merely the means to tranquility through escape from
desire, but is a, and indeed the only, thing that is intrinsically valuable; correspond-
ingly, the role of reason is not to guide us toward the preference of readily satisfiable
rather than readily frustrated desires, but to guide us toward the realization of
freedom as the capacity to have “our own will.” If we can locate the commencement
of Kant’s mature moral philosophy and of the modern conception of autonomy itself
in any one passage, this would be it.
But we must still ask what Kant means by saying that having our own will is the
ultimate and unconditional end of morality, and also how he proposes to argue for
this striking claim. I will consider the first of these questions in the remainder of this
section, and the latter in section 4.
Kant’s transformation of the ancient conception of freedom into the modern
conception of autonomy begins with his distinction between the negative and

21
Naturrecht Feyerabend is transcribed in vol. 27, part 2.2, of the Akademie edition, pp. 1317–94. An
English translation appears in Immanuel Kant, Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy, ed. Frederick
Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The manuscript is dated “Winterhalben Jahre
1784,” although the catalogue of lectures for the University of Königsberg shows that the course was
actually given in the summer semester of 1784; see Michael Oberhausen and Ricardo Pozzo, eds,
Vorlesungsverzeichnisse der Universität Königsberg (1720–1804) (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Fromman-Holzboog,
1999), Teilband 2, p. 500. Thanks to Norbert Hinske for pointing this discrepancy out to me; perhaps the
discrepancy results from a later rather than simultaneous transcription of the notes.
22
Fey., 27:1321–2.
 , ,   

positive definitions of freedom at the start of Section III of the Groundwork. The
negative definition of freedom is the concept of freedom as the property of the
causality of the will “that it can be efficient independently of alien causes determining
it”; on this definition, freedom is the independence of the will from direct determin-
ation by desires. But since the will cannot be determined by nothing at all, Kant
accompanies this negative definition with a positive one, namely autonomy, “the
will’s property of being a law to itself,” where “the proposition, the will is in all its
actions a law to itself, indicates only the principle, to act on no other maxim than that
which can also have as object itself as a universal law” (G, 4:446–7). This principle is
the moral law that Kant has identified in the previous two sections of the Ground-
work, which takes the form of the categorical imperative insofar as it presents itself as
a constraint to creatures like us who do not automatically do or desire to do what it
requires. This principle can be considered the principle of pure practical reason
insofar as it applies reason’s inherent requirement of universality to the domain of
actions through their maxims. Thus Kant’s distinction between negative and positive
conceptions of freedom could be considered his statement of the view that freedom
from the determination of the will by mere desires or inclinations is only to be
achieved through the determination of the will by pure reason instead; and then one
might ask whether he has really advanced beyond the ancient conception of freedom,
which also supposed that the use of reason is the means to the tranquility of freedom
from desires and their accompanying fears.
The answer to this question lies in the complexities of the second section of the
Groundwork, where Kant introduces a variety of formulations of the categorical
imperative, of which the requirement to act only on universalizable maxims is only
the first. Specifically, in Groundwork II Kant links the requirement of universaliz-
ability to the concept of an end in itself or necessary end that he had introduced in the
Naturrecht Feyerabend. In Groundwork I Kant had derived the requirement of
the universalizability of maxims from the supposedly common-sense idea that
acting out of mere inclination, no matter how beneficial, is never morally estimable
(G, 4:400–2). In Groundwork II, Kant derives this requirement from the very concept
of a categorical imperative, by means of the argument that accepting the requirement
of acting only on universalizable maxims is the only alternative to acting out of
inclinations that can never lead to anything more than hypothetical imperatives, that
is, recommendations of means to ends that are merely contingently determined by
inclination. But Kant then goes on to accompany this argument by elimination or, we
might say, negative argument for the categorical imperative, with a positive charac-
terization of a necessary end or end in itself that could serve as “the ground of a
possible categorical imperative” (G, 4:428), an end to be served by it that can give a
positive reason for its acceptance. Here is where Kant’s conception of morality as
freedom really turns from negative to positive and where his advance over the ancient
conception of freedom really takes place, for this positive ground for the initial
formulation of the categorical imperative is nothing other than the idea that “the
human being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely
as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion” (G, 4:428), which in turn
leads to the second main formulation of the categorical imperative, “So act that you
use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the
 , ,  

same time as an end, never merely as a means” (G, 4:429). This leads to a new
conception of autonomy because Kant’s conception of that which is to be an end in
itself and never treated merely as a means is nothing other than the capacity to set
ends itself.
Kant makes this clear a few pages later in the Groundwork when he states that
“Rational nature is distinguished from the rest of nature by this, that it sets itself
an end” (G, 4:437), and when he states in the later Metaphysics of Morals (1797)
that humanity is, in contrast to animality, the property of a human being “by which
alone he is capable of setting himself ends” (MM, Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction,
section V, 6:387), and repeats that “The capacity to set oneself an end—any end
whatsoever—is what characterizes humanity (as distinguished from animality)”
(section VII, 6:392). Plugging these definitions into Kant’s statement of the second
formulation of the categorical imperative results in the conclusion that the necessary
end that is to be the ground of any possible categorical imperative is nothing other
than the capacity to set ends itself; that is the thing of fundamental and unconditional
value that grounds all other values in the system of ends just as, at least in the eyes of
pure reason,23 an ens a se or something that exists on its own must ground everything
else in the system of efficient causes.
Kant makes it clear that we are to regard the capacity to set ends as of uncondi-
tional value in every instantiation, not only in our own. This is the point of the
following argument:
If, then, there is to be a supreme practical principle, and, with respect to the human will, a
categorical principle, it must be one such that, from the representation of what is necessarily an
end for everyone because it is an end in itself, it constitutes an objective principle of the will and
thus can serve as a universal practical law. The ground of this principle is: rational nature exists
as an end in itself. The human being necessarily represents his own existence in this way; so far
it is thus a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being also represents
his existence in this way consequent on just the same rational ground that also holds for me:
thus it is at the same time an objective principle from which, as a supreme practical ground, it
must be possible to derive all laws of the will. (G, 4:428–9)

This is not a fallacious argument that because I hold my own capacity to set ends as
my most fundamental value I must therefore hold everyone’s capacity to set ends as
of equally fundamental value, nor a fallacious argument that because everyone holds
his own capacity to set ends as his most fundamental value, everyone must hold
everyone’s capacity to set ends as of equally fundamental value. It is rather an
assertion that each of us must hold his own and everyone else’s capacity to set their
own ends as of equally fundamental value because the capacity to set ends is of
objectively intrinsic and unconditional value, equally valuable in every instance. That
we may have an emotional attachment to our own capacity to set ends is morally
irrelevant, or rather one of the inclinations that may have to be regulated in the name

23
I add this qualification, of course, because it is the main argument of the Critique of Pure Reason that
such conceptions of pure reason are not actually confirmable by or consistent with the character of our
senses and lead to metaphysical illusion unless understood as either merely regulative principles for
theoretical inquiry or moral ideals for practical conduct.
 , ,   

of morality; and that we may often be in a better position to preserve or promote our
own capacity to set ends rather than anyone else’s is only a contingent fact about the
implementation of our duty to treat humanity always as an end and never merely as a
means, not an essential feature of the duty itself.
Of course, this passage leaves open the question of how Kant might argue for the
thesis that the capacity to set ends is a universal or objective value. I will return to that
question in section 4. What has been said so far also leaves open precisely how the
first formulation of the categorical imperative, the requirement of the universaliz-
ability of maxims that can be regarded as the definition of practical rationality itself,
can be seen as a means to the realization of the second formulation, the intrinsic
value of humanity as the capacity to set ends as an end in itself, as Naturrecht
Feyerabend’s claim that reason is only the means to freedom implies that it should.
I will return to that question shortly, but first I want to pursue the issue of the
objectivity or universality of the value of freely setting ends a little further. This is the
focus of Kant’s third main formulation of the categorical imperative. Actually, Kant
offers two versions of the third formulation. First he describes “the idea of the will of
every rational being as a will giving universal law” as the “present third formula of the
principle” (G, 4:432) (this can be reformulated as an imperative by saying “Act only
on maxims consistent with the idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving
universal law”), but then he presents the third way “of representing the principle of
morality” as the formula “that all maxims from one’s own lawgiving are to harmonize
into a possible realm of ends, as a realm of nature” (G, 4:436) (this is already in the
form of an imperative). These two formulations may be regarded as making explicit
the universal scope of each of the two previous formulations: the first makes explicit
that everyone is to aim for universalizability in all his maxims taken together, thus
that each maxim of each person is to be part of a single, universally consistent set of
maxims; and the second formulation describes what would be the outcome of
accepting the second formulation of the categorical imperative: treating everyone
as an end in him- or herself would bring about a natural order in which everyone is
treated as an end in himself.24
Kant’s initial description of the concept of the realm of ends makes clearer what his
final formulation of the categorical imperative really requires of us. He says that “The
concept of every rational being as one who must regard himself as giving universal
law through all the maxims of his will . . . leads to a very fruitful concept dependent
upon it, namely that of a realm of ends,” and then explains:
By a realm I understand a systematic union of different rational beings through common laws.
Now since laws determine ends in terms of their universal validity, if we abstract from the
personal differences of rational beings as well as from all content of their private ends, it will be
possible to conceive of a whole of all ends in systematic connection (a whole both of rational

24
For a detailed presentation of this analysis, see my “The Form and Matter of the Categorical Imperative,”
in Volker Gerhardt et al., eds, Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant
Kongresses, 5 vols (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 131–50, reprinted in my Kant’s System of
Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 146–68.
 , ,  

beings as ends in themselves and of the ends of his own that each may set himself ), that is, a
realm of ends, which is possible in accordance with the above principles. (G, 4:433)

On the one hand, the necessity of treating every rational being whom we can affect,
that is, every human being, as an end in him- or herself is independent of our feelings
about any particular person or about the particular ends (“all content of their private
ends”) that either we or they set in the exercise of their capacity to set ends. On the
other hand, the intrinsic, unconditional, and completely objective value of each
person’s capacity to set ends means that we must not only treat each person’s
capacity to set ends as an end in itself and never merely as a means to our own
ends, but also that, just because they have been freely chosen, we must make the ends
that each person sets for him- or herself in the exercise of this capacity our own ends
insofar as those particular ends form a consistent whole, that is, insofar as they can be
consistently promoted and realized. We are not to do so because of our preference or
inclination for the particular ends that anyone has set, but rather because of the value
that these ends, whatever they are, as long as they are mutually consistent, derive
from having been freely chosen by beings that are ends in themselves.
Only if we so understand Kant’s conception of the realm of ends can we under-
stand the fourfold classification of duties that he uses to illustrate the application of
the categorical imperative—now using that term to refer to what is required of us by
all the formulations of this imperative working together25—in the Groundwork, the
division of duties into perfect and imperfect duties to ourselves and to others. The
first class of duties, perfect duties to self, is illustrated by the prohibition of suicide,
the prohibition of the destruction of an instance of the capacity to set ends regardless
of what any current inclination to shorten its life an agent might have. The second
class, perfect duties to others, is illustrated by the requirement to act toward others
only in ways to which they can consent, or to make sure that the ends we freely chose
for ourselves in other-affecting actions could also be freely accepted by them and in
that way made their own ends. The class of imperfect duties to self is illustrated by the
duty to cultivate our talents, which is necessary for the effective pursuit of the ends
that we freely set for ourselves, so that our free choice of ends will not be constrained
by an avoidable limitation of our means for pursuing them. And the final class of
imperfect duties to others is illustrated by the maxim of mutual aid or beneficence,
the duty to promote the realization of the particular ends freely chosen by others
when we are in a better position to do so than they are. The first two of these kinds of
duty clearly illustrate the requirement to treat the capacity to set ends as an end in
itself: we are not to destroy our own capacity to set ends merely in order to gratify a
current inclination, nor are we to constrain the ability of others to exercise their
capacity to set their own ends in order to use them as a means to the realization of our
own ends. The fourth kind of duty clearly indicates that the realization of particular
ends by anyone derives value from the value of their capacity to set ends, not from
their or our own inclination toward those particular ends. The third duty, the duty to
cultivate our own talents, might illustrate the value both of the capacity to set ends

25
See Allen W. Wood, “The Supreme Principle of Morality,” in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 342–80.
 , ,   

and of the particular ends set by the exercise of this capacity: cultivating our talents
makes us effective in the pursuit of our particular ends (or in the task of helping
others to realize their ends), but also, perhaps more fundamentally, enables us to
avoid unnecessary constraints on our very choice of ends.
There are many issues that arise from these illustrations. I have discussed some of
them elsewhere,26 and we will return to some in Chapters 4–7 in this volume. Now,
I will comment only briefly on the relation between the requirement of universaliz-
ability and this explication of what is required by the imperative to treat humanity
whether in one’s own person or that of any other always as an end and never merely
as a means. Kant attempts to ground his prohibition of suicide on the requirement of
the universalizability of maxims, although he succeeds in arguing only, and dubiously
at that, that it could not be a law of nature that the love of life sometimes leads to
suicide, not in arguing that there is anything contradictory in the universalization of
the maxim to commit suicide when life promises more pain than pleasure. By
contrast, the requirement to act only in ways to which others could consent is an
obvious application of the requirement to act only on universalizable maxims. The
requirements to cultivate one’s own talents and to be beneficent to others can be seen
as entailed by the requirement of universalizability, for no rational being could
choose to deprive itself of the means necessary to realize its ends, whether through
its own talents or the assistance of others, and thus the maxims not to cultivate talents
or aid others could not be universally accepted; but these duties may also be seen as
following directly from the value of humanity itself, because they are necessary
conditions of the fullest possible exercise of the intrinsically valuable capacity to
choose ends.27 Thus the requirement of universalizability is supposed to be coexten-
sive with the requirement to treat the capacity to set ends as an end in itself and a
useful test for whether a proposed course of action does satisfy the second require-
ment, and with the possible exception of the prohibition of suicide, which does not
seem to turn on non-universalizability, Kant’s examples of duties of omission and
commission do illustrate this claim.
When we thus explicate Kant’s conception of autonomy as the positive definition
of freedom by means of his formulae of humanity as an end in itself and of the
realm of ends, we can see that he has indeed made an advance over the ancient
conception of freedom. To be sure, one might argue that tranquility, the ultimate aim
of the Stoic virtue of controlling our passions through reason, is in practice a necessary
condition of freely setting our own ends. But neither Plato nor the Stoics ever
explicitly recognized the intrinsic value of setting our own ends, whereas Kant has
erected his complex analysis of the moral law and his fourfold classification of our
duties entirely on the ground of the intrinsic value of setting our own ends and the
value that accrues to our particular ends not through the fact of our inclination toward
them but rather through the fact of our having freely chosen them. This, I suggest, can
be regarded as a distinctively modern conception of autonomy, although I cannot
stress too much that because of the presumptive coextensiveness of universalizability

26
For fuller discussion, see my “Kant’s System of Duties,” in Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom,
pp. 243–74, and my Kant, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2014), ch. 7, pp. 276–302.
27
Fur further discussion of this point, see especially Chapter 6.
 , ,  

and autonomy, for Kant autonomy is never a merely personal or “subjective” goal set
by inclination but is always a universal and “objective” value that can be recognized by
pure reason.

4. Arguing for Autonomy

But does Kant have a distinctively modern way of arguing for the unconditional value
of autonomy as he has conceived it? I will conclude with a necessarily brief discussion
of this question.
The Stoics argued that reason is the guide to living in accordance with nature,
where their conception of nature, or at least of human nature, seems empirical: they
argued that it is natural for human beings to seek their own preservation and
tranquility in or from their desires, and the assumptions about human nature on
which these claims are based seem grounded in experience. In his earliest arguments
about freedom, Kant also at least sometimes seems simply to appeal to experience.
His claims that anyone who has experienced freedom hates subsequent domination
and that one could best promote one’s welfare by not allowing excessive desires to
grow are not obviously grounded on anything other than experience. But once Kant
had decided, as he did in his 1770 inaugural dissertation, that “Moral philosophy . . . in
so far as it furnishes the first principles of judgment [diiudicandi], is only cognised by
the pure understanding,” that is, what he would subsequently call reason, “and itself
belongs to pure philosophy,”28 an appeal to experience could not suffice to ground
the fundamental principle of morality. Further, once he had accepted the principle
that “if a judgment is thought in strict universality . . . then it is not derived from
experience, but is rather valid absolutely a priori” (CPuR, B 4), the possibility of an
empirical foundation for the fundamental principle of morality was likewise
excluded. So Kant became committed to the need for a style of argument that the
ancient world had not explicitly recognized, an entirely a priori argument for the
fundamental principle of morality.
But what form was this new style of argument to take? In the Groundwork, Kant
tried to argue for the binding validity of the moral law by the use of a distinction
which was also not explicitly made in the ancient world, although he borrowed
ancient terms for it, namely his distinction between phenomena and noumena.
“Phenomena” means objects for the senses, and “noumena” literally means “objects
for the intellect,” but in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had argued that we are
entitled to use the concept of noumenon only in a “negative sense,” that is, “of things
that the understanding must think without . . . relation to our kind of intuitions”
(CPuR, B 307) and thus can think only indeterminately. In the second section of the
Groundwork, Kant had arrived at an analysis of the moral law valid for any rational
being, but he saw the task before him in the third section as establishing by means of
an a priori but synthetic rather than analytic argument (another contrast not made
explicitly in the ancient world) that we are rational beings; and he appealed to the

28
ID, }9, 2:396. Klaus Reich in particular argued for the importance of the inaugural dissertation in
Kant’s turn toward an entirely a priori foundation for morality; see Reich, “Kant and Greek Ethics.”
 , ,   

phenomenon/noumenon distinction to establish this: he argued that reflection on

any object of knowledge would lead to the distinction between appearances and
things in themselves, or phenomena and noumena in the negative sense; that we
would inevitably apply this distinction to ourselves, and thus draw a distinction
between information about ourselves furnished by inner sense and concerning only
our appearance and the reality that lies behind such appearances. However, instead
of stopping with the claim that we must count ourselves “as belonging to the
intellectual world, of which however [we have] no further experience” (G, 4:451),
Kant immediately turned around and asserted that “a human being really finds in
himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from
himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason,” “pure self-activity,”
and on this basis he asserted that the moral law is thus the law of our real selves, of
ourselves “as belonging to the intelligible world, under laws which, being independ-
ent of nature, are not empirical but grounded merely in reason” (G, 4:452). He thus
derived the moral “ought” from a metaphysical “is,” from an a priori claim about our
noumenal nature.29
Kant’s claim that what is in some sense our real self is essentially rational and
therefore moral is the position that I will call “normative essentialism.” It might have
been anticipated by Plato, but Kant’s defense of it on the basis of his distinction
between our phenomenal and noumenal selves is certainly novel. Unfortunately, this
way of arguing for the position may both violate the epistemological stricture of
Kant’s original distinction between phenomena and noumena, and, insofar as it
makes the moral law the universally valid causal law of our real selves, it certainly
raises a question about how we could ever act contrary to the moral law in the
phenomenal world, which should be the appearance of the noumenal world but not a
competitor to it. Kant does not seem to have recognized the second problem in the
Groundwork or the Critique of Practical Reason, but he may have had qualms about
linking his defense of the value of autonomy to a claim about our noumenal selves
more quickly. Indeed, it might be argued that his distinction between the permissible
negative sense and any positive sense of the concept of the noumenon in the second
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (B 307) is his own concession of the inadmis-
sibility of his synthetic argument. Be that as it may, Kant withdrew this argument
from a positive characterization of our noumenal self to the binding status of the
moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason, published three years after the
Groundwork and one year after the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.
There he replaced this argument with the “fact of reason” doctrine, the argument that
instead of inferring the validity of the moral law from metaphysical insight into our
noumenal self-activity we must begin from an immediate awareness of the validity of
the moral law and then infer the freedom of our will to act in accordance with it as a
necessary condition of its validity. But he certainly held on to the distinction between
phenomenal and noumenal self in the second Critique (and later), because he also
argues there that the possibility of the freedom of our will cannot be excluded
precisely because we can establish determinism as a necessary feature of the

29
See Chapter 2.
 , ,  

phenomenal world but must remain ignorant of the noumenal world and therefore
cannot assert that causal determinism holds there. As Kant says,
something different and quite paradoxical takes the place of [the] vainly sought deduction of
the moral principle, namely that the moral principle conversely itself serves as the principle of
the deduction of an inscrutable faculty which no experience could prove but which speculative
reason had to assume as at least possible . . . namely the faculty of freedom, of which the moral
law, which itself has no need of justifying grounds, proves not only the possibility but the
reality in beings who cognize this law as binding upon them. The moral law, is in fact, a law
of causality through freedom and hence a law of the possibility of a supersensible nature . . .
(CPracR, 5:47)
The last sentence of this quote shows that in writing the Critique of Practical Reason
Kant had not yet realized the danger of making the moral law a causal law of the will
at any level, namely that it makes the occurrence of immorality impossible to explain.
We will return to the issues of Kant’s arguments for his normative essentialism and
his conception of freedom of the will.30 For now, we might just suggest that even if we
ultimately have to conclude that the argument of the second Critique is an elaborate
concession of the impossibility of any a priori argument for the validity of the moral
law and thus for Kant’s modern conception of autonomy as our fundamental value,
we might also see it as the avatar of a new conception of philosophical argumenta-
tion, one that recognizes the impossibility of proving foundational principles without
prior assumptions (for if one did appeal to prior assumptions, then the foundational
principles would not be foundational after all) and instead confines itself to reconciling
contradictions among our fundamental commitments, in this example between our
fundamental commitment to the value of autonomy and the moral law erected on that
and our equally fundamental commitment to the truth of determinism in the natural
world of which we are a part (at least above the level of microscopic quantum
phenomena). In other words, while Kant goes beyond the ancient ideal of tranquility
as the fundamental principle of normative ethics, perhaps he here introduces reflective
equilibrium as the fundamental methodology of meta-ethics. This, I think, would be as
much of a modernist innovation in the methodology of morals as Kant’s positive
conception of autonomy is in the content of morals.

30
For the former, see especially Chapters 2–4 and 8; for the latter, Chapters 9 and 10.
PART I
The Value of Freedom
 2
Is and Ought
From Hume to Kant, and Now

1. Introduction
It is commonly thought that David Hume set modern meta-ethics on its path by
decisively demonstrating that “ought” cannot be derived from “is,” or that normative
principles cannot be derived from descriptive statements but must have some entirely
different sort of foundation, and that Kant unwaveringly followed Hume on this
point, although he gave an entirely different normative rather than descriptive
foundation for moral principles than Hume did. This common picture is misleading.
What Hume actually argued is that our moral principles cannot be grounded in the
description of any objects or relations outside of us or independent of our responses
to them, but they can and must be grounded in descriptions of our own sentiments in
response to various sorts of human actions and characters. He thus held that an
“ought” can be derived from the right sort of “is,” that is, from a description of the
right facts. Kant began his career by accepting both the general strategy for ground-
ing moral principles in descriptions of our own responses and the particular strategy
for grounding those principles in descriptions of our moral sentiments. In the
seminal Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Kant rejected the Humean
strategy of seeking the foundation of the fundamental principle of morality in
sentiment rather than reason, but he still sought to ground this normative principle
in a description of our rational nature; thus in that work he too held that an “ought”
can be derived from the right sort of “is.” In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant
famously reverses the direction of proof in the Groundwork, arguing that we cannot
derive the validity of the moral law from the fact of our transcendental freedom but
can deduce our transcendental freedom from our immediate recognition of our
obligation to fulfill the moral law. This suggests that in the second Critique Kant
holds that “ought” implies “can” while clearly rejecting any derivation of “ought”
from “is.” But this simplifies Kant’s ambivalent position in the second Critique, and it
is really only in the subsequent Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that
Kant unequivocally confines himself to deriving our freedom from our obligation
under the moral law while making no attempt to derive the moral law itself from any
description of our rational nature. This in turn leaves open the question of whether
any sort of justification for the moral law can be given at all, or whether that
fundamental and unconditional normative principle must simply stand on its own.
The present chapter will be primarily historical and exegetical. I will begin by
showing that Hume did not issue a blanket prohibition against deriving “ought” from
   

“is,” but rather argued only that “ought” must be derived from the right sort of “is,”
namely an empirical description of our own moral sentiments. I will then show how
successive empiricist moralists, namely Henry Home, Lord Kames, and his protégé
and Hume’s friend, Adam Smith, accepted Hume’s strategy of grounding our moral
principles in a description of our moral sentiments, but in turn attempted to explain
the nature of those moral sentiments themselves in ways that might avert any
objection that “ought” cannot be derived from “is.” Turning to Kant, I will then
argue that Kant’s innovation in the Groundwork was not to insist that “ought” cannot
be derived from “is,” but only to insist that the fundamental principle of morality
must be grounded in a description of our reason rather than our sentiments. I will
then turn to the Critique of Practical Reason and the Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason to show how Kant questioned this approach and came to insist that
normative principles must stand on their own, independent of any descriptive
statements. Finally, I will briefly consider what lessons this history may have for
contemporary strategies in meta-ethics.

2. Hume
Let us begin by considering the context in which Hume seems to say that an “ought” can
never be derived from an “is.” At the end of Book III, Part III, section 1 of the Treatise of
Human Nature—a section that Kant could not have read before the complete German
translation of the Treatise in 1790–2, and thus could not have read until after he had
completed all his works in moral philosophy but the Religion (1793) and the Meta-
physics of Morals (1797), if indeed he ever read it all—Hume writes:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the
author proceeds for some time in the ordinary course of reasoning, and establishes the being of
a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to
find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no
proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible;
but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new
relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same
time that a reason shou’d be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new
relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do
not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the reader; and am
perswaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us
see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor
is perceiv’d by reason.1

The penultimate sentence of this passage seems to say that it is “altogether incon-
ceivable” how an “ought” or “ought not” can ever be derived from an “is” or “is not,”
and that Hume is thus suggesting that normative moral principles must be grounded
in something other than any description of facts altogether. But the final sentence of

1
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 3.1.1.27, p. 302.
    

the passage makes clear Hume’s real meaning: this passage summarizes Hume’s
preceding argument that moral principles cannot be grounded solely on the appre-
hension of relations among external objects in general by our faculty of reason but
prepares the way for his argument that our moral principles can be explained by and
derived from a description of our feelings or emotional responses to certain relations
among human beings. The passage concludes the section entitled “Moral distinctions
not deriv’d from reason”2 and prepares the way for the section entitled “Moral
distinctions deriv’d from a moral sense.”3 Hume’s point is thus not that an “ought”
can never be derived from an “is,” but rather that an “ought” must be derived from
the right “is,” a description of our moral sentiments rather than a description of our
faculty of reason or of facts accessible to reason alone.
Hume’s argument depends, of course, on a specific conception of reason as our
faculty for discovering truth, understood to comprise agreement “either to the real
relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact.”4 The gist of his argument
is that moral principles must move us or “have an influence on the actions and
affections,” but that the discovery of agreement among ideas or agreement between
ideas and real existence cannot by itself move us to action; such discovery can at most
direct us in the effective performance of some action when we have an antecedent
motivation toward it based on a passion or desire of some sort.5 Hume supports his
general claim that reason by itself is inert by means of arguments that he adopts from
Francis Hutcheson. He relies on the conception of reason as merely discerning
relations among ideas in rejecting Samuel Clarke’s theory that morality is based on
the rational perception of certain “fitnesses”: the relation between parent and off-
spring is a general relation among ideas that might count as a Clarkian fitness, but the
fact that we abhor patricide among humans but have no such response toward a
sapling that “at last overtops and destroys the parent tree” shows that our moral
judgment is not based on reason alone but on our specific sentiment of abhorrence
toward the human instantiation of that general relation.6 He relies on the conception
of reason as discerning truth as the relation between idea and external object in
rejecting William Wollaston’s theory that morality is grounded in reason because it
lies in the assertion of truth and immorality in the inducement of belief in falsehood:
on this theory, Hume insists, “I shou’d have been guilty of no immorality” “if I had
us’d the precaution of shutting the windows, while I engaged myself in . . . liberties
with my neighbour’s wife,” because then my actions “wou’d have had no tendency
to produce any false conclusion.”7 From his arguments for the motivational
inertness of reason by itself, Hume concludes “that since vice and virtue are not
discoverable merely by reason, or by the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of
some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference

2 3
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1, p. 293. Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2, p. 302.
4 5
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.9, p. 295. Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.5–7, p. 294.
6
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.24, p. 300.
7
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.15n., p. 297. For the source of Hume’s arguments, see Francis Hutcheson,
Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (1728), sections II–III, in Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and
Conduct of the Passions and Affections, and Illustrations upon the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), pp. 155–73.
   

betwixt them. . . . Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judg’d,” and “An
action, or sentiment, or character is virtuous or vicious . . . because its view causes a
pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.”8 Pleasure and uneasiness are the sorts of
internal states that can move us to action, unlike mere perceptions of agreement
among ideas or of truths consisting in agreement between ideas and realities, so they
are the proper foundation of moral principles.
This is, then, the context in the midst of which Hume makes his famous statement
about “is” and “ought,” so his point is that moral principles cannot be derived from
the kinds of purely objective, factual relationships discerned by reason in his sense,
but are instead based upon our own sentiments of approbation and disapprobation
(to use the language that Hume borrowed from Hutcheson)9 toward human actions,
sentiments, and characters. Hume’s point is not that normative principles can never
be derived from descriptions, but rather that they must be derived from the descrip-
tion of the right things, namely our own sentiments, which are felt, rather than some
other relations, which are discerned by reason. Without using the terms “is” and
“ought,” he makes precisely the same point in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals—a text with which Kant was familiar—in a way that he liked so much that
he also repeated it in the essay “The Sceptic”—a text to which Kant clearly refers in
the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In the Enquiry, Hume again premises that
“Reason judges either of matter of fact or of relations,” argues that morality cannot
concern mere relations such as “contrariety” without taking into account our emo-
tional responses to specific realizations of them, and then that while it does concern
facts, it does not concern facts that can be discerned in objects without taking account
of our own feelings, but rather concerns our own feelings. He then writes:
This doctrine will become still more evident, if we compare moral beauty with natural, to
which, in many particulars, it bears so near a resemblance. It is on the proportion, relation, and
position of parts, that all natural beauty depends; but it would be absurd thence to infer, that
the perception of beauty, like that of truth in geometrical problems, consists wholly in the
perception of relations, and was performed entirely by the understanding or intellectual
faculties. . . . in all decisions of taste or external beauty, all the relations are before-hand obvious
to the eye; and we thence proceed to feel a sentiment of complacency or disgust, according to
the nature of the object, and the disposition of our organs.

Hume continues:
EUCLID has fully explained all the qualities of the circle; but has not, in any proposition, said a
word of its beauty. The reason is evident. The beauty is not a quality of the circle. It lies not in
any part of the line, whose parts are equally distant from a common center. It is only the effect,
which that figure produces upon the mind, whose peculiar fabric or structure renders it
susceptible of such sentiments.

8
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2.1–2, pp. 302–3.
9
See, for example, Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Appendix I, pp. 85–6, and Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the
Original of our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1725), Introduction, in Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the
Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004),
p. 85.
    

And then he draws the analogy for moral judgments:

Again; attend to CICERO, while he paints the crimes of a VERRES or CATILINE; you must
acknowledge that the moral turpitude results, in the same manner, from the contemplation of
the whole, when presented to a being, whose organs have such a particular structure and
formation.10
This passage locates beauty, whether natural or moral, not in the properties of objects
alone but in the response of human subjects to properties of objects. Its claim that this
response depends upon the “peculiar fabric or structure” of the mind, the “particular
structure and formation” of the “organs” of the subject, makes it clear that Hume has
no intention of grounding moral principles independently of facts about the human
being. On the contrary, his argument is that the obligation to explain how moral theory
gets from “is” to “ought” is fully discharged by including in moral theory the accurate
description of the sentiments or emotional responses of the human being to its
perception of various forms of conduct and character. Hume’s distinction between
“is” and “ought” is thus not a distinction between the descriptive and the normative,
but rather a distinction between the objective and the subjective in a certain sense:
moral principles are fully explained by an accurate description of the emotions of the
human subject rather than by a description of external objects alone.
So much for Hume’s intentions: he saw no problem in grounding what we think of
as normative principles in what we think of as descriptions of facts as long as those
are the right facts. Other empiricists shared Hume’s general strategy of grounding
moral principles in an accurate description of human nature, but felt under some
more obligation to show how such a description could yield normative results. After
all, it could be objected that even though certain sentiments of approbation and
disapprobation are inherent in human beings, they might be valueless or even
dysfunctional, and thus acting upon them could be morally neutral or even imper-
missible rather than obligatory. In other words, it might be felt that an argument is
needed to show that the natural is also normative.

3. Kames and Smith

One obvious strategy for preventing any gap from opening up between the natural
and the normative, that is, between the description of natural human sentiments and
normative moral principles, was to explain human nature itself as well adapted to
self-evidently valuable ends, which would in turn make the value of acting in
accordance with human nature self-evident. Versions of this strategy can be found
in Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751, the same
year as Hume’s second Enquiry) and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

10
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Appendix I, pp. 87–8. Hume repeats the passage
about Euclid in “The Sceptic,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. edn
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 165. Kant is referring to “The Sceptic” when he writes that “although
critics, as Hume says, can reason more plausibly than cooks, they still suffer the same fate as them,” in
Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), }34, 5:285, p. 166.
   

Kames argued against Hutcheson that we must have a sense of justice as well as
benevolence, and also took himself to be differing from Hume in arguing that we
have a natural sense of justice rather than in allowing justice to be an artificial virtue,
but he agreed with both of his predecessors that in general our judgments of the
“morality of actions” are based “on a certain quality of actions, that procures
approbation and love to the agent” from the observer of such actions.11 He then
gave a teleological explanation of the presence of the sentiments of justice and
benevolence in human beings and of the superiority of the former over the latter:
And here we must pause a moment, to indulge some degree of admiration upon this part of the
human system. Man is evidently intended to live in society; and because there can be no society
among creatures who prey upon one another, it was necessary, in the first place, to provide
against mutual injuries. Further, man is the weakest of all creatures separately, and the very
strongest in society; therefore mutual assistance is the chief end of society; and to this end it
was necessary that there should be mutual trust and reliance upon engagements . . . Now,
nothing can be more finely adjusted than the human heart to answer these purposes.12
The human feelings of approbation and disapprobation are obviously not dysfunc-
tional and disvaluable, but on the contrary have evidently been arranged so as to
promote the realization of the benefits of society for human beings. To be sure,
Kames continues, “Approbation or disapprobation merely, is not sufficient to subject
our conduct to the authority of a law,” and this might make it seem as if he
recognizes a fundamental divide between the descriptive and the normative. But
this is not so; rather, what he goes on to argue is that to give our feelings of
approbation and disapprobation the stronger authority of law, nature has instituted
or led us to institute further measures: nature leads us to connect external sanctions
to the violations of our sentiments of justice so we do not have to rely on the strength
of those sentiments alone for the enforcement of the principles of justice, and further
“Sympathy is a principle implanted in the breast of every man” that makes it
impossible for us to “hurt another without suffering for it, which is an additional
punishment,” an internal rather than external sanction to increase the authority of
our moral sentiments. The point in all of this is that the value of the moral sentiments
is fully explained by their role in the promotion of society and their authority is fully
grounded in natural dispositions of mankind as well. A full account of the moral
force of our sentiments is achieved by displaying their natural contribution to the
achievement of self-evidently valuable ends.
Adam Smith follows a similar strategy of explaining the motivational force of
sentiments by displaying their natural origin and their natural role in maintaining
and promoting society, which is itself self-evidently valuable. The foundational idea
of the Theory of Moral Sentiments is that we initially form our moral sentiments
through sympathy to the responses of a second person to the actions of a third, when
we ourselves are not parties to either side, or are impartial spectators, and that we
then learn to apply the stance of the impartial spectator to ourselves and thus to judge

11
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, ed. Mary
Catherine Moran (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Essay II, ch. III, p. 31.
12
Kames, Essays, Essay II, ch. III, p. 36.
    

how others would feel about our conduct if they knew as much about our motives
and intentions as we ourselves do. The correspondence among our sentiments that
arises when we each correct our own feelings from the standpoint of the impartial
spectator of our own motivations “is sufficient for the harmony of society,” and “In
order to produce this concord, as nature teaches the spectators to assume the
circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this last in some
measure to assume those of the spectators.”13 Smith’s idea is that our natural initial
tendencies to feeling are also naturally refined to become reliable means for the
promotion and preservation of social concord, the value of which is self-evident.
Smith extends this approach to the feelings of resentment at wrongs done to
ourselves and to others, which we feel through the operation of sympathy, and
argues that
Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only. It is the
safeguard of justice and the security of innocence. It prompts us to beat off the mischief which
is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; that the offender may
be made to repent of his injustice, and that others, through fear of the like punishment, may be
terrified from being guilty of the like offence.14

Our moral sense that certain actions deserve to be punished and our ensuing
disposition to punish them are explained as a mechanism of nature for “the safeguard
of justice and the security of innocence.” This account of the function of our feelings
is then embedded in a teleological view of nature: “It is thus that man, who can
subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was
made.”15 But his teleology works to explain the motivational force of human senti-
ments rather than of human reason:
In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the nicest artifice to the ends
which they are intended to produce; and in the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire
how every thing is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support of the
individual, and the propagation of the species. . . . [But] When by natural principles we are led
to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are
very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by
which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is
the wisdom of God.16
Smith’s point is that moral principles and practices that could appear to be the
product of human reasoning are in fact the product of nature working through our
sentiments. He thus accepts an essentially Humean account of the origin of moral
principles in sentiment rather than reason while situating our sentiments themselves
in a teleological framework that will forestall any question about the normative force
of the merely natural. And while giving such an explanation of the motivational force

13
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), Part I, section I, ch. IV, p. 27.
14
Smith, Moral Sentiments, Part II, section II, ch. I, p. 92.
15
Smith, Moral Sentiments, Part II, section II, ch. III, p. 102.
16
Smith, Moral Sentiments, Part II, section II, ch. III, p. 102.
   

of our sentiments, he expressly claims merely to be describing facts about human

nature: “the present inquiry is not concerning a matter of right, if I may say so, but
concerning a matter of fact. We are not at present examining upon what principles a
perfect being would approve of the punishment of bad actions; but upon what
principles so weak and imperfect a creature as man actually and in fact approves
of it.”17 Evidently he does not feel that explaining the function of moral sentiments
for the preservation and promotion of society even while assuming that they have
been designed for that end by a wise creator undermines the descriptive character of
his explanation.
In his Elements of Criticism, published three years after Smith’s Theory of Moral
Sentiments, Kames adds a further element to a naturalistic account of our norms. In
his defense of the existence of a standard of taste in the final chapter of this large
work, Kames claims that it is natural for us to be pleased with all those members of
any species that conform to their “common nature” and to be displeased with those
that depart from it, whether that species is the human species or any other and
whether that common nature concerns its moral sentiments and character or any
other aspect of its appearance. The “common nature” is just that pattern to which the
majority of the species happen to conform, and is not an intrinsically normative
conception, but is nevertheless naturally “conceived” by us “to be a model or
standard for each individual that belongs to the kind.” We just like it when beings
conform to the common nature of their species and dislike it when they do not.
This conviction of a common nature or standard and of its perfection, accounts clearly for that
remarkable conception we have, of a right and a wrong sense or taste in morals. It accounts not
less clearly for the conception we have of a right and a wrong sense or taste in the fine arts.
A man who, avoiding objects generally agreeable, is condemned as a monster; we disapprove
his taste as bad or wrong, because we have a clear conception that he deviates from the
common standard. . . . as the conviction of a common standard is universal and a branch of our
nature, we intuitively conceive a taste to be right or good if conformable to the common
standard, and wrong or bad if disconformable.18
Kames explains what we might understand as a norm that people ought to conform
to a certain standard in their conduct or in their aesthetic judgments as an entirely
natural preference. No doubt he would have been comfortable giving a teleological
explanation of the value of this preference; indeed, a page later he says that “Uni-
formity of taste and sentiment resulting from our conviction of a common standard
leads to two important final causes,” the first of which is that “Unhappy it would be
for us did not uniformity prevail in morals.”19 He does not pursue this point further,
“because it does not properly belong to the present undertaking,” but he also clearly
believes that the philosopher’s theoretical explanation of this tendency is not neces-
sary to justify its motivational force for us. Like Smith, Kames holds that the
motivational force of our moral sentiments can be displayed by a full description

17
Smith, Moral Sentiments, Part II, section I, ch. V, p. 90n.
18
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6th edn, ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 2005), ch. XXV, vol. 2, pp. 721–2.
19
Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. 2, pp. 723–4.
    

of our nature and does not need any further justification. When we have the right and
full explanation of what is, there is not a problem in explaining why we feel an ought
or obligation.

4. Kant
Now I want to show that although Kant quickly came to reject the British theory that
moral principles are grounded in sentiments rather than reason, he did not so quickly
reject the strategy of attempting to ground moral principles in an adequate descrip-
tion of human nature in favor of some sort of non-descriptive but normative
derivation of moral principles. On the contrary, the central argument for the validity
of the moral principle in Kant’s Groundwork is based on a description of human
nature, and only subsequently and gradually did Kant come to question such a
strategy for moral philosophy.
Kant did not begin thinking about moral philosophy at any great distance from the
British naturalists at all. His first notable remarks about moral philosophy come in
the 1764 prize essay, “The Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of
Natural Theology and Morality.” This essay is devoted primarily to distinguishing
the method of philosophy from that of mathematics, and argues that philosophy
must precede by the analysis of concepts to definitions rather than constructing
objects from definitions. Kant certainly does not mean to equate philosophical
analysis with empirical observation, but neither does he yet possess his mature
conception of philosophy as synthetic a priori cognition nor does he offer a clear
account of the concepts that philosophy analyzes: he simply says that “in metaphys-
ics, the place of . . . definitions [in mathematics] is taken by a number of indemon-
strable propositions that provide the primary data” (PNTM, Third Reflection,
}2, 2:296). When Kant turns to the fundamental principles of morality, he heads
his discussion by saying that “in their present state” they “are not capable of all the
certainty necessary to produce conviction” (PNTM, Fourth Reflection, }2, 2:298). His
reason for this claim is that although it is easy to state formal first principles of
morality, such as the “rule: perform the most perfect action in your power,” such
formal first principles are incomplete without “material first principles” that would
tell you what specific actions available to you are actually more or less perfect (2:299).
He holds that the question of material first principles has generally been neglected by
his predecessors, and that it is “only recently . . . that people have come to realize
that . . . the faculty of experiencing the good is feeling.” He thus suggests that the
material first principles of morality will be suggested by our feelings, and that for that
reason judgments of the form “ ‘This is good’ will be completely indemonstrable.”
Such judgments “will be an immediate effect of the consciousness of the feeling of
pleasure combined with the representation of the object” (2:299). The indispensable
material first principles of morality will therefore be indemonstrable. Kant attributes
this approach, which did not earn him the favor of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, to
“Hutcheson and others” (2:300), so at this stage of his career he seems to have no
qualms about grounding moral principles in a description of our feelings, even
though he already recognizes “the actions which are prescribed by morality . . . cannot
be called obligations as long as they are not subordinated to an end which is
   

necessary in itself ” (2:298). He thus does not draw a rigid distinction between the
descriptive and the normative or deny that you can get an “ought” from an “is.”
Six years later, in the inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the
Sensible and the Intelligible World, Kant remarks that “Moral philosophy, . . . insofar
as it furnishes the first principles of judgment, is only cognized by the pure under-
standing and itself belongs to pure philosophy” (ID, }9, 2:396), so he clearly rejects
the Hutchesonian, empirical foundation for morality with which he had previously
flirted. But he says nothing more about morality than this, so we cannot determine
anything about his conception of a pure philosophical account of moral principles
other than that it would be non-empirical. Moreover, it is far from clear that
Kant was even unequivocally committed to a purely rationalist rather than empiricist
foundation for moral principles by 1770. As I have argued elsewhere, not only in the
1760s but also well into the 1770s Kant explored a strategy which appears to start off
from the empirical fact that human beings abhor domination of their own freedom of
choice by either the choices of others or their own impulses, and then use their reason
to figure out a principle by means of which such domination can be avoided, the
principle, namely, that each should act on particular inclinations only to the extent
that so doing is consistent with their own freedom to act on other inclinations and
with the freedom of others to act on their own. This is an empirical derivation of at
least an analogue of the moral law from what is supposed to be a fact about our most
fundamental preference combined with our capacity to reason about how best to
satisfy this fundamental preference.20 The first work in which Kant attempts to give
an extended account of moral principles as grounded solely in “pure understanding,”
now transformed into pure reason, is the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
fifteen years later. What I now want to suggest is that although Kant’s conception of
the method of moral philosophy in this work is decidedly non-empiricist, it is in fact
still descriptive: Kant’s strategy in this work is to ground the validity of the categorical
imperative for us human beings in a proper description of our rational nature.
Throughout this work Kant makes a clear distinction between contingent maxims
of action grounded in mere inclinations and a genuinely necessary moral principle,
but he does not distinguish between a descriptive and a normative strategy for the
derivation of the latter.
The nature of Kant’s strategy in the Groundwork is evident in its third section.
In the preceding two sections, Kant had derived the content of the categorical
imperative by analysis, in the first section by analysis of the common-sense concep-
tions of good will and duty, and in the second section by analysis of the philosophical
concept of a categorical imperative itself. But at the end of the second section he had
emphasized that he had not yet proven “That morality is no phantom,” thus that “the
categorical imperative, and with it the autonomy of the will, is true and absolutely

20
I have discussed this strategy found in Kant’s notes on moral philosophy and anthropology in a
number of places, including “Kant on the Theory and Practice of Autonomy,” in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred
D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds, Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 70–98,
reprinted in my Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 115–45, and
Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum Books, 2007),
ch. 2. In the present volume, see also Chapters 3 and 4.
    

necessary as an a priori principle,” in other words, that the results of this analysis
actually apply to us and obligate us to adhere to the categorical imperative. To prove
this, Kant says, “requires a possible synthetic use of pure practical reason,” which in
turn requires a “critique of this rational faculty itself,” which Kant then promises
to deliver, “sufficiently for our purposes,” in the third and final section of the work
(G, 4:445). Kant then begins the third section by arguing that a genuinely free will can
only be a will under a moral law, but also that we cannot prove that we are subject to
the moral law simply by assuming that we are free, because in this there would be a
“kind of circle,” namely that “We take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes
in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends” but “afterwards
think ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves
freedom of the will.” In order to escape from this “kind of circle,” Kant then argues,
“we have to inquire whether we do not take a different standpoint when by means of
freedom we think ourselves as causes efficient a priori than when we represent
ourselves in terms of our actions as effects that we see before our eyes” (G, 4:450).
He then delivers a metaphysical argument that we must take that different standpoint
and that when we do we will realize that the moral law actually describes our inmost
nature. He argues as follows. First, reflection upon sense-perception is supposed to
persuade, although for reasons Kant does not trouble to explain, even “the common-
est understanding” of the difference between the appearance of things “as they affect
us” and “what they may be in themselves.” Second, it follows from this that “Even as
to himself, the human being cannot claim to cognize what he is in himself through
the cognizance that he has by inner sensation”: thus, any human being must realize
that beyond the sensible “constitution of his own subject, made up of nothing but
appearances, he must assume something else lying at their basis, namely his I as it
may be constituted in itself.” Now, it might seem as if this must condemn us to utter
ignorance about the real nature of our selves, but that is not the conclusion that
Kant draws. Instead, he observes that “a human being really finds in himself a
capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself
insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason.” Kant then infers that reason
is what distinguishes our self as it is in itself from the self as it appears, or that
reason is our real nature. From this he then infers that the moral law is the law of our
real nature:
Because of this a rational being must regard himself as intelligence (hence not from the side
of his lower powers) as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of understand-
ing; hence he has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and cognize laws for the
use of his powers and consequently for all his actions; first, insofar as he belongs to the world
of sense, under laws of nature (heteronomy); second, as belonging to the intelligible world,
under laws which, being independent of nature, are not empirical but are grounded merely
in reason.

The latter laws are nothing but the moral law, so “As a rational being, and thus as
a being belonging to the intelligible world, the human being can never think of
the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom,” with which
“the concept of autonomy is now inseparably combined,” and with that in turn “the
universal principle of morality” (G, 4:451–2).
   

There are many problems with this argument, to which I will return, chiefly in
Part II of this volume.21 The only point I want to make about it now is that it turns on
a description of our noumenal self rather than on any attempt to justify the uncon-
ditional and overriding obligatoriness of the categorical imperative from normative
considerations of any kind. The failure of all previous moral philosophies is thus not
that they have provided descriptions of the source of our moral judgments when they
should have provided some sort of normative justification of them, but rather that
their descriptions were at the wrong level: they described the inclinations of our
phenomenal selves rather than the real nature of our noumenal selves. Kant seems to
think that the uniqueness of reason allows him to describe the real nature of our
noumenal selves, and then that since the moral law is the only possible law available
for characterizing the noumenal self, no further argument of any sort is necessary to
establish that we ought to adhere to the moral law. In this argument, in other words,
Kant is quite content to derive the moral law to which we ought to adhere from a
metaphysical account of what we are.
In the Critique of Practical Reason, published just three years after the Groundwork,
Kant rejected the Groundwork’s attempt to prove the binding force of the moral law
from a claim that our noumenal selves are essentially rational, but he did not unequivo-
cally surrender the assumption that the moral law actually does describe our real,
noumenal selves. In the second Critique, Kant famously says that “the moral law is
given, as it were, as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is
apodictically certain . . . Hence the objective reality of the moral law cannot be proved by
any deduction,” but that “something different and quite paradoxical takes the place of
this vainly sought deduction of the moral principle, namely that the moral principle
conversely itself serves as the principle of the deduction of . . . the faculty of freedom”
(CPracR, 5:47). Here Kant suggests that the danger of being trapped in a circle between
the assumption of our freedom and the assumption of the validity of the moral law is
not to be averted by proving that we are really rational, therefore really free, and
therefore really governed by the moral law, but is instead to be averted by inferring
that we are free from the indemonstrable but indubitable validity of the moral law. The
basis of this inference is supposed to be the fact that the moral law presents itself to us
not as a description of our real self or anything else, but as an absolute obligation, and
that by the principle that “ought implies can” we are supposed to be able to infer from
the fact that we ought to live up to this principle that we must be free to do so. So the
argument of the second Critique is supposed to derive an “is”—that we are free to live up
to the demands of the moral law—from an “ought,” or to derive a description of our
capacities from an irreducibly normative principle, rather than the other way around.
However, a close look at Kant’s initial characterization of the “fact of reason”
doctrine suggests that Kant might still not be drawing as rigid a distinction between
descriptive and normative statements as we might think. When Kant first states that
“freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other” but denies
that we can prove the validity of the moral law by starting from the fact of our
freedom because “we can neither be immediately conscious of this . . . nor can we

21
See also my Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s Guide, ch. 6.
    

conclude to it from experience,” he then argues that “we become immediately

conscious” of the moral law “as soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves”
and thereby see that “reason presents it as a determining ground not to be out-
weighed by any sensible condition.” He then continues that “by attending to the
necessity with which reason prescribes” “pure practical laws” and “the setting aside of
all empirical conditions” we become conscious that we have a “pure will.” He appeals
to the principle that someone can judge “that he can do something because he is
aware that he ought to do it” only when he appeals to an example in order to show
that “experience also confirms this order of concepts in us” (CPracR, 5:29–30). Kant’s
primary argument is thus not that we infer that we are free from our recognition of
the obligatoriness of the moral law but rather that the necessity of the moral law
entails its purity and thereby reveals that we have a pure will as well as a pure reason,
that is, a will that is not determined by mere phenomena any more than pure reason
is. This argument seems to be written entirely in the indicative or factual mode: any
attempt to think about whether we can act upon a particular maxim directly reveals
to us that we already recognize the necessity of the moral law, thus that we may act
only on universalizable maxims (CPracR, 5:27), and that necessity by itself directly
reveals the purity of our real will. Kant’s argument thus seems to turn on a descrip-
tion of our moral reasoning and the metaphysical premise that the necessity of a
proposition implies the purity of the faculties connected with it rather than on any
obviously normative form of reasoning.
I do not mean by this to deny that Kant may be on his way to formulating the clear
distinction between is and ought, between the descriptive and the normative, that has
traditionally but erroneously been thought to have been made by Hume and accepted
by Kant from the outset. In the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
published five more years after the second Critique, Kant certainly relies throughout
on the principle that “ought implies can” in order to infer from our awareness of our
obligation under the moral law to the radical freedom on the basis of which both evil
as well as good can properly be imputed to us. The argument of the Religion is based
on the claim that, even in spite of the apparently original choice of evil by all human
beings, “the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds
unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of it” (RBMR, 6:45; see
also 6:41, 47, 50, 50n., 62, and 66). Here Kant clearly starts with an “ought,” that is,
with a normative principle that is not presented as needing any explanation or
derivation at all, and derives a “can” from it, that is, a description of our ineliminable
capacity to convert to good even if we have already chosen evil. At this point, Kant
clearly feels no need to give any account of our awareness of our obligation under the
moral law at all. Of course, that could be due just to the fact that he thinks he has
already more than adequately dealt with that issue, and is now engaged solely in the
task of explicating the religious implications of his moral philosophy, in reinterpret-
ing or undermining (as you please) the central dogmata of Christianity in light of his
own philosophy.22 If that is so, but if Kant’s previous works have left it unclear

22
Opinion has recently become divided on this issue, with a school of “New Kantians” interpreting
Kant’s Religion as a reforming but still more orthodox Christian work than has traditionally been held. For
some work in this vein, see Chris L. Firestone and Stephen R. Palmquist, eds, Kant and the New Philosophy
   

whether he is truly committed to an absolute distinction between the descriptive and

the normative, thus to the impossibility of deriving an “is” from an “ought,” then the
Religion will also leave that unclear.

5. Conclusion
I have argued that Hume and Kant were not so clearly committed to the impossibility
of deriving an “ought” from an “is” as they have commonly been taken to be, and
appealed to some aspects of the views of Lord Kames and Adam Smith to explain
why at least traditional empiricists might not have felt that a descriptivist meta-
ethics is self-evidently absurd. I now want to conclude by very briefly suggesting that
the impossibility of deriving “ought” from “is” may not be as well entrenched in
contemporary meta-ethics as might be supposed, in fact that leading strategies in
meta-ethics may concede, precisely as Hume and Kant did, that moral principles may
be grounded in the right description of the human condition. On the one hand,
I have in mind evolutionary strategies for explaining moral principles, which argue
by appeal to human history and the behavior of other higher primates that principles
of social cooperation arise because of the selective advantage conferred on popula-
tions in which they emerge.23 Such work is the heir to the empirical accounts of the
emergence of the artificial virtue or sense of justice in conditions in which cooper-
ation is vital for the preservation and development of society that we find in Hume,
Kames, and Smith, with the adjustment of our dispositions to the needs created by
our environment done by the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation combined
with natural selection rather than a providential nature or benevolent author thereof.
On the other hand, I have in mind the project of deriving one or several fundamental
principles of morality from the first-person standpoint of conceiving of oneself as a
rational agent at all, that is, as an agent who sees himself as having reasons for his
actions,24 or from the conditions of the possibility of giving reasons for one’s actions
to another, in the “second-person standpoint.”25 In developing the first of these
approaches, Christine Korsgaard writes that “If we do not treat our humanity as a
normative identity, none of our other identities can be normative, and then we can
have no reasons to act at all,”26 that is, if we do not see ourselves as under a general

of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs, In
Defense of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), and Stephen R. Palmquist,
Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Chichester: Wiley
Blackwell, 2016). For a more orthodox interpretation of Religion as advocating practical faith but not
theoretical belief in Christian dogmata, see Lawrence R. Pasternack, Kant on Religion within the Bound-
aries of Mere Reason (London: Routledge, 2014).
23
For a tiny sample of such work, see Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and
Dynamics of Social Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
24
See Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), ch. 3.
25
See T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),
and Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
26
Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, p. 129.
    

obligation to act only for good reasons, then we will not be able to see our particular
preferences and projects as reasons why we should act in certain ways. She thus
seems to suggest that both moral reasoning and other forms of reasoning about
actions must be grounded in an irreducibly normative principle that cannot be
derived from any description of human nature or the circumstances of human life.
But she precedes that statement with the claim that “To act morally is to act a certain
way simply because you are human . . . Among the many things that you are, you are
a member of the party of humanity, or a Citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. And this
identity like any other carries certain obligations.” Her position thus seems to be that
our fundamental norms do derive directly from fundamental facts about us, thus that
our obligations can be explained by a proper description of our identity. Likewise, it
seems to me that the project of deriving certain norms as necessary conditions of the
second-person standpoint derives its force from the assumption of the fact that we do
find ourselves in interpersonal relationships and do want to maintain such relation-
ships and enjoy their manifest benefits even in the face of their costs. Neither of these
contemporary meta-ethical strategies would conceive of itself as empirical in the way
that contemporary evolutionary ethics does—Korsgaard certainly does not take our
membership in the Kingdom of Ends as an empirically discoverable and explicable
fact about us—but both share with the latter approach to ethics the assumption that
the normative force of moral principles can be derived from certain fundamental
facts about human nature and the human condition. If this is right, then the central
question to consider for further progress in moral theory is not whether we should
rigidly separate normative from descriptive approaches, but rather whether within
the latter we should prefer an empirical method that is heir to the method of Hume,
Kames, and Smith, or whether we can employ an a priori method that is heir to the
rationalist descriptivism of Kant’s central period.
 3
Freedom as the Foundation
of Morality
Kant’s Early Efforts

1. Finding a Foundation for the Categorical Imperative

By the fall of 1762, when he wrote the Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the
Principles of Natural Theology and Morality that would be published in 1764 as the
Berlin Academy of Sciences’ second-prize winner in their competition on the question
of whether there is the same potential for certainty in metaphysics as in mathematics,
Kant had formulated the concept of a categorical imperative, although he had not yet
given it that name, arrived at his mature formulation of its content, or above all come
to a clear view about its foundation. In the final section of this essay, Kant drew a
distinction between two meanings of “ought”: although
Every ought expresses a necessity of the action . . . either I ought to do something (as a means) if
I want something else (as an end), or I ought immediately to do something else (as an end) and
make it actual. The former may be called the necessity of the means (necessitas problematica),
and the latter the necessity of the ends (necessitas legalis). The first kind of necessity does not
indicate any obligation at all. It merely specifies a prescription as the solution to the problem
concerning the means I must employ if I am to attain a certain end. . . . the principle chosen
must, if it is to be a rule and ground of obligation, command the action as being immediately
necessary and not conditional upon some end. (PNTM, Fourth Reflection, }2, 2:298)
This distinction between problematic and legal necessity is obviously the forerunner
of Kant’s subsequent distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives.1
However, at this stage of his development Kant does not yet have either his subsequent
formulation of the categorical imperative2 or any clear account of the foundation for

1
Although Kant did not yet divide the class of hypothetical imperatives into the two subclasses of
problematic imperatives or imperatives of skill, recommending the means to entirely arbitrary particular
ends, and assertoric imperatives or imperatives of prudence, counseling the means to the naturally
necessary end of happiness (for these distinctions, see G, Section II, 4:414–19). As we will see in this
chapter, Kant introduced this distinction by 1764–5.
2
Or, more precisely, any of the numerous formulations of the categorical imperative deployed in the
Groundwork. There is of course a large literature on the variety of formulations of the categorical
imperative. For the classical work on the subject, see H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in
Kant’s Moral Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1947); for my approach to the issue and references to other
literature, see “The Possibility of the Categorical Imperative,” Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 353–85,
reprinted in my Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
       

such an imperative, that is, an account of its necessity or that of the necessary end it
enjoins upon us. Here Kant seems willing to allow that the “formal content” of the
categorical imperative is the same as what Wolff and Baumgarten had offered,
namely the conjunction of the two imperatives “perform the most perfect action in
your power” and “abstain from doing that which will hinder the realisation of the
greatest possible perfection,” but that the “material content” of the categorical
imperative, namely the necessary end that it enjoins upon us, may actually be
multiple, consisting of a variety of immediately good ends, and that these ends are
in turn enjoined upon us by the “many simple feelings of the good to be found in us”
into which “the compound and confused concept of the good,” which presents the
good and thus the immediately necessary end of our actions as if it were singular, can
be analyzed (PNTM, 2:299). Both the multiplicity of the immediately good ends that
are needed to furnish content for the categorical imperative formally expressed by the
Wolffian–Baumgartian conjunction and the origin of these goods in simple feelings
make it clear that even though Kant had formulated the idea of a categorical
imperative by 1762 he had not yet arrived at much of the rest of his mature moral
philosophy.
Within months of the actual publication of the Inquiry in 1764, however, Kant had
both arrived at something approximating his most common mature formulation of
the categorical imperative and identified the necessary end enjoined upon us by this
imperative. Our record of this progress is found primarily in the notes that Kant
wrote in his own interleaved copy of his 1764 book the Observations on the Feeling of
the Beautiful and Sublime, presumably shortly after the publication of the Observa-
tions, thus in 1764 or 1765.3 In the Observations, Kant had already qualified the
suggestion of the Inquiry that morality can be founded in a multiplicity of simple
feelings by arguing that the dispositions toward action that might arise from a variety
of simple feelings “or special grounds of sympathy and complaisance” need to be

pp. 172–206, and “The Form and Matter of the Categorical Imperative,” in Volker Gerhardt et al., eds, Kant
und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2001), vol. 1, pp. 131–50, reprinted in my Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2005), pp. 146–68.
3
These notes are sometimes called the Bemerkungen zur Beobachtungen über das Gefül des Schönen und
Erhabenen (Notes on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime) as if they constituted a
unitary text comprising a commentary on the Observations. But we have no idea for what purpose or in
what order Kant wrote them, and they should not be referred to as if they constituted a single text and
commentary on the book in which they were written. So I will refer to them as Kant’s notes in the
Observations, not his Notes on the Observations. They were first published in Gustav Hartenstein’s edition
of Immanuel Kants Sämmtliche Werke, 9 vols (Leipzig, 1836–9), vol. 8, pp. 609–40. They were subsequently
printed in the Akademie edition in the wartime vol. 20 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1942), ed. Gerhard
Lehmann, at pp. 1–192. They have most recently been edited by Marie Rischmüller, correctly titled,
in Bemerkungen in den “Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen,” Kant-Forschungen,
vol. 3 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1991); this edition is the basis for the translations used here. These
notes have been used for material in discussions of the evolution of Kant’s ethics since Paul Menzer, “Der
Entwicklungsgang der Kantischen Ethik bis zum Erscheinung der Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,”
Kant-Studien 1 (1897), 2 (1898), and 3 (1899), and continuing in Paul Arthur Schilpp, Kant’s Pre-Critical
Ethics (1938), 2nd edn (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1960), at pp. 63–74, who refers to
them as a “Fragment,” and Josef Schmucker, Die Ursprünge der Ethik Kants (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag
Anton Hain, 1961), at pp. 172–255.
      

governed by “principles,” but principles that ultimately arise from the single, dis-
tinctive “feeling of the beauty and the dignity of human nature” (OBS, section II,
2:217). While Kant elaborates upon a variety of issues from the Observations in his
notes, especially upon the relations between men and women and the natural history
of the emergence of morality from those relations (a lifelong interest for Kant in spite
of his own lifelong bachelorhood),4 a number of the notes offer formulations of the
fundamental principle of morality as well as suggestions towards a foundation for
this principle that not only go beyond the prize essay composed in 1762 but also
beyond the Observations itself, and thus represent progress in Kant’s thought about
the foundations of morality in the months between the composition of the prize essay
and these notes and even in the months between the composition of the Observations
and that of these notes. Josef Schmucker emphasizes that the Observations considers
“the moral character of human beings primarily from an aesthetic point of view,”5
and thus that it cannot be inferred that Kant’s brief discussion of moral principles in
the Observations represents the whole of his thought about this issue at the time he
wrote this work.6 Nevertheless, the Observations offers no hint either that the
categorical imperative can be reduced to a single formulation or that it has an
essential connection to freedom, both of which Kant will suggest and explore in his
notes, and I am inclined to believe that the notes represent significant progress in
Kant’s thought about morality. The present chapter will consider Kant’s notes in the
Observations, along with several contemporaneous notes in Kant’s copy of Baum-
garten’s Introduction to Practical Philosophy, the textbook for Kant’s lectures on
ethics, as the evidence of Kant’s earliest attempts both to formulate the categorical
imperative and to ground it in the absolute value of human freedom. I shall argue
that Kant arrived at his primary formulation of the categorical imperative in these
notes and clearly manifested his intention to argue that adherence to the categorical
imperative is the necessary means for the realization of human freedom, but that he
did not succeed in providing an explicit and unequivocal account of how the
categorical imperative’s requirement of the universalizability of maxims (in Kant’s
later terminology) is connected to freedom. But this does not diminish the import-
ance of these notes; on the contrary, some of the issues that were unresolved in these
notes may have remained unresolved in Kant’s later work, and thus what is obscure
as well as what is clear in the notes may be important for the interpretation of Kant’s
mature work in moral philosophy.

4
Thus Kant returns to this issue twenty years later in the 1786 essay on the “Conjectural Beginnings of
Human History.” Susan Shell has offered an interesting interpretation of a single extended argument that
she finds in the notes that human morality emerges out of the conditions necessary to maintain coherent
sexual relations between men and women; Susan Meld Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), ch. 2, pp. 39–84. In Kant’s mature moral theory, the
determination of the will by the a priori moral law, which is supposed to be an atemporal act at the
noumenal level, is nevertheless assumed to express itself in the progressive maturation of human individ-
uals as well as in the temporal development of the human species at the phenomenal level; we can regard
the story that Shell finds in the notes as an early version of Kant’s phenomenal and temporal account of the
development of morality, while what I shall be looking for in the notes is the emergence of his conception
of the a priori principle of morality and its foundation.
5 6
Schmucker, Ursprünge, p. 9. Schmucker, Ursprünge, p. 105.
       

2. Formulating the Categorical Imperative

As noted, the idea of a categorical imperative was already present in the prize essay.
But Kant first introduces (part of ) the name for this concept in the notes in the
Observations. The term occurs first7 in this passage:
The objective goodness of a free action or, what is the same, its objective necessity, is either
conditional or categorical; the former is the goodness of an action as a means, the latter as an
end; the former is therefore mediate, the latter immediate; the former contains problematic
practical necessity, the latter [breaks off ]
A conditionally good free action is therefore not categorically necessary, e.g., my generosity is
useful to another who is in need, therefore one must be generous. By no means. But if one wants
to be useful to someone else, then one must be generous. (NF, }39, p. 18; Ri., }120, pp. 111–12)8

The first of these paragraphs introduces the term “categorical” (categorica, since the
passage is in Latin) to replace the term “legal” (legalis) used in the prize essay. The
second tries to illustrate the distinction made in the first, but is actually confused,
perhaps because Kant has not yet replaced his earlier term “conditional” with
“hypothetical,” and ends up illustrating his later distinction between imperfect and
perfect duties rather than the distinction between hypothetical and categorical
imperatives that he is here introducing: generosity is a conditional duty, since
particular acts of generosity may well be optional but to adopt the end or general
policy of being generous is not morally optional, but morally mandatory or categor-
ical. Thus the duty to adopt the policy of being generous is genuinely categorical,
although the necessity of exercising that policy in any particular circumstances is
conditional upon several factors, so the duty of generosity is an imperfect rather than
perfect duty.9
Kant’s next use of his new term “categorical” does not clearly make this mistake,
and also introduces the subdivision within what will become the bifold class of
hypothetical imperatives in Kant’s mature theory. Kant writes:
The objective necessity (goodness) of actions is either conditional (under the condition of some
desired good) or categorical. The former is problematic, and, if the drives that are considered to
be the necessary conditions of the action are regarded not only as possible but as actual, then it

7
That is to say, this is the first occurrence of the term in the sequence of Kant’s notes. But we have no
basis on which to infer that Kant wrote the notes in the order in which they appear.
8
The first number indicates that assigned to this passage in the selection included in Kant, Notes and
Fragments (NF), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), followed by the page number for the passage in that volume. Then
comes the number assigned to the passage by Rischmüller (Ri.) followed by the page number(s) for the
passage in her edition.
9
For Kant’s later distinction between imperfect and perfect duties, see especially Metaphysics of Morals,
Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, sections VI–VII, 6:388–91, and numerous passages in the lectures on the
metaphysics of morals transcribed by Johann Friedrich Vigilantius in the winter semester 1793–4,
beginning with 27:527, in Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter
Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 288–9. Of course there is a sense in which the
necessity of the exercise of any duty is conditional upon circumstances, since even perfect duties such as
those to refrain from suicide or false promising are relevant only in certain circumstances, those in which
committing suicide or making a false promise present themselves as relevant options.
      

is the necessity of prudence. In order to know them, it will be necessary to diagnose all of the
desires and instincts of human nature, so that a computation can be performed of what is best
for the inclination of the subject, and this not only in its present but also in its future state. The
categorical necessity of an action does not require so much effort, but merely the application of
the matter to the moral feeling.
In certain situations of life a lie is apparently necessary and hence in accordance with the
rule of prudence lying seems the thing to do, but for this there is required great acuity and
sagacity concerning the consequences. But if one considers things morally, then on the ground
of moral simplicity it will immediately be known what is to be done. (NF, }42, p. 19; Ri., }125,
pp. 115–16)

Here Kant distinguishes three kinds of necessity for actions: the problematic neces-
sity of an action as a means to any particular end considered merely as possible,
without regard to the longer-range concerns of either prudence or morality; the
necessity of an action as a prudent means to one’s “future state” of long-term
happiness;10 and unconditional moral necessity. With the doctrines of Stoic and
Epicurean ethics in the back of his mind, as they so often are, Kant claims that while
it may take the “great acuity and sagacity” of a sage to figure out what would make
even oneself happy over a lifetime, it takes no wisdom at all to know what morality
requires.11
The next paragraph in this note takes a stab at formulating the simple formula the
application of which will deliver the immediate knowledge of what is to be done, but
before we turn to that let us look at one more purely classificatory passage in which
Kant not only employs his mature threefold classification of imperatives but also, if
with hesitation, introduces the term “hypothetical” to designate the two different
kinds of conditional necessity of action—with hesitation, because Kant first wrote but
then crossed out the word. On the next interleaved sheet in the Observations, he
writes: “The [crossed out: hypothetical] conditional necessity of an action as a means
to a possible end is problematic, as a means to an actual goal it is a necessity of
prudence, categorical necessity is moral” (NF, }44, p. 21; Ri., }129, p. 120). Kant’s
syntax in this unpunctuated, Latin sentence is rocky, but it seems clear that he
intends to classify both the conditional necessity of an action as a means to a possible
end and the recommendation of an action as a prudent means to the always actual
end of happiness as hypothetical necessities, and only the categorical necessity of an
action as moral.

10
The “future state” that Kant is talking about here is clearly that of the natural human lifespan, not of
an afterlife, of which there is no hint in these notes.
11
The view that morality, unlike prudence, requires no special sagacity will remain a constant for Kant;
for an especially prominent passage, see G, Section I, 4:404. This undercuts the central claim of Ian Hunter
in Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), that Kant’s moral philosophy continues an esoteric, scholarly or
university, metaphysical approach to ethics to be found in Leibniz and Wolff, in contrast to an exoteric,
popular, non-metaphysical approach to be found in Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius. If anything, Kant,
as he so often does, is attempting to bridge the gulf between two opposed traditions, in this case by
preserving certain aspects of the rationalist and perfectionist approach of Leibniz and Wolff but by
insisting on the availability of the essential form of moral reasoning to every human being.
       

Thus far, this is only a terminological advance over Kant’s first hint toward the
categorical imperative in the prize essay. What is more important is that in the notes
in the Observations Kant replaces the Wolffian–Baumgartian characterization of the
form of the imperative with something clearly anticipating his mature conception of
the fundamental principle of morality: Kant now introduces the idea that what is
morally mandatory is that a proposed path of action—Kant does not yet introduce
the term “maxim”—not contradict itself when universalized. First, in a series of notes
in which Kant is taking early steps toward his eventual theory of property,12 he
writes, “That will must be good which does not cancel itself out [sich selbst aufheben]
if it is taken universally and reciprocally . . . Thus when a person calls things his own
he thereby tacite promises that in similar circumstances through his will he will not
[breaks off ]” (NF, }19, p. 10; Ri., }53, p. 53). That Kant breaks the second sentence off
without completing it suggests that he has not gotten very far with his analysis of
property, but the first sentence already suggests the idea that a morally good will is
one that does not contradict itself if its proposal is taken universally and reciprocally,
that is, presumably, a good will is one that acts on an intention only if it could still act
on that intention if every one else did so as well.13
That what Kant has in mind as the test of morality is the universalizability of a
proposed action is even clearer in the continuation of the note in which he first
introduced the distinction between the two types of (non-moral) conditional neces-
sity. Here he contrasts “philanthropy,” which is being directly moved by the prospect
of utility to others, from “the sense of justice, from which we learn to distinguish what
may be done from what may not be done.” What he means by philanthropy here is
not to be confused with the imperfect duty of benevolence: one is always obliged to
have benevolence as an end, even if particular circumstances, including one’s own
capacity, sometimes contra-indicate acting for this end, as when another duty has
priority; but philanthropy here is a sensible inclination to do something nice for
others regardless of moral considerations. The sense of justice, in turn,
has its origin in the nature of the human spirit [ducit a mentis humanae natura], through
which it judges what is categorically good (not useful), not in accordance with utility to oneself
or others, but rather by considering the same action in others; if in that case there arises
opposition and contrariety, then the action displeases, but if there arises harmony and
consensus, then it pleases. Hence the capacity to put oneself into the position of others is a
heuristic means to morality. (NF, }42, p. 20; Ri., }125, p. 116)

We will return shortly to Kant’s ensuing explanation of why contrariety displeases

when we consider others acting in the same way we propose to act ourselves and
consensus pleases when we consider so acting; what is important for the moment is

12
The theory eventually published in MM, Doctrine of Right, }}1–17.
13
For this “practical” or “volitional” interpretation of the consistency required by the categorical
imperative, see Onora O’Neill, “Consistency in Action,” in Universality and Morality: Essays on Ethical
Universalisability, ed. Nelson Potter and Mark Timmons (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), pp. 159–86, reprinted
in her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 81–104, and Christine M. Korsgaard, “Kant’s Formula of Universal Law,”
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1985): 24–47, reprinted in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 77–105.
      

just the idea that the test of moral goodness is this test of contrariety or consensus in
the universalization of one’s proposed course of action. Kant’s equation of this test
with the idea of putting oneself into the position of others sounds like the idea of
the impartial spectator in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in
1759, five or six years before Kant wrote these notes.14 But unlike Smith’s idea, which
is that one can put oneself into the shoes of any disinterested person in taking an
impartial view of one’s own intended actions, Kant’s passages thus far suggest that
one must put oneself into everybody’s shoes, that is, that one’s proposed action passes
the moral test only if one can imagine everyone, oneself included of course, acting
in that way (while holding all other assumptions about human conduct constant).
Kant makes this point clear in his next formulation of the test as well, contained in
the note already quoted in which he for the first time introduced the designation of
non-moral imperatives as hypothetical (although, as we saw, only to cross it out).
Here he writes that
An action considered from the point of view of the universal will of human beings, if it
contradicts itself, is morally impossible (impermissible). Let me have the idea of taking
possession of the fruits of another. As I then see that no person would acquire anything
under the condition that what he has acquired can be ripped from him, I would from a private
point of view want that which belongs to another, but from a public point of view decline
it. . . . In the case of a conflict, the universal will is more important than the individual will. (NF,
}44, p. 21; Ri., }129, pp. 119–20)

This makes it clear that the test is the consistency of one’s own performance of a
proposed action with the possibility of everyone acting in the proposed way. Kant’s
example of acquisition should presumably be fleshed out to say that I cannot
consistently will that I acquire and maintain possession of objects by force and that
everyone do so, because then I cannot really will to maintain possession of the object
I myself have acquired in this way. Again, Kant speaks of proposed actions here, not
yet of maxims, but the general similarity of this test to his later formulations of the
categorical imperative in Section I and in the first phase of his argument in Section II
of the Groundwork twenty years later is clear.
So in these notes, although he has not yet introduced the term “imperative” and
not yet made his later distinction between the fundamental principle of morality as it
would present itself to any rational being and the imperatival form in which it
presents itself to imperfectly rational beings like ourselves, he has introduced his
mature distinction between “hypothetical” and “categorical” practical necessities; and
although he has not yet introduced his mature conception of maxims, he has
introduced the idea that morality requires consistency between one’s own actions
and the universalization of those actions, or everyone acting in the way one proposes

14
Smith’s idea of the impartial spectator is that morality requires us to consider how our actions would
look to others if they knew as much about our intentions and motivations as we do ourselves; see The Theory
of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Part III, ch. I,
}}5–6, pp. 130–1. Smith’s work does not appear to have been translated into German until 1770, but it was
translated into French in 1764, just months before Kant wrote these notes. However, I know of no evidence
that Kant knew Smith’s work at the time of these notes.
       

to act oneself. But now what is his account of the necessity of this conception of
moral obligation? In the Observations, as we saw, although he did not suggest that
there was a single fundamental principle of morality, Kant suggested that moral
principles arise from a “feeling of the dignity and beauty of human nature.” Thus far,
we have only seen him suggest in the notes that the sense of justice or recognition of
the categorical principle of morality originates “from the nature of the human spirit.”
Do these notes suggest anything more specific than that?

3. The Foundation of the Categorical Imperative

I have suggested that Kant’s idea of testing the consistency of the universalization of a
proposed course of action was his alternative to the idea of putting oneself into the
shoes of others (even if there is no direct evidence that Kant was familiar with this
idea at the period of the notes). In the passage that suggested this interpretation, Kant
goes on to offer an explanation of the normative force of such a requirement of
universalizability that could also be considered to be in the British tradition to which
Smith was heir, and which even employs some of the tell-tale phraseology of that
tradition: Kant follows his statement that putting oneself into the position of others is
a heuristic means to morality with the further statement that:
For we are by nature sociable and cannot call that good in ourselves which we blame in others.
The common sense for the true and the false is nothing other than human reason, taken in
general as the criterion of the true and the false, and the sense of good and evil is the criterion
thereof. Heads that are in opposition cancel out logical certainty; hearts that are in opposition
cancel out moral certainty. (NF, }42, p. 20; Ri., }125, p. 116)
This remark combines the epistemological claim that the faculty for the detection of
contradiction among intentions—“hearts that are in opposition”—is a sense, indeed,
like the sense for the true and the false a common sense, or a generally shared
capacity, with the explanatory suggestion that we approve of interpersonal consist-
ency or the universalizability of intended actions because we are by nature sociable
and thus naturally desire social harmony, acting in ways that are accepted by others
and in which they could act too. The two key assumptions here are that sociability
requires universalizability and that our sociability and thus our approbation of
universalizability and disapprobation of any failure of universalizability is simply a
fact of our nature that cannot and need not be further explained.
The later Kant will certainly reject several aspects of this position: by the inaugural
dissertation of 1770, Kant will maintain that the first principles of moral judgment
are “only cognised by the pure understanding” (ID, }9, 2:396), not by any sort of
sense, and in the Groundwork Kant will insist that “the ground of obligation . . . must
not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circumstances of the world
in which he is placed, but a priori simply in the concepts of pure reason” (G, Preface,
4:389), that is, not in anything about the nature of the biological species of human
beings that can only be known empirically but only in the concept of humanity as an
instance of rational being or rational agency that can be known a priori. Kant’s appeal
to the sociable nature of human beings in his early note seems to be empirical, and
thus to be an inadequate foundation of morality, at least by the lights of his later self,
      

for that reason. But this appeal is only his first word on the foundation of the moral
law in his early notes, not the last. Let us look at another line of thought that he
attempts to develop before we worry further over whether these notes suggest only an
empirical foundation for the moral law or suggest the path to an a priori foundation.
The key premise for this other line of thought is the remark that “freedom in the
proper sense (moral not metaphysical) is the supreme principium of all virtue and of
all happiness” (NF, }9, p. 5; Ri., }25, p. 29). This statement obviously presents several
interpretative difficulties. One question is what Kant means by the remark that the
freedom at issue is “moral not metaphysical,” and another is what Kant means by
saying that freedom in the moral sense is the supreme principle of virtue and
happiness. I take Kant’s discussion throughout the notes to suggest that what he
means is that freedom of choice and action from interference by both our own
sensible inclinations and the inclinations of others is not merely a necessary condi-
tion for the imputation of responsibility and therefore for the assignment of moral
worth and worthiness for happiness, but is itself the necessary end of moral action,
the source of value; and I likewise take him to hold that freedom of choice and action
from interference by these factors is of supreme value without also asserting that we
can always choose to make this value our supreme end regardless of our circum-
stances or prior history, thus without asserting the metaphysical doctrine that the will
is always free, a doctrine that Kant did not defend before he wrote these notes and
which does not appear in them, but only later.15 The main challenges for Kant,
however, are to explain why freedom should be considered the supreme principle of
morality and what the connection is between freedom and acting only in ways that
are universalizable.
Kant offers one line of explanation for the value of freedom that makes its value
apparent but not its connection to the requirement of universalizability. This is what
we might consider the Hellenistic idea (common to Stoicism, Epicureanism, and
Cynicism) that we should free ourselves from as many desires as possible in order to
minimize the number of desires that are likely to be frustrated in our lives and to
maximize the number that may readily be satisfied. This is what we might think of as
a negative account of the value of freedom, or an account of the value of negative
freedom, freedom from desires that are likely to bring more frustration than satis-
faction,16 and is in fact the account of the value of freedom that Kant suggests in the
paragraph preceding his statement that freedom is the supreme principle of morality:

15
In Kant’s first philosophical work, the New Exposition of the First Principles of Metaphysical
Cognition of 1755, he defended a Leibnizian view of freedom as the determination of the will by internal
rather than external grounds instead of the (Crusian) view of freedom as indeterminism. The view that the
causal determinism that prevails in the phenomenal world must be reconciled with some form of
noumenal freedom does not emerge until the critical works of the 1780s, and even then the view that
noumenal freedom is the freedom to choose between the moral law and the principle of self-love no matter
what one’s antecedent (phenomenal) history has been does not completely emerge until the Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason of 1793. For an account of the stages of development in Kant’s thought
about freedom of the will, see my Kant, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 245–65.
16
The locus classicus for the distinction between negative and positive conceptions of freedom is G,
Section III, 4:446. Kant also defines freedom in negative terms as never being “overwhelmed through
animal incentives into willing something that reveals a principium of action against itself” at R, 6801,
19:165, NF, p. 436, apparently written between 1772 and 1775.
       

If I would place myself in a great although not complete independence from people, then
I must be able to be poor without feeling it and to make do with little without paying attention
to it. But if I were a rich man then I would above all introduce freedom from things and from
people into my enjoyments. I would not be weighed down with things like guests, horses, and
servants, about the loss of whom I would have to be concerned. I would not have any jewels,
because I can lose them. I would not [crossed out: arrange my clothing] according to the whims
of another, so that he would not really injure me, e.g., diminish my relations with others, but
not so that my comfort would depend upon him. (NF, }9, p. 5; Ri., }25, pp. 28–9)
Freedom here means self-control, and the idea is that I should not make my
happiness dependent on things beyond my own control, such as physical objects
that can easily be lost or the opinions of others that can easily be swayed by factors
having nothing to do with me. By minimizing desires of this sort and confining my
desires to those that are readily satisfied by means within my own control, I maximize
my chances for happiness. As Kant says a few pages later, “One could promote one’s
welfare by allowing one’s desires to expand and striving to satisfy them . . . But there is
another solution . . . namely, not allowing these inclinations to arise” (NF, }11, p. 6;
Ri., }32, p. 35). Or as he also writes, now calling those inclinations that may readily be
satisfied by means likely to be within one’s own control “natural,”

A person’s contentment arises either from satisfying many inclinations with many agreeable
things, or from not letting many inclinations sprout and thus by being satisfied with fewer
fulfilled needs. The state of him who is satisfied because he is not familiar with agreeable things
is simple sufficiency, that of him who is familiar with them but who voluntarily does without
them because he fears the unrest that arises from them is wise sufficiency. . . . Virtue does not at
all consist in overcoming acquired inclinations in particular cases, but in seeking to be free
from such inclinations and thus learning how to do without them gladly. It does not consist in
conflict with the natural inclinations, but rather in making it the case that one has none except
for the natural ones, because these can always be satisfied. (NF, }21, p. 10; Ri., }60, p. 60)

Again, the key idea here is the negative idea of freedom from inclinations that are
likely to be difficult to satisfy; the underlying assumption is then that such freedom
is the supreme principle of both virtue and happiness because the ultimate aim of
virtue is one’s own happiness, and this is the way to maximize the chances of
realizing that goal.
What appears to be a second phase to this still negative approach to the value of
freedom, one that seems more reminiscent of Kant’s contemporary Rousseau than of
the Hellenistic ethicists, is the thought that we have a special resentment at being
dominated by other people rather than by our own inclinations, and that the path to
happiness thus consists in arranging our affairs to minimize the likelihood of such
domination. Kant writes that some “dependence upon many external things” is
unavoidable, so it would be implausible to place our happiness in total independence
from such things, although we can learn to distinguish between genuine needs on the
one hand and “concupiscence” or adventitious and avoidable desires on the other,
and thereby to minimize our dependence on external things and the possibility of
disappointment inherent in such dependence. But, Kant continues, “what is harder
and more unnatural than this yoke of necessity is the [crossed out: dependence]
      

subjection of one human being under the will of another. No misfortune can be more
terrifying to one who is accustomed to freedom, who has enjoyed the good of
freedom, than to see himself delivered [crossed out: under] to a creature of his own
kind who can compel him to do what he will” (NF, }24, p. 11; Ri., }72, p. 70). Here the
solution to the puzzle of conduct would seem to be simply to minimize one’s
exposure to the will of others.
This assertion of the value of freedom from domination by others might seem to be
unrelated to the previous assertion of the value of freedom from domination by one’s
own desires. But the two accounts are intimately related: Kant’s idea is that to be
dominated by others is actually to be dominated by their drives and inclinations, and
that has the same effect as making one’s happiness hostage to whims and desires that
are not under one’s own control as does placing one’s happiness in one’s own
“unnatural” or “concupiscient” desires, basically that of making one’s happiness
hostage to fortune rather placing it under one’s own control. Thus Kant writes:
But the will of another person is the effect of his own drives [and] inclinations and agrees with his
own true or imagined welfare. But if I was previously free, then nothing can open a grimmer
prospect of misery and desperation to me than that in the future my condition should not lie in
my own will but in that of another. If it is very cold today then I can go out or stay at home as
I alone prefer, but the will of another determines not what on such an occasion would be most
agreeable to me but to him. . . . Even if I suppose that he is good, nothing stands in the way of
sometime thinking otherwise. The motions of matter hold to a certain determinate rule, but the
obstinacy of the human being is without any rule. (NF, }25, p. 12; Ri., }73, p. 71)
What I need for my happiness is for my actions to be under my own control, not
under the control of another. This might sound as if it could undercut Kant’s first
argument, that is, it might sound as if happiness and thus virtue lies in being able to
act on my own drives, inclinations, and whims rather than in being forced to act in
accordance with those of another. But the present thought rather complements the
first: to secure my own happiness, I first need to be free of domination by the whims
of others, and only then can I be free to exercise control over my own whims as well
and to limit my desires to the “natural” desires that I can be sure of satisfying.
The restriction of my desires to those I can be sure to be able to satisfy presupposes
control over my other desires as well as freedom from domination by the whims
of others.
Nevertheless there are numerous problems with this approach to the value of
freedom. First, there are many places even within the same set of notes where Kant
insists that virtue has nothing do with happiness or utility, whether one’s own or
even that of everyone, for example the passage already quoted where he said that the
sense of justice judges what is categorically good “not in accordance with utility to
oneself or others” (NF, }42, p. 20; Ri., }125, p. 116), or in another note where he says
that “in moral matters, the noble must not be considered from the viewpoint of
utility” (NF, }29, p. 14; Ri., }93, p. 89). Thus the entire approach to explaining the
value of freedom by what is likely to maximize one’s own happiness seems to be one
that the Kant of 1765 rejects as decisively as the Kant of 1785. A second problem is
that judgment about which desires are readily fulfilled and which not, or which
“natural” and which not, as well as judgment about whether the whims of others
       

are likely to conflict with one’s own or not, is surely empirical, and thus if the
fundamental principle of morality is supposed to be a priori this does not seem to be
a likely source of such a principle. A third problem is that there is no obvious
connection between this negative conception of the value of freedom and the rule of
consistency in universalizability that Kant has formulated; the principle that would
seem to be necessary for achieving virtue were it defined as the present arguments
have assumed would simply be “Restrict your desires to ones that may readily be
satisfied by means likely to remain at your disposition and minimize your exposure
to the whims of other people,” and this does not seem to have anything to do with
universalizability.
Does Kant suggest any account of the value of freedom that does not see it merely
as a means to happiness, that does not reduce the moral principle founded upon it to
something empirical, and that does have a plausible connection to the categorical
principle of universalizability that he has formulated in the notes in the Observations?
What I now want to show is that there are notes that do suggest a positive and not
necessarily empirical account of the value of freedom as the necessary end upon
which the supreme principle of morality can be founded, and although a connection
between the positive value of freedom and the categorical imperative is only hinted at
in these notes, it is at least a little more explicit in some of Kant’s other notes from the
same period or from the several years following the composition of the notes in the
Observations.
A number of Kant’s notes describe the existence of a positive satisfaction in the
exercise of one’s own agency rather than treating the exercise of one’s agency in
the control of one’s desires as a means to the avoidance of dissatisfaction. Indeed,
Kant suggests that even in the fulfillment of duties of benevolence toward others, the
thought that the improvement of their condition is achieved by the exercise of one’s
own agency is the ultimate source of one’s satisfaction in such morally requisite
conduct:
The capacity to recognize something as a perfection in others does not at all have the
consequence that we will find gratification in it ourselves. But if we feel gratification in it,
then we will also be moved to desire it and to apply our powers to it. Thus the question arises,
whether we feel gratification immediately in the well-being of another or whether the imme-
diate pleasure actually lies in the promotion of the possible application of our power. Both are
possible, but which is actual [?] Experience teaches that in a simple condition a person regards
the good fortune of another with indifference, but that if he has promoted it then it pleases him
infinitely more. Likewise, the ill fortune of another is usually equally indifferent, but if I have
caused it then it sickens me more than if another had done it . . . . We have gratification in
certain of our perfections, but far more if we ourselves are the cause. We have the most if we are
the freely acting cause. To subordinate everything to the free capacity for choice [ freyen
Willkühr] is the greatest perfection. (NF, }35, p. 16; Ri., }114, p. 107)

A page later Kant makes it explicit that the gratification [Vergnügen] that he is talking
about in this note is a feeling of pleasure and that it is morally significant, indeed that
it is moral feeling and thus, as long as moral feeling is still regarded as the basic mode
of the cognition of the good and the morally fundamental motivation, that this
satisfaction in the exercise of our freedom is the foundation of morality: “The feeling
      

of pleasure and displeasure concerns either something with respect to which we are
passive or our self as an active principium of good and evil through freedom. The
latter,” that is, the feeling of pleasure in ourselves as an active principle, “is moral
feeling.” As in the previous note, Kant calls the subordination of all other goods to the
exercise of our power of free choice itself our greatest perfection: “Since the greatest
inner perfection and the perfection that arises from that consists in the subordination
of all of our capacities and receptivities to the free capacity for choice, the feeling for
the goodness of the free capacity for choice must immediately be much different and
also greater than all of the good consequences that can thereby be effected” (NF, }36,
pp. 16–17; Ri., }116, pp. 108–9). The concluding claim of both notes that the exercise
of free choice is our greatest perfection and a greater good than any of the actual
consequences of free actions makes it clear that the claim that we take greater
satisfaction in the well-being of others or greater dissatisfaction in their misfortune
when it is a product of our own free choice and action is not just an expression of
pure egotism or self-centeredness; the general claim implies that even when it comes
to our own well-being, we take greater satisfaction in having been the free cause of
our condition than in the condition itself. Whether our action is other-directed or
self-directed, it is our freedom of choice and action rather than the consequence of
our action that is the source of our greatest satisfaction.
There are still problems with such a view, however, at least from Kant’s mature
point of view. First, Kant presents his claim as one that we know empirically: he says
that “experience teaches” us this claim. Second, even though as has we have just seen
there is one way in which the claim is not completely self-centered, nevertheless it
does seem to treat doing good to others instrumentally, as a means to the exercise and
enjoyment of one’s own free choice rather than something that is immediately good
and morally necessary. And third, a connection between this view of our satisfaction
in our exercise of free agency and the categorical imperative that Kant has formulated
in these notes remains obscure. What we have been told implies that we should
follow the rule of exercising our free choice as much as possible, which in turn
implies that in evaluating the consequences of our possible actions we should always
consider their effects upon our future exercise of free choice and prefer the action
that leaves the most scope for such future exercise, but what this might have to do
with acting only on universalizable intentions is unexplained.
Kant’s next note suggests that a connection between acting for the sake of one’s
own free agency and acting in behalf of others, even if instrumental, is not entirely
accidental: seeking to bring about good consequences for others and not just for
oneself will give one a greater sphere of action and thus more opportunity to enjoy
the exercise of one’s own agency: “Since the human being requires little of nature”—
now this connects Kant’s present account of the positive good of free action with his
previous account of its negative good—“the human being is perfect insofar as he can
do without but yet has much power left to promote the needs and happiness of
others; thus he has a feeling of a will that is active in behalf of a good outside himself ”
(NF, }37, p. 17; Ri., }117, p. 109). If one were to confine oneself to actions that are self-
regarding in the ordinary sense, one just would not have much opportunity to
exercise one’s free agency; helping others enlarges the scope for one’s free action.
Doing good to others is still only a means to doing to oneself the ultimate good
       

of maximizing the exercise of one’s agency, but it is at least not a dispensable means
to this end.17
This consideration goes a small way to ameliorating the second problem just
mentioned, but it still leaves Kant’s account of the positive value of the exercise of
freedom entirely empirical and without a clear connection to the moral requirement
of universalizability. One note in the Observations obscurely hints at a connection
between freedom and universalizability while reaffirming the empirical character of
the connection between freedom and moral satisfaction. In this passage, Kant writes
that “The sole naturally necessary good of a human being in relation to the will of
others is equality (freedom) and, with respect to the whole, unity. . . . The truth of a
perfection consists in the magnitude of the pleasure, which is greater if it is not
exclusive with regard to oneself and others” (NF, }45, p. 21; Ri., }134, p. 123). Here
Kant employs the magnitude of pleasure as the paradigmatically naturalistic measure
of goodness, presupposes that this is produced by the maximal exercise of one’s own
freedom, reiterates the suggestion that acting on behalf of others beyond oneself
increases the sphere for the exercise of one’s freedom, but also suggests an equation
between freedom and equality, thus implying without explaining that there is a
connection between being free and acting in ways that could be accepted by others.
But he hardly spells that connection out.
While not addressing that issue, a few other notes do suggest that the exercise of
free agency is so essential to what it is to be a person that to fail to exercise such
agency, to undermine it, or in any way to minimize it unnecessarily is not simply
something that we empirically discover to be dissatisfying, but rather a contradiction
of the essence of human being itself, a metaphysical rather than a merely psycho-
logical problem. One note simply asserts that “spontaneity” is a characteristic of the
human being and that subjection to the will of another contradicts this essential fact
and is hateful for that reason: “A will that is subject to another is imperfect and
contradictory, because the human being has spontaneitatem; if he is subjected to the
will of another (when he himself can already choose) then he is hateful and con-
temptible” (NF, }18, p. 9; Ri., }52, pp. 52–3). The parenthesis is meant to leave room
for the proper subjection of children to the control of adults until they are ready to
exercise their own capacity for choice; apart from that restriction, Kant’s assumption
is simply that because mature human beings can exercise their own agency, they ought
to. Another passage calls the failure to exercise one’s own will both “absurd” and
“perverse,” suggesting that such a failure contradicts the essential concept of what it is
to be a human being and is morally objectionable for that metaphysical reason:
There is in subjection not only something externally dangerous but also a certain ugliness and a
contradiction that at the same time indicates its injustice. An animal is not yet a complete being
because it is not conscious of its self, and whether its drives and inclinations be resisted by
another or not, it certainly feels its ills, but these are forgotten in a moment, and it knows
nothing of its own existence. But that a human being should as it were need no soul himself

17
Of course, going around acting against the interests of others rather than just ignoring them would
also enlarge one’s sphere of action. Kant still owes us an explanation of why only benevolent and not
malificent actions count here.
      

and have no will of his own, and that another soul should move my limbs, that is absurd and
perverse. (NF, }26, p. 12; Ri., }75, p. 72)

This passage hints at a connection between freedom and self-awareness that Kant
certainly does not unpack, but the basic idea seems to be that freedom is the essence
of what it is to be a human being, that to be or to be made unfree contradicts that
essence and is morally unacceptable for that reason, and that consciousness of one’s
ability to exercise one’s freedom is the basis of positive moral feeling while con-
sciousness of the restriction of freedom is the basis of moral dissatisfaction. Once
again, however, Kant does not say anything about the connection between this
essential requirement of freedom and the requirement of universalizability.
This seems to be as far as Kant got in the notes in the Observations, then: a
formulation of the categorical principle of morality as requiring universalizability, an
insistence that freedom is the greatest perfection of human beings and the foundation
of the supreme principle of morality, a hint that this norm is founded in the
metaphysical essence of human beings rather than in a merely empirical, psycho-
logical preference, but no well worked-out connection between the realization of
freedom and the requirement of universalizability. Kant’s other remaining notes on
moral philosophy from the same period as the notes in the Observations and the
following decade suggest that his efforts were especially directed both at firming up
the idea that to be free is essential to what it is to be a human being and the source of
the absolute value of human beings as well as at developing the connection between
being free and acting only in accordance with universalizable principles. A thorough
examination of Kant’s other surviving notes and his lectures on ethics from the period
between 1765 and 1775 or 1780 would be beyond the scope of the present chapter, so
here only a few examples of Kant’s efforts on these two issues can be offered.
One note in which Kant states that freedom is the fundamental end of morality
and implies that the value of freedom does not have its source in mere preference
although it has an effect on feeling is this note, which the Akademie edition
conjectured came from 1769–70 but also allowed might be earlier, from 1764–8,
thus from the same period as the notes in the Observations:

The understanding is only mediately good, as a means to another good or to happiness. The
immediate good can be found only in freedom. For, because freedom is a capacity for action,
even if it does not please us, freedom is not dependent upon the condition of a private feeling;
however, it always refers only to that which pleases, so it has a relation to feeling and can have a
universally valid relation to feeling in general. Hence nothing has an absolute worth but
persons, and this consists in the goodness of their free power of choice. Just as freedom
contains the first ground of everything that begins, so it is also that which alone contains self-
sufficient goodness.
The moral feeling is not an original feeling. It rests on a necessary inner law to consider
and sense oneself from an external standpoint. Likewise in the personality of reason: there one
feels oneself in the universal and consider’s one’s individuum as a contingent subject like the
accidens of the universal. (R, 6958, 19:103; NF, p. 420)

A great deal is going on in this note. Kant unequivocally states that freedom is the
only immediate good, that it is what is essential to human beings and is the source of
       

their moral worth: looking ahead to the famous formula of humanity in the Ground-
work (Section II, 4:429), this can be taken to say that human beings must be treated as
ends and never merely as means because of their freedom, and that to treat them as
ends rather than merely as means is to treat their freedom as an immediate and the
sole immediate or self-sufficient good, acting only and always in ways that will
preserve and promote their freedom of choice and action. Jumping ahead to the
conclusion of the passage, it also seems to suggest that the freedom of all is equally
good, and that an individual must value her own freedom not just because it is her
own but because it is an instance of what is generally good, an accident of the
universal, and thus that the individual has the same reason to value the freedom of
any and everyone as she does to value her own freedom.18 This could open an
argument to the requirement of universalizability if it could be argued that to value
the freedom of everyone requires acting only in ways that could be accepted and
replicated by everyone, but Kant does not develop such an argument here. What is
most obscure is the middle part of the passage, in which Kant tries to clarify the
relation between the immediate good of freedom and feeling. Kant’s initial remark
that “freedom is not dependent upon the condition of a private feeling” clearly
implies that the value of freedom is not dependent upon a personal feeling of
approbation for it, which opens the way for his subsequent suggestion that one
values one’s own freedom not because it is one’s own but because it is an instance of
something universally valid; his further claim that the moral feeling is not an
original feeling appears to be directed at the moral-sense theory and to mean that
even the freedom of all is not the sole immediate good simply because we have a
strong feeling of approbation toward it, but rather that our feeling of approbation
reflects the intrinsic value of freedom in a “universally valid relation to feeling.”
That the fundamental principle of morality is not grounded on mere feeling but
has a profound effect upon feeling is of course a position that Kant will attempt to
work out in his theory of the feeling of respect in the Groundwork and Critique of
Practical Reason.
Kant’s identification of freedom as the basis of the absolute worth of persons in
this passage is clear; the connection between this and universalizability is only hinted
at. Another note from the same period, however, while clearly reiterating the first
point, perhaps makes more explicit that to respect the freedom of all requires acting
only upon principles that could be freely accepted by all:
The essential perfection of a freely acting being depends on whether this freedom [crossed out:
of the power of choice] is not subject to inclination or in general would not be subject to any
foreign cause at all. The chief rule of externally good actions is not that they conform with the
happiness of others, but with their power of choice, and in the same way the perfection of a
subject does not depend upon whether he is happy but on whether his condition is subordin-
ated to freedom: so also the universally valid perfection, that the actions must stand under
universal laws of freedom. (R, 6605, 19:106; NF, p. 422)

18
In the terms of Kant’s argument for the formula of humanity, this is to say that an individual values
his own existence on a rational ground that holds for all, namely the value of all instantiations of freedom;
see G, Section II, 4:428–9.
      

Here it is clear that the “chief rule” of action is not simply to act in a way that
preserves or maximizes one’s own freedom, even if treating others well should turn
out to be a good means to doing that, but to act in a way that conforms with the free
choice of all, and that what this requires is acting “under universal laws of freedom,”
that is, presumably, laws that could freely be accepted by all.
Perhaps this thought is the key that Kant needs. Another thought that he explores
extensively in the 1770s is that what is contrary to freedom is to allow one’s actions to
be determined by inclination, and that the only alternative to having one’s actions
determined by inclination is to determine them in accordance with universally valid
principles, thus principles that are valid for others as well as for oneself. There are
many notes that try to work out this thought; perhaps this one can stand for many:
The primary ought is a condition under which alone freedom becomes a capacity in accord-
ance with constant rules that determine a priori. This rule-governedness is, however, a
necessary requirement of reason with regard to a capacity that dynamically determines a priori.
The will that is limited by no object and hence is pure must first not contradict itself, and
freedom as the dynamical condition of the intellectual world and its commercii must have unity.
The independence of freedom from sensibility presupposes a dependence of freedom on the
universal condition of consensus with itself. (R, 6850, 19:178; NF, p. 439)

Here Kant says that in order to free itself from determination by sensibility the will
must act in accordance with a priori rules of reason. He emphasizes that the will must
do this in order to avoid self-contradiction, presumably meaning by this that acting
on mere inclination can lead to contradictions in the will, wanting at one moment
what is incompatible with what one might want at the next, while acting in accord-
ance with rational principles will ensure that one wills only goals that are compatible
with one another over one’s lifetime. But rules that are a priori and thus independent
of one’s particular inclinations of sensibility will also be valid for all, so to act in a way
that preserves one’s own will from contradiction is also to act only in ways that are
universalizable.

4. Conclusion
Kant thus explores two different routes by which to connect the idea of freedom and
its absolute worth with the idea of universalizability: the idea that to respect freedom
as absolutely valuable is to respect all instances of freedom as equally valuable, not
just one’s own instance, and for that reason requires acting only on universally
acceptable principles, and the idea that preserving one’s own independence from
determination by mere inclinations of sensibility requires acting in accordance with
rational and a priori principles, which are ipso facto universally valid and acceptable
principles. The first of these strategies might seem more appealing to us now as a way
of grounding the universality of moral principles in the value of freedom, since it
makes the universal acceptance of such principles essential rather than so to speak a
by-product of their value for oneself. Whether Kant ever clearly distinguished these
two strategies for deriving the requirement of universalizability and settled on one
should be a central question for further discussion of Kant’s derivation of the
categorical imperative in his mature writings in moral philosophy.
       

A second question for the interpretation of Kant’s mature moral philosophy raised
by the formative notes that we have been discussing is whether Kant ever settled on a
single strategy for a derivation of the immediate and absolute value of freedom, and if
so then which. It would not sit well with our contemporary understanding of the
character of Kantian ethics to suppose that in the end Kant stayed with the natur-
alistic and empirical account of the value of freedom that he suggested in some of the
notes in the Observations. But the alternative strategy of deriving the normative
principle of the absolute value of freedom from a (purported) fact about our
metaphysical essence seems to sit equally ill with our post-Humean assumption
that an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is,” and to become particularly prob-
lematic when it becomes mixed up with Kant’s distinction between phenomena and
noumena, as it does in Section III of the Groundwork, where Kant appears to attempt
to derive the validity of the moral law not for rational beings in the abstract but for
ourselves in the concrete from knowledge of our noumenal freedom. In fact, as we
saw in Chapter 2, neither Hume nor Kant had any problem with the general strategy
of deriving an “ought” from the right “is,” nor of course did Kant himself find the
distinction between phenomena and noumena problematic.19 Nevertheless, Kant
seems to have developed qualms about any strategy of deriving the moral law or
the fundamental value on which it is based from anything supposedly more funda-
mental, and would turn to the position that the validity of the moral law and the
intrinsic and absolute value of freedom are self-evident in his “fact of reason”
doctrine in the Critique of Practical Reason.20 This may seem like foot-stamping,
or, in the face of Kant’s critique of all alternative derivations of the moral law in
that work and elsewhere, it might seem sufficient. Either way, Kant’s early notes
on ethics put beyond doubt that the absolute value of freedom is the supreme
principium of Kantian ethics, but whether Kant himself ever came up with a
conclusive argument for this value or whether we ourselves can do so remains the
most controversial question for further discussion of Kant’s ethics and further
development of Kantian ethics.

19
For my argument that the problem with Kant’s strategy for the derivation of the categorical
imperative in Section III of the Groundwork is not that it is an argument from ought to is but that it is
an argument from a noumenal is, see Chapter 10 as well as my “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments
in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Inquiry 50 (2007): 444–64.
20
For the classical discussions of the “fact of reason” argument, see Lewis White Beck, A Commentary
to Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 166–70; Dieter
Henrich, “Der Begriff der sittlichen Einsicht und Kants Lehre vom Faktum der Vernunft,” in Gerold
Prauss, ed., Kant: Zur Deutung seiner Theorie von Erkennen und Handeln (Cologne: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, 1973), pp. 77–115, trans. Manfred Kuehn in Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s
Philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 55–87; and John
Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), pp. 253–72.
 4
Freedom and the Essential
Ends of Humankind

1. Essential, Universal, and Complete Ends

In his published writings, Kant appears to use the phrase “essential ends” (without
“of humankind”) only twice, in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” at the very end of
the Critique of Pure Reason. The more informative of these occurrences is neverthe-
less quite obscure:
Essential ends are . . . not yet the highest, of which (in the complete systematic unity of reason)
there can be only a single one. Hence they are either the final end, or subalternate ends, which
necessarily belong to the former as means. The former is nothing other than the entire vocation
of human beings, and the philosophy of it is called moral philosophy. (CPuR, A 840/B 868)
This merely directs us to Kant’s moral philosophy for an account of what he means
by “essential ends,” but does suggest that the “essential ends” we are to find there
might not be identical with the “highest” or “complete” end of humankind, in other
words with what Kant calls in his moral philosophy the summum bonum. Before we
can worry about that negative implication, however, we must find a positive account of
what Kant does mean by the “essential ends” of humankind in his moral philosophy.
That project might seem to be stymied by the fact that Kant does not use this
phrase in his published writings in moral philosophy at all. However, this does not
leave us bereft of resources, for Kant does use this and closely related phrases several
times in the lectures on ethics that he gave from the mid-1770s to the mid-1780s1 and
in his surviving notes on moral philosophy from the same period. In the lectures
on ethics Kant uses the plural phrase “essential ends of humankind” twice, both
times saying that freedom must be restricted in or to “conformity with the essential
ends of humankind” without immediately saying what those essential ends are. Two
sentences after his first reference to plural but unspecified “essential ends,” however,

1
I refer here to the Collins lectures, that is, Moral Philosophy from the Lectures of Professor Kant, Winter
Semester 1784–85, by Georg Ludwig Collins, 27:242–471, in Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and
J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), which are apart from
several omissions identical to the Kaehler transcription, Collegium Philosophiae practicae universalis una
cum Ethica from the summer semester, 1777, reproduced in Kant, Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, ed.
Werner Stark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), as well as to the version edited in 1924 by
Paul Menzer from a now-lost 1780 manuscript called Brauer. According to Stark, all these versions
probably trace back to transcriptions originally made in Kant’s ethics course in either 1773–4 or 1775–6
(Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, pp. 402–4).
        

Kant also speaks of a single “essential end of humankind,” and implies that this is
nothing other than the rule for the regulation of an agent’s freedom itself: “Anyone
who allows his person to be governed by his inclination is acting contrary to the
essential end of humankind, for as a free agent he must not be subject to his
inclinations, but should determine them through freedom; for if he is free, he must
have a rule; and this rule is the essential end of humankind” (MP-Collins, 27:345;
Kaehler, p. 178). In a note from the same period, Kant suggests that it is not the rule
for the governance of freedom but rather the very freedom of the agent that is to be
governed by such a rule that constitutes the “essential determinations of his own
person and of life itself ” (R, 6801, 19:165).
What I will argue here is that Kant’s moral philosophy is indeed based on the
assumption that freedom itself is the essential end of humankind, but that the kind
of freedom Kant has in mind can be realized only through adherence to moral law,
which is of course nothing but the well-known requirement of universalizability,
that we act only on maxims that could also be willed as universal laws. I will also
argue, however, that it took Kant a long time—the better part of twenty years—to
clarify whose freedom is the essential end that is the fundamental value of morality,
that is, it took him a long time to decide whether the essential end for each moral
agent is his own freedom, with regard for the freedom of others being only a
necessary condition for or by-product of the realization of his own freedom, or the
freedom of all rational agents (or all relevant rational agents, namely all human
beings), with the agent’s own freedom being valuable only as an instance of the
freedom of all, an instance that is no more but also to be sure no less valuable than
any other. I will also argue that it took Kant a long time to decide how to argue for
the claim that freedom is the essential end of mankind, and in the end he may have
decided not to argue for it at all, but simply to let it stand on its own, content to
show that it is immune from the objections to which all other proposed founda-
tions for morality are liable.
As I noted, Kant already suggested at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason that
the essential end of mankind is not the same as the highest or complete end for
mankind. This is of course the premise from which Kant begins his discussion of
the highest good in the Critique of Practical Reason (5:110). I have argued before
that the highest good should not be understood as the conjunction of two different
ends of mankind, the moral end of virtue and the natural end of happiness, related
only by the fact that the pursuit, particularly the individual pursuit, of the latter end
must be constrained by the former end,2 but that instead once the freedom realized
through virtue is understood as the freedom to set particular ends and happiness is
understood as the realization of particular ends, the connection between the two
components of the highest good is more intimate than that. I will not revisit those

2
This approach has most recently been defended by Ralf M. Bader, in “Kant’s Theory of the Highest
Good,” in Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader, eds, The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 183–213. Bader bases his interpretation solely on the Critique of Practical
Reason, thus taking into account neither Kant’s earlier treatment of the topic in the Critique of Pure Reason
nor his numerous subsequent treatments, and I believe that on precisely this issue the Critique of Practical
Reason is misleading.
       

arguments in this chapter.3 I bring up the highest good here only to suggest that the
evolution that Kant’s thought about freedom as the essential end of humankind
undergoes parallels the development that his conception of happiness as an element
of the highest good undergoes: just as over the period from the first Critique to later
works such as the Critique of the Power of Judgment and the 1793 works “On the
Common Saying: That might be correct in theory but is of no use in practice” and
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant’s conception of the happiness
component of the highest good evolves from one’s own happiness to the happiness of
all of humankind, his conception of the freedom that is the essential end of human-
kind likewise evolves from the freedom of each agent, with the freedom of others
being only instrumental or consequential to that, to the freedom of all humans, with
one’s own freedom being only an instance or part of that. I will just pause for a
moment over this issue in Kant’s understanding of the highest good to drive home
the point I want to make about the development of his conception of freedom as the
essential end for mankind. In the “Canon of Pure Reason” in the first Critique, his
first published discussion of the highest good, Kant seems to treat the happiness that
is aimed at in the highest good as individual happiness when he says that “he who has
not conducted himself so as to be unworthy of happiness must be able to hope to
partake of it” (A 813/B 841) and argues that both personal immortality and the
existence of a God who would “distribute all happiness” to immortal individuals can
and must be postulated in order to make this hope rational. Although Kant seems to
suppose in this discussion that if all were truly virtuous then all would inevitably be
happy, the basis for his postulation of both immortality and God seems to be that in
face of the obvious fact that all are not truly virtuous, the moral resolve of the
individual who is truly virtuous can be maintained only if there are rational grounds
for the belief that at least her virtue will eventually be rewarded by her happiness
(CPuR, A 809–10/B 837–8, A 812–13/B 840–1). By the time Kant wrote the essay on
Theory and Practice, however, stung by the criticism of Christian Garve that he had
made the hope of individual happiness a necessary motive for morality,4 Kant clearly
maintained that the only moral “end for the human being’s will” is “to work to the
best of one’s ability toward the highest good possible in the world (universal happiness
combined with and in conformity with the purest morality throughout the world),” an
end that does not make “one’s own happiness” an immediate object of morality but
makes it a moral object only mediately, only as part of the larger end of universal
happiness (TP, 8:279, 279n.)—the response to Garve resting on the assumption that
surely no one could think that a desire for the happiness of all is a selfish and morally
reprehensible motivation, rather it can only be a moral object of the will deriving from
one regarding all human beings as ends in themselves whose ends should be realized.

3
See “From a Practical Point of View: Kant’s Conception of a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason,” in my
Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 333–71; “Ends
of Reason and Ends of Nature: The Place of Teleology in Kant’s Ethics,” in my Kant’s System of Nature and
Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 169–97; and “Kantian Communities,” in Lucas Thorpe, ed.,
Kant and Community, North American Kant Society Publication Series 9 (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 2011), pp. 88–120, reprinted in the present volume as Chapter 16.
4
See Christian Garve, Versuche über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Moral and Literatur (Breslau:
Wilhelm Gottlieb Korn, 1792), vol. 1, pp. 110–16.
        

My claim will now be that Kant’s thought about freedom as the essential end of
humankind underwent a similar evolution. I would argue even more strongly that the
evolution in Kant’s conception of the scope of the happiness included in the highest
good was entailed by and had to follow the similar development in his conception of
the freedom that is the essential end of humankind. If this is right, then the
development of Kant’s moral philosophy could be understood as a compound
movement from an emphasis on the freedom of the individual with only an instru-
mental concern for the freedom of others to an immediate concern for the freedom of
all, combined with a movement from a concern for one’s own happiness constrained
by the demands of morality to a more direct concern for the happiness of all as part of
the object although not the motive for morality. But having drawn attention to the
parallel, I will now discuss only the evolution of Kant’s conception of freedom as the
essential end of mankind.

2. The Development of Kant’s View of Freedom

as our Essential End
My understanding of Kant’s moral philosophy is founded on premises he asserts in
both his lectures and his published works. In the Lectures on Ethics, as we have
already seen, he describes the rule for freedom or freedom in accordance with a rule
as the essential end of mankind, and the perfection of free choice as inner goodness.
In these lectures he also describes “freedom according to a power of choice that is not
necessitated to act” as the “inner worth of the world, the summum bonum” (MP-
Collins, 27:344), here using the term that he will later reserve for our complete rather
than merely essential good. He thus describes freedom as our fundamental value. In
Naturrecht Feyerabend, his 1784 lectures on natural right, Kant says that “The inner
worth of the human being rests on his freedom, that he has his own will,” although
since “nothing more horrifying can be conceived than all being free without any law,”
this must be freedom exercised in accordance with a rule rather than lawless freedom.
In Naturrecht Feyerabend Kant then links these statements and thus the theory of the
lectures on ethics to the language of his published writings by also stating that “The
freedom of the human being is the condition under which he can himself be an end”
and then describing reason, our faculty for laws, and thus the faculty by means of
which we discover the law that must regulate freedom, as the means to this end. “If
only rational beings can be ends in themselves,” he says, “then this cannot be because
they have reason, but because they have freedom. Reason is merely a means” (Fey.
27:1319–21). The terminology of ends in themselves of course takes us to the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, written during the period when he was
giving these lectures, where Kant holds that the principle that “the human being and
in general every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be
used by this or that will at its discretion” is the “ground of a possible categorical
imperative, that is, of a practical law” (G, 4:428), and in turn defines rational being,
that in virtue of which a human being ought to be an end in itself, as the capacity to
“set itself an end” (G, 4:437). In the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals Kant likewise defines
“humanity” as “the capacity to set oneself an end—any end whatsoever” (MM, DR,
       

Introduction, section VIII, 6:392; see also section V, 6:387). Thus, although Kant
shifts from the language of freedom as inner worth or goodness in the lectures on
ethics to the language of humanity as an end in itself in the Groundwork and later
publications, I take the linkage of the two sets of terms in the lectures on natural right
to mean that he is saying the same thing with both sets of terms: that the freedom to
set our own ends is the only thing that is of intrinsic and unconditional worth,5 thus
an end in itself, although it must be regulated in accordance with a rule in order to
realize its value, and that rule is the moral law, adherence to which is thus the means
to freedom or humanity as the end in itself.
This is the core idea of Kant’s moral philosophy, but the point that I want to make
here is that this apparently simple idea masks some profound ambivalences, and that
it took Kant what we might think of as the best years of his life, the twenty or more
years from the middle of the 1760s to the middle of the 1780s and beyond, to clarify
this thought. Even then, although he clearly came to reject one way of arguing for it,
as well as rejecting other foundations for morality, he may never have settled on a
positive way to argue for it, and may have decided in the end that it is essentially self-
evident, needing only defense from misleading justifications. First, at least the
surviving record of Kant’s thought suggests that he began with the idea that an
entirely natural interest in one’s own freedom from domination by others requires
what we might think of as adoption of a rule of self-restriction of one’s domination of
them in order to earn the same concession from them, a sort of Hobbesian egoism
only applied to one’s own freedom rather than one’s survival or happiness; he then
moved from that to a recognition that what is even more important and compre-
hensive is one’s own freedom from domination by one’s own inclinations, which can
be achieved only by self-governance in accordance with a law of reason, which, as
universal, applies to others as well as oneself, and thus as it were automatically
extends freedom to them as well as to oneself; but only gradually did he begin to
treat freedom as an immediate, objective, and universal value, of which one’s own
freedom is just one, and not a special case. Second, as he underwent this develop-
ment, Kant also realized that the value of freedom could not be explicated in the
essentially psychological terms he had used in his earliest thought about freedom,
and sought other ways to present its value. He thus began to treat freedom as a fact
about our essence that entails how we should treat ourselves and others—a position
that we might dub “normative essentialism”—but after attempting to argue for this
position from the premises of his own transcendental idealism, he may have con-
cluded that this could not be done (although he would continue to use transcendental
idealism to defend the possibility of the freedom of the will), and that it would be
better to rest his own position on negative arguments against other moral theories
combined with an appeal to a “fact of reason” that one “cannot reason . . . out from
any antecedent data of reason” (CPracR, 5:31). But whatever the difficulty Kant may
have encountered in arguing for his final formulation of the essential ends of
mankind, what is clear is that he did gradually move from a conception of one’s

5
For this distinction, see Christine M. Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” Philosophical
Review 92 (1983): 169–95, reprinted in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 249–74.
        

own freedom as an end, with relation to which the freedom of others is only a means
or by-product, to a conception of freedom as a universal value, of which one’s own is
only one instance. In the remainder of this section, I outline the development in
Kant’s conception of the value of freedom prior to his published works in moral
philosophy. In section 3, I will show how those published works reflect the position
that Kant reached in the course of his previous development.
In some of his earliest surviving notes on moral philosophy, the notes he made in
his own interleaved copy of his 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime, Kant includes several striking passages that emphasize the entirely natural
interest of human beings in their own freedom from domination by other humans. In
one, he holds that we conceive of non-human constraints on our activity or well-
being as merely the natural conditions within which we can exercise our own
freedom, conditions that we do not in any way resent but merely cope with, but
that we deeply resent the constraint of our own choices by the will of others:
Find himself in what condition he will, the human being is dependent upon many external
things . . . and because he is the administrator of nature but not its master he must often
accommodate himself to its compulsion . . . But what is harder and more unnatural than this
yoke of necessity is the subjection of one human being under the will of another. No misfortune
can be more terrifying to one who is accustomed to freedom, who has enjoyed the good of
freedom, than to see himself delivered to a creature of his own kind who can compel himself to
do what he will (to give himself over to his will). It requires a very long habituation to make the
terrifying thought of servitude tolerable . . . still in the choice between slavery and the risk of death
one will have no reservation about preferring the latter. (NF, p. 11; Ri., pp. 70–1)

Kant’s language here is that of natural, psychological facts: people who have been
accustomed to freedom, a contingent fact, seem to abhor subsequent servitude, a
psychological fact, and though they can be habituated to it to some degree, another
psychological fact, if given a choice they prefer death to slavery, yet another psycho-
logical fact. And the explanation that Kant gives of this set of natural facts is also
naturalistic: we can accommodate ourselves to the harsh restrictions of nature—“the
heat of the burning sun, the raw wind, the motions of the water”—because they are at
least predictable, and we can learn to forecast and cope with them, but nothing is
more unpredictable than “the will of another person” as “the effect of his own drives
and inclinations” agreeing “only with his own true or imagined welfare,” and for this
reason “nothing can open a grimmer prospect of misery and desperation than that in
the future my own condition should not lie in my own will but in that of another”
(NF, pp. 11–12; Ri., p. 71). In fact, this argument ultimately concerns well-being or
happiness: because of the predictability of non-human nature, I can learn how to live
tolerably well in almost any environment, but because of the unpredictability of
human nature, domination will inevitably lead to misery. Kant does not spell out a
resolution to this problem, but its traditional resolution is that we define equal
spheres of freedom for all and thus restrict our own domination of others in order
to win the concession of freedom from domination from them. On any such
argument, however, our concession of freedom to others is strictly instrumental
in securing enjoyment of our own freedom, which is itself our chief source of
happiness.
       

But there are hints of other ideas even in these early notes. First, Kant also suggests
that there is some sort of conceptual or metaphysical problem with the subjection of
one’s will to that of another, not just a detriment to happiness. Thus he writes a few
pages after the passages we have just considered:
There is in subjection not only something externally dangerous but also a certain ugliness and a
contradiction that at the same time indicates its injustice. An animal is not yet a complete being
because it is not conscious of its self, and whether its drives and inclinations be resisted by
another or not, it certainly feels its ills, but these are forgotten in a moment, and it knows
nothing of its own existence. But that a human being should as it were need no soul himself
and have no will of his own, and that another soul should move my limbs, that is absurd and
perverse. Also in our constitutions every person is contemptible to us who is to any great
degree subjected [breaks off ] (NF, p. 12; Ri., pp. 72–3)
The way that this passage suddenly breaks off suggests that Kant did not yet have a
clear idea of what kind of absurdity is involved in the idea of the subjection of one
human being to another—he seems to suggest that it is more than just an obstacle to
happiness, but what more he cannot yet say. He hints that something essential to a
human being is contradicted by subjection to another—“A will that is subject to
another is imperfect and contradictory, because the human being has spontaneita-
tem” (NF, p. 9; Ri., pp. 52–3)—but he makes explicit neither a metaphysics that
would explain the status of spontaneity in the concept of a human being nor a meta-
ethics that would explain its normative implications.
In other notes in the Observations, Kant suggests that the freedom with which we
are most concerned is not freedom from domination by others but freedom from
domination by our own inclinations (of which freedom from domination by others
might turn out to be a special case, if it is only our own inclination—to avoid conflict,
to gain material benefits—that leads us to accept domination by others). But here too
he wavers between a purely psychological account that suggests that the domination
of our wills by our own inclinations is a source of unhappiness and an inchoate
metaphysical argument that it is some other kind of violation of the essence of
humanity. The first sort of argument is that the unbridled growth and reign of
inclinations is a detriment to happiness because that will inevitably produce more
frustration than satisfaction. Sounding like his wayward follower Schopenhauer (who
could not have known this unpublished passage), Kant says that “It is not compatible
with happiness to let the inclinations become excessive, for since there are uncom-
monly many cases where circumstances are unfavorable for these inclinations, when
things are not as desired, they become a source of oppression, misery, and worry, of
which the single person knows nothing” (NF, p. 7; Ri., pp. 37–9). One might think to
expand one’s happiness by expanding one’s inclinations to offer more opportunities
for satisfaction—“One could,” one might think, “promote one’s welfare by allowing
one’s desires to expand and striving to satisfy them”—but that is likely to lead to
more frustration than satisfaction, and “there is another solution . . . namely, not
allowing these inclinations to arise” (NF, p. 6; Ri., p. 35). The latter is the virtuous
solution: “Virtue does not at all consist in overcoming acquired inclinations in
particular cases, but in seeking to be free of such inclinations and thus learning to
do without them gladly . . . in making it the case that one has none except for the
        

natural ones, because these can always be satisfied” (NF, p. 10; Ri., p. 60). This is
simply an empirical, psychological—and ancient—argument that there is greater
satisfaction and thus more happiness to be found in minimizing one’s own inclin-
ations and desires than in maximizing them, which just maximizes the probability of
frustration.
However, there are also notes in which Kant suggests that there is some sort of
perfection of the will that is intrinsically valuable quite apart from any calculations
about the probability of satisfying or frustrating inclinations. He writes that “Since
the greatest inner perfection . . . consists in the subordination of all of our capacities
and receptivities to the free capacity for choice, the feeling for the goodness of the free
capacity for choice must immediately be much different and also greater than all of
the good consequences that can thereby be effected” (NF, p. 16; Ri., pp. 108–9). Here
Kant appeals to a fact about human psychology—in a way that he will throughout his
later career, in his theory of respect—in assuming that the determination of the mind
by purely moral considerations must have an effect upon our feelings, and indeed
greater effect on feeling than any mere gratification of ordinary inclinations could.
But he does not seem to be appealing to any merely empirical fact about human
psychology when he supposes that our perfection lies in the subordination of all of
our capacities, thus including our capacities for inclinations and their gratification, to
the free capacity of choice. This seems to be some non-psychological and normatively
significant fact about us, although Kant does not explain what that could be.
Nor does Kant yet offer a clear account of the relation between the value of one’s
own freedom and the value of freedom from others. We might suppose that if the
disposition to dominate others is a mere inclination, then anyone who subordinates
her inclinations to her free faculty of choice will ipso facto be freed of any desire to
dominate others, thus that respect for the freedom of others would be at least a by-
product of the perfection of one’s own will, but Kant does not spell such an argument
out. Rather, he seems to leave it open whether concern for the perfection of one’s own
capacity for free choice necessarily entails equal respect for the free choice of others:
“Now this capacity for choice contains either the merely individual will as well as the
universal will, or it considers the person at the same time in consensu with the
universal will” (NF, pp. 16–17; Ri., pp. 108–9). However, in other notes Kant does
move toward a resolution of this issue. In reflections from 1773 to 1778, the same
period in which the lectures on ethics took on the form preserved in most of the
surviving transcriptions, Kant repeatedly addresses the connection between freedom
and law, but also begins to use formulations that suggest that it is not merely one’s
own freedom that is the source of moral law, but freedom as such, and thus one’s own
freedom only as one instance of freedom among many.
Many of these reflections make it clear that the freedom to be promoted by
adherence to moral law is in the first instance what Kant will subsequently call
negative freedom, that is, freedom from the determination of the will by inclination,
but that freedom from inclination can be achieved only by adherence to universally
valid law, or positive freedom. In one remark from 1776–8, Kant states succinctly
that “The independence of freedom from sensibility presupposes a dependence of
freedom on the universal condition of consensus with itself ” (R, 6850, 19–178; NF,
p. 439). Another note from the same period is more expansive, suggesting that action
       

does not take place without sensible incentives at all—for without them, we would
have no actions even to consider undertaking—but that freedom of choice lies in
choosing which incentives to act upon in a way that is consistent with the “unity” of
our power of choice or with maintaining its freedom throughout our actions, and
that the role of the rules that we apply to our incentives is precisely to allow us to
achieve this governance of them for the sake of maintaining our freedom:
In morality we require no other concept of freedom than that our actions do not follow the
thread of instinct in accordance with experience, but intermix reflections of the understanding
with the incentives. Through instinct there arises a lack of coherence . . . Freedom from instinct
thus requires rule-governedness in the practical use of the understanding. Thus we represent to
ourselves rule-governedness and unity in the use of our power of choice to conditions that
bring it into consensus with itself. (R, 6852, 19:182; NF, p. 442)

The key idea here, and thus the key move beyond Kant’s earlier idea that regulation
of inclinations is necessary to maximize their gratification, is that while of course we
cannot act without sensible incentives, the role of rules is not to maximize the
gratification of such incentives but to bring the power of choice into consensus
with itself, that is, to preserve its freedom by making it consistent. That it is the
self-consistency of the power of choice and not just its consistency with some
external incentive that is the essence of morality is the animus of Kant’s distinction
of his position from any form of utilitarianism:
It is of the greatest necessity for reason to assume certain practical rules as principles that
necessitate absolutely (categorically), without resting on the conditions of utility, e.g., to have
no intention against one’s own life or not to sacrifice one’s own person to another’s intentions.
Since in the determination of utility everything is contingent (the universal condition of all free
actions and of the preeminence of freedom itself, which makes human beings capable of a
moral and inner worth, is namely this, that he is never to be overwhelmed through animal
incentives into willing something that reveals a principium of action against itself, etc.), so must
that which is an antecedent condition for making use of freedom necessarily restrict freedom,
hence the essential determinations of his own person and of life itself. No intention opposed to
these can obtain, although to be sure they themselves cannot simply be the intention itself.
Essential determinations are those without which one would either not be a human being or
would not be a free being at all. (R, 6801, 19:165; NF, p. 436)

There is a great deal compressed into this complex passage. First, although it might
seem that anyone could introduce consistency into her choices and actions by
subordinating or coordinating them all to the overarching goal of utility or the
maximization of happiness, whether just her own or that of any larger group up to
all mankind, Kant insists that in the determination of utility “everything is contin-
gent,” thus it could not afford any genuine rule for the consistency of choice and
action. This claim needs unpacking, of course, but presumably it could be unpacked
along the lines of arguments that Kant later explicitly makes: utility or happiness,
whether of all or even just of oneself, only sounds like a determinate and consistent
goal, but is in fact nothing but the goal of maximal satisfaction of inclinations,
whether one’s own or those of all, and since inclinations are contingent so is their
consistency, thus without some rule external to those inclinations (although internal
        

to the will itself ) there can be no guarantee of consistency in choice and action. The
rule that the faculty of choice should seek consistency in order to preserve its own
freedom regardless of whether this maximizes utility is not, however, liable to such
contingency. Second, however, in the penultimate sentence of the passage Kant
reiterates that self-consistency or consistency with the overall freedom of the faculty
of choice cannot be the complete aim or intention of any particular choice, because
any particular action will be aimed at the satisfaction of some inclination; the point of
applying rules in free action must thus be understood not as that of eliminating
inclinations altogether, but rather that of regulating inclinations, that is, determining
which ones to act upon, for the sake of the consistency or the preservation of the
power of free choice itself rather than for the sake of the maximization of gratifica-
tion. And finally, Kant suggests that the “preeminence of freedom” or its role as the
most fundamental value to be realized even when acting also for the sake of lesser
values (the fulfillment of particular inclinations) is due to the fact that it is the
“essential determination” of a person and of—human—life itself, that without
which one would not be a human being at all. Here Kant seems to invoke a
metaphysical description with normative inclinations, or what I am calling “norma-
tive essentialism”: our most fundamental obligation is to realize our most essential or
deepest mode of being.
This thought, obscure as it is, is surely not especially self-referential, that is, it does
not offer me a reason to value my own freedom especially, toward the realization of
which respect for the freedom of others might be a means or from which it might be a
by-product. Rather it seems to offer a reason for each human being to value
immediately and directly the freedom of all. If the freedom of any human being is
valuable just because it is of the essence of each human being to be free, then that
provides each human being a reason to value the freedom of all, although the
particular ways in which one human being can express and realize the value of his
own freedom and that of others might not be the same—it might be the case that
what one can do with regard to the freedom of others is primarily not interfere with
it, while one may be able to do more to promote one’s own. Kant finally makes this
tolerably clear in at least one reflection from 1776–8:
Morality consists in the relation of free actions with the laws (conditions) of the general will,
either of humanity or of human beings. The general will of humanity pertains to the
preservation of that which belongs to the essential ends of human nature. The general will of
human beings consists in the object or the form of actions through which it becomes
independent from every particular inclination. It signifies the will of each and every part, the
will that can be directed to each and every one. (R, 6950, 19:212; NF, p. 451)
Here Kant clearly combines the thesis that independence from the determination of
the will by mere inclination is the essential end for human beings with the thesis that
the value of this is entirely general, independent from any primary valuation of one’s
own freedom, and thus that the realization of such freedom in all human beings is the
primary end for every human being. Promoting the freedom of all is neither a means
nor a by-product of promoting one’s own freedom, but the immediate goal of
morality dictated by the essential character of all human beings. Kant’s alternation
in this passage among the expressions “humanity,” “human beings,” and “human
       

nature” should also be noted: in light of his use of the term “humanity” both in the
Groundwork and in later writings, we may take him to be suggesting here that it is not
the biological existence of human beings as such that we must unconditionally value,
but their humanity or human nature, that is, their capacity for free choice, although
of course biological human beings are the only form of humanity with which we are
acquainted. (Compare Kant’s remarks in the lectures that “in and for itself, life is in
no way to be highly prized,” although “Humanity, in our person, is an object of the
highest respect, and is never to be violated in us”; MP-Collins, 27:371, 377.)
Is this decisive assertion of the value of all instances of freedom as the “essential
ends of human nature,” not just my own, reflected in Kant’s most public statement of
his thoughts about moral philosophy during the mid-1770s, namely the lectures on
ethics? It is not obvious in the pages where we find Kant stating that freedom is the
“inner worth of the world” and summun bonum. In a central passage in these pages,
Kant argues that if a person has no rule for regulating his inclinations, then “freedom
is his greatest misfortune.”
So it has to be restricted, not, though, by other properties and faculties, but by itself. Its
supreme rule is: In all self-regarding actions, so to behave that any use of powers is compatible
with the greatest use of them. For example, if I have drunk too much today, I am incapable of
making use of my freedom and my powers; or if I do away with myself, I likewise deprive
myself of the ability to use them. So this conflicts with the greatest use of freedom, that it
abolishes itself, and all use of it, as the highest principium of life. Only under certain conditions
can freedom be consistent with itself; otherwise it comes into collision with itself. (MP-Collins,
27:346)

Here Kant seems to be describing only the necessity of a self-consistent use of one’s
own power of choice (in the use of one’s other powers) for the full realization of one’s
own freedom. But this is not surprising, since this passage—the whole passage about
freedom as the inner worth of the world—comes in the section of the lectures on
“Duties to Oneself,” and the passage from which I have just quoted comes from a
paragraph that begins “Let us consider those actions of a man that relate to himself,
and contemplate freedom there” (MP-Collins, 27:345). So it is hardly surprising that
Kant is here focusing on the necessity of self-consistency in the exercise of freedom,
that is, the necessity to avoid free choices that will interfere with or undercut the
possibility of one’s other free choices, and (later) the necessity of free choices that will
promote the possibility (or efficacy) of one’s other free choices. But the premise for
Kant’s valuation of individual freedom here is precisely his assumption of the
unconditional value of freedom as such and thus freedom in all, of which one’s
own freedom is, precisely, only one case; that he is now dealing with just one of two
cases may be why Kant speaks of the essential ends of mankind in the plural rather
than speaking of freedom as simply the essential end of mankind. But the general
position is clear in the introductory section of the lectures. In the section “Of the
Principle of Morality,” in which Kant rejects “empirical systems” of ethics (MP-
Collins, 27:253) as well as any “intellectual system” based on “external grounds,” that
is the theological ethics of divine command, the internal intellectual system that is left
standing as Kant’s own is based on “a conformity of free choice with itself and others”
(27:254), where by that Kant clearly means the consistency of any one exercise of
        

one’s own freedom both with the rest of one’s exercise of one’s own freedom and with
the exercise of their freedom by everyone else.6
This point is driven home in Kant’s initial explication of the categorical imperative
a few pages later. Here Kant says that “the subjection of our will under the rule of
universally valid ends is the inner goodness and absolute perfection of free choice, for
then it is in conformity with all ends” (MP-Collins, 27:257), but he does not mean by
this that there is some universally valid set of ends determined independently of the
unconditional value of freedom itself with which the use of freedom must be
consistent; he means rather that the role of freedom is to select ends, but that any
single exercise of this power must be consistent with the rest of one’s own use of
freedom and with everyone else’s for this same purpose. This is clear as he continues:
Moral goodness is thus the governance of our choice by rules, whereby all acts of my choice
concur with universal validity. And a rule which is the principle of the possibility of conformity
in all free choice, is the moral rule. All free actions are determined neither by nature nor by any
law, so that freedom is a terrifying thing, since the actions are not determined at all. Now in
regard to our free actions a rule is needed whereby all actions concur, and this is the moral rule.
If my actions are in accordance with [a] pragmatic rule, they do indeed concur with my own
choice, but not with that of others, nor even always with my own, for they are drawn from well-
being . . . Thus . . . pragmatic rules are in agreement neither with the choice of others, nor with
my own. There must therefore be rules whereby my actions hold good universally . . . and these
are the moral rules. (MP-Collins, 27:258)

Here Kant makes it clear that the key idea of his mature moral philosophy is the need
for consistency in one’s own use of free choice and between one’s own use of free
choice and that of all others, a necessity that derives from the unconditional value of
freedom as such, and of my own only as one instance of that freedom in general.

3. Kant’s Mature View of Freedom as our Essential End

Having reached this foundation for his practical philosophy in the 1770s, Kant
clearly retained it in his published works of the 1780s and 1790s. When he attempted
to argue for his position by more than the mere elimination of what he saw as the
only alternatives, Kant also retained the pattern of inferring from the metaphysical
essence of humans as free beings to the validity of the moral law as the necessary
condition for the realization of freedom that we have found in his notes from the
1770s. In particular, Kant’s Groundwork attempts to argue for what I have called his
normative essentialism on the basis of transcendental idealism. Of course, Kant
seems to have withdrawn the Groundwork’s central argument for the validity of
the moral law in favor of the “fact of reason” stance of the Critique of Practical
Reason. But this does not mean that he actually altered the substance of his normative
essentialism, the idea that the freedom of all, humanity in my own person and that of
every other, is the inner worth of the world. Thus, although Kant does not use the

6
On Kant’s placement of his own system within the spot in his customary fourfold division of moral
theories usually reserved for the critique of (previous) versions of perfectionism, see also Chapter 5 in this
volume.
       

language of “essential ends” in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the
Metaphysics of Morals that it subsequently grounded, in these texts he continues to
present freedom as the end that is to be achieved through adherence to moral law,
and also presents freedom as a universal and necessary end, of which one’s own
freedom is just one instance, worth no more nor less than any other.
We may begin by noticing (as I have already hinted) that Kant’s earlier insight that
the goal of freedom from inclinations can be achieved only by adherence to law is
reproduced in the mature works in the form of the relation between negative and
positive conceptions of freedom in which the latter is the necessary condition for the
former. Thus the familiar pair of definitions with which Kant opens the third section
of the Groundwork reproduces the connection between freedom from the determin-
ation of the will by inclination and the determination of the will by law that he had
earlier discerned:
Will is a kind of causality of living beings insofar as they are rational, and freedom would be
that property of such causality that it can be efficient independently of alien causes determining
it . . . The preceding definition of freedom is negative . . . but there flows from it a positive
concept of freedom . . . Since the concept of causality brings with it that of laws . . . so freedom,
although it is not a property of the will in accordance with natural laws, is not for that reason
lawless but must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind;
for otherwise a free will would be an absurdity . . . . what then can freedom of the will be other
than autonomy, that is, the will’s being a law to itself? But the proposition, the will is in all its
actions a law to itself, indicates only the principle, to act on no other maxim than that which
can also have as object itself as universal law. (G, Section III, 4:446–7)

Here Kant clearly states that the freedom of the will understood as freedom from
determination by external causes, that is, inclinations, is only possible if the will is
determined by a law that is internal to it, which can be nothing other than the idea of
universal law itself. This obviously summarizes Kant’s argument for the categorical
imperative in the first section of the Groundwork (4:401–2). But it has been noticed
less often that Kant also constructs the later Metaphysics of Morals on the same
contrast between negative and positive conceptions of freedom. In his statement of
the “Preliminary Concepts of the Metaphysics of Morals” Kant complicates matters
slightly by characterizing the negative conception of freedom as a “negative principle
of speculative reason” and contrasting this to a positive practical conception of
freedom, but his basic point remains that freedom from the determination of the
will by inclination can only be achieved by the determination of the will by universal
moral laws:
The concept of freedom is a pure rational concept, which for this very reason is transcendent
for theoretical philosophy, that is, it is a concept such that no instance corresponding to it can
be given in any possible experience, and of an object which we cannot obtain any theoretical
cognition; the concept of freedom cannot hold as a constitutive but solely as a regulative and,
indeed, merely negative principle of speculative reason. But in reason’s practical use the
concept of freedom proves its reality by practical principles, which are laws of a causality of
pure reason for determining choice independently of any empirical conditions (of sensibility
generally) [emphasis added] and prove a pure will in us, in which moral concepts and laws
        

have their source. On this concept of freedom, which is positive (from a practical point of
view), are based unconditional practical laws, which are called moral. (MM, Introduction,
section III, 6:221)
Kant embeds his central insight within a summary of the meta-ethical proof strategy
that he had developed in the Critique of Practical Reason, that of arguing that the
reality of transcendental freedom can only be validly inferred “from a practical point
of view” from the validity of the moral law itself, rather than vice versa, but the point
remains that freedom from inclination can only be achieved by the determination of
the will by moral law instead. Kant then develops this insight into a metaphysics of
morals, in which “principles of application” are “inferred from universal moral
principles” with the addition of a few key assumptions about “the particular nature
of human beings” (MM, Introduction, section I, 6:217) concerning our physical
embodiment and terrestrial situation, by arguing that “juridical laws” or duties of
right are conditions for the realization of “freedom in the external use of choice”
while “ethical laws” or duties of virtue are conditions for the realization of “freedom
in both the external and internal use of choice, insofar as it is determined by laws of
reason” (MM, Introduction, section II, 6:220). The final content of Kant’s practical
philosophy is an enumeration of the duties necessary for securing the external and
internal use of the power of free choice in all persons equally, derived from the
fundamental principle of the unconditional value of such free choice.
But there will be no room here for a detailed discussion of the Metaphysics of
Morals,7 so let us return to the Groundwork. As already mentioned, Kant does not
use the phrase “essential ends” in the Groundwork. But we may regard him as having
replaced this concept with the idea of an unconditional good as the goal of morality.
He then analyzes both commonsensical and philosophical conceptions of the uncon-
ditionally good in order to reach the clear and precise formulation of the fundamen-
tal law of morality in the form in which it presents itself to us, that is, the categorical
imperative. In the first section of the Groundwork, “common rational cognition” of
course equates the unconditionally good with a good will, and Kant then identifies a
good will precisely as one that is not motivated by mere inclination but instead by
respect for law (G, Section I, 4:399–400). He then infers that if the good will is not to
be motivated by inclination or “impulse” “nothing is left” to motivate it “but the
conformity of actions as such with universal law” (4:402). Here Kant makes the same
equation between freedom from determination by inclination and determination by
universal law that he had discovered in the 1770s. In the second section of the
Groundwork, Kant constructs a more elaborate philosophical argument, the first
“step” (G, Section II, 4:426) of a metaphysics of morals (the second step of which will
be the inference of principles of application of the universal law of morality in the
Metaphysics of Morals). Here Kant reiterates that “an absolutely good will . . . consists

7
For an approach to the Metaphysics of Morals based on this approach, see my “Kant’s System of
Duties,” in Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom, pp. 243–74, as well as my Kant, 2nd edn (London:
Routledge, 2014), chs 7 and 8. See also the classic Mary J. Gregor, Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant’s
Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963),
and Robert B. Pippin, “Mine and Thine? The Kantian State,” in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 416–46.
       

just in the principle of action being free from all influences of contingent grounds,
which only experience can furnish,” but then adds that since a rational will must
always have an object or goal for the actions that it wills, a will that is to be moved by
universal law in the form of a categorical imperative must have an “objective” or
universally valid and necessary end: “what serves the will as the objective ground of
its self-determination is an end, and this, if it is given by reason alone, must hold for
all rational beings,” “something the existence of which in itself has an absolute worth,
something which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws” and “the
ground of a possible categorical imperative” (G, Section II, 4:427–8). It seems natural
to equate such an “end in itself” and “ground of a possible categorical imperative”
with the “essential end of humankind.” Kant then proposes that it is nothing other
than “the human being and in general every rational being” that exists as an end in
itself (4:428), more precisely that it is “humanity, whether in your own person or in
the person of any other” (4:429) that is always to be treated as an end and never
merely as a means. But by humanity, or rational nature as embodied in human
beings, as we noted at the outset, Kant means nothing other than the capacity to set
oneself an end or ends free from determination by external causes such as inclin-
ations (see G, Section II, 4:437; M, Introduction, section V, 6:387; section VIII, 6:392).
The capacity to set ends freely is thus the necessary or essential end for mankind, and
the ground of a possible categorical imperative in that adherence to the categorical
imperative is what is necessary to realize this end.
The Groundwork illustrates what it means to make the freedom of all to set ends
the essential end for each with its four examples of perfect and imperfect duties to self
and others, which will subsequently be refined into the system of juridical and ethical
duties of the Metaphysics of Morals, and with its conception of the realm of ends, but
there is no room to go into those details here. Instead, we can just linger over the
point that Kant now clearly conceives of the freedom of all as the immediate goal of
morality, rather than conceiving of the freedom of each as his or her own immediate
goal, with the freedom of all only a means to or by-product of this immediate goal.
This well-known passage confirms this point:
If, then, there is to be a supreme practical principle and, with respect to the human will, a
categorical imperative, it must be one such that, from the representation of what is necessarily
an end for everyone because it is an end in itself, it constitutes an objective principle of the will
and thus can serve as a universal practical law. The ground of this principle is: rational nature
exists as an end in itself. The human being necessarily represents his own existence in this way;
so far it is thus a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being also
represents his existence in this way consequent on just the same rational ground that also holds
for me; thus it is at the same time an objective principle from which, as a supreme practical
ground, it must be possible to derive all laws of the will. (G, Section II, 4:428–9)

It is crucial to see that in this passage Kant does not attempt to derive my duty to treat
the humanity (freedom) of others as an end from the undeniable interest of my own
freedom for me or of the freedom of others for them. Rather, he asserts that each
represents his own humanity or freedom as an end for himself “on just the same
rational ground” that holds for all, thus each must recognize that the value of his own
freedom is just the same, no more but also no less, as the value of the freedom of
        

every other. The freedom of all as an objective end is not derived from freedom as a
subjective end for each; rather, freedom as a subjective end for each is derived from
freedom as an objective end for all. This is the same position that Kant had reached
over the course of his development in the preceding decade.
Now it must be noted that Kant admits in a footnote that he has put forth this
“proposition as a postulate,” and says that the grounds for it will be found only in the
final section of the Groundwork. Although is certainly debatable whether the argu-
ment for this proposition that he then offers in Section III to redeem this pledge is
compelling,8 its form is clear enough: it is the same sort of normative essentialism
that we found Kant moving towards in the previous decade, although now reformu-
lated within the framework of the transcendental idealism for which Kant had argued
in the Critique of Pure Reason. That is, while we might have hoped to find the
analytical arguments for the categorical imperative from the common and philo-
sophical conceptions of the will in the first two sections of the Groundwork to be
supplemented by some sort of purely normative argument for the binding validity of
the moral law in the third, what we in fact find is a metaphysical argument that at the
deepest level we just are free wills moved by the purely rational consideration of
universality rather than by inclination. This argument assumes the distinction
between phenomenal appearance and noumenal reality from Kant’s epistemology,
and then identifies the affection of sensibility by objects, thus all determination by
inclination, with the merely phenomenal self, and the determination of the will by
reason, and thus law, with the noumenal self, or our “proper self” (G, Section III,
4:457). The central claim of this argument is that “a rational being must regard
himself as intelligence (hence not from the side of his lower powers) as belonging not
to the world of sense but to the world of understanding” (G, Section III, 4:452) or
reason (in this passage Kant does not distinguish these two faculties as he often does),
and thereby must regard his will as freed by adherence to moral law from any
determination by inclination. Kant’s normative insight that the essential end for
human beings is securing their freedom from determination by inclination through
adherence to moral law is thus transformed into a metaphysical necessity.
To be sure, this argument raises the profound methodological problem of ground-
ing normative ethics on transcendental idealism as well as the equally profound
substantive problem of explaining the possibility of wrong-doing if our authentic self
is in fact free from determination by inclination, but I will not further belabor these
problems here. Nor will I labor the obvious point that, with his appeal to the “fact of
reason,” Kant suppresses this form of argument in the Critique of Practical Reason
without replacing it with something else, and thus in the end may rely solely on his
objections to other approaches to moral theory for the recommendation of his own.
Here I want only to emphasize that this argument is nothing less than Kant’s mature
way of expressing the position he had reached over the course of his development in
the two decades preceding the Groundwork.

8
See my “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Inquiry 50 (2007):
444–64, 497–510, and “Problems with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and its Subsequent
Emendations,” in Jens Timmerman, ed., Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp, 176–202, in this volume Chapter 10.
 5
Kantian Perfectionism

1. Kant and Virtue Ethics

“Virtue ethics” as it is currently understood was not on Kant’s docket, nor was
Aristotle, with whom contemporary virtue ethics is most closely associated, a major
figure in Kant’s historiography of moral philosophy.1 Nevertheless, Kant clearly
rejected several ancient ideas that have been taken up in contemporary virtue ethics,
and did have one criticism of Aristotle that he made on several occasions. First, Kant
began his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by firmly rejecting any idea that
we could characterize our moral obligations through several independent virtues
such as “courage, resolution, and perseverance in one’s plans,” since while these “are
undoubtedly good and desirable for many purposes . . . they can also be extremely evil
and harmful if the will which is to make use of these gifts of nature . . . is not good”
(G, Section I, 4:393), and a good will, as the Groundwork argues, requires a single
fundamental principle of morality to which it freely chooses to conform, in light of
which it can decide when and how to use such “virtues” as courage or perseverance.
But this was not meant as a criticism of Aristotle; rather, the doctrine of the
independence of the virtues was pre-philosophical Greek wisdom, which was criti-
cized by Plato through Socrates’s doctrine of the “unity of virtue” and by Aristotle in
his view that the use of such virtues should be guided by the pursuit of the highest
good for human beings.2 Kant’s doctrine of the good will, which will itself be the
foundation for a conception of the highest good, can thus be seen as a variant of what
was already an ancient critique of virtue ethics. Second, Kant rejected the idea that
virtue should be a habit, which is often associated with Aristotle although Kant does
not mention his name in this context, on the grounds that, first, “a uniformity in
action that has become a necessity through frequent repetition, is not one that
proceeds through freedom, and is therefore not a moral aptitude,” and, second, any

1
On Kant and Aristotle, see Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting, eds, Aristotle, Kant, and the
Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially papers
by T. H. Irwin, Christine Korsgaard, Julia Annas, and the editors; Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of
Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Lawrence Jost and
Julian Wuerth, eds, Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), from which the present chapter is reprinted, and also essays by Marcia
Baron, Allen Wood, and Talbott Brewer, in Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader, eds, The Highest Good
in Aristotle and Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and especially the essay by Robert Louden.
2
See John M. Cooper, “The Unity of Virtue,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1998): 233–74, reprinted
in his Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), pp. 76–117.
   

habit or aptitude that is to lead to morally acceptable results in all circumstances

must be governed by the specific free choice “to determine oneself to act through the
thought of the law” (MM, Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, section XIV, 6:407). That
is, in Kant’s view any habit is worthy of esteem and thus truly virtuous only if it
proceeds out of an act of free choice, and further any general tendency of action will
produce morally proper results only if its exercise is always restricted in light of the
moral law to appropriate occasions. This second point is, of course, the same as the
opening point of the Groundwork.
Finally, Kant’s only explicit criticism of the Aristotelian conception of virtue is
aimed at Aristotle’s doctrine that a virtue is always a mean between two extremes.
This criticism is made several times in the lectures on the metaphysics of morals
recorded by Johann Friedrich Vigilantius in 1793–4, thus almost a decade after the
Groundwork. Kant’s objection to the doctrine of the mean is essentially that it is
question-begging: to know whether too much or too little is being done in some line
of action, one must in fact already know what the morally right amount is, thus one
must presuppose a more fundamental principle of morality than the doctrine of the
mean. And once one has identified this more fundamental principle of duty, then
there is no such thing as doing “too much” to realize it. As Kant is recorded as saying,
Aristotle, in his day, located virtue in the mean between two extremes: courage, for example,
between cowardice and recklessness . . . ; but the rule that we should do the good neither too
much nor too little loses all logical correctness and use in morals. For (1) it leaves the resolution
of the task quite indeterminate, and solves it only by as tautology: the too much and too little of
moral goodness stands related to the conformity of our actions to moral law; and both would
represent a want of conformity . . .

This is the charge that any attempt to use the doctrine of the mean would presuppose
a more fundamental moral principle. Kant then makes the further point that while it
is certainly possible to do less than one’s duty, the idea of doing more than one’s duty
makes no sense: “It is impossible to perform more than our duty, and so in duty one
cannot do too much” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:611–12, 654, 660). While the second of
these claims would require careful reconciliation with Kant’s recognition of imperfect
duties, the first of these points is obviously correct, and one might argue that it was
already conceded by Aristotle himself when he wrote that “a master of any art avoids
excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this—the intermediate not
in the object but relatively to us,”3 for in a moral case that “in us” to which virtue is
the right amount can only be our fundamental principle of morality.
The reason that Aristotle does not enjoy a larger role on Kant’s stage, however, is
that Aristotle is actually a perfectionist rather than a virtue theorist in our current
sense, in whose perfectionism the doctrine of the mean plays only a subsidiary role,
and Kant has a perfectionist target much closer to hand than Aristotle, namely
Christian Wolff and his followers such as Alexander Baumgarten and Moses Men-
delssohn. And while it might seem that there must be great differences between

3
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1106b4–5; trans. W. D. Ross, rev. J. O. Urmson, in Jonathan Barnes, ed.,
The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p. 1747.
  

Aristotle’s pagan perfectionism and that of these Judeo-Christian Leibnizians, Kant is

well within his rights to take a modern rather than ancient exemplar of perfectionism
for his own purposes, since the differences between Aristotelian and Wolffian
perfectionism are not in fact very great, at least from the Kantian point of view.
I will thus comment only briefly on Aristotle’s perfectionism before turning to the
Wolffian variety—on my way to the central point of this chapter, namely that we can
understand Kant’s own moral philosophy as a form of perfectionism, as long as we
are clear about what it is that is supposed to be perfected.
Aristotle begins his ethics by arguing that there must ultimately be some one end
for the sake of which we desire everything else that we do, thus a highest good
(1094a18–22), and accepts the traditional view that this is happiness, which is indeed
desired for its own sake rather than as a means to anything else (1097b14–21). But he
recognizes that to say that we desire happiness is tautologous and uninformative, and
that ethics must in fact provide a substantive account and “rational principle” of what
can best make us happy. His claim is then that “the function of man [is] a certain
kind of life, and this [is] an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational
principle, and the function of a good man [is] the good and noble performance of
these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the
appropriate excellence, human good turns out to be activity of the soul in conformity
with excellence” (1098a12–16). The doctrine of the mean is subsidiary to this aim in
that it supposedly can be used to calculate the amount of various virtues needed as
means to the achievement of this overall goal, but the content of the goal—excellence
in human life—can and must be stated independently of and antecedently to the
determination of appropriate means to it. Human excellence in turn consists of
success in various forms of action, but above all of success in contemplation because
“the activity of wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of excellent activities” and it is
also “the most continuous, since we can contemplate truth more continuously than
we can do anything” else (1177a21–3). Aristotle’s perfectionism is thus the doctrine
that the goal of life is to make ourselves maximally happy through contemplation, to
which other activities are ultimately the means, and that the doctrine of the mean or
moderation applies to the virtues that we must exercise for success in these actions
which are themselves only means to the goal of contemplation.
The premise that the morally good is that which contributes to the realization of
our vocation and that this is in turn identical to that which brings us maximal
happiness also underlies Wolffian perfectionism.

2. Wolffian Perfectionism
The key elements of Wolff ’s philosophical vision are that reason provides insight
into the order of nature created by God, that our moral obligation is to use our reason
and the insight into the order of nature that it provides to do our share in preserving
and promoting that order, and that our recognition of that order through our reason
is God’s final end in the creation of nature. In this section, I focus on the second of
these claims.
Wolff begins his account of reason with what Kant would subsequently call its
“logical use,” that is, its role in the performance of inferences, which he defines as
   

connections among truths: “The art of inferring shows that truths are connected with
one another . . . The insight that we have into the interconnection of truths or the
capacity to have insight into the interconnection of truths is called reason” (Deutsche
Metaphysik, }368).4 But Wolff immediately equates logical insight into connections
of implication among truths with insight into real connections among things, and
indeed illustrates this idea with connections among actions and their consequences:
We say, e.g., that Sempronius has ordered his affairs rationally if he has well considered what
sorts of damage and utility can arise from his actions and accordingly arranged it so that in his
action and omission he is not in contradiction with himself but rather one promotes the other.
Now in what does the reason that he displays here consist? Certainly in nothing other than in the
insight that he has into the interconnection among things, namely into the interconnection of his
actions as well as into their interconnection with other things. (Deutsche Metaphysik, }368)

Thus in his very first illustration of his conception of reason Wolff already points
toward the conception of practical reasoning that is at the core of his ethics: the
fundamental use of reason in practice is to obtain insight into the advantageous and
disadvantageous consequences of our actions, and then to act in accordance with
reason to maximize the former and minimize the latter, thereby perfecting our
condition. But let us proceed here a little more slowly than does Wolff himself.
The key to Wolff ’s view is that reason provides insight into the connection among
things; the connection among things is what constitutes their perfection; so the role
of reason is to provide insight into the perfection of things and guidance for us to act
in accordance with that perfection. The middle premise of this inference is furnished
even before Wolff defines reason itself, and is again immediately illustrated with an
example from the sphere of human practice as well as with one from the sphere of
scientific or technical enquiry:
The concordance [Zusammenstimmung] of the manifold constitutes the perfection of things.
E.g., one judges the perfection of a clock from the fact that it shows the hours and their parts
correctly. But it is composed out of many parts, and all of these as well as their combination is
aimed at its hands showing the hours and their parts correctly . . . If, in contrast, there are any
parts in the clock that hinder it from showing the time correctly, then the clock is imperfect.
The course of human life [Der Wandel der Menschen] consists of many actions: if these all
concord [zusammen stimmen] with one another in such a way that they are finally all grounded
in one universal aim, then the course of human life is perfect In contrast . . . imperfection
consists in contradiction within the manifold. (Deutsche Metaphysik, }152)
Perfection, whether of things or actions, consists in concordance, or as Wolff says a
few sections later, “Perfection consists in sheer order” (}156). Insofar as it is reason
that provides insight into the order of things, then, it will also be reason that provides
insight into the perfection of things and guidance for acting in accordance with the
perfection of things.

4
Deutsche Metaphysik is an abbreviation for Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt,
und der Seele des Menschen, new edn (Halle: Renger, 1751). I have used the German text in Christian Wolff,
Metafisica Tedesca, ed. Raffaele Ciafardone (Milan: Bompiani, 2003). The translations of Wolff are my own.
  

To put it kindly, this characterization of order and perfection remains at the

highest level of abstraction. But Wolff does not leave matters so vague; as should
be expected in a philosophy grounded on the principle of sufficient reason, the order
in which perfection consists is equated with the dependence of perfectly ordered
things as consequences of a ground: “For where there is a perfection, there everything
is related to a common ground, from which one can explain why each is simultan-
eously beside the other or the one follows from the other” (}156). If the logical use of
reason in understanding an inference is to see how the conclusion follows from the
conjunction of premises, then its real use in the comprehension of perfection is to see
how the simultaneous and successive order of things—whether these are other than
human actions or human actions and their consequences—follows—or should
follow—from a common ground.
This characterization is emphasized subsequently in Wolff ’s chapter on ontology,
where he repeats his initial definition of perfection as a “correspondence of the
manifold” (Übereinstimmung des Mannigfaltigen), adds that the world consists of
many corporeal parts, each of which itself has further parts, and draws the conclusion
that “the perfection of the world consists in the correspondence of everything that is
simultaneous or follows from something else with one another, that is, in the
particular grounds, which everything has, always resolving into some sort of com-
mon ground. The greater this correspondence is, the greater is the perfection of the
world also” (Deutsche Metaphysik, }701).
Wolff already states the essence of his thoroughly consequentialist ethics within
this metaphysical framework: the good is that which makes ourselves and our
condition more perfect, and since it is by means of reason that we have insight
into what makes anything perfect, the use of reason to determine what will make
ourselves and our condition more perfect by preserving or promoting the coherence
of our actions and their consequences is the practical role of reason:

That which makes ourselves and our condition more perfect is good. E.g., the art of invention
makes our understanding more perfect, and it is therefore something good. Health makes our
body more perfect, and thus it is likewise something good. Money makes our external
condition more perfect, and thus it is also something good. (Deutsche Metaphysik, }422)

An account of the ways in which we are to use our reason in order to increase the
perfection of our understanding, from which the perfection of our will also follows,
the perfection of our bodies, and the perfection of our external circumstances
furnishes the content of Wolff ’s ethics.
Before we turn to the details of Wolffian ethics, one general point about his
approach can be made. Wolff has defined reason as the capacity to have insight
into perfection as the connected order of things, and reason’s insight into perfection
as the connected order of human actions and their consequences is the basis for
human morality. But the power of human reason is limited, and therefore we can
never have complete insight into the perfection of any sufficiently complicated order
of things. Wolff makes this limitation of human reason explicit in his cosmology:
Since the perfection of the world must be judged on the basis the correspondence of all things,
from the greatest to the smallest, whether they must be judged to be simultaneous or
   

successive, but it is not possible that we cognize all things, let alone have insight into how they
are all concordant with one another; thus we are not in the position to comprehend the
perfection of the world and to explain it completely. (Deutsche Metaphysik, }702)
Our reason provides insight into perfection, but it is not itself perfect, so our insight
into perfection is always limited. In ethics, this limitation of human reason’s ability to
understand the perfection of things means that our knowledge of right and wrong,
thus of what we should do in the concrete and therefore infinitely detailed circum-
stances of actual human action, will also be limited: to do what is right is to do what
maximally perfects our minds, our bodies, and our external circumstances, but since
we cannot have perfect knowledge of what that is, we cannot have perfect knowledge
of what it would be right to do.
This consequence of Wolff ’s conception of reason might seem perfectly reason-
able, indeed it might seem to be a salubrious reminder to avoid excessive confidence
and harshness in our moral evaluation of ourselves and others. But it was clearly a
result to which Kant profoundly objected, and that may be one of the deepest reasons
for his rejection of moral consequentialism whether in Wolffian or any other form.
With this in mind, let us now turn to some details of Wolffian ethics.
At the most abstract level, there are of course great similarities between the moral
philosophies of Wolff and Kant. Like Kant, Wolff believed that the fundamental law
of morality is accessible to pure reason independent of any divine command, and
further that a rational human agent does not need the promise of divine rewards or
threat of divine punishments in order to be motivated to act in accordance with that
law (Deutsche Ethik, }35).5 And Kant would follow Wolff in dividing the substance of
morality into duties to self, duties to God, and duties to others, although ultimately he
would argue that we have no duties to God other than to fulfill our duties to ourselves
and others (see, e.g. MM, Doctrine of Virtue, }18, 6:443–4). But beneath that level of
abstraction, Wolff ’s perfectionist ethics is defined precisely by the presuppositions
that Kant most firmly rejects: consequentialism, naturalism, and intellectualism.
Consequentialism, because in Wolff ’s view the fundamental law discovered by
reason is that right conduct is that which will produce the greatest perfection in
the internal and external condition of ourselves and others, so morality requires that
we use our reason to determine the consequences of our actions for the perfection of
ourselves and others; naturalism, because according to Wolff the determination of
such consequences requires a thorough knowledge of the laws of nature, but the
realization of such consequences is also the inherent tendency of nature; and
intellectualism, because in Wolff ’s view nothing is required in order for human
beings to do the right thing but adequate knowledge of the natural consequences of
their actions, and the only explanation for wrong conduct is ignorance. For Kant, of
course, pure reason tells us to act upon maxims that meet certain formal constraints
regardless, apparently, of the actual consequences of such action, and our motivation to
be moral does not depend upon an assumption that nature itself will attach desirable
consequences to our lawful actions, although ultimately rationality does demand that

5
“Deutsche Ethik” is the nickname for Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von der Menschen
Thun und Lassen, zur Beförderung ihrer Glückseeligkeit, 4th edn (Frankfurt and Leipzig: n.p., 1733).
  

we find a way to see the laws of freedom and the laws of nature as coherent; and of
course for Kant the radical freedom of human action inexorably entails the possibility
of radical evil, that is the choice to flout the demands of morality even in full cognizance
of what those demands are. Thus, Kant is both more of an ethical rationalist than Wolff,
for he believes we can determine what is right and wrong by pure reason alone without
any detailed knowledge of nature, but also less of a rationalist than Wolff, because he
does not believe that the knowledge of the moral law that pure reason affords us can
ever guarantee that we will always do the right thing.
The consequentialist character of Wolff ’s ethics, already stated in his metaphysics,
is asserted again at the outset of his moral philosophy: “the free actions of human
beings promote either the perfection or the imperfection of their internal and
external condition,” but “that which makes our internal as well as our external
condition perfect is good” (Deutsche Ethik, }}2–3). Wolff ’s general concept of what
makes our condition perfect is a formal conception of coherence: “Now if the present
condition is concordant with the preceding and the following and all of these
together with the essence and nature of the human being, then the condition of the
human being is perfect” (}3). But Wolff ’s many pages on our duties to ourselves and
others are filled with concrete examples of how we can improve our knowledge of the
effects of our actions and thereby our will, how we can improve our health, and how
we can improve our external circumstances. These descriptions belie Kant’s claim
that the fundamental principle of Wolffian morality is an “empty and unphilosoph-
ical tautology,” but warrant his claim that Wolff ’s principle is ultimately material and
therefore empirical (CPracR, 5:41).
Wolff himself is quite clear that his consequentialism means that the possibility of
right action depends on detailed knowledge of nature: “Thus if one will judge
whether actions are good or evil, one must research what alterations in our internal
condition of body and soul as well as in our external condition they carry in their
train, and thereby attend to whether the altered condition is concordant with the
essence and nature of the human being, that is, of the body and the soul, and with the
preceding condition, or is contradictory to it” (Deutsche Ethik, }4). He is also explicit
that his principle that what makes actions right or wrong is their natural conse-
quences means that it is not the attachment of divine rewards or sanctions that makes
them right or wrong: “Since the free actions of human beings become good or evil
through their consequence, that is, through the alteration that follows in the inner
and outer condition of the human being, but what follows from them must neces-
sarily come from them . . . thus they are good or evil for and in themselves, and are
not first made thus through the will of God” (}5). The moral law is in the first
instance a law of nature, and can be known and known only through knowledge of
nature (}19); of course, since God is the author of nature, the laws of nature, and
therefore the moral law, are also laws of God (}29). All of this leads Wolff to the
remarkable statement that

A rational human being is a law to himself and beyond natural obligation needs no other; thus
for him neither rewards nor punishments are motivations for good actions and for the
avoidance of evil ones. And therefore a rational person does what is good because it is good,
and refrains from what is evil because it is evil; in which case he is similar to God, in having no
   

superior who can oblige him to do what is good and omit what is evil, but rather does the
former and omits the latter solely through the perfection of his nature. (Deutsche Ethik, }38)

Wolff ’s statement that the rational—and therefore good—human agent is a “law to

himself” sounds much like Kant’s subsequent declaration that “autonomy,” the
“property of the will by which it is a law to itself,” is the “supreme principle of
morality” (G, 4:440). But the similarity is profoundly superficial: for Wolff, the
rational agent can be a law to himself and needs no external law to be moral because
the moral law is completely natural, while for Kant moral autonomy depends upon
the ability to know what is right and wrong and to do it completely independently of
all the mechanisms of nature—as Kant makes clear when he continues that the
property of the will to be a law to itself obtains and can be exercised completely
“independently of any property of the objects of volition.”
A further similarity masking a great difference between Wolff ’s ethics and Kant’s
lies in their treatments of the highest good. This concept has seemed to some to make
no normative contribution to Kant’s ethics,6 but it is clearly deeply rooted in Kant’s
Wolffian and indeed beyond that Aristotelian and Ciceronian inheritance. Wolff
argues that no human being could achieve the absolutely highest good, for only God
can and does possess complete perfection, but that the “highest good for human
beings” consists in “unhindered progress toward greater perfections” (Deutsche
Ethik, }44). But because the law to seek ever greater perfection is in Wolff ’s view
entirely natural, human progress toward the highest good for humans is a natural
consequence of the law of nature itself:
Now since the human being progresses toward ever greater perfection if he directs his action
and omission in accordance with the law of nature, the highest good or the blessedness of
which one is capable will be achieved through the observation of the law of nature and the
fulfillment of the latter is therefore the means through which we attain the highest good or the
blessedness of which we are capable on earth. (}45)
For Kant, however, the moral law is valid entirely independently of the laws of nature
and the decision to be moral can never be guaranteed or explained by natural means.
The fundamental premises of Kantian morality therefore open a great “gulf” (CPJ,
Introduction, section II, 5:175) between the laws of nature and the laws of freedom
that must somehow be closed before the highest good can be restored to the position
it enjoyed so naturally in Wolffian morality. Perhaps the deepest difference between
Kant and Wolff lies in the fact that for Kant the compatibility of human autonomy
and the laws of nature cannot be taken for granted, and that the bridge between
human autonomy and nature can only be constructed within the limits imposed by
Kant’s concepts of practical faith and reflective judgment.
Before I turn to Kant’s response to Wolff ’s form of perfectionism, let me illustrate
the prevalence of this doctrine in Kant’s philosophical environment with a reference
to its occurrence in an even closer contemporary, namely Moses Mendelssohn.
Mendelssohn presents a brief purview of ethical theory in his essay on Evidence in

6
See Lewis White Beck, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1960), p. 245.
  

the Metaphysical Sciences, the prize essay to which Kant’s own Inquiry Concerning
the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality took second place
in 1764 and which, since the two essays were published together, Kant must have
known intimately.7 In this essay, Mendelssohn argues that the fundamental principle
of morality can be known with certainty by three different but mutually compatible
and reinforcing routes. First, one can simply observe “the thousandfold desires and
wishes, passions and inclinations of human beings,” and induce “that they all aim at
the preservation or betterment of the intrinsic or extrinsic condition of ourselves or
another creature.” This observation yields the “general practical maxim, the first law
of nature: make your intrinsic and extrinsic condition and that of your fellow human
being, in the proper proportion, as perfect as you can.”8 The Wolffian and indeed
Aristotelian inheritance of this statement of perfectionism is self-evident. Second,
Mendelssohn holds that the “same natural law can be proven a priori from the mere
definition of a being with free will.” “A being endowed with free will,” he asserts, will
choose “what pleases him from various objects or representations of objects,” and
what will please such a being will in fact be “the perfection, beauty, and order that he
perceives or believes he perceives in the preferred object”—nothing other than the
“utility and sensuous pleasure that the object promises us since both belong to the
perfections of our intrinsic and extrinsic condition” (p. 297). Here Mendelssohn
makes clear the tight connection between perfectionism and hedonism that obtains
within the Wolffian framework and that can indeed be thought of as going back to
Aristotle: perfection in our own activities (intrinsic condition) and our circumstances
(extrinsic condition) is that which makes us maximally happy. Of course, Kant will
radically revise this account of what we can infer a priori from the very concept of a
being endowed with free will. Finally, Mendelssohn claims we can also infer the
“general practical maxim” from the thought that we have been created by God as a
mirror of himself, and thus since it is God’s essence to create perfection, “I conform
to the great final purpose of creation and become an imitator of the divinity whenever
I render a creature, myself or another, more perfect” (pp. 297–8), of course in regard
to either intrinsic or extrinsic conditions. Thus Mendelssohn concludes that “Our
actions are good or evil insofar as they agree with the rule of perfection,” which we
can know either empirically or a priori, “or, what is the same, with God’s intentions”
(p. 299). And following the basic structure of perfectionism going back to Aristotle,
he then adds that “Virtue is a proficiency in performing good actions,” that is, those
that preserve or better the perfection of the intrinsic or extrinsic conditions of
ourselves or others, “and vice [is] a proficiency in performing evil actions” (p. 299),
that is, those that that destroy or diminish the perfection of the intrinsic or extrinsic
conditions of ourselves or others.
Mendelssohn’s concise restatement of the fundamentals of Wolffian perfectionism
thus make clear the only sort of “virtue ethics” that Kant was concerned to combat:

7
For a detailed contrast between the two essays, see my “Mendelssohn and Kant: One Source of the
Critical Philosophy,” originally in Philosophical Topics 19 (1991): 119–52, reprinted in my Kant on
Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 17–59.
8
On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences, in Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans.
Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 296.
   

not one on which a number of different virtues are supposed to be self-evidently

desirable or obligatory, but one on which virtues and vices are the means to the
realization or diminishment of the perfection of our bodily and intellectual condi-
tions and the external conditions on which these depend, a perfection which is in
turn identical with human happiness. As we now turn to Kant, we shall see that what
Kant really rejects is not the abstract concept of perfection as the goal of morality, but
the specific conception of perfection that his contemporaries like Wolff and Men-
delssohn had ultimately derived from Aristotle. What Kant really does is to replace
the perfection of our intrinsic and extrinsic condition as the ultimate goal of virtue
with the perfection of the quality of our will itself—the good will.

3. Kantian Perfectionism
Kant transforms the traditional and Wolffian conception of reason as a power of
insight into connections existing independently of our thought and action into a
conception of reason as a power to create order by our thought and action. Nowhere
are the implications of this transformation clearer than in Kant’s practical philosophy.
But this does not mean that Kant’s moral philosophy cannot be understood as a species
of perfectionism, as long as it is recognized that the role of reason is not to perfect our
condition through greater insight into the available means to do so but to perfect our
own will or power of choice by conforming to our own ideal of rationality.9
Kant transforms Wolff ’s conception of reason as a capacity for insight into
connections that exist independently of us into a conception of it as a power to
create order that does not otherwise exist. Like Wolff, Kant begins by conceiving of
the power of reason in its “logical use” as the capacity to perform inferences with
judgments. But instead of assuming that all the inferences performed by reason
necessarily give us insight into real connections among things, Kant argues that the
unrestricted use of reason to find the condition for something given as conditioned
by means of an inference leads to ideas of that which is completely unconditioned,
through the “principle of pure reason” that “when the conditioned is given, then so is
the whole series of conditions subordinated one to the other, which is itself uncon-
ditioned” (CPuR, A 303–5/B 359–1). In particular, Kant argues that by applying this
principle to three different sorts of series, reason forms the ideas of the self as an
absolute subject of all thoughts, of the world as an absolute whole of all objects in
space and time, and of God as the absolutely necessary ground of all possibilities. But
since we can have theoretical cognition only when a concept, whatever its origin, is
applied to sensible intuition, and because of the infinitely extendable or divisible
character of sensible intuition we can never be given anything absolutely uncondi-
tioned in sensible intuition, Kant concludes that the pure ideas of reason can never
give us theoretical cognition. This is of course Kant’s fundamental criticism of the

9
In Kant’s Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
Gary Banham notes that in his lectures on ethics Kant criticizes Wolffian-Baumgartian perfectionism with
the statement that “ ‘moral goodness consists in the perfection of the will’ ” (p. 32n.; the quotation is from
the Collins lectures, 27:266), but he does not show that Kant’s mature moral philosophy can be seen as
developing this criticism into Kant’s own position. That is what I will now attempt to do.
  

rationalist tradition in philosophy, whether ancient or modern. But even though the
ideas of reason cannot give us theoretical cognition, Kant holds, they can give us
ideals, that is unique conceptions of how reality ought to be rather than determinate
cognition of how it is. Thus Kant argues that while the theoretical use of pure reason
can only lead to metaphysical illusion, the practical use of pure reason generates the
ideals by which we ought to act in transforming the world. In the brief “Canon of
Pure Reason” which is the constructive counterpart to the long but destructive
“Transcendental Dialectic,” Kant states that “Pure reason thus contains—not in its
speculative use, to be sure, but yet in a certain practical use, namely the moral use—
principles of the possibility of experience, namely of those actions in conformity with
moral precepts which could be encountered in the history of humankind” (A 807/B
835). Pure reason gives us not knowledge of the world as it actually is but the ideal of
a moral world, the conception of “the world as it would be if it were in conformity
with all moral laws (as it can be in accordance with the freedom of rational beings and
should be in accordance with the necessary laws of morality)” (A 808/B 836). This
radical reconception of the products of pure reason will lead to Kant’s most funda-
mental departures from Wolff.
Kant’s ideal of a moral world, introduced in the “Canon of Pure Reason” and then
developed throughout his writings in practical philosophy, is the ideal of a world in
which human autonomy is fully realized, that is, a world in which the human will “is
a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition)” (G, 4:440)—a
world in which the will is determined by a law inherent in itself rather than by the
desirability of any object offered to it. The ideal of autonomy is above all the ideal of
the independence of the will from all properties of objects and states of affairs
external to it. In at least one place, Kant explicitly presents this ideal as a goal of
perfection, but of the perfection of our will alone in contrast to the Wolffian goal of
the perfection of our mental, bodily, and external condition. Both in his lectures on
ethics and in published works, Kant offers a fourfold classification of the options for
moral theory arising from the intersection of two distinctions, namely, the distinction
between empirical and intellectual principles for moral theory and that between
internal and external sources of such principles (CPracR, 5:39–41 and MP-Collins,
27:252–5). In this classification, Kant uses chiefly what he regards as modern moral
theories, and provides no place for an ancient-inspired virtue ethics. Moral theories
based on empirical internal principles are theories of self-love, such as that of
Epicurus, who is mentioned only as the ancestor of theories such as those of
Helvetius and Mandeville, or theories of moral sense, such as those of Shaftesbury
and Hutcheson; moral theories based on empirical external principles are those that
see moral norms as arising only through custom, education, or government, such as
the theories of Montaigne and Hobbes; and moral theories based on an external
intellectual principles are those that base moral principles solely on the command or
“will of God,” such as the theory of “Crusius and other theological moralists” (see
MP-Collins, 27:253–4, and CPracR, 5:40).10 Now Kant ordinarily cites Wolff as the

10
In the latter location, Kant cites Mandeville as a representative of the theory that moral norms arise
only from the external empirical principle of a “civil constitution,” while in the former he cites him as a
representative of the view that moral norms arise from the internal empirical principle of self-love.
   

chief proponent of a morality based on the internal but intellectual principle of our
own perfection—and then charges such a theory as being empirical in spite of itself,
because it depends upon an empirical conception of the human condition and how it
should be perfected (CPracR, 5:41), or as vacuous, because it presupposes rather than
provides a moral conception of what should be perfected (MP-Collins, 27:264–5).11
But in his lectures he presents his own moral principle in the position reserved for an
internal and intellectual principle of perfection, but as a principle of the perfection of
choice rather than of condition:12
The second systema morale is the intellectual one. On this, the philosopher judges that the
principle of morality has a ground in the understanding, and can be apprehended completely a
priori. . . . If I consider my free choice, it is a conformity of free choice with itself and others. It is
thus a necessary law of free choice. . . . Yes, the moral law expresses categorical necessity, and
not a necessity fashioned from experience. All necessary moral rules must hold good a priori,
and hence the principles are intellectual. . . . This intellectual principle can take two forms:
1. Insofar as it rests on the inner nature of the action, so far as we apprehend it through the
understanding.
2. It can also be an external principle, insofar as our actions have a relation to a being other
than ourselves.
The latter is the theological principle of morality . . . (MP-Collins, 27:254)
While Wolff ’s conception of perfection is the coherence of our condition at any time
with what precedes and follows it, Kant’s conception of perfection “in the inner
nature of the action” is the “conformity of free choice with itself and others” as the
principle of action. That is, the fundamental principle of morality is that each of us
makes our exercise of our capacity for choice consistent with itself and with the
exercise of that same capacity by others. This principle holds independently of any
empirical principle, thus independently of the desirability of any objects of our
actions. In this sense the ideal of autonomy is the ideal of the perfection of our choice.
This is the most abstract way to describe Kant’s transformation of the Wolffian
conception of the perfection of the practical use of reason. Of course, Kant also
describes his fundamental principle of morality through a series of at least slightly
more concrete principles, the several formulations of the categorical imperative in the
Groundwork. These can also be understood as expressions of reason’s conception of
the unconditioned as ideals for practice rather than as ideas for theoretical cognition.
Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative, “Act only in accordance with

11
Kant is actually discussing Baumgarten rather than Wolff in this passage.
12
There are also numerous notes in Kant’s Handschriftliche Nachlaß from the time of the Collins
lectures (1777–84) and earlier in which Kant presents his moral ideal as the perfection of the will or free
choice. In perhaps the most important of these, from the decisive year 1769–70, Kant writes “There is a free
power of choice which does not have its own happiness as its aim . . . The essential perfection of a freely
acting being depends on whether this freedom is not subject to inclination or in general would not be
subject to any foreign cause at all . . . the perfection of a subject does not depend on whether he is happy but
on whether his condition is subordinated to freedom: so also the universally valid perfection, that the
actions must stand under universal laws of freedom” (R, 6605, 1769–70?, 19:105–6; translation from Kant,
Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 422). Several years later, Kant writes that “the dignity
of human nature lies solely in freedom” (R, 6856, 1776–8, 19:181; NF, p. 441).
  

that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal
law” (G, 4:421), can be understood as reason’s application of the ideal of uncondi-
tional in the sense of universal validity to any particular maxim on which an agent
proposes to act. Kant’s second formulation, “So act that you use humanity, whether
in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end,
never merely as a means” (4:429), can be understood to apply the rational ideal of
unconditional value to the moral agent himself, and also to apply again the ideal of
universal validity insofar as it applies the ideal of unconditional validity to all
persons. And it is through this formulation, further, that Kant’s published presenta-
tion of the fundamental principle of morality connects up with his more informal
presentation in his lectures, for he at least subsequently defines humanity simply as
the capacity to choose or “set oneself an end—any end whatsover” (MM, Doctrine of
Virtue, Introduction, section VIII, 6:392), so that what is being commanded through
the second formulation of the categorical imperative is that the unconditional value
of the freedom of choice be universally respected. Kant then gives two further
formulations of the categorical imperative, although he calls each of these the
“third” formulation at least once. The first of these is the “principle of every
human will as a will giving universal law through all its maxims” (G, 4:432): this
can be understood to express a second application of the ideal of universal validity to
maxims in requiring not just that each maxim on which one proposes to act be
universalizable for all agents but that all of the maxims on which both oneself and all
the other members of the community of agents are to act be conjointly valid, that is,
consistent with one another.13 The second version of the third formulation of the
categorical imperative is the requirement “that all maxims from one’s own lawgiving
harmonize into a possible realm of ends” (G, 4:436), where such a “realm of ends” is
understood as a “whole of all ends in systematic connection (a whole both of rational
beings as ends in themselves and of the ends of his own that each may set himself)”
(G, 4:433): this formulation applies the ideal of universal validity twice, first to the
unconditional value of all rational beings and second to the derivative and therefore
conditional value of the particular ends that such beings choose in the exercise of
their free agency, that is, to the value that particular ends derive precisely from being
determined by that in their agents which itself possesses unconditional value, their
humanity or capacity for choice itself.
Taken together, Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative present auton-
omy as realizable only through a collective choice of maxims that preserves each
agent’s capacity to choose his or her own maxims freely and which prescribes the
realization of the maximally consistent sets of ends chosen by such free agents
because of the value that attaches to those ends precisely in virtue of their having
been freely chosen by such agents. It is in this sense that Kant’s ideal of the perfection
that can be created by reason is that of the perfection of the choices of oneself and
others, in contrast to Wolff ’s conception of the perfection that can be understood by
reason as the perfection of the condition of oneself and others—although under ideal

13
This interpretation of the first version of the third formulation of the categorical imperative,
commonly referred to as the “Formula of Autonomy,” has been proposed by Allen Wood in Kant’s Ethical
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 163–5.
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circumstances the latter sort of perfection should be the consequence of the former,
and thus the “universal happiness” that would consist in the satisfaction of a “whole
of all ends” (see TP, 8:279–80) that is included in Kant’s conception of the highest
good is for him not merely a natural good that is to be constrained by the require-
ments of virtue but a proper consequence of virtue. The doctrine of the highest good
can in fact be considered as Kant’s attempt to incorporate the central idea of
perfectionist ethics from Aristotle to the Wolffians into a proper position in his
own practical philosophy, so I will now turn briefly to that doctrine.
Wolff ’s moral philosophy is based on the assumption of a seamless web connect-
ing human reason, human agency, nature, and God: the human being uses his reason
in order to perfect his natural capacities and conditions and thereby make his own
contribution to the perfection of nature as a whole that has been willed by a perfect
God. Kant’s conception of the fundamental value and the fundamental principle of
morality, in contrast, introduces a radical breach between human morality and
nature: the goal of morality is the perfection of our capacity of choice, not the
perfection of our natural condition or the fulfillment of our natural desires, and—
although it is of course arguable whether he need have thought this—for Kant our
power of choice is free from determination by our antecedent history and condition
in a way that nothing in nature is, an expression of our noumenal character rather
than of our membership in the phenomenal, causal order of nature. For Kant, the
human will is free to choose to perfect the consistency of its choice regardless of even
the mightiest threats and blandishments of nature.14 But Kant did not mean simply
to ignore our natural goal of happiness through the perfection of our condition or to
leave the breach that he had created between freedom and nature entirely unbridged.
Rather, Kant’s argument for the necessity of the highest good as the union of virtue
and happiness and for the necessity of practical faith in the postulates of pure practical
reason as the conditions of the possibility of this highest good is in fact the concluding
argument in each of his three critiques, indeed not merely the concluding but the
culminating argument in each of the critiques. The centrality of this doctrine to Kant’s
thought is also evident in his lectures on ethics, which he typically began precisely by
showing how none of the ancient theories of the highest good15 got the relationship
between virtue and happiness right, thereby making it clear to his students that one if
not the fundamental goal of moral philosophy must indeed be that of getting this
relationship right. So we can begin our discussion of just how far Kant is willing to go
in repairing the breach between freedom and nature that he has introduced into the
Wolffian web with a comment on his theory of the highest good.
It is possible to read some of the things that Kant says about the highest good as
implying that each of us pursues happiness as a merely natural goal that all of us must
constrain or confine within proper limits out of respect for duty.16 But at least later

14
Kant expresses this conception of the freedom of the will in the Critique of Practical Reason, of course,
especially in the “Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason” (5:89–106), but it also
comes to striking expression in his account of the “dynamical sublime” in the CPJ, }28, especially at 5:262.
15
Kant specifically mentions the Cynic, Epicurean, and Stoic accounts of the highest good, but not
Aristotle’s account.
16
Again, see the essay by Ralf Bader in Aufderheide and Bader, eds, The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant.
  

texts such as the essay “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but is
of no use in practice,” the Preface to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
and the Doctrine of Virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals make it clear that Kant really
believes that happiness, to be sure not one’s own “selfish” happiness but “universal
happiness” (see TP, 8:279–80), is not an independent, merely natural goal, but the
object although of course not the motive of morality itself. The argument for such a
conclusion is straightforward, although Kant never states it fully: respecting each
person as an end in himself requires allowing each person to choose his ends freely to
the extent that his so doing is compatible with everyone else’s doing the same; but, as
Kant says in the Groundwork, “there is still only a negative and not a positive
agreement with humanity as an end in itself unless everyone also tries, as far as
he can, to further the ends of others” (G, 4:430); yet happiness just consists in the
realization of ends (the happiness of an individual in the realization of all of the
agent’s ends to the extent that they are consistent with each other, universal happi-
ness in the realization of as many of everyone’s ends as are consistent with each
other); so our duty not merely to respect but also as far as we can to further or
promote the ends of all is nothing less than the duty to promote universal happiness,
as far as we can (although the duty to promote maximal virtue will presumably
remain the duty of each to promote his or her own virtue). Insofar as it has moral
worth this derivative but positive duty will not be motivated by the intrinsic desir-
ability of happiness, whether one’s own or everyone’s, but solely by our respect for
the moral law; but if the moral law requires the promotion of the freely chosen ends
of human agents as part of what it is to respect their freedom of choice, then virtue, or
being motivated by respect for duty, requires the promotion of universal happiness.
I take this to be what Kant meant when he said even in the first Critique that “in the
moral world, in the concept of which we have abstracted from all hindrances to
morality (of the inclinations), such a system of happiness proportionately combined
with morality can . . . be thought as necessary, since freedom, partly moved and
partly restricted by moral laws, would itself be the cause of the general happiness”
(CPuR, A 809/B 837).17 Kant’s final step in the theory of the highest good is then to
suppose that it can only be rational for us to act as our respect for duty requires if
we can believe that it is at least possible for the object of our action from duty to be
realized, or if we can believe that the laws of nature are at least compatible with the
realization of the goal of our action from duty; and this, Kant supposes, we can
believe only if we believe that a “highest reason, which commands in accordance
with moral laws,” is “at the same time the cause of nature” (CPuR, A 810/B 838), or
if “a supreme cause of nature having a causality in keeping with the moral
disposition is assumed” (CPracR, 5:125).
Now Kant makes it abundantly clear in the first two critiques that the belief in the
existence of God engendered by this argument is a matter of practical faith, not

17
Notice that Kant is careful in this sentence to say that the moral world requires abstraction from
inclinations as hindrances to morality; I take this to mean that in a moral world there would be no inclinations
contrary to morality, not that there would be no inclinations whatsoever, for if there were no inclinations
whatsoever then agents would not even have any ends for actions that could survive restriction by morality,
and thus no ends the satisfaction of which could yield happiness.
   

theoretical cognition, “a postulate from a practical point of view” that might even be
expressed by representing “the upright man” as saying “I will that there be a God, that
my existence in this world be also an existence in a pure world of the understanding
beyond natural connections” (CPracR, 5:143).18 This is of course a direct repudiation
of the conviction of Wolff and every other rationalist that we can have theoretical
proof of the existence of God. Moreover, when Kant argues that pure reason must not
only prove the existence of God but also form a “precisely determined concept of this
original being” only from the “supreme principle of its practical use,” he repudiates
not only the Wolffian argument for the existence of God but also the central premise
of Wolff ’s teleology, that our experience of nature can inform us of the “omniscience,
all-beneficence, and omnipotence” of God: for Kant, our only justification for
attributing such properties to God, which go beyond anything that we could ever
experience in nature, is that we must think of God in such terms—and only such
terms—in order to think of him as playing his assigned role of ensuring the
possibility that the happiness commanded by our virtue can actually be realized in
nature (CPracR, 5:126).
Having initially broken all connections between morality and nature, Kant thus
reconstructs a twofold connection between the two. Happiness, the satisfaction of our
natural desire, cannot be seen as either the motivation for morality or its immediate
object, but it can be seen as its indirect object; and since such happiness can only be
achieved within nature, and we must be able to believe that even the indirect object of
morality is possible for our attempt to be moral to be rational, that is, not under-
mined by a conviction of a threat of the impossibility of realizing the goal that it
enjoins upon us even if only indirectly, we must therefore believe that the laws of
nature are at least compatible with human happiness, and have the sort of authorship
adequate to make them such. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant also
argues, although I have not discussed that point here, that the freedom to choose
what duty requires can never be seen as a product of nature, but we can and must see
nature as aimed at producing the discipline or control over our desires that we need
in order to make our free choice to act out of respect for duty efficacious in
the natural world (}83). Kant thus restores humankind to the central position
in the system of nature that we enjoyed in Wolff ’s philosophy, but to a very different
end and in a very different key. For Wolff, all of nature exists to support humankind
in its cognitive role as witness to the perfection of God, and this is the culminating
claim of the single system of metaphysics (Deutsche Metaphysik, }1045). For Kant, all
of nature can be seen as a system aimed at the development of human freedom or
autonomy, but of course nature can never itself produce human autonomy: it can at
most produce a necessary condition for the exercise of human autonomy, namely
discipline over our desires, and the conditions for the realization of the indirect object
of human autonomy, namely happiness. And God comes into this picture not as the
object of our veneration, but only as the putative condition of the possibility of
nature’s service to our own autonomy. Further, Kant reminds us that the image of

18
Kant continues, of course, “and finally that my duration be endless.” I omit discussion of the postulate
of immortality.
  

nature as conformable to our own morality is not a part of speculative metaphysics,

but only a postulate of pure practical reason.
In conclusion, then: In the perfectionist tradition from Aristotle to the Wolffians,
perfection and happiness are directly linked—for Aristotle, human perfection is
defined as that which will bring us greatest happiness, and while in Wolff and his
followers perfection is not initially defined in terms of happiness, it is in fact equated
with the perfections of our intrinsic and extrinsic conditions that lead directly to
happiness. The virtues are then defined as specific means for the realization of
perfection, thus as instrumentally valuable. For Kant, the moral ideal consists in
the perfection of our will, choice, or autonomy, and specific virtues—which I have
not had room to discuss here—are also thought of as means to this end; while
happiness as the perfection of our intrinsic and extrinsic conditions, the chief object
of traditional perfectionism, is reincorporated into his practical philosophy as the
ultimate object but not the motive of virtuous action. So in the end, the deepest
difference between Kantian and traditional perfection is in Kant’s account of moral
motivation, or of virtuousness in the deepest sense. In light of that, perhaps it is
Kant rather than anyone else who should be regarded as the best model for an
ethics of virtue.
 6
Setting and Pursuing Ends
Internal and External Freedom

1. The Greatest Use of Freedom

Kant often describes the goal of morality as the maximization of intra- and inter-
personal freedom, or what, in the lectures on ethics, in the form in which he gave
them from the mid-1770s to the mid-1780s, he calls “the greatest use of freedom . . . the
highest principium of life” (MP-Collins, 27:346), and says that the “moral law”
expresses “categorical necessity” in requiring that “If I consider my free choice”
there must be “conformity of free choice with itself and others” (27:254).1 He further
states that “A rule which is the principle of the possibility of conformity in all free
choice, is the moral rule” (27:257). Kant’s idea seems to be that insofar as any action
affects oneself, to be morally correct it must be an exercise of one’s freedom in a way
that is consistent with the possibility of oneself being able to continue acting freely in
the future, and that insofar as any action affects others it must be consistent with the
possibility of the exercise of their freedom in the present and future by the other
agents whom it affects. For example, suicide is morally prohibited because even
though the decision to commit suicide, considered in isolation, may be a free choice,
it would be a free choice that destroys all further possibility of the exercise of freedom
by its agent; in Kant’s words, “So far, then, as anyone destroys his body, and thereby
takes his own life, he has employed his choice to destroy the power of choosing itself;
but in that case, free choice is in conflict with itself ” (MP-Collins, 27:369). Likewise,
fraud is prohibited because even though my decision to make a false promise, again
considered in isolation, might be a free choice, it is one that would undermine the
free choice of its victim, manipulating him into doing something even though he
could not “possibly agree to my way of behaving toward him” were he informed of
my real intentions. Morally correct choices are thus ones that at the very least, as in
these examples of perfect duties, preserve the possibility of further free choices by
their agents and the others affected by them. The actions required of us by imperfect
duty, I will further suggest, are ones that would promote or expand our freedom of
choice or that of others, by expanding rather than contracting the range of ends they

1
The transcriber of the Collins lectures, Georg Ludwig Collins, matriculated at the Albertina in 1783–4,
and his transcription is dated “Winter Semester 1784–85.” But since it is virtually identical with the Kaehler
transcription from the summer semester of 1777 (see Kant, Vorlesungen zur Moralphilosophie, ed. Werner
Stark and Manfred Kuehn [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004]), but not with the contemporaneous
Mrongovius II transcription, it seems likely that Collins’s notes were copied from some earlier source
rather than being a transcription of what Kant actually said in class that semester.
    

could possibly set, and in that sense they not only do not minimize but also maximize
freedom of choice.
To be sure, Kant does not use the apparently maximizing phrase “the greatest use
of freedom” in the most prominent published statement of his mature moral
philosophy, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. However, the greatest
possible use of freedom is in fact what his statement of the fundamental principle of
morality in the form of his multiple versions of the categorical imperative prescribes
as the goal of morality. Kant begins his exposition of the categorical imperative with
the formula of universal law, because that is what he has derived from his analysis of
the common conception of duty in Section I of the Groundwork and then derives
again from the very concept of a categorical imperative in Section II. However, in
Section II he introduces the formula of humanity as an end in itself as “the ground of
a possible categorical imperative” (G, 4:428), so that seems to me to be the real
foundation of Kant’s moral philosophy. This formulation, of course, states that we
must “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other,
always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (4:429). What this means
naturally depends on what Kant means by “humanity” here. This is a complicated
question, but in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of
Morals, in which he proposes to expound in detail what duties follow for specifically
human beings from the fundamental principle of morality,2 Kant says that humanity
is the feature of human beings by which they alone are capable of setting themselves
ends (MM, DV, Introduction, section V, 6:387), or that “The capacity to set oneself
an end—any end whatsoever—is what characterizes humanity (as opposed to ani-
mality)” (section VIII, 6:392). If we plug this definition into the formula of humanity
from the Groundwork, we get the prescription always treat the capacity to set ends,
any ends whatsoever, whether in your own person or that of any other, as an end, never
merely as a means. And from this we get not only the other formulations of the
categorical imperative as stated in the Groundwork but also the moral rule as stated in
the lectures on ethics, always to seek the greatest possible use of freedom. For if one
must always treat the capacity to set ends in oneself as an end and never merely as a
means, then one cannot set an end for oneself on one occasion in a way that destroys
one’s capacity to set ends for oneself on all other occasions, and one must further
promote this capacity as far as is possible; and if one must always treat the capacity to
set ends in oneself and in any or all others as an end and never merely a means, then
one cannot set one’s own ends in a way that destroys the capacity of others to set their
own ends, or that uses their capacity to set ends merely as a means to one’s own ends,
and one must likewise promote their capacity to set their own ends as far as is
possible for one to do. In other words, one must always use one’s own capacity to set
ends in a way compatible with the greatest possibility of other exercises of this
capacity by oneself and others, that is to say, in a way compatible with the greatest
possible use of freedom.

2
In the Metaphysics of Morals, this is what Kant means by a metaphysics of morals, in analogy to the
metaphysical foundations of natural science, and in contrast to what he had meant by the same term in the
Groundwork, where it had meant the derivation of the absolutely pure fundamental principle of morality
alone; compare G, Preface, 4:390 and MM, Introduction, 6:217.
     

These constraints on our capacity to set our own ends are also what are spelled out
by the further formulations of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork. As we
have just seen, the first and second formulations, the formulas of universal law3 and
of humanity as an end in itself, are the Groundwork’s way of making explicit what the
lectures had expressed by saying that freedom must be exercised in accordance with a
rule (MP-Collins, 27:344): if we stipulate that selecting a maxim is an expression of
what ends we set for ourselves,4 then selecting only maxims that others could also
agree to, thus if they choose select for themselves as well, is the way to ensure that our
own setting of ends is compatible with the exercise by others of their capacity to set
their own ends, or with our making their capacity to set their own ends an end and
never merely a means. But further, since everyone, not just me, is subject to the
categorical imperative, we must all always set our ends only in ways compatible with
the possibility of all of us always freely setting our own ends, so we must all be
committed to “the principle of every human will as a will giving universal law through
all of its maxims,”5 the so-called “formula of autonomy”: we must all in the setting of
all our ends and thus in the selection of all of our maxims select them only in a
mutually consistent way. And this gives rise or “leads to a very fruitful concept
dependent upon it, namely that of a kingdom of ends,” the requirement that in the
determination of our own ends or the exercise of our capacity to set ends we must
always set them only in a way compatible with “a whole of all ends in systematic
connection (a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the ends of
his own that each may set himself ), that is, a kingdom of ends” (G, 4:433): we must
each set our own ends only in ways compatible with treating humanity in every
person, or own or any other, as an end and never merely a means, and that means in a
way compatible with all setting their own particular ends, of course insofar as each
does that in a way compatible with the same general requirement.
So the categorical imperative in its several formulations, or, as Allen Wood has
called it, the categorical imperative as a system of formulas,6 prescribes the exercise of
one’s own capacity to set ends on any one occasion only in a way that does not
undermine but rather expands the possibility of oneself and others freely exercising
that capacity throughout their lives—in other words, the greatest possible use of

3
For present purposes I will not distinguish between Kant’s initial formulation of this as “act only in
accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”
and the reformulation of it, “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law
of nature” (G, 4:421), since in his summation of the formulations of the categorical imperative Kant
himself does not distinguish them either, and invokes the reformulation rather than the original formu-
lation (see 4:436).
4
I put it this way, rather than just equating selecting a maxim with setting an end, because Kant will
argue, in the case of duties of right, that adopting the maxim to observe such duties does not set any more
particular ends for ourselves, but it still depends upon our commitment to treating humanity always as an
end and never merely a means.
5
Kant, G, 4:432.
6
Allen W. Wood, “The Moral Law as a System of Formulas,” in Hans-Friederich Fulda and Jürgen
Stolzenberg, eds, Architektonik und System in der Philosophie Kants (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2001),
pp. 287–306, and “The Supreme Principle of Morality,” in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 342–80, especially
pp. 348–61.
    

freedom. Again, since this requirement applies to the temporally extended lives of
oneself and others, it refers to the exercise of humanity or the ability to set ends in the
empirical world of space and time.
Yet Kant’s transcendental idealism can certainly make it seem as if the act of free
choice that is the locus of moral worth is not something that takes place in the
empirical existence of human beings in space and time. And even when he does write
as if the act of free choice takes place in space and time, his famous description of the
good will in the Groundwork (4:394) can make it sound as if moral worth concerns
only the quality of an agent’s intention and not the outcome of the agent’s action in
the physical world. In these two ways, it can seem as if the freedom with which
morality is concerned is something entirely internal, purely a matter of motivation
and intention. Kant might seem to further such an impression in the Metaphysics of
Morals when he claims that duties of virtue, in contrast to duties of right, are
“internal” rather than “external.”7 By this distinction Kant may seem to mean that
duties of right concern only our external freedom of action, something that takes
place only in the external world of moving bodies without regard to anyone’s
particular ends and therefore, presumably, their capacity to set ends at all, while
virtue and thus presumably duties of virtue concern only our inner, ultimately
noumenal motivation, our motivation by respect for the moral law itself, and thus
have nothing to do with the world of moving bodies nor could be influenced or
restricted by anything that happens there. This would in turn imply that Kant’s
doctrine of right is not grounded in his fundamental principle of morality.
To combat this impression, I want to make two points in this chapter. First,
although compliance with the duties of right can be externally legislated and need
not be motivated by the good will or virtuous respect for the moral law, the very
existence of such rights does depend upon the obligation to treat humanity, as the
capacity to set ends, as an end and never merely as a means. Second, although, Kant
supposes, the fulfillment of duties of virtue can only be motivated by the internal
legislation of virtuous respect for the moral law and our specific duties of virtue not
only, thereby and obviously, also depend upon our fundamental obligation to treat
humanity as an end and never merely as a means, these duties also necessarily
include the obligation to promote external conditions, the perfection of our own
talents, and the happiness of others, that would seem to have more to do with the
ability to pursue rather than set ends; however, I will argue that these duties are
actually part of what is required in order to maximize the freedom of all to set their
own ends. In order to prove the first point, I must show that in spite of the several
senses in which duties of right concern only the external use of our freedom of choice,
they nevertheless depend upon the status of freedom as our capacity to set ends as the
moral end in itself; in order to prove the second point, I must show how in spite of
the internal character of virtuous motivation, our duties of virtue are nevertheless
duties to enhance our freedom of action in the external world.

7
See Kant, MM, Introduction, section IV, 6:219; Doctrine of Virtue, Introduction, section II, 6:383, and
section III, 6:385 (I order and number the sections of the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals as a
whole in accordance with the editions of Bernd Ludwig (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1989) and Mary
Gregor (in Practical Philosophy, 1996).
     

2. Derivations of Duties
In both the published Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 and the 1793–4 lectures on the
metaphysics of morals transcribed by Johann Friedrich Vigilantius, Kant makes it
clear that both duties of right and all ethical duties—a class that is actually wider than
the duties of virtue to promote one’s own perfection and the happiness of others—
derive from the status of humanity as an end in itself. But humanity is only ever
defined as the capacity to set our own ends, not as the capacity to set and effectively
pursue ends (again, see MM, DV, section V, 6:387, and section VIII, 6:392), thus the
derivation from humanity of neither the duties of right, which seem to be duties
concerned only with the freedom of all to pursue the ends of their own choice, nor of
the duties of virtue that also seem concerned with the promotion of the ability of self
or others to pursue their ends effectively, is obvious. Part of what it will take to render
the unobvious obvious is to make it clear that Kant’s insistence that duties of right
can be externally legislated while ethical duties (all of them) can only be internally
legislated concerns only the possible and permissible motivation for the fulfillment of
such duties, not their content. The larger part of what it will take is showing that the
capacities to set and effectively to pursue ends, both of which must be preserved and
promoted in the name of humanity or the greatest possible use of freedom, are not two
separate components of humanity, but are more intimately connected than that:
Limitations on the ability to pursue ends limit what ends may be rationally set, and
conversely the enhancement of the capacity to pursue ends with a reasonable prospect
of success expands the range of ends that may be rationally set and thus expands the
scope of freedom itself.8
Kant defines humanity simply as the ability to set ends, any ends whatsoever. This
means that the moral constraints on what ends we may permissibly pursue and the
moral rule for what ends we must pursue are not already included in the concept of
humanity, but arise rather from the conditions for always treating humanity in both
oneself and in all others as an end and never merely as a means.9 Kant suggests that

8
Thus, Kant never simply says, although I and others have attributed it to him, that humanity
comprises the separate abilities to set and pursue ends, or to set and effectively pursue ends, so that treating
the pursuit of freely chosen ends as an end and never merely as a means, or preserving and promoting the
ability to pursue ends effectively, is just part of, in Kant’s language analytically contained in, the concept of
what it is to treat humanity as an end and not a means. For example, “Kant’s System of Duties,” in Paul
Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 243–74, at
p. 250. This is essentially the interpretation also offered by Robert N. Johnson in Self-Improvement: An
Essay in Kantian Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 110–23. (I will suggest in n. 10 that
Johnson recognizes an alternative basis in Kant, although he does not clearly distinguish it from the present
idea.) So the connection between setting ends and the actual pursuit and capacity for the actual pursuit of
them has to be other than that.
9
I reject the interpretation associated most prominently with Richard Dean that Kant’s concept of
humanity is equivalent to his concept of the good will; see Dean, The Value of Humanity in Kant’s Moral
Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). That interpretation would not only undermine our obligation to
those with less than a good will, as Allen Wood and others have argued, it would also make the derivation
of moral principles from the concept of humanity circular, because a good will is one that acts always and
only in accordance with moral law, which thus has to be presupposed in order to determine the content of
the good will. In Kant’s terminology from the Religion, humanity is actually more like the Willkür of a
rational agent than it is like a good will; of course, Wille or practical reason as such commands that Willkür
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this must be the case in his program for the metaphysics of morals, which explicitly
states that all duties may be derived from the concept of humanity alone. This
program is presented in the published text of the Metaphysics of Morals as well as
in the preceding Vigilantius lectures. In the published text, Kant states that “In the
doctrine of duties a human being can and should be represented in terms of his
capacity for freedom” and that so doing yields “the following divisions,” namely
duties to oneself divided into those founded on “The right of humanity in our own
person” and “The end of humanity in our own person,” and duties to others divided
into those founded on “The right of human beings” and “The end of human beings”
(MM, DR, Introduction, 6:240). He had already suggested a similar division in the
Vigilantius lectures, where he had divided duties into “internal” and “external,” here
meaning by that self-regarding and other-regarding, then divided internal duties into
“strict or internal duties of right, i.e., the right of humanity in our own person” and
“broad or internal duties of virtue, the end of humanity in our own person, or that
end which humanity imposes on us, and which we should therefore possess,” and
likewise divided external duties into “strict or external coercive duties, i.e., the rights
of men in regard to one another” and “broad or external duties of virtue, i.e., ends
towards other men” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:583). In general terms, the duties founded
on the right of humanity would appear to be duties not to destroy or damage
humanity in oneself or in others, while the duties founded on the end of humanity
would appear to be duties to promote humanity in oneself and in others.
There is one immediately apparent problem in this division in light of what Kant
also claims in the published Metaphysics of Morals, namely that “A Strict Right Can
Also Be Represented As the Possibility of a Fully Reciprocal Use of Coercion That Is
Consistent With Everyone’s Freedom In Accordance With Universal Laws” (6:232),
thus that duties of right are defined by the possibility and necessity of their coercive
enforcement: the problem is that in the end Kant does not treat strict duties toward
oneself, deriving from the right of humanity in one’s own person, such as the
prohibition of suicide or self-mutilation, as coercively enforceable, and thus includes
them under the rubric of ethical duties although not duties of virtue proper (see MM,
DV, Introduction, section II, 6:383); he likewise includes certain strict duties to
others, such as the duty not to slander or ridicule them, under the rubric of ethical
duties and in this case even of duties of virtue proper, likewise implying that they are
not coercively enforceable. So the class of duties of right turns out to be much smaller
than the class of strict duties to self and others.
But an apparently deeper problem with Kant’s scheme is that while humanity has
been formally defined only as the capacity to set ends, almost all of the duties Kant
subsumes under the headings of this classifications are duties not to interfere with or
to promote the effective pursuit of ends. This can be seen from a quick review of
Kant’s actual catalogue of duties. Duties of right, although they leave what particular
“end anyone wants to set for his action” entirely to his own “free choice” (MM, DV,
Introduction, section II, 6:382) and concern only “the external . . . relation of one

become a good will precisely by commanding that Willkür should always be treated as an end and never
merely as a means.
     

person to another, insofar as their actions, as deeds, can have (direct or indirect)
influence on each other” (MM, DR, Introduction, section B, 6:230), in fact constitute
constraints on how we may use objects other than ourselves, whether non-human or
human, for the realization of our ends, whatever those might be. Specifically, the
innate right of all to freedom of their person concerns liberties we must allow in the
pursuit of our own ends to others in the pursuit of theirs, such as their freedom of
expression and equal rights before the law (MM, DR, Introduction, 6:237–8), while
acquired right concerns the restrictions we must accept on our own use of non-
human objects, above all land, as well as on the choices and capacities of others
(contract right and rights to persons akin to rights to things), in order to use all this in
ways consistent with the equal freedom of all to the pursuit of their own ends; public
right concerns merely the further rights and obligations that are necessary to make
sure that the institution, namely the state, that is to ensure the satisfaction of the first
two classes of duties of right is itself just. Those duties that should be described as
ethical duties but not specifically duties of virtue include those that proscribe the
termination of one’s own existence, which would of course eliminate the possibility
of one’s setting any further ends as well as of pursuing them, but also those that
proscribe the use or abuse of one’s own body, such as self-mutilation, in ways that
would more apparently injure one’s ability to pursue one’s own ends rather than
one’s ability to set them; and they also proscribe actions toward others, for example
slander, in ways that would compromise their dignity as human beings (but not
obviously their ability to set their own ends, so if anything their ability to pursue their
own ends). But the prescriptive rather than proscriptive ethical duties, the duties of
virtue proper, all seem to concern the promotion of the condition for the effective
pursuit and realization of ends rather than the ability merely to set them: thus, the
prescription of the general goal (for now we are dealing with broad, imperfect duties)
of self-perfection or cultivating one’s talents seems to prescribe the policy of culti-
vating one’s ability to effectively pursue one’s own ends, and the end of promoting
the happiness of others seems to prescribe a policy of helping to realize the ends that
others have set for themselves when their own resources are inadequate, but not to
concern their ability to set their own ends directly. Thus although all our duties are
supposed to be derived from the right or end of humanity and humanity is defined
merely as the ability to set ends, the duties of right proper and the duties of virtue
proper all seem to concern the preservation of the conditions for effectively pursuing
rather than merely setting ends.
Further confusion can be created by Kant’s characterization of the “legislation”
(Gesetzgebung) of duties of right as “external” but that of ethical duties including
duties of virtue as “internal,” for if we think “external” connotes the conditions for the
pursuit of ends and “internal” those for freely setting ends, then that might suggest that
while duties of right should, as they do, concern only the conditions for the effective
pursuit of ends, ethical duties should concern only the free setting of ends—but as
we have just seen at least the duties of virtue proper clearly concern the promotion
for the conditions for the effective pursuit of ends. But at least this concern may be
readily set aside, because this application of Kant’s distinction between external and
internal concerns only the permissible and necessary “incentives” or motivations
for the fulfillment of our duties, not the content of our obligations or their derivation.
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As Kant says, “All legislation (Gesetzgebung) can . . . be distinguished with respect to the
incentive (even if it agrees with another kind with respect to the action that it makes a
duty, e.g., these actions might in all cases be external)” (MM, Introduction, section IV,
6:218–19). Then he argues that “juridical” legislation “does not include the incentive of
duty in the law and so admits an incentive other than the idea of duty itself,” namely an
incentive that “must be drawn from pathological determining grounds of choice,
inclinations and aversions,” and in fact from aversions, i.e. from the threat of coercive
enforcement, for “it is a legislation, which constrains, not an allurement, which
invites,” while where the coercive fulfillment of duties is neither possible nor appro-
priate, then the only possible incentive for the fulfillment of such duties is “the internal
incentive to action (the idea of duty)” itself (6:219). As Kant also says, an “obligation is
assigned to ethics not because the duty is of a particular kind (a particular kind of
action to which one is bound)—for there are external duties in ethics as well as in
right—but because the legislation in this case is an internal one and can have no external
lawgiver” (6:220). Thus the description of juridical duties as external and of ethical
duties as internal has nothing to do with the content of those duties, but only with the
incentive to fulfill them. Moreover, the last quotation makes it clear that ethical duties
can concern external actions as well as internal ones, thus presumably the effective
pursuit of ends as well as merely setting them, while Kant’s further claim that the
fulfillment of juridical duties can but need not be motivated by the internal incentive
of respect for duty itself makes it clear that the issue of the content of duties is
separable from that of the possible or necessary motivation for their fulfillment. Thus
all duties ought to be derivable from the law that humanity should always be treated
as an end and never merely a means even though their fulfillment does not have to be
motivated in every case from respect for that law—indeed, although Kant does not
spell this out, that law itself must allow for and indeed require external legislation or
coercive enforcement in particular cases where sheer respect for it does not suffice to
bring about compliance.
It is the distinction between external and internal legislation that is responsible for
Kant’s inclusion of only a subset of the strict duties grounded on the right of
humanity in others in the category of duties of right and of the remainder of the
strict duties to others as well as all strict duties to oneself self under the rubric of
ethical duties even though they are not duties of virtue proper concerning the
promotion of the end of humanity through self-perfection and assistance in realizing
the happiness of others. Even though Kant does not actually provide an argument for
this, his assumption is that the prohibitions of suicide, self-mutilation, and self-abuse
as well as of slander, arrogance, and ridicule of others cannot be coercively enforced,
perhaps because of lack of standing on the part of anyone other than the self-victim
in the first cases and lack of effective means in the second, and thus that the only
possible incentive for the fulfillment of these perfect or strict duties is the same as that
for the fulfillment of the duties of virtue proper, the ends that are also duties, namely
respect for the moral as such.
But even once we have seen that the internality of the legislation or incentive
available for ethical duties is not incompatible with the externality of the mandated
actions themselves, as must be the case not only for juridical duties, which concern
only how actions might interfere with one another regardless of the particular ends of
     

those actions, but also for the duties of virtue proper, which concern the conditions
for the effective pursuit of ends (self-perfection) or the actual realization of ends (the
happiness of others), we are just forced back to the question of how any duties
regarding the effective pursuit of ends can be derived from the concept of humanity
and the demand to treat it as an end and not merely a means when humanity has
been defined as nothing but the capacity to set ends, any ends whatsoever. It is now
time to resolve that question.

3. The General Duty Not to Restrict Freedom

Unnecessarily
The thought now to be considered may apply most straightforwardly to the duty to
develop one’s own potential talents, but I will argue that it applies equally well to
duties of right, and that although it is not Kant’s explicit explanation of our imperfect
duty of virtue to promote the happiness of others, it could be applied to that case too.
This is the idea that if we are to avoid or minimize constraint on the free selection of
ends, we need to maximize the availability of means to ends, whatever they might be,
or to make sure that our choice of ends is not constrained by the avoidable
unavailability of means rather than just by the constraint of the compatibility
between any one choice of ends and all the rest of one’s own and others’ choice of
ends. The premise for this argument is that just as it is a basic canon of rationality,
reflected in Kant’s principle of the hypothetical imperative, that it is irrational to will
an end without willing an adequate means to that end (G, Section II, 4:417), so is it
also a canon of rationality, indeed derivable from the first by modus tollens, not to will
an end for which there is no available means: willing an end in the face of the
(known) unavailability of any means to it is the very definition of idle wishing as
opposed to rational willing (see CPJ, Introduction, section III, 5:178–9n.). Just as
ought implies can, so I rationally will to ç implies I can ç, and I cannot ç implies I will
not rationally will to ç. This in turn implies that in order to maximize the possibility
for free choice of ends in myself and others, I must do what I can to minimize the
constraints on choice arising from the unavailability of the necessary means to
realizing possible ends.
From this it would follow, first, that in matters of right I must not unnecessarily
interfere with the property or person of others in order not to unnecessarily limit
their own freedom to choose ends, whatever those ends might be, that would depend
upon their freedom of the person or freedom to use their property as they see fit. It
would follow, second, that in the case of my duty to cultivate my own capacities—or
my own non-moral capacities, since the necessity of cultivating of my moral capaci-
ties, self-knowledge and conscience, would not seem to require any justification
beyond my duty to be moral, whatever else that involves—I must not unnecessarily
limit my freedom to choose my ends by having avoidably neglected to cultivate
talents that would have given me the means to realize whatever ends I could
otherwise (and morally acceptably) have chosen. And it would follow, third, that in
the case of duties of love to others, I must not unnecessarily limit their freedom to
choose their own ends by failing to make available to them resources that I could
    

have made available to them (compatibly with my other obligations, of course);

thereby I would of course also promote their happiness, consisting in the realization
of their own ends, though to be sure only indirectly, not as the direct object of my
duty toward them.
On this account we do not need to consider the ability to pursue ends effectively as
a separate part of the essence of humanity, to be treated as an end because it is a part
of humanity alongside the ability to set ends; rather we must simply do whatever is in
our power to avoid unnecessary constraints on the ability to set ends freely, whether
in ourselves or others.10 We can start from the minimal idea of humanity as the
capacity to set ends freely, and then explicate all our duties as conditions necessary to
avoid compromising the exercise of this capacity alone.
Now of course Kant recognizes that not all constraints on our rational choice of
ends are unavoidable. In one of his early notes in his copy of his 1764 Observations on
the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime labeled “On Freedom,” Kant remarks that
“the human being is dependent on many external things,” for example, the availabil-
ity of air, sun, and nourishment, and human beings cannot always control the
availability of such resources, although with their intelligence they can usually figure
out how “to accommodate [themselves] to [the] coercion” of nature, which it is
necessary for them to do “because [they do] not find that it will always accommodate
itself to [their] wishes.”11 If I find myself in a desert, there is no point in setting my
heart on some ice cream—that is the paradigm of an idle wish rather than an act of
rational will; I should instead count myself lucky if I can get some water. More
generally, every choice that we make, no matter how important or how trivial,
excludes some other possible choices: for a trivial example, having chosen to brush
my teeth just once this morning, and with Crest, I cannot also choose to brush them
with Colgate. To forget this truism would be to allow ourselves to become paralyzed
by the thought that every choice eliminates the possibility of some others, the fallacy
of the “man without qualities” in Robert Musil’s great novel of that name. Our duty is
rather to avoid avoidable constraints on the free choice of ends needlessly imposed by
ourselves and others, not the unavoidable constraints imposed by the laws of logic
and nature.

4. The Derivation of Duties from This Idea

Does Kant actually state this idea? He does not state it explicitly, but I do think it is
presupposed by several of his most characteristic arguments for important duties. We
can certainly see it at work in the Doctrine of Right. It is most obviously the basis of

10
Robert Johnson has pointed to this idea in writing of examples of persons who have neglected to
develop their own talents that “By refusing to develop their abilities they thereby employ their practical
reasoning to restrict the ends that they can rationally adopt” or “circumscribe the extent and content of the
ends that they will adopt presently and into the future,” although in my view Johnson does not distinguish
this thought from the idea, as he states it, that “the capacity to set and pursue ends is contained in the
conception of humanity.” See Johnson, Self-Improvement, pp. 89, 94.
11
Kant, Notes in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 20:91–2; translation from
Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and
Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 127.
     

the “universal principle of right,” “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s
freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice
of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law”
(MM, DR, Introduction, section C, 6:230); the essence of right is simply to avoid
placing any constraint on the freedom of others to set their own ends other than the
overriding moral constraint that they too choose their own ends consistently with
this requirement (and when they do not choose their own ends consistently with this
requirement, they can at least rightfully be coerced into acting as if they had; that is
the sense in which juridical legislation is “external”). The idea is then presupposed in
Kant’s inference of the principles of “innate” and “acquired” right from the universal
principles of justice. Kant spells out innate right thus:
Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist
with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right
belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity.—This principle of innate freedom already
involves the following authorizations, which are not really distinct from it,
namely, “innate equality, that is, independence from being bound by others to more
than one can in turn bind them,” “a human being’s quality of being his own master
(sui iuris), as well as . . . being beyond reproach,” and “finally, his being authorized to
do to others anything that does not in itself diminish what is theirs,” even to express a
falsehood as long as it remains “entirely up to them whether they want to believe him
or not” (MM, DR, Introduction, 6:238). The principle of innate right is that we may
do nothing to others that restricts their right to set their own ends and we may do
anything to them, including lying to them, that does not restrict their right to set
their own ends12 (although of course lying to others violates a duty to ourselves); the
point is that in so acting we are restricting our external use of choice with regard to
others and restricting their external use of choice with regard to us so that all may be
free to set their own ends subject to the condition and canon of rationality that they
not be unnecessarily deprived of the opportunity to pursue any ends they might set
for themselves.
This may not make the relation between the freedom to set ends and the avail-
ability of means clear, but I believe that Kant does use the idea I am imputing to him
as a premise in his argument for the “postulate of practical reason with regard to
rights,” which is the basis for his account of the acquired right to property, most
obviously property of the non-human kind although Kant ultimately also owes
us a postulate for the acquisition of property in the will or choices of others (contract
right and the right to persons akin to rights to things). Kant argues that it is rational
for human beings to claim private property, but that they must also find a rightful
way to do so, that is, a way for each to claim private property consistently with the
freedom of others to do so as well. The argument proceeds through the premise that
it would be irrational for human beings to deprive themselves of the control and use

12
Of course, on the subject of speaking falsehood, Kant will later argue that telling a lie violates one’s
duty to oneself to preserve undamaged one’s natural capacity for the communication of truth, even if it does
not violate any duty of right to others; but that is a matter for ethics rather than right; see Kant, MM, DV,
}9, 6:429–31.
    

of non-human property, that is, objects without their own will, because “then
freedom would be depriving itself of the use of its choice with regard to an object
of choice, by putting usable objects beyond any possibility of being used . . . even
though in the use of things choice was formally consistent with everyone’s outer
freedom in accordance with universal laws” (MM, DR, }6, 6:250). Or as Kant put it,
perhaps even more clearly, in his drafts (Vorarbeiten) for the Doctrine of Right,
“That every object of choice [Willkühr] outside of me must be acquirable is an
identical proposition, for otherwise it would not be an object of choice, or freedom
would exclude itself from its use in general, which is a contradiction,” and “no law is
conceivable by means of which free choice as such in external relations would be
made dependent upon corporeal objects . . . precisely because this principle is
opposed to everyone’s freedom.”13 Kant’s thought is not that since we have various
sorts of ends, it would be irrational for us to deny ourselves the use of available means
to those ends for any reason other than consistency with universal law; it is rather
that by denying ourselves the use of objects for any other reason than consistency
with universal law we unnecessarily limit our freedom of choice in the first place; that
is, we deprive ourselves of the freedom to set ends that could only be attained with
those means, and that is itself a violation of the fundamental moral command to
maximize rather than minimize freedom of choice. As in the case of innate right,
Kant’s conception of acquired right concerns our external use of choice, or external
action, but is grounded on the necessity of not unavoidably limiting our freedom to
choose our ends, something more internal.
Kant’s argument here, we should note, is not indexed to individuals, that is, it is
not an argument that it is immoral to deprive oneself of freedom of choice; it is rather
that it is immoral for us to deprive ourselves collectively of freedom of choice by
denying ourselves collectively the use of means to ends we could possibly set for
ourselves; we are thereby under an injunction to establish a system of property rights
collectively. But its premise is so general that the argument should have implications
beyond the prohibition of restricting the freedom of choice of others that may seem to
be the special focus of right. The premise should be able to ground duties to oneself
that do not fall into the sphere of right, and I believe we can see it at work in several of
Kant’s treatments of duties to self. We will also see that Kant gives the idea of duty to
self a collective aspect, including within it a duty to cultivate one’s own talents for the
benefit of others and not just oneself.
Here are a few examples. In the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant states
that “Virtue requires, in the first place, governing oneself” (section XV, 6:407). This
means that one is not to allow “affects and passions” to develop that make reflection
“impossible or more difficult,” rather,
Since virtue is based on inner freedom it contains a positive command to a human being,
namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control and so to rule
over himself, which goes beyond forbidding him to let himself be governed by his feelings and
inclinations . . . for unless reason holds the rein of government in its own hands, his feelings
and inclinations play the master over him. (6:407–8)

13
Vorarbeiten zur Rechtslehre, 23:279, 291.
     

Presumably what Kant means is that one is not to allow feelings and inclinations to
play the master over one’s choice of ends, although of course ends may, perhaps
ultimately must be suggested by feelings and inclinations, and that one is not to make
reflection on what ends to set for oneself impossible or more difficult.14 This is a
negative argument, that one should not let inclination get in the way of one’s freedom
to set one’s own ends rationally, but it is certainly compatible with a complementary,
positive argument that one must also take positive steps to expand one’s freedom to
set one’s ends—by cultivating talents that will make available the means that are
necessary in order to will and not just wish ends.
Kant’s discussions of duties to self in his lectures on ethics also make it clear that the
point of the duties to self other than the cultivation of the directly moral capacities is to
preserve and enhance one’s capacity for free choice. In the Collins lectures, Kant states
the general principle “of duties in regard to the body itself ” thus:
The body must first be disciplined, because in it there are principia by which the mind is
affected, and through which the body alters the state of the mind. The mind must therefore
take care to exercise an autocracy over the body, so that [the body] cannot alter the state of the
mind. The mind must therefore maintain supremacy over the body, so that it may guide the
latter according to moral and pragmatic principia and maxims. (MP-Collins, 27:378)
The last clause again suggests a negative argument that we must take care not just
that the mind does not distort our selection of moral maxims only but that it does not
distort our selection of maxims in general—and since our choice of maxims expresses
our choice of ends,15 this means that our duty here is to make sure that our freedom
to set our ends is not unduly restricted by either neglect or indulgence of the body.
The point is that we must not allow our freedom to set our ends to be restricted by the
condition of our body, not that we must make sure the body is an effective means to
our ends for any other reason than that. A similar point is made in Kant’s treatment
of the duty of “self-possession” in the Vigilantius lectures, where he states that our
duty is “to determine all actions by way of a free choice,” which can be attained “only
by subjecting all [our] powers and capacities solely to [our] free choice,” and even
when actions are “involuntarily undertaken . . . to determine nevertheless, whether he
will make use of them or not, whether he wishes to pay attention to them or abstract
from them, and whether, by the former, he is minded to strengthen them and extend
their consequences, or to distance and destroy their effects” (MM-Vigilantius,
27:626). The point is always to retain our freedom to set our own ends, and even

14
David Forman has recently argued that for Kant a passion, unlike an affect, is itself a product of
choice, though one that subsequently blocks reflection; see “Kant on Moral Freedom and Moral Slavery,”
Kantian Review 17 (2012): 1–32, especially pp. 15–19.
15
Many interpretations of Kant’s conception of maxims have stressed that the full statement of a maxim
includes the statement of the end for the sake of which we are proposing a certain type of action; for example,
Onora Nell (O’Neill), Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian Ethics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1975), pp. 37–8. Kant does not explicitly assert that a maxim always has the form (“To - - - if . . . in
order to ___.” But he evinces recognition that a maxim includes an end in his examples, for instance when he
considers (and of course rejects) the maxim to the effect that when the continuation of life promises more
pain than pleasure then end it in order to avoid that outcome.
    

in the case of involuntary bodily behaviors to put them at the service of our freely
chosen ends if we cannot simply ignore them.
Another point at which Kant’s underlying idea reveals itself in negative form is in
his treatment of miserliness, a subject that fascinated him, perhaps because of a
concern to keep his own tendency to frugality within reasonable limits. On Kant’s
analysis, the essence of miserliness is that it “consists in the desire to possess the
means, without regard for the end that can be attained thereby.” It might seem as if
there is just a failure of instrumental rationality here, a waste of effort to accumulate
means to no end that one has, but I think Kant’s point is rather that the miser allows
his obsession with accumulation to deprive him of his own capacity to set ends:
the want of morality here does not properly lie in the failure to employ these means for any
purpose—that he deprives himself of all amusements, and shares nothing thereof with others, for
their pleasure or use or necessity; it lies, rather, in the principle he has adopted, of retaining in his
possession the means for using, while renouncing any such use. He becomes a mere custodian of
his money or other property, without attaching the smallest use or purpose thereto. He becomes,
therefore, an instrument, a mere means to an end . . . (MM-Vigilantius, 27:659)

The moral failing is that in allowing himself to become a mere means, the miser does
not treat his capacity to set his own ends freely as an end. He has unnecessarily
restricted his own capacity to set his ends freely by his obsessive attachment to what
should be mere means to freely chosen ends.
Still, all these arguments are negative, that one must not indulge in forms of behavior
that unnecessarily limit one’s freedom to set one’s own ends rationally and freely. Does
Kant ever explicitly deploy a positive argument that one must cultivate one’s talents in
order to have the means available that will maximize one’s freedom to set one’s own
ends? He does explicitly deploy an argument already found in Pufendorf ’s Whole Duty
of Man that one must cultivate one’s talents in order to enable others to realize their
ends: for example, in the Vigilantius lectures, Kant says that “In regard to ourselves, the
maxim of duty can be directed only toward rendering [ourselves] perfect, since to
further the happiness of others is an end, the means to which I can furnish no
otherwise than through my own perfection, in order to act in accordance with this
moral aim” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:651).16 But we must defer discussion of our duty to
promote the happiness of others for another moment; our question now is whether
Kant has a positive argument that one must cultivate one’s own talents in order to
expand rather than limit one’s own freedom to set ends.
It might be too strong to say that Kant has an explicit positive argument for the
position I am ascribing to him, but he can be regarded as stating the general principle
for such an argument in the Vigilantius lectures. This comes in a description of two
positive duties to oneself that Kant does not name in the published Doctrine of
Virtue (he says there will be three, but the text breaks off after the second and then
resumes with a discussion of a duty of omission rather than commission regarding
oneself, namely the prohibition of suicide). Kant begins with the duty “To possess

16
See Samuel Pufendorf, On the Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, trans. Andrew
Tooke, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), Book I, ch. V, section I,
p. 70.
     

oneself ” (his treatment of which in the Metaphysics of Morals has already been
mentioned) and says in explication of it that “The human being has the resources
[Vermögen] to employ himself in a purposive way. But he attains this only by
subjecting all his powers and capacities [Kräfte und Fähigkeiten] solely to his free
choice [Willkür], and employing them accordingly” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:626). The
point seems to be that our first-order abilities, Kräfte und Fähigkeiten, need to be
subordinated to our power of choice, and that we have the higher-order ability
(Vermögen) to do that; but if the power of choice is essentially our capacity to set
our own ends, thus our humanity itself, then the claim is that our first-order
capabilities ought to be put in the service of our power of choice generally, or
cultivated on its behalf. They ought not to be allowed to limit our power of choice
but rather ought to expand it. In his description of the next duty, “the duty to govern
oneself,” Kant says that “This involves cultivation of the mental powers [Gemüths-
kräfte] to those ends with which they are compatible, and constitutes, therefore, the
essential in the soul’s resource [Vermögen] or readiness to enlarge and direct the
facultates animi for all moral ends” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:627). This duty is actually
described in narrower terms than the preceding duty of self-possession, for it concerns
only mental powers or facultates animi, not all our powers, and treats them as means to
our moral ends, not all our ends; but by its use of the verb “enlarge” (auszubilden) it
does suggest that the enlargement of our capacities as means is necessary to enlarge
rather than limit the range of our possible ends, and this principle is quite general.17
The same idea is suggested in Kant’s explication in the published Doctrine of
Virtue of “A human being’s duty to himself to develop and increase his natural
perfection, that is, in a pragmatic respect.” Here Kant says that the human being
owes it to himself (as a rational being) not to leave idle and, as it were, rusting away the natural
predispositions and resources [Naturanlage und Vermögen] that his reason can some day use.
Even supposing that he could be satisfied with the innate scope of his resources for his natural
needs, his reason must first instruct him through principles of this satisfaction with the meager
scope of his resources, since as a being capable of ends (making objects into end[s]), he must
owe the use of his powers not merely to the instinct of nature, but to the freedom by which he
determines their scope. (MM, DV, }19, 6:444)

I suggest that we read Kant’s peculiar construction that reason must instruct the
human being, by its principles, “of this satisfaction with the meager scope of his
resources,” to mean that reason must instruct us of the inadequacy of such satisfac-
tion and instead tells us to develop our capacities so that they can serve our freedom
to set our own ends rather than mere instinct. From this it is then not a stretch to
infer that the development and increase of our capacities serves our freedom to set
our own ends by expanding the range of ends we could rationally set for ourselves.
Kant’s inclusion of the modifier “in a pragmatic respect” in the title of the section
could also suggest that we are to develop our means so as to expand our range of
possible ends generally, not just to expand our capacity to set specifically moral

17
And “all moral ends” might mean “all morally permissible ends,” not some special moral ends
contrasted to the rest of our ends.
    

ends—although what morality commands is in fact precisely that we expand our

(collective) capacity to set our own ends generally.
Now we must turn from the duties of right and the duties of virtue toward
ourselves to the duties of love toward others, the duty to promote their happiness
by benevolence, gratitude, and sympathy. Here Kant does not do much to make
explicit the thought that I am attributing to him. His most obvious justification for
the existence of the duty to promote the happiness of others in the face of his own
insistence that a concern for happiness cannot in general be the foundation of the
fundamental principle of morality18 is an application of the universalizability require-
ment of the categorical imperative to one’s own natural rather than immediately moral
interest in one’s own happiness. His argument is that (any) one has a natural desire for
or interest in happiness, but that as a finite rational being self-aware of one’s limited
resources one will also have a natural desire for assistance from others in realizing the
various ends in which one has set one’s happiness, and then that the only moral way for
one to adopt the maxim of seeking and expecting help from others when one needs it
for one’s own pursuit of happiness is by universalizing this maxim and thus being
prepared to extend help to others in the pursuit of their happiness when they need such
help. This argument is simply stated in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue:
The reason that it is a duty to be beneficent is this: since our self-love cannot be separated from
our need to be loved (helped in case of need) by others as well, we therefore make ourselves an end
for others; and the only way this maxim can be binding is through its qualification as a universal
law, hence through our will to make others our ends as well. The happiness of others is therefore
an end that is also a duty. (section VIII, 6:393; see also MM, DV, }27, 6:451, and }30, 6:453)

The reference to self-love introduces the idea of the human being as a finite, natural
rather than purely rational being, who thus has a natural interest in happiness as an
end, indeed a second-order end, comprising satisfaction of whatever first-order ends
he would set for himself, and an equally natural interest in the means to it, including
help from others in case of need. This entirely natural interest in means to one’s own
ends can be moralized, so to speak, only by being universalized, thus by one’s being
prepared to help others with the realization of their ends and thus of their happiness
in cases of need just as one naturally wants them to do for oneself. Thus “When it
comes to my promoting happiness as an end that is also a duty, this must therefore
be”—or more properly include19—“the happiness of others, whose (permitted) end
I thus make my own end as well,” but, Kant stresses, “It is for them to decide what
they count as belonging to their happiness” (see MM, DV, section V, 6:388); by this
he makes clear that our immediate or underlying moral obligation is not to happiness
as such, but to the freedom of all to set their own ends, and that our obligation to
provide others with the means to happiness derives from our obligation regarding
their capacity to set their own ends. Of course, Kant also emphasizes that the duty to

18
See especially G, 4:417–18, and CPracR, Theorem II and Remarks, 5:22–6.
19
As Kant says later, “since all others with the exception of myself would not be all, so that the maxim
would not have within it the universality of a law, . . . the law making benevolence a duty will include
myself ” (MM, DV, }27, 6:451).
     

promote the happiness of others is an imperfect duty—even leaving our permissible

concern for our own happiness aside, none of us could possibly help everyone else
with the realization of even their permitted ends, so we always have to pick and choose
how to help others, and here we can consider whether we actually approve of their
ends. But even with that restriction, we are still to make others’ ends our own, not
impose ours on them, because that would undermine the point of the duty altogether.
The argument just considered is, not surprisingly, also what Kant suggests in his
illustration of the imperfect duty of beneficence following the formulation of the
categorical imperative as the requirement of the universalizability of our maxims in
the Groundwork (Section II, 4:423). An alternative approach, namely that our
obligation to promote the happiness of others follows not indirectly from the
universalization of our natural interest in our own happiness but directly from our
obligation to preserve and promote the capacity of all to set their own ends in the
exercise of their humanity, with happiness simply being what would follow from the
realization of their ends, is suggested by Kant’s second explication of the duty of
beneficence in the Groundwork, following the statement of the formula of humanity:
he begins by restating that the “natural end that all human beings have is their own
happiness,” but then says that “there is still only a negative and not a positive
agreement with humanity as an end in itself unless everyone also tries, as far as he
can, to further the ends of others” (G, Section II, 4:430). In the analogous place in the
argument of the Doctrine of Virtue, his derivation of the “Duty of Love toward Other
Human Beings,” Kant does not initially refer to happiness at all, rather starting his
argument with the statement that “The duty of love for one’s neighbor can . . . also be
expressed as the duty to make others’ ends my own (provided only that these are not
immoral)” (MM, DV, }25, 6:450); the implication that helping others realize their
ends will promote their happiness is left unstated, perhaps because it is so obvious. In
both cases, the argument must rest on the underlying identification of humanity with
the capacity to set one’s own ends, that in turn leading to the thought that the duty to
promote the ends of others follows from the obligation to promote their humanity
itself. This thought is also reflected from Kant’s definition of the realm of ends, which
we are charged to realize by the third formulation of the categorical imperative, as “a
whole of all ends in systematic connection (a whole both of rational beings and of
the ends of his own that each may set for himself )” (G, Section II, 4:433). But the
assumption that humanity is the capacity not only to set but also to realize or
effectively pursue those ends is precisely the premise I have argued Kant never
actually asserts, thus a step is missing from his derivation of our duty to make others’
ends our own, and this approach is less complete than the first, built upon the natural
interest of each in his own happiness plus the demand to universalize. That is why
I have suggested it could be better derived with the help of the thought that providing
others with means to realize their ends actually expands the range of ends they can
rationally set and thus directly supports their humanity as simply the capacity to set
their own ends. The question now is whether Kant ever actually suggests that point in
his discussion of our duty with regard to the happiness of others.
In the early Collins lectures, Kant begins his section on “Duties towards Other
People” by answering the question “What, then, is the source of our obligation to do
good to others on principle?” with the following argument:
    

Here we must survey that worldly stage upon which nature has set us as guests, and on which
we find everything needed for our temporal welfare. Everyone has a right to enjoy the good
things of this world. . . . everyone must so enjoy these good things of life, that he is mindful
also of the happiness of others, who have an equal interest in them, and must not preempt
anything from his fellows. (MP-Collins, 27:414)
This at least makes it clear that our duty toward others concerns the provision of
means to them rather than a direct provision of their happiness itself, but it does not
explicitly say that we are to provide them means to their freely chosen ends rather
than just leaving them some, or that by so doing we actually expand their capacity to
set their own ends.
But two passages in the discussion of duties toward others in the later Vigilantius
lectures may at least point in the direction of the thought I am attributing to Kant. In
one passage, Kant says that “The love for others can be considered in its generality,
and to that extent it rests on this, that our ends coincide with those of others in such a
way that they are able to co-exist together according to the universal rule of duty”
(MM-Vigilantius, 27:673). This at least suggests that our obligation to promote the
happiness of others—the duty of love—actually derives from out obligation to ensure
their freedom to set their own ends, for that is what the co-existence of ends
according to a universal rule requires. But then, some pages later, Kant also says
that the imperfect duty to promote the happiness of others “is incumbent on me only
in regard to the end of humanity.”
It presupposes that I seek to attain the end of humanity, which I must have both in my own
person, and in respect of others, i.e., that I make myself fit, by my acquired perfection, for all
possible ends; then alone can I also promote the perfection of others, insofar as their end lies in
agreement with my own capacity, and they are able and willing to make use of it. The
beginning must therefore come from the cultivation of my own capacity, in that it is only
through my own moral perfection that I put myself in possession of the means to all possible
ends, and can thereby make it possible to employ them. . . . Only so, therefore, can our own
perfection be applied to the happiness of others, and the agent himself become happy in
consequence. (MM-Vigilantius, 27:705)

This complex passage begins with the straightfoward Pufendorfian point that I need
to cultivate my own capacities in order to fulfill my duty to others. Then it becomes
harder to follow. But it seems at least possible to read it as suggesting that just as
I must cultivate my own capacities—my “acquired perfection”—in order to “put
myself in possession of the means to all possible ends,” that is, make myself free to set
ends the possibility of which depends on my having cultivated the means to realize
them, so how I must apply my own perfection to the happiness of others is by my
cultivating means that it will make it possible for them to set all sorts of ends for
themselves—from which their happiness will be the consequence. If the passage can
be read this way, then its point would be that I do not have a direct duty to provide
happiness to others, but rather a duty to provide them means that will expand the
range of ends they can rationally set for themselves, and thereby secure their own
happiness though with my help in this regard. Thus could I most fully treat their
humanity always as an end.
 7
Freedom, Ends, and Duties in
Vigilantius

1. The Essential End of Mankind

This chapter develops the argument of the previous one in more detail on the basis of
Kant’s 1793–4 lectures on the metaphysics of morals, transcribed by his lawyer
Johann Friedrich Vigilantius. But first I review the underlying argument that the
essential end of humankind, which is the same as that humanity that is always to be
treated as an end and never merely as a means, is nothing other than freedom of
choice itself, which I have developed in the preceding chapters, especially Chapter 4.
Thus, in the Collins lectures on moral philosophy dated 1784–5, Kant is recorded
as stating that “freedom according to a choice that is not necessitated to act” is “the
inner worth of the world, the summum bonum,” that the “essential end of human-
kind” is that “as a free agent” a human being “must not be subject to his inclinations,
but should determine them through freedom,” and that “the essential ends of
humankind” (now in the plural, perhaps because in the context Kant is already
thinking of self-perfection and the happiness of others as the ends that are also duties,
as he will later call them) are the “conditions under which alone the greatest use of
freedom is possible, and under which it can be self-consistent.”1 The essential end of
humankind is thus that human beings set their own ends rather than having them
imposed by inclination, and the fundamental principle of morality is that each use his
or her own freedom to set ends subject to the sole constraint that such use be
compatible with the freedom of all to set their own ends. In his 1784 course on
natural right,2 similarly, Kant is recorded as saying that “The inner worth of the

1
Kant, Moral Philosophy from the Lectures of Professor Kant, Königsberg, Winter Semester, 1784 and
1785, by Georg Ludwig Collins, 27:241–471, at 27:344, 345, 346. The close similarity of Collins’s notes to the
earlier transcription by Johann Friedrich Kaehler from the summer semester of 1777, as well as the rather
different opening lectures recorded by Carl Coelestin Mrongovius starting January 3, 1785 (29:597–639),
strongly suggest that Collins copied his lectures or had them copied from an earlier source rather than
taking them himself in class. Since the Collins transcription of Kant’s lectures on anthropology is dated
1772–3 even though Collins was matriculated at Königsberg only a dozen years later, there is evidence in
the case of another course that he purchased an older set of notes or had them copied for himself. The
Kaehler transcription of the lectures on moral philosophy is Kant, Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, ed.
Werner Stark, introd. Manfred Kuehn (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2004).
2
Gottfried Feyerabend inscribed his notes from this course “winter semester 1784,” but according to the
catalog of the university in Königsberg Kant lectured on natural right in the summer semester of 1784.
Either way, the course took place close in time to the lectures on moral philosophy through which Collins
sat. Feyerabend’s notes on Naturrecht are included in the Akademie edition at vol. 27.2.2, pp. 1317–94; a
 , ,    

human being rests on his freedom, that he has his own will,” and that “If only rational
beings can be ends in themselves, they can be thus not because they have reason, but
because they have freedom. Reason is merely a means” (Fey., 27:1319, 1321).
In the Groundwork itself, Kant does not repeat the formulation of the Collins
lectures that freedom is the end in itself that is the inner worth of human beings or of
the world, but instead uses a formulation like the second of those just quoted from
the Feyerabend lectures in saying that it is “rational being” or its instantiation in
human beings as “humanity” that is “an end in itself,” which lies “at the ground of a
possible categorical imperative,” the most fundamental formulation of which must
therefore be “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or that of
any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means” (G, 4:428–9).
But several pages later Kant says that “Rational nature is distinguished from the rest
of nature by this, that it sets itself an end” (G, 4:437), thus implying that the rational
nature or rational being or, in its instantiated form, humanity that is an, indeed the
only, end in itself, is nothing other than the capacity of rational or human rational
beings to set their own ends. Kant makes this implication explicit when, a dozen years
later, he finally follows the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals with the
Metaphysics of Morals itself and defines humanity as that “by which alone” a
human being “is capable of setting himself ends” or as “the capacity to set oneself
an end—any end whatsoever” (MM, DV, Introduction, section V, 6:387; section VIII,
6:392). This makes it clear that the humanity that is the end in itself is nothing other
than the capacity to set ends, any ends whatsoever—subject to the condition, of
course, as already made clear in the Collins lectures, that any use of this freedom be
“self-consistent,” or that any use of this freedom by one person be consistent with the
possibility of the further use of such freedom by that person on other occasions and
by all other persons as well, insofar as their freedom to set ends might be affected by
the other’s use of such freedom. And Kant makes the identity of the freedom that is
the inner worth of mankind and through mankind the world with humanity even
more explicit in the Notes on the Lectures of Mr. Kant on the Metaphysics of Morals
taken by his friend and lawyer Johann Friedrich Vigilantius in the winter semester
1793–4, thus three years prior to the appearance of the published work of that title,
when he says that “Humanity is . . . thought of as pure intelligence in regard to the
capacity for freedom and accountability implanted in man,”3 again having defined

new edition has been published, Stellenindex und Konkordanz zum Naturrecht Feyerabend, ed. Heinrich
P. Delfosse, Norbert Hinske, and Gianluca Sadun Bordoni, 3 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog, 2010–14). An English translation appears in Kant, Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy,
ed. Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
3
Kant, Notes on the Lectures of Mr. Kant on the Metaphysics of Morals, begun October 14, 1793, taken by
Johann Friedrich Vigilantius, Akademie edition, 27:477–732, translation in Kant, Lectures on Ethics,
pp. 249–452, at 27:579. Lehmann’s edition of the Vigilantius lectures in the Akademie edition, published
in 1975, was based on an earlier publication of the original manuscript, now lost, by Emil Arnoldt
(1907–9). The Vigilantius lectures are structured around the same distinction between duties of right
and duties of virtue or ethical duties that divides the subsequent Metaphysics of Morals, but it is striking
that in the lectures Kant is reported as expounding the duties of virtue twice, from 27:541–86 and again at
pp. 600–712. One can only wonder whether Vigilantius did not compile his manuscript from several
sources.
 , ,     

freedom as consisting “only in this, that the agent utilizes his powers at his own
choice,” although “in accordance with a principle of reason” (MM-Vigilantius,
27:594). If humanity is the same thing as freedom and humanity is the end in itself,
then freedom is the end in itself.4 Thus in finally executing his metaphysics of morals
Kant comes back full circle to the original characterization of the fundamental
principle of morality offered in his lectures on ethics two decades earlier, concluding
that “An action is therefore right or wrong, only insofar as it accords or conflicts with
the condition, that the agent’s freedom can coexist with that of anyone else, by
universal laws, or is contrary to them . . . The reason for that is as follows: the
universal law of reason can alone be the determining ground of action, but this is
the law of universal freedom” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:525).
With this background in place, the question to be addressed in this chapter can
now be framed. In beginning his main discussion of duties of virtue in Vigilantius,
Kant begins with perfect duties or officia debita to oneself, and states that the
“duties of humanity” with regard to oneself “flow strictly, unconditionally and
negatively from the concept of freedom” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:601). That all duties,
positive as well as negative, flow strictly and negatively from the concept of freedom
is what we should expect him to say, given his statements that the fundamental
principle of morality is simply the greatest possible use of freedom in accordance
with reason’s requirement of self-consistency or universal law. The question to be
addressed here is to what extent this statement is actually true of Kant’s derivation
of all duties, including positive as well as negative duties to oneself as well as both
duties of right and duties of virtue to others. This is a problem because in the
Vigilantius lectures Kant also says that in the case of duties of virtue, “Apart from
the freedom of the action, there is . . . another principle present, which in itself is
enlarging, in that, while freedom is restricted by the determination according to
law, it is here, on the contrary, enlarged by the matter or end thereof” (MM-
Vigilantius, 27:543), and in light of things that Kant says in the published Meta-
physics of Morals it might seem natural to read this as saying that duties of virtue
depend on an end additional to that of freedom altogether, for example the
happiness of others as an end entirely distinct from their freedom. Although such
a line of thought is by no means alien to Kant, since he sometimes presents
happiness as a merely natural end to be combined with morality in the highest
good (see CPracR, 5:110), what I want to argue here is that the Vigilantius lectures
in particular suggest an interpretation of this passage as saying that while negative
duties to both others and oneself are duties to avoid the restriction of freedom, the
principle of positive duties to others as well as to oneself is that of the expansion of
freedom itself, and thus all classes of duty can in fact be derived from the concept of
freedom combined with some basic facts about the human condition that bear on
the realization of freedom.

4
Lara Denis has argued for a similar equation of Kant’s concepts of humanity and freedom in
“Freedom, Primacy, and Perfect Duties to Oneself,” in Denis, ed., Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 170–91, at pp. 171–3.
 , ,    

2. Strategies for the Derivation of Duties

In the Metaphysics of Morals and the preceding Vigilantius lectures, Kant derives
duties for human beings from the pure a priori and completely universal principle
of morality valid for all rational beings that had been “sought out and secured” in
the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason5 combined with the most funda-
mental facts about our embodiment and emplacement in the world. As Kant says,
in the metaphysics of morals “we shall often have to take as our object the particular
nature of human beings, which is cognized only by experience, in order to show in
it what can be inferred from universal moral principles” (MM, Introduction,
section I, 6:217). In the works of the 1790s, Kant divides the specific duties of
human beings into duties of right to others, which are a subset of our perfect duties
to others, namely those that it is both physically and morally possible to enforce
coercively,6 and ethical duties, which include our perfect duties to ourselves, our
imperfect duties to ourselves and others, and those of our perfect duties to others
that cannot be coercively enforced, such as the duties to avoid defamation and
ridicule of others. Duties of right flow from the Universal Principle of Right, “Any
action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom of choice in accordance with
a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with
everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law” (MM, DR, Introduction,
section C, 6:230), that is, the principle that one may allow oneself as much freedom
of choice and actions as is consistent with the equal degree of such freedom that one
must concede to everyone else. It is easy to see how this principle can be derived
from the “concept of freedom” or its universalization under the requirement of
moral law, and how more specific duties for human beings can flow from it, for
example the duty to establish a rightful system of property given that human beings
need to use the resources of nature that could also be used by others and indeed
often need to use the labor or other resources of each other as resources for their
own ends. It is also easy to see how perfect, negative duties to oneself, such as the
duty not to destroy one’s own freedom by suicide nor compromise it by drunken-
ness or gluttony, could flow directly from the concept of freedom supplemented by
the empirical but indubitable fact that the ability to exercise human freedom of
choice and action is dependent on the continued existence and condition of the
living human body, and thus will be destroyed or impaired by the destruction or

5
In Kant’s words, the “Gegenwärtige Grundlegung ist aber nichts mehr, als die Aufsuchung und
Festsetzung des obersten Princips der Moralität, welche allein ein in seiner Absicht und von aller anderen
sittlichen Untersuchung abzusonderndes Geschäfte ausmacht” (4:392). The derivation of the specific duties
of human beings in a way that adds to the fundamental principle of morality certain basic although
empirical facts about the conditions of human existence, our embodiment and our emplacement on the
finite surface of a sphere, falls under the category of the “other” or further “ethical investigation” to which
Kant refers.
6
Kant does not make the two conditions on the enforceability of duties explicit, but the distinction
I have invoked is standard in the account of perfect duties that he is appropriating from Gottfried
Achenwall; see, for example, Gottfried Achenwall and Johann Stephan Pütter, Anfangsgründe des Nat-
urrechts (Elementa Iuris Naturae), ed. and trans. Jan Schröder (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1995),
Book I, ch. 4, }177, p. 61.
 , ,     

impairment of that body.7 It is less obvious how the imperfect duties to oneself and
others, which Kant specifies as the duties to promote one’s own perfection and the
happiness of others (and in at least one place identifies as the duties of virtue proper, as
contrasted to the broader class of ethical duties that includes the non-coercively
enforceable perfect duties to oneself; MM, DV, Introduction, section II, 6:283), can
be derived from the concept of freedom alone, or from the concept of humanity as an
end in itself where humanity is equated with the freedom to set any ends whatsoever,
even if that concept is supplemented by some basic facts about the human condition.
Indeed, Kant frequently says that these duties are ends that are also duties, thus, as
already suggested, that they depend upon the attribution of certain specific ends to
human beings (MM, DV, Introduction, section I, 6:380–1), apparently ends other
than the end of freedom itself, and that for that reason the derivations of
these duties are synthetic rather than analytic (see MM, DV, Introduction, section
X, 6:396–7). As Kant says in the Vigilantius lectures, “the principia of ethics are not
to be derived from the nature of a man’s person,” that is, presumably, from the
concept of humanity or the equivalent concept of freedom alone, “but must be
unfolded synthetically, because the officia meriti [imperfect duties] can at all times
be appended, merely, to the officia debiti [perfect duties]; in relation to the latter
they are thus at all times ampliative, e.g., cultivation of talents, promotion of the
welfare of others” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:600). In spite of remarks like this, my project
here is to see how far we could get in deriving all the classes of duty from the
concept of freedom alone plus the requisite factual assumptions about human
nature that take us from the groundwork for the metaphysics of morals into the
metaphysics of morals proper,8 and I will argue that the Vigilantius lectures
themselves give us valuable guidance in this project.
There would seem to be at least four ways in which duties might be derived from
the concept of humanity or freedom. First, and this is certainly the most natural
interpretation of Kant’s claims that duties of virtue proper are synthetic and
ampliative rather than merely analytic, duties might arise from the combination
of the moral law with the entirely natural ends of human beings, specifically from
the constraint of the latter by the former. Second, and this might also be a natural
interpretation of the claim that we have a duty to promote the happiness of others,
thus to make their ends in a way our own, duties to promote ends might arise
simply from the fact that those ends have been freely chosen on the assumption
that the unconditional value of the free choice of human beings is communicated to

7
Lara Denis has demonstrated in detail how Kant’s perfect duties to oneself are derived from our
obligation to preserve freedom in Collins, Vigilantius, and the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of
Morals in “Freedom, Primacy, and Perfect Duties to Oneself,” pp. 174–81.
8
In the Groundwork, Kant uses the term “metaphysics of morals” to designate the pure, completely a
priori part of moral philosophy, its derivation of the fundamental principle of morality, which is valid for
all rational beings and contains nothing empirical (see 4:388); in the Metaphysics of Morals, however, he
says that “a metaphysics of morals cannot dispense with principles of application” that takes as their
“object the particular nature of human beings, which is cognized only by experience, in order to show in it
what can be inferred from universal moral principles” (6:217). This is the sense of “metaphysics of morals”
that is used in the title of the work, in parallel to the sense of “metaphysics” in the 1786 Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science, and it is in that sense that I use the term here.
 , ,    

the ends that they have freely chosen, at least insofar as those are consistent with
the fundamental principle of morality, by a principle of transitivity of value. Third,
duties might arise from the fact that humanity should not be equated solely with
the capacity to set ends but rather with the capacity to set and effectively pursue
ends: this would be a natural interpretation especially of the imperfect duty to
cultivate our own talents. And finally, all duties might somehow be nothing more
than the forms of conduct necessary to preserve and maximize rather than
minimize the freedom of human beings to set their own ends. I will argue that
although Kant indubitably employs the first method of deriving some of our duties,
especially our imperfect duty to promote the happiness of others, that is not the
only strategy he employs, especially in the Vigilantius lectures. But, I will argue, it
is not the second or third strategies I have suggested, natural as it may be to impute
them to Kant, by which he supplements the first strategy. It is the fourth, the idea
that if not all of our duties then certainly more of them than might at first be
imagined can be derived “strictly” from the concept of freedom as the forms of
conduct necessary to preserve and expand freedom itself or from humanity as
nothing more than the freedom to set our own ends.
There is, to be sure, some justification for attributing the second and third
strategies to Kant, since he suggests them both in a prominent passage, namely in
his illustration of the derivation of duties from the formula of humanity in the
Groundwork. Kant suggests the second strategy, that we have a positive duty to
promote the realization of ends chosen by persons as ends in themselves just because
those ends have been chosen by persons in the exercise of the capacity that makes
them ends in themselves, namely their humanity or freedom to set ends, in his
foundation of the duty of mutual aid upon the proposition that “there is still only a
negative and not a positive agreement with humanity as an end in itself unless
everyone also tries, as far as he can, to further the ends of others. For, the ends of a
subject who is an end in itself must as far as possible be also my ends, if
that representation is to have its full effect on me” (G, Section II, 4:230). The
representation that is to have its full effect is the representation of the humanity of
others as an end in itself, and the suggestion is that the unconditional value of that
humanity, as the capacity to set ends, includes or confers value upon the particular
ends set by others in the exercise of that capacity—although the value of those
particular ends cannot itself be unconditional, since our obligation to assist
in promoting their realization is conditional upon those ends themselves being
lawful, with our assistance in promoting them being consistent with our other
duties, including the satisfaction of all of our perfect duties, and with priorities
among our imperfect duties, and in some circumstances even with our own
endorsement of those particular ends. Still, the basic idea is that the value of the
capacity to set ends flows to the ends set by that capacity. We might think of this
thought as the complement to Christine Korsgaard’s interpretation of Kant’s
argument for the value of humanity itself: she argues (in the first-person case)
that it makes sense for us to think of our particular ends as having (what can only
be conditional) value only if we assign (unconditional) value to our capacity to set
those ends, and the present suggestion just completes that thought by making
explicit the flow of value from end-setting back down to ends which that argument
 , ,     

presupposes.9 It might be objected that the conditional value of particular ends

chosen does not presuppose and therefore cannot imply the unconditional value of
the capacity of choosing them; but if the unconditional value of humanity were
somehow independently given, there would be no objection to the idea that its
value is transmitted to the ends that it sets, particularly since it could well be argued
that the conditions on the value of those ends themselves also flow from the
unconditioned value of humanity itself. So the present suggestion is not philosoph-
ically problematic; the problem is just that Kant barely develops it beyond this hint
in the Groundwork, and in particular does not call upon it in either the Vigilantius
lectures or the subsequent Metaphysics of Morals in deriving our duty to promote
the happiness of others.
The third strategy I suggested was that humanity should be understood as the
capacity to set and effectively pursue ends, from the second half of which would flow
the duty to develop our capacities to pursue ends, given the empirical but obvious
fact, as undeniable as the very fact that human beings are embodied creatures, that
unlike insects who burst from their cocoons ready to perform all their adult functions
or foals who drop from mares ready to run around, human beings are not born ready
to exercise their potential adult capacities but need to develop them over a long
period of maturation and education.10 The problem with this argument is rather that,
although I and others have attributed it to Kant,11 he barely hints at it even in the
Groundwork. In his derivation of “contingent (meritorious) duty to oneself” from the
formula of humanity, he says that “it is not enough that the action does not conflict
with humanity in our person as an end in itself, it must also harmonize with it. Now
there are in humanity predispositions to greater perfection, which belong to the end
of nature with respect to humanity in our subject; to neglect these might be consistent
with the preservation of humanity as an end in itself but not with the furtherance
of this end” (G, Section II, 4:430). The last part of this quotation suggests that
the “predispositions to greater perfection” are part of humanity itself, thus that the
capacities which, properly developed, allow us to pursue our freely chosen ends

9
See Christine M. Korsgaard, “Kant’s Formula of Humanity,” originally in Kant-Studien 77 (1986):
183–202, reprinted in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp. 106–32.
10
Indeed, this last point suggests that although this thought would obviously explain the duty of each of
us to cultivate his or her own natural talents or “predispositions to greater perfection,” we would also have a
duty to help others develop theirs, to the extent that we can, in other words a duty to provide education to
others (since this would be an imperfect duty, to some relevant others, beginning perhaps with our own
children but not necessarily ending with them). This extension of the duty to perfect talents is important to
note, because in the Metaphysics of Morals Kant argues that we can have only a duty to promote the
happiness of others, not to perfect their talents, because that is something that only they can do (MM, DV,
Introduction, section IV, 6:386), but that is not entirely true: perhaps everyone can perfect only their own
moral predispositions, but people can certainly assist each other in perfecting their natural predispositions
to knowledge and skills—that is certainly what a large part of human culture comprises. And in various
places Kant makes it clear that moral education is part, perhaps the most important part, of education,
which presupposes that moral predispositions need to be and can be developed with the assistance of
others.
11
See Paul Guyer, “Kant’s System of Duties,” in Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected
Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 243–74, for example, p. 250, and Robert N. Johnson, Self-
Improvement: An Essay in Kantian Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for example, p. 94.
 , ,    

effectively should also be considered part of humanity and developed in its name. But
not only is this hint not developed; it might also be different from what is suggested
in the first part of the quote, namely a teleological argument that these natural
predispositions must be developed because that is the end of nature, not because it
is part of the preservation and promotion of humanity as a strictly moral end. Or
perhaps one should say that it is only in the metaphysics of morals, whether the
lecture version or the published version, that the relation between natural conditions
and moral requirements is fully explored; but then one must acknowledge that Kant
does not follow up on this line of thought in either version of the metaphysics of
morals. In the published version, as we saw, he defines humanity strictly as the
capacity to set ends, without any reference to the capacity to pursue them effectively,
and does not seem to use the latter idea in his derivation of duties to oneself.
Sometimes Kant does suggest a purely instrumental account of the duty to develop
our own natural talents. In honor of an earlier proponent of it, one might call such an
account of duties to oneself “Pufendorfian.” For Pufendorf, human beings have a
duty to honor their creator and both a desire for their own preservation and a duty
toward their own preservation, as creatures of their creator. A duty to promote the
well-being of society as a whole follows from the desire and duty for the preservation
of each, because “Man is an animal . . . liable to many Wants; unable to Support
himself without the Help of other of his Kind; and yet wonderfully fit in Society to
promote a common Good,” including for each his own, from all of which it follows
“That EVERY MAN OUGHT, AS MUCH AS IN HIM LIES, TO PRESERVE AND
PROMOTE SOCIETY.”12 Each individual then has a duty to cultivate his own native
endowments, not merely for his own direct benefit, but also to honor God and to
benefit society as a whole, which will indirectly benefit him: “For not being born for
himself alone, but being therefore furnish’d with so many excellent Endowments, that
he may set forth his Creator’s Praise, and be rendred a fit Member of Human Society;
it follows hence, that it is his Duty, to cultivate and improve those Gifts of his Creator,
which he finds in himself, that they may answer the End of their Donor.”13 Pufendorf
thus has an at least in part doubly instrumental derivation of the duty to cultivate
one’s own talents: one needs the help of society as a whole for one’s own preservation,
and then one needs to cultivate one’s own talents for the sake of that society as a
whole. In the Vigilantius lectures, Kant sometimes derives the duty to cultivate one’s
own natural endowments by means of an argument similar to the second if not the
first stage of this instrumental reasoning: one has a duty to cultivate one’s own talents
as a means of fulfilling one’s otherwise grounded duty to promote the happiness of
others. For example, “In regard to ourselves, since to further the happiness of others
is an end, the means to which I can furnish no otherwise than through my own
perfection” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:651) and “both in my own person, and in respect of
others . . . I make myself fit, by my own acquired perfection, for all possible ends”
including “the perfection of others” as well as their happiness (27:705). In such a

12
Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, trans. Andrew Tooke
(1691), ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), Book I, ch. III, paras VII
and IX, pp. 55–6.
13
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Book I, ch. V, para. I, p. 70.
 , ,     

derivation of duties to oneself, however, there is no reference to freedom as an end,

whether one’s own freedom or that of anyone else.
Indeed, it can sometimes seem that Kant’s argument for our duty to promote the
happiness of others is itself instrumental, and that his overall argument for our
imperfect duties to promote our own perfection and the happiness of others thus
has the same structure as Pufendorf ’s larger argument. Kant begins the (first)
discussion of ethics in the Vigilantius lectures with the distinction between the
“principium ethicum, which is purely formal,” and the “principium ethices, which is
material.” By the former, which concerns only “the disposition from which the action
is supposed to arise,” he means that ethical duties can be enforced only by the
motivation to “Act according to the law for the law’s sake, or [to] do your duty
from duty.” By the material principle, which “itself determines the action that is to be
done” rather than its motive, Kant means the particular duties to oneself and
others.14 But at first Kant describes only the principle underlying our ethical duties
to others, which he states as “Act so towards other men, that you can will that the
maxim of your action might become a universal law.” He then continues:
Here, then, the object is not universal freedom, but will in relation to the universal will. This
universal will consists in the universal end of all men, and is called love for others, the principle
of well-wishing, directed to the universal end of happiness.
It is, in fact, impossible for a man to will that the universal law of freedom should exist and
be exercised, when it would run counter to the universal end of mankind. His own will compels
him, in that case, to make no use of his legitimate freedom, since otherwise, by his own law, he
would have to deprive himself of universal co-operation. He can thus will morally only that
which is in accordance with the universal end of man, namely happiness. (MM-Vigilantius,
27:541)

This might make it sound, first, as if the end of promoting happiness does not arise
from the duty to preserve and promote freedom at all, but arises independently, from
another source, which if it is not freedom can only be nature, and that if anything our
duty regarding freedom can actually be limited by our duty to promote happiness.
Kant certainly cannot mean that, since he makes it clear, especially in the Vigilantius
lectures, that the fulfillment of our imperfect duties, which include the duty to
promote happiness, is always subordinate to the fulfillment of our perfect duties,
which are duties to preserve freedom: “imperfect duties always succumb to perfect
ones, just as several imperfect duties outweigh a single one” (MM-Vigilantius,
27:537).15 Yet even with this point clarified, the passage might still suggest that the

14
The distinction between formal and material that Kant is making here is thus the same as that which
he makes in the published Doctrine of Virtue between specific duties of virtue and the general obligation to
be virtuous; see my essay “The Obligation to be Virtuous: Kant’s Conception of the Tugendverpflichtung,”
Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2010): 206–32, also in book form in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr.,
and Jeffrey Paul, eds, Moral Obligation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 206–32; reprinted in
this volume as Chapter 13.
15
See also 27:600–1, where Kant says of officia meriti or imperfect duties that “Such things can be a duty
only if they can coexist with the observance of strict duties,” and 27:669, where he says that “since the officia
debiti contain the necessary condition . . . only fulfilment thereof first affords freedom to fulfil other duties
and enlarge one’s dutifulness.”
 , ,    

duty to promote the happiness of others arises only from one’s own natural end of
happiness combined with the recognition that promoting the happiness of others is a
naturally effective means to the realization of one’s own happiness: the remark that
by failing to exercise one’s own freedom on behalf of the “universal end of mankind,”
that is, the desire of all for their own happiness, one would “deprive himself of
universal co-operation” might be taken to mean that one’s only reason for promoting
the happiness of others is to ensure that others will be ready to cooperate with one in
the realization of one’s own happiness when circumstances call for that. That would
be a strictly instrumental reason to make the happiness of others one’s own end. And
then the argument for the development of one’s own potential talents might also
seem purely instrumental: Kant says that “In regard to ourselves, the maxim of duty
can be directed only towards rendering perfect, since to further the happiness of
others is an end, the means to which I can furnish no otherwise than through my own
perfection” (27:651). Indeed, if furthering the happiness of others is itself only a
means to the end of one’s own happiness, the perfection of one’s own talents would
be doubly instrumental, or mediately instrumental: sometimes directly the means to
one’s own happiness, sometimes indirectly so, as the means to the happiness of
others which is however only a means to one’s own happiness.
It should be clear, however, that this is not what Kant means. While it is no doubt
true that cooperating with others in the realization of their happiness can be an
effective means to the realization of one’s own, what Kant finally makes clear in
the published Doctrine of Virtue is that it is morally permissible—consistent with the
requirement of acting only on universal law or universalizable maxims—to seek the
assistance of others in the realization of one’s own happiness, as anyone is naturally
liable to want to do in the natural course of affairs, only if one is willing to
universalize the maxim that one should be able to enjoy the assistance of others in
the pursuit of his own happiness, thus only if one is willing to assist others just as one
would like to be assisted by others in the pursuit of one’s own happiness. For there
Kant deduces the statement that “I want every one else to be benevolent toward me;
hence I ought also to be benevolent to them” from the preceding statement that “every
morally practical relation to human beings is a relation among them represented by
pure reason, that is, a relation of free actions in accordance with maxims that qualify
for a giving of universal law” (MM, DV, }27, 6:451). In other words, one should be
cooperative with others not (merely) because that is the prudent way to secure (or at
least increase the probability of ) their cooperation with oneself, but because that is
the only morally acceptable way in which to seek their cooperation, something that
one will inevitably naturally desire at some point or other.
Nevertheless, this line of thought still derives the duties to promote the happiness
of others and to perfect one’s own talents, at least insofar as the latter is the means to
the former, only by premising a natural desire for happiness in addition to the purely
moral value of freedom.16 The question remains whether there is a way to derive all

16
This is also evident in many of Kant’s presentations of the argument for the highest good as the
complete end of morality, as is particularly clear in the recently republished analysis by John Silber; see his
Kant’s Ethics: The Good, Freedom, and the Will (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2012),
especially ch. V, “The Highest Good as the Material Object of Moral Volition,” pp. 152–72.
 , ,     

of our duties from the concept (or value) of freedom alone, what I have called the
fourth strategy for the derivation of duties. As I have suggested, the Vigilantius
lectures offer a number of hints toward such a derivation.

3. Deriving Duties from Freedom Alone

Kant suggests one picture with a statement like this: “en générale . . . all duties of right,
and the concepts to be formed of them, must be derived analytically from the concept
of freedom, whereas all duties stemming from an end have to be demonstrated
synthetically, merely, from the determination of human nature” (MM-Vigilantius,
27:583). But he also says that “all obligation rests on freedom itself, and has its
ground therein as far as freedom is regarded under the condition whereby it can be a
universal law” (27:523). My question now is whether all of the particular classes of
duty that Kant recognizes in his metaphysics of morals can be derived in accordance
with the latter rather than the former statement.
The division of duties that Kant employs in the published Metaphysics of Morals is
between duties of right, which are a subset of our perfect duties to others, and ethical
duties broadly speaking, which include our non-coercively enforceable duties to
ourselves, and our imperfect duties to both ourselves and others, the duties of self-
perfection and of the promotion of the happiness of others, that is, the duty of love,
which are also not coercively enforceable. Only the latter, imperfect and non-
coercible duties, are duties of virtue proper. (Under the imperfect duties to others
Kant also includes what he calls the duties of respect, the duties to avoid arrogance,
defamation, and ridicule, though it is not clear why, as negative duties or duties of
omission, these are not perfect rather than imperfect duties—they call for the
avoidance of certain behaviors without room for any exceptions or latitude—nor
does Kant explain why these are not to be coercively enforced.) In the Vigilantius
lectures, Kant suggests a somewhat different classification, for instead of lumping our
negative and perfect duties to ourselves along with our imperfect duties of self-
perfection, although distinguishing the latter as duties of virtue within the broader
class of ethical duties, Kant instead characterizes them as duties of right, though to
ourselves and internal rather than to others and external—even though he also says
that only the latter are “coercive, or genuine officia juridica,” while for the former “no
external legislation is possible” but only an “inner one” or “self-coercion” (MM-
Vigilantius, 27:582, 587). This classification makes its own kind of sense, because
both the coercively enforceable perfect duties to others and the non-coercively
enforceable perfect duties to oneself can be grouped together as duties not to destroy
permanently or temporarily the freedom of humans, whether oneself or others,
insofar as that is compatible with the equal freedom of others, in accordance with
the universal principle of right. “All rights are based on the concept of freedom, and
are a result of preventing damage to freedom in accordance with law,” Kant says
(27:587), and the perfect duties to self can be considered the “right of humanity in
our own person” (27:592).17

17
Denis also notes Kant’s discussion of perfect duties to self as a kind of duty of right in Denis,
“Freedom, Primacy, and Perfect Duties to Oneself,” pp. 178–9.
 , ,    

(i) It is easy to see how external duties of right or duties of right toward others
are analytically derived or flow directly from the concept of freedom: the universal
principle of right is, after all, the principle to claim only as much freedom for oneself
as is compatible with universal law, or with the universality of law, which is to say
always to allow others as much freedom as one claims for oneself. “An action is
therefore right or wrong, only insofar as it accords or conflicts with the condition, that
the agent’s freedom can coexist with that of anyone else, by universal laws, or is
contrary to them” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:525). But taken in its full generality, the
principle of right also means that one must claim no less freedom for oneself than
anyone could claim compatible with equal freedom for all others, in other words it is
a principle to maximize not only the freedom of others but also of oneself, to the
degree compatible with the maximization of freedom for all.
What does this mean when we interpret freedom or the humanity from which the
right to freedom flows specifically as the freedom of each to set his or her own ends?
In considering one case of wrongful action, one that could be enforced by law and
thus be an officia juridica proper, Kant asks what would be wrong with not repaying a
rich man “the money advanced, if is a burden to you, and he thereby incurs no
significant loss?” He answers that acting on this maxim would be “a contradiction of
the action with the law itself,” which would be a tautology if the law he meant were
the law to repay debts; but obviously what he means is that action on such a maxim
would contradict the principle of right, or the principle of allowing everyone, oneself
included, the maximum freedom compatible with equal freedom for all. To see why
this is so, one must presuppose the complement of what Kant adduces in the
Groundwork as the principle of hypothetical imperatives: this is the principle that
if one wills an end then, rationally, one must also will a sufficient means to it
(G, Section II, 4:417), and its complement is that it is rational to will an end only if
some adequate means to it is available, otherwise one is not willing at all but merely
wishing. Assuming this premise, then, refusing to repay the loan to the rich man
would contradict the principle of right because if one’s proposed maxim were to be
universalized, that is, freely adopted by all as it must be able to be if it is to be
rightfully adopted by you, then “nobody would lend to another” (MM-Vigilantius,
27:532), and by willing that to be the case one would thereby have restricted one’s
own freedom of action, that is, one’s own freedom to set ends, by depriving oneself
of the ability rationally to set any end the only means to which would be a loan.
Willing a maxim the universalization of which would contradict the possibility of
acting upon it oneself deprives one of the ability to set certain ends for oneself,
thereby limiting one’s freedom to set ends. The “right of humanity” in oneself as
well as in others prohibits doing that.
But the more obvious cases of internal duties of right are those which damage one’s
own freedom without obviously damaging the freedom of others. The first such duty
that Kant considers, in both the lectures and the published text, is the duty to refrain
from suicide and self-mutilation. These acts are prohibited because “A human being
cannot dispose over his own substance, for he would then himself be the master over
his very personality, his inner freedom, or humanity in his own person” (MM-
Vigilantius, 27:601). In other words, one cannot destroy the capacity to set ends
 , ,     

that is located within one. But in the lectures more than in the published text, Kant
also repeatedly emphasizes the prohibition of self-enslavement, because that would
be a surrender of one’s ability to set one’s own ends although not necessarily the
destruction of one’s own life (though it would take disposal over one’s own life out of
one’s hands). Thus he says that “Freedom consists only in this, that the agent utilizes
his own choices, in accordance with a principle of reason; now anyone who ceded
himself, with all his powers, to the disposition of another, and thus voluntarily
enslaved himself, would alienate this freedom; he would treat his person as a thing,
and this he cannot do” (27:594), and that one “cannot dispose over the causality of
humanity, i.e., of freedom, insofar as this is outer freedom, in opposition to . . . inner
freedom . . . He cannot therefore rob himself of his freedom, which would happen if
he were willing to hand over the totality of his forces and powers for the arbitrary,
absolute, unpermitted use of another” (27:601–2). Kant’s contrast between “inner
freedom” and “outer freedom” in the last passage might make it sound as if the
person who would enslave himself to another might retain his ability to set ends and
just be surrendering his ability to pursue effectively the ends that he sets for himself,
and thus might seem to imply the prohibition of self-enslavement only given the
bipartite definition of humanity as comprising both the abilities to set and to pursue
ends that I previously said Kant does not actually employ. But since, again, one can
rationally will an end only if one has adequate means to achieve those ends,18 a
person who gives up control of his powers to another also destroys or restricts his
freedom to set his own ends. That is what the right of humanity in one’s own person
demands that one not do.
Other forms of conduct short of complete self-enslavement are also prohibited
because they (voluntarily) compromise one’s freedom to set one’s own ends. Of
course, as we already know from the Groundwork, obtaining loans by false promises
is prohibited, but Kant actually issues a more general injunction against borrowing
on the ground that “To incur debts . . . involves a lowering in the value of one’s own
person, in that the debtor gives authority to the creditor to treat him arbitrarily (by
extending the scope of his duty) . . . The debtor is put into the position, that with every
call he will be expected to bring something” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:605). In other
words, by incurring debt one restricts one’s freedom to set one’s own ends and
gives some of one’s powers over to the creditor’s freedom to set his own ends,
whatever they might be. Kant likewise objects to begging because “It is a human
being’s obligation to exert himself to the utmost to remain a free and independent
being in relation to others; but as a beggar he depends upon the whims of others, and
sacrifices his self-sufficiency” (27:605); in other words, the beggar fails to maintain to
the maximum extent possible his freedom to set his own ends. And yet in another case
that Kant frequently visits in the lectures, Kant characterizes miserliness as a violation
of the right of humanity in oneself.19 “The miser merely collects resources, but
eschews every method of employing them,” or “possesses money, and thus a means

18
Or at least takes oneself to have those means; but a person in a condition of self-enslavement is hardly
likely to be ignorant that he lost his powers to pursue his own ends.
19
Kant gives more air time to the fault of miserliness in the lectures than he does in the published
Metaphysics of Morals, where he devotes only one paragraph (}10) to the prohibition of avarice.
 , ,    

of attaining all ends, but does not attempt thereby to become more perfect, since he
renounces every use of it. He therefore contradicts himself in determining his own
action” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:606). This might make it sound as if in failing to use his
money in any way that would increase his self-perfection, the miser violates his
imperfect duty to self-perfection, which we are not yet discussing; but Kant’s remark
that the miser “contradicts himself in determining his own action” suggests that even
more generally the miser is unnecessarily compromising his ability to set his own
ends freely, thus compromising his own humanity. Kant suggests the same general
point when he also writes that miserliness “consists in the desire to possess the
means, without regard for the end that can be attained thereby” (27:659). Perhaps
one could object that undertaking the project of collecting rather than expending
resources is an end that one could freely set for oneself, but Kant’s assumption is
clearly that money is by definition merely a means to possible ends, and that by
devoting oneself exclusively to the accumulation of what is a mere means one is
perforce restricting or surrendering one’s capacity to set ends freely.
It should now be clear how the coercively enforceable duties of right towards
others and even the non-coercively enforceable but still perfect duties of right toward
humanity in oneself are duties to avoid destroying or damaging others’ or one’s own
freedom to set ends. Let us now turn to the more controversial cases of the imperfect
duties of self-perfection and happiness of others, which Kant himself has often
suggested do not flow from the concept of freedom alone but has, as we saw, also
suggested do so flow.
(ii) In the published Metaphysics of Morals, Kant explains why the perfection of
others cannot be our duty without really explaining why our own perfection is. He
then divides the objects of self-perfection between “cultivating one’s faculties (or
natural predispositions), the highest of which is understanding” and “the cultivation
of one’s will (moral cast of mind), so as to satisfy all the requirements of duty” (MM,
DV, Introduction, section V, 6:387). In both the published work and the lectures,
Kant lavishes attention on the cultivation of the moral capacities of self-knowledge
and conscience, and his discussion of conscience in the lectures is particularly
illuminating; but we can also say that our duty to cultivate these faculties is
second-order, that is, we need to cultivate them in order to be able properly to fulfill
all our first-order duties, or at least our first-order ethical duties, where no external
coercion is available, but they do not by themselves tell us anything about the
contents or source of those first-order duties. So we need to see in particular how
the duty to cultivate our natural rather than moral predispositions derives from our
duty with regard to our own humanity or capacity to set ends directly, if it does. We
might also note that in the published work Kant first includes the duties to cultivate
self-knowledge and conscience among the perfect duties to oneself (}}13–15), which
are otherwise the negative duties not to destroy, injure, or stupefy oneself or to lie or
fall victim to avarice, but then again includes the duty to “increase” one’s moral
perfection among the imperfect duties, not on the ground that this duty is not
entirely determinate but on the ground that human beings can only strive for
moral perfection but not attain it, at least in this life (}}21–2). This repetition is
confusing, since in neither place does Kant explicitly refer to what might be involved
 , ,     

in moral self-perfection other than the perfection of self-knowledge and conscience,

namely the perfection of virtue itself, as strength of will (Willkür?), nor does he
explain why the perfection of that is always inevitably imperfect (though it is). In the
lectures, this confusion is not present. As we have already seen, in the lectures the
negative duties entailed in not destroying or damaging one’s own freedom and thus
one’s own humanity have also been hived off as internal and non-coercively enforce-
able duties of right, so they are not dealt with under the rubric of self-perfection. All
of this leaves the duty to perfect our various natural capacities, divided in the
published Metaphysics of Morals into the duties to cultivate our “spirit,” or under-
standing and reason, our “soul,” or supporting intellectual powers such as memory
and imagination, and our bodily strength and facility (}19), to be derived from the
concept of freedom itself.
As earlier noted, there are passages in the lectures in which Kant derives the duty
for the perfection of one’s not directly moral capacities instrumentally, as the
perfection of the means needed for the promotion of the happiness of others and
oneself. This passage, now quoted more fully than before, suggests that thought:
In regard to ourselves, the maxim of duty can be directed only towards rendering perfect, since
to further the happiness of others is an end, the means to which I can furnish no otherwise than
through my own perfection, in order to act in accordance with this moral aim. For perfection
as such, and taken as genus in abstracto, is completeness, suitability of a thing to all kinds of
ends, or formal perfection in relation to every material perfection that one can enumerate
singly in regard to all the capacities of mind or body. In specie, here, in the moral sense,
perfection is the conformity of all our powers with the end of humanity, i.e., happiness; and if
our actions are directed to seeking our own perfection for the happiness of others, they
conform to the end of humanity. (MM-Vigilantius, 27:651)

However, another passage suggests a very different argument. Here Kant says that
In regard to our own person, humanity is an ideal, to which we owe the duty of perfecting
ourselves, so that we may fulfill the duties that it imposes on us. Now cultivation itself is
applied to an inner capacity of the soul, by whose essential nature man attributes a free person
to himself, and which is thus the personality of man, as a being endowed with freedom. So all
duties that are incumbent on him in regard to his own person take account of him as
noumenon, or as a being that acts in freedom . . . (MM-Vigilantius, 27:626)
There is no mention of happiness here, only of freedom, so the duties that are to be
derived from “humanity as an ideal” must be duties concerned with the preservation
or promotion of freedom.
Kant then continues that the duties that follow from this basis “can be reduced to
three general determinations,” namely, first, “To possess oneself, i.e., to determine all
actions by way of a free choice. . . . For man has a capacity to employ himself in a
purposive [zweckmäßig] way. But he attains this only by subjecting all his powers and
capacities solely to his free choice, and employing them accordingly” (MM-
Vigilantius, 27:626); second, “The duty to govern oneself,” which “involves cultivation
of the mental powers to those ends with which they are collectively compatible, and
constitutes, therefore, the essential in the soul’s capacity or readiness to enlarge the
 , ,    

facultates animi for all moral ends”—and then there is a gap in Vigilantius’ notes, and
the third “determination” is not explicitly mentioned. And when the text resumes,
Kant is discussing the impermissibility of suicide, which is of course a duty of self-
preservation rather than self-perfection, so there is obviously a missing transition and
there is no way to gauge how much material is missing. But in his discussion of the two
“determinations” that our notes do include, Kant states that the duty of perfecting
our (non-moral) capacities of spirit, soul, and body is necessary in order to determine
all our actions by way of free choice or to employ all our capacities in a purposive way;
in the second determination, he says that we must enlarge the faculties of our soul for
all moral ends, but these phrases in the first determination suggest that we must
enlarge the faculties of our soul for all ends, without restriction, thus that the latter
phrase should be understood as “all morally permissible ends.” And what can this
mean? Not that we must cultivate our faculties in order to be able to achieve our ends,
as he says later, but that we must cultivate them in order to expand rather than
contract our room for choice of ends. Why would this in turn be so? Because, again, by
the general principle of reason according to which we can rationally will only those
ends for which we have adequate means, failing to cultivate our natural predisposi-
tions to talents and capacities limits our possible choice of ends, while cultivating
those predispositions, precisely by expanding the means available to us, also expands
the range of ends we may rationally choose. In other words, perfecting what might
seem like mere means to ends already chosen or given in fact enhances our freedom
to choose ends, or perfects our freedom itself. The freedom to set ends might seem
like something entirely internal, as the opening of the passage presently under
discussion seems to say, entirely independent of the question of whether means to
realize those ends are available in the external world, but freedom is not independent
of external conditions in that way, rather the scope of our freedom of choice depends
on the availability of means to the ends we might want to be able to choose.
The principle of the imperfect positive duty of self-perfection is thus, on this
approach, the complement to the perfect negative duty not to destroy or limit one’s
own freedom of choice: just as miserliness, for example, sacrifices the freedom to set
ends to its obsession with the accumulation of means, self-perfection develops our
natural capacities as means to expanding our freedom to choose our own ends. On
that note, we can now turn to the question of whether our imperfect positive duties
toward others can also be derived from the concept of freedom rather than from
that of happiness.
(iii) Of course Kant explicitly describes our positive duty of virtue or “duty of
love” toward others as the duty to promote their happiness in the Metaphysics of
Morals, and as we have already seen frequently describes it in the same way in the
preceding lectures. This is a duty that arises from our own natural desire for or
natural end of happiness, the natural desire of others for their own happiness, and the
requirement that we act only on universalizable maxims and thus seek assistance for
others in the pursuit of our own happiness only if we are willing to assist them when
an appropriate occasion arises. The freedom of the others whose happiness we are to
promote does not seem to play a role in this argument. There is, however, a role for
freedom built into even this conception in the form of Kant’s requirement, stressed in
 , ,     

the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue and also expressed in his anti-paternalist
theory of the state, that we promote the happiness of others only in accordance with
their own conceptions of happiness, not in accordance with ours: “It is for them to
decide what they count as belonging to their happiness,” although it is also “open to
me to refuse them many things that they think will make them happy but I do not, as
long as they have no right to demand them from me as what is theirs” and, presumably,
I also have other ways in which to fulfill my imperfect duty to promote the happiness of
others—which, given the nature of the human condition, I surely always will (MM DV,
Introduction, section V, 6:388).20 But this says only that preservation of the other’s
freedom to choose his own ends is a necessary condition on the promotion of
happiness, as of course it must be if the preservation of freedom is the principle of
our perfect duties to others as well as to ourselves and perfect duties always trump
imperfect duties. It does not say that the duty to promote the happiness of others
itself derives from an imperfect duty to promote or expand the freedom of others.
And it would be difficult to find an explicit statement of the latter in the Vigilantius
lectures, because in fact these lectures say virtually nothing about the general duty to
promote the happiness of others beyond what we have already seen. Instead, where
we might expect a discussion of this general duty, the lectures instead turn almost
immediately to our imperfect duties to others who stand in particular relations to us,
especially our parents, our children, and our friends, his discussion of which Kant in
turn connects to his discussion of our duties with regard to our spouses. This is
striking, because while in the Metaphysics of Morals Kant discusses our duties to
spouses and children under the rubric of acquired private right, his placement of his
discussion of these relationships under the category of our imperfect duty to others,
thus duties of virtue, in the Vigilantius lectures suggests that while of course we have
a duty to promote the happiness of mankind in general, in fact the characteristic
objects for the fulfillment of our imperfect duty to others are those to whom we stand
in special, indeed intimate relationships: it is in our relationships to those close to us
that most of our moral lives occur, not in our relations to strangers. And in Kant’s
discussion of these relationships in the Vigilantius lectures, promoting the moral end
of freedom is indeed more clearly the source of our duties than promoting the merely
natural end of happiness.
Thus, Kant writes about parental duty toward children that “the rearing of
children up to the point of self-sufficiency, i.e., an education so ordered that the
children thereby obtain contentment with their lot, and pleasure in their existence, is
an opus supererogationis on the parent’s part, a thing superadded, a kindness which
involves something meritorious” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:670). This is a remarkable
statement in several ways. First, Kant’s claim that the duty of education is super-
erogatory might seem implausible: although it arises from his premise that perfect
duties are always negative duties not to harm while imperfect duties, the fulfillment
of which is meritorious, are positive duties to benefit, the line between not harming
children by withholding some reasonable amount of education and positively bene-
fiting them by providing an adequate or more than adequate education seems fuzzy,

20
For Kant’s political anti-paternalism, see, for example, TP, 8:290–1.
 , ,    

to say the least. But what seems most important in the passage is its suggestion that
the aim of education is to make children capable of self-sufficiency, and that their
happiness is to result from their self-sufficiency. Throughout Kant’s discussion of
duty to self, self-sufficiency is closely linked to and one of the forms of freedom: self-
sufficiency consists in not allowing oneself to become dependent on external objects
and on others, thus retaining the ability to set one’s own ends (see MM-Vigilantius,
27:652–3), but also in developing the means to satisfy possible ends and thereby
enhancing one’s freedom to set one’s own ends. This is what parents (and no doubt
other adults, ranging from grandparents and guardians to teachers to taxpayers)
must help children develop, and then, Kant suggests, the happiness and contentment
of the children will follow, because contentment lies in exercising one’s own freedom
and happiness follows not just from having one’s ends satisfied but in satisfying ends
one has chosen for oneself. In other words, our fundamental imperfect duty to
children is to enhance their freedom, and the enhancement of their happiness is
primarily a consequence of that.
In the lectures, Kant immediately follows his discussion of our duty to educate our
children with a discussion of friendship. Kant uses the word “freedom” only once in
the discussion of friendship that concludes the “elements of ethics” in the published
Doctrine of Virtue (}}46–7), and does not use it at all in his extended discussion of
the topic in the Vigilantius lectures (27:675–86). In the latter discussion, he begins by
characterizing friendship as “reciprocal” “well-wishing love to others” (27:675–6)
and continues by characterizing the “reciprocal enjoyment of humanity” that takes
place in friendship as “mutual relation in regard to capacity, and the satisfaction of
the power and need so typical of human being[s] to stand together, to communicate
not only their feelings and sensations to one another, but also their thoughts”
(27:677). Here Kant does not explicitly connect the concept of humanity to the
capacity to set ends, although no doubt it is implicit in the concept of mutual well-
wishing that friends want to promote the freely chosen ends of each other because
those are freely chosen ends. This is also implicit in Kant’s requirement that “Those
who love” in friendship be “equals; well-wishing, love and friendship differ from
favor in this respect. The ability, that is, to promote the other’s well-being, and do
him good, must be the same in both . . . inter superiores et inferiores no friendship
occurs” (27:676). The reason for this restriction is that when a superior confers a
benefit on an inferior, the freedom of the latter is restricted in a way that the freedom
of the former is not: the inferior will feel the need to return a favor he cannot afford,
or that will force him to give up some other end in a way that the original conferral of
benefit by the superior did not force him to give up anything equivalent, and so on; in
some way or other, the inferior will suffer a loss of freedom that the superior did not.
But perhaps most important, Kant’s rationale for the importance of sharing thoughts
and feelings in friendship is ultimately that this enhances the freedom to set ends of
each friend. Kant writes:
For the possession of a friend affords pleasure only in that the need to communicate our
feelings and thoughts can be satisfied quite unconditionally and unrestrictedly, without reserve
or any seeking for advantage, and thus without interest. Only that pure interest which is the
end of this inclination converted to a need, namely to perfect our acquirements [Kenntnisse] by
 , ,     

communicating, rectifying and determining them through the judgment of others, is the one
pure goal that must lead us to friendship. This is all the more beneficial, in that we cannot
rectify circumscribed ideas and thoughts in any other way than by sharing them, and should
this not occur, we are never secured against errors . . . (27:683)
Our “pure interest,” at least according to Kant’s moral theory as a whole, can only be
to preserve and promote our own freedom and that of others to set ends. What this
passage then argues is that to do this as best we can—and thus to maximize our
freedom to set ends—we need our judgments—judgments about what ends would be
best for us, what ends would be most moral, that is, most compatible with and
beneficial for the ends of others as well, and what means would be most effective for
our ends—to be as well informed as they can be, and that reaching such a level of
clarity is not something we can do on our own, but something we can do only
through frank and open discussion with people we respect and trust to have both our
own interests and those of mankind at large at heart. That is what friends are for: to
enhance the freedom of each but also to assist each in enhancing the freedom of all.
Kant also suggests such a conclusion in his striking comparison of friendship to
marriage. Kant’s view of marriage is much too large a subject to address adequately
at this late stage of the present chapter,21 but one point will suffice for present
purposes. In his discussion of friendship in the Vigilantius lectures, Kant says that
“It is somewhat the same” in friendship “as in marriage,” namely each is “communal
possession of one person by the other, or reciprocal possession, i.e., union of their
person as to moral disposition. . . . each mutually shares in every situation of the
other, as if it were encountered by himself; and this, indeed, by laws of moral
freedom” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:677). This is very general, but what Kant stresses in
his discussion of marriage in the Metaphysics of Morals, where it comes in the
Doctrine of Right, not the Doctrine of Virtue, is that marriage is the only way to
avoid treating oneself as well as another as a mere means to pleasure in sex, a mere
thing, because while in marriage it might initially seem as “one person is acquired by
the other as if it were a thing,” since “the one who is acquired acquires the other in
turn . . . in this way each reclaims itself and restores its personality” (MM, DR, }25,
6:278). Since the contrast to using oneself and the other as a mere means is treating
both oneself and the other as an end, and that in turn means allowing each to set his
or her own ends as freely as possible consistent with the equal freedom of the other,
this must mean that marriage does (or can) turn sex into an exercise of freedom: by
extending freedom to the other to set his or her own ends in having sex, the other
controls his or her own sexual inclinations by this moral concession, and thereby
transforms his or her own sexual conduct from a mere gratification of inclination
into an exercise of freedom. Marriage is thus a vehicle for transforming acting on
inclination into an exercise of freedom. It is this feature of marriage that can also be
found in friendship, where for example the selection of pastimes or a place for dinner

21
For valuable discussions, see Barbara Herman, “Could it be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and
Marriage?”, in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds, A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason
and Objectivity (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), pp. 49–67, and Kyla Ebels-Duggan, “Against Beneficence:
A Normative Account of Love,” Ethics 119 (2008): 142–79.
 , ,    

that might otherwise be a matter of mere inclination, although presumably less

fraught than the choice of sexual practices, can still be transformed into an exercise
of freedom of each by the concession of freedom to the other that underlies any
agreement achieved through mutual communication and deliberation.
This discussion of friendship and marriage allows me to conclude with a point
about Kant’s distinction between duties to self and others, and to some extent about
his distinction between duties of right and of virtue as well: namely, that these
distinctions are abstractions, and that in real life how we treat ourselves and how
we treat others, as well as how we preserve freedom and how we enhance freedom,
are typically intertwined. In a friendship and in a marriage, we typically enhance our
own freedom and that of the other at the same time, thereby fulfilling duty both to
self and other at the same time. And in marriage but presumably in friendship as well,
we both preserve or protect and promote and enhance the freedom of both ourselves
and others at the same time. Further, the cultivation of our natural predispositions to
skill, knowledge, and so on is necessary both to protect and to enhance the freedom
of both ourselves and others; it is not merely a means to achieving ends that are
independently and antecedently set, but a necessary condition for preserving and
enhancing our freedom to set ends. As Kant shows in some detail in the Vigilantius
lectures, we do not need to bisect the definition of humanity into the separate
capacities to set ends and to pursue them effectively to derive the whole duty of
man,22 but can derive it from an adequate understanding of what the freedom to set
ends really involves.

22
Or two of the three parts of what Pufendorf called the whole duty of man, that is, duties to self and to
others; for Kant, of course, we have no duties to God.
PART II
The Actuality of Freedom
 8
The Proof-Structure of the
Groundwork and the Role of
Section III

1. Introduction
By borrowing Dieter Henrich’s title for his famous article on the Transcendental
Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason,1 I immediately suggest that the central
argument of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals also proceeds in two
steps. Of course, we all know that this argument proceeds in two steps, because Kant
explicitly says it does: first an analytic step and then a synthetic one (G, Preface,
4:392). Kant repeatedly says that the derivation of the content of the categorical
imperative in Sections I and II of the Groundwork is merely analytic and that it is
only in Section III, on the basis of its critique of our faculty of pure practical reason,
that there is a “synthetic use of pure practical reason,” demonstrating that “the
categorical imperative and with it the autonomy of the will is true, and absolutely
necessary as an a priori” and synthetic principle (G, Section II, 4:445). Kant also says
that the “present groundwork is nothing more than the identification [Aufsuchung]
and corroboration [Festsetzung] of the supreme principle of morality” (G, Preface,
4:392), and it seems natural to interpret this remark by means of the analytic–
synthetic distinction that immediately follows: the identification or one could also
say determination of the content of the principle that takes place in Sections I and II
will be analytic, and the corroboration or establishment of the principle that takes
place in Section III will be synthetic. One thing I want to do in this chapter is to argue
that this interpretation of Kant’s use of the analytic–synthetic distinction in the
Groundwork is only part of the story, and that there is another use of the distinction
which must itself be distinguished from this one, and on which there are analytic and
synthetic moments within the arguments of Sections I and II, not just Section III.
I will come back to that point shortly and briefly, however, for it is not the main
point that I want to make. This point is rather that there is a different distinction
between methods of argument at work in the Groundwork, one that is not so obvious
but that is crucial to understanding the structure of Section II as well as to under-
standing what is supposed to be proved in Section III. This is the distinction between

1
Dieter Henrich, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics 22
(1968–9): 640–59, reprinted in Ralph C. S. Walker, ed., Kant on Pure Reason (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982), pp. 66–81.
  -   

“apagogic” arguments, indirect arguments or arguments by elimination, and “osten-

sive” or direct or positive arguments; and my argument will be that Kant’s transition
from the formula of universal law to the formula of humanity in Section II of the
Groundwork is nothing less than a transition from a negative to a positive argument,
from an apagogic to an ostensive argument, and that the transition from analytic to
synthetic method that is supposed to happen between Sections II and III can be better
understood once we recognize that fact about Section II. In introducing the concept
of humanity as an end in itself in Section II Kant says that although it is the “ground
of a possible categorical imperative” (G, Section II, 4:428) it is also only a “postulate”
the “grounds for which” cannot be provided until Section III (G, Section II, 4:429n.).
My argument will be that we can only understand the first of these remarks as
marking Kant’s turn from a negative to a positive argument within Section II, and
that we can then better understand the central argument of Section III if we
understand it as the intended proof that the principle that humanity is an end in
itself is not just a postulate but, in the words that Kant uses at the end of Section II, is
true and absolutely necessary (G, Section II, 4:445).

2. Two Senses of the Analytic–Synthetic Distinction

But first, my brief comment on the two different senses of the analytic–synthetic
distinction in the proof-structure of the Groundwork. Following his remark that the
present groundwork aims at nothing more than the identification and corroboration
(Aufsuchung und Festsetzung) of the supreme principle of morality, Kant goes on to
say that
In this work, I have adopted the method, that is, I believe, most fitting if one wants to take one’s
route analytically from common cognition to the determination of its supreme principle and in
turn synthetically from the examination of this principle and its sources back to common
cognition, in which we find it used. That is why it is divided as follows:
1. First section: Transition from common to philosophical moral rational cognition.
2. Second section: Transition from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals.
3. Third section: Final step from the metaphysics of morals to the critique of pure practical
reason. (G, Preface, 4:392)
This passage is confusing. It clearly cannot be read as describing a transition first
from common conceptions of morality to a philosophical one, then from there to a
metaphysics of morals, and finally from there to a critique of pure practical reason, for
the simple reason that the common rational moral cognition to be described in
Section I is regarded by Kant as fundamentally sound, though easily “corrupted” (see
G, Preface, 4:390) or “seduced” (G, Section I, 4:405), and thus leads to proper
philosophical moral cognition, while the popular moral philosophy discussed at the
outset of Section II is not fundamentally sound, rather it represents precisely the
seduction of common-sense morality, and it needs to be replaced by a proper philo-
sophical cognition of morals, though now in the form of a metaphysics of morals.2

2
Kant’s usage of the phrase “metaphysics of morals” is also confusing: in the Groundwork, it means the
purely a priori identification and establishment of the fundamental principle of morality, but in the later
  -    

Rather, Sections I and II start from different data, a sound common conception of
morals in Section I and a metaphysics of morals, or philosophical conception of a
rational agent, in Section II (see G, Section II, 4:412), and arrive at the same result,
namely an identification of the supreme principle of morality or determination or
formulation of its content—although this is, crucially for my main point, fuller in
Section II than in Section I. But none of this is problematic, for both of these
transitions, from common to philosophical rational cognition of morals and the
replacement of popular moral philosophy by a proper metaphysics of morals, may
still be regarded as entirely analytic in method, and our presumption that the results of
this (double) analysis are finally to be corroborated or grounded in a synthetic phase of
argumentation in Section III, namely in the grounding of the metaphysics of morals in
the critique of pure practical reason, seems to continue to hold.
The only problem with this conclusion, however, is that the kind of synthetic
corroboration of the analysis leading to the formulation of the supreme principle of
morality (or its phenomenological form for us, the categorical imperative, to which I will
henceforth refer) in Sections I and II that we can expect to find in Section III is not what
Kant actually describes in the paragraph preceding his description of the three sections.
Here Kant says that the synthetic turn in the argument of the whole work is that in
which we turn from the “examination of this principle and its sources back to common
cognition, in which we find it used” (G, Preface, 4:392). Although we will see that in the
central synthetic argument of Section III Kant does claim that even the “commonest
understanding” will accept the premise of the argument to follow and even come to it on
its own (G, Section III, 4:450), there is nothing in this argument about the common use
of the categorical imperative, no corroboration of the correctness of Kant’s formulation
of the imperative by a demonstration that it is what ordinary people actually use in their
moral reasoning. However, we do find arguments of precisely this sort within both
Sections I and II. In Section I, we find it immediately after Kant has derived his first
formulation of the moral law from his analysis of the concept of duty, when he says that
“common human reason in its practical judging is actually in perfect agreement” with
the categorical imperative as he has formulated it, “and always has the envisaged
principle before its eyes” (G, Section I, 4:402), and then illustrates this with his claim
that anyone considering making a false promise naturally asks himself whether he
would be content that his maxim “should hold as a universal law” (4:403). In Section II,
we find a similar phase to Kant’s argument when after his first two main formulations of
the categorical imperative (the formula of universal law in the form of the formula of the
law of nature, and the formula of humanity as an end in itself) he “enumerates some
duties, according to their common division” (G, Section II, 4:421) in order to show that
his principle does in fact give rise to all the commonly accepted classes of duty (perfect
and imperfect duties to self and others). Here Kant is corroborating his identification of
the categorical imperative not in the sense of providing it with some deep foundation
but simply in the sense of showing that it is consistent with (sound) common practices
and beliefs about duty.

work entitled Metaphysics of Morals, it means the derivation of the duties of human beings from this
fundamental principle and certain basic but empirically known facts about human nature and circum-
stances (see MM, Introduction, section I, 6:217).
  -   

Such a corroboration of his philosophical analysis is a synthetic argument in a

perfectly traditional sense, that in which a synthetic argument goes from causes to
effects or from a general principle to its consequences. In this sense, the synthetic
phase of Kant’s argument in the Groundwork is not found in Section III at all, but
only in Sections I and II. However, I mention this aspect of Kant’s synthetic method
in the Groundwork only to set it aside: in what follows, I will not be further interested
in the synthetic phases of Sections I and II in this sense, but only in the way in which
Section III is a synthetic phase of Kant’s argument, namely in its attempt to ground in
a critique of pure practical reason the metaphysics of morals or determination of the
pure principle of morality attained by the analyses of Sections I and II.
As I said earlier, however, my claim is that we can understand how the synthetic
argument of Section III is supposed to work only if we understand the transition
from negative to positive, from apagogic to ostensive, argument that takes place in
the transition from the formula of universal law to the formula of humanity as an end
in itself that takes place within Section II. So let me now turn to that distinction and
to an analysis of the two crucial stages of argument within Section II.

3. Apagogic and Ostensive Argumentation

within Section II
I may be using Kant’s contrast between “apagogic” and “ostensive” proofs somewhat
loosely. What I have in mind is a distinction between indirect arguments for the
formulation or content of the categorical imperative that turn on the elimination of all
other candidates for the supreme principle of morality on the ground that they fail to
satisfy an essential condition of such a principle, and direct or positive arguments for the
principle as the consequence of something recognizable as a ground for it. And what
I want to claim is that while Kant’s initial derivation of the categorical imperative from
his analysis of the common concept of duty in the first section of the Groundwork as well
as his derivation of the first formulation of the categorical imperative from the very
concept of a categorical imperative in the second have the form of arguments by
elimination, the formula of humanity as an end in itself, as the only ground of a possible
categorical imperative, is a direct argument for the categorical imperative, one that does
not merely exclude all alternatives to it but also makes intelligible why it takes the form or
has the content that it does. So my claim is that there is a turn from negative to positive
argumentation within Section II. My further claim will then be that the central, synthetic
argument of Section III can best be understood as an attempt to prove that this concept
of a positive and direct ground for the categorical imperative really does apply to us.
I take the distinction between “apagogic” and “ostensive” arguments from the
Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Pure Reason as well as from Kant’s logic. In the
Doctrine of Method Kant says that “The third special rule of pure reason, if it is
subjected to a discipline in regard to transcendental proofs, is that its proofs must
never be apagogic but always ostensive” (CPuR, A 789/B 817).3 By an apagogic proof

3
Kant’s first rule for transcendental proofs is “to attempt no transcendental proof without having first
considered whence one can justifiably derive the principles on which one intends to build” (A 786/B 814),
  -    

he means one that infers the truth of a proposition from the falsehood of a conse-
quence of its contradictory, which is often unusable, because “insight into all possible
consequences of any proposition that is assumed exceeds our powers” (although
sometimes one might fortunately hit upon the relevant false consequence even within
the limits of our powers), but more importantly can at best give us “certainty, to be
sure, but never comprehensibility of the truth of its connection with the grounds of
its possibility” (A 789–90/B 817–18). An ostensive proof, by contrast, does adduce
the ground of the possibility—or one would think, actuality—of the proposition to be
proved, and thereby makes it comprehensible. Or, as Kant puts it in his logic lectures,
apagogic proofs are demonstrationes ad absurdum contrarium, while the positive
“connection of cognitions with their grounds is . . . the surest and best mark of the
truth of a cognition.”4 And, Kant claims, “it simply cannot be allowed that assertions
of synthetic propositions be justified by the refutation of their opposites” (A 792/B
820), or by apagogic proof. They must be justified by ostensive proofs—which, since
we are talking about transcendental proofs, of synthetic a priori rather than a
posteriori propositions, cannot of course take the simplest form of ostension, namely
just pointing to an empirical object, but must take another form. As we know, and
as the Doctrine of Method has already made clear, in the case of theoretical
transcendental proofs, that is, transcendental proofs of theoretical synthetic a priori
propositions, this other kind of ostension takes the form of pointing to the unique
condition of the possibility of experience of objects (see especially A 737/B 765).
Since morality concerns not what does happen but what ought to happen (A 802/
B 830), it would hardly seem that this could be the form that an ostensive
transcendental proof of a practical synthetic a priori proposition, namely the
categorical imperative, could take. Actually, we will see that this is not quite
right, and that trying to link the validity of the categorical imperative to a crucial
condition of the possibility of our experience is central to the strategy of Kant’s
synthetic method in Groundwork III. But before we get to that, we need to see that
the structure of Groundwork II is precisely that of turning from an apagogic to an
ostensive proof even of the content of the categorical imperative, from an indirect
proof of it by elimination of any alternative to a positive ground for it. Only then
can we see that the synthetic proof of Groundwork III is supposed to work by
proving that this concept of the positive ground of the categorical imperative,
merely postulated in Section II, actually applies to us.

4. The Indirect and Direct Arguments for the

Formulation of the Categorical Imperative
So my next step must be to show that Kant’s introduction of the concept of humanity
as an end in itself constitutes the provision of a positive ground that will make

and the second is “that for each transcendental proposition only a single proof can be found” (A 787/B
815), namely that from the condition of the possibility of objects of the concept invoked in the proof.
4
Kant, Blomberg Logic, }103, 24:99; in Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 76.
  -   

comprehensible what has until that point been argued for only by the elimination of
alternatives. That in both Section I and in the argument of Section II that leads up to
the formula of universal law and its restatement as the formula of laws of nature Kant
has been arguing by elimination is evident. In the analysis of the concept of duty—the
concept of a good will though under “certain subjective limitations and hindrances”
(G, Section I, 4:397)—that constitutes the heart of Section I, Kant begins with the
assumption that any candidate for the supreme principle of morality must be
universally and necessarily valid, that is, pick out all and only instances of morally
correct action. This might be regarded as the indemonstrable axiom of practical
reasoning, just as the law of non-contradiction might be regarded as the indemon-
strable axiom of theoretical reasoning, and then, just as apagogic proof in the
theoretical domain works by rejecting anything that violates the law of non-
contradiction, apagogic proof in the practical domain works by rejecting any candi-
date for the supreme principle of morality that does not yield all and only morally
correct actions. Kant then shows that any principle of acting on inclination or for the
sake of the objects of inclination or purposes suggested merely by inclination violates
this condition: such a principle might sometimes yield an action in compliance with
moral law, sometimes not; thus it would only yield any such action contingently, not
necessarily.5 Having thus excluded any principle based on inclination, Kant asks
what kind of principle could be left. His well-known answer explicitly has the form of
an argument by elimination: “Since I have robbed the will of all impulses [Antriebe]
that could arise for it from following some particular law, nothing remains but the
universal conformity of actions with law as such . . . i.e., I ought never to proceed
except in such a way that I could also will that my maxims should become a universal
law” (G, Section I, 4:402). The argument is simply that if the moral law cannot be
based on any inclination or any object set by inclination—that is, any object insofar
as it is set solely by inclination, for ultimately particular objects of action must at least
be suggested by inclination—then nothing is left to determine the law except the form
of law itself, that is, universality. The argument of course assumes that the division
between inclination as the source of all matter on the one side and the form of
universality on the other is complete.
The argument for the formula of universal law and the associated formula of laws
of nature in Section II of the Groundwork is likewise an argument by elimination. In
Section II, Kant rejects popular moral philosophy based on empirical examples of
human conduct, and proposes to replace it with a metaphysics of morals consisting
in an analysis of “the universal concept of a rational being as such” (G, Section II,
4:412). The first step6 in this analysis is the analytical proposition that a rational
being “has the capacity to act according to the representation of laws,” accompanied
with the further claim that if a rational being is “also subject to subjective conditions
(to certain incentives) that are not always in agreement with the objective ones,” then

5
See Jens Timmermann, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 26–7.
6
See Paul Guyer, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s Guide (London:
Continuum, 2007), pp. 73–4, and Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals:
A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 151–2.
  -    

the laws of conduct that it represents to itself will present themselves in the form of
imperatives, demanding constraint or “necessitation” in order to act as the law
requires. Of course, the claim that any particular rational beings, for example
human beings, are subject to such conditions and therefore to imperatives would
be a synthetic rather than analytic proposition; nevertheless Kant continues his
analysis by now deriving the content of the categorical imperative from the mere
concept of such an imperative, and once again his argument is an argument by
elimination. He characterizes hypothetical imperatives as commanding actions
merely as means “to something else,” which is an end set by inclination, which is
always contingent—this is true even of the supposedly “assertoric” imperative of
personal happiness or prudence, since such happiness is a pseudo-end, or, more
kindly, a second-order end consisting in the satisfaction of a maximally consistent set
of whatever first-order ends suggested by inclination one happens to have, which
explains both why Kant can safely assert that her own happiness is an end that
everyone naturally has, because it is no end in addition to her particular ends of
inclination, but also why happiness is an indeterminate end, for it is entirely
dependent on the inclinations one happens to have. Any hypothetical imperative,
then, based as it is on inclination, obligates only conditionally, “since what it is
necessary to do merely for attaining a contingent purpose can be regarded as in itself
contingent, and we can always be rid of the prescription if we give up the purpose”
(G, Section II, 4:420). By elimination, then, an imperative that is to be categorical,
universally and necessarily binding, since it cannot concern inclinations and its
objects, can require only the conformity of maxims to the nature of law as such:
“For since besides the law the imperative contains only the necessity of the maxim to
conform with this law, whereas the law contains no condition to which it was limited,
nothing is left but the universality of a law as such with which the maxim of the
action ought to conform” (G, Section II, 4:421). Since “nature” may in turn be defined
entirely in terms of “the universality of the law according to which effects happen,”
the imperative to act only on maxims that can also be universal laws is analytically
equivalent to the imperative to “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by
your will a UNIVERSAL LAW OF NATURE.” (This formula should not be seen as a
schematism of the first formula, because it introduces no assumption, not even an a
priori one, about maxims or actions, nor should it be seen as introducing any
teleological conception of nature, that nature always acts for the sake of a purpose,
even if Kant does introduce teleological assumptions into his ensuing derivation of
classes of duty from the formula of laws of nature.7) The key to the argument is again

7
The rejection of a teleological interpretation of the formula of laws of nature is of course directed
against H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (London: Hutchinson,
1947), ch. XV. Timmermann calls the formula of laws of nature a “variant” of the formula of universal law
resting “on an analogy: that of universal laws as laws of nature” (Commentary, p. 77n.) That seems too
weak: to consider whether your maxim could become a universal law is identical to asking whether it could
become a law of nature, given Kant’s definition of nature in the present passage. However, this correction
only strengthens Timmermann’s suggestion that Kant includes this formulation in order to show that the
Stoic idea of living in harmony with nature, recently popularized by Garve’s translation of Cicero, adds
nothing to his own interpretation of the categorical imperative as the requirement to act only on
universalizable maxims.
  -   

the assumption that the division between imperatives based on contingent inclin-
ation and an imperative commanding only that maxims have the form of law as such,
namely universal validity, is exhaustive.8
So the first phase of Kant’s argument in the Groundwork is not only analytic but
also apagogic, an argument by elimination, or one that shows that anything other
than a categorical imperative requiring solely the universalizability of maxims would
contradict the premise that a supreme principle of morality must be universally and
necessarily valid. But as Kant said, in transcendental philosophy, any apagogic
argument, certain as it may be, must be supplemented by a unique ostensive
argument, which makes it comprehensible by adducing the ground of its possibility
(CPuR, A 789/B 817). My claim is now that Kant’s transition from the formula of
universal law and its analytical equivalent to the formula of humanity as an end in
itself is nothing other than a transition from an apagogic to an ostensive argument, as
is marked by his statement that only in “something the existence of which in itself
has an absolute worth, that is, . . . an end in itself,” could there be “a ground of
determinate laws” and indeed “the ground of a possible categorical imperative” itself
(G, Section II, 4:428). Kant is about to assert that humanity and in general rational
being as such, thus humanity not in the sense of biological membership of the species
homo sapiens but humanity as the empirical manifestation of rational being, is such
an end in itself of absolute worth and thus the ground of the categorical imperative as
thus far formulated and derived by means of the preceding apagogic argument.
Before I comment further on what this claim means and how it ties in to the
argument of Section III, however, one potential obscurity about the structure of
Kant’s transition should be cleared up. I earlier said that although there is one way in
which there is already a synthetic phase in Kant’s argumentation in Sections I and II,
namely the descent from general principle to specific examples or the corroboration
of the former by the latter, apart from this Kant’s argument in Sections I and II is
supposed to be analytic throughout, with the transition to a synthetic argument
coming only in Section III. Thus the transition from the formula of universal law to
the formula of humanity and with it from apagogic to ostensive proof should still take
place within the framework of an analytic argument, the analysis of the pure concept
of rational being. Yet Kant commences the transition to the formula of humanity in a
way that might suggest that it is a transition from an analytic to a synthetic argument.
He asks whether it is really true that all rational beings are bound by the formula of
universal law, obviously raising the question of whether there is a positive ground for
this claim previously reached only by the argument from elimination:
The question therefore is this: is it a necessary law for all rational beings always to judge their
actions according to maxims of which they themselves can will that they serve as universal
laws? If it is, then it must (completely a priori) already be bound up with the concept of the will

8
Kant’s derivation of the categorical imperative in the Critique of Practical Reason also has the same
structure, that of an argument by elimination: Having begun with the premise that “practical laws” hold
“for the will of every rational being” (5:19), Kant next asserts that “All practical principles that presuppose
an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are, without exception,
empirical and can furnish no practical law” (5:21), so the only alternative that remains is that a “pure will,”
“independent of empirical conditions,” is “determined by the mere form of law” (5:31).
  -    

of a rational being as such. But in order to discover this connection, one must, however
reluctantly, take a step outside, namely into metaphysics, if into a region of it that differs from
that of speculative philosophy, namely into the metaphysics of morals. (G, Section II, 4:426)

Following this, Kant argues that a rational being not only acts in accordance with its
representation of a law, but also acts for the sake of an end, adds that if such a being is
to act in accordance with a law valid for all rational beings then it must also act for the
sake of an end that “must hold equally for all rational beings” (G, Section II, 4:428),
and then introduces rational being itself as the only candidate for such an end,
leading to the formula of humanity. But this passage is puzzling for two reasons. First,
it suggests that it is only with the formula of humanity that the argument is moving to
the plane of metaphysics of morals, thus beyond popular moral philosophy; yet Kant
had spoken in precisely the same terms at the start of the analysis of imperatives
leading to the formula of universal law for which a ground is now being sought,
which suggests that the present passage cannot be the start of the metaphysics of
morals. Second, Kant’s phrase that in order to connect the formula of universal law
with the concept of the will of a rational being as such we must “take a step outside,”
presumably outside the concept of the will of a rational being as such, suggests the
start of a synthetic rather than analytic argument, which would contradict the
supposition that the whole argument of Section II remains analytic.
I am not sure that we can say anything more about the first problem than that it
would have been better had Kant said that we must now take a further step into the
metaphysics of morals. To the second point, I think we must say that nothing that
now ensues has the standard form of a synthetic argument in theoretical philosophy,
namely supplementing the analysis of a concept with an appeal to an a priori
intuition or the form thereof as the condition of the possibility of the realization of
the concept. Instead, Kant simply adds what seems to be a further step in the analysis
of the concept of a rational being, or more precisely a rational agent, that is, a rational
being that can act, namely that a rational being always acts for the sake of an end.
This could be seen as a step outside or beyond the first stage of the analysis of the
concept of a rational being, because there was no mention of an end in the first result
that a rational being acts in accordance with its representation of a law, but neither is
there any appeal to intuition here, a priori or otherwise; so this argument must
simply be seen as uncovering a second predicate or mark in the concept of a rational
being or agent. The current step of the argument would thus be a step outside the first
predicate of a rational being, but not a step outside the concept of a rational being
altogether, and so the argument would remain analytic.
So, having said that the possibility of a categorical imperative must be grounded in
something that is an end in itself and therefore a necessary end for all rational beings,
but not yet intending to assert the synthetic proposition that we ourselves are rational
beings with this end, Kant simply states (“Now I say,” nun sage ich) that “a human
being and every rational being at all exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means for
the discretionary use of this or that will . . . because their nature already marks them
out as ends in themselves, i.e., as something that may not be used merely as a means,
and hence to that extent limits all choice (and is an object of respect)” (G, Section II,
4:428). There is no argument for this claim, as indeed there cannot be if it is to be an
  -   

analytic exposé of one of the fundamental rather than derivative marks in the concept
of a rational being, one of “the marks which, as essential points (constitutiva,
rationes) originally constitute the basic concept of the thing”:9 at the most basic
level of analysis, there can only be what Descartes or Locke (although not Kant)
would have called the intuition that two predicates belong together in the concept of
an object, although again, for Kant, there will subsequently have to be something that
will count as a synthetic argument that such a concept is instantiated. There is
certainly no argument for the analytical claim that a rational being is an end in itself
in the following paragraph, which simply adds that if I am to consider my own
existence as an end in itself on an objective rather than subjective ground, then I must
do so on the same objective ground that holds for everyone—which is nothing other
than the asserted ground that rational being is an end in itself. It is precisely to the
statement that this objective ground holds for me that Kant notes, “Here I put this
proposition forward as a postulate. The grounds for it will be found in the final
section” (G, Section II, 4:429n.). This makes it clear that what will be (attempted to be)
proven in the final section is that I am indeed a rational being, and thus that whatever
holds for the concept of rational being in general also holds for me. There will be no
further attempt to prove that rational being should be treated as an end in itself, only
that I—and each of us who can conceive of herself as an I—am a rational being and
should be treated as an end in herself. Finally, it should be noted that Kant’s
statement clearly has the form of inferring an ought from an is: the claim is that
rational being ought to be respected and treated as an end in itself because it exists as
an end in itself, or its nature marks it out as such. This is the position that I have
called “normative essentialism.”10
No argument being possible or intended for Kant’s assertion that rational being or
its manifestation in the form of humanity is an end in itself, just as no argument is
possible for the starting point of Kant’s previous argument by elimination that any
candidate for the supreme principle of morality must be universally and necessarily
valid, the question remains, just what is meant by rational being or its human
manifestation, humanity? This has been a hotly contested question, although it
seems to me that Kant’s meaning is straightforward. At the conclusion of his
systematization of the (chief ) formulations of the categorical imperative in the
Groundwork, Kant says that “A rational nature is distinguished from the others by
this, that it sets itself an end” (G, Section II, 4:437). In the Introduction to the
Doctrine of Virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says that humanity is that
by which alone a human (rational) being “is capable of setting himself ends” and that
“the capacity to set oneself an end—any end whatsoever—is what characterizes
humanity as distinguished from animality” (MM, DV, Introduction, section V,
6:387; section VIII, 6:392). And in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
although without defining it, Kant distinguishes the “predisposition to humanity”
from the “predisposition to personality,” which is “the susceptibility to respect for the
moral law as of itself a sufficient incentive to the power of choice” (RBMR, 6:27), which

9
Kant, Jäsche Logic, Introduction, section VIII, 9:61; Lectures on Logic, p. 567.
10
See Chapter 2 in this volume, as well as my “Progress toward Autonomy,” in Oliver Sensen, ed., Kant
on Moral Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 71–86.
  -    

is at least compatible with the interpretation that rational being, or its human form,
humanity, is just the capacity to set ends, simpliciter.
Now this has seemed to some an implausible ground for the possibility of a
categorical imperative, for after all human beings, at least, can set themselves patently
immoral ends, and indeed seem to do so with considerable frequency, as Kant
himself asserts in his illustration of the thesis that “The Human Being is by Nature
Evil” with the “unprovoked” cruelty of both savages and the supposedly civilized
(RBMR, 6:32–3). This has driven some to propose alternative interpretations of what
Kant must mean by humanity if it is to be the ground of the categorical imperative.
Thus Richard Dean has argued that humanity must be equivalent to the good will,
that is, to the achievement of a thoroughly moral disposition,11 while Henry Allison
has argued that it can only be the “capacity for morality.”12 But the problems with
these proposals should be evident. First, as Allen Wood argued before Dean ever
made his proposal, Kant—and any right-minded person—does not think that we
have moral obligations only to persons with good will, but to all persons, even known
wrong-doers.13 The only way to avoid the damning implication of Dean’s view would
be to hold, as Christine Korsgaard does in another context, that no one really has an
evil will, that is, intends wrong-doing, though some people are worse at realizing their
intention to be moral than others are, as is of course the case with other kinds of
intentions, and thus end up performing immoral actions.14 This seems counter-
intuitive, to say the least. And this is why Allison holds that the ground for respect of
rational beings and of the categorical imperative must be their capacity for morality
rather than their actual achievement of a good will. But this position seems to suffer
from another problem that also affects Dean’s: namely, it seems vacuous or tautolo-
gous, in the same way that Kant charged that Baumgarten’s formula fac bonum et
omite malum is tautologous: it just tells us that to be moral is to respect the capacity
to be moral.
Moreover, such desperate measures seem unnecessary, for in fact the mere idea
that the capacity to set ends should be an end in itself does give us the ground for the
categorical imperative if we think about it correctly. There are two ways to think
about it. First, if we take seriously Kant’s proposition that rational being is to be
considered an end in itself in one’s own person as well as in the person of any other,
that is, in the person of every other, then of course not every exercise of this capacity
is compatible with its status as an end in itself: only such settings of ends that are
compatible with other settings of ends by oneself and with the possibility of all others

11
Richard Dean, The Value of Humanity in Kant’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), especially pp. 92–5.
12
Allison, Commentary, pp. 215–18.
13
See Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
pp. 134–5.
14
See Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), ch. 8. Korsgaard’s position is a response to the claim, first made by Johann August
Heinrich Ulrich in his Eleutheriologie oder über Freiheit und Notwendigkeit (Jena: Croker, 1788), that
Kant’s position that the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal will makes the performance of evil
actions by beings with such a will inexplicable); Korsgaard’s response is that evil-doers do not have an evil
will, but just suffer from “defective action.”
  -   

also setting their own ends will be compatible with this status. And of course all sorts
of exercises of one’s own capacities to set ends violate this condition: for example,
making it your end to secure a loan by a promise to another to which the other would
never agree, that is, make his own end, if he knew your intention not to repay the loan
(G, Section II, 4:429–30). Second, setting an end is not the same as simply being
moved toward some object by some desire or inclination, as if by merely natural law,
just as falling objects are moved by gravity; setting an end is something we do freely,
and in Kant’s view freedom from the rule of merely natural law can only be achieved
by acting in accordance with a rule of reason instead—and since reason by its nature
seeks universality, such a rule can only have the form of universal law. Treating the
free setting of ends as an end in itself, which means not just now in me, but always in
everyone, brings us to the same point as that to which we were previously brought by
Kant’s argument by elimination, namely, that we must choose our maxims—for to
set an end is nothing other than to adopt a maxim, and to adopt a maxim is nothing
other than to set an end—only in a universally valid way, for anything else is not to
set an end at all but just to be pushed around mechanically by desire or inclination.
So Kant’s argument by elimination and his ostensive argument from the ground of a
possible categorical imperative bring us to the same place: freeing ourselves from
mere inclination in freely setting ends can only be accomplished by acting in accord-
ance with the idea of universally valid law. This is why Kant begins Section III of the
Groundwork with the claim that freedom negatively conceived, that is, freedom
from the determination of the will by “alien” causes, can only be achieved through
freedom positively conceived, that is, the determination of the will by a law that we
give ourselves, the only candidate for which, since any other law would merely be
determined by inclination, is that we act only in accordance with universalizable
maxims (G, Section III, 4:446–7). So let us now at last turn to Groundwork III.

5. Redeeming the Postulate

The analytical argument of Groundwork I and II having shown that the concept of
humanity as the only end in itself does give rise to the same result achieved by the
argument from the elimination of any principle motivated by mere inclination, the
task for Section III is to redeem the “postulate” that the concept of humanity applies
to us and its normative implication binds us.
Kant begins the section with his famous distinction between the negative and
positive definitions or explications (Erklärung) of freedom (G, Section III, 4:446),
which may be taken as a suggestion that the apagogic and ostensive arguments of the
previous sections have now come together: the negative conception of freedom is that
of independence from “alien” causes, that is, inclinations, and the idea that the moral
will must be determined independently of alien causes was the premise for his initial
derivations of the formula of universal law; the positive conception of the will as
autonomy, “the property of the will of being a law to itself ” (4:447), is the idea that
has been grounded on the idea of humanity being an end in itself. In the course of
stating this distinction Kant says that freedom so conceived must be “a causality
according to immutable laws” (4:446), which of course immediately raised the
question of how a truly free will could then ever be immoral. Kant’s next step in
  -    

this strategy is to make clear that what has just been stated is merely the summary of
the analytic argument of the first two sections: since “if freedom of the will is
presupposed, morality along with its principle follows from it, by mere analysis of
its concept” (4:447), which again raises the question of the possibility of evil, although
the complementary statement in the Critique of Practical Reason that only a will not
determined by natural causes could adopt “the mere lawgiving form of maxims” as its
“sufficient determining ground” (Problem I, 5:28) does not raise this problem. Let us
set this problem aside until we have completed the diagnosis of Kant’s argument in
Section III.
That is hard enough, for Kant now continues in a most confusing manner. First he
says that the principle of morality—that “an absolutely good will is that whose maxim
can always contain itself considered as a universal law”—is nevertheless “always a
synthetic proposition;” “for, by analysis of the concept of a good will per se, that
property of its maxim cannot be found” (G, Section III, 4:447). This seems to belie the
entire analytic argument of the first two sections, which is essentially that an
absolutely good will is one that takes humanity as its end in itself and for that reason
also has to adopt the principle that its maxims must be universalizable, and the only
remaining question is whether that concept of the good will is really binding for us.
That is, what we were previously told was that the question whether “it is a necessary
law for all rational beings always to judge their actions according to maxims of which
they themselves can will that they serve as universal laws” would be settled by the
further step into the metaphysics of morals that would show that rational being (or
its human form, humanity) is the only possible objective end for rational beings, and
that the only question that would remain as a “postulate” to be redeemed in
Section III would be whether “just the same rational ground . . . also holds for me”
(G, Section II, 4:429), that is, whether the concept of rational being thus far analyzed
actually applies to us human beings. And that is of course consistent with Kant’s
general use of the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, for
example in his discussions of the existence of God, where the transition from analytic
to synthetic occurs when we ask whether a concept is actually instantiated, and the
problem is when its instantiation is asserted a priori rather than merely a posteriori.
So let us just assume that Kant still means to be asking whether the concept of a
rational being and the moral law along with it actually applies to us, and that there is
just something misleading in the current wording.
That does not solve all of our immediate problems, however, for there is a further
obscurity in this passage. This is that Kant says, predictably enough, that for a
synthetic proposition, two cognitions, in this case the concept of the moral law and
the concept of ourselves, have to be bound together by a third that is already
contained in neither, but then says first that the “positive concept of freedom provides
this third thing” yet next that “freedom points us” (worauf uns die Freyheit weiset) to
“this third thing” (G, Section III, 4:447), which suggests that freedom is not itself the
“third thing.” It might seem natural to take Kant’s first statement as describing the
strategy of what is to follow, and thus to suppose that he will somehow show directly
that we are free in the positive (and therefore also in the negative) sense, from which
our obligation to act in accordance with the moral law (or even, although problem-
atically, the causal necessity that we act in accordance with the moral law) will follow.
  -   

But I suggest that we will better understand Kant’s ensuing strategy if we take the
second statement at face value, that is, assume that the concept of freedom itself only
“points to” yet something else that can be directly proven, and that it this further
thing that can be directly proven, from which our freedom and therefore our
obligation under (or causal necessity to act in accordance with) the moral law will
follow, thereby now proving what was merely a postulate in Section II. For what Kant
next says is that “Freedom must be presupposed as a property of the will of all
rational beings” (G, Section III, 4:447), and this suggests that what must now be done
is to prove that we really are rational beings (in the relevant sense), from which our
freedom (in the positive and therefore negative sense) will follow, from which it will
in turn follow that we really are bound by (or able to act only in accordance with) the
moral law.
Kant then prepares for the proof in the next paragraph, with the title that I have
just quoted. First, he states that “since morality serves as a law for us only as for
rational beings, it must hold for all rational beings as well; and since it must be derived
solely from the property of freedom, freedom must also be proved as a property of
the will of all rational beings; and it is not enough to establish it from certain
supposed experiences of human nature” (G, Section III, 4:447–8), and this suggests
that although the moral law can be derived, let us suppose analytically, from freedom,
freedom itself must “be proved as a property of the will of all rational beings”: so what
will ultimately have to be proven is that we are rational beings, therefore we are free,
and therefore we are bound by the moral law. Once again, Kant creates room for
confusion as he continues, because he next says that “every being that cannot act
otherwise than under the idea of freedom is actually free, in a practical respect”
(4:448), and some have taken this to be the heart of Kant’s entire argument in
Section III, with the argument being simply that in contemplating any choice of a
maxim or a course of actions, we think of ourselves as free, and if we think of
ourselves as free we must always think of ourselves as governed (in one or both
senses) by the moral law, and really do not need to ask from any other standpoint
than the standpoint of choice whether we actually are free.15 But it seems clear that
Kant intends no such argument, for two reasons. First, his next step is to link the idea
of freedom to the idea of rational being: he “asserts” that “we must necessarily lend to
every rational being that has a will also the idea of freedom, under which alone it
acts,” for “one cannot possibly think of a reason that would self-consciously receive
guidance from any other quarter with regard to its judgments, since the subject
would then not attribute the determination of its judgment to his reason, but to an
impulse”; and this implies that freedom is inferred from rationality, or from its status
as a rational being, or that it is not presupposed simpliciter, but presupposed as the
condition of possibility of rationality. Second, after a brief interlude in which he
distinguishes acting out of morality from acting out of any ordinary interest, Kant
then raises the question of whether he has simply presupposed freedom “so as to
think ourselves under moral laws,” whether he has reasoned in a circle, or better, it

15
Notably Thomas E. Hill, Jr., in “Kant’s Argument for the Rationality of Moral Conduct,” Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1985): 3–23, reprinted in his Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral
Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 97–122, especially at p. 119.
  -    

has been argued, simply begged the question, or committed a petitio principii,16 to
which his response, in the central argument of Section III, is now to (attempt to)
prove that we really are rational, from which it will follow that we really are free, from
which it will finally follow that we really are under the moral law.
Or so seems to me the most natural way to read what now follows. Kant follows the
worry about the circle or petitio principii with the statement that “there still remains
for us one way out, namely to try [suchen]: whether when, through freedom, we
think of ourselves as causes efficient a priori we do not take up a standpoint that is
different from when we represent ourselves according to our actions as effects that we
see before our eyes” (G, Section III, 4:450), and this may seem to confirm the idea he
thinks that we simply can and must think of ourselves as free when we think of
ourselves as acting rather than being acted upon, with all that follows from that self-
conception. However, in this passage Kant says only that we can try to get out of the
circle by thinking of ourselves from two different points of view, and only after he has
followed this suggestion with the central argument of the section does he say that
“The suspicion we stirred above has now been removed, as though our inference
from freedom to autonomy and from it to the moral law contained a covert circle,”
and only once this has happened can we “transfer ourselves as members into the
world of understanding,” “think of ourselves as free,” and “cognize autonomy of the
will, along with its consequence, morality” (G, Section III, 4:453). We cannot simply
take the standpoint of action and think of ourselves as free and therefore subject to
the moral law; we have to prove that we are entitled (and required) to take this
standpoint. And that is what Kant attempts to do between his statement that we
should try to break the circle and his claim that we have actually done so.
So how does the crucial argument proceed? Kant begins with the claim that “no
subtle thinking” (Nachdenken) is necessary to distinguish between appearances and
things in themselves (as if the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique had not
been necessary): as soon as we think about “representations that come to us without
our choosing (like those of the senses)” we distinguish between “objects only as they
affect us,” or mere appearances, and those objects as they might be as things
themselves. And that is also to distinguish between representations passively received
and the objects that actively produced them. Then we realize that there are also ideas
“we produce solely from ourselves,” and that we must be active as well as passive, and
thus things in themselves (ourselves) as well as mere appearances, members of a
“world of sense” as well as a “world of understanding” or “intelligible world”
(Verstandeswelt) (G, Section III, 4:451). So now we have two standpoints from or
ways in which to think of ourselves, as passive appearances and as active things in
themselves, and we have not just assumed that we can think of ourselves from two
standpoints.

16
See especially Dieter Schönecker, Kant: Grundlegung III: Die Deduktion des kategorischen Imperativs
(Freiburg: Verlag Karl Albert, 1999), and Marcel Quarfood, “The Circle and the Two Standpoints,” in
Christoph Horn and Dieter Schönecker, eds, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Berlin and New
York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 285–300. Both Gregor and Timmermann adopt this interpretation in
translating Kant’s term Erbittung in his summary of the argument that comes next (4:453) as petitio
principii or just petitio; see Practical Philosophy, p. 98, and Timmermann’s translation, p. 134.
  -   

However, the ideas that we actively “produce solely from ourselves” and add (or
apply) to the ideas passively received from the senses to which the argument has thus
far appealed are in fact nothing but the concepts of the understanding narrowly
construed, that is, the categories that we use to structure our intuitions into concepts
and knowledge of objects, so thus far it has only been proved that there is a certain
kind of activity in our theoretical thought; nothing relevant to morality has yet been
proved. So Kant introduces a further premise, namely that “A human being actually
[wirklich] does find in himself a capacity by which he is distinguished from all other
things, even from himself in so far as he is affected by objects, and that is reason,” and
he continues that “as pure self-activity, it is elevated even above the understanding”
(in the narrow sense of the first Critique) because it does not merely “bring sensuous
representations under rules” but “shows a spontaneity so pure that” a human agent
with such a faculty of reason “goes far beyond anything that sensibility can ever
afford him, and provides proof of its foremost occupation by distinguishing the
world of sense and the intelligible world [Verstandeswelt] from each other, and
thereby marking out limits for the understanding [dem Verstande] itself.” (We can
make sense of what Kant is saying only if we translate his sentence thus.) And then
Kant says that it is on account of this that
a rational being must view itself, as an intelligence [Intelligenz] (thus not from the side of its
lower powers, as belonging not to the sensible but to the intelligible world [nicht als zur Sinnen-,
sondern zur Verstandeswelt gehörig], and recognize laws for the use for the use of its powers, and
consequently for all its actions: first, insofar as it belongs to the world of sense, under laws of
nature (heteronomy), secondly, as belonging to the intelligible world [intelligibelen Welt], under
laws that, independent of nature, are not empirical, but have their foundation merely in reason.
(G, Section III, 4:452)

Kant’s argument is that we really—wirklich, in Kant’s own term—find reason in

ourselves, that reason is pure self-activity, unlike even mere understanding, or
spontaneity, in other words, that we are free, and therefore autonomous or subject
to the moral law, the law, “independent of nature,” that has its “foundation merely in
reason.” The wirklich tells us where the circle is broken or the petitio avoided, where
the argument moves from its analytic to its synthetic phase, namely in the cognition
that we really do have reason, which is in turn spontaneous or free, and in turn binds
us to the moral law. That is the central argument of Section III, by which the mere
postulate that we must always regard rational being as an end in itself is now proven.
However, one question about this proof will immediately present itself. In a
footnote to the paragraph entitled “Freedom must be presupposed as a property of
the will of all rational beings,” which I have treated as the culminating statement of
the analysis of the concept of rational being before Kant’s synthetic proof, within the
framework of transcendental idealism, that this analysis really applies to us, Kant
himself says that “I follow this route—that of assuming freedom only . . . so that I may
not incur the obligation of proving freedom in its theoretical aspect as well,” because,
he says further, “the same laws that would bind a being that was actually free yet hold
for a being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of its own freedom”; “Here
we can thus liberate ourselves from the burden that weighs upon theory,” he
concludes (G, Section III, 4:448n.). Yet the proof that I have just expounded seems
  -    

like a theoretical proof of our obligation under the moral law, starting from the fact of
our rationality and inferring from that the fact of our spontaneity and from that our
obligation under the moral law. Has Kant just ignored his own preceding liberation
from the burden of theoretical proof, or rather have I just ignored it? I hope the latter
is not the case, and I think the former may not be quite the case either. For after he
has completed the proof, Kant also says that “reason would overstep all its bounds if
it undertook to explain HOW pure reason can be practical, which would be one and
the same task entirely as to explain how freedom is possible” (4:458–9). If we take
Kant’s first remark to be anticipating the second one, there is no contradiction
between his proof and his assessment of it: the proof would be theoretical, but
would not offer a complete theory of our freedom and therefore of the satisfaction
of the condition for our obligation under the moral law: in Kant’s characteristic
terminology from the first Critique (paradigmatically at B xxix–xxx), the transcen-
dental idealism that allows us to think our freedom as a consequence of our
rationality also prevents us from fully knowing or understanding our freedom, as
something that exists at the inaccessible noumenal level. In this way Kant can offer an
adequate theoretical proof of our freedom, not merely postulate it, but at the same
time not offer an adequate theory of it, and to that extent still liberate himself from
the burden of proof.
Even if this solution is accepted, another objection may quickly present itself. For
have I not presented Kant’s argument as an inference from is to ought, and did not
Hume teach us that any such inference is illegitimate? My response to this is that
Hume meant to argue no such thing, nor did Kant accept such an assumption. As
I have tried to show in Chapter 2, what Hume meant to argue is that moral principles
cannot be founded on facts about objects or relations outside of us, but must be
founded on the facts about human sentiments, and Kant simply replaces Hume’s
reliance on facts about human sentiment with reliance upon the fundamental fact
about human reason, that it gives us the moral law. Still, even if Kant’s appeal to the
kind of argument is not blocked by his own assumption that an ought cannot be
derived from an is, we might still well ask how Kant really proposes to derive a
normative claim about our obligation from a description of our noumenal being,
assumed to be our essential identity or as he later says our “proper” (eigentliche) self
(G, Section III, 4:457). Kant does not explicitly address this question, and I am not
sure that he had anything more to say about it than something he said among his
earliest recorded thoughts about moral philosophy, the notes he wrote in his own
copy of the 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, that
“There is in subjection”—either to the will of another or even to one’s own mere
inclinations—“not only something externally dangerous but also a certain contra-
diction and ugliness that at the same time indicates its injustice. . . . that a human
being should as it were need no soul himself and have no will of his own, and that
another should move my limbs, that is absurd and perverse.”17 In other words, to
treat anyone—another or myself, as Kant’s switch from “his” to “my” implies—as a

17
See Kant, Notes and Fragments, p. 54, or Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Paul Guyer and Patrick Frierson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), p. 129.
  -   

mere means rather than (at least also) as an end is effectively to deny that something
with a free will has a free will; it is the same as to assert a contradiction, and for that
reason unacceptable. This is to say, by the way, that even though the contradiction
between one’s maxim and its universalization that is be avoided under the formula of
universal law is, as has been widely accepted, a “practical” contradiction, a contra-
diction between willing a maxim and willing a condition that would undermine the
possibility of acting upon it,18 the validity of the moral law itself may rest upon
something much closer to a logical contradiction, the contradiction inherent in both
asserting and denying that an agent, oneself or any other, has a free will. This is the
position I have called Kant’s “normative essentialism,” the idea that because it is the
essence of a human being to be free we also ought always to treat every human being
as free, in order to avoid denying the true essence of such a being.
My aim here has only been to display the structure of Kant’s argument in
Section III and its place in the argument of the Groundwork as a whole, which
I have now done. Of course there are numerous problems with this argument. For
one, that the moral law is even more pure than the categories is not so obvious, since
it would seem that the moral law, in the form of the requirement of universalizability,
is applied to maxims which, or at least occasions for acting upon which, are suggested
to us by sensibility, a point that Kant himself had made at the end of the 1780s with
the concise statement that “The matter of the good is empirical, the form is given a
priori.”19 Second, there may be another circle in the offing, namely that we can only
know that reason is a form of pure “self-activity” from our recognition of the moral
law itself; at least this is what Kant seems to suggest in the Critique of Practical
Reason, where his central argument—the “fact of reason” argument—is precisely that
it is the moral law of which we are “immediately conscious,” that we “become aware of
pure practical laws just as we are aware of pure theoretical principles, by attending to
the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us and to the setting aside of all
empirical conditions to which reason directs us,” and that the “concept of a pure
will,” in other words, of our transcendental and positive freedom, in turn arises from
our recognition of the purity of our will (CPracR, 5:29–30). In other words, instead of
inferring from the fact of our rationality to our spontaneity and from there to our
obligation under the moral law, we infer from our recognition of our obligation
under the moral law to the purity of our reason to the purity of our will—though the
direction of inference from rationality to freedom remains the same as in the
Groundwork, the fact of our pure rationality is now not immediately given but
inferred from our obligation under the moral law, and the circle that Kant worried
about in the Groundwork may have reappeared. And finally, there is again the
problem that if the moral law is the causal law of our pure or noumenal will, not
merely an ideal for it or that by which it ought to be governed but that by which it
must be governed, then the problem of the possibility of freely willed evil arises.

18
See Onora Nell (O’Neill), Acting on Principle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Christine
M. Korsgaard, “Kant’s Formula of Universal Law,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1985): 24–47,
reprinted in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp. 77–105; and Allison, Commentary, pp. 186–7.
19
R, 6820, 19:172.
  -    

About this, all I can say here is that although in illustration of the argument that he
has given in the second Critique Kant says that someone contemplating a moral
offense (giving false testimony) “judges . . . that he can do something because he is
aware that he ought to do it” and this leaves open the possibility that the agent might
nevertheless freely break the moral law, because “ought implies can” does not imply
“ought implies does,” Kant does not explicitly acknowledge this solution until
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where indeed he celebrates it, using
the formula “ought implies can” more than half a dozen times.20 But just as Kant left
the solution of this problem for another day, so must we leave further discussion of
all the problems I have just mentioned for another day. (These problems will be
further discussed in Chapter 10.) The only further point that I will make here is that,
whatever its other problems might be, Kant’s normative essentialism at least leaves
the way open to his solution of this last problem, for while it may be that in treating
someone as a mere means we contradictorily both assert and deny that she has a free
will, human beings have been known to assert propositions that upon analysis do
contain contradictions. If even Frege could do it (according to Russell), so can the rest
of us, especially when not logic but self-love is involved.

20
See RBMR, 6:41, 6:45, 6:47, 6:50, 6:51, 6:62, and 6:66.
 9
Proving Ourselves Free

1. The Irrelevance of Determinism?

The mature Kant notoriously held, first, that we can be obligated to do what the
moral law requires of us only if we are always free to do what it requires no matter
what our prior history and the laws of nature might seem to entail, but, second, that
since deterministic causal laws apply to every event in nature, there can be room for
the freedom that moral obligation requires of us only if the nature that is so
thoroughly determined is mere appearance and determinism is not true of that
which lies behind the appearance of nature, thus if our own completely deterministic
histories are mere appearances and our real selves are free from determinism. In
other words, Kant held that the possibility of moral obligation requires what he called
transcendental freedom. Yet it is easy to argue that the truth of determinism is either
irrelevant to or actually necessary for the most important forms of moral judgment.
Determinism, we can easily argue, is irrelevant to our own decisions about our future
conduct, because even if our future choices are in principle fully determined by our
prior histories and the laws of nature, we can in practice never know either of those in
adequate detail to know what they actually entail, and so can instead only try to
determine what would be right or best to do and to act accordingly, just as we would
if our actions were not actually determined by our past. And determinism, we can
also argue (as of course Hume and others have), is actually presupposed by our
practices of praising or blaming and rewarding or punishing actions already done,
because our intention in those practices is to influence the future choices and
behavior either of those whose actions we are judging or of others who might follow
their example, and such influence is possible only if our praise and blame, our
rewards and punishments, do act as causes that will contribute to the determination
of future actions, whether of the agent judged or of others. So our practices of both
first-person, forward-looking moral decision-making and first-, second-, or third-
person, backward-looking moral appraisal, we can argue, do not in fact presuppose
the falsehood of determinism or need the alternative of transcendental freedom, and
may in part even presuppose the truth of determinism.

2. Kant and the Irrelevance of Determinism?

Further, it can look as if Kant himself accepts these arguments about the conditions
for both moral choice and moral appraisal, and thus does not himself actually need
transcendental freedom as an alternative to determinism. On the subject of one’s own
forward-looking moral choice, Kant famously writes:
    

Now I say: Every being that cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is precisely for
this reason actually free in a practical respect, i.e., all laws inseparably combined with freedom
hold for it, just as if its will had also been declared free in itself and in a way that is valid in
theoretical philosophy,
and adds:
I take this route, of assuming freedom as sufficient for our aim only as rational beings ground it
on the idea in their actions, so that I may not be obligated to prove freedom also in its
theoretical intent. (G, Section III, 4:448)

This statement has often been interpreted to mean that if I adopt the standpoint of
agency or think of myself as genuinely acting at all, then I must think of myself as
acting freely in choosing among alternatives that are genuinely open to me, and thus
as acting in accordance with—or as obliged by—only the laws in accordance with
which a truly free agent would act rather than in accordance with any mere
mechanism. Thus, it is held, from the “practical point of view” of trying to determine
how I should act on some present or future occasion, I can simply ignore any
theoretical question of whether I am actually free or not, thus whether some natural
law or laws different from the moral law in accordance with which truly free beings
would act might actually influence my behavior.1
Kant himself can seem to suggest such an interpretation of this well-known
passage from the Groundwork. For example, in a note that might have been written
in 1776–8, but that might also have been written in the 1780s, he writes:
In morality we require no other concept of freedom than that our actions do not follow the
thread of instinct in accordance with experience, but mix reflections of the understanding in
with the incentives. Through instinct there arises a lack of coherence, because instinct, when it
alone rules, has rules, just as does the understanding when it alone rules; the understanding,
however, which does not prescribe rules for itself, makes everything unruly when it fills in for
the lack of instinct. Freedom from instinct thus requires rule-governedness in the practical use
of the understanding. Thus we represent to ourselves rule-governedness and unity in the use of
our power of choice as possible only through our understanding tying our power of choice to
conditions that bring it into consensus with itself. Where, however, this use of the under-
standing is really from, whether it itself has its causes in the predetermined series of appear-
ances or not, is not a practical question. It suffices that the laws of the consensus of the power of
choice with itself, which is not to be expected from impulses but can come only from reason,
alone have this effect and are thus in accord with our supreme will (with regard to the sum of
all ends) and are good. (R, 6859, 19:182)
In this note, Kant asserts what we can think of as one version of what is now known
as his “reciprocity thesis,” namely, the claim that freedom in the “negative” sense

1
See, for example, Christine Korsgaard, “Morality as Freedom,” in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), at pp. 162–3, and Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “The Rationality of
Moral Conduct,” in his Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1992), especially pp. 118–19. Hill actually argues that given Kant’s prior proof (in the
first Critique) that we cannot prove that we are not free, acting under the idea of our freedom is practically
possible.
   

(“freedom from instinct”) requires freedom in the “positive” sense or autonomy

(“rule-governedness in the practical use of the understanding”),2 and then apparently
proposes that we can attempt to use the understanding in order to institute “rule-
governedness and unity in the use of our power of choice” without any further
enquiry whether the use of the understanding in attempting to act in accordance with
rule rather than mere instinct “itself has its causes in the predetermined series of
appearances or not.” Such a question, he says, is not a “practical” one, but apparently
would be a theoretical or metaphysical question that we do not need to answer in
order to decide how we should attempt to act. So Kant seems to suggest that the
question of whether we are truly free to act as such a rule requires is irrelevant to our
own decision-making: all we can do and all we need to do from a “practical” point of
view is to determine what such a rule would require of us and to attempt to do it.
Here Kant seems to say that we do not need to worry about even the possible truth of
determinism in making our own moral choices.
In making our own decisions about what to do, then, Kant’s position in these
passages seems to be that we can simply ignore the possibility of determinism and
attempt to do what the moral law requires of us. What about evaluations of actions
already done or to be done by others, or even retrospective evaluation of our own
actions already done rather than prospective decisions about what to do? Are moral
evaluations of the deeds of others or even assessments of our own past deeds dependent
upon the assumption that they or we ourselves have transcendental freedom rather
than being subject to determinism?
Sometimes Kant insists that the moral evaluation of any deed, whether one’s own
or that of another, requires the transcendental freedom of the author of that deed.
In his discussion of the third “Antinomy of Pure Reason” in the first Critique, for
example, he writes:
One may take a voluntary action, e.g., a malicious lie . . . and one may first investigate its moving
causes, through which it arose, judging on that basis how the lie and its consequences could be
imputed to that person. With this first intent one goes into the sources of the person’s
empirical character, seeking them in a bad upbringing, bad company, and also finding them
in the wickedness of a natural temper insensitive to shame, partly in carelessness and
thoughtlessness; in so doing one does not leave out of account the occasioning causes. In all
this one proceeds as with any investigation into the series of determining causes for a given
natural effect. Now even if one believes the action to be determined by these causes, one
nonetheless blames the agent, and not on account of his unhappy natural temper, not on
account of the circumstances influencing him, not even on account of the life he has led
previously; for one presupposes that it can be entirely set aside how that life was constituted,
and that the series of conditions that transpired might not have been, but rather that this deed
could be regarded as entirely unconditioned in regard to the previous state, as though with that
act the agent had started a series of consequences entirely from himself. This blame is

2
See G, 4:446, as well as CPracR, }}5–6, Problems I and II, 5:28–9. The expression “reciprocity thesis”
has been made canonical by Henry Allison; see his Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), ch. 11, pp. 201–13, and his earlier “Morality and Freedom: Kant’s Reciprocity
Thesis,” Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 393–425. See also Hill, “Kant’s Argument for the Rationality of
Moral Conduct,” especially 102–4, 106–16.
    

grounded on the law of reason, which regards reason as a cause that, regardless of all the
empirical conditions just named, could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the
person to be other than it is. (CPuR, A 554–5/B 582–3)
However, it should be noted that Kant begins even this apparently unequivocal
passage by stating that one may consider such an example of action “in order to
clarify the regulative principle of reason through an example of its empirical use—not
in order to confirm it (for such proofs are unworkable for transcendental proposi-
tions.” In other words, he suggests that even though we may have to presuppose the
transcendental freedom of the author of any deed we subject to moral evaluation, we
cannot offer a theoretical proof of such freedom.
In other places, Kant suggests that the imputation of responsibility for actions is
entirely an empirical matter, and does not presuppose transcendental freedom at all.
In the account of the imputation of responsibility given in his lectures on moral
philosophy—I refer to lectures first given in the second half of the 1770s, but recorded
by one student as late as 1784–5, although perhaps not transcribed on the basis of the
current form of his course3—Kant argues that the imputation of responsibility for
actions requires the assumption that the agent was free rather than compelled in the
performance of the action, but the distinction between freedom and compulsion that
he employs here seems strictly empirical, not transcendental. On this account, an agent
is compelled and therefore not responsible for his action and their consequences if
his action was the consequence of certain kinds of natural causes, such as the actions
of another person, and free if it was not the product of any of those sorts of causes,
without any suggestion that an action free from the relevant sorts of compulsion
must be free from any natural causation whatever. Here Kant’s account of imputation
of responsibility for actions already done thus seems at least compatible with
determinism.
This should be evident both from Kant’s examples and from his discussion of the
“degrees of imputation.” Kant starts his discussion of imputation in the lectures by
stating that “All imputation is the judgment of an action, insofar as it has arisen from
personal freedom, in relation to certain laws. In imputation, therefore, there must be
a free action and a law.” But that “personal freedom” is not transcendental freedom
from the determinism of nature is suggested by the illustration of his claim that Kant
immediately offers: “the actions, for example, of a madman or drunkard can be
attributed, although not imputed to them . . . The drunkard cannot, indeed, be held
accountable for his actions, but he certainly can, when sober, for the drunkenness
itself ” (MP-Collins, 27:288). Kant clearly assumes that as a matter of empirical fact,
intoxication impairs a person’s ability to reflect upon the lawfulness and the conse-
quences of his actions, and such an assumption is not only consistent with but
actually assumes the truth of determinism. But if he is treating “personal freedom”
as something that can be impaired by natural mechanisms, he must be treating it as
itself a natural rather than transcendent condition, subject to deterministic laws itself;
in any case, he certainly does not assert that the agent’s decision to get drunk, for
which he can be rightly held accountable, is transcendentally free. It seems to be

3
See Chapter 7, note 1.
   

nothing more than a natural occurrence not itself caused by the natural mechanism
of intoxication, though no doubt caused by some antecedent factors in some way that
is in principle explicable and knowable, although perhaps not fully so in practice.
Kant’s claim that there are “degrees of imputation” and his discussion of the
factors that affect the degree of the imputability of an action also assume that the
“personal freedom” required for the imputation of an action is affected in empirically
determinable ways by natural factors, and thereby suggest that such freedom is
empirical and compatible with determinism rather than transcendental. “Degrees
of imputation,” Kant asserts, “depend on the degree of freedom” (MP-Collins,
27:291), but transcendental freedom, one would think, does not come in degrees,
certainly not degrees determined by natural factors. Kant states that “The subjective
conditions of freedom are the ability to act, and further, that we know what pertains
thereto, that we are aware of the motivating grounds and the object of the action.”
The degree of the personal freedom and therefore of the imputability of some
particular action is determined by both the agent’s cognitive condition and his ability
to act in accordance with his cognitive condition. As factors that can affect both of
these “subjective conditions of freedom” Kant then mentions childhood and once
again a temporary state like drunkenness, so his assumption is that both one’s
cognitive condition—one’s knowledge of one’s own motivation as well as of the
possible consequences of one’s actions—as well as one’s ability to act in accordance
with one’s cognitive condition—one’s ability to act on one’s motivation or to act in
cognizance of the possible consequences of one’s actions—are naturally affected by
factors such as one’s age and one’s current metabolic condition. But that the degree of
one’s personal freedom can be affected by such natural factors suggests that personal
freedom itself is a natural condition, not a transcendental one, and thus something
consistent with the determinism that is on Kant’s own account universally prevalent
in nature.
Strikingly, Kant retains the account of degrees of imputation depending on factors
in the empirical etiology of an action even in his lectures on the metaphysics of
morals from 1793–4, even though in those lectures he also presents the first Critique’s
view that for “an action to be imputed . . . it is requisite that somebody can be
regarded as the originator (auctor) of the action, i.e., as its complete first cause. In
this case the agent cannot be determined by other, external causes; he must be
independent of all predetermining causes, and cannot stand under the law of natural
necessity” (MM-Vigilantius, 27:503).4

3. Kant on the Threat of Determinism

It might seem then as if Kant himself assumes that in the first-person task of deciding
what to do we can simply ignore the fact of determinism and attempt to decide what
morality requires and to do it, while when it comes to making second- or third-
person moral evaluations or even evaluating our own prior deeds he is torn between

4
For Kant’s reiteration of the empirical account of the factors affecting the degree of imputation in the
same lectures, see 27:567–70.
    

the position that we can simply assume that “personal freedom” is an empirical
condition deterministically affected by natural processes and mechanisms and the
position that for such evaluation we must assume transcendental freedom, but can
never prove it. However, such a conclusion would be too hasty. What Kant’s mature
publications in moral philosophy suggest is actually the more complicated position
that for purposes of first-person decision-making and also moral self-evaluation we
must actually each prove to ourselves the reality of our own transcendental freedom,
but that for the evaluation and even the punishment of the deeds of others we cannot
prove their transcendental freedom, and indeed that it may be morally preferable for
us to think of their freedom in empirical terms and thus as something that can be
limited and compromised by empirical conditions. Kant’s moral writings thus aim to
provide arguments by which each of us can prove him- or herself to be transcen-
dentally free, but do not attempt to provide arguments by which we could prove each
other transcendentally free.
That Kant is not content with the idea that each of us can act merely under the idea
of our own freedom quickly becomes evident in the Groundwork. Shortly after the
famous paragraph (4:448) which has been taken to suggest that in thinking of oneself
as acting one can simply ignore the possibility that one’s actions might be determined
in accordance with natural laws and attempt to act in accordance with the moral law
instead, Kant raises the concern that perhaps he has merely been arguing in a circle
(G, Section III, 4:450).5 In fact, it is not clear that Kant succeeds in diagnosing any
genuinely circular reasoning of which he might have been guilty; he may just raise the
question of whether he has simply begged the question of whether we really are free
and thus really are subject to the moral law, thus begged the question of whether
merely acting under the idea of freedom and the moral law is sufficient to establish
that we are free and thus can, let alone must act in accordance with the moral law.6
But why should Kant worry about whether we really are free: why is it not enough for

5
On the danger of the circle, see Chapter 8.
6
Kant first describes the threat of the circle thus: “In the order of efficient causes we assume ourselves to
be free in order to think of ourselves as under moral laws in the order of ends, and then afterward we think
of ourselves as subject to these laws because we have attributed freedom of the will to ourselves” (G, 4:450).
But there is no circle here, rather simply the repetition of the idea that we are subject to the moral law
because we are free. Restating the threat of circularity several pages later, after he has made the argument
that is supposed to resolve it, Kant describes the “suspicion . . . that there was a hidden circle in our
inference from freedom to autonomy and from the latter to the moral law” as “that we perhaps took
freedom as ground only for the sake of the moral law in order afterward to infer the latter once again from
freedom” (4:453); again, this does not describe a circle, but rather merely a repetition of the worry that
perhaps we have merely assumed freedom in order to derive (our subjection to) the moral law from it. Kant
himself seems finally to recognize this point when he continues that perhaps “we could not offer any
ground for [freedom] except as a begging of the question” (translation modified), that is, an Erbittung eines
Prinzips or petitio principii. The worry is simply that our freedom has still merely been assumed rather than
proved, and thus that our subjection to the moral law is also still only assumed rather than proved. There is
of course an extensive literature on the problem of the “circle”; see especially Reinhard Brandt, “Der Zirkel
im dritten Abschnitt von Kants Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,” in Hariolf Oberer and Gerhard
Seel, eds, Kant: Analysen—Probleme—Kritik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1988), pp. 169–92,
and Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 218–21. Allison provides reference to further literature on the
topic prior to 1990. The issue has continued to be extensively discussed, especially by Dieter Schönecker;
see his Kant: Grundlegung III: Die Deduktion des kategorischen Imperativs (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber,
1999), ch. 5.
   

him to assume that even if our actions are causally determined, still we cannot
possibly know enough about the relevant laws of nature and initial conditions to
predict what we would actually do in any concrete circumstances, and so have no
choice but simply to figure out what morality requires of us and to attempt to do it?
There are in fact two quite different reasons why he cannot adopt that stance at this
point in the argument of the Groundwork. First, he takes himself to have established
the only possible content of the moral law by his “analytic” arguments in the first two
sections of the Groundwork, but not yet to have proven that the moral law is actually
binding upon us (see especially G, Section II, 4:445); so if we are in the position of
having to decide what to do rather than to predict what we will do, we still have no
sufficient reason to attempt to decide that only in accordance with the moral law
rather than in accordance with some other principle, for example, that of what is best
for our own happiness. That the moral law is binding upon us is what is to be proven
in the third section of the Groundwork, by means of an argument from the two
premises that if we are really free then we must act in accordance with the moral law
and that we really are free because we really are rational, and rationality itself entails
freedom. So if the opening argument of the section has begged the question of
whether we are really free we cannot yet know that we are really bound by the
moral law.7 But second, and this will be my chief concern in this chapter, even if we
were to suppose that by this point in the argument we somehow know that we are
bound by the moral law, the absence of a sufficient proof that we really are free would
leave us open to a “natural dialectic” that could “bring into doubt” the “purity” and
“validity” of that moral law (G, 4:405), and thereby undermine our confidence that
we can legitimately adopt the standpoint of agency in which it should seem to us
that we are free to decide to act in accordance with the moral law and can retain our
freedom only by so deciding.
What “dialectic” does Kant have in mind? The “Dialectic” in the Critique of
Practical Reason will concern the relation between the moral law, as the principle
of virtue, and happiness, and will introduce the concept of the highest good, which
makes happiness a consequence of virtue, so that we may not mistakenly make
happiness a motive for virtue and thereby not merely undermine the purity of our
motivation but also adopt an incorrect maxim that will lead to morally impermissible
actions. But in the Groundwork, Kant has already addressed the question of the
relation between happiness and the moral law in its second section, so properly
determining that relation would not appear to be the issue for the dialectic that
worries him in its third section. Instead, as Kant reveals another few pages after the
expression of his concern that he may be begging a question, he is worried about
fatalism, the possibility that if our freedom has not been proven then “the fatalist
can with reason . . . expel all morals from its supposed property as taken possession
of without title” (G, Section III, 4:456).8 What precisely is this worry? Well, as

7
Kant’s strategy of deriving the validity of the moral law from the proof of our (transcendental)
freedom is also very clearly stated in a text simultaneous with the composition of the Groundwork, namely
the lectures on moral philosophy transcribed by C. C. Mrongovius in the winter semester of 1784–5; see
29:597.
8
For a further key reference to fatalism, see CPracR, 5:98–9.
    

traditionally understood, fatalism is the doctrine that the outcome of our actions is
fully determined by antecedent events beyond our own control no matter what we try
to do or even succeed in doing at the moment of action. If Kant understands fatalism in
this way, then what he is worrying about is the fact that even if we know what
morality requires of us in any particular circumstance, we might think that what
we will do in that circumstance is already determined, and therefore simply not try
very hard to do what we know we should do. Fatalism is not a threat to our
understanding of the content of the moral law in the way that confusion about the
relation between virtue and happiness would be, but it would be a threat to our
commitment to attempt to do what the moral law requires of us, thus to our virtue
in the sense of “the strength of the resolve to perform our duties, and to strive
against the constant enticements to do otherwise which sensory feelings inspire”
(MM-Vigilantius, 27:570).9
So at this point in his argument Kant now needs to prove that we really are free,
not merely acting under the idea of freedom, in order to prove both that the moral
law really is binding on us and that we really are capable of acting in accordance with
it in spite of what our past might predict, so that our commitment to attempting to
do so will not be weakened by the threat of fatalism. He is worried, in other words,
that our adoption of the standpoint of agency with the thought of our own freedom
that is inherent in that standpoint will be undermined if we cannot prove our
transcendental freedom. What I now wish to show is that the arguments that Kant
offers to avert this threat are arguments that are addressed to each of us individually,
arguments that each of us may and must conduct and accept for him- or herself. In
other words, what Kant now offers are arguments by means of which each of us may
prove him- or herself free, but not arguments by means of which any one of us can
prove that any or all others are free. Thus Kant will revise the first Critique’s
statement that transcendental freedom cannot be proven for the first-person case,
but will not revise it for the third-person case. Kant’s arguments address the first-
person question of how I should choose to behave, not the third-person question of
whether I can hold others responsible for their actions. This is because the possibility
that I am not really free could undermine my own commitment to try to live up to
what morality requires by playing into my natural tendency to go easy on myself,
but the possibility that others might not really be free will not undermine my
actual practices of imputing responsibility to them, and might even have the benefit
of correcting my perhaps equally natural tendency to excessive harshness in the
evaluation of others.
That Kant’s proofs of the freedom of the will, apart from differences in their details
on which I will comment in a moment, are primarily addressed to allaying our
individual doubts about our own freedom is also evidenced by his suggestion in the
“Elucidation of the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason” in the second Critique that
proof that “a rational being can . . . rightly say of every unlawful action he performed
that he could have it omitted it even though as appearance it is sufficiently

9
The threat of fatalism is dialectical, of course, because (according to the argument of the Critique of
Pure Reason) we must think of the appearance of nature as fully deterministic. What has now to be done is
to show that the determinism of nature does not imply fatalism in our conduct.
   

determined in the past and, so far, is inevitably necessary” is requisite in order to

explain the efficacy of conscience, the evaluation of one’s own actions in light of one’s
inexorable consciousness of the demands of the moral law:
A human being may use what art he will to paint some unlawful conduct he remembers as an
unintentional fault—as a mere oversight which one can never avoid altogether, and as
something in which he was carried away by the stream of natural necessity—and to declare
himself innocent of it; he nevertheless finds that the advocate who speaks in his favor can by no
means reduce to silence the prosecutor within him.

This is because, unlike “a genuine fatalist,” “when it is a question of the law of our
intelligible existence (the moral law),” the person who hears the voice of conscience
recognizes no distinction of time and asks only whether the event belongs to [him] as a deed
and, if it does, then always connects the same feeling with it morally, whether it was done just
now or long ago. For, the sensible life has, with respect to the intelligible consciousness of its
existence (consciousness of freedom), the absolute unity of a phenomenon, which, so far as it
contains merely appearances of the disposition that the moral law is concerned with (appear-
ances of the character), must be appraised not in accordance with the natural necessity that
belongs to it as appearance but in accordance with the absolute spontaneity of freedom.
(CPracR, 5:98–9)
The most important thing for Kant is for each of us to be able to prove him- or herself
free so as not to have an excuse to shut out the voice of conscience. When it comes to
judging others, as we shall see, Kant ultimately suggests a very different concern.

4. Kant’s Proof of Transcendental Freedom

in the Groundwork
I now turn to just enough details of Kant’s arguments for freedom of the will to show
that these are indeed all arguments by means of which each of us can prove him- or
herself free but not directly prove that anyone else is free. The argument that Kant
offers in the Groundwork is an argument addressed to “the commonest understand-
ing” (G, Section III, 4:450) or to “a reflective human being” (4:452) by means of
which any such person can prove that he or she herself is a free yet rational or
autonomous being. The argument begins with the assumption that anyone reflecting
on his or her own cognitive condition will recognize the distinction between the way
that things appear to him or her and the way they may be in themselves, or between
“a world of sense” and “a world of understanding” (4:451) (apparently one need not
have read the whole of the Critique of Pure Reason in order to recognize the necessity
of this distinction!). The argument then continues that any such person will also
recognize that “Even about himself and in accordance with the acquaintance that the
human being has of himself through inner sensation, he may not presume to cognize
how he is in himself.” So any person undertaking this process of reflection “neces-
sarily assumes about this constitution of his own subject, which is composed of sheer
appearances, that it is grounded on something else, namely his I, however that may
be constituted in itself.” But further, such a “reflective human being” will also
    

recognize that his reason is “a faculty through which he distinguishes himself from all
other things, and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects,” and will then
infer that since it is his reason that distinguishes him from everything else in nature,
this reason must show “such a pure spontaneity that it thereby goes far beyond
everything sensibility can provide it.” On this account, “a rational being has to regard
itself as an intelligence . . . , as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of
understanding,” and from this metaphysical conception of himself any such rational
being will conclude that “it has two standpoints, from which it can consider itself and
cognize the laws for the use of its powers,” one in which it belongs to the world of
sense and is subject to natural laws, but the other in which it belongs “to the
intelligible world, under laws which are independent of nature, not empirical, but
rather grounded merely in reason” (4:451–2).
There are many things one can say about this striking argument. First, it should be
clear that Kant does not take his famous distinction between the two standpoints of
theory and practice as something that is self-evident in reflection upon moral issues
alone, but rather derives it from the distinction between appearance and reality as it is
in itself that arises in a theoretical or as we might say epistemological context
combined with his present insistence that pure practical reason is essentially char-
acteristic of the noumenal self revealed by epistemology. Second, in spite of Kant’s
confidence that even the “commonest understanding” must make the distinction
between appearance and reality as it is in itself on which the entire argument
depends, this distinction is metaphysical and, to put it politely, controversial, so
Kant’s whole argument here is indisputably metaphysical in character. Third, sub-
sequent to the distinction between appearance and reality as it is in itself, the other
key move in the argument is the identification of the law governing one’s real self
with the principle of practical reason, and this is problematic for several reasons.
Kant’s inference may be problematic because it slides from the conception of the
theoretical spontaneity of the self that cognizes appearances to the practical spontan-
eity and autonomy of the real self that acts upon the world of appearances,10 or
because it slides from the fact that the faculty of reason is that which empirically
distinguishes us from other things in the natural, phenomenal world, or even that
which empirically distinguishes one part of our self from another, to the conclusion
that (practical) reason as we understand it on that basis is what distinguishes our
noumenal selves from our phenomenal ones. Kant’s inference is also problematic
because of what it implies: it attempts to prove by a single inference that our
noumenal spontaneity or freedom is “under laws . . . grounded merely in reason,”
and this leaves Kant open to the notorious objection that was first raised by
J. A. H. Ulrich in 1788 and reiterated by Henry Sidgwick a century later, namely
that if our noumenal freedom is necessarily governed by the moral law, then it cannot
be possible for a noumenally free agent to act contrary to the moral law, thus to do
anything immoral, from which it follows in turn that anyone who commits an
immoral act is not noumenally free and therefore not responsible for that act.11

10
This is the criticism made by Henry Allison in Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 227–9.
11
Ulrich raised the objection in Eleutheriologie (Jena: Cröker, 1788). Karl Leonhard Reinhold
responded to the objection in the eighth letter of the second series of his Briefe über die Kantische
   

But the point that I want to emphasize here is simply that this argument is addressed
to oneself, and by means of it one proves oneself to be a free yet rational being.12 By
means of the considerations adduced in the argument, one is supposed to distinguish
first between the way the world appears to oneself and the way it is in itself, and then
between one’s own appearance and one’s own real self, which is spontaneous and yet
rational in a way that nothing in the world of appearances is (or more precisely
appears to be). Of course, the argument is addressed to each of us, each common yet
reflective understanding, so that each of us should be able to prove him- or herself
free and rational by means of it, but it is not an argument by means of which any one
of us can prove that everyone else is free and rational—indeed, it cannot do that, since
for each of us everyone else is part of the world of appearance, and thus not a subject
for the concept of spontaneity at all.

5. Kant’s Proof of Transcendental Freedom

in the Critique of Practical Reason
Kant’s argumentation in the Critique of Practical Reason, for all of its radical
departures from the argument of the Groundwork, still has the same character of
offering a method by means of which each one of us can prove him- or herself free.
The argument of the Critique of Practical Reason famously reverses the direction of
the argument in the Groundwork, beginning with the same premise that freedom of
the will and subjection to the moral law reciprocally imply one another (CPracR,
Problems I and II, 5:29), but then inferring that we have freedom of the will from our
subjection to the moral law instead of attempting to infer that we are subject to the
moral law from the proof that our real self has a kind of spontaneity not found in the
realm of appearances. This reversal of direction in its argument is even responsible
for the outward structure of the “Analytic of Pure Practical Reason,” which rather
than proceeding from pure intuitions of sensibility to pure concepts of understanding
to pure principles of judgment, as in the first Critique, proceeds instead from the
fundamental principle of morality to the concept of the freedom of the noumenal self
to the effect of the pure and rational will on sensibility in the form of the feeling of
respect in order to reflect the fundamental fact that the reality of our freedom is now
being derived from our subjection to the moral law rather than the reverse (CPracR,
5:89–90). And this reversal of direction seems to have been triggered by Kant’s
recognition that the metaphysical argument for the spontaneity of the will in the
Groundwork was unsatisfactory, indeed that there could be no successful theoretical
proof of the freedom of the will, whether empirical or a priori.13 So if one cannot

Philosophie (Leipzig, 1792), reproduced in Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer, eds, Materialen zu Kants
“Kritk der praktischen Vernunft” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 252–74; see also Allison,
Kant’s Theory of Freedom, pp. 133–5. Sidgwick formulated the problem in his article “The Kantian
Conception of Free Will,” Mind 13 (1888), reprinted as an appendix in his Methods of Ethics, 7th edn
(London: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 511–16.
12
I discuss other issues with this argument in Chapter 10.
13
Kant rejects the possibility of a theoretical proof of freedom throughout the Critique of Practical
Reason, beginning in the Preface at 5:5–6. On Kant’s rejection of the proof-strategy of the Groundwork in
    

prove one’s subjection to the moral law from a prior proof of freedom, the only
possibility is to prove one’s freedom from the prior establishment of one’s subjection
to the moral law.14 But the point that I want to emphasize here is only that once again
the method for establishing our subjection to the moral law is addressed to the
individual: Kant argues that each one of us is inescapably conscious of his or her own
subjection to the moral law, from which each of us can then infer his or her own
freedom, but he does not offer an argument by means of which any one of us can
prove that all of us are subject to the moral law and hence that all of us are free.
Kant begins the central argument of the second Critique with his paradigmatic
statement of the “reciprocity thesis,” comprising the two premises that only a will
that is free from “all determining grounds of events in nature in accordance with the
law of causality” can act on “the mere lawgiving form of maxims” regardless of their
content, and that “lawgiving form” is “the only thing that can constitute a determin-
ing ground” for a free will (CPracR, 5:28–9). (The second of these premises, by the
way, raises, at least as clearly as anything in the Groundwork does, the problem that
an immoral act cannot be the act of a transcendentally free will at all.) Rejecting the
idea that we can make any inference from these premises starting from an immediate
or mediate consciousness of freedom, Kant now maintains that “It is therefore the
moral law, of which we become immediately conscious (as soon as we draw up
maxims of the will for ourselves), that first offers itself to us and . . . leads directly to
the concept of freedom” (CPracR, 5:29–30). Kant’s supposition is that as soon as one
considers whether it would be permissible to act on a particular maxim, one
considers the question of whether one could will the universalization of that
maxim, thereby evincing one’s recognition of the validity of the moral law. The
“fact,” he says, that “Pure reason . . . gives (to the human being) a universal law which
we call the moral law” is “undeniable”: “One need only analyze the judgment that
people pass on the lawfulness of their actions in order to find that, whatever
inclination may say to the contrary, their reason, incorruptible and self-contained,
always holds the maxim of the will in an action up to the pure will, that is, to itself
inasmuch as it regards itself as a priori” (CPracR, 5:31–2). This immediate conscious-
ness that any maxim on which one proposes to act must be held up to the ideal of
universal law or the test of universalizibility is what Kant calls the “fact of reason”:
“Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason because one
cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason . . . and because it instead forces
itself upon us of itself” (5:31). The point I want to make here is just that this fact
forces itself upon each one of us individually: it is in considering whether one may
oneself act upon a proposed maxim that one comes upon one’s own consciousness of
the moral law as a fact of reason. One can be immediately conscious only of one’s
own representations, after all, so what one is conscious of in the fact of reason can

the second Critique, see Dieter Henrich, “Kants Deduktion des Sittengesetzes,” in Alexander Schwann, ed.,
Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 55–112,
(partially) trans. in Paul Guyer, ed., Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 303–41; and Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis
of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, new edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), ch. VI, pp. 189–233.
14
See CPracR, “On the Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason,” 5:42–50.
   

only be one’s own representation of the moral law. So one becomes conscious of
the validity of the moral law for oneself, and from that one can infer, by means of
the initial biconditional, the further fact of one’s own freedom. The argument of the
Critique of Practical Reason, in other words, in spite of its fundamental reversal
of the direction of argument from the Groundwork, is still an argument by means of
which each of us can prove him- or herself to be free, not an argument by means
of which anyone can directly prove anyone else to be free.

6. The Moral Standing of Other Persons

This fundamental methodological feature of Kant’s arguments in both the Ground-
work and the second Critique raises two problems for Kant’s moral philosophy. The
first of these is simply that if I can prove only myself to be free and subject to the
moral law, but if others are due moral treatment from me only because they are free
and rational beings who are ends in themselves, how can I prove to myself that others
are indeed ends in themselves who must always be treated as such and never merely
as means? Kant clearly assumes that each of us reasonably presupposes that other
people are rational beings who are both capable of freely choosing to act in accord-
ance with the moral law and worthy of being treated as ends in themselves for that
reason; thus in the Groundwork he has no hesitation in asserting that “All human
beings think of themselves as having free will” (G, Section III, 4:455). But to my
knowledge Kant never explicitly asks whether one can know that other human beings
actually possess free wills or attempts to prove it. And it is clear that on Kant’s
epistemology we can be directly acquainted only with the outward appearance of
other persons, and cannot have any immediate knowledge of their inner states, let
alone of the noumenal reality behind that. So the attribution of any inner states at all
to others must presumably be based on a transposition of our experience of our own
inner states to our representation of others, mediated by our assumptions about the
connections between our own states of inner sense, which are not like anything we
can directly observe in others, and our own outwardly observable bodily states, which
are like what we can directly observe in others. Kant does not call this an argument by
analogy, but in the list of possible types of “theoretical grounds for proof” that he
offers us—“logically strict rational inferences,” “inferences from analogy,” “probable
opinion,” and “hypothesis” (CPJ, }90, 5:463)—that would seem the natural pigeon-
hole in which to place this way of forming our conception of others.15 And on this
scale anything below “strictly logical rational inferences” is not strictly theoretically
provable. So apparently Kant thinks that our belief that others have inner lives like
our own is highly probable but not theoretically certain. Once having ascribed inner
states to others by transposing to them a conception of the kind of experience that
I myself have, however, Kant seems to think that I would have no choice but to

15
Patricia Kitcher suggested in the discussion of this chapter at the X. International Congress (2005)
that Kant’s model of our ascription of an inner life to others might better be understood on the model of
contemporary simulation-theory than as an argument from analogy. But given Kant’s scale of epistemic
possibilities, any model of this ascription other than “strictly logical rational inference” would still fall short
of certainty, which is all that I am claiming here.
    

conceive of their inner life as like my own, because I can only represent it on the basis
of my own. Thus, in the first Critique he states that “I cannot have the least
representation of a thinking being through an external experience, but only through
self-consciousness. Thus such objects are nothing further than the transference of
this consciousness of mine to other things” (CPuR, A 347/B 405).16 This would mean
that my belief that others are free agents conscious of the moral law and thus also
deserving of being treated as objects of morality by me has a complex basis, founded
as it is partly on something like an inference from analogy and partly on something
more like a conceptual necessity—that I have only one model of inner life, namely my
own, to ascribe to others. But since my characterization of the inner life of others is
logically dependent upon my initial ascription of any such life to them on the basis of
method of proof that falls short of strictly logical rational inference, it would seem
that my belief in their inner life as a whole can be highly probable but not certain.17
In view of this epistemological situation, perhaps the step that we have to take
beyond anything Kant explicitly argues would be to make a sort of Pascalian wager:
the value of treating others morally if they really are free and rational beings is so
high, and the error of failing to treat them morally if they really are the kinds of
beings who should be morally treated would be so grave, that even just a
probability—or perhaps indeed just the possibility—that the other human bodies
I observe and interact with are really also bearers of moral personality is enough to
make it rational to treat them as if they are. There is much value to be realized in
treating others as if they are truly free and rational beings, we might argue, and little
to be lost by so doing, so of course that is the wager we should take.

7. Holding Ourselves and Others Responsible

The second problem raised by the fact that we can only prove ourselves to be free and
cannot prove others to be so is not why we should count them as free in making our
own decisions about what we owe them, but how we can fairly hold them responsible
for their choices, and thus praise and reward them for their deeds and blame and
punish them for their misdeeds.18 In spite of his empirical treatment of grounds for
and degrees of imputation in his lectures, as I noted, Kant often insists that complete

16
Perhaps that the only way I have of representing the inner life of others is through my conception of
my own inner life is what prompts Kant to say elsewhere that “the question of whether I, as a thinking
being, have reason to admit the existence of a whole of other beings beyond my existence, forming a
community with me . . . is not anthropological but merely metaphysical” (Anth., }2, 7:130).
17
At the Congress, Barbara Herman raised the Wittgensteinian objection that we cannot really learn
the first-person application of all sorts of predicates including mental predicates to ourselves except
through our intercourse with others. But of course we can infer a true conclusion from false premises,
and so we might learn to apply certain predicates to ourselves from their merely apparent application to
others. I do not mean to suggest that this is a possibility that we should seriously worry about in
epistemology. But I will argue that refraining from automatically assuming that our proof of our own
transcendental freedom automatically proves the transcendental freedom of others actually has a beneficial
influence in moral contexts, and that Kant recognizes this.
18
A more extensive discussion of this issue than I will be able to offer here may be found in Christine
Korsgaard, “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations,” in her
Creating the Kingdom of Ends, especially pp. 197–212.
   

freedom of choice is the necessary condition of imputability,19 and this would seem
to make certainty that others really are free necessary for fairly imputing responsi-
bility for their deeds and their consequences to them. But at least at one point, Kant
also argues that “All punishments by authority are deterrent, either to deter the
transgressor himself, or to warn others by his example . . . . All the punishments of
princes are pragmatic, the purpose being either to correct or to present an example to
others” (although he hastens to add that such punishments must be deserved because
a crime has actually taken place, thereby forestalling any temptation to punish an
innocent as a deterrent to other would-be malefactors) (MP-Collins, 27:286). That we
may take steps to deter those who have committed malicious deeds from doing
further ones and can hope to deter those who have not yet committed such deeds but
might by the example of our treatment of the former could suggest that at least much
of our practices of reward and punishment is compatible with the assumption of
determinism and may even presuppose it. If so, then we would not need to be able to
prove the transcendental freedom of others in order justifiably to engage in these
practices. A comment on the potentially beneficial effect on another of the threat of
external sanctions such as “the strictest controls and . . . punishment” in the lecture on
the metaphysics of morals transcribed by Vigilantius can be read in a similar fashion:
In general, if the countermeasures are adequate to weaken the inclination and enliven his
sensory feeling by another contrary feeling in collision within it, we are then in a position to
ensure that continuing habituation will weaken the power of inclination, and thereafter moral
grounds have an impact, so that by removal of the obstacle he is thus made free, and can be
brought, by this pathological expedient, to a recognition of his duty. (MM-Vigilantius, 27:522)

If one can make another free by strengthening some of his feelings and habits to the
point that he can overcome the effect of other feelings and habits that have previously
been obstacles to his recognition—and performance—of his duty, then the sort of
freedom that is involved cannot be a transcendental freedom that the agent is always
free to exercise regardless of his phenomenal feelings and habits, but must itself be a
phenomenal, natural condition in which considerations of what duty requires and
associated feelings and habits are more powerful determinants of the agent’s actions
than feelings and habits that would lead him to ignore his duty or do something
contrary to it.
One might even further suggest that while certitude about our own freedom is
necessary in order to undercut the risk presented to our own efforts to be moral by
the idea of fatalism, uncertainty about the real freedom of others could lead us to
temper our retributive instincts with humility and mercy. If so, then Kant’s strategy
of offering arguments by means of which each of us can prove his or her own
freedom but not prove beyond all doubt the freedom of others could have a doubly
desirable outcome, leading us to be rigorous in our moral demands on ourselves20
but merciful in our judgments of others. Kant does not explicitly draw such a
connection between the strategy of his proofs of freedom and his views about

19
See, in addition to the passage from MM-Vigilantius, 27:503, previously quoted, RBMR, 6:21. The
Religion (1793) was published in the same year in which Kant began the Vigilantius lectures (1793–4).
20
See RBMR, 6:23.
    

moral evaluation, but he does clearly express the view that we must be rigorous in our
moral evaluations of ourselves, thus assuming that we always have it in our power to
do what we should, while being more lenient in our judgments of others, allowing for
the possibility that they really could not have done what ideally they should have
done. This passage from the Collins lectures on ethics draws precisely such a
contrast:
Fragilitas and infirmitas humana can only be taken into account when judging the actions of
other people; in regard to my own actions, I myself must not count on them, and thereby excuse
what I do. Man, as a pragmatic lawgiver and judge, must take fragilitas and infirmitas humana
into consideration when dealing with others, and remember that they are only human; but in
regard to himself he must proceed with complete strictness. (MP-Collins, 27:295)
A passage in the Vigilantius lectures from a decade or more later shows that even
after Kant had developed the final form of the argument by means of which each one
of us can prove him- or herself free by reflecting on the condition of the possibility of
the moral obligation of which we are indubitably aware through our consciousness of
the moral law, he had not changed his position that we must be lenient in our moral
evaluation of others precisely because we cannot be certain of what degree of freedom
to impute to them:
The judgment or adjudication of others (judicatio) differs greatly from the execration or
condemnation (dijudicatio) of their faults. The latter consists in judgment with decisive legal
power, by determination of the consequences. Such decision in regard to the moral disposition
of the agent is impossible. Here it is a matter, not of external actions, which are the object of
judicial sentence in foro externo sive juridico, but of knowing the agent’s motives; but now
outwardly we do not know what sort of sensory impulses (stimuli) concurred in this, or how far
temperament contributed, or what sort of product a man is capable of achieving in his action,
through his education or mental powers. It is even less possible to learn this in others, than it is
hard, in our own case, to discover the motives that underlie our actions. Hence it is impossible
to judge oneself or others internally, either through a judge set up by the public law, or in statu
privato; it belongs only ad forum divinum, but also creates for us the beneficial duty of taking a
very mild view of the specifically illegal acts of other men, and judging them with leniency.
(MM-Vigilantius, 27:704)

Here Kant suggests that in evaluating the freedom of another we consider only
empirical factors such as his impulses, temperament, education, and mental
strengths, thus that we conceive of the freedom of another as consisting solely in a
condition of such empirical factors that is favorable to the performance of duty. He
further seems to assume that we can rightly condemn another for moral failures
when the other seems to have been sufficiently free in this sense to avoid them. But
since our judgments about the factors contributing to the freedom of another in this
sense are always less than completely certain, we can be, and indeed it could no doubt
be argued that we have a duty to be, lenient in our moral evaluation of them. (Since
juridical judgments concern external actions but not inner motives, this consider-
ation does not apply in their case.) Now in this passage Kant also observes that it is
difficult to know our own motives and strengths, although not as difficult as it is to
know those of others; but even so he does not conclude that we should be lenient with
   

ourselves, although he might be thought to have provided a premise for such a

conclusion. This must be precisely because each of us can prove him- or herself
transcendentally free and thus always capable of doing what morality demands even
without knowing the empirical details of our psychology.
Thus Kant attempts to show how each one of us may prove him- or herself
transcendentally free in order to prevent our commitment to morality from being
undermined by the thought of fatalism, that is, the thought that we are really not
entitled to adopt the standpoint of agency, while he refrains from attempting to show
that we can prove each other transcendentally free and even suggests that we should
be lenient in our judgments of others because of our uncertainty about their real
freedom. It is of course controversial whether Kant’s proofs of transcendental
freedom ever work, even when considered only from a first-person point of view,
and I would hope that our commitment to attempting to be moral would not be
undermined if they do not. But suggesting reasons why we should always attempt
to hold ourselves up to the highest moral standard while being more forgiving in
our judgments of others would hardly be an unfortunate outcome of what might
initially have seemed to be only a technical peculiarity of Kant’s methods of proving
ourselves free.21

21
I would like to thank Karl Ameriks for a useful suggestion in writing this chapter. I would like to
thank a number of the auditors of the previous version of this chapter at the X. International Kant
Congress, including, in addition to Patricia Kitcher and Barbara Herman, Marcus Willaschek and Houston
Smit, for their questions, which I have attempted to respond to explicitly or implicitly.
 10
Problems with Freedom
Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and its
Subsequent Emendations

1. Problems with Freedom

In the first two sections of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant has
offered an analytical argument for his claim that the categorical imperative is the
fundamental principle of morality. In Section I, he has argued that the imperative
“I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxims
should become a universal law” (G, 4:402) is derivable by the analysis of “common
rational moral cognition,” specifically from common-sense conceptions of good will
(4:393–6) and of duty, which is the concept of good will with the addition of “certain
subjective limitations and hindrances” (4:397) that are inescapable for human beings,
namely the fact that our inclinations do not always coincide with the demands of
morality. In Section II, he has argued that the categorical imperative, which has now
been represented as a system of formulas of which the specific formulation derived in
Section I is only the first,1 is derivable by analysis of the “universal concept of a
rational being as such” (4:412), or, more accurately, from the general concept of a
rational being with a will, or a rational agent (4:412, 427). But in both cases, Kant
claims, the mere analysis that suffices to determine the content of the fundamental
principle of morality does not by itself prove that this principle is binding for us
actual human beings. He makes this clear after his derivation of the first formulation
of the categorical imperative in Section II, the formulation that is the same as that
reached in Section I, when he says that “We have not yet advanced so far as to prove a
priori that there really is such an imperative . . . which commands absolutely of itself
and without any incentives” (4:425); again in Section II, after he has completed the
presentation of the system of imperatives and summed them up in the conception of
“autonomy as the supreme principle of morality,” when he says that “That this
practical rule is an imperative, that is, that the will of every rational being is
necessarily bound to it as a condition, cannot be proved by mere analysis of the
concepts to be found in it, because it is a synthetic proposition” (4:440); and at the
beginning of the third section, when he says, reverting to the initial formulation of

1
See Allen W. Wood, “The Moral Law as a System of Formulas,” in Hans Friedrich Fulda and Jürgen
Stolzenberg, eds, Architektonik und System in der Philosophie Kants (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001),
pp. 287–306, and “The Supreme Principle of Morality,” in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 342–80.
   

the categorical imperative, that “the principle of morality—that an absolutely good

will is that whose maxim can always contain itself regarded as a universal law—is
nevertheless always a synthetic proposition, for, by analysis of the concept of an
absolutely good will that property of its maxim cannot be discovered” (4:447).
Section III of the Groundwork is then supposed to provide a “critique of the subject,
that is, of pure practical reason” (4:440), that is, of our pure practical reason, which
will prove that the synthetic proposition that the fundamental principle of morality
as analyzed in the first two sections really is a categorical imperative for us, that is, a
practical principle that is universally and necessarily binding or categorical for us but
that also presents itself to us as a constraint or imperative because we are not always
and only inclined to do what it demands. The question, of course, is how Section III
of the Groundwork is supposed to accomplish this proof of a synthetic rather than
analytic proposition.
My thesis here (and in Chapters 8 and 9) is that the “critique of the subject” that is
supposed to provide this proof is a metaphysical argument depending upon a claim
about our real, “noumenal” selves, not a further analysis of the concept of agency, as
it is often represented in recent literature, that would yield merely another analytical
statement of the content of the categorical imperative.2 This metaphysical argument
is intended to prove that the moral law is the causal law of the real self, because the
freedom of the will that is attributed to the noumenal self, “although it is not a
property of the will in accordance with natural laws, is not for that reason lawless but
must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind”
(G, 4:446). That Kant’s argument in Section III is a metaphysical argument that the
moral law is the causal law of the noumenal self immediately raises several objections,
however. First, how could a critique of our pure practical reason possibly yield a
positive, synthetic a priori claim about our real, noumenal selves, when the entire
argument of the Critique of Pure Reason has apparently proven that we can have no
metaphysical cognition of the noumenal realm at all, only empirical, synthetic a
posteriori knowledge of its appearance in experience, synthetic a priori cognition of
the logical and mathematical structure of appearance, and synthetic a priori know-
ledge of the transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience, that is, the
necessary conditions for the representation of objects in experience? Second, if, as
Section III appears to argue, our noumenal self is the ground or basis—“noch etwas
anderes zum Grunde liegendes”—of the “constitution” of the subject “that is made up
of nothing but appearances” (G, 4:451), how can there be any tension or conflict

2
To be sure, my thesis that, contrary to a currently popular approach, Kant’s argument in Section III is
not an analysis of the concept of agency but a metaphysical argument is not unique; others who have
presented such an interpretation, although with differences of detail, include Henry E. Allison, in Kant’s
Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 12, pp. 214–29; Karl Ameriks,
“Kant’s Groundwork III Argument Reconsidered,” in his Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2003), pp. 226–48, previously published as “Zu Argumentation am Anfang des Dritten Abschnitts
der Grundlegung,” in Hans-Ulrich Baumgarten and Carsten Held, eds, Systematische Ethik mit Kant
(Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 2001), pp. 24–54; and Dieter Schönecker and Allen W. Wood, Immanuel
Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), ch. 4, pp. 175–217; this chapter is based on Schönecker’s previous book, Kant:
Grundlegung III: Die Deduktion des kategorischen Imperativs (Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, 1999).
    

between the inclinations of the phenomenal, empirical self and the will of the real,
noumenal self? How can my noumenal, moral self be as it were only a part of my
whole self, so that “if I were only this, all my actions would always be in conformity
with the autonomy of the will, but since at the same time I intuit myself as a member
of the world of sense” I can only say that “they ought to be in conformity with it”
(4:454)? Third, if the moral law is really the causal law of our noumenal selves, and if
a causal law is genuinely universal and necessary, a “rule,” as Kant says in the Critique
of Pure Reason, “in accordance with which [an] occurrence always and necessarily
follows” (A 193/B 238), then how can anyone ever act contrary to the moral law, that
is, how is immoral action possible at all?
Kant attempted to address these three questions in his works on the foundations of
morality subsequent to the Groundwork, that is, the Critique of Practical Reason and
the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In the Critique of Practical Reason
Kant addresses the first two questions, the first by introducing a conception of
“practical” knowledge that is an alternative to the purely “theoretical” knowledge
of the noumenal that was banned by the first Critique,3 and the second by introdu-
cing the thesis that one must regard one’s entire empirical character, inclinations and
all—“in general every determination of his existence changing conformably with
inner sense, even the whole sequence of is existence as a sensible being”—“as nothing
but the consequence and never as the determining ground of his existence as a
noumenon” (CPracR, 5:97–8). According to this thesis, there is indeed nothing in
anyone’s phenomenal self that is not grounded in his noumenal self. However, I will
argue, in spite of a famous change in direction in the argument of the Critique of
Practical Reason, its switch from the Groundwork’s inference from our noumenal self
to the moral law as its causal law to an inference from the fact of our consciousness of
the moral law to our noumenal freedom (see CPracR, 5:47), Kant does not in fact
change his conception of the moral law in the second Critique: it remains the causal
law of the noumenal self or will. Thus the problem of how such a self could ever
violate the moral law remains, or, given that the noumenal self is now clearly
recognized to be the ground of everything in the phenomenal self, the problem of
how the latter could even appear to violate the moral law becomes pressing. Kant
addresses this problem only in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
although he does so there not by explicitly retracting anything that he has previously
argued about the noumenal self and will but rather simply by heavily relying on the
principle that “ought implies can” and the implicit corollary that “ought does not
imply does”—this pair of principles will yield the result that if it is our duty to make
the moral law our fundamental maxim, then we are free to do so, but we are equally
free to choose not to, that is, to make self-love our fundamental maxim instead,
which in turn implies the points Kant is concerned to make in the Religion, namely

3
The second Critique’s conception of practical cognition was anticipated by Kant’s famous statement in
the Preface to the second edition of the first Critique that “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room
for faith” and thereby make possible a “practical extension of pure reason” (B xxx); but since the second
Critique apparently grew out of Kant’s work on the revision of the first, and was indeed intended as part of
the second edition of the first Critique rather than as a separate work, this does not undermine my thesis
but if anything supports it.
   

that even if we have already chosen evil, as we all seem to have done, we are still free
to choose good, but that even if we seem to have chosen good, not only can we never
be sure of that, but we are also still free to relapse into evil, and thus must not rely on
any external guarantee of the completeness of our conversion but must remain
constantly vigilant to preserve it. This position requires a fundamental departure
from the conception of the freedom of the noumenal will that is common to both the
Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason.

2. The Argument of Groundwork III

Not what but how Kant intended to argue in Section III of the Groundwork is as
controversial as any issue in Kant interpretation. I take the position, here as in
Chapters 8 and 9, first, that Section III begins with a recapitulation of the analytical
approach of Sections I and II that is expressed in the statement that “If freedom of the
will is presupposed, morality together with its principle follows from it by mere
analysis of its concept” (G, 4:447), but which then leads to the worry about a circle,
which entails a petitio principii,4 namely that we may “take ourselves as free in the
order of efficient causes in order to think ourselves under moral laws in the order of
ends” but “afterwards think ourselves as subject to these laws” only “because we have
already ascribed to ourselves freedom of the will” (4:450), and, second, that Kant then
attempts to prove5 the synthetic proposition that we really are free qua rational
beings and thus that the moral law really does apply to us, thereby breaking the circle
or averting the petitio principii, by an appeal to his doctrine of transcendental
idealism, specifically to its distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal self,
but an appeal which is affirmative in character, making a positive assertion about the
noumenal self, rather than, as we might have expected from the Critique of Pure
Reason, merely negative in character, restricting the scope of our assertions about the
phenomenal self but not positively asserting anything about the noumenal self.
The first phase of Groundwork III (4:446–50) is the most confusing, because Kant
says very early (4:447) that “the principle of morality” is “always a synthetic prop-
osition” but that it can be grounded in the third term (the “third thing” necessary to
bind subject and predicate in any synthetic proposition; see CPuR, A 155/B 194)
provided by “the positive concept of freedom,” which might suggest that the section
is meant to be a synthetic rather than analytic argument from the outset. However,
Kant immediately says that “What this third thing is, to which freedom points us and
of which we can have an idea a priori, cannot yet be shown here and now; nor can the

4
See Marcel Quarfood, “The Circle and the Two Standpoints,” in Christoph Horn and Dieter
Schönecker, eds, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter,
2006), pp. 285–300, especially pp. 287–92.
5
Both Jens Timmermann and Samuel Fleischacker have objected to my claim that the central argument
of Section III attempts to prove that we are noumenally free, suggesting instead that Kant is only trying to
make philosophical space for our pre-philosophical conviction that we are free to do as morality requires,
which would conflict with our pre-philosophical as well as critical commitment to determinism in the
natural world. I think that this more modest interpretation of Kant’s aim in Groundwork III, though it may
have much to recommend it, does not make sense of his subsequent attempt to create a category of
practical or “practico-dogmatic” knowledge, so I will stick to my more radical account of Kant’s aim.
    

deduction of the concept of freedom from pure practical reason, and with it the
possibility of a categorical imperative, as yet be made comprehensible; instead some
further preparation is required” (G, 4:447); he heads the immediately following
paragraph with the still provisional statement that “Freedom must be presupposed
as a property of the will of all rational beings,” thus remaining at the level of
conceptual analysis; and by raising the threat of a “circle” three pages later (4:450)
he again reminds us that the argument is still merely analytical. So I take it that
everything through that statement is meant to be merely analytical, thus a recapitu-
lation of the analytical arguments of the first two sections although perhaps with a
new twist, and that the positive, synthetic “deduction” of the concept of freedom and
with it of the moral law to which Kant refers at 4:447 is meant to be found only in the
argument from transcendental idealism that begins, following the worry about the
circle, at 3:451.6
If this is right, the first two subsections of Section III, the first of which concerns
negative and positive concepts or definitions (or “explications,” Erklärungen) of
freedom and the second of which expands upon the statement that freedom must
be presupposed as a property of the will of all rational beings, are both merely
analytical, as is signaled not only by the heading for the second subsection but
also by the heading of the first, namely, “The concept of freedom is the key to the
[definition or explication] of the autonomy of the will” (4:446). Kant begins the first
subsection with what is clearly intended to be the non-controversial statements that
“Will is a kind of causality of living beings insofar as they are rational, and freedom
[of the will] would be that property of such causality that it can be efficient of alien
causes determining it.” He then says that this definition or explication of freedom is
“negative and therefore unfruitful for insight into its essence” (given how he uses this
terminology, he could also have said that it is merely a nominal definition of
freedom). “But there flows from it a positive concept of freedom, which is so much
the richer and more fruitful,” namely that even though freedom of the will as
negatively defined, namely as freedom from external determination of the will,
must not be “a property of the will in accordance with natural laws, it is not for
that reason lawless but must instead be a causality in accordance with immutable
laws of a special kind.” Since another way of describing the determination by external
factors that is excluded is as “heteronomy,” Kant next says that the positive concep-
tion of the will must be the concept of “autonomy,” which is in turn nothing but the
“will’s property of being a law to itself.” This in turn means that the principle of the
will under the positive conception of its freedom is the moral law, because, according
to Kant, the “proposition, the will is in all its actions a law to itself, indicates only the
principle, to act on no other maxim than that which can also have as object itself as a

6
In the works previously mentioned, Allison, Ameriks, and Wood and Schönecker all agree that Kant’s
actual attempt at a deduction of the moral law in section III does not come until after he has stated the
danger of a circle, although Ameriks does not actually discuss the metaphysical argument that follows and
Wood and Schönecker claim that the actual deduction comes only after the appeal to transcendental
idealism, when Kant explains how the difference between our noumenal and phenomenal selves explains
the imperatival character of the principle of morality (pp. 206–9). I regard this as a statement of a
consequence of the deduction rather than the attempted deduction itself.
   

universal law” (4:446–7). Presumably this follows by the same sort of argument by
elimination that Kant used in Sections I (4:402) and II (4:421): once heteronomous
grounds or objects for laws are eliminated, nothing is left to serve the will as a law
except the requirement of the lawlikeness, that is, the universalizability of its maxims
itself. Thus Kant infers from the negative conception of freedom to the positive
conception of freedom and from the positive conception of freedom, or autonomy, to
the moral law. The reason why he now says that the principle of morality is a
synthetic proposition that cannot be discovered “by analysis of the concept of an
absolutely good will” must be that he is here equating the concept of an absolutely
good will with the initial, negative conception of freedom, which would be consistent
with his initial, negative characterization of action from duty—which is, again, just
the good will subject to certain hindrances—with action that is not motivated by
inclination (4:398), which also could not have and was not intended to prove that we
are in fact subject to the moral law. Thus, the positive conception of freedom
becomes a third term linking the negative conception of freedom and the moral
law in a synthetic proposition. But then Kant’s claim that “what this third cognition
is, to which freedom points us . . . cannot yet be shown here and now” can only mean
that it has not yet been proven that we have freedom positively conceived, so it has
not yet been proven that we actually have freedom negatively conceived on the one
hand nor that we are actually subject to the moral law on the other.7 Everything thus
far is still at the level of conceptual analysis.
The title of the next subsection—again, “Freedom must be presupposed as a
property of the will of all rational beings”—cannot be the deduction of our positive
freedom that is still needed, because Kant introduces it precisely by saying that “some
further preparation is required” (4:447). Rather, the function of this section is to
show that the positive conception of freedom and therefore the moral law can be
connected to the concept of every rational being, which Kant has claimed is a
condition on any derivation of the moral law in the Preface (e.g. 4:389) and in
Section II (4:412). Here Kant says that “since morality serves as a law for us only as
rational beings, it must also hold for all rational beings,” thus that since morality
“must be derived solely from the property of freedom” (under its positive concep-
tion), “freedom must also be proved as a property of all rational beings.” This
excludes any proof of our freedom from “certain supposed experiences of human
nature,” which would in any case be “absolutely impossible” 4:447–8). It is at this
point that Kant makes his famous, or notorious, claim that “every being that cannot
act otherwise than under the idea of freedom is just because of that really free in a
practical respect, that is, all laws that are inseparably bound up with freedom hold
for him just as if his will had been validly pronounced free also in itself and in
theoretical philosophy” (4:448). Kant’s reason for this claim is that a rational being
that conceives of itself as acting freely cannot “consciously” (mit ihrem eigenen

7
Here I differ from Allison’s interpretation that the “third cognition” to which Kant refers us here is
“the idea of an intelligible world” (Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 215). In my view, Kant is referring to the
reality of freedom as understood through the positive concept of it, although his proof of that reality will
depend upon his proof of the reality of the intelligible world, more specifically of our rationality and
therefore of our membership in it.
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Bewußtsein) think of itself as “receiving direction from anywhere other” than its own
reason, “since the subject would then attribute the determination of its judgment not
to its reason but to an impulse.” Any rational being that thinks of itself as free must
therefore “regard [ansehen] itself as the author of its principles independently of alien
influences,” that is, must regard the moral law rather than any heteronomous source as
the principle of its action.8 This argument, which turns on attributing to any rational
being the positive conception of freedom and therefore the moral law, serves the
purpose of showing that any rational being is bound by the moral law. But it is still
just “preparation” for the deduction of the moral law because it has not yet been shown
that we are actually rational beings. Kant is not here claiming that for us to act “under
the idea of freedom” is sufficient to prove that we are rational beings; rather, he is still,
as he explicitly says, preparing the way for a subsequent proof that we are rational
beings which will demonstrate that we are not acting merely under the idea of freedom
but are actually free and therefore, in accordance with the positive conception of
freedom, bound by the moral law. This is why he can still be worried about the threat
of a circle entailing a petitio principii, at 4:450: he has not yet attempted to prove that
we are rational beings, but has only proven what will follow, namely the validity of the
moral law for us as for all rational beings, if we are. It is because Kant so clearly says
that this argument about what must be presupposed by and about any rational being is
still part of the preparation for the deduction, not the deduction itself, that I cannot, as
a matter of historical interpretation, join in the tendency to regard it as intended by
Kant to be the real basis for the proof that the moral law applies to us.9
Kant expresses the threat of the circle by stating that “freedom and the will’s own
law-giving are both autonomy and hence reciprocal concepts,” thus neither can be
used as a “ground” for proving the other (4:450). His strategy in the second main
stage of Groundwork III (4:451–4) for escaping this threat is now to prove that we
really are rational beings, and therefore positively free beings bound by the moral law,
by means of an appeal to transcendental idealism. Kant begins this stage by asking
whether we might not escape the threat of the circle by taking up “a different
standpoint when by means of freedom we think ourselves as causes efficient a priori
than when we represent ourselves in terms of our actions that we see before our eyes,”

8
Schönecker and Wood point out that this argument, which Kant had made the previous year in his
“Review of Schulz’s Essay toward an Introduction to the Doctrine of Morals,” can be traced back to Epicurus
(Kant’s Groundwork, pp. 192–3).
9
The two most influential proponents of this tendency have been Thomas E. Hill, Jr., beginning with
“Kant’s Argument for the Rationality of Moral Conduct,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1985): 3–23,
reprinted in his Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell
University Press, 1992), pp. 97–122, and continuing in the Editors’ Introduction to Kant, Groundwork for
the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Thomas E. Hill, Jr. and Arnulf Zweig (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), pp. 97–8, and Christine M. Korsgaard in, for example, “Morality as Freedom,” in Yirmiahu Yovel,
ed., Kant’s Practical Philosophy Reconsidered (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 23–48, reprinted in her
Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 159–87, especially
pp. 173–4. Other prominent proponents of this interpretation include Barbara Herman and Andrews
Reath. Referring to an earlier paper by Robert Pippin, “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind,” Canadian
Journal of Philosophy 17 (1987): 449–75, Karl Ameriks also raises doubts about attempts to find Kant’s
deduction of the moral law in this analysis of what must be presupposed in the concept of rational agency;
see “Kant’s Groundwork III Argument Reconsidered,” pp. 236–7.
   

that is, when we represent ourselves empirically or a priori. The kind of interpret-
ation I reject reads this question as if it were itself the answer, that is, as if Kant is
claiming that we can take a practical standpoint or think of ourselves as agents
independently of any metaphysical argument. But it is clear that in Kant’s own view
only the metaphysical argument that follows will allow us to adopt the practical
standpoint of agency. (It will also require us to do so.)
Kant introduces the metaphysical argument with the remarkable claim that “no
subtle reflection is required” to accept its first premise, which is that in all involuntary
representation, such as sensory representation, we must distinguish “objects only as they
affect us” from “what they may be in themselves,” or “appearances” from “things in
themselves” (4:451). Kant does not allude explicitly to the Critique of Pure Reason nor to
any of the specific arguments for transcendental idealism that he made there, nor does
he elaborate much of an independent argument for it here; he says only that this
distinction will be made “perhaps merely by means of the difference noticed between
representations given us from somewhere else and in which we are passive, and those
that we produce simply from ourselves and in which we show our activity.” If he is not
assuming any a priori and metaphysical activity here that would entirely obviate the
need for any further argument, he must be assuming a merely empirical distinction
between some states or events in which we seem active and others in which we seem
passive—like the difference between a state in which I seem to raise my arm merely
because I want to and a state in which, because my eyes are open, I see the sun whether
I want to or not—and then assuming that in the latter sort of state my representation is
the effect of a cause from which it must differ, indeed differ not merely numerically but
in such a profound qualitative way that I cannot ascribe to the cause even the same sorts
of properties that I find in the effect. Kant may have meant to state such an argument in
the inaugural dissertation of 1770 (ID, }4, 2:392), but he did not make such an argument
in the first Critique nor does he go beyond this hint here. Nevertheless, we are supposed
to accept that there must be a difference between the way objects of perception appear
and the way they are in themselves as the premise for everything that follows.
Kant’s next step is to apply this distinction to our empirical cognition of ourselves
through inner sense: “Even as to himself, the human being cannot claim to cognize
what he is in himself through the cognizance that he has by inner sensation.” Thus,
everything the human being knows about himself by means of inner sense, presum-
ably including, although Kant does not explicitly say so, everything we know about
the causal determination of our choices and actions by antecedent incentives, is
merely “the appearance of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is
affected,” yet “beyond this constitution of his own subject, made up of nothing but
appearances, he must necessarily assume something else lying at their basis, namely
his self [Ich] as it may be constituted in itself” (4:451). Thus (also) one must count
oneself as belonging not merely to the “sensible world” but also to the “intellectual
world.” Kant’s use here of also, that is, “thus” or “therefore,” makes it plain that one
does not simply adopt a conception of oneself as an agent without metaphysical
presupposition, but can do so only on the basis of the present distinction between
oneself as appearance and oneself as thing in itself.
Now Kant also says that one “has no further cognizance” of the intellectual world
to which one assigns one’s self as it is in itself, which would seem to bring the whole
    

argument to a halt. However, this claim must be provisional, for the third step of
Kant’s argument is to claim that because we find reason (his emphasis) to be “a
capacity by which one distinguishes oneself from all other things, even from oneself
insofar as one is affected by objects” (4:452), we can take reason to be a property of
ourselves as we really are rather than as we merely appear. This is because reason
goes entirely beyond sensibility: unlike understanding, which is a form of “self-
activity” but merely brings sensible representations “that arise when we are affected
by things” under rules, reason is a “pure self-activity” or “spontaneity so pure that it
thereby goes far beyond anything that sensibility can ever afford it, and proves its
highest occupation in distinguishing the world of sense and the world of under-
standing” (4:452). The key inference of Kant’s argument is thus that while sensibility
and understanding can be thought of as faculties of our merely empirical selves, we
must think of reason as a faculty of our selves as they are in themselves: thus, we
really are rational beings, and everything that is contained in the concept of a rational
being really does apply to us. And that, we are about to see, includes freedom, that is,
the self-activity or spontaneity of reason.
One might well think that the claim that reason distinguishes us from all other
things and even from ourselves insofar as we are merely affected by things, that is,
insofar as we are engaged in mere sense-perception, could only be an empirical claim:
we do not find reason in any other creatures, nor do we find reason to be involved in
mere sense-perception, but we do find ourselves able to reason in ways that cannot be
reduced to sense-perception. But discovering empirically that we have a unique
capacity for reasoning would not seem to entitle us to make any metaphysical claims
about our selves as they are in themselves. However, Kant does not pause to consider
such an objection to the nervus probandi of his argument, but instead proceeds
directly to its conclusion: namely, that if we really are rational, then we really can
attribute to ourselves negative freedom, its ground in positive freedom, and the moral
law that is the principle of positive freedom. Thus he writes, as the fourth step of his
argument, in which the “third thing” that will prove the synthetic proposition that
the moral law does apply to us is finally revealed:
As a rational being, and thus as a being belonging to the intelligible world, the human being
can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom; for,
independence from the determining causes of the world of sense (which reason must always
ascribe to itself) is freedom. With the idea of freedom the concept of autonomy is now
inseparably combined, and with the concept of autonomy the universal principle of morality,
which in idea is the ground of all actions of rational beings, just as the law of nature is the
ground of all appearances.
The suspicion that we raised above is now removed, the suspicion that a hidden circle was
contained in our inference from freedom to autonomy and from the latter to the moral
law . . . (4:452–3)

The suspicion is now removed because by proving ourselves to be rational beings we

have proved, not just presupposed or assumed, that we are (negatively) free to act
independently of the “determining causes of the sensible world” and (positively) free
to act in accordance with the “universal principle of morality.” We have proved that
what applies to all rational beings “in the idea” actually applies to us as we really are.
   

“Hence” as Kant says (but I emphasize) we have “two standpoints from which” we
can regard ourselves (4:452).
This completes Kant’s argument that the moral law as analyzed in Sections I and II
of the Groundwork really does apply to us, and the remainder of Section III is
intended only to clarify some implications of this argument. First, Kant claims that
it answers the problem that was left dangling in Section II, how is a categorical
imperative possible (G, 4:419–20), because it explains why my actions conform to the
laws of the sensible as well as the intellectual world, and thus why my inclinations can
provide resistance to the requirements of the moral law, thereby making it seem like
an imperative to us.10 Kant says that
All my actions as only a member of the world of understanding would . . . conform perfectly with
the principle of the autonomy of the pure will; as only a part of the world of sense they would have
to be taken to conform wholly to the natural law of desires and inclinations, hence to the
heteronomy of nature . . . And so categorical imperatives are possible by this: that the idea of
freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world and consequently, if I were only this, all my
actions would always be in conformity with the autonomy of the will; but since at the same time
I intuit myself as a member of the world of sense, they ought to be in conformity with it (4:453–4)—

but apparently are not necessarily always in conformity with it. Second, Kant spends
the remaining pages of Section III explaining that his argument for our rationality as
things in themselves does not violate the strictures against knowledge of things in
themselves established in the Critique of Pure Reason because it is not based on any
claim to an experience of our rationality and freedom: “By thinking itself into a world
of understanding, practical reason does not overstep its boundaries, but it would
certainly do if it wanted to intuit or feel itself into it” (4:458).
There are grave problems with Kant’s metaphysical argument in Groundwork III,
however. First, there is what we might call the epistemological problem. This can in
turn be divided into two parts. The first part has already been suggested, namely that
the premise for the crucial third step of Kant’s argument, that we find reason to be that
which distinguishes us from everything else in nature and even from ourselves as mere
perceivers, might seem to be exactly the sort of empirical premise on which he has just
denied that his argument rests; the second part is that assuring us that the argument he
has offered does not rest on any empirical premise hardly seems sufficient to explain
how we can have knowledge of the self as it is in itself even through a faculty of reason
that is not reducible to sense-perception or some operation on it. We need a more
positive account of the possibility of knowledge of the in-itself than Kant offers in the
Groundwork. Second, there is what we might think of as a metaphysical problem,
namely, Kant’s explanation that if we were solely denizens of the intelligible world we

10
This is the argument that Schönecker and Wood characterize, in my view misleadingly, as the
deduction of the categorical imperative itself (Kants “Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten” (Paderborn:
Schöningh (UTB), 2007), p. 207). In my view, this argument explains the phenomenologically imperatival
character of the fundamental principle of morality for us, that is, that it presents itself to us as a constraint,
but not the underlying fact that it obligates us. But since Wood and Schönecker also admit that this
argument presupposes the “validity” of the moral law for us (p. 209), the difference between my view and
theirs is more verbal than substantive.
    

would not find the moral law to be a constraint in accordance with which we ought to
act but that we do find it a constraint that we wish to resist because we are also
creatures of the sensible world makes it seem as if our nature is genuinely bipartite, part
rational and part irrational, with these two parts contending for control of our will; but
if our noumenal self is supposed to be the ground of our empirical self, then it ought to
be the source for everything in that phenomenal self, and while we might be able to
make sense of the idea that for some reason the phenomenal self appears different from
the noumenal self, it seems very hard to make any sense of the idea that the phenom-
enal self could in any way actually be opposed to the noumenal self, or more precisely to
the will of the noumenal self. Thus it seems hard to understand how anything in the
phenomenal self could offer resistance to the will of the noumenal self, even a resistance
that can be overcome by the noumenal will. And third, if the noumenal self is entirely
rational, not just negatively free but positively governed by the moral law, if, as Kant
said at the outset of Section III and now takes himself to have proven, “freedom . . .
must be causality in accordance with immutable laws but of a special kind,” then the
question inevitably arises, how could the noumenal will ever choose in opposition to
the moral law? Kant forces this question upon us when he writes:
The human being claims for himself a will that lets nothing be put to his account that belongs
merely to his desires and inclinations, and on the contrary thinks as possible by means of it—
indeed as necessary—actions that can be done only by disregarding all desires and sensible
incitements. The causality of such actions lies in him as intelligence and in the laws of effects
and actions in accordance with the principles of an intelligible world . . . in it reason alone, and
indeed pure reason independent of sensibility, gives the law, and, in addition, that since it is
there as intelligence only, that he is his proper self [der eigentliche Selbst] (as a human being he
is only the appearance of himself), those laws apply to him immediately and categorically, so
that what inclinations and impulses (hence the whole nature of the world of sense) incite him
to cannot infringe upon the laws of his volition as intelligence . . . (4:457–8, emphases added)
This makes it unmistakable that Kant holds the moral law to be the causal law of the
noumenal self. But if the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal self, how could
the noumenal self ever will an immoral action (that is, immoral maxim)? And then,
combining this question with the previous one, how could the phenomenal self even
appear to be acting immorally?
My argument now will be that Kant attempted to address the first two of
these questions in the Critique of Practical Reason, but that he did not address the
third question there nor modify his position in any way that would resolve the third
question. He addresses the third question only in the Religion, although not so much
by retracting the argument that gives rise to it as by skirting it.

3. Answering the First Two Questions

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant restates the “reciprocity thesis”11 that he had
already stated in the Groundwork when he said that a circle could arise precisely

11
Henry Allison has made this name for Kant’s analytical connection canonical; see “Morality and
Freedom: Kant’s Reciprocity Thesis,” The Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 393–425, and his Kant’s Theory
   

because “freedom and the will’s own lawgiving are . . . reciprocal concepts” (G, 4:450),
now asserting that “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each
other” (CPracR, 5:29), but then appears to reverse the direction of his previous
argument, stating that
our cognition of the unconditionally practical . . . cannot start from freedom, for we can
neither be immediately conscious of this . . . nor can we immediately conclude to it from
experience. It is therefore the moral law of which we become immediately conscious (as
soon as we draw up maxims of the will for ourselves), that first offers itself to us and,
inasmuch as reason presents it as a determining ground not to be outweighed by any
sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them, leads directly to the concept of
freedom. (5:29–30).
Kant himself implies that there is a reversal of the direction of the argument from the
Groundwork here several pages later, when he says that the “moral law is given, as it
were, as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and thus which
cannot be deduced from anything else,” but that “something different and quite
paradoxical takes the place of this vainly sought deduction, namely that the moral
principle conversely itself serves as the principle of the deduction of an inscrutable
faculty which no experience could prove . . . namely the faculty of freedom” (5:47).
Here Kant suggests that any attempt to derive the validity of the causal law from the
fact of our freedom, which one might have thought was the strategy of the Ground-
work, is doomed, because no theoretical proof of our freedom can be given, but that
the attempt to derive the fact of our freedom from our consciousness of our
obligation under the moral law will succeed, because the latter is a “fact of reason”
which needs no deduction.12 Presumably, what now allows Kant to derive our
freedom from our consciousness of the moral law is the premise that “you can
because you ought to,” that one “judges that one can do something because he is

of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 11, pp. 201–13. Dieter Schönecker refers to
it as Kant’s “analyticity thesis”; see his Kant: Grundlegung III: Die Deduktion des kategorischen Imperativs
(Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1999), ch. 3, pp. 147–95, and “How is a Categorical Imperative
Possible? Kant’s Deduction of the Categorical Imperative,” in Horn and Schönecker, Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 301–24.
12
The literature on the “fact of reason” is of course extensive. For a survey of the relevant texts, see
Lewis White Beck, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960), pp. 166–70; for a classic statement of the reversal interpretation, see Karl Ameriks, “Kant’s
Deduction of Freedom and Morality,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 53–79, and his Kant’s
Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, new edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000),
ch. VI, pp. 189–233; and for another statement of the reversal interpretation, see John Rawls, Lectures on
the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),
Kant lecture VIII, pp. 253–72. Those who have argued against the reversal interpretation by arguing that
the “fact of reason” argument of the second Critique is actually already implicit in the Groundwork include
H. J. Paton in The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (London: Hutchinson,
1947), and Dieter Henrich, in “Die Deduktion des Sittengesetzes,” in Alexander Schwann, ed., Denken im
Schatten des Nihilismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 55–112, partially
translated in Paul Guyer, ed., Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, p. 228.
    

aware that he ought to do it” (5:30):13 if we genuinely have an obligation, then we

must be able to fulfill it, no matter what everything else about our character and
conduct might suggest, that is, we must be able to free ourselves from any other
determinants of our behavior and be free to fulfill our obligation.
But the relation between the Groundwork and the second Critique may not be as
simple as it initially seems and as indeed Kant makes it seem. For as we have now
seen, in the Groundwork Kant does not in fact simply attempt to deduce our
obligation under the moral law from the alleged fact of our freedom, but rather
infers both our freedom and our necessary conformity to the moral law from the
alleged fact of our membership in the intelligible world and thus our rationality.
Meanwhile, in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant does not appeal to the principle
“you can because you ought to” for his primary inference of freedom from the moral
law, but only in the course of showing that “experience also confirms this order of
concepts in us” (5:30). In fact, Kant’s primary proof of our freedom in the second
Critique depends upon a claim about the purity of our knowledge of the moral law, its
status as a principle of pure practical reason, and this suggests that the primary datum
of his argument is our consciousness of the rationality of the moral law rather than its
obligatoriness—he does, after all, state that his argument begins from a fact of reason
(5:31), not a fact of obligation. But the fundamental premise of his argument in the
Groundwork was also the fact of our rationality. The real difference between the two
arguments is that in the Groundwork Kant appeals to transcendental idealism to
establish our rationality, and from that our freedom and thence our subjection to the
moral law, while in the second Critique he appeals directly to our knowledge of the
moral law to establish the fact of our rationality and thence our freedom as the self-
activity of pure reason.
This is clear in how Kant continues the passage in which he says that it is the moral
law of which we become immediately conscious and that then leads to the concept of
freedom:
But how is consciousness of that moral law possible? We can become aware of pure practical
laws just as we are aware of pure theoretical principles, by attending to the necessity with which
reason prescribes them to us and to the setting aside of all empirical conditions to which reason
directs us. The concept of a pure will arises from the first, as consciousness of a pure
understanding arises from the latter. That this is the true subordination of our concepts and
that morality first discloses to us the concept of freedom . . . is clear from the following: that
since nothing in appearances can be explained by the concept of freedom and there the
mechanism of nature must instead constitute the only guide . . . one would never have ventured
to introduce freedom into science had not the moral law, and with it practical reason, come in
and forced this concept upon us. (5:30)
It is only after this that Kant says that we can appeal to experience to confirm this, for
anyone will admit that he can do something he knows he ought to do, such as refuse
to bear false witness against an honest person even when that will cost him his life,

13
See Jens Timmermann, “Sollen und Können: ‘Du kannst, denn du sollst’ und ‘Sollen impliziert
Können’ im Vergleich,” in Philosophiegeschichte und logische Analyse/Logical Analysis and History of
Philosophy 6 (2003): 113–22.
   

even though he does not know whether he will do it. The preceding argument does
not directly appeal to an ought and thus to the principle that you can because you
ought to at all. Instead, it infers from the necessity of the moral law that it must have a
pure source within us, just as we can infer from the necessity of the laws of logic that
we must have a pure understanding (and for that matter, although Kant had argued
this in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics but does not mention it here, as
we can infer from the necessity of the laws of mathematics that we must have a
faculty of pure intuition). In making this inference, it should be noted, Kant observes
the constraint of the Groundwork (4:447–8) that the argument for the validity of the
moral law cannot turn on any specifically human feature of experience: his argument
is not that we infer to the purity of the will from our experience of necessitation
(Nötigung) by the moral law, that is, the experience of the moral law as a constraint
on our non-moral or only contingently moral inclinations (“the relation of objective
laws to a will that is not thoroughly good” [G, 4:413]), but is rather that the necessity
(Notwendigkeit) of the moral law is self-evident—something that would be self-
evident for any rational being, not just a human being—and that from the purity
of the faculty that apprehends the necessarily true moral law we can also infer the
purity of the will, the executive faculty that determines the maxims of our actions.
Now if he does not in the first instance appeal to the principle that you can because
you ought to, how does Kant get from the necessity of the moral law and therefore the
purity of its source to our freedom? The answer is that he does this by equating pure
practical reason with a pure will when he says that the consciousness of a pure will
arises from the necessity of pure practical laws just as that of a pure understanding
arises from the necessity of pure theoretical principles. That is, since he does not
think that any additional step is needed to get from pure practical reason as the
source of pure practical laws to the existence of a pure will, independent of empirical
determinants, he must be equating pure practical reason with a pure will. But if he
does this, of course, then the law of pure practical reason, that is, the moral law, must
also be the law of the pure will, and the problem that there is then no way that a being
with a pure will could choose to violate the moral law is still with us in full force.
So in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant does not exploit the possibility of
avoiding this problem that is opened up by the strategy of basing an argument for
freedom on the principle that you can because you ought to, namely the fact that you
ought to do something does not imply that you will. That move will have to await the
Religion. Nevertheless, Kant does address the first two questions left outstanding by
the Groundwork. First, each half of the epistemological problem is addressed. The
first half of the problem, namely that the Groundwork’s metaphysical argument
seems to depend upon an empirical claim about the uniqueness of our faculty of
reason, is not addressed explicitly, but is tacitly avoided by the inference to our pure
faculty of reason from the necessity of the moral law. This move does not depend
upon any empirical claim, but quite to the contrary on the principle that genuine
necessities are never known empirically, but only by means of a pure, non-empirical
faculty (see CPuR, B 3–4). Thus the present argument does not paradoxically try to
infer something about the noumenal self from something about the phenomenal self,
but instead depends upon the thoroughly Kantian principle that knowledge of
necessity is never empirical. Of course, insofar as the argument depends upon the
    

assumption of the necessity of the moral law, that is, presumably, in analogy to pure
theoretical principles, its necessary truth, the argument might seem to commit
precisely the circularity that Kant was trying to avoid in the Groundwork, taking
for granted what is supposed to be proved—but in the doctrine of the fact of reason
Kant seems to have set aside his fear of this circle and instead embraced the
indubitable necessity of the moral law.
Kant addresses the second half of the epistemological problem, that of giving a
positive account of how we can have knowledge of anything about the noumenal self,
explicitly and at length in the second Critique. He does this in his account of the
“Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason” and the ensuing section “On
the Warrant of Pure Reason in its Practical Use to an Extension which is not Possible
for it in its Speculative Use” (CPracR, 5:42–57) and in the famous section on the
“Primacy of Pure Practical Reason” in the “Dialectic” (5:119–21). In the latter
section, he argues that in the case in which “practical reason has of itself original a
priori principles with which certain theoretical positions are inseparably connected,”
then as long as those theoretical principles do not contradict any other theoretical
principles that can be proven to be true, practical reason’s need for those theoretical
principles is sufficient for it to “accept” (annehmen) them, not to be sure as theor-
etical “insights” but as “extensions of [their] use from another, namely a practical
perspective,” which is not in the least opposed to the “interest” of critical philosophy,
“which consists in the restriction of speculative mischief” (5:121). The proposition
that we have free noumenal wills, just like the proposition that an author of nature
exists who makes its laws consistent with the moral law (what Kant is about to argue
in the “Dialectic”), is a theoretical proposition, that is, it asserts a predicate of an
object, but a theoretical proposition that cannot be proven by experience. But neither
does it contradict any other theoretical proposition that can be proven, because
all that can be proven theoretically is that phenomena are completely subject to
deterministic causal laws (and the phenomena of human behavior to deterministic
causal laws of inclination), not that noumena are. But then practical reason is free to
assume that our noumenal selves are free, and thus to gain an “extension” even if not
an “insight.”
Kant makes a subtler point in his discussion of the deduction of the principles of
pure practical reason. Here he says that not only need I not bring my noumenal
actions under the causal laws of nature that apply to phenomena but that I cannot
bring them under such laws, “For the moral law is not concerned with cognition of
the constitution of objects that may be given to reason from elsewhere but rather with
a cognition insofar as it can itself become the ground of the existence of objects and
insofar as reason, by this cognition, has causality in a rational being” (5:46). That is,
the ordinary categories of experience, including the ordinary category of causality in
accordance with laws of nature, are applied to objects that are given to us; but since in
the case of practical reason we are not concerned with objects that are given to us but
with objects that we ought to produce—and, according to the Groundwork, not
physical states of affairs that we ought to produce but strictly speaking the intentions
we ought to produce (G, 4:399–400)—in thinking about practical reason we do not
have to concern ourselves with the categories that apply to the appearances of
sensible, that is, given objects at all. In the following discussion of the “extension”
   

of which reason is capable in its practical but not theoretical use, Kant goes on to
argue that while the problem about knowledge of things in themselves is ordinarily
that our claims about them must be vacuous or indeterminate, the moral law actually
makes our concept of the noumenal self determinate: while the “category of causal-
ity” which is by itself indeterminate is in its ordinary theoretical use made determin-
ate only by experience, and therefore only for phenomena, not for things in
themselves, the moral law actually makes the category determinate for things in
themselves. That is, while this category “is not capable of being determined so as to
represent a determinate object for the sake of theoretical cognition, yet for the sake
of something else (the practical, perhaps) it could be capable of being determined for
its application” (CPracR, 5:54). By thus construing the general problem of knowledge
of things in themselves as a problem of determinacy or informativeness, Kant allows
himself the possibility of claiming that the moral law resolves this general problem
about knowledge of the noumenal by making the concept of the noumenal will
determinate in a way that our concepts of the noumenal are not.
I will not comment on the plausibility of this solution other than to observe that it
once again confronts us with the third problem for the Groundwork, the problem
about the possibility of violating the moral law if the moral law is the causal law of the
noumenal self, in full force. I will now turn to the Critique of Practical Reason’s
response to the second problem for the Groundwork, the problem that it is not clear
how there can be any conflict between the law of the noumenal self and the laws of
the phenomenal self if the former is the sole ground of the latter. Kant addresses this
problem in the second Critique by maintaining that there cannot be any such
conflict, but rather that the whole of any agent’s phenomenal character must always
be regarded as determined by his noumenal character. Kant makes this point in the
“Critical Elucidation” (literally, “illumination”: Beleuchtung) of the Analytic of Pure
Practical Reason (5:89–106). The heart of this section is Kant’s explanation of how
his theory of freedom is to be reconciled with his thoroughly deterministic theory of
experience. On this theory of experience, every event is caused by antecedent
conditions which themselves have antecedent causes ad indefinitum, and human
actions are no exception. Thus, the standard compatibilist model of the freedom of
the will, according to which free actions are those due to internal causes in the agent,
such as preferences, rather than external causes, is a sham, a “wretched subterfuge”
granting the agent no more freedom than a projectile once it is in flight (5:96) or the
freedom of an “automaton” or a “turnspit” (5:97), because no matter what sort of
internal cause is posited in the agent, that will be part of a chain of causes and effects
extending far into the past, and the agent’s actions will still be determined by
antecedent conditions beyond his current control.14 The only solution to this, Kant
claims, is the transcendental idealist thesis that “The concept of causality as natural

14
Jochen Bojanowski puts this point by saying that Kant is worried about “predeterminism” rather than
“determinism”; see Kants Theorie der Freiheit: Rekonstruktion und Rehabilitierung (Berlin and New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 2006), p. 5. That could be misleading if predeterminism is equated with fatalism, that is,
the doctrine that what an agent will do at some time in his life is determined by events prior to his own
choices no matter what choices he makes in the meantime; but that is clearly not what Bojanowski thinks
Kant is worried about.
    

necessity as distinguished from the concept of causality as freedom, concerns only

the existence of things insofar as it is determinable in time and hence as appearances,
as opposed to their causality as things in themselves” (5:94). Transcendental idealism
makes it possible to “ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in
time, and so too its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to
appearance, and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself” (5:95). In
particular, transcendental idealism makes it possible for the “acting subject as
appearance,” for whom “the determining grounds of every action . . . lie so far in
what belongs to past time and is [sic] no longer in his control,” to view “his existence
insofar as it does not stand under conditions of time . . . as determinable only
through laws that he gives himself by reason,” and further to view his entire existence
in time as the product of the noumenal determination of his will:
in this existence of his nothing is, for him, antecedent to the determination of his will, but every
action—and in general every determination of his existence changing conformably with
inner sense, even the whole sequence of his existence as a sensible being—is to be regarded
in the consciousness of his intelligible existence as nothing but the consequence and never as
the determining ground of his causality as a noumenon . . . . the sensible life has, with respect to
the intelligible consciousness of its existence (consciousness of freedom), the absolute unity of
a phenomenon . . . this whole chain of appearances, with respect to all that the moral law is
concerned with, depends upon the spontaneity of the subject as a thing in itself, for the
determination of which no physical explanation can be given. (5:97–9)

On this model, there can be no genuine conflict between any feature of the appear-
ance of an agent, at least any with which the moral law is concerned, thus any
possible motivation to action, and his noumenal will, because his entire phenomenal
character is a consequence of his noumenal will. If the agent acts on non-moral
motivations or, apparently, even feels the pull of non-moral motivations, that must
somehow reflect the determination of his noumenal will, its failure to make any or a
complete commitment to morality. Indeed, to carry Kant’s thought to completion,
everything in the phenomenal world that would appear to be a determinant of an
agent’s actions must in fact be a reflection of his noumenal choice, so either events
that are phenomenally antecedent to his birth but appear to determine his choices or,
more plausibly, the laws of his character which link his prior condition to his present
choices must in fact reflect his noumenal will.
This position may not be plausible in its own right, but it is clearly a more
consistent application of transcendental idealism than was the model suggested in
Groundwork III, which characterized the human being as only partly in the intelli-
gible world and as also acted upon by causes in the sensible world, as if these two
worlds were fighting for control of his will. But of course it also makes all the more
pressing the third problem with the Groundwork account of freedom, namely that if
the phenomenal character of the agent is entirely the consequence of his noumenal
will but if the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal will, then how can there be
any violation of the moral law at either the noumenal or phenomenal level? In the
passage from the “Elucidation” that we have been discussing, Kant clearly assumes
that there is a possibility of immoral as well as moral choice at the noumenal level: he
claims that considered as a noumenon, “a rational being can now rightly say of every
   

unlawful action he performed that he could have omitted it even though as appear-
ance it is sufficiently determined in the past” (5:98), which implies that (what appears
as) his past choice of an unlawful action was free and could have been otherwise. But
how could the noumenal will be free to choose either to comply with the moral law or
to violate it if the moral law is its causal law?

4. Answering the Third Question

This is the question that drives Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,
particularly its first part. This question is sometimes thought to have been made
pressing for Kant in 1792 by Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s objection to the “friends of
Kant,” in the second set of his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, that since “the
freedom of the pure will consists merely in the self-activity of practical reason, one
must also concede that the impure will, which is not effected through practical
reason, is by no means free”;15 but since Part One of the Religion appeared in the
Berlinische Monatsschrift in April of that year, Kant may have written it before he had
seen Reinhold’s work. However, the question had already been bruited by Johann
August Heinrich Ulrich in 1788,16 so Kant may have already been prompted by him
to worry about the question, or indeed might simply have begun to worry about it
himself. (Reinhold was in fact attempting to answer Ulrich on Kant’s behalf.) One
might be tempted to say that this is the question that Kant addresses in the Religion,
except for the fact that Kant does not so much directly address this problem with his
previous account of noumenal freedom as simply sidestep it by appealing only to the
principle that ought implies can in support of his position that the very nature of
freedom is the possibility of choosing either good or evil, so that one who has chosen
evil has done so freely but is still always able to choose good, while there is also
nothing to prevent one who has chosen good, or more precisely converted from his
prior choice of evil, from relapsing and once again choosing evil—Kant explicitly
rejects any conception of divine grace on which God is supposed to ensure the
unchangeableness of an agent’s fundamental moral disposition once he has con-
verted from evil to good (RBMR, 6:67–8).
This is hardly the place for a detailed interpretation of the Religion.17 But some of
the key points of Kant’s argument are these. First, Kant maintains that an agent’s
moral evil or goodness is never a product of mere nature, that is, what inclinations
the agent happens to have: the mere occurrence of inclinations as such is morally

15
Cited from Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer, eds, Materialen zu Kants “Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), p. 255.
16
Johann August Heinrich Ulrich, Eleutheriologie oder über Freiheit und Notwendigket (Jena: Cröker,
1788).
17
There have been notable additions to the literature on Kant’s Religion since this chapter was originally
written: see James J. DiCenso, Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Christopher J. Insole, Kant and the Creation of Freedom:
A Theological Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Lawrence R. Pasternack, Routledge
Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (London: Routledge,
2014); and Stephen R. Palmquist, Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of
Bare Reason (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
    

indifferent, although in fact natural inclinations on their own would be a force for at
least externally good outcomes (RBMR, 6:28, 58). For both good and evil are
“imputable,” that is, something for which the agent is justly held responsible, and
in order to be imputable they must be a product of free choice: the subjective ground
of either evil or good “must itself always be a deed [Actus] of freedom (for otherwise
the use or abuse of the human being’s power of choice [Willkür] with respect to the
moral law could not be imputed to him, nor could the good or evil in him be called
moral)” (6:21). The agent’s free choice always takes the form of a maxim, and it is
only by being “incorporated” into his maxim—that is, made into a reason for action
by means of a freely chosen “universal rule for himself, according to which he wills to
conduct himself”—that an agent can make a naturally occurring incentive morally
significant. An agent accepts or rejects an incentive as a sufficient reason for action by
means of the maxim that he adopts regarding the action it suggests: “Only in this way
can an incentive, whatever it may be, coexist with the absolute spontaneity of the
power of choice (of freedom)” (6:24). But Kant also maintains that an agent cannot
simply adopt some particular maxims that have one moral quality and others that
have the other, that is, adopt some evil maxims and some good ones. Rather, the
agent must adopt a fundamental maxim on the basis of which he adopts his
particular maxims, and this fundamental maxim, “the first subjective ground of the
adoption of [his particular] maxims, can only be a single one, and it applies to [his]
entire use of freedom universally. This disposition too, however, must be adopted
through the free power of choice, for otherwise it could not be imputed” (6:25). Now,
because Kant holds both that every human being is aware of the moral law—his
entire manner of argument in both the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical
Reason would collapse if he did not maintain this—but also that no human being is
free of self-love, he does not characterize moral goodness as the choice of the moral
law as one’s fundamental maxim in the sheer absence of self-love, nor moral evil as
the choice to make self-love one’s fundamental maxim in sheer ignorance of the
moral law. Instead, he holds that “whether the human being is good or evil, must not
lie in the difference between the incentives that he incorporates into his maxim (not
in the material of the maxim) but in their subordination (in the form of the maxim):
which of the two he makes the condition of the other” (6:36): that is, a good person
is one who makes it his fundamental maxim to act out of self-love only when that is
consistent with the demands of the moral law, while an evil person is one who makes
it his fundamental maxim to act in compliance with the moral law only when that is
consistent with his self-love. Finally, for what appear to be, broadly speaking,
empirical reasons (6:32–3),18 Kant holds that everyone initially chooses evil, and
that anyone’s choice of evil is radical in the sense of being the choice of a fundamental

18
Seiriol Morgan, “The Missing Formal Proof of Humanity’s Radical Evil in Kant’s Religion,” The
Philosophical Review 114 (2005): 63–114, has argued that Kant calls for a “formal proof” of our universal
initial choice of evil and then supplies it by means of the argument that we necessarily initially misrepresent
freedom as merely negative freedom from constraint (see especially 64–5 and 79–85). I do not think the
text supports the demand for a “formal” proof, nor that Morgan supplies any a priori reason why every
human being should initially misrepresent the true nature of freedom. For further discussion, see my “The
Crooked Timber of Humankind,” in Amelie Rorty and James Schmidt, eds, Philosophy as History: Essays
on Kant’s Idea for a Universal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 129–49.
   

maxim that corrupts all of his particular maxim, but that since it is also radical in the
sense of being the product of a completely free choice, everyone is also free to reverse
their choice of fundamental maxim, and convert from evil to good:
Now if a propensity to this [inversion] does lie in human nature, then there is in the human
being a natural propensity to evil; and this propensity is itself morally evil, since it must
ultimately be sought in a free power of choice, and hence is imputable. This evil is radical, since
it corrupts the ground of all maxims; as natural propensity, it is also not to be extirpated . . . Yet
it must equally be possible to overcome this evil, for it is found in the human being as acting
freely. (6:37)

Since the human being is free to choose either self-love or morality as his funda-
mental maxim, the human being is free to choose either evil or good. This means that
one who has chosen evil is still always free to choose good, although conversely one
who has already chosen to be good rather than evil is still free to relapse into evil.
Now Kant’s insistence that all of a human being’s particular maxims are grounded
in the choice of a fundamental maxim is sometimes read as meaning that each
human being has only a single opportunity to choose that maxim, and thus that if
every human being’s initial choice of fundamental maxim is evil, then no human
being can ever escape that choice, and can at most progress toward a genuine
conversion, a genuine reversal of fundamental maxim, but can never actually com-
plete it.19 But obviously the inapplicability of the temporal form of our experience to
our noumenal self precludes such an inference, because to claim that a human being
has only a single opportunity to change his fundamental maxim and can at most
progress toward conversion but never actually convert would be to individuate
noumenal acts in a temporal way. If we take transcendental idealism and Kant’s
theory of practical determination of our concept of the noumenal self seriously, we
simply cannot say whether the noumenal self is capable of one or multiple acts of
choice on any theoretical ground, but can and must say about the noumenal self
everything that is required on practical grounds but only what is required on such
grounds. And what is required on practical grounds, according to Kant’s conception
of imputability, is simply that the human being is always free to choose either evil or
good, no matter what has previously happened at the level of his phenomenal self and
what we might therefore infer has “previously” (but not literally previously) been
chosen by his noumenal self.
But now we must return to the question, how can Kant suddenly maintain that we
are free to choose either good or evil, and always free to choose the other no matter
what we have, as it appears phenomenally, previously chosen, when he has previously
argued that the moral law is the causal law of the noumenal self? The answer to this is
that in the Religion, although Kant obviously presupposes transcendental idealism

19
According to David Sussman, Kant holds that “since there can be only one disposition that
characterizes each life in its entirety, no one can, in time, undergo any real conversion from depravity to
goodness or fall from goodness into depravity. Kant seems to think that all ordinary moral progress or
deterioration is purely epiphenomenal, being nothing more than the empirical manifestation of a unique
and timeless act of noumenal self-determination”; see “Perversity of the Heart,” The Philosophical Review
114 (2005): 153–78. As I argue, Kant’s transcendental idealism actually disallows any such assertion.
    

and the possibility of a noumenal choice not determined by temporal causal laws of
nature, he simply does not reproduce either the Groundwork’s argument for our
noumenal rationality or the Critique of Practical Reason’s inference from the neces-
sity of the moral law to the purity of the noumenal will. He just assumes the binding
force of the moral law and appeals exclusively to the principle that ought implies can
for assurance of the possibility of choosing good even if we have previously chosen
evil as well as for the danger of once again choosing evil even if we have already
chosen to convert from evil to good—which this principle allows because of course
“ought implies can” does not imply that “ought implies does.” Thus, while in the
second Critique Kant appealed to the principle that ought implies can only for the
empirical confirmation of our knowledge of the purity of our will that was itself
derived directly from our a priori cognition of the necessity of the moral law, in the
Religion Kant appeals directly to the principle that ought implies can every time he
needs to assure us of our freedom to convert or to relapse—and he appeals to it no
fewer than seven times. The first invocation of the principle comes in Part I, where
Kant says that “However evil a human being has been right up to the moment of an
impending free action . . . his duty to better himself was not just in the past: it is still
his duty now; he must therefore be capable of it” (RBMR, 6:41). He then amplifies in
the General Remark to Part I of the Religion, where he is rejecting the need for grace:
How is it possible that a naturally evil human being should make himself into a good being
surpasses every concept of ours. For how can an evil tree bear good fruit? But, since by our
previous admission a tree which was (in its predisposition) originally good but did bring forth
bad fruits, and since the fall from good into evil (if we seriously consider that evil originates
from freedom) is no more comprehensible than the ascent from evil back to good, then the
possibility of this last cannot be disputed. For in spite of that fall, the command that we ought
to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must
also be capable of it . . . (6:44–5)
Kant reiterates the principle three more times in this General Remark (6:47, 49n., 50),
and then invokes it twice more in Part II, where he is arguing that we have no need or
use for the idea of idea of someone else who can remit or redeem our sins, although
the figure of Jesus Christ is a necessary symbol of our own capacity to convert from
evil to good and of the suffering that we must pass through in order to do that (6:62,
66). But the character of his argument is evident in the long quotation from Part I:
here he simply asserts that the command of the moral law “resounds unabated in our
souls” without attempting to derive it from anything at all, and then derives the
actuality of our freedom to fulfill this demand from the principle that we must be able
to fulfill our duty, which is also asserted without any argument at all. Since he does
not derive the command of morality from anything at all, it is not derived from any
conception of the pure rationality of the noumenal self or will that would make the
moral law the causal law of the noumenal will, so that will is free to choose evil as well
as good. And since “ought implies can” does not imply “ought implies does,” as far as
that principle too is concerned the noumenal self is free to choose evil as well as good.
The problem of the possibility of immorality simply disappears.
Thus, while there is certainly some change in the style of Kant’s argument between
the Groundwork and the second Critique, the real caesura in Kant’s thought comes
   

between the latter work and the Religion. It is only here that Kant adopts the strategy
of simply assuming the moral law and then arguing to our freedom through the
principle that ought implies can, which raises no problem about the possibility of
immoral choice and action. Remarkably, or perhaps predictably, in the Religion Kant
is actually reverting back to the position about the moral law and freedom originally
stated in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the “Canon of Pure Reason” in the first
Critique’s Doctrine of Method, he had written:
I assume that there are really pure moral laws, . . . and that these laws command absolutely (not
merely hypothetically under the presupposition of other empirical ends), and are thus neces-
sary in every respect. I can legitimately presuppose this proposition by appealing not only to
the proofs of the most enlightened moralists but also to the moral judgment of every human
being, if he will distinctly think such a law.
Pure reason thus contains—not in its speculative use, to be sure, but yet in a certain practical
use, namely the moral use—principles of the possibility of experience, namely of those actions
in conformity with moral precepts which could be encountered in the history of humankind.
For since they command that these actions ought to happen, they must also be able to
happen . . . (CPuR, A 807/B 835)

Perhaps Kant’s last word on the proof of both the moral law and freedom was his first
word—that the moral law is self-evident to anyone who will simply think clearly
about it and that it directly implies freedom by the principle that ought implies can—
and the intervening attempts of the Groundwork and the second Critique to prove
either the moral law or our freedom by metaphysical arguments for or from our pure
rationality were noble but failed experiments.
(The implications of the Religion’s doctrine of the ever-present possibility of moral
conversion will be further explored in Chapter 11.)
 11
Natural and Rational Belief
Kant’s Final Words?

1. Introduction
The final chapter of the final part of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is “The History of
Pure Reason” in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method. Kant begins this brief
chapter of four pages with the following remark:
It is remarkable enough, although it could not naturally have been otherwise, that in the
infancy of philosophy human beings began where we should now rather end, namely, by
studying first the cognition of God and the hope or indeed even the constitution of another
world. Whatever crude concepts of religion the old customs, which were left over from the
rude state of the nations, may have introduced, these still did not prevent their more
enlightened part from dedicating themselves to free investigations of this object, and it was
readily understood that there could be no more fundamental and reliable way of pleasing the
invisible power who rules the world, in order to be happy at least in another world, than the
good conduct of life. Hence theology and morality were the two incentives, or better, the points
of reference for all the abstract inquiries of reason to which we have always been devoted.
(CPuR, A 852–3/B 880–1)

By this remark Kant refers to the doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason
that constitutes the substantive conclusion of the Doctrine of Method of the Critique
of Pure Reason and indeed of the two further critiques that he did not foresee in 1781
but would eventually publish in 1788 and 1790, the Critique of Practical Reason and
the Critique of the Power of Judgment, specifically its Critique of the Teleological
Power of Judgment. The overall argument to which the doctrine of the postulates
forms the conclusion is that knowledge of the existence of God (let alone of personal
immortality) is not a necessary condition for secure knowledge of experience and its
forms, as Descartes had held, nor for knowledge of right and wrong, as theological
moralists from time immemorial to Christian August Crusius in Kant’s own time had
held, but that rational belief in the existence of God (and personal immortality) is a
necessary as well as possible condition for the rationality of our attempt to do what
morality demands of us, thus of the object of morality. In the broadest sense, the
doctrine of the postulates is the final chapter of Kant’s philosophy.
But I will approach the postulates by way of a comparison between Kant’s account
of rational belief and Hume’s account of natural belief, because it is with a comment
on Hume that Kant concludes “The History of Pure Reason.” Following the opening
paragraph just quoted, Kant discusses three points, namely, the “object” of our
    

rational cognitions, the “origin” of such cognitions, and the “method” thereof. As far
as objects are concerned, he argues that the essential difference throughout the
history of philosophy or of pure reason itself is between “sensual philosophers”
and “intellectual philosophers,” Epicureans and Platonists, that is, those who believe
that “reality is in the objects of the senses alone” and those who hold that “only the
understanding cognizes that which is true” (CPuR, A 853–4/B 881–2). With regard to
the origin of pure cognitions of reason, the contrast is between those who hold that
“they are derived from experience or, independent of it, have their source in reason,”
and here the contrast is in the first instance between Aristotle, “the head of the
empiricists,” and Plato, the head of the “noologists,” although in this case Kant
mentions their two chief modern followers, Locke and Leibniz respectively (A 854/B
882). Finally, with regard to method, Kant distinguishes between the “naturalistic
and the scientific,” but here he dismisses the former as the method of mere unrefined
and uncorrected common sense, and instead distinguishes between two versions
of the “scientific” method, the “dogmatic” method of Christian Wolff and the
“skeptical” method of David Hume. He says nothing more about these two
methods here except to state that nothing but a third, “critical path alone is still
open” (A 855/B 883).
Reflecting back on the whole Critique, however, we may assume that what Kant
means to suggest is that his own philosophy is at least in part sensualist and
Epicurean when it comes to the objects of genuine knowledge, but more Platonic
than Aristotelean (and Lockean and Humean) when it comes to the sources of
cognition of at least the basic forms of sensible objects, yet in method certainly not
Wolffianly dogmatic but, as “critical,” more than merely Humeanly skeptical. Earlier
in the Critique, Kant had made it clear that the critical philosophy itself must include
a moment of skeptical method, when it reveals the antinomies and other fallacies that
undermine traditional metaphysical claims to knowledge of the soul, the world as a
whole, and God, but that it cannot rest with mere criticism of these dialectical
illusions, but must find some proper use of reason with regard to these objects.1
That is precisely where the doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason had
come into Kant’s argument: his argument was that, as the debacle of the dialectical
illusions shows, we have no theoretical knowledge of these rarefied objects, but that
we do have perfectly adequate knowledge from pure practical reason of what we
ought to do, and that we are entitled to believe in not only the freedom but also the
immortality of our own souls and in the existence of God as the author of a world in
which our moral goals may be realized as the condition of the rationality of
attempting to act as we know from pure practical reason we must. Since this is
where the argument of the whole Critique has led, it seems that this must be the
way in which the critical method of Kant himself goes beyond the skeptical method
of Hume.
The first question this conclusion suggests is then whether Kant’s doctrine of
rational belief does differ as he suggests from Hume’s more skeptical position. Since

1
For more on the contrast between Kant’s use of the skeptical method and his rejection of skepticism,
see Brian A. Chance, “Scepticism and the Development of the Transcendental Dialectic,” British Journal of
the History of Philosophy 20 (2012): 311–31.
     

Hume did not have Kant’s doctrine of the postulates before him and thus did not
formulate his own position as an alternative to Kant’s, we need to spend a few
moments on Hume to see how the two philosophers really differ. But then I want
to ask a second question, namely whether Kant’s final word in the three critiques on
the postulates of pure practical reason is really his final word on this subject, or
whether Kant does not in the very end of his thinking come to a position on the
postulates that is in some ways closer to Hume’s skepticism or perhaps naturalistic
account of belief than he initially held. Is Kant’s really final chapter more Humean
than might initially appear?

2. Hume’s Final Chapters

The final words of the Critique of Pure Reason are about Hume; let us turn now to
some of Hume’s own final chapters. Kant described Hume’s method as skeptical
rather than critical; how does this jibe with Hume’s own understanding of his
method and its results? I will focus on the final section of Hume’s Enquiry Concern-
ing Human Understanding, which was available in German from the early 1750s and
which Kant clearly knew, with sidelong glances at the final section of Book I of the
Treatise of Human Nature, a section available to Kant in a translation by Hamann
long before the whole Treatise was translated into German.
The first point we might note is that Hume did not actually conceive of himself as
reaching his most characteristic results by employing a skeptical method. For such a
method would seem to fall under what he calls in the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding “antecedent” skepticism, “much inculcated by DES CARTES and
others,” which recommends a “universal doubt, not only against all our former
opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties,” and which paints itself into
a corner, or “is entirely incurable,” because once one has doubted the reliability of all
of one’s faculties one has no faculty left by means of which to assuage one’s doubts.2
Hume concedes that “this species of scepticism . . . may be understood in a very
reasonable sense” if it is equated with the reasonable precaution of “preserving a
proper impartiality in our judgments, and weaning our mind from all those preju-
dices, which we may have imbibed from education or rash opinion,” and instead
“begin with clear and self-evident principles, . . . advance by timorous and sure
steps, . . . review frequently our conclusions, and examine all their consequences”—
who could argue with this? (apart from noting that the last step is not literally
possible)—but also says that these precautions, which may remind us more of
Descartes’s early Rules for the Direction of the Mind or his Discourse on the Method
rather than the Meditations on First Philosophy, comprise “a necessary preparative to
the study of philosophy” but do not comprise philosophy or a philosophy itself.3
Hume’s actual philosophy cannot employ the full-blown antecedent skepticism of
the Meditations because it does not doubt the reliability of all our faculties but rather
shows the limits of the faculty of reason while reassigning some of that faculty’s

2
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), Section 12, Part 1, para. 3, p. 112.
3
Hume, Enquiry, Section 12, Part 1, para. 4, pp. 112–13.
    

supposed functions to “custom” or in the Treatise of Human Nature to the faculty of

imagination, which is limited in ways that reason pretends not to be—imagination
generalizes from or fills in what we have actually experienced, but cannot make any
claims beyond the limits of our experience—but neither receives nor apparently
needs any validation. Indeed, Hume signals that his theory of custom and imagin-
ation will not receive any special validation by expounding his alternative to the failed
attempt to ground our practice of causal inference in pure reason under the rubric of
a “Sceptical Solution” to his “Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the
Understanding,”4 but nowhere in the “Sceptical Solution” does Hume argue that
there is anything inadequate or dubious about the operations of custom or imagin-
ation. On the contrary, he states that “Custom . . . is the great guide of human life,”
“that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect,
for the future, a similar train of events which have appeared in the past.”5 “All these
operations,” he continues, “are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or
process of the thought and understanding is able, either to produce, or to prevent.”6
That no reasoning can prevent our practice of causal inference is, of course, the key to
Hume’s “sceptical solution,” as well as where it goes beyond any reasoning: what we
are actually entitled by experience to assert would be that in the past no reasoning has
ever interfered with our practice of causal inference, but what we believe is never-
theless that no reasoning ever will interfere with this practice. But instead of saying
that we should worry about this or in some way try to justify this assumption, what
Hume instead says, sounding for once like a well-known rationalist philosopher, is
that “Here, then, is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature
and the succession of our ideas; and though the powers and forces, by which the
former is governed, be wholly unknown to us; yet our thoughts and conceptions have
still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature.”7 So Hume
does not advocate any general method of antecedent skepticism, rather he thinks that
nature—our nature—is incompatible with any such method.
But Hume is quite specific about the limits of what we can and will believe on the
basis of experience and custom, and here of course is where his differences with Kant
are clear. To turn to the final section of the Enquiry, and indeed to the final part of the
final section: what I want to focus on is Hume’s advocacy of “a mitigated scepticism,
which may be of advantage to mankind,” namely “the limitation of our enquiries to
such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding.”8
The key to Hume’s position here is actually a contrast between imagination and
custom, which earlier Hume had closely associated. His thought seems to be that the
imagination can come up with all sorts of ideas, presumably by combining ideas
derived from impressions, that is, past experience, in unexperienced ways, but that
belief about actual rather than merely possible objects is generated only by custom,
that is, repeated experience, so that, since we cannot form belief about actual objects
on the basis of pure ratiocination alone, we can form beliefs only about the kind of
objects we have actually experienced. In Hume’s more elegant words,

4
Hume, Enquiry, titles of Section 5, p. 35, and Section 4, p. 24.
5 6
Hume, Enquiry, Section 5, para. 6, p. 38. Hume, Enquiry, Section 5, Part 2, para. 8, p. 39.
7 8
Hume, Enquiry, Section 5, para. 21, p. 44. Hume, Enquiry, Section 12, Part 3, para. 25, p. 120.
     

The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraor-
dinary, and running, without controul, into the most distant parts of space and time, in order
to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to us. A correct Judgment
observes a contrary method, and avoiding all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to
common life, and to such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience; leaving the more
sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and
politicians.

Even in the case of the objects of daily practice and experience, about the future
conduct of which we do form beliefs or firm expectations, we still cannot explain why
they behave the way they do; but about objects beyond our daily practice and
experience, even if by means of imagination we can construct ideas about them, we
have no basis for forming beliefs at all:
While we cannot give a satisfactory reason, why we believe, after a thousand experiments, that
a stone will fall, or fire burn; can we ever satisfy ourselves concerning any determination, which
we may form, with regard to the origin of worlds, and the situation of nature, from, and to
eternity?9

There are several points to be noted about this passage. First, even at its most fanciful,
the imagination, since it is limited to playing with ideas derived from our impres-
sions, is restricted to conceiving of objects in terms of the kinds of qualities we have
actually experienced; thus it conceives of what is impossibly remote in space and
time, but still conceives in spatio-temporal terms. The ideas of priests as well as poets
will be limited by this basic premise of Hume’s empiricism; thus any attempt so much
as to conceive of God will be hopelessly limited, even before we raise the question of
how we could form any firm belief about a supposedly unique object. Second, notice
that although in the conclusion of the passage Hume alludes to the formation of
causal inferences about objects other than ourselves—that stones will fall and fire
burn, in the future as in the past—earlier in the passage he suggests that beliefs are
formed in daily practice as well as experience. That is, we form beliefs not only about
the kinds of objects we repeatedly observe but also about the kinds of objects on
which we repeatedly act and with which we repeatedly interact, for example, food,
tools and instruments, and ourselves and other people—the kinds of things to which
Hume refers in his typical examples, such as of bread that nourishes us, water that
may drown us but on which we might also learn to row a boat successfully by
cooperating with another rower, and so on.
The implication of all of this is that in spite of the lack of a purely rational basis for
our beliefs about the typical behavior of objects, including people, we can and will
form firm beliefs about the kinds of objects that observedly and repeatedly act upon
us and upon which we act, but not about any other kinds of objects. Thus Hume can
conclude that
Moral reasonings are either concerning particular or general facts. All deliberations in life
regard the former; as also all disquisitions in history, chronology, geography, and astronomy.

9
Hume, Enquiry, Section 12, Part 3, para. 25, pp. 120–1.
    

The sciences, which treat of general facts, are politics, natural philosophy, physics, chymistry,
&c. where the qualities, causes, and effects of a whole species of objects are enquired into . . .

And on the basis of custom or experience, we can form firm beliefs about patterns of
human feeling and conduct:
Morals and criticisms are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and
sentiment. Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived. Or if we
reason concerning it, and endeavour to fix its standard, we regard a new fact, to wit, the general
taste of mankind, or some such fact, which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.10

So we can form not only beliefs such as that fire will burn and we can use it to cook
our food, but also beliefs such as that we and others will enjoy watching bonfires and
fireworks but will be averse to being burned, and further beliefs such as that we will
normally be averse to doing to others something to which they can be expected to
have such a strong aversion as being burned. In other words, custom or experience
offers us an adequate basis of beliefs for our conduct as well as for our science, so long
as we understand that our conduct is based on beliefs about the preference and
aversions of people that are formed in the same way as our beliefs about the behavior
of other objects, and we do not need anything except such ordinary beliefs about
ordinary objects including people to explain or to guide our conduct. We can imagine
but cannot form any firm beliefs about God or an immortal soul on the basis of
custom, because we have not experienced such things even once let alone repeatedly,
but neither do we need beliefs about any such things to guide our conduct, because
that is guided by beliefs about our actions and their consequences including the
sentiments of others and ourselves that are formed by custom.
Perhaps still smarting from his clash with the Edinburgh ministers who had
blocked his appointment to the professorship of moral philosophy, Hume adds this
conciliatory paragraph which I have elided from the last quote:
Divinity or Theology, as it proves the existence of a Deity, and the immortality of souls, is
composed partly of reasoning concerning particular, partly concerning general facts. It has a
foundation in reason, so far as it is supported by experience. But its best and most solid
foundations is faith and divine revelation.11
But this remark cannot be seriously intended. Insofar as theology concerns particu-
lars, it concerns particulars we have never experienced and about which we can thus
form no firm beliefs by means of custom. Hume has offered no account of faith in
contrast to belief based on custom, so his appeal to faith is entirely hollow. And of
course in his essay “Of Miracles” he offers what he at least takes to be a devastating
critique of any appeal to revelation for support for claims contrary to the ordinary
course of experience. So there can be no basis for belief about a deity or immortality
in his empiricism, but neither is there need for any such beliefs for the guidance of
our conduct.

10
Hume, Enquiry, Section 12, Part 3, paras 30, 31, and 33, pp. 122–3.
11
Hume, Enquiry, Section 12, Part 3, para. 32, p. 122.
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3. Kant’s Not Yet Final Words

Kant’s position on the relation between our conduct and beliefs about God and
immortality seems to be quite different from Hume’s. Kant agrees with Hume that we
cannot have theoretical knowledge of kinds of objects lying beyond our experience,
although because he separates a priori form and a posteriori matter within experience
in a way in which Hume does not, he can be somewhat more generous than Hume in
his account of theoretical knowledge. That is, according to Kant we can know that
space and time are infinite and that substance endures and causality obtains in
regions of it far beyond whatever we have and will have experienced because we
have a priori intuitions of infinite space and time and a priori concepts of substance
and causality that Hume failed to recognize. But we still cannot have any theoretical
knowledge of anything that should not be represented in spatio-temporal form at all,
such as God or an immortal soul. However, on Kant’s view we can not only use our a
priori categories, independently of the forms of intuition, to form ideas (or “Ideas”)
of such things, we also need and are entitled to hold positive beliefs about them as
necessary conditions of the possibility of morality. We cannot have theoretical
cognition but we can and must affirm postulates of pure practical reason about
these objects. On this point, Kant seems diametrically opposed to Hume. What I now
want to argue, however, is that over the course of the last phase of his thinking Kant
seems to have weakened his doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason to a
point where his thought is not incompatible with Hume’s. For although the expos-
ition of the doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason is really the final
chapter of Kant’s philosophy, the conclusion of each of his three critiques, the
doctrine becomes more attenuated in Kant’s further thought upon it, and his last
word on it seems quite minimal.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant discusses the “ideal of the highest good” in the
“Canon of Pure Reason,” the second chapter of the Doctrine of Method. He asserts
that “there are really pure moral laws, which determine completely a priori (without
regard to empirical motives) the action and omission, that is, the use of the freedom
of a rational being in general, and that these laws command absolutely (not merely
hypothetically under the presupposition of other empirical ends)” (CPuR, A 807/B
833). He then suggests that in spite of the fact that the moral law is not aimed at
happiness, under ideal conditions, or in a world in “which we have abstracted from
all hindrances to morality (of the inclinations), . . . a system of happiness proportion-
ately combined with morality, can also be thought as necessary, since freedom, partly
moved and partly restricted by moral laws, would itself be the cause of the general
happiness” (A 809/B 837). He does not spell out his reasoning, but if we may
interpret his idea through the lens of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
that was to follow, we can assume that what he means is that morality commands
that the humanity in everyone always be treated as an end and never merely as a
means, that humanity is the capacity to set our own ends, that happiness is what
results from being allowed to set and achieve our own ends, so that the general
happiness or happiness of all would in fact follow from morality under such ideal
conditions. Of course, the actual world is not this ideal world, and in the actual world,
the realization of the ends of and thus the happiness of even the most virtuous person
    

can be thwarted by those who are less virtuous. But Kant then suggests that in the
absence of an expectation of happiness the moral resolve of even the most virtuous
person would be weakened, yet that since we observe no necessary connection
between personal virtue and personal happiness in the world of our experience, we
can only assume them to be connected in “a world that is future for us,” by the agency
of God rather than oneself. “Thus God and a future life are two presuppositions that
are not to be separated from the obligation that pure reason imposes on us” (A 811/B
839). One’s expectation of happiness cannot be one’s motive for being moral, yet
“without a God and a world that is now not visible to us but is hoped for, the majestic
ideas of morality are, to be sure, objects of approbation and admiration but not
incentives for resolve or realization, because they would not fulfill the whole end that
is natural for every human being” (A 812–13/B 840–1). Even the purest moral
motivation cannot be maintained if the natural hope of a human being for happiness
cannot be sustained.
In the 1793 essay “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but it is
of no use in practice,” Kant would try to refute the objection by Christian Garve that
he was reducing the motivation for being moral to the hope of one’s own happiness,
but he must have worried about the possibility of such an objection long before then,
because in the 1788 Critique of Practical Reason he modified his argument for the
rationality of the postulates of God and immortality in a way that might well seem to
have been designed to avoid it. In this treatment, Kant introduces the interest in
happiness as part of the presumably natural end of a “finite rational being,” not as
flowing directly from the interest of such a being in morality itself, and therefore as
part of the “complete” rather than “supreme” good “as the object of the faculty of
desire of rational finite beings,” although he does add, without explanation, that
happiness is required “not merely in the partial eyes of a person who makes himself
an end but even in the judgment of an impartial reason” (CPracR, 5:110). This
suggests that there must be some moral basis for an interest in the happiness of all
and not merely a natural interest in one’s own happiness, but Kant does not spell out
what this is. Nevertheless, as if to avoid at least part of an objection that any one
agent’s postulation of his own immortality is motivated by a hope for his own
happiness, Kant changes the ground for the postulate of immortality from a condi-
tion for the possibility of the realization of personal happiness to that of a condition
for the perfection of one’s own virtue or moral motivation:
Complete conformity of the will with the moral law is . . . holiness, a perfection of which no
rational being of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his existence. Since it is
nevertheless required as practically necessary, it can only be found in an endless progress
toward that complete conformity . . . This endless progress is, however, possible only on the
presupposition of the existence and personality of the same rational being continuing endlessly
(which is called the immortality of the soul). Hence the highest good is possible only on the
presupposition of the immortality of the soul . . . (CPracR, 5:122)

There can be no confusing a promise of immortality to allow for the perfection of

virtue with a promise of it to allow for the realization of happiness.
Yet Kant continues to base the argument for the practical rationality of belief in the
existence of God on a claim that this is the necessary condition for the possibility of
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happiness. Moreover, although Kant’s position on this is far from clear, it may seem
that it is as a condition of the possibility of the worthy moral agent’s own happiness
and not the happiness of all that the existence of God is to be postulated. Kant begins
his discussion of the postulate of the existence of God in the second Critique with the
remark that the moral law “must also lead to the possibility of the second element of
the highest good, namely happiness proportioned to that morality, and must do so as
disinterestedly as before, solely from impartial reason” (CPracR, 5:124); and one
would think that if impartial reason has any interest in happiness at all, it would have
an equal interest in the happiness of all, not an interest in the happiness of any one
agent alone, thus not in that of a particular agent exercising impartial reason. But as
Kant continues the argument he describes happiness as the state of an individual
subject—“Happiness is the state of a rational being in the world in the whole of whose
existence everything goes according to his wish and will”—and describes God as “a
cause of all nature, distinct from nature, which contains the ground of” “a necessary
connection between the morality and the proportionate happiness of a being belong-
ing to the world as part of it and hence dependent on it, who for that reason cannot
be by his will a cause of this nature and, as far as his happiness is concerned, cannot
by his own powers make it harmonize thoroughly with his practical principles”
(5:124–5). This makes it sound as if God is postulated to ensure that the happiness
that does not necessarily naturally flow from the virtue of one agent, for example
because of the non-cooperation of less virtuous other agents, nevertheless will be
connected to it. On this point, then, Kant’s position in the second Critique does not
notably differ from his position in the first.
There are several problems with the conjunction of the arguments for the two
postulates of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of God in the second
Critique. First, as just suggested, it can look as if the conception of the highest good on
the basis of which God is postulated is the conjunction of one’s own happiness with
one’s own virtue or worthiness to be happy, and especially in the absence of even the
first Critique’s all too brief suggestion that the promise of one’s own happiness is
necessary only to maintain one’s moral resolve, as a complex being who has a natural
interest in happiness as well as a rational interest in being moral, but not as one’s
motivation to be moral, this can suggest that the individual agent’s reason for postu-
lating the existence of God is his selfish interest in his own happiness, not morality at
all. Second, although Kant has argued that the perfection of individual virtue can be
expected only in an eternal life, his postulation of God as the author of a nature in
which a necessary connection between virtue and happiness can be expected after all
suggests that the realization of the happiness of a morally worthy agent can be expected
to occur in his natural lifespan, thus before he has completed the perfection of his
virtue! This just seems bizarre; at least the Critique of Pure Reason deferred the
perfection of both virtue and happiness to a life that is future for us.
Kant’s doctrine of the highest good and postulates of pure practical reason in his
most prominent and therefore what might have been expected to be his most careful
exposition of it thus seems like an unhappy mélange of ill-fitting or even incompat-
ible ideas. Kant’s next treatments of the highest good seem designed to avoid some of
the difficulties that we have just encountered. In both the Critique of the Power of
Judgment of 1790 and the essay on theory and practice of 1793, which begins, as
    

previously mentioned, with an explicit response to Christian Garve’s objection that

Kant’s conception of the highest good makes an interest in one’s own happiness the
motive for being moral and thereby undermines the purity of Kant’s conception of
morality itself, Kant makes it clear that he means that morality commands an interest
in the happiness of the human species, not oneself, and that the God must be
postulated as the author of a nature in which this goal can ultimately be achieved.
Although a few vestigial references to a postulate of personal immortality remain,
there is no further argument that such immortality must be postulated as a necessary
condition of the perfection of either one’s own virtue or one’s own happiness. So both
the bizarre possibility that the completion of one’s own happiness might precede the
perfection of one’s own virtue as well as the more general risk that an interest in one’s
own happiness as part of the highest good could undermine the purity of moral
motivation are obviated.
Kant’s treatment of “ethico-theology” or the “moral proof of the existence of God”
in the third Critique is distributed over a number of the sections of the Doctrine of
Method of the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment.” Prior to this stage of
his argument, Kant had reached the conclusion that our natural tendency to interpret
organisms as purposive systems also naturally leads us to regard nature as a whole as
a purposive system, a system with a point (CPJ, }67, 5:378–9). Kant then observes
that the happiness of neither human individuals nor the human species appears to be
a special concern of nature (}83, 5:430–1), and moreover that only something of
unconditional value could play the role of the point of the entire system of nature.
The only candidate for this is the full development of human freedom in morality
(}84, 5:438). But this is a problem, because on Kant’s account human freedom is not a
product of nature at all, but a kind of spontaneity that must stand outside nature.
There are two ways around this problem, however: one, that nature itself can at least
lead us to cultivate “discipline,” which, while not sufficient for morality, is at least
necessary for us to make our moral resolves effective in the phenomenal world (}83,
5:432); and second, that in thinking about our own freedom as the ultimate point of
creation we should also consider “the object that it can set for itself as the highest end
(the highest good in the world)” (}84, 5:435). Having already been led by “reflective
judgment” to conceive of a purposive creator of organisms and of nature as a whole,
we are now led by a pattern of reasoning with which we are already familiar from the
second Critique to postulate the existence of an author of nature whose laws allow for
the realization of the highest good—and of course these are two thoughts of one and
the same being. But what is most important for our present purposes is that Kant
now clearly describes the highest good as the condition of the possibility of which we
must postulate God clearly as the good of the human species rather than of particular
virtuous agents: “We are determined a priori by reason,” he says, “to promote with all
of our powers what is best in the world, which consists in the combination of the
greatest good for rational beings in the world with the highest condition of the good
for them, i.e., the combination of universal happiness with the most lawful morality”
(}88, 5:453). Kant’s argument is that we must think that nature allows for the
combination of the fullest human virtue with the fullest human happiness, and
that we must therefore think that the author of nature has authored laws of nature
that allow that. But there is no suggestion of any guarantee that any individual
     

human being must have time enough to perfect his own virtue or be rewarded with
happiness for so doing whether in the present life or in a future life; the argument is
only that nature must allow the human species at some point to realize both universal
virtue and universal happiness if it is to make sense for us to work toward that goal.
In fact, there is no reference to the postulate of immortality at all within Kant’s
exposition of “moral theology” in the third Critique, only a ritualistic mention of it in
the final section of the work, “On the kind of affirmation produced by means of a
practical faith” (}91, 5:467), in which Kant comments on the epistemic status of the
postulates of pure practical reason, much as he had a decade earlier in the section of
the Canon of Pure Reason “On having an opinion, knowing, and believing” (CPuR,
A 820–31/B 848–59) which commented on the results of the preceding section
“On the ideal of the highest good,” without adding anything to the actual content
of the preceding argument. There is no argument for personal immortality within the
moral theology of the third Critique, nor need there be, given its emphasis on the
highest good of the human species rather than of any human individual.
Kant’s section on the highest good in the essay on theory and practice is primarily
concerned to defend the purity of his conception of moral motivation from Garve’s
charge that the doctrine of the highest good undermines it, and to this end he
emphasizes that his conception of the highest good includes the happiness of all
mankind enjoined upon us as an object by the moral law, and not one’s own
happiness, which would indeed be an impure motivation even if it led to action in
outward compliance with the moral law. Kant is less interested in defending the
postulates of pure practical reason as necessary conditions of the realization of the
highest good in this essay, and perhaps for that reason he repeats, just once and
perhaps we can say ritualistically, his usual formula that the highest good, “since it is
within our control from one quarter but not from both taken together, exacts from
reason belief, for practical purposes, in a moral ruler of the world and in a future life”
(TP, 8:279). That is, our intentions are within our own control, but their conse-
quences are not, so we must postulate the conditions necessary for our virtue to have
its intended outcome. But nothing in the characterization of the highest good that
Kant then offers requires the postulate of personal immortality. Kant says that the
concept of the highest good is required not to give duty the “sure basis and requisite
strength of an incentive,” but only to give it an “object,” and he then describes the
object of duty thus:
Without some end there can be no will. . . . But not every end is moral (e.g., that of one’s own
happiness is not), but this must rather be an unselfish one; and the need for a final end assigned
by pure reason and comprehending the whole of all ends under one principle (a world as the
highest good and possible through our cooperation) is a need of an unselfish will extending
itself beyond observance of the formal law to production of an object (the highest good). This is
a special kind of determination of the will . . . a determination of the will which limits itself and
its aim of belonging to such a whole to this condition is not selfish. (TP, 8:279–80n.)

The object of pure practical reason is a whole of all ends—to borrow language from
the Groundwork, “a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the
ends of his own that each may set for himself” (G, 4:433)—and the happiness that
would result from the realization of such a whole of all ends, and all that must be
    

postulated is a condition of the possibility of realizing such a condition. Since there is

no argument that this condition must be able to be realized by any one individual in
spite of the non-cooperation of others, there is no premise for a postulation of
personal immortality here; what is postulated is precisely and only a condition of
the possibility of human cooperation at some point in human history.
In what is sometimes regarded as if it were a fourth critique and thus in that regard
itself Kant’s final word on the critical philosophy, namely Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason, a work also published in 1793 and thus contemporan-
eous with the essay on theory and practice (although its crucial Part I was in fact
published a year earlier), Kant offers another reason for the suppression of the
postulate of personal immortality, now not a clarification of his conception of
the happiness component of the highest good but rather a revision of his conception
of the conditions for the perfection of individual virtue. The point of the Religion is to
reinterpret the central ideas of Christianity as symbolic representations of the central
ideas of the morality of pure practical reason, suited to the sensible as well as rational
nature of human beings, who “demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of
reason something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experi-
ence,” for which “some historical ecclesiastical faith or other, usually already at hand,
must be used” (RBMR, 6:109). The first and most important of Kant’s reinterpreta-
tions or in this case transformations is that of the Christian doctrine of original sin
into the Kantian conception of radical evil. This is a transformation rather than
merely interpretation because while at least for some versions of Christianity (those
Kant knew best) the original sin of Adam and Eve would predestine their descend-
ants to perdition except for divine intervention or grace, for Kant radical evil is just
the complement of the radical freedom of every human individual: human evil is
radical in the sense that it is the choice of the fundamental maxim of subordinating
morality to self-love—“it corrupts the ground of all maxims”—but it is also radical in
the sense that it is never the product of mere nature but always of the free choice of
the individual—“it must ultimately be sought in a free power of choice, and hence is
imputable.” Yet precisely because evil is the product of a free power of choice, even
the evil individual is always free to change his fundamental maxim, to subordinate
self-love to morality—“it must equally be possible to overcome this evil, for it is found
in the human being as acting freely” (RBMR, 6:36–7). And precisely because radical
evil and its overcoming concern the choice of fundamental maxim, the choice
between morality and self-love, an either/or, moral perfection is always within the
grasp of any human being. No one needs immortality to achieve perfection in the
choice of fundamental maxim; one can achieve that at any time.
Because Kant supposes that the radical freedom that is the source of both radical
evil and its overcoming exists at the noumenal level and is not experientially
accessible to us, however, it is also part of his view that no one can be certain of
what his real motivation is, thus whether he has actually converted from evil to
good—after all, outwardly similar actions can always be performed out of respect for
the moral law or from some conception of self-interest. This leads Kant to a
completely different account of the idea of immortality from what he had ever
given before: because of our uncertainty whether we have actually converted, we
can only think of moral conversion as if it were an “infinite progression . . . toward
     

conformity to the law.” But this is merely a consequence of our limitation to an

empirical, temporal perspective even on our own will; God, by contrast (should he
exist), can know that we have in fact converted from evil to good in our natural
lifespans even if we ourselves cannot. “A human being can still expect to be generally
well-pleasing to God, at whatever point in time his existence be cut short” (RBMR,
6:67). On Kant’s final theory of freedom, an infinite lifespan is not necessary to
perfect our will; an infinite progress toward moral perfection is only our sensible
representation of our uncertainty about our own moral perfection, not a condition of
its possibility that needs to be practically postulated.

4. Conclusion
Kant thus has several reasons for giving up the postulate of personal immortality as a
condition of the possibility of human morality, and on this point we can think of him
as ultimately having come to agree with Hume, for whom the immortality of the soul
was a paradigmatic example of the kind of remote idea in which no firm belief can be
generated in the course of our ordinary active life, even in the course of our moral life.
But of course Hume’s other paradigmatic example of such an idea was the idea of a
Deity, and on this point Kant seems to remain diametrically opposed—even as Kant
has clarified that the ultimate object of morality is the universal and non-selfish
happiness of a whole of all finite rational beings as ends in themselves, he has
continued to maintain the postulation or reflective judgment that nature’s laws
have been authored so as to make the realization of this possible. However, I want
to suggest that in several of his most final works Kant suggests an alternative to
practical postulation that brings his position even closer to Hume’s view that we
simply cannot but also need not form firm beliefs about remote objects in order to be
able to live the moral life.
In the Conclusion to the Doctrine of Right of the Metaphysics of Morals, another
final chapter in one of Kant’s final works, Kant lays out his ultimate insight into the
logic of moral possibility with great clarity:
If someone cannot prove that a thing is, he can try to prove that it is not. If (as often happens)
he cannot succeed in either, he can still ask whether he has any interest in assuming the one or
the other (as an hypothesis), either from a theoretical or from a practical point of view. An
assumption is adopted from a theoretical point of view in order merely to explain a certain
phenomenon. . . . An assumption is adopted from a practical point of view in order to achieve a
certain end, which may be either a pragmatic . . . or a moral end, that is, an end such that the
maxim of adopting it is itself a duty.—Now it is evident that what would be made our duty in
this case is not the assumption . . . that this end can be realized, which would be a judgment
about it that is merely theoretical and, moreover, problematic; for there can be no obligation to
do this (to believe something). What is incumbent upon us, as a duty, is rather to act in
conformity with the idea of that end, even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood that
it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either. (MM, DR,
Conclusion, 6:354)

Where we ought to do something or bring about some end, we need to believe that we
can, but all that we need to believe that we can is that its impossibility not be able to
    

be demonstrated. Thus if we ought to achieve the highest good in the world, we need
only believe that its impossibility cannot be demonstrated. And even if for some
reason we were convinced that the possibility of the highest good depends upon the
actuality of God, or that “the postulate of the possibility of the highest derived good
(the best world) is likewise the postulate of the reality of a highest original good,” as
Kant had put it in the second Critique (CPracR, 5:125), we still need only the premise
that the existence of God cannot be disproved to allow the possibility of the highest
good. And that the existence of God can no more be theoretically disproved than it
can be proved was precisely the conclusion of Kant’s lifelong reflection on all
attempts to prove the existence of God. So there would seem to be nothing that
could disprove the possibility of the highest good; certainly the lack of empirical
evidence for its likelihood would not disprove its possibility.
And several years earlier, in “Theory and Practice,” where he had decisively resolved
the ambiguity in his earlier conception of the highest good in favor of “universal” rather
than “selfish” happiness, or the happiness of the human species rather than the self-
interested individual agent, Kant had already applied the same logic to the possibility of
the progress of the species towards this goal. In the third section of this essay, thus in his
final words in his final work on the highest good, Kant had written that
I shall therefore be allowed to assume that, since the human race is constantly advancing with
respect to culture (as its natural end) it is also to be conceived as progressing toward what is
better with respect to the moral end of its existence, and that this will indeed be interrupted
from time to time but will never be broken off. I do not need to prove this presupposition; it is
up to its adversary to prove [his] case. For I rest my case on my innate duty, the duty of every
member of the series of generations . . . so to influence posterity that it becomes always better
(the possibility of this must, accordingly, also be assumed) . . . (TP, 8:308–9)

If it is our duty to work for the progress of both the virtue and the happiness of the
human species, then we must do so as long as the impossibility of attaining this goal
cannot be demonstrated.
Even if Hume would have felt no attraction to Kant’s long-standing premise that
possibility requires a ground in actuality, and thus no attraction to the idea that the
possibility of the highest derived good depends upon the reality of a highest original
good, namely God, an assumption of which in any case Kant gives no hint in the
passages just quoted, as a good empiricist he would certainly have had to agree that
the impossibility of the realization of the highest good cannot be demonstrated.
Either its realization or its impossibility would be just the sort of remote thing about
which we cannot form a firm belief from our ordinary experience. To be sure, Hume
might well have been hesitant to summarize our duties, in his terms to be agreeable
and useful to ourselves and others, under the rubric of the highest good, and would
have confined our obligations to particular acts within our purviews as individual
human beings. But he would still have had to agree with Kant that the impossibility of
success in our attempts to fulfill our duties can never be proven. Whether the source
of our duties is mere sentiment, as Hume held, or a deeper kind of reason, as Kant
insisted, both philosophers would agree that we can have no reason not to attempt to
fulfill our duties as long as the impossibility of success in so doing cannot be proven,
which both must agree it cannot be.
PART III
The Achievement of Freedom
 12
A Passion for Reason
Hume, Kant, and the Motivation for Morality

1. Introduction
Hume is famous for the assertion that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of
the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them,”1 meaning that our ends are set entirely by our feelings and that reason merely
figures out the means to those ends. As a member of the “moral sense” tradition
previously established by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Hume intends this to apply to
moral as well as any other practical reasoning: morally permissible or mandatory
ends are likewise supposed to be determined solely by feeling, with reason again
confined to the role of figuring out the means to realize those ends. Thus, Hume says,
“’tis impossible, that the distinction betwixt moral good and evil, can be made by
reason: since that distinction has an influence upon our actions, of which reason
alone is incapable. Reason and judgment may, indeed, be the mediate cause of an
action, by prompting, or by directing a passion,” but they cannot “bestow those
moral qualities on the actions, which are their” immediate or primary “causes.”2
Meanwhile, Kant is equally famous for the assertion that the ground of moral
obligation “must not be sought in the nature of the human being or in the circum-
stances of the world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in concepts of pure
reason” (G, Preface, 4:389), from which it is supposed to follow that “an action from
duty is to put aside entirely the influence of inclination and with it every object of the
will; hence there is left for the will nothing that could determine it except objectively
the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law, and so the maxim of
complying with such a law even if it infringes upon all my inclinations” (G, Section I,
4:400–1). The contrast could hardly be clearer: for Hume, passion alone determines
even our moral goals and the role of reason in the realization of these goals is strictly
instrumental, while for Kant reason alone determines the principle of morality and
our inclinations or feelings must play no role either in determining what is morally
good or motivating us to try to realize that. At least in its first appearance, the
“obscure feeling” of respect for the moral law that Kant recognizes is supposed to be
“a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore specifically

1
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), Book II, Part III, section iii, para. 4, p. 266 (in the style to be used
henceforth, 2.3.3.4, p. 266).
2
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.16, pp. 297–8.
    

different from all feelings” of any other kind (G, Section I, 4:401n.), and moreover
seems to be a consequence and not a cause of the determination of our will by the
moral law.
But is the contrast between Hume and Kant as simple as I have just made it seem?
I will argue that there is more common ground between the two philosophers than
first appears, and suggest that the ground that is common between them might be a
good starting point for a plausible theory of our motivation to be moral. On the one
hand, while Hume does stand by his theory that our ends are always determined by
our passions, he also supposes that most of us are ultimately motivated by a passion
for calm or tranquility, or a passion for freedom, at least in the negative sense of
freedom from domination by importunate desires. Thus reason may be the slave of
the passions, but we also have a fundamental passion to be reasonable and enjoy our
tranquility. On the other hand, for Kant the ultimate aim of morality is also freedom,
although his understanding of freedom is fuller than Hume’s. Further, Kant’s theory
of moral motivation, at least at the empirical level, is that we cannot be moral without
an original passion for freedom, although that passion must be redirected under the
direction of reason from our own freedom to the freedom of all without losing its
force. Thus, both authors ground the content and the possibility of morality in our
passion for freedom, although for Hume that is equivalent to a passion for reason-
ableness while for Kant our native passion for freedom must be tempered by reason,
and once so tempered Kant himself would no longer call it a passion.

2. Hume: Calm Passion and a Passion for Calm

I begin with Hume. My exposition of Hume’s account of the foundation of morality
will proceed in three steps. First, I recount Hume’s well-known argument in the
Treatise of Human Nature for his thesis that reason is and ought only to be the slave
of the passions. Next, I recount his equally well-known claim that what appears to be
more than merely instrumental reason in moral motivation is actually only calm
rather than violent passion. Finally, I turn from the Treatise to Hume’s restatement of
his moral theory in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals to provide the
evidence that on his account our ultimate end is calm itself, analyzed there in terms of
magnanimity and tranquility, so that the passion that underlies moral motivation can
be nothing other than the passion for calm itself.
Hume’s argument that “moral distinctions” are “not deriv’d from reason”3 is that
reason just reports facts and neither has nor generates preferences of its own, thus is
not motivating, while moral principles must be motivating and therefore depend on
preferences that do not arise from reason. In summarizing the argument this way
I am using the word “facts” broadly, but that fits with Hume’s own broad usage of the
term “reason” in his statement of this argument. For while in his argument in Book
I of the Treatise and the first Enquiry that our causal beliefs are not founded on
reason Hume had restricted the faculty of reason to the analysis of “relations of ideas”

3
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1, title, p. 293.
     

and inferred that all of our beliefs about existence or “matters of fact,”4 including our
beliefs about the existence of causal relations, must be grounded on something other
than reason, namely repeated experience, in his thesis about moral principles in
Books II and III of the Treatise what was previously contrasted with reason, namely
experience, is now lumped together with it. Thus Hume argues that neither “dem-
onstration [n]or probability,” neither knowledge of “the abstract relations of our
ideas, or those relations of objects of which experience only gives us information,”5
by themselves give us any reason to act. We may know that one sum is greater than
another, that some object exists, or that some causal relation between objects or states
of affairs holds, but none of that would give us any reason to act unless we also have a
preference for a larger amount of something, for the presence of something, or for
some alteration that we could effect by exploiting the causal connections that obtain
in the world. Taking action depends on an “aversion or propensity towards [some]
object,” or on “the prospect of pain or pleasure” from it, and such impulses arise “not
from reason” but are only “directed by it,” because “these emotions extend them-
selves to the causes and effects” of objects “as they are pointed out to us by reason and
experience,”6 where the latter is actually part of the former in its broader sense.
Specifically, reason can tell us whether the objects of our emotions really exist and
whether the means we have chosen for a “design’d end” are causally sufficient to
bring it about,7 but such knowledge has an influence on our action only to the extent
that we have desires or aversions, emotions or passions, with regard to the current or
possible states of the objects that may affect us and that we can affect or effect. The
passions for ends, however, are not themselves established by reason, and it is on that
account that Hume says so dramatically that “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the
destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” or conversely “to
choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of [a] . . . person otherwise
unknown to me.”8
Hume then completes his argument in Book III of the Treatise by taking it for
granted that “morals” are supposed to “have an influence on the actions and
affections,” from which it follows that “they cannot be deriv’d from reason . . . because
reason alone, as we have already prov’d, can never have any such influence.”9 Just as
any action must originate from some emotion or passion arising independently of
reason even if reason’s knowledge of relations, existence, and causal connections may
direct that impulse most effectively toward its object, so too moral actions, including
moral appraisals, must originate in a “moral sense,” or in “a sentiment of pleasure or

4
For these terms, see David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom
L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), Section 4, Part 1, para. 1, p. 24.
5 6
Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.2, p. 265. Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.3, p. 266.
7
Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.6, p. 267.
8
Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3.6, p. 267. Hutcheson had put the point without Hume’s colorful examples when
he wrote in Illustrations upon the Moral Sense that “all exciting Reasons presuppose Instincts and
Affections . . . As if indeed Reason, or the Knowledge of the Relations of things, could excite to Action
when we proposed no End, or as if Ends could be intended without Desire or Affections”; Francis
Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the
Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. 2002), Treatise II, section I, pp. 138–9.
9
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.1.6, p. 294.
    

pain, which arises from characters and actions, of that peculiar kind, which makes us
praise or condemn.” Such feelings of pleasure are not functionally different from, that
is, they may lead to action in the same way as, those in “A good composition of music
and a bottle of good wine,” but they are phenomenologically distinct from those and
those are phenomenologically distinct from each other.10 Again, the factual know-
ledge provided by reason in the broad sense may direct our impulses to action that
arise from our moral sentiments, but reason does not originate those impulses.
Now all this is well known, and I have belabored it only to remind you that the
conception of reason on which Hume bases his argument about the non-rational
foundation of moral principles, although broader than his conception of reason in
Book I of the Treatise, is still quite specific. My next point is also well known. Hume
wants to explain why, in spite of the argument he has just presented, the belief that
morality is founded in reason is so persistent. His answer is that we are taken in by
the fact that reasoning on the one hand and experiencing moral sentiments on the
other do not feel very different. For reason generally “exerts itself without producing
any sensible emotion,” and the moral sentiments, including both specific ones such
as “benevolence and resentment, the love of life, and kindness to children” as well as
“the general appetite to good, and aversion to evil, consider’d merely as such,” are
also typically “calm, and cause no disorder in the soul,” so the latter “are very readily
taken for the determinations of reason, and are suppos’d to proceed from the same
faculty . . . which judges of truth and falsehood.”11 That is, reasoning is calm, moral
sentiments are generally calm, and so we mistake the latter for the former (although
apparently not vice versa).
But the main point I want to make is that Hume is not offering simply an error
theory. For he does not rest with the claim that we merely confuse the calmness of
moral sentiments with the calmness of reason, but rather argues substantively that
among our deepest preferences is a preference for tranquility or calm. If passions
were always violent, it would be odd to say that we have a passion for calm, but since
Hume has just maintained that we have calm as well as violent passions, he can
coherently claim that we have a calm passion for calm. Since calm or tranquility can
be understood as freedom from the demands of importunate desire, we can say that
according to Hume we have a calm passion for freedom, at least in the negative sense
of freedom from importunate desire. And because calm passion phenomenologically
mimics reason, it can even seem to us that we have reason to desire freedom.
Hume argues briefly in the Treatise that our moral sentiments, feelings of pleasure
“which arise from the contemplation and view of particular qualities or characters,”12
are triggered in the first instance by qualities “immediately agreeable to others” and
those “immediately agreeable to the person himself,”13 and then derivatively by
qualities that either allow people to “perform their part in society” or “render them
serviceable to themselves,”14 that is, qualities that are means to being agreeable either
to others or to oneself. This is the basis for a more extensive discussion in the second
Enquiry of social qualities, or qualities useful to others, “Qualities Useful to

10 11
Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2.4, p. 303. Hume, Treatise, 2.3.4.8, pp. 267–8.
12 13
Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.15, p. 371. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.28, p. 377.
14
Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.24, p. 375.
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Ourselves,” “Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Ourselves,” and “Qualities Agree-

able to Others.”15 Qualities such as discretion, industry, and frugality, although
Hume classifies them as qualities useful to ourselves, obviously allow us to be useful
to others as well, while qualities such as honesty, fidelity, and truth(fulness)16 are
more overtly other-regarding, but collectively all these qualities allow us to be
effective in our attempts to be pleasing or agreeable either to ourselves or others;
they are thus the sorts of qualities that reason can recommend to us, but only as
effective means to the goals of being agreeable to ourselves and others, which are not
set by reason. Qualities immediately agreeable to others include such things as
politeness, wit, modesty, and decency,17 which are simply things that we enjoy in
our intercourse with others. Qualities immediately agreeable to ourselves include
cheerfulness, dignity, and courage, although the first two of these are obviously
agreeable to others as well and the last might seem at least as useful as immediately
agreeable to others as well as ourselves.
But even though Hume makes no attempt to reduce all agreeable qualities or even
all qualities agreeable to oneself to a single one, the quality that he discusses under the
names of “greatness of mind” or “dignity” and “tranquility” seems to have a special
place among all these qualities, as not only the most agreeable to oneself but also the
most important condition for being in all other ways agreeable and useful to oneself
and others. These names might seem to designate two different qualities of mind, but
in fact they both refer to the ability to rise above threats to one’s equilibrium, though
perhaps with the distinction that greatness of mind refers more to the ability to rise
above external threats, those that arise when a hero is “delivered over to the merciless
rabble; tossed, buffeted, and kicked about; constrained, by their holding a poinard
under his chin, to raise himself, and expose himself to every contumely,”18 and
nevertheless manages to retain his dignity and peace of mind, while tranquility refers
more to the ability to rise above internal threats, those that arise from one’s own
desires that might not be able to be satisfied or that might get out of control. Hume
states that “The philosophical tranquillity may, indeed, be considered only as a
branch of magnanimity,”19 or greatness of mind, treating courage as the other
branch: this suggests that tranquility is a response not to the special threats faced
by warriors and princes who need to overcome external threats, which is courage, but
to the desires that can affect anyone but are resisted by the sage. Hume then writes:
Of the same class of virtues with courage is that undisturbed philosophical TRANQUILLITY,
superior to pain, sorrow, anxiety, and each assault of adverse fortune. Conscious of his own
virtue, say the philosophers, the sage elevates himself above every accident of life; and securely
placed in the temple of wisdom looks down on inferior mortals, engaged in pursuit of honours,
riches, reputation, and every frivolous enjoyment . . . . And the nearer we can approach in
practice, to this sublime tranquillity and indifference (for we must distinguish it from a stupid

15
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), Sections 5–8.
16
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 6, Part 1, especially para. 13, p. 50.
17
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 8.
18
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 7, para. 9, p. 61.
19
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 7, para. 16, p. 63.
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insensibility) the more secure enjoyment shall we attain within ourselves, and the more
greatness of mind shall we discover to the world.20

Tranquility consists in freedom from or superiority to such general disturbances as

pain, sorrow, and anxiety, but also in freedom from such specific, object-directed
passions as those for honors and riches, while courage consists in freedom from fear
at the specific threats to oneself posed by other people. Since the undue influence of
passions of either the former or the latter sort, more general or more particular fears,
could interfere with our effective pursuit of other self- or other-regarding goals,
magnanimity with its two species of courage and tranquility is necessary for the
effective pursuit of such goals. But since Hume has classified it as a quality immediately
agreeable to oneself, such magnanimity or tranquility must also be something that we
immediately enjoy and are motivated to achieve for its own sake, and indeed it seems to
be something that the wise person is motivated to place at the top of her list of goals as
both in some sense the greatest of pleasures, perhaps the most enduring of pleasures, as
well as the most important condition for effectively achieving other aims. Yet since
Hume has argued that we can make nothing an end without having a feeling, emotion,
or passion for it, we must have a passion for magnanimity, courage, and tranquility. Of
course, that must be a calm passion, since a violent passion for tranquility would be
incompatible with tranquility. So even though Hume does not want to found all of
morality on a single impulse, a calm passion for greatness of mind seems to be primus
inter pares among the sentiments on which morality is founded.21 And since calm feels
like reason to us, the calm passion for tranquility as freedom from domination by all
our other passions as well as courage as freedom from domination by other people
seems like a passion for reason as well as a passion for freedom.
So much for Hume. We will now see that although Kant’s conception of the
relation between passion and reason, especially at the most metaphysical level of his
thought, appears to be the diametrical opposite of Hume’s, in fact Kant also recog-
nizes the necessary role of something like a passion for freedom, at least when he
describes the “empirical character” of moral motivation.

3. Kant: A Passion for Freedom

In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant notoriously
appears to argue that only actions performed in the absence of all inclination have

20
Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 7, para. 16, p. 63.
21
One point that should be added here: Hume also clearly recognizes that benevolence, whether
observed in others or in oneself, is gratifying or self-rewarding, quite apart from any instrumental benefit
it might have in the second case, should one’s kindness to another be repaid in kind. “It appears also,” he
says, “that, in our general approbation of characters and manners, the useful tendency of the social virtues
moves us not by any regards to self-interest, but has an influence much more universal and extensive”
(Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 5, para. 45, p. 45). It would seem then that being
useful to others is a source of intrinsic satisfaction alongside magnanimity and tranquility. But how can one
be ultimately most useful to others? If their good does not consist in the mere satisfaction of their first-
order desires, whatever those happen to be, but in the satisfaction of their desires only within the
framework of their own magnanimity and tranquility, then again it must seem as if the promotion of
the latter is the ultimate aim of all morality, and a passion for that the basis of all moral motivation.
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moral worth. But this appearance results merely from the heuristic device he uses to
demonstrate that the fundamental principle of morality is not immediately con-
cerned with happiness, certainly not one’s own happiness: if the fundamental
principle of morality can be acted upon in the absence of inclination, as it does in
some particularly clear-cut examples of moral worth, what it enjoins cannot be the
gratification of (one’s own) inclination. In the third section of the Groundwork and in
the Critique of Practical Reason, and equally notoriously, Kant argues that the deter-
mination of the will by pure reason at the noumenal level is the ground of moral action
at the phenomenal level. Kant’s theory of the freedom of the noumenal will is certainly
diametrically opposed to Hume’s rejection of freedom of the will at the phenomenal
level of human experience, the only level of reality Hume recognizes. Yet Kant’s own
theory of the empirical etiology of moral action, at least in his late works the Meta-
physics of Morals and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (although the latter
is based on lectures that Kant had been giving for twenty-five years), is by no means
that pure reason or the pure will effects moral action in the absence of or in spite of all
our inclinations, but rather that it effects moral action precisely through the refinement
of our original passion for our own freedom. It is at this stage of his thought that the
important similarity as well as most interesting differences between Kant and Hume
emerge. What we will see is that in spite of Kant’s famous claim that “rational being”
must be treated as an end and never merely a means, Kant actually shares Hume’s view
that reason is merely a means, namely a means to freedom, something for which, like
Hume’s tranquility, we have a passion, although a passion that must be expanded from
our own freedom to the freedom of all and which, being so expanded, can no longer be
called a passion but needs another name.
As noted at the outset, in the Groundwork Kant asserts that the principle of moral
obligation must be sought “a priori simply in concepts of pure reason” (G, Preface,
4:389), and claims that the only feeling that could be involved in a morally worthy
action is the “obscure feeling” of respect that is “self-wrought by means of a rational
concept” (G, Section I, 4:401n.). He continues that “Duty is to be practical uncondi-
tional necessity of action” determined by reason alone, “and it must therefore
hold for all rational beings . . . and only because of this be also a law for all human
wills” (G, Section II, 4:425). Having said this, could Kant allow that we experience
such a thing as a passion for being rational, let alone that such a passion is a necessary
condition for our performing our duty and being moral? It would hardly seem that he
could, for he defines passion (Leidenschaft, passio) as the opposite or the obstacle to
reason. In his textbook on anthropology, published at the end of his career in 1798,
he says that passion is “Inclination that can be conquered only with difficulty or not
at all by the subject’s reason” (Anth., }73, 7:251); in student notes from a version of
his anthropology course given in the period of the Groundwork, he says even more
clearly that “All passion is grounded on inclination insofar as it does not merely
motivate [treibt] but dominates [herrscht]. It is a dominating inclination that puts
reason out of action [außer Stand setzt].”22 If passion is incompatible with the
operation of reason, it would hardly seem that there could be such a thing as a

22
Kant, Anthropologie Mrongovius, Winter Semester 1784–5, 25:1353.
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passion for reason, let alone that our being moral could be grounded on our having a
passion for reason. Passion and reason thus seem diametrically opposed, and the idea
of a passion for reason seems incoherent. But when we see that reason itself is not the
ultimate end in Kant’s moral philosophy, but only an indispensable means to what is
the ultimate end, we will see that there is an opening for something like passion in
Kant’s moral philosophy after all. For it is freedom that is the ultimate end in Kant’s
moral philosophy, and the idea of something like a morally indispensable passion for
freedom is not entirely incoherent. Kant thus shares with Hume the ideas that
morality is founded upon a passion for freedom and that reason is not an end in
itself but rather a means to the gratification or at least the refinement of this passion.
In lectures on moral philosophy dating back to the middle of the 1770s, Kant
clearly says that the “necessary law of free choice” is nothing other than the
“conformity of free choice with itself and others” (MP-Collins, 27:254). In the
introduction to Naturrecht Feyerabend, a course on “natural right” also given at
the time of the composition of the Groundwork, Kant adds that rational beings are
“ends in themselves not because they have reason, but because they have freedom.
Reason is merely a means” (Fey., 27:1321). Kant’s idea is that the goal of morality is to
act in accordance with the “greatest use of freedom” (MP-Collins, 27:346) or to
achieve intra- and interpersonal consistency in the exercise of freedom, and that
rationality is valuable not for its own sake but because it, as our capacity for acting in
accordance with universal or universalizable principles, is what allows us to exercise
our freedom in a consistent way.
And while the idea of a passion for reason seems absurd, the idea of a passion for
freedom is not obviously absurd. Indeed, again in his anthropology lectures, Kant
describes a passion for freedom as in many ways the most fundamental of all human
passions: the inclination to freedom is “the inclination to determine oneself in
accordance with one’s own inclination and to be independent from the inclination
of others . . . the first thing that the human being demands,” he says in the 1784–5
lectures,23 or “the greatest formal inclination and held to be the greatest good by
everyone” he says four years later.24 To be sure, this inclination or even passion for
freedom is an inclination for one’s own freedom, and to serve in any way in the
realization of morality this passion for freedom has to be transformed into a desire
for the freedom of everyone. This is where reason can come in, for, although Kant
never puts it quite as simply as this, reason can teach us each that our own freedom is
no different and therefore no more important than the freedom of anyone and
everyone else. Such an insight would require us to redirect our original passion for
freedom, transforming its object from one’s own freedom now to one’s own and
everyone’s freedom always, and in so doing it should transform the original passion
for one’s own freedom into something no longer a passion incompatible with reason
but some kind of feeling that is compatible with reason. My suggestion is that Kant’s
mature model of moral motivation, at least at the empirical level, is precisely that our
original impetus toward freedom must be retained while its application is expanded
beyond our own, present case. Kant’s model of moral motivation thus shares

23 24
Kant, Anthropologie Mrongovius, 25:1354. Kant, Anthropologie Busolt, 25:1520.
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fundamental features with Hume’s although his account refines the conception of
both of the elements, feeling and freedom, that we found in Hume.
Kant’s idea that freedom is the end of morality and reason merely its means
pervades the entire development of his moral philosophy. In his first published
remarks about morality, the “prize essay” of 1764, Kant argues that the formal first
principle of morality provided by reason must be accompanied by a material first
principle that actually expresses the value that is to be achieved through the use of
reason (PNTM, Fourth Reflection, }2, 2:298–9). It is not a stretch to suggest that the
material first principle states the end of morality while the formal principle concerns
its means. In this essay, Kant then suggests that Francis Hutcheson was on the right
path in suggesting that it is feeling that determines the good or the first material
principle of morality, but of course for Hutcheson what the moral sense approves is
simply benevolent intentions.25 However, in notes written soon afterwards in his
own copy of his other work of 1764, the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
and Sublime, Kant reveals his emerging view that freedom, not the happiness at
which benevolence aims, is the good or the material first principle of morality that
must be paired with a formal first principle due to reason. Kant’s emerging view can
be seen in a remark such as this:
Since the greatest inner perfection and the perfection that arises from that consists in the
subordination of all our capacities and receptivities to the free capacity for choice, the feeling
for the goodness of the free capacity for choice must immediately be much different and also
greater than all of the good consequences that can thereby be effected.
Now this capacity for choice contains either the merely individual as well as the universal
will, or it considers the person at the same time in consensu with the universal will.26

That is, freedom is the material good, but since the formal principle of morality is
universality, it is the freedom of all, not just oneself, that is the object of morality. The
challenge of moral motivation is then to get from the feeling for the goodness of one’s
own capacity for free choice to a recognition of the universal value of free choice that
nevertheless retains the force of the original feeling for one’s own freedom. More
fully, we start from a psychological preference for freedom from our own excessive
desires, which seems very much like Hume’s desire for tranquility,27 as well as from a
hatred of domination by other people: “Nothing can open a grimmer prospect of
misery and desperation to me than that . . . my condition should not lie in my own
will but in that of another.”28 But we have to transform these personal preferences
into a moral principle, through the insight that “All right action is a maximum of the
free power of choice when it is taken reciprocally,” as Kant says in another note from

25
See Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Treatise II,
section III, para. 1; ed. Wolfgang Leidhold, rev. edn (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), pp. 116–17.
26
Kant, note after Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 2:246; cited from Kant,
Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 16–17.
27
See, for example, the notes at Observations 2:215–16 and 225–6, in NF, pp. 6 and 10.
28
Kant, note opposite Observations 2:230, in NF, p. 12.
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the same period (R, 6596, 19:101), without losing the vigor of those original
preferences.
This idea of universal freedom as the end of morality also dominates Kant’s
lectures on ethics in the 1770s. Here Kant says, for example, that “Moral goodness
is . . . the governance of our choice by rules, whereby all acts of my choice concur with
universal validity” (MP-Collins, 27:257). We might expect him to say “universal
validity of” something, but precisely because he does not, we have no way to fill in
the missing term except as the universal validity of free choice itself, in other words,
the fundamental requirement of morality is that all acts of my free choice concur with
the universal possibility of free choice. Later in the lectures, in his discussion of
“Duties to Oneself,” Kant states that “the inner worth of the world, the summum
bonum, is freedom according to a choice that is not necessitated to act. Freedom is
thus the inner worth of the world” (MP-Collins, 27:344). He does not provide an
argument for this premise—and in the end, that is, in the Critique of Practical Reason,
Kant famously shies away from attempting to provide a deduction of the fundamen-
tal principle of morality at all, offering instead only a defense of our freedom to act in
accordance with this principle, no matter what29—but he does tell us what follows
from it, namely that “The conditions under which alone the greatest use of freedom is
possible, and under which it can be self-consistent,” constitute the “principium of all
duties” (27:346). Since he is discussing duties to oneself, he goes on to detail the ways
in which we each need to preserve rather than undermine our own continuing
possibility of free choice, above all by developing what he calls “self-mastery,” the
ability to regulate the “rabble element” of desires and inclinations that would
otherwise dominate our behavior (27:360). He reasserts only at the end of his
treatment of duties to others that freedom is “the inner principium of the world”
(27:470), without having made it clear in the interval how our particular duties to
others are actually duties to allow them the same degree of freedom we are naturally
inclined to claim for ourselves. But this is precisely what he does in the next decade in
the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
Now this claim might seem surprising, because instead of starting from the
premise that freedom is the inner worth of the world, the Groundwork proposes to
derive the content of the fundamental principle of morality from the common
concepts of good will and duty and from the philosophical concept of the categorical
imperative itself, that is, the concept of the moral law in the form in which it presents
itself to us, imperfect beings with inclinations that do not always point us to doing
what the moral law requires that we do. From these concepts Kant derives the first
main formulation of the categorical imperative as the requirement to “act only in
accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it
become a universal law” (G, Section II, 4:421), and the second, “So act that you use
humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the
same time as an end, never merely as a means” (4:429), and neither of these
formulations makes any explicit reference to freedom. However, the requirement

29
See Dieter Henrich, “The Deduction of the Moral Law: The Reasons for the Obscurity of the Final
Section of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Paul Guyer, ed., Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 303–41, at p. 309.
     

to act only on universalizable maxims can be understood as the requirement to act

only on maxims that could be freely adopted by everyone, not just yourself, while
since Kant means by “humanity” the “capacity to set oneself an end—any end
whatsoever” (MM, DV, Introduction, section VIII, 6:392), the requirement to treat
humanity as an end and never merely a means in everyone, not just yourself, can be
understood as the requirement to allow everyone the same freedom to determine
their own ends that you naturally claim for yourself. Both of these formulations of the
categorical imperative can thus be understood as expressions of the fundamental
principle of morality to allow everyone the same freedom of choice that you claim
for yourself.
That the fundamental goal of morality is the universalization of the freedom to set
ends that everyone naturally claims for him- or herself can also be seen from Kant’s
examples of duties following these two main formulations of the categorical impera-
tive. Kant’s avowed purpose in these illustrations is to confirm his interpretation of
the categorical imperative by showing that it is compatible with the commonly
recognized division of duties into perfect and imperfect duties to self and others.30
But in fact his examples also suggest a lexically ordered series of duties to preserve the
capacity to exercise free choice and to promote the conditions for the fullest use of
free choice in setting ends. Kant’s first example, the prohibition of suicide, is a duty to
preserve the existence of a free being, in this case oneself, and thereby preserve its
capacity for free choice. His second example, the prohibition of false promises, is a
duty to preserve the same possibility of the exercise of free choice by another on a
particular occasion that you would claim for yourself by not denying to the other the
information about your own intentions that is necessary for him to set his own ends
without constraint by you. Kant’s third example, the duty to cultivate one’s own
talents, is a duty to put yourself into a position for the effective pursuit of your own
freely chosen ends, which, as I have argued in Chapter 6, is a necessary condition of
being able to rationally set such ends. And finally, the duty to assist others is a duty to
further their freely chosen ends, to expand their freedom to rationally set their ends,
when doing so is consistent with the other duties regarding freedom that have been
enumerated. Collectively, Kant’s categories of duty comprise the overarching duty to
preserve freedom of choice and promote the conditions for its effective use, the
“greatest possible use of freedom.”31 Thus Kant, like Hume, construes the goal of
morality as freedom, although he conceives of this freedom not just as negative
freedom from importunate desires but as the positive freedom to set ends, and not
just as one’s own freedom to set ends but as everyone’s freedom to do so.
I now turn to the second part of my argument, namely that Kant supposes that to
act morally requires actually refining an initial passion for one’s own freedom into a

30
See Kant, G, Section II, 4:421n. The distinction between duties to self and duties to others was
commonly recognized in the Wolffian as well as Pufendorfian traditions, and the distinction between
perfect and imperfect duties was a centerpiece of the latter.
31
Kant’s examples of the four classes of duties are provided at G, Section II, 4:421–3 and 4:429–30;
Practical Philosophy, pp. 73–5 and 80–1. I have argued for the present approach to these examples in
“Kant’s System of Duties,” ch. 10 of Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 243–74, especially pp. 255–7, and Kant, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2014),
ch. 7.
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positive feeling for the freedom of all. In the Groundwork, as we saw, Kant states that
since “an action from duty is to put aside entirely the influence of inclination . . . there
is left nothing for the will that could determine it except objectively the [moral] law
and subjectively pure respect for this practical law,” and he describes respect as a
“feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept” (G, Section I, 401n.), Here the
feeling of respect seems to be epiphenomenal, merely our empirical consciousness of
being motivated solely by the moral law at the noumenal level where the choice of
principles really takes place. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant begins to
complicate this simple picture. He again asserts that “What is essential to any
moral worth of actions is that the moral law determine the will immediately” (CPracR,
5:71), thus suggesting that the determination of the will by the moral law must itself
be the cause of anything else involved in moral motivation, including any conscious
feeling of respect. But he now elaborates a more complicated model of the causal role
of the feeling of respect, suggesting that it intervenes between the immediate deter-
mination of the will by the moral law and the actual performance of a morally
mandated action: he states that “the moral law, as the determining ground of the will,
must by thwarting all our inclinations produce a feeling that can be called pain” but
also produce a “positive feeling,” and that by these means “the moral law deprives
self-love of its influence . . . and thereby the hindrance to pure practical reason is
lessened and the representation of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses
of sensibility is produced” (CPracR, 5:73, 75–6). The idea seems to be that the
determination of the will by the moral law leads to action in the empirical world
by reweighting our natural incentives: it makes the naturally pleasurable prospect of
indulging our own inclinations painful and transforms the naturally painful prospect
of thwarting our own inclinations into the pleasurable prospect of living up to the
moral law, and this realignment of our prospects for pleasure and pain is what leads
to our dutiful action. Here it looks as if the Kantian moment of the determination of
the will by pure reason has to pass through a Humean mechanism of the motivation
of action by prospects of pleasure and pain.
Now on the transcendental idealist theory of freedom of the will that Kant had
presented as at least possible in the Critique of Pure Reason and asserted in Section III
of the Groundwork, the determination of the will by the moral law would take place
at the noumenal level, and manifest itself to consciousness—that is, our empirical
selves—in whatever moral reasoning and decision-making we consciously engage in
but also in these modifications of our natural propensities to feelings of pleasure and
pain. But that is not a problem, since Kant explicitly asserts that “every determination
of [our] existence changing conformably with inner sense, even the whole sequence
of [our] existence as a sensible being” (CPracR, 5:97–8), is the product of our
noumenal choice, and there is no need for him to restrict the effects of our purely
rational noumenal choice to reason or reasoning as an empirical phenomenon, as
contrasted to feeling.32 But the inscrutability of the relation between noumenal
choice and its phenomenal consequences also means that the former gives us no

32
I first developed this argument in “Duty and Inclination,” ch. 10 of Kant and the Experience of
Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 335–93, especially pp. 361–5.
     

information about the latter, and in fact Kant must rely solely on empirical data for
his theory of the phenomenal character of moral motivation. Transcendental ideal-
ism may remain in place as a background guarantee that every human being is always
free to choose to do the right thing, but it plays no further role in the development of
Kant’s model of the phenomenology of moral motivation. Even if the choice to be
moral is entirely noumenal and free, experience teaches us that moral action comes
about by reason working with rather than against our native inclinations.
This insight is considerably refined in Kant’s last published work in moral phil-
osophy, the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue in
this work, Kant does not characterize us as being moved to moral action by a single
even if complex feeling of respect that is produced by reasoning about the moral law.
Instead, he portrays us as being moved to perform the particular actions called for by
morality by a panoply of feelings or more precisely “aesthetic preconditions” that are
both “cultivated,” that is, strengthened, and “conditioned,” that is, constrained when
necessary, by our conscious reflection on the moral law and what it requires of us. In
the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue of this last work, Kant enumerates four
“aesthetic and antecedent but natural predispositions of the mind (praedispositio) for
being affected by concepts of duty,” “tendencies” (Anlagen) that we have to possess
naturally in order to be able to be moved to action by concepts of duty but that must
also be strengthened and guided by our thought about duty (MM, DV, Introduction,
section XII, 6:399). These are “moral feeling,” a general “susceptibility to feel pleasure
or displeasure merely from being aware that our actions are consistent with or
contrary to the law of duty” (6:399), which plays the role of what Kant earlier called
respect; “conscience,” not so much a feeling but a disposition to hold particular
actions that suggest themselves to us up to the moral law for “acquittal or condem-
nation” (6:400); “love” of other human beings, a feeling of pleasure in the idea of
doing good to them; and “respect,” now in the sense of “self-esteem” (Selbstschätz-
ung), a “feeling (which is of a special kind) [that] is the basis of certain . . . actions that
are consistent with [one’s] duty to himself” (6:402–3). Our obligation is “to cultivate”
each of these aesthetic preconditions so that they will be strong enough to move us to
action when needed; in the case of conscience, for example, our duty “is to cultivate
one’s conscience, to sharpen one’s attentiveness to the voice of the inner judge and to
use every means to obtain a hearing for it,” and something similar holds for the
others. It is important to recognize that the cultivation of these propensities is not
merely a back-up in case the sheer determination of the will by the moral law fails us;
even if the idea of the determination of the will by the moral law alone at the
noumenal level makes sense, being moved to action by these feelings once they
have been adequately cultivated is the way that the determination of the will by the
moral law actually moves us to action at the phenomenal level. This is Kant’s ultimate
accommodation of Hume and the other moral sense theorists. (The argument of this
paragraph is developed more fully in Chapter 14.)
In a further rapprochement with his Scottish rivals, Kant adds a fifth feeling of, or
perhaps it would be better to say further specifies the feeling of, love towards others as
“sympathetic joy and sadness (sympathia moralis) . . . sensible feelings of pleasure or
displeasure (which are therefore to be called ‘aesthetic’) at another’s state of joy or
pain.” “Nature,” he continues, “has already implanted in human beings receptivity to
    

these feelings . . . as a means to promoting active and rational benevolence,” that is,
actual performance of beneficent actions (MM, DV, }34, 6:456). He reiterates that we
have a duty to “cultivate” these “compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings” so that
we can reliably “make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral
principles” (MM, DV, }35, 6:457). But as the last clause, as well as his statement that
to use sympathy “as a means to promoting active and rational benevolence is still a
particular, though only a conditional, duty” (MM, DV, }34, 4:456) imply, our duty is
not only to cultivate these natural propensities in the name of or out of respect for the
moral law, so they will be able to move us to particular actions when we need to be so
moved; we must also always make action upon them conditional with their compli-
ance with the moral law, that is, watch out that the actions they would move us to are
in fact morally correct. After all, sometimes love or sympathy or self-esteem could
prompt us to do something we should not; to borrow Barbara Herman’s wonderful
example, our natural and well-cultivated sympathy might move us to help someone
struggling to move a heavy package out of the back door of a museum in the middle
of the night, when what we should be doing is calling the police,33 and what we
should be doing in a case like this is checking rather than acting upon our sympa-
thetic feeling. Conscience may be the “aesthetic predisposition” that plays this
particular role of reminding us to check whether the actions to which we are
prompted by the other, well-cultivated “aesthetic predispositions” are in fact morally
appropriate. But whether or not this detail is correct, the general point remains that
the normal way for us to make the moral law effective in our lives is not by ignoring
our feelings, but by cultivating our natural receptivity to concepts of duty while also
making sure that the actions to which our cultivated propensities impel us are in fact
the ones that duty demands.
Now, how does all this relate to my original claim that Kant grounds the possibility
of morality on a passion for one’s own freedom that must be refined into a sentiment
on behalf of the freedom of all without losing its original impetus? First, recall that in
his courses in anthropology Kant reported that every human being displays a passion
for his or her own freedom, already present in the baby’s “loud cries, unlike all other
animals, simply because it regards its inability to make use of its limbs as a constraint,
and thus it immediately announces its claim to freedom” (Anth., }82, 7:268). This
passion, as we saw, is fundamental in the sense that it underlies all more particular
desires and passions: we want to satisfy our particular desires, but above all because
they are our own, and if the inclination for freedom “cannot be satisfied then neither
can any of our other desires.”34 This primal passion is entirely self-regarding, unlike
the aesthetic preconditions of susceptibility to duty that Kant enumerated in the
Doctrine of Virtue. But along with this passion, reason is also natural to human
beings, and naturally develops as they mature; and as “reason gradually develops
instinct loses its domination,” although “instinct remains in place” while “reason

33
Barbara Herman, “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,” Philosophical Review 90 (1981):
359–82; reprinted in Herman The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), pp. 1–22, at pp. 4–5.
34
Kant, Anthropologie Mrongovius, 25:1355.
     

receives more power over it.”35 In other words, the passion for freedom is not simply
replaced by reason, but gradually becomes governed by reason. Here again we have to
speculate about how exactly Kant thought the foundation of morality in pure reason
was supposed to go, but one obvious thought is just that since reason teaches us that
we are not significantly different from each other—as it taught Descartes that we are
all similar in intelligence or Hobbes that we are all similar in strength—it teaches us
that the freedom of any one of us is worth neither more nor less than the freedom of
any other. As this insight sinks in during the process of maturation, the impetus
originally attached to the idea of our own freedom would be transferred to the idea of
the freedom of all, and the “inclination to persist in” our own “outer freedom” would
become transformed into “an affect, which is called enthusiasm,” for “the concept of
freedom under moral laws” (Anth., }82, 7:269), that is, for self-consistent freedom,
for the greatest use of freedom, or for the maximum of freedom for both oneself and
others, without losing its original motivational force. Our original passion for
freedom needs to be and at least according to Kant is gradually corrected by reason,
but without that passion, now transformed into a more rational enthusiasm, we could
not act on behalf of the freedom of all. (Kant often uses “enthusiasm” as a pejorative
name for passion, but here he turns to it as a positive term for properly refined
passion.) Our enthusiasm for the freedom of all would then play the ultimate
motivational role in Kant’s mature moral theory analogous to Hume’s calm passion
for magnanimity and tranquility.
I personally find Kant’s theory that we have a noumenally free will that always
allows us to do the right thing no matter what our inclinations a fairy-tale. But I find
his empirical theory that we come to be able to act morally only by refining and
cultivating our native inclination toward our own freedom entirely plausible. To be
sure, insofar as it is empirical, this theory offers no guarantee that everyone will
redirect their passion toward their own freedom toward the freedom of all, and many
do not seem to do so. But at least this theory gives us a starting point for moral
education, which Kant’s theory of the noumenally free will hardly does. I’ll take that
over a meaningless guarantee of free will any day.36

35
Kant, Menschenkunde, 25:1123–4.
36
I would like to thank the Department of Philosophy of Edinburgh University, and especially Pauline
Phemister, for the invitation to present a “Nature of Knowledge” lecture in December 2011, as the
culmination of their celebration of the Hume tricentenary, which allowed me give this lecture a trial run
before its presentation at the Eastern Division meeting later that month. And I would like to thank
Professor Dina Emunds of the Philosophical Seminar of the University of Konstanz for the invitation to
present the lecture in July 2012, which occasioned a lively discussion that assisted me in preparing for its
final revision. I would particularly like to thank Christoph Vehige for pressing me to clarify my interpret-
ation of Hume.
 13
The Obligation to be Virtuous
Kant’s Conception of the Tugendverpflichtung

1. Duties of Virtue and the Obligation to be Virtuous

In the “Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Virtue,” the second half of the
Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, Kant distinguishes between specific duties of virtue or
ethical duties (Tugendpflichten), such as the duty to develop one’s own talents or to
be beneficent to others, and a general obligation of virtue or obligation to be virtuous
(Tugendverpflichtung).1 He expresses this distinction by characterizing the general
obligation to be virtuous as “formal” and the duties of virtue as “material,” and then
infers the singularity of the general obligation to be virtuous from its formality and
the multiplicity of the specific duties of virtue from their materiality. He first makes
the distinction and this inference in section II of the Introduction to the Doctrine of
Virtue. He starts by distinguishing the “ethical obligations” in general that are to be
discussed in the Doctrine of Virtue from the juridical obligations or duties of right
that have already been discussed in the first half of the Metaphysics of Morals, the
Doctrine of Right, by means of the criterion that duties of right are accompanied with
rights on the part of specific persons to coerce their fulfillment,2 while ethical
obligations do not permit coercive enforcement:
To every duty there corresponds a right in the sense of an authorization to do something
(facultas moralis generatim); but it is not the case that to every duty there correspond rights of
another to coerce someone (facultus juridica). Instead, [the latter] duties are called, specifically,
duties of right.—

Following his dash Kant then introduces the distinction between the non-coercively
enforceable ethical obligations with which I am concerned:
Similarly, to every ethical obligation there corresponds the concept of virtue, but not all ethical
duties are thereby duties of virtue. Those duties that have to do not so much with a certain end

1
I borrow this interpretation of Kant’s term Tugendpflichten from Philip Stratton-Lake, “Being
Virtuous and the Virtues: Two Aspects of Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue,” in Monika Betzler, ed., Kant’s Ethics
of Virtue (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 101–21.
2
I purposely use the vague words “are accompanied with” in order to sidestep the debate about whether
the possibility of legitimate coercive enforcement is part of the concept of a duty of right or is rather
connected with it in a way that counts as synthetic but a priori; for my position in this debate, see my
“Kant’s Deductions of the Principles of Right,” in Mark Timmons, ed., New Essays on Kant’s Metaphysics of
Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 24–64, reprinted in my Kant’s System of Nature and
Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
      

(matter, object of choice) as merely with what is formal in the moral determination of the will
(e.g., that an action in conformity with duty must also be done from duty) are not duties of
virtue. Only an end that is also a duty can be a called a duty of virtue. For this reason there are
several duties of virtue (and also various virtues), whereas for the first kind of duty only one
(virtuous disposition) is thought, which however holds for all actions. (MM, DV, Introduction,
section II, 6:383)
The specific duties of virtue are material and plural because they are duties that are
also ends, or duties to have and pursue ends, in the first instance the two compre-
hensive ends of one’s own perfection and the happiness of others (MM, DV,
Introduction, section IV, 6:385–8), and then in turn the more specific ends that
comprise those two, such as the duties to preserve and cultivate one’s own physical and
mental capacities and to practice beneficence, gratitude, and sympathy towards others
while refraining from arrogance, defamation, and ridicule toward them. The ethical
obligation that is not one of these material and specific duties, however, what seems to
be the duty to have a virtuous disposition, is formal in the sense that it concerns not
what it is to be done but so to speak how it is to be done, that is, the kind of motivation
from which the more specific ethical duties are to be fulfilled, and it is singular rather
than plural because there is only one way to have a truly virtuous disposition, namely,
to act “from duty,” or out of respect for the moral law itself (G, Section I, 4:400–1).3
Kant emphasizes this point by describing the categorical imperative that is to be the
content of virtuous motivation as itself a formal principle:
The concept of duty stands in immediate relation to a law (even if I abstract from all ends, as
the matter of the law). The formal principle of duty, in the categorical imperative “So act that
the maxim of your action could become a universal law” already indicates this. Ethics adds only
that this principle is to be thought as the law of your own will and not of will in general. (MM,
DV, Introduction, section VI, 6:388–9)
It is something about the will in general that requires us to adopt the specific
material ends that are also duties of self-perfection and the happiness of others, but
ethics adds this general formal obligation that we be virtuous by making the moral
law itself our fundamental motivation. (This means that while it is an ethical
requirement to act out of the motivation to be moral, this requirement is not part
of the concept of morality as such, thus not a constituent of all properly moral duties;
therefore duties of right, compliance with which is ordinarily expected from the
aversion to threatened sanctions rather than from virtuous respect for the moral law,
are still a proper part of morality although not of ethics.)4
Kant also makes the contrast between the plural duties of virtue and the singular
obligation to be virtuous as a contrast between material and formal duties in a later
section of the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue in which he discusses “Concepts
Preliminary to the Division of the Doctrine of Virtue,” although here he uses his

3
For a similar emphasis on the formality of the general obligation to be virtuous, see Stratton-Lake,
“Being Virtuous and the Virtues,” p. 105.
4
Contrary to the position taken by Allen W. Wood in The Free Development of Each: Studies on
Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), for
example, pp. 33, 35, 37, 79.
     

all-purpose distinction between the formal and the material in two different ways,
first to contrast ethical obligations in general from duties of right and only then to
contrast the specific duties of virtue to the general obligation to be virtuous. Thus,
This principle of division must first, in terms of what is formal, contain all the conditions that
serve to distinguish a part of the doctrine of morals in general from the doctrine of right and to
do so in terms of its specific form. It does this by laying down 1) that duties of virtue are duties
for which there is no external law-giving; 2) that since a law must yet lie at the basis of every
duty, this law in ethics can be a law of duty given, not for actions, but only for the maxims of
actions; 3) that (as follows in turn from this) ethical duty must be thought as wide, not as
narrow, duty.
The principle of division must secondly, in terms of what is material, present the doctrine of
virtue not merely as a doctrine of duties generally but also as a doctrine of ends, so that a human
being is under obligation to regard himself as well as every other human being as an end . . .
(MM, DR, Introduction, section XVII, 6:410)

Here Kant claims that ethical obligations unlike duties of right cannot permissibly be
coercively enforced, that they are duties to adopt certain ends or policies, such as being
beneficent, and that therefore they do not specify types of actions that must always be
performed or omitted, such as fulfilling contracts or expropriating property without
consent, but leave open to determination when and how they are to be fulfilled, for
example to whom and in what ways one should be beneficent since one obviously
cannot be beneficent to everybody and in all ways. The formal differences between
duties of right and ethical obligations, in other words, arise from the fact that the
former are themselves so to speak formal duties—they arise from the necessity of
preserving equal spheres for freedom of external action for all persons regardless of
what anyone’s particular ends are (see MM, DR, Introduction, section C, 6:230–1)—
while the latter are material duties—they are duties to adopt and promote particular
ends. The formal difference that consists in the relative determinacy of the formal
duties of justice, that is, the relative specificity of what it takes to preserve equally
maximal spheres of freedom of action, as contrasted to the relative indeterminacy of
the material duties of ethics, that is, the relative indeterminacy of what it takes to realize
such ends as self-perfection and the happiness of others, is at least part of what in turn
explains the coercive enforceability of duties of justice and the non-coercive enforce-
ability of duties of virtue, for specificity is a necessary condition of enforceability,
although it may not be a sufficient condition therefor—there may also need to be a
moral justification for the coercive enforcement of a duty even if it is specific enough
for the attempt to enforce it coercively to make sense.5

5
For a brief discussion of this issue, see Stratton-Lake, “Being Virtuous and the Virtues,” pp. 109–10.
Stratton-Lake makes it sound as if Kant sometimes considers that the specificity of perfect duties is a
sufficient condition for their coercive enforceability. However, Kant’s inclusion of all perfect duties to
oneself as well as some perfect duties to others among the duties of virtue rather than the duties of right
makes it clear that he could not have thought this, as does his attempt to provide a justification for the use
of coercion even in the case of those perfect duties to others included in the sphere of right; see MM, DR,
Introduction, section D, 6:231.
      

Kant then uses a second version of the contrast between formal and material to
make the contrast between specific duties of virtue and the general obligation to be
virtuous in the same way as before:
Third, with regard to the distinction of the material from the formal in the principle of duty (of
conformity with law from conformity with ends), it should be noted that not every obligation of
virtue (obligatio ethica) is a duty of virtue (officium ethicum s. virtutis); in other words, respect
for law as such does not yet establish an end as a duty, and only such an end is a duty of
virtue.—Hence there is only one obligation of virtue, whereas there are many duties of virtue;
for there are indeed many objects that it is also our duty to have as ends, but there is only one
virtuous disposition, the subjective determining ground to fulfill one’s duty . . . (MM, DR,
Introduction, section XVII, 6:410)
Again, the obligation to be virtuous is necessarily singular because it is the obligation
to act out of a certain motivation, namely respect for “law as such” or for the moral
law, and there is only one such law, while the moral law itself gives rise to a number of
specific duties to adopt ends that cannot be coercively enforced but can be fulfilled
out of this motivation. Kant here emphasizes the difference between the general
obligation to be virtuous and the specific duties of virtue by remarking that the
general obligation to be virtuous could and in some sense even should be the
motivation for fulfilling duties of right, although of course while the outward
fulfillment of the latter can be coercively enforced the satisfaction of the requirement
to have this inward motivation cannot be: the “virtuous disposition . . . extends to
duties of right as well although they cannot, because of this, be called duties of
virtue.” Kant had also made this point in the general Introduction to the whole
Metaphysics of Morals (MM, Introduction, section IV, 6:218–21).
So now we have before us Kant’s distinction between the general and formal
obligation to be virtuous or to make respect for the moral law one’s fundamental
motivation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the specific and material duties of
virtue to make one’s own perfection and the happiness of others and the even more
specific ways in which these goals can be implemented into one’s ends. It is now time
to ask whether it makes any sense for Kant to speak of the former as itself a duty or
obligation, that is, to say that one has a duty to fulfill one’s duties in a specific way, out
of a specific motivation. Surely it would be either redundant or potentially infinitely
regressive to say simply that one has a duty to fulfill one’s duties? That is, to describe
something—whether juridical, such as the requirement to fulfill one’s contracts, or
ethical, such as the requirement to be beneficent—as a duty is to say that one is
obliged to fulfill it, and it would either add nothing or add a potentially infinite
repetition to say that one has a duty to fulfill one’s duties, that is, that one has an
obligation to fulfill one’s obligations. To call them duties is already to say that their
fulfillment is mandatory. However, Kant is not simply saying that one has a general
duty to fulfill one’s specific duties, but rather that one has a general obligation to
fulfill one’s specific duties in a particular way, namely out of a certain motivation, out
of one’s respect for the moral law.
But is that the sort of thing that can sensibly be called a duty or an obligation? One
might object to this out of a certain general picture of motivation and action. That is,
one might suppose that it makes sense to talk of duties where there is room to talk of
     

choice, that there is room to talk of choice with regard to our actions, but that our
motivations are just states that we have, not states that we choose, and so that it makes
no sense to say that we have a duty to have a certain motivation because we cannot
choose to have one motivation or another. Kant himself does not limit choice in this
way, however: at least by the time he wrote the Metaphysics of Morals, he had
straightened out his view about the freedom of choice in the Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason to say that our most basic—“radical”—free choice is
precisely the choice whether to make the moral law or self-love our most fundamen-
tal maxim and motivation, that is, whether to adopt the principle always to make the
principle of self-love subordinate to the principle of morality and therefore to act out
of self-love only when that is consistent with morality or, vice versa, to make the
principle of morality subordinate to the principle of self-love and only to act morally
when that is consistent with acting out of self-love. Kant clearly incorporated the
fundamental distinction that he had to make in order to arrive at this view that we
freely choose whether or not to make the moral law our fundamental motivation, the
distinction between Wille as an essentially cognitive faculty, identical to pure prac-
tical reason as Kant sometimes says (e.g. G, Section I, 4:412),6 that offers us the moral
law, and Willkür as the faculty of choice or “elective will” as the practical faculty that
makes the choice between the moral law and self-love into the Metaphysics of Morals
(MM, Introduction, section III, 6:226). So when he makes the distinction between the
general obligation to be virtuous and the specific duties of virtue in the Metaphysics of
Morals, Kant does think that we can choose whether to make the moral law our
fundamental motivation or not, thus choose to adopt specific ends such as being
beneficent to others out of respect for morality as such or, for example, out of our
sense of prudence. So he at least would not think it an objection to the idea of a
general duty to be virtuous that this would make sense only if we had a freedom to
choose our motivation that we do not in fact have.
However, Kant’s own conception of “moral worth” might seem to conflict with his
idea of a general obligation to be virtuous. In the opening section of the Groundwork,
Kant appeals to what are supposed to be common-sense notions of the good will
and duty, “the good will though under certain subjective limitations and hindrances”
(G, Section I, 4:397), in order to arrive at a first formulation of the categorical
imperative (actually, a first formulation of the first formulation thereof) that will
then be confirmed and amplified from more philosophical premises in the second
section and finally proved to be binding for us human beings in the third.7 His
strategy is to find indubitable examples of moral worth—not historical examples, to
be sure, but thought-experiments—or cases in which it is beyond doubt that there is
good will or that duty has been done, in order to establish the constraints on any
possible candidate for the moral law or categorical imperative—the latter being the
former as it presents itself to creatures such as ourselves who do not automatically

6
Although even as early as the Groundwork, it should be noted, Kant says that will and practical reason
would be identical in a purely rational being, “If reason infallibly determines the will,” not that they are
identical in us, fallible human beings; although Kant by no means fully recognizes the implications, he has
already laid the basis for the distinction between Wille and Willkür in the Groundwork.
7
On the general strategy of the Groundwork, see Chapter 8.
      

follow it. His argument from the concept of duty to the formulation of the moral law
proceeds in three steps. His analysis begins from the premise that although agents
who are motivated solely by inclination might, under fortunate circumstances, act in
conformity with duty, only if such agents lose their inclination to act in conformity
with the moral law and act out of respect for the moral law and the idea of duty
instead do their actions have what Kant calls “moral worth” (G, Section I, 4:397–8).
The point of this is to show that if such agents can demonstrate moral worth when
and only when they act without inclination, then it must be possible to act on the
moral law without inclination, and the moral law can therefore not be grounded on
inclination or have anything directly to do with the satisfaction of inclination, thus
with happiness. Kant then draws the consequences of this premise in the two further
steps of his analysis of duty, inferring first that if moral worth and therefore the moral
law is independent of inclination, then the moral law also cannot concern the objects
of inclination and indeed cannot directly concern the objects of our actions at all
(4:399–400),8 and then that moral worth can lie only in acting from respect for the
moral law itself (4:400), which, since it cannot concern inclinations or their objects,
can only prescribe that our maxims have the form of law as such, or be universal-
izable (4:401–2). The relevance of all this to our present concern is simply that in this
analysis Kant presents “moral worth” or acting from duty as something different
from and more estimable than merely acting in conformity with duty: acting in
conformity with duty regardless of motive “deserves praise and encouragement but
not esteem” (4:398), while only acting from duty merits esteem. And this suggests
that even though we can use the absence of any inclination from these indubitable
cases of moral worth to determine the content of the moral law, because obviously
agents who clearly have moral worth are acting in accordance with the moral law,
there is something especially meritorious about actually acting from respect for the
moral law. The agents who merely act in conformity with the law and who should be
praised and encouraged for so doing (by way of positive reinforcement, just so they
will continue to do so) are, after all, acting in accordance with the law—that is why we
want to them to continue to do so. Thus it seems as if they are doing their duty, and
that acting from duty, that is, more precisely, from respect for the moral law, is doing
more than one’s duty and deserves “esteem” precisely because it is so. Thus, it would
seem, acting in conformity with the moral law is what duty requires, and acting from
duty deserves esteem just because it is more than what duty requires; and so it seems
that if to have a virtuous disposition is to be motivated to act from respect for the

8
I have argued that the second step of Kant’s argument is formally invalid, since he fails to consider the
possibility that the moral law could be grounded in the value of a necessary object of the will rather than
one grounded in mere inclination, or command the realization of such a necessary rather than contingent
object—but also that Kant rectifies this fallacy by the argument that humanity itself is a necessary end of
the will that is the ground of the categorical imperative in the second section of the Groundwork (4:427–9);
see “The Derivation of the Categorical Imperative: Kant’s Correction for a Fatal Flaw,” Harvard Review of
Philosophy 10 (2002): 64–80. The moral law will also entail the duty to promote the happiness of others,
and through this the duty to promote the highest good, once it is shown that one cannot morally seek the
assistance one will naturally desire in one’s own pursuit of happiness, which is a merely natural goal, unless
one is willing to universalize one’s own maxim of seeking help and rendering help to others when they need
it and one can.
     

moral law itself then to have such a disposition is more than what duty requires, and
there cannot be a duty to have a virtuous disposition.
Kant suggests a similar objection to the idea of a general obligation to be virtuous
in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue itself by means of a contrast between
“merit” and “demerit.” Kant says that fulfillment of imperfect duties “is merit
(meritum) = +a; but failure to fulfill them is not in itself culpability (demeritum) = –a,
but rather mere deficiency in moral worth = 0, unless the subject should make it his
principle not to comply with such duties” (MM, DV, Introduction, section VII,
6:390); and he includes the general obligation to be virtuous as well as the specific
duties of virtue among the imperfect duties, in fact he immediately illustrates this
claim with the general obligation to be virtuous rather than with a specific duty of
virtue: “It is only the strength of one’s resolution, in the first case, that is properly
called virtue (virtus); one’s weakness, in the second case, is not so much vice (vitium)
as rather mere want of virtue, lack of moral strength (defectus moralis).” Since there is
no actual demerit in not being virtuous, unless one has actually made it a principle
not to do one’s duty and is prepared to act on this principle, but there is special merit
in being virtuous, that is, in fulfilling one’s particular duties with a virtuous dispos-
ition, it seems again as if fulfilling one’s duties is one thing and doing so virtuously is
another, additional thing, above and beyond duty and therefore not part of duty.
These reasons internal to Kant’s own account of moral worth and merit therefore
seem to make his idea that we have a general obligation to be virtuous in addition to
our specific duties of virtue problematic. Can his idea be saved? In fact, the ground
for an affirmative answer to this question has already been suggested in the last
quotation from Kant: by virtue or a virtuous disposition in general Kant does not just
mean being motivated by respect for the moral law alone, but rather the strength of
one’s resolution to be so, and this is something that both can be developed and indeed
that one can choose to develop, as well as something the development of which is for
real-world human beings a necessary condition for the fulfillment of their particular
duties in the absence of external, coercive constraints, thus a necessary condition for
the fulfillment of their particular duties of virtue, and for that reason something that
can be demanded of them as itself a duty. Kant makes it clear that virtue is not just
being motivated by the moral law but rather the strength to be so motivated in the
presence of natural inclinations that may be an obstacle to being so motivated in
every human being, and a strength by means of which we may constrain ourselves to
the fulfillment of our particular duties, in two key passages. First,
Virtue is the strength of a human being’s maxims in fulfilling his duty.—Strength of any kind
can be recognized only by the obstacles it can overcome, and in the case of virtue these
obstacles are natural inclinations, which can come into conflict with the human being’s moral
resolutions; and since it is the human being himself who puts these obstacles in the way of his
maxims, virtue is not merely a self-constraint . . . but also a self-constraint in accordance with a
principle of inner freedom, and so through the mere representation of one’s duty in accordance
with its formal law.
All duties involve a concept of constraint through a law. Ethical duties involve a constraint for
which only internal law-giving is possible, whereas duties of right involve a constraint for which
external law-giving is possible. Both, therefore, involve constraint, whether it be self-constraint or
      

constraint by another . . . the moral capacity to constrain oneself can be called virtue . . . (MM,
DV, Introduction, section IX, 6:394)

This passage makes it clear that virtue in general lies not merely in being motivated
by the moral law in addition to acting in conformity with its mandates, but in having
the strength to constrain oneself to be so motivated and to so act, a strength that is a
necessary condition for being so motivated and so acting in us human beings because
of the obstacles that our natural inclinations can present. Kant reiterates this con-
ception of virtue in a further passage, under the rubric “On virtue in general”:
Virtue signifies a moral strength of the will. But this does not exhaust the concept; for such
strength could also belong to a holy (superhuman) being, in whom no hindering impulses
would impede the law of its will and who would thus gladly do everything in conformity with
the law. Virtue is, therefore, the moral strength of a human being’s will in fulfilling his duty, a
moral constraint through his own law-giving reason, insofar as this constitutes itself an
authority executing the law. (MM, DV, Introduction, section XIII, 6:405)
Again, Kant suggests that virtue is not just being motivated by the moral law, thus the
ground of moral worth and merit that goes beyond duty, but rather the strength of will that
is necessary in order to fulfill duty in the face of the obstacles to so doing that are natural to
human beings, thus that it is in this way a necessary condition for the fulfillment of duty,
not something above and beyond duty, therefore something that can be demanded in the
name of or as part of duty. For this reason it seems to make sense after all to say that we
have an obligation or duty to be virtuous as well as specific duties of virtue.
No sooner has he led us to this conclusion, however, than Kant seems to under-
mine it by adding that “Virtue itself, or possession of it, is not a duty (for then one
would have to be put under obligation to duties); rather, it commands and accom-
panies its command with a moral constraint (a constraint possible in accordance
with laws of duty)” (MM, DV, Introduction, section XIII, 6:405). Here Kant seems to
hold that it cannot be a duty to have what is a necessary condition for the fulfillment
of particular duties, and perhaps that such a supposition would generate an infinite
regress after all. So now we must ask whether the defense that I have offered of Kant’s
idea of a general obligation to be virtuous can be saved from what is apparently his
own direct criticism of any such idea.
I will argue that Kant himself shows us how to defuse this criticism by arguing that
even if it may not make sense to say that we have a duty to have a disposition that is a
necessary condition for any specific obligation it makes perfectly good sense that we
have a duty to cultivate and strengthen a natural disposition that is a necessary
condition to the performance of our particular obligations, and that this is how the
general obligation to be virtuous should be understood: as an obligation to cultivate
and strengthen our natural tendency to be moved by the moral law. But before I make
that argument, I want briefly to locate Kant’s conception of obligation historically and
by so doing to suggest that there is historical precedent for his conception of a duty to
cultivate what is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of more particular duties.9

9
In pursuing this issue about the plausibility of Kant’s conception of a general duty to be virtuous, I will
sidestep an issue that both Stratton-Lake (“Being Virtuous and the Virtues”) and Marcia Baron (in
     

2. Two Conceptions of Duty

On one conception of duty with which Kant was obviously familiar, a duty is simply
an action required by a law. Thus, in his German Ethics, Christian Wolff wrote that
“By duty [Pflicht] we understand an action that is in accordance with a law . . . No law
is without obligatoriness [Verbindlichkeit].”10 In a Wollfian textbook from a few
decades later, Johann Stephan Pütter and Gottfried Achenwall define moral obliga-
tion as whatever actions the will should determine to do in accordance with the
concepts of good and evil: “That obligates [obligat] in the most general sense which
connects with a spontaneous act a resulting good or evil . . . The connection of a
motive with a free action is called a moral obligation [Obligatio].”11 These definitions
suggest that whatever is required by a law, in Wolff ’s apparently deontological
formulation, or by a moral conception of good and evil, in Pütter’s and Achenwall’s
explicitly teleological formulation, is a duty—I say Wolff ’s “apparently deonto-
logical” formulation, because his larger argument is that our duties are to perfect
the mental, physical, and external conditions of ourselves and others (as well as to
worship God), and thus his moral philosophy as a whole is as teleological as they
come12—and that it would make no particular sense to look beyond the particular
requirements of the moral law or moral ends for a general duty to conform to moral
law or seek moral ends. That would indeed risk generating an infinite regress of
duties that does not need to get started in the first place.
A more complex conception of duty, however, and one to which Kant seems to be
responding, is to be found in the widely influential, somewhat earlier work of Samuel
Pufendorf, whose Whole Duty of Man (1673) remained influential throughout
Europe for a century. He makes two moves that are helpful to understanding
Kant’s conception of duty. First, he defines a duty not merely as “That Action of a
Man, which is regularly order’d according to some prescribed Law, which he is oblig’d
to obey,”13 but goes on to define a law as “A Decree by which the superior obliges one
that is subject to him, to accommodate his Actions to the Directions prescrib’d
therein,”14 and thus to imply that a duty or an obligation is not merely prescribed

“Overdetermined Actions and Imperfect Duties,” in Heiner Klemme, Manfred Kuehn, and Dieter Schö-
necker, eds, Moralische Motivationen: Kant und die Alternativen [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006],
pp. 23–37, esp. pp. 27–9) have raised, namely whether it makes sense to say that one has a general duty to
perform imperfect duties, when those duties do not themselves seem to make it mandatory to perform
particular actions on particular occasions. I will just assume for the present discussion that it makes sense
to think of a particular policy or end (such as being beneficent) being commanded by a general sense of
duty rather than being recommended by prudence, and not worry about how the obligatoriness of the
policy is transmitted to particular actions in particular occasions.
10
Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von der Menschlichen Thun und Lassen (originally 1720),
4th edn (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1733), }221.
11
Johann Stephan Pütter and Gottfried Achenwall, Anfangsgründe des Naturrechts (Elementa Iuris
Naturae), ed. and trans. Jan Schröder (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1995) (originally Göttingen: Joh.
Wilhelm Schmidt, 1750), }}80, 82, p. 39.
12
As Kant makes clear at CPracR, 5:40, where he classifies Wolff ’s moral philosophy under the rubric
of perfectionism.
13
Samuel Pufendorf, On The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, trans. Andrew
Tooke, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), Bk I, ch. I, }i, p. 27.
14
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. II, }ii, p. 43.
      

by a law, or an act required by a law, but is also “superinduced upon the Will of Men
properly by a Superior.” To this last inference he immediately adds that a superior is
not only “such a one as being greater or stronger, can punish Gainsayers,” but also
one “who has just Reasons to have a Power to restrain the Liberty of our Will at his
own Pleasure.”15 There are thus two elements in Pufendorf ’s conception of duty
rather than one: a duty is not merely an action required of agents in accordance with
a law for the existence of which there is a good reason, but it is also an action required
of agents by an authority that has the power to enforce that law. On Pufendorf ’s
account, the primary source of duties is God, who has created us to live sociably with
one another and has legislated the laws of nature with the good reason that they are
what it is necessary for us to follow in order to live sociably with one another, and the
secondary source of duties is the civil authority that transforms natural law into civil
law and adds what further obligations are necessary in order to maintain civil
authority itself.
A second aspect of Pufendorf ’s conception of duty that will turn out to be
important to Kant is his conception of the nature of duty to oneself. Pufendorf
employs the tripartite division of duties into duties to God, duties to self, and duties
to others that would remain canonical in German moral philosophy throughout the
eighteenth century. “Those Duties,” Pufendorf writes, “which from the Law of Nature
are incumbent upon Man, seem mostly aptly to be divided according to the Objects
about which they are conversant. With regard to which they are ranged under three
principal heads; the first of which gives us directions how by the single Dictates of
right Reason Man ought to behave himself towards God; the second contains our
Duty toward our selves; and the third that towards other Men.”16 Our duty to other
men is obviously to live in accordance with the rules that make it possible to live with
them sociably, to which we have a natural disposition, by keeping our unsociable
impulses, which we also naturally have, in check. Our duty to God is the direct duty
to worship him in gratitude for our creation, but is also an indirect duty to fear him in
order to better maintain our society with other men:
But though those Precepts of the Law Natural, which have a relation to other Men, may
primarily and directly be derived from that Sociality, which we have laid down as a Foundation;
yet even the Duties also of Man towards God may be indirectly deduc’d from thence, upon this
Account, that the strongest Obligation to mutual Duties between Man and Man arises from
Religion and a Fear of the Deity; so as that Man could not become a sociable Creature if he were
not embu’d with Religion; and because Reason alone can go no farther in Religion than as it is
useful to promote the common Tranquillity and Sociality or reciprocal Union in this Life.17

And then Pufendorf also interprets our duty to ourselves as an indirect duty to
cultivate those powers of our mind and body by means of which we may successfully
fulfill our duties to others and to God (in the latter case, since our duty to God is
already itself at least in part an indirect duty, our duty to ourselves is at least in part a
doubly indirect duty):

15
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. II, }v, p. 44.
16
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. III, }xiii, p. 59.
17
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. III, }xiii, p. 59.
     

But the Duties a man owes to Himself arise jointly from Religion, and from the Necessity of
Society. So that no Man is so Lord of himself, but that there are many things relating to himself,
which are not to be disposed altogether according to his Will; partly because of the Obligation
he lies under of being a religious Adorer of the Deity, and partly that he may keep himself an
useful and beneficial Member of Society.18
The duty that we have with regard to our mind or soul is in turn divided into “the
right Formation of the Mind and the Heart,” that is, the duty to form true opinions
about God and society, and the duty to regulate “the Dispositions of our Minds; in
reducing and conforming them to the Dictates of right Reason . . . and in one word, in
getting ourselves possest of all those Qualities which are necessary for us to lead an
honest and a sociable Life”19 and “To gain the Mastery over our Passions.”20 The duty
that we have with regard to our body is, “as far as possible,” to “continue and increase
the natural Strength and Powers of our bodies, by convenient Food and proper
Exercise, not ruining them by any Intemperate Excess in Eating and Drinking, nor
wasting and consuming them by unnecessary or immoderate Labours, or by any
other Abuse or Misapplication of our Abilities,”21 so that our bodies will be fit
instruments for the accomplishments of our moral objectives with regard to others
in society.
The contents of Kant’s own enumeration of our duties to our selves in the Doctrine
of Virtue is obviously deeply indebted to Pufendorf, but this is not the point that
I want to emphasize. Rather, I want to draw attention to two more general points.
First, Kant’s account of duty clearly includes Pufendorf ’s requirement that there is a
duty only when there is not just a good reason for the performance or omission that
is enjoined, but also when there is a proper authority for the enforcement of that
performance or omission—but he changes Pufendorf ’s conception of the primary
superior for the enforcement of duty from God to our own reason and the strength of
our own will. Kant begins his “Discussion of the Concept of a Doctrine of Virtue”
with the Pufendorfian premise that “The very concept of duty is already the concept of
a necessitation (constraint) of free choice through the law,” but fundamentally alters
the theological foundation of Pufendorf ’s theologically grounded theory of natural
law when he continues that “Since the human being is still a free (moral) being, when
the concept of duty concerns the internal determination of his will (the incentive) the
constraint that the concept of duty contains can only be self-constraint (through the
representation of the law alone); for only so can that necessitation (even if it is
external) be united with the freedom of his choice” (MM, DV, Introduction,
section I, 6:379–80). For Kant, the idea that our duty to live sociably with other
men is imposed upon us by the will of God and enforced by the strength of God is the
very picture of heteronomy; for him, for whom autonomy is the ultimate moral value
and source of all moral obligations, the requirements that we preserve our own
freedom and cultivate the means for its successful exercise and that we live on terms

18
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. III, }xiii, p. 60.
19
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. V, }ii, pp. 70–1.
20
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. V, }viii, p. 77.
21
Pufendorf, Whole Duty of Man, Bk I, ch. V, }x, p. 80.
      

of equal freedom with others can only be the contents of the moral law suggested by
our own reason, and the freedom that is the ultimate aim of all morality can be
imposed upon us only by the strength of our own will if it is not to contradict itself, if
it is not to become an imposed freedom that is no longer freedom. For all the
similarities in both form and content between Kant’s moral philosophy and the
Pufendorfian paradigm, this is a fundamental revolution.
The sea-change between Kant’s ethics of self-imposed and self-enforced obligation
and Pufendorf ’s theory can also be gauged in Kant’s revision of Pufendorf ’s con-
ception of the relation between divine and civil authority. For Pufendorf, our primary
duty is the duty to live sociably with others, a duty in accordance with natural law
that is primarily enforced by our fear of God and secondarily enforced by civil
authorities in accordance with civil law but under the authority of God. For Kant,
civil or juridical law is typically enforced through the external, aversive constraints of
a public penal code, which works upon and is satisfied with our merely prudential
motivation for obedience, but it is also possible and morally estimable for us to obey
the dictates of civil law out of the purely moral motivation of respect for the moral
law itself, which is after all the source of the requirement that we preserve maximally
equal spheres of external freedom in our interactions with others as well as of the
non-coercively enforceable duties to ourselves and others that comprise ethics:
“All that ethics teaches is that if the incentive which juridical law-giving connects
with . . . duty, namely external constraint, were absent, the idea of duty by itself would
be sufficient as an incentive,” and indeed there is a “proof of virtue” in the observa-
tion of juridical legislation only if we “do it even where no coercion may be applied”
(MM, Introduction, section IV, 6:220). Kant does not see the observation of legal
requirements out of fear of the consequences of disobeying them as undermining our
autonomy in the way that he sees fulfilling moral requirements generally only out of
fear of divine punishment or hope for divine rewards as the epitomy of heteronomy,
because he views the institution and maintenance of the juridical authority of the
state as itself a product of our freedom; but he does view the motivation to fulfill even
juridical legislation out of our respect for the moral law alone as the fullest expression
of our freedom.
My first point, then, has been that Kant accepts from Pufendorf the requirement
that duty must always involve the possibility of constraint by an appropriate author-
ity, but radically transforms Pufendorf ’s conception of duty by making the ultimate
authority for duty our own reason, enforced by the strength of our own will. My
second point is that Kant accepts from Pufendorf the idea of indirect duty that
structures Pufendorf ’s conception of duty to oneself and even to an extent his
conception of duty to God. To confine ourselves to the former case, as we saw
Pufendorf conceives of duty to self as the duty to develop those capacities and powers
in oneself that will enable one to satisfy one’s duties to others in society. So on his
account we can have a duty to ensure the existence of the necessary conditions to
satisfy other duties, and there is nothing redundant or infinitely regressive in such an
idea. We have a duty to develop those capacities in ourselves that are necessary to
enable us to fulfill our duties to others, and that is not redundant, because there is a
substantive difference in content between the duties to self and the duties to others,
nor is it infinitely regressive, because there is no further duty to fulfill the duties to self
     

that are the necessary conditions for being able to fulfill duties to others, and so on.
What I now want to suggest is that Kant uses this structure in his own account of the
relation between the general obligation to be virtuous and the specific duties of virtue:
the development of the strength of will that is required by the former is the necessary
condition of fulfilling the latter (and even of fulfilling the duties of right in those cases
in which external constraint is either not available or not necessary).
By drawing this parallel I do not want to suggest that Kant reduces all duties to self
to instruments for fulfilling duties to others, either other humans or God, as
Pufendorf does: for Kant, we have a duty to treat humanity in our own selves always
as an end and never merely a means that is on exactly the same plane as our duty to
treat humanity in others that way, and we would have that duty to ourselves even if
there were no others (which for embodied human beings could hardly be the case).
I only want to suggest that Kant exploits the idea of an indirect duty to realize the
necessary condition of satisfying other duties that Pufendorf suggests in his account
of duties to self. But before we can see how the details of this strategy work, we must
face the threat left hanging at the end of the previous section, the suggestion by Kant
himself that the possession of “virtue itself” cannot actually be a duty (MM, DV,
Introduction, section XIII, 6:405).

3. The Obligation to be Virtuous as an Obligation to

Strengthen One’s Resolve
As noted earlier, by the time that Kant wrote the Metaphysics of Morals he had
abandoned the view of the Groundwork that the moral law is the causal law of the
noumenal self (G, Section III, 4:446) and committed himself to the alternative view that
we have a free, noumenal choice whether to make the moral or the principle of self-love
subordinate to the other. Freely choosing to make the moral law superior to the
principle of self-love is a necessary condition for fulfilling any particular duties when
doing so is not prescribed by self-love. The whole point of instituting a penal code is to
make sure that self-love will fairly reliably prescribe fulfilling duties of right even if
commitment to the moral law does not, so in this case a virtuous disposition, a
commitment to be motivated by the moral law above all else, cannot be demanded as
a necessary condition for the fulfillment of duties of right, and from the point of view of
right a virtuous disposition can indeed be regarded as estimable, something the presence
of which is meritorious but the absence of which brings no demerit. But it is not
appropriate or even possible to enforce fulfillment of duties of virtue by coercive means,
so in their case firm commitment to the superiority of the moral law over the principle
of self-love is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of those duties when self-love
does not itself prescribe it, which can often be the case—although of course self-love will
often prescribe the appearance of virtue, as when “honesty is the best policy.” Thus it
seems that a virtuous disposition, commitment to the moral law, can be demanded as
the necessary condition of fulfillment of the particular duties of virtue in all cases, and is
not meritorious in a merely supererogatory way but can be considered a duty, the
obligation to be virtuous. This could be understood on the model of the two-tiered
structure of direct and indirect duty that Kant could have adopted from Pufendorf.
      

So Kant could have argued to counter his own objection that “Virtue itself, or the
possession of it, is not a duty.” But this is not precisely what he does argue. Rather,
what he does say four pages after making this remark is that “Virtue is always in
progress and yet always starts from the beginning.—It is always in progress because,
considered objectively, it is an ideal and unattainable, while yet constant approxima-
tion to it is a duty. That it always starts from the beginning has a subjective basis in
human nature” (MM, DV, Introduction, section XVI, 6:409). In other words, while
there may be a sense in which it makes no sense to say that to be virtuous is a duty, it
makes sense that to strive to make progress toward becoming virtuous is a duty. How
does this help save Kant from an objection to the idea that a necessary condition of a
duty is also a duty?
One thing this remark could be taken to mean is that to be perfectly virtuous
cannot be considered a duty, because it is simply not possible for human beings to
have a holy will, that is, to be moved only by the moral law and not even be moved by
self-love, and agents have no obligation to attempt to do that which is impossible for
them to do; but humans can always have purer motivation than they do, thus always
make progress towards having perfectly virtuous dispositions, so it is possible for
“constant approximation” to virtue to be a duty. However, although Kant makes that
point later in the body of the Doctrine of Virtue (}22, 4:446–7), and we will return to
it, that does not seem to be his point here. His point rather seems to be something like
this. On the one hand, it may not seem to make sense to think of the disposition to
make the moral law our fundamental maxim that is the necessary condition of the
possibility of constraining ourselves to fulfill our particular duties of virtue as itself
the object of a duty precisely because it is the condition of the possibility of being put
under an obligation: unless we had such a disposition, it would not be possible for us
to recognize any claims of duty at all, so it does not make sense to say that we have a
duty to have that disposition itself—that would start us off on an infinite regress. But
on the other hand, although we do have a natural disposition to do our duty that
makes it possible for us to recognize the claim of and fulfill particular duties, that is
not our only natural disposition, for we also have the disposition toward self-love,
and thus our natural disposition to be moral always needs to be strengthened and our
disposition toward self-love weakened and controlled. At the noumenal level, per-
haps, we are simply able to choose to subordinate the principle of self-love to the
principle of morality rather than the contrary, but what doing this requires of us at
the phenomenal level is that we constantly strive to strengthen our natural dispos-
ition in favor of morality at the expense of our natural disposition in favor of self-
love. (All the more so if there is no such thing as noumenal freedom of the will.)
Thus, while it would make no sense to say that we would have a duty to have a
disposition in favor of morality, a virtuous disposition, if we did not already have one,
because without such a disposition duties can make no claim on us, it makes perfectly
good sense to say that we have a duty to strengthen our natural disposition to
morality, because that very disposition itself allows us both to recognize the claim
of duty in general but also to recognize that we may always need to strengthen our
moral resolve in order to be able to do our duty in particular cases where self-love
tempts us to do otherwise. Thus the general obligation to be virtuous can be perfectly
well understood as a duty to strengthen our natural disposition to be moral.
     

Kant suggests precisely such a pattern of reasoning in his discussion of “the Mind’s
Receptivity to Concepts of Duty as Such.” In this section of the Introduction to the
Doctrine of Virtue, preceding the remark that “constant approximation” to virtue is a
duty by several pages, Kant writes:
There are certain moral endowments such that anyone lacking them could have no duty to
acquire them.—They are moral feeling, conscience, love of one’s neighbor, and respect for
oneself (self-esteem). There is no obligation to have these because they lie at the basis of
morality, as subjective conditions of receptiveness to the concept of duty, not as objective
conditions of morality. All of them are natural predispositions of the mind, antecedent
predispositions on the side of feeling. To have these predispositions cannot be considered a
duty; rather, every human being has them, and it is by virtue of them that he can be put under
obligation. (MM, DV, Introduction, section XII, 6:399–400)
Love of one’s neighbor and self-esteem are being treated here as particular natural
dispositions that make it possible for one to fulfill particular duties of virtue toward
others and toward oneself; let us leave them aside22 and focus on the dispositions
toward moral feeling and conscience, which seem to be general conditions for
recognizing and fulfilling any claims of duty in the absence of external constraint.
Kant’s claim is that it makes no sense to say that we have a duty to have these
dispositions, because without them we could not be receptive to the concept of duty
at all, that is, recognize and be motivated to fulfill the claims of duty. His idea must be
that although at the noumenal level we simply choose to prioritize morality over self-
love, at the phenomenal level our recognition of the superiority of morality manifests
itself in our moral feeling and conscience outweighing our equally natural disposition
to self-love; moral feeling and conscience are the natural means through which our
free choice to be made moral is made effective on our actions, which of course take
place in the phenomenal world. But Kant does not think that we simply make the
noumenal choice to be moral and then, as if by magic, our moral feeling and
conscience automatically outweigh any contrary natural dispositions; on the con-
trary, what he thinks is that our noumenal choice to be moral leads us to take steps to
strengthen our moral feeling and conscience so that they will be effective in particular
cases of action. In other words, the first manifestation of our recognition of duty in
general will be the recognition that we have the duty to strengthen our moral feeling
and conscience. Here is how Kant puts the point in the case of moral feeling:
Since any consciousness of obligation depends upon moral feeling to make us aware of the
constraint present in the thought of duty, there can be no duty to have moral feeling or to
acquire it; instead every human being (as a moral being) has it in him originally. Obligation
with regard to moral feeling can be only to cultivate it and to strengthen it through wonder at
its inscrutable force. (MM, DV, Introduction, section XII, 6:399–400)

Kant does not worry that any human being is simply lacking in moral feeling: “No
human being is entirely without moral feeling, for were he completely lacking in
receptivity to it he would be morally dead,” a mere animal (perhaps this is a merely

22
They will be further discussed in Chapter 14.
      

analytical point: if you do not have moral feeling, it would not be possible for you to
be moved by the thought of duty, and you would not count as a moral agent—we
would have to deal with you otherwise, restrain or destroy you but not judge or
punish you). He believes the same about conscience, which he defines as “practical
reason holding the human being’s duty before him for his acquittal or condemnation
in every case that comes under a law,” and which I think we should understand as the
natural disposition that presents situations to our empirical selves as cases calling for
moral decision:23 “So too, conscience is not something that can be acquired, and we
have no duty to provide ourselves with one; rather, every human being, as a moral
being, has a conscience within him originally,” but “The duty here is only to cultivate
one’s conscience, to sharpen one’s attentiveness to the voice of the inner judge and to
use every means to obtain a hearing for it (hence the duty is only indirect)” (6:400–1).
Again, while it may make no sense to say that we have a duty to have a predisposition
without which we could not have duties at all, it makes perfectly good sense to say
that we have a duty to strengthen a natural predisposition through which we can
make our choice to be moral in particular cases effective. Kant explicitly says that this
duty is “indirect” in the case of conscience: what he most obviously means by this is
that conscience is what allows us to recognize that we are in particular circumstances
in which a duty needs to be fulfilled, while moral feeling is that which provides the
impetus to fulfill it, or transmits the impetus of the noumenal choice to fulfill it into
the phenomenal world; but both the duty to strengthen moral feeling and the duty to
strengthen conscience can also be regarded as indirect duties in the sense previously
suggested, that is, they can be regarded as duties because they are the means to the
fulfillment of more particular duties, and indeed the only means to the fulfillment of
particular duties of virtue where self-love would do otherwise.
So the indirect duties to strengthen moral feeling and conscience suggest a model
for the indirect general obligation to be virtuous. Indeed, I would suggest that the
duties to strengthen moral feeling and conscience comprise the general obligation to
be virtuous, or comprise a large part of it. That is, what we have to do in order to
make progress towards being virtuous, which is how we are now understanding the
general obligation to be virtuous, is in very large part just to constantly take steps to
strengthen our natural disposition to have moral feeling and to have conscience and
by that means to “fight” against the “brood of dispositions opposing the law” (MM,
DV, Introduction, section XIII, 6:405). It is by strengthening these dispositions that
we come to “govern ourselves” and gain control over our feelings and inclinations,
and even more so over “affects” or “precipitate and rash” feelings and “passions” or
“sensible desire[s]” that have become “lasting inclination[s].” Kant says that “Virtue
Requires, in the First Place, Governing Oneself,” that

23
Thus “conscience” would be Kant’s term for the psychological faculty that presents “moral salience”
to our empirical selves, to borrow Barbara Herman’s term; see Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral
Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 4. But Kant conceives of conscience as the
disposition to bring individual cases of prospective action before the bench of the moral law, to test whether
their maxims are universalizable; he does not suggest that we can rely on rules of thumb to do this
(although Herman may be right that we often can).
     

Since virtue is based on inner freedom it contains a positive command to a human being,
namely to bring all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control and so to rule
over himself, which goes beyond forbidding him to let himself be governed by his feelings and
inclinations (the duty of apathy); for unless reason holds the reins of government in its own
hands, his feelings and inclinations play the master over him. (MM, DV, Introduction, section
XV, 6:408–9)
This is the conclusion of the section that immediately precedes the one in which Kant
states that constant approximation to virtue is a duty. So the positive command to
govern ourselves—the general obligation to be virtuous—can only be understood as
the command to constantly strengthen our self-government, and this is in turn
accomplished in large part by strengthening our natural disposition to moral feeling
and conscience, which are the means by which we counter the attractions of affects
and passions.
I say “in large part,” because Kant amplifies the steps that we must take in order to
fulfill our general obligation to be virtuous a little bit in the main body of the Doctrine
of Virtue.24 In a characteristic display of his love for architectonic, Kant divides the
body of the Doctrine of Virtue into two “Parts,” the first concerning duties of virtue
to the self and the second concerning duties of virtue to others;25 he then divides Part
I (but not Part II) into two “Books,” the first concerning perfect duties to oneself and
the second imperfect duties to oneself; and finally divides each of these into “Chap-
ters,” the first concerning perfect or imperfect duties to oneself respectively as “an
animal being” and the second those duties to oneself “merely as a moral being.”26 The
perfect duties to oneself as an animal being are the prohibitions against suicide, self-
abuse, and self-stupefaction (MM, DV, }}5–8), that is, duties to preserve one’s body

24
Philip Stratton-Lake observes that Kant “complicates” his distinction between the general obligation
to be virtuous and the particular duties of virtue by including the duty to perfect ourselves—which he must
be understanding as the duty to perfect our moral being in order to think there is any confusion—among
the particular duties of virtue (“Being Virtuous and the Virtues,” p. 105). He then says that to avoid
confusion “we have to distinguish between striving to make oneself virtuous and the state of virtue one is
striving to attain.” This distinction is not the answer to the confusion created by Kant’s inclusion of the
duty to perfect oneself (morally) among the particular duties of virtue but, as we have already seen, is
Kant’s solution to the paradox of how we can have a duty to acquire that which is the condition of the
possibility of having duties. The response to the confusing inclusion of the general duty to strengthen our
virtue among the particular duties of virtue is rather that, as we will now see, the latter treatment only adds
one detail to what we can recognize has already been argued in the Introduction as long as we interpret the
duties to strengthen our moral feeling and conscience there as actually comprising the general duty to
approximate to virtue.
25
Note that Kant has reformed the entire Pufendorfian tradition, represented by Wolff and his
followers such as Baumgarten as well, of a tripartite distinction among duties to God, to self, and others:
he has already argued in the Religion that we have no direct duties to God, but only a duty to ourselves and
others to join in an ethical commonwealth that may require worship of God as a sort of cement, and he
briskly argues in an “episodic section” in the Doctrine of Virtue that while we may have a “duty of religion”
to regard all of our duties “as if (instar) they were divine commands” this is not a “duty to God” (MM, DV,
}18, 6:443).
26
Part II is divided more simply, primarily into a section on “duties of love” towards others, the
positive, imperfect duties of beneficence, gratitude, and sympathy, and on “duties of respect toward
others,” the duties not to be arrogant toward them or defame or ridicule them. The latter should no
doubt be considered perfect but not coercively enforceable duties, therefore not perfect duties of others
included in the Doctrine of Right.
      

and its efficacy as an instrument of one’s free choices, and the imperfect duties to
oneself as an animal being are the duties to perfect (or adopt the end of perfecting)
one’s natural powers of “spirit” or reason, “soul” or other mental powers such as
memory and imagination that can be put to work by reason, and “body,” or physical
strength and skill, all of which are powers by means of which one’s free choices can be
made efficacious (}19). One’s perfect duties to oneself as a moral being are, first, the
prohibitions against lying, avarice, and servility, which would undermine one’s
power to communicate with others, one’s power to use non-human things for
reasonable purposes, and one’s dignity in the eyes of others (}}9–12), and then,
what is relevant to our present argument, the “Human’s Being Duty to Himself as His
Own Innate Judge” (}13, 6:437) and “the First Command of All Duties to Oneself,”
the duty to “ ‘know (scrutinize, fathom) yourself,’ not in terms of your natural
perfection . . . but rather in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty”
(}14, 6:441). Kant then finally adds an imperfect duty to oneself as a moral being, the
duty “to increase his moral perfection, that is, for a moral purpose only” (}21, 6:446).
Now what Kant actually says about our duties to ourselves as moral beings within
this complicated framework is quite simple. First, he says that “Every human being
has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened, and in general kept in awe
(respect coupled with fear) by an internal judge; and this authority watching over the
law in him is not something that he himself (voluntarily) makes, but something
incorporated in his being” (MM, DV, }13, 6:438); and he does not add, having
already said so in the Introduction, that our duty with regard to his faculty that is
already present within us and by its nature commands our attention can only be to
strengthen it. This first perfect duty to oneself as a moral being thus does not add
anything to the analysis of what is necessary in order to fulfill one’s general obligation
to be virtuous that has already been provided in the Introduction, and its inclusion
here among particular duties of virtue may be momentarily confusing but is harm-
less. Second, under the command to know oneself, not in terms of one’s natural
abilities and thus what sorts of projects one could prudently undertake but with
respect to one’s “moral perfection in relation to our duty,” he adds that one needs to
know one’s heart, know one’s good and evil tendencies, which is necessary in order
“first to remove the obstacle within (an evil will actually present in him) and then to
develop the original predisposition to a good will within him, which can never be
lost” (}14, 6:441). Kant adds that moral cognition of oneself will “dispel fanatical
contempt for oneself as a human being (for the whole human race),” that is, the belief
that all human beings are necessarily evil, for this moral self-knowledge will also
reveal the natural predisposition to a good will. He then infers that “Impartiality in
appraising oneself in comparison with the law, and sincerity in acknowledging to
oneself one’s inner moral worth or lack of worth are duties to oneself that follow
directly from this first command to cognize oneself” (}15, 6:441). Here Kant adds
something to the requirements of strengthening moral sense and conscience as the
constituents of the general obligation to be virtuous that have already been provided
in the Introduction, but something that we might suppose is implicit in them, since
knowing what we need to do in order to strengthen our moral feeling and conscience
and to weaken other feelings and voices within ourselves surely presupposes knowing
what states those feelings are currently in and what our current degree of moral
     

worth or lack of moral worth is. Kant does not explicitly state that we must have some
natural predisposition to appraise ourselves in comparison with the law and to
acknowledge our inner moral worth or lack thereof and that what our actual duty
with regard to that can be is only to cultivate and strengthen it, but perhaps that is
self-evident. Finally, under the rubric of our imperfect duty to ourselves as moral
beings, Kant does not actually add any new requirement, but only makes explicit that
a human will is never a holy will, simply not tempted by inclination, so that our duty
to strive after moral perfection “remains only a progress from one perfection to
another” (}21, 6:446), and thus that “This duty to oneself is a narrow and perfect one
in terms of its quality; but it is wide and imperfect in terms of its degree, because of
the frailty (fragilitas) of human nature” (}22, 6:446). That is, we do not have a choice
whether or not to strive to be virtuous in this situation or that, we are always under a
general obligation to improve our virtue, but while there is no limit to how much we
can strengthen our virtue there is also nothing that will ever count as completing the
task of strengthening our virtue.
What it takes to cultivate and strengthen our general resolve to fulfill our particular
virtues even when we are not externally constrained to do so has thus already been
largely spelled out in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue, and Kant has not
really confused the general obligation to be virtuous with the particular duties of
virtue that he discusses in the body of the text. What he has done in the Introduction
is to show that it does make sense to impose upon ourselves a general obligation to
cultivate and strengthen our natural disposition to be moral by cultivating and
strengthening our natural tendencies to moral feeling and conscience, which both
require cultivating moral self-knowledge. He has also shown this general obligation
to be one freely imposed on us by our own reason and thus to be an autonomous
form of self-constraint rather than a heteronomous form of external constraint. By so
doing, Kant has made sense of a general obligation to be virtuous as well as of
particular duties of virtue, and any confusions in his account are quite superficial.27

27
Work on this chapter was supported by the generous award of a Research Prize from the Alexander
von Humboldt Stiftung for 2007–8 and by the hospitality of the Lehrstuhl für Deutschen Idealismus of the
Institut für Philosophie of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and its occupant at the time, my dear friend
Rolf-Peter Horstmann.
 14
Kant on Moral Feelings
From the Lectures to the Metaphysics of Morals

1. Introduction
Kant made well-known statements that suggest that morally worthy action must be
performed without any reliance upon feeling. In his notorious illustrations of morally
praiseworthy actions from duty in Section I of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals Kant says that “action first has its genuine moral worth” only when it is done
“without any inclination, simply from duty” (G, Section I, 4:398) and that “an action
from duty is to put aside entirely the influence of inclination” (4:400); in the Critique
of Practical Reason, he says that “What is essential to any moral worth of actions is
that the moral law determine the will immediately,” which in turns seems to mean not
“by means of a feeling” (CPracR, 5:71). Yet the sentence from the Critique of Practical
Reason is the opening of the chapter, its analogue to the “Transcendental Aesthetic”
of the Critique of Pure Reason no less, in which Kant argues that a feeling of respect is
the “incentive” of pure practical reason, and even in the Groundwork no sooner has
Kant argued that morally worthy action does not depend upon inclination than he
turns around and treats respect as a feeling. The whole sentence that sums up his
analysis of duty, from which my second quotation from the Groundwork was
excerpted, states that

an action from duty is to put aside entirely the influence of inclination and with it every object
of the will; hence there is left for the will nothing that could determine it except objectively the
law and subjectively pure respect for this practical law, and so the maxim of complying with
such a law even if it infringes upon all my inclinations. (G, Section I, 400–1)

One could think that “pure respect” here refers simply to the act of affirming the
moral law, without any particular phenomenology of feeling, just as the affirmation
of a proposition could be simply a propositional attitude toward it without any
particular phenomenology. Indeed, in light of the theory of the noumenal will that
Kant introduces in Section III of the Groundwork, one might think that this attitude
of pure respect must be a determination of the noumenal will, necessarily without
any phenomenological character at all. But in a footnote to the following paragraph,
Kant defends himself against the objection that “behind the word respect” he seeks
refuge “in an obscure feeling” not by denying that in talking about respect he is
talking about a feeling at all, but rather by insisting that “respect is a feeling” although
one “self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore specifically different
from all feelings . . . which can be reduced to inclination or fear” (G, Section I,
    

4:401n.). In these passages Kant clearly does allow some feeling, namely the feeling of
respect, an essential place in morally worthy action. How is this to be reconciled with
his suggestions that in morally worthy action the will is immediately determined by
the moral law without any input from inclination at all?
One approach to this issue, besides emphasizing Kant’s distinction between the
feeling of respect and inclination, resolves this tension by treating the feeling of
respect as epiphenomenal, that is, as the empirical or phenomenal manifestation or
consciousness of the determination of the noumenal will by the moral law alone, but
as playing no further causal role in the etiology of morally worthy action even at the
phenomenal level.1 The feeling of respect is treated as an effect and expression of
the determination of the will to make the moral law its fundamental maxim and of
the selection of more particular maxims in light of that fundamental commitment as
well as of the initiation of actions under the aegis of those particular maxims, but not
as a cause at any stage of morally worthy actions. I will argue instead that for Kant
moral feeling does play an indispensable causal role at least in the phenomenal
etiology of morally worthy action. Indeed, I will argue that Kant’s final discussion
of moral feeling in the Doctrine of Virtue of the Metaphysics of Morals assigns
different kinds of moral feelings causal roles at several distinguishable stages in the
phenomenal etiology of morally worthy action. Both the general feeling of respect,
which is what Kant specifically calls “moral feeling” in this late work, as well as
specific feelings such as feelings of sympathy towards others and of esteem towards
oneself, play distinct causal roles in the transition from the empirical representation
of the moral law to the initiation of specific actions required by this commitment. On
this model, the feeling of respect or general moral feeling can still be regarded as a
phenomenal feeling “self-wrought” by pure practical reason as a noumenal agent,
supposing, for the sake of discussion, such a thing to exist, and more specific moral
feelings such as feelings of sympathy and self-esteem can then be regarded as
phenomenal-level feelings freely cultivated as a result of the authority loaned to the
moral law itself, at the phenomenal level, by the general feeling of respect and also as a
further stage or stages in the causation of morally worthy particular actions. But,
although no doubt Kant did not intend this, the late model of the Doctrine of Virtue
could also be read as if it has left the theory that the general feeling of respect is
noumenally “self-wrought” behind, and instead maintains simply that our natural
dispositions both to general moral feeling and to the more specific dispositions of
conscience and the feelings of sympathy and self-esteem can be cultivated and
strengthened in the light of our phenomenal representation of the moral law so that
they will provide adequate impulses to morally requisite action at particular moments
of decision. That is, the phenomenal act of cultivating natural predispositions to
moral feelings and conscience in light of our commitment to the moral law could be
seen as replacing the idea of phenomenal feelings that are noumenally “self-wrought.”

1
Versions of this approach include Andrews Reath, “Kant’s Theory of Moral Sensibility: Respect for
Moral Law and the Influence of Inclination,” Kant-Studien 80 (1989): 284–302, reprinted in his Agency and
Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 8–32, for example,
p. 11, and Daniel Guevara, Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), ch. 3,
pp. 93–125, for example, pp. 98–100.
     

Even if Kant himself remained committed to the idea that the representation of the
moral law must be given by pure practical reason independent of all sensible
conditions, and thus that it is given noumenally, as he surely did, he would still
have had good reason to separate the pure representation of the moral law and the
noumenal determination of the will, as a power of choice (Willkür), to make the
moral law its fundamental maxim, from the role of feeling in the phenomenal
etiology of actions carrying out the former commitment and caused by the strength
of moral feeling. That is, Kant would have good reason to separate the noumenal
representation of the moral law from the noumenal determination of the will, in
order to avoid the notorious problem that the noumenally free agent can act only in
accordance with the moral law,2 and this is precisely what Kant does in Religion
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, but would have further reason to separate
both of these from the role of moral feeling in the transition from will to action at the
phenomenal level. In any case the relation between the noumenal determination of
the will to abide or not by the moral law and the phenomenal process of willing a
particular action, or between intelligible and empirical character, is supposed to be
inscrutable, and we are not supposed to postulate anything more about the noumenal
basis of willing than is strictly required for practical purposes. So throughout this
discussion we will go along with the “official” Kantian position that the complex
model of moral feeling offered in the Metaphysics of Morals is just supposed to be an
empirical model of the determination of the will to perform morally requisite and
worthy actions that no doubt expresses the noumenal determination of the will in an
inscrutable way but in which moral feelings play an empirically indispensable causal
role. We can nevertheless leave open the possibility that the system of moral feelings
offered in Kant’s late work could stand on its own as a plausible and attractive
empirical model of moral motivation independent from Kant’s transcendental ideal-
ist theory of the freedom of the will.

2. Kant’s Early View of Moral Feeling:

The Lectures and the Groundwork
In his lectures on ethics as he gave them up to the time of the Groundwork, Kant
clearly recognized an indispensable causal role for moral feeling (and did not
complicate matters by any reference to his eventual transcendental idealist solution

2
This is the problem identified in 1788 by Johann August Heinrich Ulrich in Eleutheriologie (Jena:
Cröker). In 1790, Carl Christian Erhard Schmid responded by distinguishing between the moral law and
the freedom to choose for or against it, but since he supposed (as Kant might be thought to have suggested
in the Critique of Practical Reason), that the noumenal faculty of choice gets to make only one election
whether to be moral or not, his position was in turn accused of being “intelligible fatalism” and responded
to by Karl Leonhard Reinhold in the second series of Letters on the Kantian Philosophy of 1792 with a
distinction between reason as the source of the moral law and the freedom to choose for or against it that
did not carry that commitment (see Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer, eds, Materialen zu Kants ‘Kritik
der praktischen Vernunft’ [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975], pp. 249–51). Kant’s own firmed-up
distinction between Wille and Willkür in Part I of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason also
rejects Schmid’s “intelligible fatalism,” as its insistence on the possibility of conversion from freely elected
evil to freely elected good implies.
    

to the problem of free will, which he may not have formulated until late in the process
of the composition of the Critique of Pure Reason).3 At the start of his introductory
section on “The Supreme Principle of Morality,” Kant distinguished between the
criterion of moral right and wrong on the one hand and the incentive or “principle of
execution” for morally right actions on the other, and held that the latter although
not the former is moral feeling—thus already here Kant rejected his earlier attraction
to the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, according to which moral
feeling is both criterion and incentive, or in Hutcheson’s terms both “justifying
reason” and “exciting reason,”4 for morally appropriate and praiseworthy actions.
Kant maintained that “(1) The principle of appraisal [dijudication] of obligation,
and (2) the principle of its performance or execution,” “Guideline and incentive
[Triebfeder],”5 must be distinguished. He continued:
If the question is, what is morally good or not?, that is the principle of appraisal, whereby
I judge the goodness or depravity of actions. But if the question is: What moves me to live
according to this law?, that is the principle of incentive. The approbation [Billigung]6 of the
action is the objective ground, but not yet the subjective ground. That which impels me to do
the thing, of which understanding tells me that I ought to do it, is the motiva subjective
moventia. The supreme principle of all moral judgment lies in the understanding; the supreme
principle of the moral impulse to do this thing lies in the heart. This incentive is the moral
feeling. (MP-Collins, 27:274–5)

Here Kant clearly believed that the intellectual apprehension and even approbation
of the moral law—here ascribed to the “understanding” rather than “pure practical
reason”—is necessary but not sufficient to impel an agent to the action that morality
requires; for that an additional element, a “feeling” in the “heart” rather than the
understanding, is required. It is not unnatural to think that Kant’s claim, as he puts it
in the second Critique, that in morally worthy action the moral law determines the
will immediately is meant as a retraction of this earlier position. What I will argue,
however, is that Kant’s mature conception of respect, or what he even later calls
moral feeling, is rather meant as his accommodation of the obvious fact that an
abstract principle of morality cannot impel a human agent to action without an effect

3
I retain this traditional view in spite of Desmond Hogan’s arguments that Kant’s move toward a
transcendental idealist resolution of the problem of free will was an early motivation for transcendental
idealism rather than a later benefit of a doctrine motivated primarily by considerations concerning the
possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge of the structure of space and time; see Hogan, “Noumenal
Affection,” Philosophical Review 118 (2009): 501–32, at pp. 516–18, and “How to Know Unknowable
Things in Themselves,” Nous 43 (2009): 49–63.
4
For this distinction, see Francis Hutcheson, Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (1728), section I, in An
Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed.
Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), pp. 141–6. For Kant’s early attraction to moral sense
theory, see the 1764 prize essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology
and Morality, Fourth Reflection, }2, 2:299–300, and M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the Programme
of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765–1766, 2:311–12.
5
Heath translates Triebfeder as “motive,” but I am substituting “incentive” for the sake of consistency
with the Gregor translations of the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason to be quoted below; see
Lectures on Ethics, pp. 65–6.
6
Heath translates Billigung as “appraisal,” but since he has also used that word as the translation of
Dijudication, that choice is confusing.
     

on the human “heart,” that is, without an empirical effect on human feelings: his
position is that there must be a feeling of respect that is self-wrought by the “rational
concept” of the moral law because only through such a feeling can a flesh-and-blood
human being be impelled to action.
But Kant barely hints at his eventual conception of the causal role of the feeling of
respect in his first discussion of this feeling in the Groundwork, published soon after
the student Georg Ludwig Collins took Kant’s course on ethics in the winter semester
of 1784–5.7 Let us now see what he adds to his conception of respect in the
Groundwork before he begins to clarify the causal role of this feeling in the second
Critique and completes his account of the causal role of moral feelings in the
Metaphysics of Morals. Kant’s main discussion of respect in the Groundwork is in
the footnote in Section I already referred to. Two points in this note are particularly
worthy of attention. First, there is a certain ambivalence in Kant’s account of the
origin of the feeling of respect. On the one hand, as earlier quoted, he says that this
feeling is “self-wrought by means of a rational concept” and that “What I cognize
immediately as a law for me I cognize with respect, which signifies merely conscious-
ness of the subordination of my will to a law without the mediation of other
influences on my sense” (G, Section I, 4:401n.). The statements that the feeling of
respect is self-wrought by a rational concept and that cognition of the law is cognition
with respect might suggest that it is the mere representation of the moral law that
produces the feeling of respect, which would in turn allow for the feeling of respect to
play a causal role in the determination of the will to accept or abide by that law; in
that case, the feeling of respect would be the product of the cognition that I ought to
subordinate my will to the law and would then play a causal role in my actually
subordinating my will to that law. This suggestion of course raises the problem that
in Section III of the Groundwork Kant will introduce his transcendental idealist
theory of the freedom of the will according to which the actual determination of the
will to accept the moral law transpires in a noumenal realm that is the ground of the
phenomenal realm, which then suggests that the feeling of respect, as something
phenomenal, could not play a causal role in the actual determination of the will to
abide by the moral law, which must be a noumenal “event” (in scare-quotes, because
the noumenal determination of the will is not temporal, though we have none but
temporal language with which to refer to it). So, on the other hand, several of Kant’s
further formulations in this note suggest that it is not the mere representation of the
moral law but the determination of the will by that law that produces the feeling of
respect: thus the sentence following the last one quoted says that “Immediate
determination of the will by the law and consciousness of this is called respect, so
that this is regarded as the effect of the law on the subject”; and Kant makes several
further remarks in that vein: “The object of respect is therefore simply the law, and

7
In fact, Collins may have transcribed his notes not from Kant’s oral presentation that semester but
from some earlier set of notes floating around Königsberg; indeed, the great similarity of his notes to the
Kaehler notes of 1777 might be thought to make that more likely than not. But the same passage appears in
C. C. Mrongrovius’s notes (27:1422–3), apparently from the winter semester 1782–3 (see the Akademie
edn, 27:1052), which might be thought to increase the likelihood that Kant was still making this claim in his
lectures not long before the publication of the Groundwork, and that he did not mean to repudiate it.
    

indeed the law that we impose upon ourselves . . . As a law we are subject to it without
consulting self-love; as imposed upon us by ourselves it is nevertheless a result of our
will” (all still from G, 4:401n.). These remarks suggest that it is not simply the
representation of the law but the self-imposition of the law on our will, that is, the
determination of the will to abide by the law, that produces the feeling of respect;
the claim that it is the (feeling of) respect that constitutes consciousness of this
“immediate determination of the will” would then be compatible with the idea that
the self-determination of the will by the moral law does take place at the noumenal
level, where it is not caused by the phenomenal feeling, and that the feeling of respect
is instead the phenomenal effect of this noumenal self-determination. That conclu-
sion seems compatible with the metaphysical model of freedom of the will that Kant
propounds in the Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, and Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and should presumably be regarded as Kant’s official
position throughout his mature works. But even if this means that the feeling of
respect is ultimately an epiphenomenon of the noumenal determination of the will,
the feeling of respect could still be supposed to play an indispensable causal role in
the phenomenal process that expresses the noumenal determination of the will to
abide by the moral law. This at least phenomenally indispensable causal role of the
feeling of respect will be my focus in what follows.
The second point that becomes clear in this note is that the phenomenal feeling of
respect is phenomenologically complex: although Kant does not explicitly refer to
pleasure and pain, as he will repeatedly do in his discussion of respect in the second
Critique, he nevertheless makes it clear here that the feeling of respect has both
pleasurable and painful aspects. He says (now I fill in some words previously elided,
while eliding some previously quoted):
Respect is properly the representation of a worth that infringes upon my self-love. Hence there
is something that is regarded as an object neither of inclination nor of fear, though it has
something analogous to both. . . . As a law we are subject to it without consulting self-love; as
imposed upon us by ourselves it is nevertheless a result of our will; and in the first respect it has
an analogy with fear, in the second with inclination. (G, 4:401n.)

The self-imposition of a law that does not serve self-love but rather infringes upon it
produces a feeling somewhat analogous to fear, that is, a feeling of aversion, a feeling
of pain at the prospect of forgoing the gratification of self-love; but the fact that this
restriction of self-love is our own deed, the product of our own will, produces
something analogous to inclination, a positive or pleasurable feeling.8 Kant will
clearly retain this analysis of the feeling of respect in the second Critique, although
for now, at least, the causal significance of this twofold phenomenology remains
unexplained: ordinarily the prospects of pain and pleasure are incentives for some
sort of action, but so far Kant has only suggested that these painful and pleasurable

8
Daniel Guevara argues on the basis of text from the Critique of Practical Reason that the feeling of
respect is an entirely positive feeling, although it does have a “feeling of pain caused by respect for the law”
as a consequence (Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation, p. 111), but he does not consider this passage from
the Groundwork, which clearly assigns the painful and pleasurable analogues of fear and inclination to one
and the same feeling of respect. I will argue shortly that Kant retains this position in the second Critique.
     

aspects of the feeling of respect are effects of the self-determination of the will to
abide by the moral law without specifying that they are the cause of anything else.
We should also note that shortly before the end of the Groundwork, Kant
remarks that:
In order for a sensibly affected rational being to will that for which reason alone prescribes the
ought, it is admittedly required that his reason have the capacity to induce a feeling of pleasure
[Lust] or of delight [Wohlgefallens] in the fulfillment of duty, and thus there is required a
causality of reason to determine sensibility in conformity with its principles. But it is quite
impossible to see, that is, to make comprehensible a priori, how a mere thought which itself
contains nothing sensible produces a feeling of pleasure or displeasure; for that is a special kind
of causality about which, as about any causality, we can determine nothing whatever a priori
but must for this consult experience alone. But since this cannot provide us with any relation of
cause to effect except between two objects of experience—whereas here pure reason, by means
of mere ideas (which yield no object at all for experience), is to be the cause of an effect
that admittedly lies in experience—it follows that for human beings it is quite impossible
to explain how and why the universality of a maxim as law and hence morality interests us.
(G, Section III, 4:460)

Kant does not explain the relation between the feeling of pleasure in the fulfillment of
duty to which he here refers and the feeling of respect that he previously discussed,
although it seems natural to assume that he is here referring to one aspect of that
feeling and implying that, whatever the role of the negative aspect of the feeling of
respect turns out to be, the positive aspect has an essential role to play in explaining
some aspect of our fulfillment of duty. The remainder of Kant’s passage confirms the
interpretation previously suggested that the feeling of respect is the phenomenal
effect of something noumenal, although here Kant reverts to referring to the
noumenal ground of respect as a “mere thought” rather than as the actual
self-determination of the will by that thought: Kant’s claim is that ordinarily we
comprehend causal relations by experiencing both cause and effect, but that here we
are certain that there is a causal connection between the thought and the feeling
although we cannot experience the former and therefore cannot comprehend the
relation. One might well ask how we can be so sure there is a causal connection if one
of its terms, the cause, necessarily remains beyond experience. Kant will attempt to
address this issue in the Critique of Practical Reason by arguing that we can know a
priori that both pain and pleasure must be attached to the noumenal determination
of the will by pure practical reason without knowing the mechanisms by which those
attachments are made; although some commentators have invested energy in trying
to understand Kant’s argument on this point,9 I will not, but will instead focus on the
issue of what causal role might be assigned to the feeling of respect if the determin-
ation of the will by the moral law is itself supposed to be noumenal and therefore
presumably not the effect of something phenomenal like the occurrence of the feeling
of respect.

9
See Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1960), ch. XII, }6, pp. 219–21, and Guevara, Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation, ch. 3, }}7, 9,
pp. 108–12, 115–19.
    

3. The “Incentives of Pure Practical Reason”

in the Critique of Practical Reason
Whereas Kant devoted only a footnote to the feeling of respect in the Groundwork, in
the second Critique he devotes the whole third chapter of the “Analytic of Practical
Reason” to this topic, a chapter he regards as analogous to the “Transcendental
Aesthetic” in the first Critique although coming at the end of its “Analytic” rather
than preceding it because practical philosophy, unlike theoretical philosophy, cannot
begin with any a priori form that is found in sensibility alone, but rather, according to
the argument of the second Critique, all moral thought begins with the “fact of reason,”
our consciousness of our obligation under the moral law (CPracR, 5:31), and both the
reality of freedom and the effect of the moral law on sensibility must be subsequently
inferred (5:16). Many commentators have noted that this chapter is repetitious or
worse, and in order to reach Kant’s discussion of moral feelings in the Metaphysics of
Morals expeditiously I shall have to limit my discussion of it to a few points.
The chapter begins with the assertion that “What is essential to any moral worth of
actions is that the moral law determine the will immediately” (CPracR, 5:71), from
which Kant infers that we must not look for some “other incentive” in order to give
the moral law “influence on the will” (5:72), some “antecedent feeling in the subject
that would be attuned to morality” (5:75), but must instead “determine carefully in
what way the moral law becomes the incentive, and, inasmuch as it is, what happens
to the human faculty of desire as an effect of” the moral law as the “determining
ground upon it” (5:72). Kant further says that the question of how the law can
immediately determine the will is an “insoluble problem” identical with the problem
of free will itself—for explaining how this happens would require knowledge of
causal mechanisms at the inaccessible noumenal level—but that we can show, a
priori no less, what the moral law “effects (or, to put it better, must effect) in the mind
[im Gemüte] insofar as it is an incentive” (5:72). Kant’s use of the term Gemüt, which
always denotes the mind as an empirical phenomenon, suggests that his ensuing
discussion of the feeling of respect is to be an account of the empirical manifestation
or phenomenology of the determination of the will by the moral law. Kant’s insist-
ence that neither the content of the moral law nor its determination of our will can
depend on an antecedent feeling is obviously an expression of his fundamental
rejection of the moral sense school that he once admired, but his recognition that
the immediate determination of the will by the moral law produces an effect on our
sensibility and does not simply work around our sensibility is his concession to this
school. What remains unclear thus far, however, is whether this effect of the
immediate determination of the will on sensibility is entirely epiphenomenal or has
some indispensable causal role to play at some point in the phenomenal etiology of
morally worthy action.
Kant initially suggests a causally indispensable role for the feeling of respect, but
one that is in tension with his suppositions that the feeling of respect is exclusively an
effect of the determination of the will by the moral law and that this determination is
a noumenal action that cannot be affected by a phenomenal event. As he continues,
however, he will suggest a causal role for the feeling of respect that is not in conflict
with these suppositions. First, following the line already laid out in the Groundwork,
     

Kant emphasizes that “every determination of the will by the moral law . . . as a free
will” entails not only the commitment to act as the moral law dictates “without the
cooperation of sensible impulses” from any independent source but even readiness
for “rejection of them all and . . . infringement upon all inclinations insofar as they
could be opposed to that law” (CPracR, 5:72). An unconditional commitment to the
moral law implies a readiness to refrain from acting on any of one’s inclinations
which would suggest an action contrary to the moral law, and in the real circum-
stances of human life it indubitably requires actual restraint from acting on some
inclinations, thus frustration of these inclinations. From the premise that “the
negative effect on feeling (by the infringement upon the inclination that takes
place) is itself feeling” Kant then infers that “we can see a priori, that the moral
law, as the determining ground of the will, must by thwarting all our inclinations
produce a feeling that can be called pain; and here we have the first and perhaps the
only case in which we can determine a priori from concepts the relation of a
cognition . . . to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (5:73). At the same time,
however, Kant also says that since the moral law which commands restriction of
our inclinations
is still something in itself positive—namely the form of an intellectual causality, that is, of
freedom, it is at the same time . . . an object of the greatest respect and so too the ground of a
positive feeling that is not of empirical origin and is cognized a priori. Consequently, respect
for the moral feeling is a feeling that is produced by an intellectual ground, and this feeling is
the only one that we can cognize completely a priori. (5:73)

In other words, because the law that would restrict our action on our inclin-
ations is the product of our own intellectual “causality” or activity, our own
freedom, we feel positively towards it—take pleasure in it—in spite of the pain
that it causes at the prospect of restricting our inclinations, and this connection
is known a priori.
If Kant were claiming that this positive or pleasurable effect of the moral law is
the only effect on feeling that is known a priori, he would contradict his previous
claim that the painful effect of the moral law is the only feeling that is known a
priori. The only way to avoid such a contradiction here is to interpret Kant to mean
that what is known a priori is a single feeling with both painful and pleasurable
dimensions. That it is this complex feeling that we know a priori is precisely what he
next claims:
The moral law is even subjectively a ground of feeling. Now, all that is found in self-love
belongs to inclination, while all inclination rests on feeling, so that what infringes upon all the
inclinations in self-love has, just by this, a necessary influence on feeling; thus we can conceive
how it is possible to see a priori that the moral law can exercise an effect on feeling, inasmuch
as it excludes the inclinations and the propensity to make them the supreme practical
condition, that is, self-love, from all participation in the supreme lawgiving—an effect which
on the one side is merely negative but on the other side, and indeed with respect to the
restricting ground of pure practical reason, is positive; and for this no special kind of feeling
need be assumed, under the name of a practical or moral feeling preceding the moral law and
serving as its basis. (CPracR, 5:74)
    

Here the claim of a priori knowledge clearly applies to a single effect on feeling, itself
a feeling, that is both positive and negative.10
There are several problems here, however. One obvious problem is whether the
claim that any effect on feeling always takes the form of some further feeling, whether
a feeling of pain at the frustration of some of our feeling or a feeling of pleasure as the
recognition that this frustration is our own work, is something that we can know a
priori, and thus whether we really know a priori that the determination of the will by
the moral law must produce a feeling of pain and pleasure. This, however, is the issue
I said I will not pursue; it seems clear enough that frustration of our desires does
typically produce pain, and that the discovery of our own powers does typically
produce pleasure. In any case Kant’s claim that we know a priori that there must be
such a feeling as the feeling of respect is not actually the premise for any further
conclusion in his argument, so there is in fact no risk in leaving his assertion of the
existence of this feeling as a well-attested empirical claim, if it is that, rather than an a
priori claim.
A potentially more serious problem is Kant’s initial suggestion that an uncondi-
tional commitment to the moral law thwarts all of our inclinations. This is surely
false both in fact and even in Kant’s own considered view, because there are many
cases in which acting on our inclinations is perfectly compatible with the demands of
morality and our inclinations are even a force for the good,11 although equally
obviously acting on some of our inclinations would conflict with morality. However,
Kant solves this problem when he clarifies that what the moral law strikes down is
not “rational self-love” but rather “self-conceit” or “Arrogantia,” where rational self-
love is the restriction of self-love, “as natural and active in us even prior to the moral
law, to the condition of agreement with this law” (CPracR, 5:73), whereas self-conceit
makes self-love “law-giving and the unconditional practical principle” or “prescribes
as laws the subjective condition of self-love” (5:74). In other words, acting in ways
that serve self-love is in many cases perfectly compatible with morality and even
required by morality, as in most cases of acting to preserve one’s own life or to
cultivate one’s own talents. What is incompatible with morality is to make self-love
one’s law, that is, to act in ways that serve self-love whether that is compatible with
morality or not. Self-conceit is the same as what Kant later calls radical evil, that is,
making “the incentives of self-love and their inclinations the condition of compliance
with the moral law” instead of making the latter “the supreme condition of the
satisfaction of the former” (RBMR, 6:36). So Kant’s claim is not that the moral law
requires the frustration of all inclinations and that the negative aspect of the feeling of
respect is the painful feeling of that total frustration; the moral law requires only that
self-love not be made our supreme principle, and the negative aspect of the feeling of
respect must be our feeling of frustration at that more restricted constraint. The
positive aspect of the feeling of respect remains our feeling of satisfaction at the fact

10
It is because of a passage like this one that Guevara’s claim (Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation,
pp. 108–11) that the negative feeling that results from the restriction of inclination is not part of the feeling
of respect and that the feeling of respect is identical only to the feeling of pleasure that ensues upon the
recognition that the restriction is one’s own act must be rejected.
11
See RBMR, Part I, 6:26–8.
     

that the law that restricts such self-conceit is the product of our own intellectual
activity.
So that problem is readily solved. The next problem with Kant’s conception of
respect, however, is that in spite of his opening claim that this feeling is the effect of
the immediate determination of the will by the moral law Kant goes on to write as if
this feeling were the effect of the mere thought of the law but the empirical cause of
the subsequent determination to act in accordance with this law, which seems to
contradict his opening claim that what is essential is that the moral law determine the
will immediately (CPracR, 5:71). Thus Kant writes:
The representation of the moral law deprives self-love of its influence and self-conceit of its
illusion, and thereby the hindrance to pure practical reason is lessened and the representation
of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of sensibility is produced and hence, by
removal of the counterweight, the relative weightiness of the law (with regard to a will affected
by impulses) is produced in the judgment of reason. And so respect for the law is not the
incentive to morality; instead it is morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive
inasmuch as pure practical reason, by rejecting all the claims of self-love in opposition with
its own, supplies authority to the law, which now alone has influence. . . . This feeling (under
the name of moral feeling) is therefore produced solely by reason. It does not serve for judging
actions and certainly not for grounding the objective moral law itself, but only as an incentive
to make this law its maxim. (5:75–6)

This passage makes it clear against the moral-sense school that no merely empirical
feelings of approbation or disapprobation of types of conduct can be the source of the
content of the moral law—that is produced solely by reason. However, it seems to
suggest that the feeling of respect is produced by the mere representation of the moral
law, not by the antecedent determination of the will to act in accordance with that
law, and that it is the reweighting of empirical feelings or preferences by the feeling of
respect that “supplies authority to the law” and leads the agent to make the moral law
instead of self-conceit (that is, not rational self-love but “self-love in opposition with”
the claim of “pure practical reason”) his fundamental maxim. How this would
happen is not the problem—we can readily imagine that the “hindrance” to acting
in accord with “pure practical reason” is causally effected by the feeling of respect
attaching the prospect of the pain of humiliation to the idea of acting out of self-
conceit and attaching the prospect of pleasure to the idea of always acting in
accordance with the moral law, thereby modifying and rendering ineffective our
original prospect of pleasure at the idea of acting out of self-conceit and of pain at the
idea of frustrating self-conceit. The problem is rather that this causal model seems to
make the determination of the will to make the moral law its supreme authority
follow the feeling of respect rather than precede it, and in so doing also seems to
make the determination of the will by the moral law a phenomenal rather than
noumenal occurrence.
As earlier stated, Kant presumably wishes to avoid any such result. So perhaps
what he means to suggest by his claim in the middle of this passage that “respect for
the law is not the incentive to morality” but instead “morality itself subjectively
considered as an incentive” is that this causal model of the representation of the
moral law as modifying our prospects for pleasure and pain and thereby removing
    

the hindrance to making the moral law one’s maxim and giving it the requisite
authority is all the phenomenal manifestation of the noumenal determination of the
will by the moral law, or, in the language of the Critique of Pure Reason, the former is
the “empirical character” of the latter “intelligible character” (A 539/B 567). And
perhaps that is an adequate solution to the apparent contradiction between Kant’s
opening claim that the determination of the will precedes the feeling of respect and
his empirical model of the feeling of respect on which it seems to remove an
empirical hindrance to making the moral law our fundamental maxim and giving
it the requisite authority by reweighting our prospects for pain and pleasure. One
passage suggests an alternative although not incompatible resolution of this problem,
however. Several pages after the last passage quoted, Kant includes a passage that
begins with the same image of the feeling of respect removing a phenomenal obstacle
to what must therefore be the phenomenal act of accepting the moral law, but then
hints that the empirical effect of the feeling of respect is not the adoption of the moral
law itself as one’s fundamental maxim but rather the adoption of more particular
maxims of conduct. Kant writes:
Whatever diminishes the hindrances to an activity is a furthering of this activity itself. Recog-
nition of the moral law is, however, consciousness of an activity of practical reason from objective
grounds, which fails to express its effect in actions only because subjective (pathological) causes
hinder it. Therefore respect for the moral law must be regarded as also a positive though indirect
effect of the moral law on feeling insofar as the law weakens the hindering influence of the
inclinations by humiliating self-conceit, and must therefore be regarded as a subjective ground of
activity—that is, as the incentive to compliance with the law—

and thus far seems to suggest the same picture as before, namely that the mere
representation (“recognition”) of the moral law produces a change in feelings—here
Kant mentions only humiliation or the prospect of pain at acting out of self-conceit—
thereby creating an empirical incentive to compliance with the moral law. All of this
is, as before, an empirical model of the determination of the will that could just
harmlessly describe the empirical manifestation of a noumenal determination. How-
ever, Kant continues the sentence thus far broken off by describing the “subjective
ground of activity” that is “the incentive to compliance with the law” also “as the
ground for maxims for a course of life in conformity with” the law (CPracR, 5:79;
emphasis added). That is, he now suggests that the feeling of respect is not (or not
only) the incentive for the adoption of the moral law itself as one’s fundamental
maxim, but rather the incentive for the adoption of the more particular maxims that
govern the course of one’s life, such as the maxims to cultivate one’s talents, be
beneficent to others, be respectful of others, and so on. Here there would be no
danger that the feeling of respect would be both effect and cause of the adoption of
one’s fundamental maxim; rather, the feeling of respect would be an effect of the
noumenal determination to make the moral law one’s fundamental maxim but then a
cause counteracting other inclinations that would otherwise counter one’s dispos-
ition to adhere to such particular maxims. Since the choice of particular moral
maxims is in any case something that can be conceived of as happening only in the
phenomenal world—because we can only know empirically that humans, unlike
other animals, need to cultivate their talents in order to be able to realize their own
     

ends or those of others, that human beings, unlike other animals, are likely to need
help from each other and are capable of supplying it to each other, and so on—the
idea that this choice should take place empirically and can be affected by the
empirical reweighting of our prospects of pleasure and pain by the feeling of respect
is entirely natural, and would not require us to choose between the alternatives that in
describing the empirical effects of this feeling Kant is either contradicting his
underlying theory of the noumenal determination of the will or else merely describ-
ing its empirical manifestation.
In the penultimate passage cited, Kant referred to the feeling of respect “under the
name of moral feeling” (CPracR, 5:76). In the Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue
of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant discusses no fewer than four “Aesthetic Precon-
ditions of the Mind’s Receptivity to Concepts of Duty as such” (Ästhetische Vorbe-
griffe der Empfänglicheit des Gemüts für Pflichtbegriffe Überhaupt) (MM, DV,
Introduction, section XII, 6:399; translation modifed), among which “Moral Feeling”
(Das moralische Gefühl) and “Respect” (Achtung) are listed separately. What he
means there by “respect” is not respect for the moral law in general, however, but
self-respect in particular, and he is following the lead of his remark in the Critique of
Practical Reason in using the term “moral feeling” to connote what he previously
meant by the general feeling of respect for the moral law. Kant is thus suggesting that
“receptivity to concepts of duty as such” requires both general and particular
“aesthetic preconditions,” and thereby suggesting at least a two-staged empirical
model of the initiation of morally requisite actions involving both general and
particular feelings. Are the (at least) two stages he recognizes in the Doctrine of
Virtue the same model as the two stages of determination leading to the adoption of
particular maxims suggested by the second Critique? Kant’s reference to plural
concepts of duty might suggest that he is concerned with particular maxims of
duty, but he does not clearly discuss necessary conditions for the empirical choice
of particular maxims in the Metaphysics of Morals. Instead, what he will suggest
seems more like a theory of the impulses that are empirically necessary to act on
particular maxims. But it would not be incoherent to suggest that particular moral
feelings play a role in both of these functions. In any case, let us now look at Kant’s
late theory of the “aesthetic preconditions of the susceptibility to concepts of duty”
and see how it might fit together with the theory of respect from the second Critique.

4. Aesthetic Preconditions of Receptivity to

Duty in the Doctrine of Virtue
Kant’s discussion of the “Aesthetic Preconditions of the Mind’s Receptivity to
Concepts of Duty in General” in section XII of the Introduction to the Doctrine of
Virtue (6:399) is brief but raises many questions. Questions can begin with the title of
the section. I am using “aesthetic preconditions” as a translation for Kant’s expres-
sion ästhetische Vorbegriffe, and both words in this phrase are problematic. Vorbe-
griffe could be more literally translated as “preconcepts,” but that is not English, or
“preconceptions,” but that suggests mere prejudices and would thus be misleading;
I have chosen “preconditions” in light of the terms “natural predispositions of the
    

mind” (natürliche Gemütsanlagen) and “praedispositio” that Kant uses in his own
explication of what he has in mind. But this still leaves the question of what he means
by “aesthetic” here. Mary Gregor has paraphrased this term as “on the part of
feeling,”12 but this seems to me at once both too vague and too specific: too vague,
because it is not clear what relation or relations are connoted by “on the part of,” and
too specific, because it seems to suggest that each of the four instances of “aesthetic
predisposition” that Kant will subsequently discuss is itself a feeling, and that is not
quite right: moral feeling, love, and self-esteem, three of the four items that Kant
discusses, may be feelings, but the fourth, conscience, does not itself seem to be a
feeling, although it may have an effect on feeling. In general, Kant seems to be
discussing the empirical aspects of the receptivity of human minds to concepts of
duty, which include but are not limited to a variety of feelings. Since the meaning of
the term “aesthetic” itself is vague enough to include all of that and more, it seems
best just to translate (or transliterate) Kant’s word ästhetisch rather than to para-
phrase it, and thus to leave the ensuing exposition to speak for itself.
So let us now turn to Kant’s exposition. It begins with the following paragraph,
referring to the aesthetic preconditions of receptivity to duty mentioned in the title of
the section:
There are certain moral qualities that if one did not possess them there could also be no duty to
acquire them.—They are moral feeling, conscience, love of one’s neighbor, and respect for
oneself (self-esteem), to have which there is no obligation because they lie at the basis of
morality as subjective conditions of receptivity to the concept of duty, not as its objective
conditions. They are all aesthetic and antecedent but natural predispositions of the mind
[Gemütsanlagen] (praedispositio) for being affected by concepts of duty; to have such predis-
positions cannot be seen as duty, but every human being has them and it is by means of them
that he can be put under obligation.—The consciousness of them is not of empirical origin;
rather it can only follow from that of a moral law, as its effect upon the mind [Gemüt]. (MM,
DV, Introduction, section XII, 6:399; translation modified)
There are several points to be noted here. First, as Kant’s repeated use of his term
Gemüt in the body of this paragraph as well as in the title of the section makes clear,
he is talking throughout about empirical conditions for receptivity to concepts of
duty, thus empirical factors in empirical compliance with duty or in the empirical
attempt to comply with duty. Second, Kant says that these empirical factors are
affected by the consciousness of the moral law, not, as in the opening sentence of the
discussion of respect in the second Critique, by the determination of the will by the
moral law; this leaves open the possibility that the empirical effects on feelings and
other empirical factors to be described are themselves causally indispensable factors
in the determination of the will to fulfill concepts of duty, at least at the phenomenal
level, however that might ultimately be related to the noumenal determination of the
will (about which Kant has very little more to say in the Metaphysics of Morals).
Third, Kant shifts between describing these aesthetic preconditions as conditions of

12
Her translation of the title is “Concepts of What is Presupposed on the Part of Feeling by the Mind’s
Receptivity to Concepts of Duty as Such” (Practical Philosophy, p. 528).
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receptivity to the concept of duty and to concepts of duty; this might be a problem
unless what Kant means to suggest is that he is about to describe some empirical
factors that enter into our general commitment to the moral law or decision to make
the moral law our fundamental maxim and further feelings that enter into our
commitment to abide by particular moral maxims—which is exactly what I suggest
he does mean.13 Finally, Kant’s insistence that we do not have a duty to have these
empirical feelings and factors because having them is a precondition of being
effectively put under obligation at all is complemented in what follows by a repeated
insistence that we do have a duty to cultivate and strengthen these predispositions.
On Kant’s ordinary account of duty, that would suggest that the cultivation of these
predispositions, when it does happen as it should, is a product of free choice for
which we may be praised, and the failure to cultivate them an omission for which we
may be held responsible and blamed. But if some of these factors are themselves to be
efficacious in the transition from the mere consciousness of the moral law to the
actual determination of the will to abide by the moral law, that would raise the
problem of a vicious circle: we would have to have a commitment to morality to
choose freely to cultivate these feelings, but could only become actually committed to
morality once we have cultivated these feelings. This problem would not arise in the
case of the cultivation of any feelings that are preconditions only for receptivity to
and action upon specific maxims of duty, and I will argue that feelings of love for
one’s neighbor and self-esteem should be so understood; but this problem would
seem to arise in the case of moral feeling and conscience if these are supposed to be
freely cultivated on the one hand and yet preconditions for commitment to the moral
law on the other hand. One way to solve this problem would of course be to claim again
that the passage from consciousness of the moral law through the aesthetic predis-
positions of moral feeling and conscience to actual commitment to the moral law as
fundamental maxim is only the empirical manifestation of the free although inscrut-
able noumenal choice of the moral law as fundamental maxim; but Kant does not
actually mention his transcendental idealist theory of freedom of the will anywhere
near the vicinity of this discussion of aesthetic predispositions, so we should consider
whether there might be a solution to this problem at the phenomenal level.
With these issues about Kant’s opening paragraph before us, let us now turn to
the four aesthetic predispositions themselves.
a. Moral feeling. Kant defines moral feeling as “the receptivity to pleasure or
displeasure merely from the consciousness of the correspondence or conflict of our
action with the law of duty,” and asserts that “All determination of our faculty of
choice [Willkür] proceeds from the representation of the possible action through the

13
My argument in this section can thus be interpreted as a response to the charge by Harald Köhl,
whose account of the causal role of moral feeling in Kant I have otherwise found very helpful, that Kant’s
account makes “das Achtungsgefühl die einzige und alleinige moralische Motivationsquelle,” in contrast to
a Strawsonian account of moral sentiments, which recognizes many distinct motivational reactive atti-
tudes; see Köhl, Kants Gesinnungsethik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 154–5. My argument is precisely that
Kant’s theory of the “aesthetic preconditions” in the Doctrine of Virtue makes room for an at least
phenomenally motivational role for a variety of specific moral feelings, even if he does not list as many
of these as a contemporary writer might.
    

feeling of pleasure or displeasure, for taking an interest in it or its effect, to the deed.”
He then adds that if the feeling of pleasure or displeasure that is the linchpin between
possible and actual action precedes the representation of the moral law, then that
feeling is pathological, but if it succeeds the representation of the moral law, then the
feeling is moral (6:399). Here the following points are to be noted. First, by the first
and third of these statements Kant describes moral feeling as a feeling of pleasure or
displeasure that is produced by the representation of the moral law. Sometimes, as in
many passages in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, when Kant refers to the
“feeling of pleasure or displeasure” he really seems to mean only the feeling of
pleasure, the activation of our capacity to feel either pleasure or displeasure only in
the one direction of pleasure;14 but the fact that Kant describes moral feeling as
resulting from either the correspondence of an action to the moral law or its
contradiction of that law makes it clear that the moral feeling can be a feeling of
either pleasure, in the former case, or pain, in the latter case, not just a feeling of
pleasure. Now, Kant’s opening definition might make it seem as if the action that he
is referring to is an action already done, and thus that moral feeling is a retrospective
response to an action already performed, in which case it would be either a pleasur-
able feeling, if the action had been in accord with the moral law, or an unpleasant
feeling, if the action had been a violation of moral law; but this would make moral
feeling a product of self-judgment, which Kant discusses only later (MM, DV, }14),
not of mere consciousness of the moral law, and in any case Kant’s second statement
makes it clear that he is talking about moral feeling in connection with possible
action, that is, prospective action, not retrospective judgment on action already done.
Moral feeling arises from the thought of the correspondence or contrariety of a
possible, future action with the moral law, not from judgment of prior action. That
still leaves open the possibility that there are two separate kinds of moral feeling,
pleasurable moral feeling at the thought of a possible action corresponding with duty
and painful moral feeling at the thought of a possible action contrary to duty.
However, if we think about Kant’s assumptions about human action, we will realize
that such feelings do not occur in isolation from one another: Kant’s assumption is
that we typically consider whether to perform an action in conformity with duty in
the face of the possibility of an alternative action suggested by self-love, and thus,
assuming we are moved by the thought of the moral law, then we typically experience
both displeasure at the thought of one action contrary to duty that is open to us
and pleasure at the thought of the alternative action open to us that would corres-
pond to duty. In other words, moral feeling as Kant describes it here in the Doctrine
of Virtue has the same complex structure as the feeling of respect as he described in
previous works.

14
Thus in }1 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to aesthetic judgment as resting on
the subject’s “feeling of pleasure or displeasure” and then “feeling of pleasure and displeasure” (5:203), but
in section VII of the Introduction he has already made it clear that an aesthetic judgment of beauty rests on
the feeling of pleasure alone (5:190). That Kant connects aesthetic judgment to the feeling of pleasure or
displeasure in }1 is part of what leads some commentators to hold that Kant must posit a pure judgment of
ugliness analogous to the pure judgment of beauty; I have argued against that position in “Kant on the
Purity of the Ugly” in my Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), ch. 6, pp. 141–62.
     

But is it the same feeling? Kant’s second statement, that moral feeling is the link
between the representation of a possible action and the performance of the action in
fact, might suggest that it is not the same as the feeling of respect: thinking back to the
Critique of Practical Reason, one might suppose that the feeling of respect has already
played its role in giving “authority” to the moral law to which the thought of one’s
possible action has been compared—or more precisely, as we have just seen, to which
the alternative courses of action open to one have been compared—and that what is
now being called moral feeling is a further feeling leading from the comparison of
one’s possible action to the performance of the action itself. However, several of
Kant’s remarks in the two further paragraphs of his present discussion of moral
feeling suggest that this is not what he has in mind, that what he means is rather that
moral feeling is what makes us susceptible to the general idea of acting in accordance
with duty; in other words, that it is what gives authority to the idea of the moral law
itself and is thus involved at the beginning of the causal chain leading to the
performance of an action in accord with duty, not halfway along this chain.
Kant’s next paragraph states that
There cannot be a duty to have or acquire a moral feeling, for this feeling lies at the basis of all
consciousness of obligation, in order to become conscious of the necessitation that lies in the
concept of duty; rather every human being (as a moral being) has it in him originally; the
obligation with regard to it can only be to cultivate it and even strengthen it through the
admiration of its inscrutable origin. (6:399–400, translation modified)

And his final paragraph on moral feeling, after taking one more swipe against moral-
sense theory by insisting that “It is inappropriate to call this feeling a moral sense” for
it is not a “theoretical capacity for perception” of the content of the moral law, then
adds, “We have, rather, a susceptibility on the part of free choice to be moved by pure
practical reason (and its law), and this is what we call moral feeling” (6:400). Kant’s
statements here that “the concept of duty” and “pure practical reason (and its law)”
are what activate our susceptibility to the moral feeling make it clear that this feeling
is aroused by the moral law in general, that its role in the etiology of particular moral
actions is thus that of making the moral law in general effective in us, and therefore
suggest that what Kant is now calling moral feeling is in fact the same as what he
previously called the feeling of respect, not something distinct from it. This conclu-
sion would be confirmed both by the fact that Kant did earlier use “moral feeling” as a
synonym for the feeling of respect (CPracR, 5:76) and by the fact that he will go on to
introduce several more specific feelings, namely love of others and self-respect, which
stand closer to the performance of particular actions.
So moral feeling and respect seem to be one and the same. But then Kant seems to
be saying that it is the cultivation of moral feeling that strengthens the authority of
the moral law itself, and thus we seem to be back with the problem that the
cultivation of moral feeling seems to be both the product of a free choice that must
be grounded in commitment to the moral law yet a causal factor that leads to the
determination of the will—the faculty of choice, Willkür—to accept the authority of
the moral law. Let us now see whether Kant’s discussion of the next “aesthetic
precondition of susceptibility to concepts of duty,” namely conscience, sheds any
light on this issue.
    

b. Conscience. Kant states that

Conscience is practical reason holding the human being’s duty before him for his acquittal or
condemnation in every case that comes under a law. Thus it is not directed to an object but
merely to the subject (to affect moral feeling by its act), and so it is not incumbent on one, a
duty, but rather an unavoidable fact. . . . The duty here is only to cultivate one’s conscience, to
sharpen one’s attentiveness to the voice of the inner judge and to use every means to obtain a
hearing for it (hence the duty is only indirect). (6:400–1)
Conscience is not itself a feeling, but causes or stimulates—“affects”—moral feeling.
So it triggers moral feeling as an aesthetic precondition of receptiveness to duty. But
insofar as it is itself also an aesthetic precondition of receptiveness to duty, even
though not a feeling, conscience must be an empirical phenomenon; it must be the
empirical awareness of the moral law that activates the phenomenal disposition to
moral feeling to produce an occurrence of moral feeling in the experience of the
agent. Since cultivation is an activity that takes place in time, in the actual experience
of an agent, the duty not to acquire a conscience—for it “is not something that can be
acquired . . . rather, every human being, as a moral being, has a conscience within him
originally” (6:400)—but to cultivate it also implies that conscience is itself an
empirical phenomenon. It should also be noted that Kant’s definition implies that
conscience is the empirical awareness of the moral law in general, not of any more
particular moral maxims, and thus the moral feeling that is triggered by conscience is
a general impulse to do what the moral law requires, in other words that moral
feeling, discussed in the preceding subsection a of section XII, that I have argued is
equivalent to the feeling of respect. Kant’s order of exposition thus seems to reverse
the causal order of moral feeling and conscience as phenomena: conscience as the
empirical awareness of the moral law is the trigger for the cultivation of the natural
disposition to moral feeling.
This picture need not be altered by Kant’s further discussion of conscience under
the rubric of “the Human Being’s Duty to Himself merely as a Moral Being” in the
body of the Doctrine of Virtue (MM, DV, }9, 6:428), although there Kant elaborates
his conception of conscience with juridical and theological imagery. Under the more
specific title of “The Human Being’s Duty to Himself as his Own Innate Judge,” Kant
here describes conscience as “Consciousness of an internal court in the human being”
(‘before which his thoughts accuse or excuse one another’), in which sits an “internal
judge,” an “authority watching over the law in him” and keeping him “in awe (respect
coupled with fear),” which authority “is not something that he himself (voluntarily)
makes, but something incorporated in his being.” Kant goes on to say that this
authority must be represented as “another person,” because it would be “an absurd
way of representing a court” to “think of a human being who is accused by his
conscience as one and the same person as the judge.” This might suggest that his
conception of the internal judge is a version of Adam Smith’s concept of the internal
spectator, but Kant next says that since such an “ideal person” must be represented
not only as “a scrutinizer of hearts” but also as the one who “impose[s] all obligations”
and further can “give effect to his laws (as is necessarily required for the office of
judge,” the internal judge can only be conceived of as God and “conscience must be
thought of as the subjective principle of being accountable to God for all of one’s
     

deeds.” No sooner has he said this, however, then Kant also adds that the human
being is not entitled, “through the idea to which his conscience unavoidably guides
him, to assume that such a supreme being actually exists outside himself . . . For the
idea is not given to him objectively, by theoretical reason, but only subjectively, by
practical reason, putting itself under obligation to act in keeping with this idea” (MM,
DV, }13, 6:438–9). The claim that we must have the idea of God but do not assert the
actual existence of God is characteristic of Kant in the later 1790s, and tends to replace
earlier his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason as an assertion of the
actual existence of God but one based on practical rather than theoretical grounds.15
The characterization of conscience as a court and as one in which the judge is God
himself thus seem to be further aspects of the empirical consciousness of the moral
law itself, and the claim that in this court the judge keeps the agent “in awe (respect
coupled with fear)” seems to be a further statement that it is the empirical conscience
of the moral law that causes moral feeling. The image of a court might suggest that
conscience brings particular deeds already done before its bench, where they are to be
assessed in light of laws more particular than the moral law itself, and in these points
the present conception of conscience might seem to differ from Kant’s introductory
conception. As to the first point, however, Kant adds that “In a case involving
conscience . . . the human being thinks of conscience as warning him . . . before he
makes his decision” (6:440), so here as before he is conceiving of conscience as
judging prospective actions, not judging deeds already done. As to the second point,
Kant does several times suggest that the court of conscience brings particular
prospective actions up for judgments under particular laws or particular concepts
of duties. But when he comes to explain what concrete obligation we actually have
with regard to duty, what he says is that one has the duty to “know (scrutinize,
fathom) yourself” (}14, 6:441), and this in turn is cashed out as the requirement of
“Impartiality in judging oneself in comparison with the law, and sincerity in acknow-
ledging to oneself one’s inner moral worth or lack of worth” (6:441–2). This passage
suggests that in the court of conscience we hold up our possible deeds and motiv-
ations to the moral law itself, and thus seems consistent with Kant’s earlier charac-
terization of conscience. It may also be noted that while Kant now treats impartiality
and sincerity as particular duties to oneself necessary to give conscience its full
weight, he neither retracts nor adds anything to his previous claim that our duty
with regard to conscience is to cultivate our attentiveness to its voice. But impartiality
and sincerity in self-appraisal, even if we suppose natural dispositions towards them,
are themselves surely also tendencies that need to be cultivated and strengthened. So
in sum we must have the duties to sharpen our attentiveness to the voice of
conscience as well as to cultivate impartiality and sincerity in our self-assessment
in light of this voice.

15
The contrast between the idea and the actual existence of God, or between the idea of God and God as
a substance, is particular prominent in the late convolutes of the Opus postumum; see my article “The Unity
of Nature and Freedom: Kant’s Conception of the System of Philosophy,” in Sally Sedgwick, ed., The
Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 19–53,
reprinted in my Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005),
ch. 11, pp. 278–313, at 305–13.
    

Kant’s later discussion of conscience thus not only enriches his account of it as the
empirical awareness of the moral law but also enriches his account of our duty to
cultivate and strengthen it. But it does not seem to change the basic model that
empirical consciousness of the moral law produces moral feeling. And this then
returns us to the underlying issue of whether there is a circularity in Kant’s causal
model of an empirical representation of the moral law triggering a moral feeling
which is however supposed to be an empirical precondition of commitment to the
moral law itself. Perhaps the answer to that question is that conscience, as the mere
empirical representation of the moral law, naturally triggers a certain degree of moral
feeling that might not be sufficient to make us abide by the moral law in moments of
moral crisis but that is sufficient in moments of moral calm to motivate us to take
steps to strengthen conscience as our attentiveness to the moral law as well as to
further strengthen that moral feeling itself, whatever those steps would be (inten-
tional contemplation of morally uplifting examples of the behavior of others is one
that Kant frequently suggests in his discussions of moral education).16 This solution
to the threat of circularity at the phenomenal level is, frankly, speculative, but seems
consistent with all of Kant’s empirical assumptions.
Be this as it may, there is certainly no threat of circularity in the idea that a general
commitment to abide by the moral law strengthened by the cultivated feeling of
respect can in turn cause us to cultivate natural predispositions to more particular
moral feelings that may in turn be impulses to the performance of particular actions
mandated by particular moral maxims. Let us now turn to the last two of Kant’s
“aesthetic preconditions” to see if that is what he has in mind with these.
c. Love of human beings. Kant discusses the third aesthetic precondition of
susceptibility to concepts of duty under the rubric of “love of human beings,” but
the ensuing discussion makes it clear that he is referring to love of others, in
connection with the duty of beneficence. Disappointingly, his discussion here is
entirely negative. He starts by saying that “Love is a matter of feeling, not of willing,
and I cannot love because I will to, still less because I ought to . . . so a duty to love is an
absurdity” (MM, DV, Introduction, section XII, 6:401), but then adds that if someone
practices the duty of beneficence “often and succeeds in realizing his beneficent
intention,” then “he eventually comes actually to love the person he has helped”
(6:402), in other words, he claims that feelings of love towards (specific) others are a
consequence or effect of beneficence, not an aesthetic precondition or cause thereof.
However, Kant returns to the issue of feelings towards others when he discusses
the duties of love in the body of the Doctrine of Virtue, and there he describes specific
feelings towards others that are aesthetic preconditions of susceptibility to duty, thus
do play a causal role in the initiation of beneficent actions. He divides the duties of
love towards others into beneficence, gratitude, and sympathy (MM, DV, }28, 6:452).
The first of these is the deed to perform actions that directly “promote according to
one’s means the happiness of others in need, without hoping for something in

16
For a useful recent discussion of the particulars of Kant’s conception of cultivation of moral
predispositions, see Laura Papish, “The Cultivation of Sensibility in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Kantian
Review 12/2 (2007): 128–46.
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return” (}30, 6:453), the second the duty to adopt an attitude towards others, namely
“honoring a person because of a benefit he has rendered us” (}31, 6:454), which does
not require the performance of any action that directly promotes the happiness of the
benefactor, but presumably ordinarily requires some sort of action to express the
attitude of gratitude. The third duty, of sympathy, requires the cultivation of feelings,
specifically the cultivation of naturally occurring feelings of sympathy towards
others—not specific beneficiaries of past acts, but any who might need help—as a
means to the performance of beneficent acts in their behalf, as required by the first
duty of love, the duty of beneficence. As Kant puts it, “Nature has . . . implanted in
human beings receptivity” to the feelings of “Sympathetic joy and sadness,” these can
be used as “means to promoting active and rational benevolence” (}34, 6:456), and it
is therefore “an indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic)
feelings in us” in order to be able to “make use of them as so many means to
sympathy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them.” The
cultivation of the feelings of sympathetic joy and sadness to which we are naturally
predisposed can be accomplished by various actions to which we might not otherwise
have a direct duty, such as visiting sickrooms or debtors’ prisons, which will
supposedly strengthen our natural disposition to sympathy. Kant infers that we
thus have a duty to perform such actions in order to cultivate and strengthen “the
impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the representation of duty would
not accomplish by itself” (für sich allein nicht ausrichten würde) (}35, 6:457).
These claims have to be interpreted precisely in order to avoid confusion. First,
there is nothing in the claims leading to Kant’s last point that suggests that sympa-
thetic feelings should be cultivated only in case the “representation of duty” is too
weak by itself to move one to beneficent action; his previous statements that sympa-
thetic feelings are the means that nature has implanted in us to promote benevolence
rather suggest that sympathetic feelings are the means through which the general
representation of duty naturally works to move us to beneficent actions—they are not
safeguards in case the representation of duty fails to work, but the means through
which the representation of duty normally works. This in turn gives us a way of
interpreting Kant’s remark that we must cultivate and use the feelings of sympathy as
“so many means to sympathy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate
to them”: the latter, singular feeling would be the feeling of respect that accompanies
the representation of the general idea of duty and makes it effective, at least at the
empirical level, and thus general moral feeling or the feeling of respect would be the
cause of the cultivation of the more specific feelings, namely the feelings of sympathy,
that are in turn the aesthetic preconditions, in the form of the proximate causes, of the
beneficent actions—particular actions, though within the limits of determinacy for
imperfect duties—that the moral law in general and the particular maxim that it
entails for such needy rational beings as human beings, require of us. In other words,
Kant’s contrast between sympathetic feelings in the plural and moral feeling in the
singular implies the multi-staged model of moral feeling that I have proposed: general
moral feeling or the feeling of respect is connected with the authority of the
moral law, as the actual empirical source of the authority of this law (although
perhaps only the empirical expression of the underlying noumenal determination
of the will by this law); the authority of this law is then transmitted to the more
    

particular maxims of duty, such as the maxim of beneficence, that it entails for
rational beings in our particular circumstances; and that authority then leads to the
cultivation of more particular feelings, such as feelings of sympathy towards others,
that are the proximate causes of the specific actions called for by such a maxim. If the
general moral feeling is thought of as effecting the transmission of authority from
the moral law as fundamental maxim to more particular maxims of duty, as hinted
in the Critique of Practical Reason, which is necessarily a phenomenal process because
the more particular maxims can only be formulated in our actual empirical world, this
model remains valid: general moral feeling can be seen as investing a maxim such as
the maxim of beneficence with authority, the authority of that maxim would then not
only call for the performance of beneficent actions in certain circumstances but also
lead us to cultivate and strengthen the feelings of sympathy towards others to which we
are naturally predisposed, and those feelings, thus strengthened, would then initiate the
performance of beneficent actions in appropriate circumstances.17
Of course, as Kant notes, the duty to use sympathetic feelings as a means to action
is only a “conditional” duty, because even well-cultivated, strong feelings of sympathy
may sometimes prompt one to actions that are morally impermissible—as in Barbara
Herman’s oft-cited example, one has a duty not to help someone struggling with a
heavy package, which one might otherwise be moved by one’s well-cultivated feelings
of sympathy to do, if that person is in the middle of committing a robbery18—and in
such cases the impulse of sympathy will have to be checked by reflection on the more
general implications of the moral law and by one’s general commitment to that law
and all of its implications, expressed by general moral feeling rather than the specific
feeling of sympathy. But that does not mean that the duty to cultivate sympathetic
feelings is a conditional duty; only the duty to act upon them is conditional, that is,
restricted to appropriate circumstances as determined by the moral law through the

17
Both Marcia Baron and Nancy Sherman hold that the role of sympathetic feelings is strictly epistemic,
that is, they are supposed to alert us to occasions when our help is needed; see Marcia Baron, Kantian
Ethics Almost without Apology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 220 (“they draw our
attention to human need and to ways in which we might help”), and Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity
of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 146 (“Given a
practical interest in the moral law . . . we still require further information about when and where and how to
deploy our practical interest. And such information is often provided through the emotions”). The
motivation for such an interpretation is to avoid the implication that emotions such as sympathetic
feelings are supposed to be causes of sympathetic actions instead of or in addition to duty itself; thus
Baron says that “One way that cannot be what Kant has in mind is this: the sympathetic impulses join
forces with the motive of duty so that their combined strength is more able to combat competing forces
than the motive of duty alone” (p. 219). But there is no hint of such a purely epistemic role in Kant’s
discussion of the feelings of sympathy in }}34 and 35, and Kant’s word “impulses” (Antriebe) does suggest
that these feelings function as proximate causes rather than as mere information. The way to interpret
Kant’s statement that these feelings are impulses that nature has implanted in us to do what the
representation of duty alone may not accomplish is, as has been argued here, to interpret these feelings
as part of the phenomenal causal process through which the noumenal commitment to duty is expressed;
there is no conflict between their causal role in this phenomenal process and the noumenal fact of
determination of the will by the moral law alone since the cultivated and causally efficacious state of
these feelings is, as has Kant has stressed since the Groundwork, “self-wrought” by the moral law and its
determination of the will at the noumenal level.
18
See Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), pp. 4–5.
     

application of all relevant more particular maxims (only all of that can determine that
“imperfect duties always succumb to perfect ones, just as several imperfect duties
outweigh a single one”; see MM-Vigilantius, 27:537). The duty to cultivate these
feelings is indirect but unconditional, since it is only by means of them that we are
ever capable of performing the beneficent actions that are called for by the maxim of
beneficence in appropriate circumstances.19
The discussion of sympathetic feeling in }}34 and 35 thus provides the positive
account of the role of such particular moral feelings in lieu of the merely negative
account of love actually provided in section XII of the Introduction to the “Doctrine of
Virtue.” Of course, to reconcile these two passages, some distinction between the love of
others that only follows upon the practice of beneficence and the feelings of sympathy
that precede and cause specific beneficent actions must be made. Kant does not address
this issue, so I will not attempt to spell out how this distinction might be made. Instead,
I will now turn to the last of Kant’s aesthetic preconditions, the feeling of (self-)respect.
d. Self-respect. Kant’s discussion of the last of the four aesthetic preconditions is
very brief. The section is entitled with Kant’s most general term for moral feeling,
“respect” (Achtung), and its first three sentences make familiar points about what
seems to be that general feeling, which Kant also parenthetically calls reverentia:
respect is a subjective feeling which it cannot be a duty to have because it is rather the
subjective state through which duty is represented. But then Kant inserts a dash and
apparently changes the subject to a more specific feeling of self-esteem (Selbstschätz-
ung): “it is not correct to say that a human being has a duty of self-esteem; it must
rather be said that the law within him unavoidably forces from him respect for his
own being, and this feeling (which is of a special kind) is the basis of certain duties,
i.e., of certain actions that are consistent with his duty toward himself.” Once again
Kant says that we should not simply say that one “has a duty of respect toward
oneself, for one must have respect for the law within himself in order even to think of
any duty whatsoever” (MM, DV, Introduction, section XII, 6:402–3). This leaves
unsaid what was explicit in the previous sections, namely that although one cannot
have a duty to have a feeling that is the condition of being susceptible to duty, one can
have a duty to cultivate and strengthen one’s natural disposition to such a feeling in
order to increase one’s susceptibility to duty and the likelihood of one’s doing one’s
duty, although in the final clause of the sentence and section Kant seems to revert to
discussing the general feeling of respect rather than the specific feeling of self-respect
that he introduced in the previous sentence. This confusion could be remedied if we
take Kant to be assuming, as he often argues, that fulfillment of one’s duties to oneself
is a condition of one’s fulfillment of one’s duties to others: unless one has perfected
one’s own moral being, one will not be in a position to know any of one’s duties to
others or be disposed to fulfill them, and unless one has worked toward the imper-
fectly attainable goal of perfecting one’s physical and non-moral mental talents
one will not be in a position to promote the happiness of others by assisting them

19
This conclusion of course implies that Kant’s example of the philanthropist in whom all feelings of
sympathy have been extinguished (G, 4:398) is not on his own view a realistic account of moral motivation,
but a thought-experiment intended only to elucidate the content of the moral law.
    

in the realization of their own ends. So one could ascribe the following picture to
Kant: the general feeling of respect prompts one (as always, at least at the phenom-
enal level, though perhaps this is just the mechanism of expression of the noumenal
determination of the will) to the commitment to morality and the fulfillment of one’s
duty in general, but in particular to the cultivation of one’s natural disposition to
feelings of self-respect which are themselves means afforded by nature to the
fulfillment of one’s duties to oneself, and the fulfillment of one’s duties to oneself,
including the perfection of one’s moral as well as non-moral abilities, will in turn be
the means to the fulfillment of one’s duties toward others, which itself involves, at
least in part, the cultivation of one’s disposition to feelings of sympathy toward others
as the natural means to the fulfillment of the duty of benevolence. In the end, Kant’s
model of the phenomenal etiology of the fulfillment of duty may thus involve not just
two but even three stages: the general feeling of respect caused by conscience as the
representation of duty strengthens one’s commitment to duty which leads one to
strengthen one’s feelings of self-respect as a means to the fulfillment of duties to
oneself which leads one to strengthen one’s feelings of sympathy as a means to the
fulfillment of one’s duties to others.
This reconstruction of Kant’s conception of the role of feelings of self-esteem may
well be more precise than anything Kant had explicitly in mind. And in this case,
Kant does not amplify his brief introductory discussion of self-esteem with any
further detail in the body of the “Doctrine of Virtue.” His lectures on ethics, however,
both early and late, leave no doubt about Kant’s recognition of the importance of
feelings of self-esteem in his complete empirical model of moral motivation. He
recurs to this topic often in both the pre-critical lectures represented by Collins and in
the Vigilantius lectures of 1793–4 that were the run-up to the Metaphysics of Morals,
and has at least two main points to make. First, he frequently stresses that while our
comparison of our abilities to the rigorous demands of the moral law itself should
produce a feeling of humility, “in comparison with others we have no reason to
entertain a poor opinion of ourselves, for I can just as well possess worth as anyone
else” (MP-Collins, 27:349), and this feeling of self-worth and adequacy in comparison
to others, perhaps generated from some instances of performing “a good action from
good dispositions,” should persuade me, as long as it does not degenerate into self-
conceit or arrogance (27:350), that I am “capable of doing yet more of them” and thus
support me in doing them (27:351). The feeling of humility of which Kant here
speaks must be the humility that is the negative aspect of the general feeling of
respect, and one might therefore be tempted to suppose that the feeling of self-worth
of which he here speaks is only the positive side of that general feeling, not a specific
feeling of self-esteem; but since he describes this feeling as one that arises in
comparison of oneself with others, as long as that does not turn into self-conceit,
this positive feeling does seem specifically comparative and self-referential, in a way
that the feeling of respect is not, and to play a role in strengthening one’s efforts to
fulfill one’s own duties, beginning with one’s duties toward oneself, which Kant
stresses in the lectures are the conditions for fulfilling any of one’s duties (27:341).
The second point that Kant stresses is that a proper degree of self-respect in one’s
relations to others will help one maintain one’s dignity both in one’s own eyes and in
the eyes of others. He notes, for example, that by not only inwardly maintaining but
     

even outwardly expressing, for example through proper dress, an appropriate degree
of self-respect, one not only avoids making oneself “contemptible in the eyes of
others” but even gains influence over others and thereby—again assuming that one’s
self-respect has not degenerated into self-conceit—“promotes the dissemination
of virtue, to which we are obligated in any case; he acquires for himself, and for
moral perfection itself, an influence upon others that resides in the feeling of taste”
(MM-Vigilantius, 27:635). Here Kant’s thought seems to be that by cultivating a
proper feeling of self-respect and the expression of it in one’s outward bearing, even
one’s dress, one contributes to the empirical realization of one’s own moral perfec-
tion in a variety of ways—by avoiding contemptuous treatment from others, which
might then afford a temptation to pay them back in immoral kind, and by contrib-
uting to their own moral development in the phenomenal realm by the causal
impress of one’s own good example—though to be sure that is not a specific duty,
whether to oneself or to others, that Kant has explicitly spelled out. Much detail is
lacking here, but Kant seems to suggest a model on which both the general moral
feeling of respect as well as the specific feeling of self-esteem or self-respect play
causal roles in the fulfillment of duties to oneself and to others, and at least
sometimes in the fulfillment of duties to others through the intermediate stage of
fulfillment of duties to self.
As long as we remain within the confines of interpretation, there is no reason to
ascribe to Kant a more careful and complete model of the role of feelings in the
empirical character of moral motivation. But I hope that I have presented sufficient
evidence to confirm that Kant does have a complex model of this role, on which
conscience or empirical consciousness of the moral law produces a general feeling of
respect that causes or at least strengthens our commitment to acting in accordance
with it, at least at the phenomenal level, which in turn leads us to cultivate particular
feelings, such as sympathy and self-respect, that can in turn prompt us to fulfill
specific duties towards ourselves and others, although of course only where a check of
our ensuing dispositions to actions back against the moral law itself, if needed,
authorizes our proposed actions. As has been conceded all along, it is Kant’s official,
transcendental idealist position that this complex empirical causal process should all
be understood as the phenomenal manifestation of the determination of the nou-
menal will to abide by the moral law, and is not supposed to be the primary and self-
sufficient explanation of how we go from the mere representation of the moral law
that leads to the actual determination of the will to make the moral law its funda-
mental maxim. But if one is willing or even happy to leave Kant’s transcendental
idealist theory of the freedom of the will in the dustbin of history, then one is left with
an empirical but plausible theory of the role of feelings in the general commitment to
the moral law, the commitment to particular maxims of duty, and the initiation of
particular actions in light of those maxims that seems interesting and promising,
although some of its details certainly remain fuzzy.
 15
Examples of Moral Possibility

1. Kant’s Attitudes toward Examples

Kant was notoriously critical of the use of examples in moral theorizing. He was
equally emphatic about the necessity of examples in moral education. Is there a
contradiction here? Not necessarily; after all, theorizing is reflection on practice, not
practice itself, so the two activities are not identical. And one might be tempted to say
that we should not base moral theory on examples of moral conduct, because we
never have perfect examples of such conduct, but that imperfect examples will be
better than none in education—where, after all, we can use them to illustrate the
nature of moral failings as well as moral successes. Kant’s position is more complex
than that. It is indeed part of his criticism of the use of examples of actual conduct for
moral theorizing that we rarely if ever have perfect examples of moral conduct, and
would be more than likely to infer the wrong principle of morality from actual
examples of human conduct if that were how we tried to arrive at the principle of
morality. This view is part and parcel of his view that the moral law is synthetic a
priori, and thus while not innate in the sense that Locke had easily attacked, that of
being present to consciousness from birth, is nevertheless inherent in every human
being and will reveal itself in reflection upon prospective action in the course of
individual human development. However, precisely because Kant does insist upon a
distinction between innateness and apriority, he can and does suppose that even
though the moral law is a priori children still need a skillful series of questions—what
Kant calls a “catechism”—to achieve a clear consciousness of it—and this catechism
involves the use of examples, as we will see. Second, although Kant is insistent that
duty should never become a matter of mere habit, because he thinks of habit as an
unreflective and possibly inappropriate response to particular circumstances, he also
recognizes that duties of virtue in particular, precisely because they are indetermin-
ate, can to some extent be taught only by example, not by rule. Finally, Kant
recognizes that children (and even adults) may need persuasion that they are capable
of living up to the moral law, or that fulfillment of the moral law is a real possibility
for them, not just a logical possibility, and for that they need examples, indeed actual
examples, of genuine moral conduct.
This last claim immediately raises two questions. First, does Kant not reject the use
of examples of actual human conduct in moral theorizing precisely because we can
never be sure we have an example of perfect human conduct? That turns out not to
be a problem, however, but a solution, because Kant thinks that human beings must
learn the threats to the possibility of fulfilling the moral law as well as the sheer
possibility of doing so, and thereby learn that they can develop virtue only by
     

constantly struggling against those threats to morality. This is something humans

learn best from actual examples of moral conduct amidst the imperfections of human
life, not from abstract ideas of holy wills or Stoic sages.
But, second, does Kant not hold that human beings are immediately conscious of
their freedom along with their consciousness of the moral law—is that not what he
calls the “fact of reason” (CPracR, 5:31–2, 42–3, 47–8)? If humans are inherently
conscious of the moral law and their obligation under it, why would they need
anything else to be conscious of their freedom to act in accordance with it, which
seems to be all that recognition of the possibility of being moral requires? The answer
to this question is that although the fact of reason would obviously be self-evident to
a fully rational being, the human being, particularly the maturing child and adoles-
cent, but even the human adult, is not a fully rational being, but is a being with
sensory as well as intellectual powers as well as needs; and such a being needs sensible
or palpable as well as purely intellectual evidence of the possibility of being moral. As
Kant puts it in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, “because of the natural
need of all human beings to demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of
reason something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experience
or the like” (RBMR, 6:109) is needed even for the a priori concepts and self-evident
facts of pure practical reason. For humans, seeing is believing, or at least sensory
evidence is deeply conducive to our convictions about how the world ought to be as
well as to those about how it is.
I explore these thoughts further in what follows. After a brief discussion of
Kant’s rejection of examples for moral theorizing, I consider his positive account
of the role of examples in moral education, narrowly and broadly construed—
that is, the education of the growing child and the continuing education of the
mature human being; here we will see that Kant does allow some role for
examples not only for proving the possibility of being moral but also in moral
instruction, indeed about both the most general principle of morality as well as
more specific duties of virtue, which can never be fully spelled out and can
therefore be taught only by example. I next consider the role of examples in
giving us the palpable evidence of the possibility of being moral that we need,
both as children and adults: while outside of his accounts of moral education
Kant looks for palpable evidence of the possibility of the realization of the object
of morality, namely the highest good, as well as for palpable evidence of our
freedom to strive for compliance with the moral law, in his account of the moral
education of children he discusses only the latter, and no doubt for good reason.1
Finally, we will see that Kant looks to examples to teach us not only the
possibility of being moral but also the limits or at least the obstacles to
our freedom to be moral, so that we may learn the possibility of virtue for
mixed beings like ourselves rather than an impossible purity or holiness of will

1
Kant considers our need for sensory evidence of the possibility of the highest good perhaps in Critique
of the Power of Judgment, }42, but certainly in the second half of the work, the “Critique of the Power of
Teleological Judgment,” especially }}82–4. There will be no room to discuss that issue here; I have
discussed it elsewhere, especially in the articles collected in Part III of my Kant’s System of Nature and
Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
    

that might be possible for purely rational beings but is not possible for
human beings.2

2. Kant’s Rejection of Examples in Moral Theorizing

Kant famously rejects founding moral theory on examples at the start of Section II of
the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. In Section I, he had argued that an
initial formulation of the fundamental principle of morality can be readily arrived at
by reflection on common notions of the good will and duty, and then confirmed his
deduction of the principle by stating that it is what “human reason . . . actually has
always before its eyes and uses as a norm for its appraisals,” by means of which it
“knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and
evil.” “Inexperienced in the course of the world” as you may be, when confronted
with a possible path of action you nevertheless ask yourself “can you will that your
maxim become a universal law?” and know that “If not, then it is to be repudiated”
(G, 4:403–4). This is an expression of Kant’s conviction of our a priori knowledge of
the fundamental principle of morality. The appeal to “common moral cognition” of
Section I (G, 4:393) is not the same as appeal to empirical example, and in Section II
Kant argues that the attempt of “popular moral philosophy” to infer the fundamental
principle of morality from empirical examples or “experience of people’s conduct” is
doomed. He first asserts that “it is absolutely impossible by means of experience to
make out with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action
otherwise in conformity with duty rested simply on moral grounds and on the
representation of one’s duty,” indeed that if one scrutinizes actual conduct closely
enough one is very likely to find a “covert impulse of self-love” or at least not be able
to exclude such an impulse, and thus “there have at all times been philosophers who
have . . . ascribed everything to more or less refined self-love” (G, Section II, 4:406–7).
In other words, if you attempt to base your conception of the fundamental principle
of morality on examples of actual conduct, you may end up with the idea that what
this principle enjoins is the maximal gratification of self-love. But, and this is Kant’s
deeper point, we already know that this conclusion is wrong. We know that because
we already know the moral law, and know that this is not it.
This leads to Kant’s conceptual argument against examples, which does not
depend upon an empirical claim that we cannot find a perfect example of moral
conduct. The argument is rather that we could not recognize an example of morality,
even an example of imperfect morality, as an example unless we already knew the
moral law:

2
My argument in this chapter may thus be considered a clarification of the treatment by Felicitas
Munzel, who runs together Kant’s position in the Groundwork that examples “put the feasibility of what
the law commands beyond doubt” (her quote from 4:409) with his position in the lectures on pedagogy
that we must teach children “the duties they are to fulfill, as far as possible through examples” (her quote
from 9:488); see G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical Link” of Morality,
Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 289. My argument
is that these are two quite different roles for examples in moral education.
     

Nor could one give worse advice to morality than by wanting to derive it from examples. For
every example of it represented to me must itself first be appraised in accordance with
principles of morality, as to whether it is also worthy to serve as an original example, that is,
as a model; it can be no means authoritatively provide the concept of morality. Even the Holy
One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is
cognized as such. (G, Section I, 4:408)
The last line of this quotation suggests that Kant’s conception of the dependence of
our recognition of examples of morality on our prior cognition of the principle of
morality is part and parcel of his Enlightenment anti-voluntarism,3 and Kant makes
the larger context of this argument clear by repeating it in the Religion:
even if there had never been one human being capable of unconditional obedience to the law,
the objective necessity that there be such a human being would yet be undiminished and self-
evident. There is no need, therefore, of any example from experience to make the idea of a
human being morally pleasing to God a model for us; the idea is present as a model already in
our reason. (RBMR, 6:62)

We can recognize an example of moral conduct only if we already know the moral
law that such conduct exemplifies; only thus can we know what it exemplifies, a
fortiori how fully it exemplifies what it does and where it falls short if it does.
As we will see in a moment, however, this argument against trying to ground the
derivation of the moral law on empirical examples does not entirely preclude a role
for examples in the moral education of children: what is inherent may nevertheless
need to be brought to consciousness or clarity by a process of education that can
involve the use of examples. But before we turn to that specific point, there is a more
general question that needs to be raised, namely, did not Kant himself use examples
in his own derivation of the proper formulation of the moral law in Section I of the
Groundwork? Did he not persuade us of the constraints on any possible moral law
that lead to the recognition that the requirement that we act only on universalizable
maxims is the only candidate for this law4 by giving us examples of the cold-hearted
or grief-stricken men who are nevertheless able to fulfill their duties to be beneficent
or refrain from suicide not from inclination but from a moral law that does not refer
to inclination (G, Section I, 4:398)? He did, but it is important to note that these are
thought-experiments, not empirical examples of actual human conduct.5 Their
power of persuasion does not depend upon there ever having been anyone motivated
entirely without inclination by the moral law alone, but it does depend upon the fact
that we inherently know the moral law and thus know how to construct or follow

3
I would go so far as to characterize anti-voluntarism as the defining attitude of the Enlightenment; for
a seminal example, see Shaftesbury’s 1699 Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, Book I, Part III, section 2; in
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed.
Philip Ayres, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), vol. 1, p. 213.
4
For a full account of Kant’s “criterial” strategy for the derivation of the moral law, see Samuel
J. Kerstein, Kant’s Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), ch. 4.
5
They are what Onora O’Neill calls “hypothetical” rather than “ostensive” examples in her paper “The
Power of Example,” Philosophy 61 (1986): 5–29, reprinted in her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of
Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 165–86.
    

such examples. Thought-experiments of this sort are immune from the first point
that Kant makes at the outset of the next section of the Groundwork and confirm his
second point.

3. The Use of Examples in Teaching the Moral Law

We may now return to the question of whether examples may be used in educating
children to the content of the moral law itself, or perhaps more loosely the moral law
and its relations to the other fundamental concepts of morality, such as duty, worth,
and happiness. The basis for Kant’s recognition of the value of examples for this
purpose, as already suggested, is his distinction between innateness and apriority:
Kant does not assume that what is (synthetic) a priori is innate in the sense of being
present to conscious without any instruction.6 He had made this distinction as early
as his inaugural dissertation on The Forms and Principles of the Sensible and
Intelligible Worlds, where he had argued that the concepts of space and time, even
though a priori, are not innate but must be “acquired, not, indeed, by abstraction
from the sensing of objects (for sensation gives the matter and not the form of human
cognition), but from the very action of the mind . . . in accordance with permanent
laws” (ID, }15, 2:40). But there is nothing to say that for a child to learn the actions of
its own mind and the laws in accordance with which those actions take place does not
require the guidance of a teacher, and indeed the use of examples, and Kant hardly
assumes that because geometry and arithmetic, which describe the structure of space
and time, are a priori, they do not need to be taught. They do need to be taught, and
are taught by the use of examples—the construction of figures, the addition of
sums—that illustrate their general principles. The same is true in the case of the
general principle and concepts of morality, even though they are a priori.
Kant gives an example of the use of examples at this general level of moral
education in the Doctrine of Method of Ethics in the Metaphysics of Morals, in the
form of a “Fragment of moral catechism” (MM, DV, Remark following }52, 6:480–4).
Here what Kant suggests is that the teacher have his pupil both use himself as an
example and also consider thought-experiments or hypothetical examples as the
theorist did in Section I of the Groundwork. He has the teacher begin by asking the
student, “What is your greatest, in fact your whole, desire in life?”, then prompting
the student to respond that it is his own happiness, which proposal the student
immediately rejects in favor of the idea that he would want to share his happiness
with others “and make them happy and satisfied too.” Thus far the teacher is asking
the student to use his own responses as examples to reach a formulation of the moral
law. The teacher then introduces hypothetical examples of the character and conduct
of others, asking the student whether he would really choose “to give a lazy fellow soft
cushions so that he could pass his life away in sweet idleness” or “see to it that a
drunkard is never short of wine,” from which the student again recoils, quickly

6
We can have analytic a priori cognition of the relations among the predicates of constructed concepts
such as “bachelor,” and of course those concepts have to be learned before we can have that a priori
knowledge. What is at issue here is whether there is a sense in which we need to learn synthetic a priori
principles and the concepts they involve.
     

coming to see that only those who are worthy of happiness should be granted
happiness and that duty is the condition of worthiness to be happy (6:481–2).
From these examples, the student immediately realizes the difference between hap-
piness and the worthiness to be happy. From this point, Kant describes the teacher
leading the student to a recognition of the conception of the highest good and the
postulate of the existence of God as the condition of its possibility rather than to a
formulation of the moral law (6:482), but we can suppose that by similar means the
teacher can lead the student toward a formulation of the moral law itself. In all this,
it seems that the student is coming to a clear formulation of the moral law and its
status as the condition of worthiness to be happy from the examples offered to him
by the teacher.
How should the role of these examples be understood? The premise of Kant’s
account is that “The teacher, by his questions, guides his young pupil’s course of
thought merely by presenting him with cases in which his predisposition for certain
concepts will develop (the teacher is the midwife of the pupil’s thoughts)” (MM, DV,
}50, 6:478). “Cases” (Fälle) are nothing other than examples, from which the student
will draw inferences based on his “predispositions,” which are nothing other than
concepts and principles that he knows a priori but of which he needs to become
conscious. Now, Kant’s use of the term “midwife” is an unmistakable reference to
Socrates’s description of his own role in his debates with his Athenian interlocutors.7
However, Kant goes on to say that “The formal principle of such instruction does not,
however, permit Socratic dialogue as the way of teaching for this purpose, since the
pupil has no idea of what questions to ask, and so the teacher alone does the
questioning” (MM, DV, }51, 6:479). But of course in many Socratic dialogues
Socrates’s interlocutor does not get to ask many questions, either, and the model
for Kant’s catechism seems to be precisely a dialogue like Meno, in which Socrates
shows how easy it is to elicit the correct answers to geometrical questions even from a
slave-boy by presenting him with the right figures in order to demonstrate that our
knowledge of geometry is what Kant would call a priori: the right examples can get
children to express their a priori knowledge, whether of geometry or morals. Of
course, it is crucial to Socrates’s procedure that the slave-boy not be drawing his
inferences from observation of the empirical realization of the figures before him,
lines drawn in the sand or on a board with all their imperfections, for then he would
be getting inaccurate answers: these figures get him to draw on his inherent under-
standing of equality, triangularity, and so on. In Socrates’s words, the boy “will know”
the geometrical results that Socrates gets him to see “without having been taught but
only questioned” because he can “find the knowledge within himself.”8 Likewise,
Kant’s moral teacher’s catechism, with its examples, gets his pupil to draw on his a
priori knowledge of the moral law. Of course, Kant does not go on to say that
“finding knowledge within oneself ” is “recollection,” as Socrates does, but it is a
matter of bringing what is a priori to consciousness by means of examples in the
sense of thought-experiments.

7
See Plato, Theatetus, 149a; trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles F. Burnyeat, in Plato, Complete Works, ed.
John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), p. 165.
8
Plato, Meno 85d; trans. G. M. A. Grube from Plato, Complete Works, p. 886.
    

So far from precluding the use of examples in teaching the most general content of
morality, the moral law and its relation to such other fundamental concepts as duty,
happiness, and the worthiness to be happy, Kant supposes that our a priori know-
ledge of this principle and these concepts must be elicited from the maturing child by
means of examples. This is entirely consistent with what we might think of as the
relation between his epistemology and his pedagogy.

4. The Use of Examples in Teaching

the Duties of Virtue
The second role of examples in moral education is to teach the pupil the require-
ments of her imperfect duties to herself and others.
This role of examples must be distinguished from Kant’s use of examples of duty in
his confirmation of his formulations of the moral law in Section II of the Ground-
work, which is a use of examples in moral theory rather than moral pedagogy. There
Kant’s aim is to “enumerate a few duties in accordance with the usual division of
them into duties to ourselves and to other human beings and into perfect and
imperfect duties” in order to confirm the correctness of his formulations, although
he also notes that “the division here stands only as one adopted at my discretion (for
the sake of arranging my examples),” his definitive division of duties being reserved
“for a future Metaphysics of Morals” (G, Section II, 4:421 and 421n.). In other words,
what he offers here is only supposed to be an example of examples to confirm his
formulation of the moral law, although as it turns out his definitive division of duties
in the actual Metaphysics of Morals is grounded on the same basic division of duties
into perfect and imperfect duties to self and others. Be that as it may, Kant’s point
here is that the correctness of his formulations of the moral law, first the formulation
of it as the requirement that we act only on universalizable maxims (4:421) and
second the formulation of it as the requirement always to treat humanity as an end
and never merely as a means (4:429), can be confirmed by showing that examples of
each of the classes of duty commonly recognized can be explained on the basis of
these principles.
But all this, as I said, is a use of examples in moral theorizing, not in moral
pedagogy. We come to the latter when Kant says in the Lectures on Pedagogy that “In
order to ground a moral character in children . . . One must teach them the duties that
they have to fulfill as much as possible by examples and orders [Beispiele und
Anordnungen]” (Ped., 9:488). Now the final word in this quotation, although it
could be translated by “directions” or “instructions” as well as by “orders,” might
suggest that Kant means to claim that perfect as well as imperfect duties need to be
and can be taught by example, for perfect duties, such as the prohibition of suicide or
theft, can certainly be the subject of “orders”: “Under no circumstances commit
suicide,” and the like. However, Kant’s continuation of the passage suggests that what
he has in mind is primarily the imperfect duties to ourselves and others. He
continues, “The duties which a child has to perform are after all only ordinary duties
to itself and to others.” That is still general, allowing for perfect as well as imperfect
duties, but Kant goes on “Therefore we have to consider more closely”:
     

a) duties to oneself. These do not consist in buying fine clothes for oneself, having splendid
meals and so forth, although everything must be clean. Nor do they consist in trying to satisfy
one’s desires and inclinations, for on the contrary one must be very moderate and temperate.
Rather they consist in the human being having a certain dignity within himself which ennobles
him before all creatures, and it is his duty not to deny this dignity of humanity in his
own person.
But we deny the dignity of humanity when we, for example, take to drinking, commit
unnatural sins, practice all kinds of immoderation, and so forth, all of which degrade the
human being far below the animals. (Ped., 9:488–9)

Here we are dealing with an end that is also a duty, namely, preserving the dignity of
humanity in oneself, and we can be given examples of things that damage this dignity
and should be avoided as well as things that promote it, but no complete list—each of
the lists that Kant does give ends with “and so forth.” Perhaps some of the prohib-
itions are relatively determinate—Kant may have in mind a determinate list of
“unnatural sins.” But other prohibitions are not determinate—Kant does not after
all ban all use of alcohol, only drinking to excess—and how can what constitutes
drinking to excess be taught except by example? More generally, Kant offers no
complete list of the things that can damage the dignity of humanity in oneself, let
alone a complete list of things that could promote it. The child can be offered only
examples of actions that can damage or promote his own dignity, and has to figure
out how to go on from there, how to assimilate new situations that might present
themselves to him to the examples that he was given by his teacher. That’s what “and
so forth” implies.
Similarly, Kant says that “duties to others” must also be taught by example. So,
first, he says that “Reverence and respect for the rights of human beings must be
instilled into the child at a very early age, and one must carefully see to it that the
child puts these into practice.” But even in the case of reverence and respect the child
cannot be given a complete list of ways to show reverence and respect, but only
examples of how to demonstrate these.
For example, if a child meets another, poorer child and haughtily pushes it out of the way or
away from itself, gives it a blow and so forth, then one must not say “Don’t do that, it hurts the
other one. You should have pity! It is a poor child,” and so forth. Rather one must treat it just
as haughtily and noticeably, because its behavior was contrary to the rights of morality.
(Ped., 9:489)

There are actually two separate points here, both of great importance. One is that
children cannot be taught their duties by pronouncements of abstract principles, but
by eliciting in them the feelings that their actions would produce in others, which
feelings they will eventually come to understand as mandated by the a priori
principles of morality that they will eventually come to recognize. But second, and
more germane to the present argument, is that children cannot be given a complete
list of ways in which to damage or respect the dignity or rights of others; they can be
given examples of actions that would hurt the rights of others or actions that would
preserve them, and then they have to figure out how to go beyond those examples.
Once again, “and so forth” cannot be avoided.
    

This is even clearer in the case of the positive duty of beneficence, Kant’s example
of imperfect duty to others in the Groundwork, which Kant here explicitly says is
“only an imperfect obligation.” Kant suggests that children must learn how to fulfill
this duty from examples: “For example, if someone who should pay his creditor today
is touched through the sight of someone in need and gives him the sum which he
owes and should now pay—is this right or not?” (Ped., 9:490) Well, obviously not,
and given his “predisposition” or inherent knowledge of the moral law and of
the kinds of duties it implies, the child will immediately draw this inference. But
can the child be given a complete list of the constraints imposed by perfect duty on
the fulfillment of imperfect duty, or a mechanical procedure for determining when
and to what extent to fulfill imperfect duties? Again, obviously not—the very nature
of imperfect duty precludes this. Any instruction about how to fulfill imperfect duty
is going to have to begin with “For example” and end with “and so forth.” So the
use of examples is in fact ineliminable from instruction about duties, certainly
imperfect duties.
We have now seen two ways in which the use of examples seems to play an
indispensable role in instruction about the content of morality. First, in spite of the
apriority of the moral law, consciousness of that law and its related concepts must be
elicited from children by careful use of examples, just as mathematical knowledge
must be elicited from them by the careful use of examples in spite of the apriority of
mathematics. Second, the concrete requirements of duty, certainly of imperfect duty,
can only be taught by examples, because of the impossibility of formulating rules that
would cover every relevant situation, specify precisely how duties should be fulfilled,
how they can impact each other—and so forth. Still, neither of these are clearly what
Kant regards as most important about the use of examples in moral education. There
can be little doubt that what Kant regards as most important is the use of examples to
bring home to children both the possibility of their being moral and the constraints
against which they will have to struggle—lifelong—in order to be moral. And for this
purpose, Kant seems to hold, examples of actual human conduct will be most
effective.

5. Examples of Moral Possibility

The crucial role of examples in moral education is to teach children that they are in
fact free to be moral but that they must also struggle with the limits of human nature
in order to be so. Kant stresses both of these points in his central remarks on moral
pedagogy in the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Practical Reason, and
emphasizes the second point in a variety of contexts from his criticism of the ideal
of the Stoic sage who is simply immune to the blandishments of desire as a form of
“moral enthusiasm” (CPracR, 5:86) to his interpretation of Jesus Christ as an example
not of the immunity of the will to desire but of the inevitable struggle between good
and evil in the human being, combined with the possibility of good triumphing over
evil (RBMR, 6:64–5). Indeed, even before he comes to the discussion of moral
pedagogy in the second Critique’s Doctrine of Method, Kant states that the “proper
moral condition” of the human being, “in which he can always be, is virtue, that is,
moral disposition in conflict, and not holiness in the supposed possession of a
     

complete purity of dispositions of will,” and adds that the inculcation of an ideal of
simply transcending or eliminating natural desires will only lead to delusion:
By exhortation to actions as noble, sublime, and magnanimous, minds are attuned to nothing
but moral enthusiasm and exaggerated self-conceit; by such exhortations they are led into the
delusion that it is not duty—that is, respect for the law whose yoke (though it is a mild one
because reason itself imposes it on us) they must bear, even if reluctantly—which constitutes
the determining ground of their actions, and which always humbles them inasmuch as they
observe the law (obey it) . . . (CPracR, 5:84–5)

What the moral pupil must learn is that the human condition requires a constant
struggle to subordinate desire to morality—to subordinate the principle of self-love
to the principle of morality, in the terms of the Religion (6:35–6)—and that this is
possible, but not that morality requires what is impossible, namely the sheer elimin-
ation of desire. Much as a rational being might wish that (G, Section II, 4:428), the
difference between wish and will is precisely that the former is not constrained by
possibility while the latter is. The Doctrine of Method then adds that all of this—both
the purity of the moral law itself as well as the fact that our commitment to it can only
take the form of virtuous struggle and not humanly impossible holiness of will—
cannot in fact be taught by mere exhortation, but only by example.
Since what must be taught is the real rather than merely logical possibility of virtue,
that is, both the real possibility of our freedom to comply with the moral law and the
real obstacles of our own desires that we inescapably encounter in doing so, it is crucial
that this aspect of moral education, that is, education about moral possibility, employ
actual and not just hypothetical examples of human conduct. Kant signals this point at
the outset of his discussion of the use of examples in the Doctrine of Method:
I do not know why educators of young people have not long since made use of this propensity
of reason to enter with pleasure upon even the most subtle examination of the practical
questions put to them and why they have not, after first laying the foundation in a purely
moral catechism, searched through the biographies of ancient and modern times in order to
have at hand instances for the duties presented, in which, especially by comparison of similar
actions under different circumstances, they could well activate their pupils’ judgment [Beur-
teilung] in marking the lesser or greater moral import of such actions . . . (CPracR, 5:154)9

In this passage, we may see Kant’s division of labor for the use of examples in moral
education at work: as we have already seen from the illustration of the moral
catechism that he later offered in the Metaphysics of Morals, that stage of moral
education is focused on elucidating the student’s a priori concepts of the moral law
and its relation to happiness, which can be done by hypothetical examples or
thought-experiments; but what is now to be made clear beyond doubt—even though
it is again in some sense already known by us a priori as the “fact of reason”—is the
real possibility of our living up to the demands of morality, in the form of virtue
rather than holiness, and for that we need examples of actual human conduct, not

9
Here I have departed from Gregor’s usual rendition of Beurteilung as “appraisal” to make clear the
connection between this part of Kant’s sentence and the continuation of it that will be quoted shortly.
    

thought-experiments. Thus the teacher must turn to ancient and modern biograph-
ies, not ancient and modern myths and fictions. (It might seem as if in his original
account of it Kant supports the “fact of reason” with thought-experiments, not actual
examples: You know that you could resist your temptation to enter into a house of ill-
repute if threatened with death for doing so; don’t you think you could resist your
temptation to give false testimony against an innocent person when threatened with
death for not doing so? [CPracR, 5:30] Maybe Kant thinks that such thought-
experiments can work to confirm adults in their conviction of their own freedom,
but not children; or maybe the adult’s strongly felt response to such a question
bridges the gulf between a mere thought-experiment and an actual example.)
Indeed, in his ensuing exposition of the use to be made of such biographical and
hence real examples of moral conduct, Kant emphasizes the importance of leading
children to understand the struggle required to be moral even before he makes clear
that they can learn the very possibility of being moral from such examples. He
continues the long sentence last quoted by saying that if they were to use such
examples, educators
would find that even someone very young, who is not yet ready for speculation, would soon
become very acute and thereby not a little interested, since he would feel the progress of his
faculty of judgment; and, what is most important, they could hope with confidence that
frequent practice in knowing good conduct in all its purity and approving it and, on the
other hand, marking with regret or contempt the least deviation from it, even though it is
carried on only as a game of judgment in which children can compete with each other, yet will
leave behind a lasting impression of esteem on the one hand and disgust on the other, which by
mere habituation, repeatedly looking on such actions as deserving approval or censure, would
make a good foundation for uprightness in the future conduct of life. (CPracR, 5:154–5)

(It is a theme in Kant’s lectures on pedagogy that children have a natural impulse to
play games, and the wise teacher does not simply try to constrain that impulse,
although he must sometimes do so in order to teach them the necessity of work, but
also tries to turn those games to educational purpose; Ped., 9:467–8.) Thus far, this
sentence might still be talking about the first stage of moral education, learning what
is moral, that is, bringing to consciousness the child’s a priori but latent understand-
ing of morality, for which fictional examples might do. But Kant immediately
continues to stress the danger of fictional examples and by implication the import-
ance of real examples, namely that the former can all too easily be used to recom-
mend an unachievable holiness of will rather than really possible virtue, which could
lead not merely to frustration but to actual neglect of our real moral duties:
But I do wish that educators would spare their pupils examples of so-called noble (super-
meritorious) actions, with which our sentimental writings so abound, and would expose them
all only to duty and to the worth that a human being can and must give himself in his own eyes
by consciousness of not having transgressed it; for, whatever runs up into empty wishes and
longings for inaccessible perfection produces mere heroes of romance who, while they pride
themselves on their feeling for extravagant greatness, release themselves in return from the
observance of common and everyday obligation, which then seems to them insignificant and
petty. (CPracR, 5:155)
     

Most of us will live most of the time in undramatic circumstances, and most of what
morality will require of us will be pretty ordinary: paying back our debts, cultivating
our talents and being generous to others but only when we can do these without
neglecting our other obligations, and so forth (again). So children must learn that.
But they must also learn that even that will require controlling other desires they will
inevitably have, though there is no magic that will simply free them of such desires.
That is something in particular that they need to learn from actual examples of
human virtue, not saintly holiness or Stoic sagacity.
Only once he has made this point clear does Kant turn to the role of example in
teaching the real possibility of human freedom to comply with the moral law. He
proposes that the moral educator use a “story of an honest man whom someone
wants to induce to join the calumniators of an innocent but otherwise powerless
person (say Anne Boleyn, accused by Henry VIII of England)” (CPracR, 5:155).
Kant’s earlier thought-experiment about a person threatened by a prince if he will not
betray an innocent person has now become a real example. (Perhaps we should not
underestimate the effect on the philosopher of living under an unconstrained mon-
arch, even if a supposedly enlightened one such as his own Friedrich II.) The story is
developed, as first the subject is offered gifts if he will do as he is asked, then
threatened with increasingly serious punishments, loss of friendship, of wealth,
then “loss of freedom and even of life itself.” As the level of threat is increased
while the subject “remains firm in his resolution to be truthful, without wavering or
even doubting,” the “young listener will be raised step by step from mere approval to
admiration, from that to amazement, and finally to the greatest veneration and a
lively wish that he could be such a man (though certainly not in such circumstances)”
(5:156). But the point is precisely that the child’s “lively wish” will not be a mere wish,
because there really was someone who resisted Henry’s threats if he did not testify
against Anne—Henry Norris, the “groom of the stole,” who “would rather die a
thousand deaths than calumniate an innocent person.”10 That Henry Norris could
resist the demands of such a powerful monarch as Henry VIII will give the child
palpable evidence that he too could resist the blandishments of his own desires and
fears in order to fulfill the demands of morality that he has come to venerate—even
though, of course, he, and we, hope that he will never find himself in such dire straits
as Henry Norris did.
Having suggested the positive role that examples of actual moral conduct can play
in convincing children of the real possibility of their own virtue, Kant reiterates the
danger of hoping, as he thinks many in his own sentimental times do, “to have more
influence on the mind through melting, tender feelings or high-flown, puffed-up
pretensions, which make the heart languid instead of strengthening it, than by a dry
and earnest representation of duty” (CPracR, 5:157). He emphasizes again that if the
concepts of morality “are to become subjectively practical . . . the representation of

10
David Hume, The History of England, introd. William Todd, 6 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
1983), vol. 3, pp. 234–6. Kant often uses examples from British history, and since the earliest translation of
Hume’s history into German was published between 1763 and 1771 (David Hume, Geschichte der England,
4 vols [Breslau and Leipzig: Meyer, 1763–71), Hume’s history could have been a source for Kant’s reference
to Anne Boleyn and the story of at least one man who refused to calumniate an innocent.
    

them must be considered in relation to human beings and to the individual human
being” (5:157–8), not in relation to fanciful images of saints or sages. “In a word, the
moral law demands obedience from duty and not from a predilection that cannot and
ought not to be presupposed at all” (5:158). That is what the child must learn, and the
child can learn not only what the moral law demands but also that it is really possible
to live up to this demand from real examples of virtuous human conduct.

6. Conclusion
Kant’s conception of the role of examples in moral education is founded on the
premise that our knowledge of the content of the moral law and of our freedom to
fulfill it is a priori but latent, as much (synthetic) a priori knowledge is, and that
children must bring this knowledge from latency to consciousness by means of
examples (and even adults may need to be reminded of it by example). Hypothetical
examples or thought-experiments may suffice to bring children to consciousness of
the moral law itself, along with the distinction between mere happiness and the
worthiness to be happy. The contents of particular duties, particularly the imperfect
duties, may also need to be taught by example, for the simple reason that all the ways
in which human dignity could be injured or conversely promoted could never be
fully enumerated—although Kant leaves it open whether hypothetical or real
examples are necessary for this purpose. But when it comes to our freedom to live
up to the demands of morality, since it is our real freedom and not just the logical
possibility of freedom of which we must be convinced, only historical and not
hypothetical examples will do, or at least they are what will be most persuasive for
the growing child. Thus the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, which begins
with the fact of reason, ends with the story of Anne Boleyn and one man who refused
to join in betraying her.
Conclusion
 16
Kantian Communities
The Realm of Ends, the Ethical Community,
and the Highest Good

In his practical philosophy, Kant employs a number of conceptions of community

among moral agents, the meanings of which and the relations among which are
contested. The realm of ends that Kant introduces in his third formulation of the
categorical imperative in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is clearly a
conception of a community of moral agents of some sort: a realm is “a systematic
union of various beings through common laws,” and a realm of ends is a “whole of all
ends in systematic connection (a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves
and of the ends of his own that each may set himself)” (G, 4:433). The highest good,
which Kant discusses in each of the three critiques as well as in Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason and “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in
theory but it is of no use in practice,” is clearly a condition of a community of moral
agents of some sort, at least in some of Kant’s versions of this concept, as when he
defines it as “universal happiness combined with and in conformity with the purest
morality throughout the world” (TP, 8:279). But what is the relationship between the
realm of ends and the highest good? Some authors hold that the concept of the
highest good is identical to or follows directly from that of the realm of ends,1 while
others argue that they are quite distinct and that the concept of the highest good as
the complete object of morality cannot even be derived from that of the realm of
ends.2 In the section of the “Canon of Pure Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason
that is entitled “On the ideal of the highest good,” Kant also introduces the concept of
the “moral world” as that of a “system of self-rewarding morality” (A 809/B 837). Is
this the same concept as that of the highest good or a different concept? In the
Religion, Kant speaks of an “ethical community,” and contrasts it as an “ethico-civil
society” to a political community or “juridico-civil society” (RBMR, 6: 94–5); yet
while some authors accept this distinction, and insist that an ethical community
“may have nothing resembling a political constitution,”3 others argue that the ethical
community is fully realized in the condition of international perpetual peace, which

1
For example, Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., Kant and the Problem of God (Malden, MA, and Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 106.
2
John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Ethics, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), pp. 313–17.
3
Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 315.
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according to Kant must be the product of a league of nations that one would have
thought does have a political constitution.4 More generally, some philosophers think
that Kantian ethics requires a focus on the agent’s own virtue that eliminates a
genuine concern for the well-being of others,5 while other philosophers think that
Kantian ethics is so exclusively focused on what is universally owed to others that it
allows neither duties attached to particular stations nor any place for a genuine
concern with an agent’s own projects.6 Some think that “For Kant, true community
involves the collective pursuit of ends set in common with others”7 and that the ends
of morality can only be achieved through collective effort, while others interpret Kant
as believing that the achievement of morality is always up to the individual. What
is one supposed to make out of such a welter of concepts and conflicting interpret-
ations of them?
We can make no headway on such issues without a careful analysis of what Kant
means by the various concepts that have been mentioned. This chapter will thus be
an analysis of just what Kant means by the realm of ends, the moral world, the
highest good, an ethical community, and the juridico-civil state to which the latter is
contrasted, and will trace out some of the relations between these concepts. I will
argue in particular that Kant’s conception of the highest good underwent some
considerable changes over the period from 1781 to 1793, that is, from the Critique
of Pure Reason to the essay on “Theory and Practice” and the Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason, and that different interpretations of the relation between
the concepts of the highest good and the realm of ends can arise from Kant’s different
conceptions of the highest good. I hope by means of this narrative to bring some
order to the current confusion of beliefs about the various concepts of community in
Kant’s practical philosophy.

1. The Realm of Ends

The first candidate for a conception of a community of moral agents that Kant
introduces into his specifically moral writings is the realm of ends.8 The realm of ends
is the culminating conception in Kant’s sequence of formulations of the categorical
imperative,9 and is introduced in the position of a criterion or goal for the selection of
maxims, depending perhaps on exactly how one translates the word zu: using the

4
Philip J. Rossi, SJ, The Social Authority of Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of
Humankind (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 99.
5
For example, Carol Gilligan and other “care theorists”; see Sally Sedgwick, “Can Kant’s Ethics Survive
the Feminist Critique?”, in Robin May Schott, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 77–100, at pp. 77–8.
6
For example, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985), p. 7.
7
Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 315.
8
Like John Rawls, I prefer “realm” rather than “kingdom” as the translation for Reich because in
contemporary English usage it does not so clearly imply the existence within the realm of a lawgiver who is
not also a subject of those laws, i.e. a king.
9
For the idea that Kant’s sequence of formulations of the categorical imperative should be considered as
a systematic exposition of the full contents of a single moral principle, see Allen W. Wood, “The Moral Law
as a System of Formulas,” in H. F. Fulda and J. Stolzenberg, eds, Architektonik und System in
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concept in the formulation of an imperative, Kant writes that “alle Maximen aus
eigener Gesetzgebung zu einem möglichen Reiche der Zwecke, als einem Reiche der
Natur, zusammenstimmen sollen” (G, 4:436), which Mary Gregor translates as “all
maxims from one’s own lawgiving are to harmonize with a possible kingdom of ends
as with a kingdom of nature,”10 treating the concept of the realm of ends as a
criterion against which one’s particular maxims are to be tested, while Allen Wood
translates it as “all maxims ought to harmonize from one’s own legislation into a
possible realm of ends as a realm of nature,”11 treating it as a goal that is to be
achieved through the sum of one’s maxims. I find the translation of zu as “into” more
natural, and thus read the realm of ends as the goal that is to be aimed at in the
selection of all of one’s maxims. This is also a natural conclusion to draw from the
fact that Kant says that this “fruitful concept” follows from the preceding require-
ment that “every rational being . . . must regard himself as giving universal law
through all his maxims” (G, 4:433). The realm of ends is the state of affairs that
would be realized if everyone were to conform to this formulation of the categorical
imperative as the fundamental norm or command of morality, and is thus the goal,
object, or ideal for each agent in his or her selection of maxims in accordance with the
fundamental principle of morality.
Now, as already noted, Kant defines the realm of ends as “a whole of all ends in
systematic connection (a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of
the ends of his own that each may set himself).” This suggests that what moral
legislation is to aim at is a state of affairs in which every agent who could possibly be
affected by one’s own choice of maxims is treated as an end and never merely as a
means (thus showing that the concept of the realm of ends is firmly anchored in
Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative, which requires precisely
that; see G, 4:429), and in which the particular ends set by each such agent, including
oneself, are realized to the extent that they are consistent with the treatment of every
agent as an end and not merely a means and with each other. As Allen Wood, for
example, puts it, “Rational beings constitute a realm to the extent that their ends form
a system. This happens when those ends are not only mutually consistent, but also
harmonious and reciprocally supportive . . . The laws of a realm of ends are such that
universally following them would result in the agreement and mutual furthering of
the ends of all rational beings in a single unified teleological system”12—although if it
is not already clear from the expression “a single unified teleological system,” I would
make it explicit in the last of these sentences that the laws of a realm of ends would
result in the agreement of the ends of all those rational beings who can actually
interact with one another and are thereby residents of a single world. However,

der Philosophie Kants (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), pp. 287–306, and Kant’s Ethical Thought,
chs 3–5.
10
Gregor, Practical Philosophy, p. 86. Here Gregor follows the older translations of Thomas K. Abbot,
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and rev. Lara Denis (Peterborough:
Broadview, 2005), p. 94, and H. J. Paton, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
(London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 104, and is followed by Arnulf Zweig in Kant, Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Arnulf Zweig and ed. Thomas E. Hill, Jr., and Arnulf Zweig (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 237.
11 12
Wood, translation, p. 54. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 166.
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immediately prior to the phrase that I am taking as the definition of the concept of
the realm of ends, Kant says that “Now since laws determine ends in terms of their
universal validity, if we abstract from the personal differences of rational beings as
well as from all the content of their private ends we shall be able to think of” a realm
of ends in the sense defined (G, 4:433). This could suggest that the realm of ends has
no concern with particular ends at all, but is simply the condition in which each agent
regards all others as ends in themselves and therefore adopts only maxims that could
be accepted by all others, thus only maxims that could be collectively universalized.
On this account the realm of ends would simply be a community of autonomous
moral legislators but would imply nothing about their ends. John Rawls might be
thought to suggest such an interpretation when he says that “we now come back to
viewing ourselves not as subject of the moral law, but as legislators, as it were, of the
public moral law of a possible realm of ends,” and that “what we legislate, viewed as a
moral law for a possible realm of ends, is the whole family of general precepts . . . that
are accepted by the [categorical-imperative] procedure.”13 However, I take Kant to
mean that while adopting only maxims that treat all others as ends in themselves may
require that one cannot regard one’s own particular ends as sufficient and conclusive
reasons for the adoptions of maxims, what it is to treat rational beings as ends and
not merely as means includes making their particular ends one’s own as well as acting
only on ends of one’s own that others can make theirs. This relation between the
general status of rational beings as ends and particular ends is evident as early as
Kant’s second example of duty in the Groundwork, the prohibition of fraudulent
promises as a perfect duty toward others (G, 4:429–30) as well as, more obviously, in
his analysis of “meritorious duty to others” as “furthering the ends of others” (4:430).
As we saw in Chapter 6, Kant’s inference may not be based on the natural assumption
that we should regard all of their ends as worthy of promotion just because they have
been set by those rational beings in the exercise of the rational and free agency that
gives them their dignity as ends in themselves, but on the subtler thought that by
being prepared to assist others in the realization of their particular ends one actually
helps them toward a greater freedom in their choice of possible ends. But either way,
since the underlying moral requirement is to treat rational being as an end and never
merely as a means in one’s own person as well as in that of others, the realm-of-ends
formulation of the categorical imperative requires that the particular ends of oneself
and others be promoted insofar as they form a consistent system, not because of the
particular contents of one’s own ends or anyone else’s and the particular attachments
oneself or others may have to these ends, but simply because they have been freely
chosen by rational beings. And in fact Rawls too recognizes that the realm of ends
requires the promotion of particular ends when he writes:
To understand what Kant means by a whole of ends in systematic conjunction, we should also
take into account the next paragraph. Thus, as [Kant] says there (4:433), the systematic
conjunction of a realm of ends arises when all reasonable and rational persons treat themselves
as well as others as such persons and therefore as ends in themselves. From the second
formulation [of the categorical imperative], this means that everyone not only pursues their

13
Rawls, Lectures on the History of Ethics, pp. 204–5.
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personal (permissible) ends within the limits of the duties of justice (the rights of man) but also
gives significant and appropriate weight to the obligatory ends enjoined by the duties of virtue.
These duties, to state them summarily, are to promote one’s moral and natural perfection and
the happiness of others.14
This way of explicating the concept of a systematic whole of ends, however, depends
upon the derivation of the duties of justice and the duties of virtue from the
requirement that rational nature always be treated as a means and not merely as
an end, a derivation that is only sketched in the Groundwork (see 4:422–3 and
429–30) and is not provided in any detail until the later Metaphysics of Morals.
Moreover, by employing the latter work’s specification of the only ends that are also
duties as one’s own perfection and the happiness of others (see MM, DV, Introduc-
tion, sections IV–V, 6:385–8), this way of deriving the requirement of the realm of
ends might seem to create a problem about the place of one’s own particular ends in
the realm of ends. My analysis, that treating all rational beings, both oneself and
others, as ends in themselves directly implies treating the freely set ends of all of those
agents as ends for all insofar as that can be consistently done, avoids the dependence
on the specific derivations of duties that Rawls’s approach requires and the problem
about the place of one’s own ends in the realm of ends that this approach may bring.
But since Kant himself, in spite of his arguments that one’s own happiness cannot be
an end that is also a duty, ultimately does recognize that “since all others with the
exception of myself would not be all . . . the law making benevolence a duty will
include myself, as an object of benevolence, in the command of practical reason”
(MM, DV, }27, 6:451), he thereby does finally recognize the place of one’s own
particular ends in the systematic whole of ends required by the realm of ends even on
the approach that derives the realm of ends from the ends that are also duties. Rawls’s
interpretation and the one offered here are thus ultimately coextensive.
Now since virtue is “the moral strength of a human being’s will in fulfilling his
duty, a moral constraint through his own law-giving reason” (MM, DV, Introduc-
tion, section XIII, 6:405), what duty requires is that we choose our maxims with the
goal of establishing a realm of ends, a realm of ends requires the promotion of all of
our individual ends insofar as they are consistent with each other and with the
treatment of each agent as an end in him- or herself, maximal happiness consists
simply in the satisfaction of a maximally consistent set of ends (see, e.g. CPracR,
5:124), and the highest good is “universal happiness combined with and in con-
formity with the purest” virtue or “morality throughout the world” (TP, 8:279), it
would seem as if the conceptions of the realm of end as the goal of morality and the
highest good as the object of morality are identical, or at least so closely related that
the highest good is the condition that would obtain in a realm of ends so far as that
is fully realized. And so I have myself previously suggested.15 As we saw, however, a
commentator like Rawls holds that the conceptions of the realm of ends and the
highest good are quite distinct. So we can see that the story of their relationship is
going to be at the very least more complicated, and we are going to have to examine

14
Rawls, Lectures on the History of Ethics, pp. 208–9.
15
See Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 340.
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each of Kant’s chief conceptions of the highest good in order to unravel it. In order
to get started on that task, however, we will have to look at another concept of a
moral community that Kant introduces in the first Critique, the concept of a “moral
world,” for it is his exposition of that concept that leads directly to his first concept
of the highest good.

2. The Moral World

Kant defines a moral world as “the world as it would be if it were in conformity with
all moral laws (as it can be in accordance with the freedom of rational beings and
should be in accordance with the necessary laws of morality” (CPuR, A 808/B 836).
Since the realm of ends would be the outcome of “conformity with all moral laws,” a
world in which the goal of the realm of ends were realized would be a moral world;
the concept of the realm of ends is thus one way and, given that this conception is the
culmination of Kant’s exposition of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork,
perhaps the best way of characterizing the idea of which a moral world would be the
realization. Although he has not yet introduced the term “realm of ends,” Kant seems
to suggest the close connection between the two notions as he continues:
The idea of a moral world thus has objective reality, not as if it pertained to an object of an
intelligible intuition (for we cannot even think of such a thing), but as pertaining to the sensible
world, although as an object of pure reason in its practical use and a corpus mysticum of the
rational beings in it, insofar as their free choice under moral laws has thoroughgoing system-
atic unity in itself as well as with the freedom of everyone else.
The exotic expression of a “corpus mysticum of rational beings” seems to mean the
same as a realm of rational beings each of whom treats all of them as ends and not
merely as means, and the “thoroughgoing systematic unity” of “their free choice
under moral laws” seems to imply that they would use their free choice to choose a
consistent set of particular ends as well as maxims. A corpus mysticum of rational
beings therefore seems to be the same as a realm of ends, and our duty to make the
sensible world agree as far as possible with the idea of a moral world thus seems to be
the same as the duty to make it as far as possible into a realm of ends.
To be sure, Kant immediately adds that the concept of a moral world abstracts
“from all conditions (ends) and even from all hindrances to morality in it (weakness
or impurity of human nature),” and that it is therefore “a mere, yet practical, idea,
which really can and should have its influence on the sensible world, in order to make
it agree as far as possible with this idea.” I have already suggested how Kant’s
requirement of abstraction from ends should be dealt with: it should be interpreted
as requiring abstraction from one’s own personal ends as motives for the adoption of
maxims that can harmonize with or into the idea of a realm of ends, but not the
irrelevance of particular ends in the determination of what maxims consistent with
the moral law require of us and thus in the realization of the realm of ends. Kant’s
second point, that in the concept of a moral world we abstract from hindrances to
morality arising from human weakness or impurity, is what leads to his introduction
of the concept of the highest good.
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3. The Highest Good in the Critique of Pure Reason

Kant introduces the concept of the highest good into the Critique of Pure Reason in a
tortuous way. He first appeals to a claim that all who have made themselves worthy of
happiness by moral conduct should be able to hope for happiness:
I say . . . that just as the moral principles are necessary in accordance with reason in its practical
use, it is equally necessary to assume in accordance with reason in its theoretical use that
everyone has cause to hope for happiness in the same measure as he has made himself worthy
of it in his conduct, and that the system of morality is therefore inseparably combined with the
system of happiness, though only in the idea of pure reason. (A 809/B 837)

One of Rawls’s objections to any equation of the concepts of the realm of ends and
the highest good is that the principle that anyone who has proven worthy of
happiness by moral or virtuous conduct should be happy does not itself seem to be
part of the fundamental principle of morality.16 One might be tempted to admit this
but to maintain at least that as an assertion about worthiness this principle must itself
be normative, and thus must still be a principle arising from practical reason, even if
independently from the fundamental principle of morality. But here Kant seems to
suggest that it is a principle of theoretical reason. How can this be understood?
Kant may reveal what he has in mind in the next paragraph:
Now in an intelligible world, i.e., in the moral world, in the concept of which we have
abstracted from all hindrances to morality (of the inclinations), such a system of happiness
proportionately combined with morality can also be thought as necessary, since freedom,
partly moved and partly restricted by moral laws, would itself be the cause of the general
happiness, and rational beings, under the guidance of such principles, would themselves be the
authors of their own enduring welfare and at the same time that of others.
This suggests that the principle that those who have proven themselves worthy of
happiness by virtuous behavior should be able to hope for happiness is a principle of
theoretical reason because it is grounded in a causal claim: in ideal circumstances, in
which no one’s commitment to the principles of morality and their execution was
weakened or undermined by refractory inclinations (Kant does not seem to worry
about any interference with the efficacy of morality coming from outside of human
nature), happiness would be the causally necessary consequence of moral conduct,
and indeed a system of happiness or general happiness would be the causally
necessary consequence of systematic or general morality or virtue, that is, universal
compliance with the moral law. This supposition makes sense, of course, only if the
realization of particular ends is included in the concept of a moral world, and thus if
the concept of a moral world is related to the idea of a realm of ends as it has here
been interpreted, since it is the realization of particular ends that produces happiness.
Given that assumption, Kant’s idea seems to be that theoretical reason’s demand that
causes should have their proper effects leads to the expectation that universal
morality should be accompanied by general happiness. Of course, one might also

16
Rawls, Lectures on the History of Ethics, p. 314.
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suppose that practical reason has an independent conception of moral worth and
independently holds the normative principle that worthiness to be happy should be
accompanied with happiness, and thus that the demands of theoretical and practical
reason coincide in the conception of the highest good.
Alas, human beings do have refractory inclinations which can weaken or destroy
their commitment to do as morality requires, and so in the sensible world the
conditions are not ideal for the realization of the moral world. Here Kant’s argument
may then seem to take a turn toward an individualistic conception of the conjunction
between virtue and happiness, in which a normative conception that worthiness to be
happy should be accompanied with happiness plays an indispensable role: that is, he
seems to be launching an argument that even though in the real conditions of human
existence we cannot expect universal compliance with morality and therefore cannot
expect general happiness, at least those individuals who are actually virtuous should
be able to expect their own happiness under some realizable condition:
But this system of self-rewarding morality is only an idea, the realization of which rests on the
condition that everyone do what he should . . . But since the obligation from the moral law
remains valid for each particular use of freedom even if others do not conduct themselves in
accord with this law, how their consequences will be related to happiness is determined neither
by the nature of the things in the world, nor by the causality of actions themselves and their
relation to morality; and the necessary connection of the hope of being happy with the
unremitting effort to make oneself worthy of happiness . . . cannot be cognized through reason
if it is grounded merely in nature, but may be hoped for only if it is at the same time grounded
on a highest reason, which commands in accordance with moral laws, as at the same time the
cause of nature. (CPuR, A809–10/B 837–8)

Kant then calls the idea of “such an intelligence, in which the morally most perfect
will, combined with the highest blessedness, is the cause of all happiness in the world,
insofar as it stands in exact relation with morality (as the worthiness to be happy), the
ideal of the highest good,” but more precisely the “ideal of the highest original good”
that would ground the “practically necessary connection of both elements of the
highest derived good, namely of an intelligible, i.e., moral world” (A 810–11/B 839–40).
To the highest original good, Kant argues, in an argument he will repeat in each of
the three critiques, we must ascribe all but only those properties that are necessary for
it to ground the highest derived good, namely omnipotence, omniscience, omnipres-
ence, and eternity (A 815/B 843; see also CPracR, 5:139, and CPJ, }86, 5:444); we must
thus postulate God so defined as the ground of the highest derived good. Kant also
holds that since the “sensible world” does not offer the necessary connection of both
elements of the highest derived good, we must assume the moral world in which
these elements will be joined “to be a world that is future for us,” and thus “God and a
future life are two presuppositions that are not to be separated from the obligation
that pure reason imposes on us in accordance with principles of that very same
reason” (A 811/B 839).
I say that Kant seems to be offering an individualistic conception of the highest
good (that is, the highest derived good, but I will usually leave that qualification out)
here because his argument starts from the premise that one cannot count on everyone
behaving morally in the sensible world, where morality would be self-rewarding if
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only everyone did. He then apparently urges each one of us to fulfill individually our
moral obligations nevertheless, that is, regardless of the non-compliance of others, in
the hope that the “unremitting effort to make oneself worthy of happiness” (emphasis
added) will be rewarded with happiness in a future life by a God who in his
omniscience knows what we have attempted to do even if because of the non-
compliance of others our virtue will not be rewarded in our normal lifetime.
However, Kant repeatedly states that what we must believe to be possible in a future
life is a moral world, not simply our individual happiness. He says that “Morality in
itself constitutes a system, but happiness does not, except insofar as it is distributed
precisely in accordance with morality. This, however, is possible only in the intelli-
gible world, under a wise author and regent” (A 811/B 839). Borrowing Leibniz’s
expression, he calls this future life “the realm of grace” (A 812/B 840), where the
word “realm” suggests that all will be moral and happy. He says that “happiness in
exact proportion with the morality of rational beings, through which they are worthy
of it, alone constitutes the highest good of a world in which we must without
exception transpose ourselves in accordance with the precepts of pure but practical
reason” (A 814/B 842), thus indicating that what we must believe in is a whole world
in which all rational beings worthy of happiness are rewarded with it, not just the
possibility of our own happiness. And finally he refers to the highest good as “this
systematic unity of ends in this world of intelligences” (A 815/B 843). Kant’s view
thus seems to be not that the individual who does the right thing throughout his
earthly life must be able to hope for his own happiness as a reward in spite of the
refractory behavior of others around him, and that the individual’s commitment to
morality will be weakened if he cannot expect this reward; rather, his view seems to
be that a genuinely moral agent must aim at the morality and the happiness of all,
and that his commitment to morality will be weakened if he cannot believe in the
possibility of the realization of this complete object of morality. Kant says that
“without a God and a world that is not now visible to us but is hoped for, the
majestic ideas of morality are, to be sure, objects of approbation and admiration but
not incentives for resolve and realization, because they would not fulfill the whole
end that is natural for every rational being and determined a priori and necessarily
through the very same pure reason” (A 813/B 841). The end that is natural for every
rational being might be only his own happiness, but the end that is determined a
priori and necessarily for every rational being through pure reason is surely the
morality of all and the happiness of all as a consequence of that morality, so all
rational beings must be able to believe in the possibility of this end for all in order to
maintain their moral resolve.
In spite of some language that might initially suggest otherwise, then, even in the
first Critique Kant’s conception of the highest good is clearly communalistic rather
than individualistic: that is, it postulates the realization of a moral world as the
condition that would obtain if the categorical imperative were universally observed
and thus the harmonization of all of our maxims into a realm in which all are treated
as ends in themselves and all of their lawful and consistent particular ends are
realized, not a condition in which just some individuals who happen to have been
virtuous are rewarded with their own happiness. Further, in spite of some remarks
that might be taken otherwise, Kant’s ideal of a moral world as the highest good
  

seems to be generated by pure reason’s demand for completeness. As we saw, Kant’s

generation of this ideal may be meant to invoke both practical and theoretical reason,
the latter demanding that the consequences of the actions demanded by the former
actually come to pass; but then again, Kant may mean that pure practical reason
alone demands both virtue from all and happiness for all as a product of that virtue,
and the postulation of the conditions necessary for the realization of this highest
good may depend only on that interpretation of the demand of morality plus the
general canon of rationality that what ought to be the case must be able to be the case.
Either way, Kant’s argument for the highest good would not seem to depend upon an
independent normative principle that virtue should be accompanied with its just
reward, contrary to what Rawls for example supposed.
Also contrary to some popular views,17 there is nothing in Kant’s suggested
grounds for the ideal of the highest good that would require that we postulate the
existence of God in order to guarantee the provision of divine punishments in
strict proportion to human vice. Kant’s statement that “happiness in exact proportion
with the morality of rational beings, through which they are worthy of it, alone
constitutes the highest good” (A 814/B 842) is often taken to mean that in a morally
ideal world the virtuous would be rewarded with happiness in proportion to the exact
degree of their virtue and the vicious punished in exact proportion to their vice, thus
that a divine judge is necessary to ensure that each of these conditions will be met,
and indeed Kant may fall into that thought elsewhere, but there is nothing about
punishment in the present argument at all. The argument is simply that morality
requires the happiness of all within its own limits, that under ideal conditions
morality would be self-rewarding, or automatically produce that happiness, that
conditions are not ideal in the sensible world, but that our resolve to do what
morality requires would be weakened if we had to believe that it is unfeasible,
therefore we must postulate life in a future world grounded by God in order to
maintain our resolve to do what morality demands.
One last point. Kant’s conception of the highest good in the first Critique is often
called a “religious” conception rather than a “secular” or even “political” conception
of the highest good.18 Any simple contrast between “religious” and “secular” con-
ceptions of the highest good is, however, seriously misleading. Kant’s conception of
the highest good in the first Critique clearly supposes that morality will be self-
rewarding with happiness only in a future life, and postulates God as the condition of
morality’s self-rewarding production of happiness in that future life. In subsequent
accounts, Kant will suggest that we must be able to suppose that morality will
produce happiness in this life, or more precisely, if not in the earthly life of a
particular human being then at least in the earthly course of the human species.

17
See Frederick Beiser, “Moral Faith,” in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant and
Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 588–629. But many authors
have supposed this to be part of a “religious” conception of the highest good.
18
See Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981); Andrews Reath, “Two Conceptions of the Highest God in Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy
26 (1988): 593–619; and Gordon Michalson, Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
   

So we might distinguish between future-life and present-life conceptions of the

highest good, transcendent and immanent conceptions, or perhaps most simply
between heavenly and earthly conceptions of the locus where both the morality
and the happiness demanded by the ideal of the highest good will be realized. But
wherever or whenever it is supposed to occur, Kant always supposes that we will need
to postulate the existence of God as the ground of the conjunction of virtue and
happiness, and if belief in the existence of God is sufficient to make anything
dependent upon it religious, then to that extent Kant’s conception of the highest
good is never anything other than religious. This is so even if the set of rational beliefs
needed in order to ground conviction in the possibility of the highest good does not
always include belief in a future life.19 Either a heavenly or an earthly conception of
the highest good remains religious as long as it involves the postulation of the
existence of God.
While clearly both heavenly and religious, Kant’s conception of the highest good in
the first Critique nevertheless seems incoherent. This is because he argues that we
must postulate God as the author of nature (A 810/B 839), even though God is
postulated to ensure that our collective efforts to be moral will be accompanied with
collective happiness in a future, that is to say, non-natural life. Yet there is no reason
why we would need to postulate God as the author of nature if he were needed to
deliver a result only in a non-natural world. Kant’s argument could be saved from
incoherence if it was meant to claim that God must be postulated as the only ground
for the possibility of our collective compliance with the demands of morality in this
earthly life, that is, as the only possible ground for our virtue, even though that
compliance is to be rewarded with happiness only in a future, heavenly life. As we will
subsequently see, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant does
apparently argue that God must be postulated as the ground of the possibility of
the “ethical community,” which is in turn a condition of the possibility of the
achievement of virtue in this life, and so does argue for the first part of the position
just described. But in the first Critique he seems to postulate the divine author of
nature only as the ground for a heavenly realization of happiness, so his position does
seem to be incoherent.

4. The Highest Good in the Critique

of Practical Reason
Kant makes only two passing references to the highest good in the Groundwork for
the Metaphysics of Morals (4:409, 412), the first of which is a reference to God, thus to
the highest original rather than derived good. But of course the concept of the highest
good is the crux of the “Dialectic” in the Critique of Practical Reason, which is Kant’s
most extended discussion of the postulates of pure practical reason. Here Kant’s
exposition may seem to suggest an individualistic conception of the highest good

19
Even though in his argument that Judaism is not really a “religious faith” because of its lack of “faith
in a future life” Kant identifies belief in personal immortality as a necessary feature of true religion; see
RBMR, 6:126.
  

even more strongly than did his discussion in the first Critique, although after some
pages of tension he may also come down in favor of a communalistic conception even
more clearly than he previously did. His account remains what I am calling a
heavenly rather than earthly conception of the highest good, although in this case
it is clearly the perfection of virtue rather than the deliverance of happiness that Kant
postpones to a future life. This might seem to remove the incoherence of postulating
God as an author of nature who makes its laws, which govern the deliverance of
happiness, consistent with the laws of morality, for happiness is supposed to be
delivered only in a non-natural afterlife rather than in the natural life of human
beings whether individually or collectively. But Kant’s account remains incoherent,
since there is no reason why happiness should need to be delivered within nature or
consistently with its laws if virtue is to be perfected only in a non-natural future life,
and it would indeed seem premature for happiness to be delivered within nature if
virtue can be realized only beyond nature.
Kant introduces the concept of the highest good into the Critique of Practical
Reason in a way that strongly suggests that it must include the ideal of the happiness
of all insofar as that is consistent with and the product of universal morality. He
states that “pure practical reason . . . seeks the unconditioned for the practically
conditioned (which rests on inclinations and natural needs), not indeed as the
determining ground of the will, but even when this is given (in the moral law), it
seeks the unconditioned totality of the object of pure practical reason, under the
name of the highest good” (CPracR, 5:108). Here Kant does not, as in the Critique of
Pure Reason, suggest that a separate appeal to theoretical reason is necessary to
explain reason’s interest in the unconditioned: practical reason itself suffices as the
source for the demand for not only complete compliance with the moral law but also
the complete realization of the consequences of such compliance, namely the real-
ization of the particular ends set by ends in themselves and the happiness that would
be the natural consequence of such realization. Since the moral law demands that all
rational beings who can be affected by each other’s choice of maxim be treated as
ends in themselves, and therefore that all their particular ends and by consequence
the happiness of all of them be promoted, this obviously grounds a communalistic
rather than individualistic conception of the highest good. Kant confirms the intim-
ate connection between the moral law and a happiness which can therefore only be
the happiness of all in concluding the opening chapter of the “Dialectic of Pure
Practical Reason”: while he has been insisting that “the moral law is the sole
determining ground of the pure will,” he adds that it is “evident that if the moral
law is already included as supreme condition in the concept of the highest good, the
highest good is then not merely object: the concept of it and the representation of its
existence as possible by our practical reason are at the same time the determining
ground of the pure will” (CPracR, 5:109). This statement can only be explained on
the assumption that promoting the morally permissible and consistent ends of all
and therefore the happiness that would result for all from the realization of those
ends is itself enjoined by the moral law requiring that all be treated as ends in
themselves, and the ensuing argument should then be that the conditions for the
realization of this objective must be postulated as conditions for the coherence of
attempting to do what morality demands.
   

The second chapter of the “Dialectic,” however, might seem to introduce grounds
for an individualistic rather than communalistic conception of the highest good.
Here Kant begins by suggesting that their own, individual happiness is a natural
desire of “rational finite beings,” that is, human beings who have both pure reason
and natural desires, and that for an individual such being “to need happiness, to be
also worthy of it, and yet not to participate in it cannot be consistent with the perfect
volition of a rational being that would at the same time have all power” (CPracR,
5:110). Such a perfectly rational being might seem to be willing in accordance with
the principle that anyone who proves himself worthy of happiness by his or her own
virtue should be rewarded with his or her own happiness, regardless of what others
have done or will receive; and this, moreover, would seem to be the sort of inde-
pendent normative principle not derivable from the moral law itself that leads Rawls
to argue that the concept of the highest good must be distinct from the concept of an
ideal that can be derived from the fundamental law of morality itself, namely the
realm of ends and its realization in a moral world.
However, Kant continues the passage just cited by saying that “inasmuch as virtue
and happiness together constitute possession of the highest good in a person, and
happiness distributed in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and
his worthiness to be happy) constitutes the highest good of a possible world, the
latter means the whole, the complete good, in which however, virtue as the condition
is always the supreme condition, since it has no further condition above it” (CPracR,
5:110–11). The contrast between the highest good of a person and the highest good of
a possible world together with the claim that the latter means the whole, complete
good, strongly suggest that Kant invokes an individual conception of the highest
good only to introduce the communal conception, and that it is the latter that is in
fact the proper object of morality which must be shown to be believable through the
postulates of pure practical reason in order to prevent the commitment to morality
from becoming undermined. Of course, the happiness of any individual, that is, the
satisfaction or his or her particular but lawful ends, will also be part of the communal
highest good.
Yet this impression might itself seem to be undermined a page later, when Kant
writes that
It is clear from the Analytic that the maxims of virtue and those of one’s own happiness are
quite heterogeneous with respect to their supreme practical principle, and even though they
belong to one highest good, so as to make it possible, yet they are so far from coinciding that
they greatly restrict and infringe upon one another in the same subject. Thus the question, how
is the highest good possible? still remains an unsolved problem. . . . (CPracR, 5:112)
This might seem to suggest once again that the concept of the highest good is that of
an individual’s virtue rewarded with that individual’s happiness, regardless of the
condition of others. However, that would be a misinterpretation of the passage. Kant
has shown in the “Analytic” of the Critique of Practical Reason that the maxim of
virtue and the maxim of one’s own happiness are utterly heteronomous, thus that
there is no moral value in wishing or aiming for one’s own happiness for its own sake
and that such a maxim is utterly incompatible with a commitment to the moral law
for its own sake. Similarly the Religion poses the choice between good and evil as the
  

choice between the two fundamental maxims of morality and self-love, one of which
must be subordinated to the other (RBMR, 6:36). But the ultimate resolution of the
problem about the relation between one’s virtue and one’s own happiness will
ultimately be solved precisely by the recognition that one’s own happiness is part
of the happiness of all, thus that insofar as the virtuous commitment to the funda-
mental principle of morality in fact requires the promotion of universal and system-
atic happiness it in fact also requires the promotion of one’s own happiness, although
not on the immediate ground that one’s natural desire for one’s own happiness
makes it unconditionally valuable, but rather on the indirect ground that this is a
consequence of what is required by the fundamental moral requirement to treat all
humanity, in one’s own person and that of every other, as an end and never merely as
a means. Kant subsequently makes this clear when he writes that
although in the concept of the highest good, as that of a whole in which the greatest happiness
is represented as connected in the most exact proportion with the greatest degree of moral
perfection (possible in creatures), my own happiness is included, this is nevertheless not the
determining ground of the will that is directed to promote the highest good; it is instead the
moral law (which, on the contrary, limits by strict conditions my unbounded craving for
happiness). (CPracR, 5:129–30)

This is Kant’s ultimate resolution between morality’s insistence on the uncondi-

tional value of all rational beings and one’s natural desire for one’s own happiness:
one is allowed to will and strive for one’s own happiness, but only as part of the
systematic and universal happiness that one must will and strive for as a conse-
quence of the moral law itself. Thus Kant’s ultimate solution to the tension between
the demands of morality and the demands of nature in the second Critique
depends squarely on a communalistic rather than individualistic conception of
the highest good.
That being said, elements of an individualistic rather than communal conception
of the highest good do remain in the second Critique. One place they do not remain is
in any suggestion of the view that virtuous individuals should be rewarded with
happiness and vicious individuals should be punished with unhappiness, and that an
omniscient and omnipotent God must be postulated in order to ground our assur-
ance that this will happen. In spite of Kant’s use of the term “exact proportion,” there
is no basis in the argument of the second Critique for the ascription of such a view to
Kant, because, as we have just seen, he unequivocally states that the concept of the
highest good is “that of a whole in which the greatest happiness is represented as
connected in the most exact proportion with the greatest degree of moral perfection
(possible in creatures).” Morality requires the virtue of all together with the happiness
of all as its ideal consequence, or “self-reward” in the language of freedom; it simply
says nothing about punishment.
However, an individualistic conception of the highest good does rear its head in
Kant’s argument that immortality must be postulated as the condition for the
realization of the “greatest degree of moral perfection.” A key difference between
the argument of the first Critique and that of the second is that while in the earlier
work a future life was postulated as the locus for the realization of the happiness that
is supposed to follow from virtue, in the second Critique immortality is postulated as
   

the condition for the possibility of the perfection of human virtue in the form of
holiness. Thus Kant writes that in a will determinable by the moral law,
the complete conformity of dispositions with the moral law is the supreme condition of the
highest good . . . Complete conformity of the will with the moral law is, however, holiness, a
perfection of which no rational being of the sensible world is capable of at any moment of his
existence. Since it is nevertheless required as practically necessary, it can only be found in an
endless progress toward that complete conformity, and in accordance with principles of pure
practical reason it is necessary to assume such a practical progress as the real object of our will.
This endless progress is, however, possible only on the presupposition of the existence and
personality of the same rational being continuing endlessly (which is called the immortality of
the soul). (CPracR, 5:122)

Here Kant supposes that each person committed to morality must believe that he or
she has adequate time to perfect his or her own virtue by attaining the state of
holiness, and therefore that he or she is immortal. There is no reference to any
community of beings collectively perfecting their virtue in an endless future life. And
if the perfection of virtue is an individual affair, then presumably the happiness
which will somehow accompany that perfection—we cannot quite say that it will be
realized at the end of an endless progress, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow—
is also an individual affair.
Perhaps this lapse into individualism is just a manner of speaking, not something
that should really undermine the communalistic character of Kant’s conception of
the highest good in the second Critique. There are nevertheless two profound
problems with Kant’s treatment of the postulate of immortality. The first is simply
that he gives no reason for the demand that the perfection of human virtue take the
form of holiness, which on Kant’s account is the condition of a will that simply has no
inclinations contrary to the requirements of morality, “an accord of the will with the
pure moral law becoming, as it were, our nature, an accord never to be disturbed (in
which case the law would finally cease to be a command for us, in which case we
could never be tempted to be unfaithful to it)” (CPracR, 5:82). Kant himself, as we
have seen, finally states that the concept of the highest good is that of the greatest
happiness in exact proportion with the greatest moral perfection possible in creatures,
and Kant gives no reason why we should think of the latter as consisting in anything
other than refusing to act upon any inclinations contrary to the moral law in one’s
natural lifetime. Indeed Kant himself suggests precisely that when he says that “The
moral law is . . . for the will of a perfect being a law of holiness, but for the will of every
finite rational being a law of duty, of moral necessitation and of the determination of
his actions through respect for this law and reverence for his duty” (5:82). Finite
rational beings should thus be able to perfect their virtue by maintaining this respect
and reverence throughout their natural lifespans, and there is no need for immor-
tality in order to attain the highest degree of moral perfection possible for creatures.
In this regard, Kant’s argument for the postulate of immortality in the second
Critique seems even worse than his argument for it in the first.
Kant’s position on the necessary conditions for the conjunction of virtue and
happiness in the second Critique also seems incoherent in the same way as his position
in the first Critique did. In the first Critique there seemed to be no reason for Kant to
  

insist upon the postulation of God as an author of laws of nature that would make
happiness a consequence of virtue when he also insisted that happiness would only be
realized in a non-natural future life. In the second Critique Kant is even more insistent
than in the first that God is postulated precisely as an author or “supreme cause” of
nature the laws of which make possible happiness proportioned to morality (CPracR,
5:124–5), but there is again no need for happiness proportioned to morality to be
possible in nature if morality itself can be perfected only in a non-natural afterlife.
Kant’s conception of the highest good in the second Critique is basically commu-
nalistic rather than individual. It lapses into both individualism and incoherence
when it requires individual immortality for the perfection of virtue, although even
then it does not suggest that the highest good consists in the apportionment of
rewards and punishments in response to individual virtue and vice. It is incoherent in
requiring God as an author of laws making happiness the consequence of virtue
within nature when it postulates the perfection of virtue only beyond nature. But that
leaves room for a requirement of God as the ground for the conjunction of virtue and
happiness on a conception according to which both of those must be achieved by and
for the human community within nature. That is essentially the earthly but still
religious form that Kant’s conception of the highest good takes in his works of the
1790s, although even then we shall see that Kant sometimes emphasizes the postu-
lation of God as the condition for the realization of the happiness of the human
species once it has perfected its virtue as far as is possible for finite creatures, and
other times emphasizes God as the condition for the possibility of the perfection of
virtue itself—in this way mirroring the distinction between the roles assigned to the
postulate of immortality in the first and second critiques.

5. The Highest Good and the Ethical

Community in the 1790s
As did the first two critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment also culminates
with the argument that the highest good is the necessary object of morality and the
foundation for an “ethicotheology” (CPJ, }86, 5:442). Kant adds little to his previous
attempts to explain why morality makes the highest good its object, except to
emphasize that the ends that rational beings can choose to set for themselves are
suggested by nature, for that reason fall under the rubric of happiness, and that the
highest good at which morality aims is therefore properly described as “the highest
good in the world possible through freedom” (}87, 5:450). There is no room here for
a conception of the highest good as something that can be completed only in a non-
natural afterlife, and any such conception would be especially inconsistent with
Kant’s objectives in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” which is to complete
his philosophy of nature by arguing that although we can explain phenomena in
nature only by mechanical laws, we must also be able to conceive of those laws
themselves as having been designed to make it possible for us to realize our “final
end,” the development of our freedom and the achievement of our happiness through
our own freedom (see also }84, 5:435), within nature. And for this reason, Kant’s
standard argument that we can specify the properties of God only as the conditions of
   

the possibility of the realization of the highest good emphasizes that God’s properties
ground the possibility of the realization of the highest good in nature:
In relation to the highest good possible under his rule alone, namely the existence of rational
beings under moral laws, we will conceive of this original being as omniscient, so that even
what is inmost in their dispositions (which is what constitutes the real moral value of the
actions of rational beings in the world) is not hidden from him; as omnipotent, so that he can
make the whole of nature suitable for this highest end; as omnibenevolent and at the same time
just, because these two properties (united in wisdom) constitute the conditions of the causality
of a supreme cause of the world as a highest good under moral laws; and likewise all of the
remaining transcendental properties, such as eternity, omnipresence, etc. (for goodness and
justice are moral properties), which must be presupposed in relation to such a final end, must
also be thought in such a being.—In this way moral teleology makes good the defect of physical
teleology, and first establishes a theology. (CPJ, }86, 5:44; italics added)

That Kant describes the conditions for the realization of the highest good as a moral
teleology makes it clear that the highest good is supposed to be realized in nature even
though we must believe it to have a divine ground: Kant’s view here is thus clearly what
I have called an earthly but religious view. Kant does mention eternity, but only as a
property of God, not of human beings. He makes no use of the argument of the first
Critique that we must postulate our own immortality to give us time for the realization
of our happiness nor the argument of the second Critique that we must postulate
immortality in order to give us time for the perfection of our virtue. References to
immortality and thus to a heavenly rather than earthly conception of the highest good
recur only at the end of the third Critique, where Kant is analyzing the “kind of
affirmation produced by means of a practical faith” (}91, 5:467), and formulaically
repeats his earlier thesis that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are
“matters of faith” because they are “the sole conditions” of the possibility of the
highest good (5:469) without any argument that would show why immortality is
among these conditions (see also 5:470, 5:471, and 5:473, where the reference to
immortality is ritualistically repeated). Kant does not consciously surrender his heav-
enly conception of the conditions for the realization of the highest good, but that is
inconsistent with his claim that only a moral teleology can ground moral theology.
Kant returned to the topic of the highest good in his two important publications of
1793, the essay “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory but it is of no
use in practice” and the book Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The first
is a seminal work in which Kant first published the main themes of his political
philosophy, but its first section is a polemic with Christian Garve, who had argued
that Kant’s theory of the highest good could undermine his insistence that moral
motivation must be pure because it makes the promise of individual happiness a
motivation for morality and that the only way for Kant to avoid this is to remove
any consideration of ends and therefore happiness from morality altogether
(TP, 8:280–1).20 Kant vehemently objected to both parts of Garve’s charge. He argued

20
Kant is responding to arguments Garve made in his Versuche über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der
Moral und Literatur (Breslau, 1792), Part I, pp. 111–16.
  

that the human being must abstract from his individualistic natural end of his own
happiness in determining his duty and not make his own happiness “the condition of
his compliance with the law prescribed to him by reason,” but that he “is not thereby
required to renounce his natural end” (TP, 8:278–9), and he then argued that “this
concept of duty does not have to be grounded on any particular end but rather
introduces another end for the human being’s will, namely to work to the best of
one’s ability toward the highest good possible in the world (universal happiness
combined with and in conformity to the purest morality throughout the world”
(8:279). Kant insists that “not every end is moral (e.g., that of one’s own happiness is
not),” but that a truly moral end must be “unselfish,” thus in the language I have been
using here communalistic. But a human will must have an end, and thus a moral
human will must have an unselfish end, and this gives rise to the necessity of the
object of the highest good as a communalistic “whole of all ends”:
The need for a final end assigned by pure reason and comprehending the whole of all ends
under one principle (a world as the highest good and possible through our cooperation) is a
need of an unselfish will extending itself beyond observance of the formal law to production of
an object (the highest good). This is a special kind of determination of the will, namely through
the idea of the whole of all ends, the basis of which is that if we stand in certain moral relations
to things in the world we must everywhere obey the moral law, and beyond this there is the
duty to bring it about as far as we can that such a relation (a world in keeping with the moral
highest end) exists. . . . A determination of the will which limits itself and its aim of belonging to
such a whole to this condition is not selfish. (TP, 8:279–80n.)
Kant’s claim that the idea of the highest good is that of a whole of all ends which is
not selfish implies that it includes one’s own ends, but only as part of the ends of all
with whom we may stand “in certain moral relations . . . in the world.” Thus one does
not need to renounce one’s own ends and the desire for their fulfillment in one’s own
happiness, but to abstract from them as an incentive in making the highest good one’s
object (8:279)—and then the concept of the highest good will itself make one’s own
happiness part of one’s object.
Kant maintains that the realization of the highest good “is within our control
from one quarter but not from both taken together,” and that for this reason we
must believe “in a moral ruler of the world and in a future life” (8:279). Presumably
he means that our virtue is within our own control but not our happiness, and that
we must postulate both God and immortality to ensure the possibility of the
latter—which would bring him back to the position of the first Critique. But this
way of talking may be just a matter of habit here; his primary concern is to make
clear that the highest good is not a conception of individual reward but a communal
object of communal effort. He gives somewhat more attention to the postulate of
immortality in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, but only as part of a
complex argument that suggests that the idea of immortality is a subjective way of
representing the moral conversion from evil to good and thus the perfection of
virtue, but cannot be considered a genuinely necessary condition for the perfection
of virtue. Thus, in spite of what one might expect from a book that purports to
argue that among the historical religions Christianity most closely approximates
the contents of the religion of reason, Kant’s Religion may diminish the importance
   

of the postulate of immortality even more than the third Critique and the essay on
theory and practice had already done. At the same time, the Religion adds to Kant’s
“ethicotheology” the positive argument that the existence of God must be postu-
lated as the condition of the possibility of the existence of the “ethical community,”
which is an earthly condition of cooperation that facilitates the development of
individual and thereby collective virtue. Thus Kant finally concludes that the
perfection of virtue required by the highest good is a collective goal to be achieved
within the natural life of human beings, and that God is necessary as the condition
of the possibility of that—which finally makes his conception of the perfection of
virtue coherent with his view held since the second Critique that the collective
happiness of human beings required by the highest good is to be realized within
nature, and that God must therefore be postulated as the author of laws of nature
consistent with the moral law. Kant thereby arrives at a coherent conception of the
highest good as an earthly condition that would realize the normative ideal of the
realm of ends and a moral world, but that requires the postulation of a divine
condition of its possibility.
The present discussion of the Religion will therefore touch upon its treatments of
the highest good, immortality, and the ethical community. Kant’s preface to the
Religion, composed within a few months of the composition of the essay on theory
and practice as well as the four essays that comprise the new book, begins by
reiterating the point of the first part of the former: Kant distinguishes again between
pure moral motivation, which abstracts from all ends except for rational beings as
ends in themselves, and the object of morality, which has a “necessary reference to”
ends “not as the ground of its maxims but as a necessary consequence accepted in
conformity to them” (RBMR, 6:4). Kant holds again that “in the absence of all
reference to an end no determination of the will can take place in human beings at
all,” so that “it cannot possibly be a matter of indifference to reason how to answer
the question, what then is the result of this right conduct of ours?” (RBMR, 6:4–5).
He then states that although the idea of the highest good is not the “foundation” of
morality, it does rise out of morality, because what it does is to unite “within itself the
formal condition of all such ends as we ought to have (duty) with everything which is
conditional upon ends which we have and which conforms to duty (happiness
proportioned to its observance” (RBMR, 6:5). Using Kant’s subsequent exposition
of his theory of duties in the Metaphysics of Morals to interpret this statement,21 we
can understand this to mean that through the direct requirements of duty morality
requires us to make our own perfection, including our moral perfection, as well as the
happiness of others, our end, while morality allows us to pursue our own happiness
as far as doing so is consistent with the duties just enumerated. And from this we can
derive the conclusion that each of us must make his or her own virtue and the
happiness of all, his or her own and that of all others, his or her object, while together
we must make our object both the virtue of all and the happiness of all insofar as
that is required by and consistent with morality. Thus morality generates an
entirely communalistic conception of the highest good as its object and, ideally,

21
Thus taking the approach of Rawls.
  

necessary consequence. And Kant also emphasizes that this end must be achieved
within nature:
It cannot be a matter of indifference to morality, therefore, whether it does or does not fashion
for itself the concept of an ultimate end of all things (although, to be sure, harmonizing with
this end does not increase the number of morality’s virtues but rather provides these with a
special point for the unification of all ends); for only in this way can an objective practical
reality be given to the combination, which we simply cannot do without, of the purposiveness
from freedom and the purposiveness of nature. (RBMR, 6:5)

Thus the Religion begins with a clear statement that the highest good is a communal
condition, realizing the aims of morality and thus the normative conception of the
realm of ends or a moral world, that must be realized within nature—although of
course, given the nature of the work, within a nature that itself must be conceived as
having a divine ground.
Kant touches only briefly upon immortality in the Religion, and his position is not
easy to interpret. Kant introduces the idea of immortality in the second part of the
Religion, where he considers the Christian image of the Son of God as a model for
persuading us that we human beings can do what we know we ought to do. As in the
second Critique, he interprets the moral goal of the perfection of our virtue as the
attainment of holiness, and assumes that “the distance between the goodness that we
ought to effect in ourselves and the evil from which we start is . . . infinite, and, so far
as the deed is concerned—i.e., the conformity of the conduct of one’s life to the
holiness of the law—is not exhaustible in any time” (RBMR, 6:66). However, instead
of next arguing that we must therefore postulate that we have an infinite time in
which to achieve holiness in our disposition, Kant instead says that we must
nevertheless assume the possibility of a change of heart from evil into a disposition
entirely committed to “the universal and pure maxim of the agreement of conduct
with the law, as the germ from which all good is to be developed—which proceeds
from a holy principle adopted by the human being in his supreme maxim” (6:66).
Kant then adds that “according to our mode of estimation” (nach unserer Schätzung),
“unavoidably restricted to temporal conditions in our conceptions of the relation of
cause to effect,” we may conceive of our moral conversion only “as a continuous
advance in infinitum from a defective good to something better,” in which our action
is “at each instance inadequate to a holy law,” but that in the view of “him who
scrutinizes the heart (through his pure intellectual intuition,” our moral conversion
can be seen as “a perfected whole even with respect to the deed (the life conduct)”;
thus a human being “can still expect to be generally well-pleasing to God, at whatever
point in time his existence is cut short” (RBMR, 6:67; final emphasis added). Thus the
imperfection of our knowledge of our own motivation combined with our inability to
foresee the moment of our own death, which leaves an indefinitely extendable series
of actions open for us, may lead us to see our own moral conversion as an indefinitely
extended progress, but God can see that our moral conversion has actually been
completed (if it has been). A non-natural infinite lifespan is therefore unnecessary for
us to prove our worthiness of happiness, although a non-natural judge may be
necessary to see that we have proven that worthiness in our natural and therefore
finite lifespan. Kant then adds that “if after this life another awaits” a human being
   

who as far as he can see has made steady improvement in his moral conduct, then he
can reasonably hope that he will persevere in this progress in that second life, “for on
the basis of what he has perceived in himself so far, he can legitimately assume that
his disposition is fundamentally improved” (RBMR, 6:68, emphasis added; see also
6:77). But this is not to argue that we must believe that a future life is necessary in
order to complete our moral conversion from evil to good; on the contrary it is
merely to observe that if there is a future life then we can believe that the moral
conversion that we have in fact but not to our own certain knowledge completed in
this life will continue to determine our disposition. This may well represent a radical
change from Kant’s earlier argument for the postulation of immortality: here he is
merely showing how the Christian belief in immortality can be added to his
own conception of moral conversion, but not arguing that we must believe in
immortality in order to believe in the possibility of complete moral conversion
from evil to good.22
Part III of the Religion turns to the possibility of “the victory of the good principle
over the evil principle,” which would lead to “the founding of a realm of God on
earth” (RBMR, 6:93; emphasis added), the very title of the part thereby making it
clear that Kant now unequivocally holds that the moral world must be achieved
within nature although we must believe in a divine condition of its possibility. The
two key steps to Kant’s argument here are that the individual perfection of virtue
requires the support of an ethical community, and that we can only believe the
possibility of such a community itself depends upon the existence of God; in what is
really Kant’s final statement of his theory of the postulates of pure practical reason,
the postulate of the existence of God thus serves as the condition of the possibility of
the greatest virtue of human beings rather than or at least prior to serving as the
condition of the possibility of their happiness.
Neither step in Kant’s argument, in my view, is well developed. Although his concept
of ethical community has recently drawn a considerable amount of favorable
press,23 Kant is actually extremely vague about its role in the perfection of virtue.
He begins Part III with a quick argument that a human being will become vicious
only when he is “among other human beings,” thus creating opportunities for envy,
addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these
(RBMR, 6:93–4). Obviously, the presence of others is necessary to create opportun-
ities for the development of such vices, but Kant must also be assuming that the
presence of others creates a tendency to the development of these vices. (In this
argument Kant says nothing about the origin of purely self-regarding vices, such as
sloth or gluttony.) Kant then says that without “a union which has for its end the
prevention of this evil and the promotion of the good in the human being—an

22
In spite, as I previously noted, of his inclusion of “faith in a future life” as a condition of true “religious
faith” in his critique of Judaism; RBMR, 6:126.
23
See especially Sharon Anderson-Gold, “God and Community: An Inquiry into the Religious Impli-
cations of the Highest Good,” in Philip J. Rossi and Michael Wreen, eds, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion
Reconsidered (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 113–31; Michalson, Kant and the Problem
of God, pp. 100–22; Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, pp. 309–20; and Philip J. Rossi, The Social Authority of
Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Humankind (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005),
pp. 87–112.
  

enduring and ever expanding society, solely designed for the preservation of morality
by counteracting evil with united forces—however much the individual human being
might do to escape from the domain of this evil, he would still be held in incessant
danger of relapsing into it” (6:94). Although one might have expected Kant to argue
that a community collectively committed to virtue would prevent such vices as envy
and avarice from arising by providing pressures to virtue opposed to the pressures to
vice that are otherwise prevalent in society, what this statement suggests is rather that
the ethical community can only reinforce individual commitments to virtue rather
than vice, thereby preventing relapses from individual conversions to the good. This
might in fact be what one should expect given Kant’s general theory of the absolute
freedom of moral agents, but it does restrict the role of the ethical community,
making it not a necessary condition for moral conversion but a, possibly only one,
support for the maintenance of virtue once it has been achieved. But even if this is all
that the ethical community actually does, that would at least obviate the obvious
objection that the ethical community is nothing but the product of individual choices
to be virtuous, playing no role at all in the individual choices to be virtuous. One
thing that we should take away from Kant’s discussion of individual moral progress
in Part II of the Religion is that although human beings may undergo true moral
conversions within their finite lifespans even if they can never be certain that they
have in fact done so, their virtue is not complete at one moment but must be
maintained throughout that lifespan. Communal support for that effort rather than
pressure to undermine it would certainly be welcome.
Kant is also vague about just how the ethical community provides its support for
its members’ efforts to maintain their virtue. He says little more than that “In
addition to prescribing laws to each individual human being, morally legislative
reason also unfurls a banner of virtue as rallying point for all those who love the
good, that they may congregate under it and thus at the very start gain the upper
hand over evil land its untiring attacks” (RBMR, 6:94). Kant emphasizes that it would
be contradictory for the ethical community to advance the cause of virtue by
providing coercive enforcement of moral laws—this must be left to the “juridico-
civil (political) state” (6:95), which can of course coercively enforce only a small part
of our moral duties, namely our duties to avoid injury to the external freedom of
others. But otherwise he seems to suggest only that the ethical community celebrates
the commitment to the cause of virtue and by that means reinforces individual
commitments to virtue or perhaps encourages individual conversions to virtue.
One might have thought that the ethical community would play an indispensable
role in moral education, being the means by which both the contents of our duties
and examples of those who have fulfilled them are communicated to our young. But
Kant does not explicitly assert that.
I will come back to the relation between the “juridico-civil state” and the ethical
community or “ethico-civil state” in a moment, but first I want to comment on the
second step of Kant’s argument, namely his claim that belief in the existence of God is
a necessary condition for the existence of the ethical community and thus for the
support of the individual conversion to good from evil, whatever the details of that
support. This step is not based on the supposition that always imperfect human
efforts to be virtuous need to be completed by an act of divine grace, although Kant at
   

least entertains that idea in Part II of the Religion (6:74–5). It depends instead on the
premise that laws will only be effective for us if they are attributed to a lawgiver. Kant
then argues that the source of the laws of the ethical community cannot be the
sovereign of a political state, however sovereignty is assigned, because such a sover-
eign legislates only laws “directed to the legality of actions, which is visible to the
eye,” not laws “designed to promote the morality of actions (which is something
internal, and hence cannot be subject to public human laws)” (6:98–9). Since we
cannot represent laws concerning the internal conditions for virtue as laws legislated
by “the people, as a people,” Kant infers that we can represent the “supreme law-giver
of an ethical community, with respect to whom all true duties, hence also the ethical,
must be represented as at the same time his commands,” only as “God as a moral
ruler of the world. Hence an ethical community is conceivable only as a people under
divine commands, i.e., as a people of God, and indeed in accordance with the laws
of virtue” (6:99). The possibility of an ethical community depends upon a belief in
the existence of God because God is represented as the source of the laws of such
a community.
In drawing attention to this argument and the radical revision of the role of the
postulate of the existence of God that it represents, I by no means intend to
endorse it. Kant’s argument in fact seems to depend upon an inference from the
fact that a people as a political unit cannot be the source of purely ethical
legislation to the unsupported idea that there is no form of association among
human beings that can credibly promulgate and celebrate such legislation. Thus
Kant’s argument seems to be fallacious, and should be distinguished from his
claim several years later in the unpublished Opus postumum that we use the
image of a divine lawgiver to represent the power of our own reason to legislate
to the other side of our own existence, namely our sometimes unruly and
refractory desires, inclinations, and emotions.24 In the Opus postumum, Kant
also stresses although we represent the “subject of the categorical imperative . . . as
God,” and “it cannot be denied that such a being exists,” it also “cannot be
asserted that it exists outside rationally thinking man. In him—the man who
thinks morally according to our own commands of duty—we live (sentimus),
move (agimus), and have our being (existimus).”25 On this account the condition
of the possibility of the ethical community would lie in nothing other than the
quasi-divine power of human practical reason itself.
I shall not attempt to decide here whether Kant changed his mind about the
postulate of the existence of God between 1793 and the end of the century, or merely
changed his mind about what he would have been willing to publish after the change
in the Prussian regime that took place in 1797. (He did not in fact live to publish the
Opis postumum, but had been working on it with the intention of publishing another
book, in his final conception a complete restatement of transendental idealism.)

24
See, for example, Opus postumum, VIIth fascicle, sheet V, p. 2, 22:251–3; in Kant, Opus postumum,
ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 211–13.
25
Opus postumum, VIIth fascicle, sheet V, p. 3, 22:55; in Förster, pp. 213–14.
  

My concern has been only to establish that in the Religion Kant has emphasized that
we should think of the existence of God primarily as the condition of our own
achievement of virtue. This at least suggests the highest good, which was the initial
concern of the book, will take care of itself if we attend to our virtue, which is
consistent with the idea that the universal happiness that should be the complement
of universal virtue would be a consequence of that virtue rather than an externally
granted reward for it. In any case, Kant does stress a strictly communalistic rather
than individualistic conception of the highest good in his discussion of ethical
community. He maintains that “since the duties of virtue concern the entire
human race, the concept of an ethical community always refers to the ideal of a
totality of human beings, and in this it distinguishes itself from the concept of a
political community” (RBMR, 6:96). He then claims that in our duty to leave an
“ethical state of nature” in order to establish an ethical community, “we have a duty
sui generis, not of human beings toward human beings but of the human race toward
itself,” and thus that as a species we are “objectively—in the idea of reason—destined
to a common good, namely the promotion of the highest good as a good common to
all” (6:97). He continues:
But, since this highest moral good will not be brought about solely through the striving of one
individual person for his own moral perfection but rather requires a union of such persons into
a whole toward that very end, toward a system of well-disposed human beings in which, and
through the unity of which alone, the highest moral good can come to pass, yet the idea of such
a whole, as a universal republic based on the laws of virtue, differs entirely from all moral laws
(which concern what we know to reside within our power), for it is the idea of working toward
a whole of which we cannot know whether as a whole it is also in our power . . . We can already
anticipate that this duty will need the presupposition of another idea, namely, of a higher moral
being through whose universal organization the forces of single individuals, insufficient on
their own, are united for a common effect. (6:97–8)
This crucial passage makes several points that may be regarded as central to Kant’s
final conception of the highest good. First, he clearly indicates that the ideal of the
highest good arises directly from the idea of pure reason, here obviously pure
practical reason. The highest good would thus simply be the realization of the
pure practical ideas of a moral world and a realm of ends. Second, Kant makes it
clear beyond all doubt that the highest good is not an individual good that can be
brought about by the virtue of an individual but a good of the entire human species
that can be brought about only by the virtue of all—“a system of well-disposed
human beings.” The highest good is thus a condition that must be realized by
the human species rather than individually. Third, the biological reference to the
human species clearly suggests that the highest good is to be realized within nature,
not beyond nature, even though we must believe that its realization depends upon
the existence of a “higher moral being.” Finally, the claim that the role of this higher
moral being is to organize the forces of single individuals is at least consistent with
the general idea that God is postulated to explain the possibility of the collective
development of virtue—however the details of that argument are supposed to go—
and that if human beings with this assistance collectively organize the exercise of
   

their virtue, happiness will at least eventually—but in the life of the species—take
care of itself.

6. The Highest Good and the Highest Political Good

Kant’s final position is thus that through an ethical community organized in accord-
ance with the ideal of a moral world and realm of ends, the highest good of the
species should emerge in its earthly course, although with define support. Before
I rest with this conclusion, however, I want to return at least briefly to the question of
the relation between the ethical community and the “juridico-civil state,” that is, to
the relation between the highest good and politics. Philip Rossi has advocated
that what Kant sometimes calls the “highest political good,” namely the establish-
ment of perpetual peace, is the vehicle for the realization of the highest good properly
speaking.26 This seems to fly in the face of Kant’s insistence that the concept of the
ethical community, which he does maintain is the condition of the possibility of the
realization of the highest good, is to be distinguished from that of the juridico-civil
state. Kant does call perpetual or “universal and lasting” peace “the entire final end of
the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason” and the “highest political
good” in the conclusion of the Doctrine of Right of the Metaphysics of Morals (6:355).
Kant defines the political as the sphere within which duties and rights can be
coercively enforced (see MM, 6:218–19), and infers that “it would be a contradiction
(in adjecto) for the political community to compel its citizens to enter into an ethical
community, since the latter entails freedom from its very concept” (RBMR, 6:95). An
ethical community is one to which all members have freely chosen to belong and in
which they have all freely chosen to commit themselves to virtue rather than vice, so
it cannot be established or maintained by coercion. For that reason the “highest
political good” would not seem to be able to contribute to the establishment of the
highest good properly speaking through an ethical community, although one would
certainly think the converse to be true, namely that the highest good properly
speaking would include the highest political good, perpetual peace. But there is no
reason to think that the establishment of perpetual peace by political means should
be a sufficient condition for the establishment of the highest good properly speaking,
even if it would follow from it.
One might think to escape this objection to a position like Rossi’s by observing that
while in an early writing like “On the Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmo-
politan Point of View” (1784) Kant does seem to think of perpetual peace being
achieved by a “system of united power, hence a cosmopolitan system of general
political security, thus a federation with coercive powers of enforcement” (IUH,
Seventh Proposition, 8:26), in Toward Perpetual Peace (1795) and the discussion of
the “right of nations” in the Doctrine of Right he seems to advocate only a “congress”
or “voluntary coalition of different states which can be dissolved at any time” (MM,
Doctrine of Right, }61, 6:351), and which does not have any enforcement powers.
Thus one might claim that the condition of perpetual peace can only be produced by

26
See Rossi, The Social Authority of Reason, passim.
  

global good will, and must thus be considered as a product of a global ethical
community even if it is not yet equivalent to or a sufficient condition for the highest
good properly speaking. But that suggestion still seems to be inconsistent with Kant’s
position that perpetual peace is the ultimate goal of the doctrine of right or justice,
which implies that it concerns the external relations of nations and their peoples, and
does not concern the motivation and hence the virtue of those peoples at all. Further,
Kant seems to suggest that perpetual peace can and will eventually be brought about
by natural mechanisms, namely, the burdens of war leading nations to become
republics and the benefits of international trade, and obviously the internal condition
of virtue, which is a necessary component and indeed the ground of the highest good
properly speaking, cannot be brought about by an external mechanism. While nature
may compel mankind to seek the solution to the problem of “attaining a civil society
which can administer justice universally” (IUH, Fifth Proposition, 8:22), nature
cannot compel mankind to become virtuous. Indeed, perhaps that is why when
Kant postulates God as the ground of the ethical community in the Religion, he is
careful not to suggest that God does this through his authorship of the laws of nature,
but only through his authorship of the moral law.
Yet there are two things that can be said on behalf of the proposal that the highest
political good is in fact an indispensable factor in the establishment of the highest
good properly speaking. First, although Kant suggests in the Religion that while the
political community may be a stepping-stone toward the ethical community—he says
that “without the foundation of a political community,” the ethical community
“could never be brought into existence by human beings” (6:94)—perhaps the
political community should not be thought of as a stepladder that is simply left
behind once the ethical community has been achieved. For remember that Kant has
always characterized the highest good as the greatest happiness in exact proportion to
the highest degree of moral perfection possible for creatures: it may be that while the
idea of an ethical community founded entirely on the good will of its members is an
admirable moral ideal for human beings, the highest degree of virtue that we can
reasonably expect to attain under natural conditions is the creation of political
conditions that will at least enforce outward compliance with the demands of
morality. The greatest degree of happiness that we could then reasonably expect
would be that degree of happiness that can be created through the best possible
administration of justice together with the always lesser degree of human virtue that
we can expect, and the conjunction of that degree of happiness with that degree of
virtue would then be the highest good possible, as Kant so often says, in the world,
that is, in the natural conditions of human existence. The maintenance of perpetual
peace, even if this should involve the use of coercion at the national or even the
international level, would then not merely be a stepladder to a higher degree of virtue,
which can be left behind once it has fulfilled its purpose, but would remain an
essential component of the highest good actually possible for human beings.
But it should also be mentioned that Kant may not mean that the political
condition of perpetual peace can be mechanically created by merely natural means
in the first place. Although the interpretation of this passage is certainly controver-
sial, in the first Appendix of Perpetual Peace Kant may mean to argue that although
the coercive means for the establishment of justice at the national level and the
   

appropriate means, whatever they are, for the establishment of peace at the inter-
national level can be devised or described even by a “nation of devils” (8:366), they can
in fact be instituted and maintained only by “moral politicans” (8:372), who will
themselves make the choice out of their own virtue to institute coercive laws by means
of which even those who are not themselves virtuous can be compelled to act in at
least outward compliance with at least those demands of morality concerning the
maintenance of external freedom and to enforce those laws justly. In other words,
although the political condition uses coercive means to maintain justice, even a just
political condition does not itself come into existence automatically, but depends
upon the free and virtuous choice of those who have in one way or another (itself
usually not just) come into power to institute a condition of justice. And perhaps a
condition in which some virtuous individuals choose to institute a political system in
which others can be coerced into at least outward compliance with some of the
demands of morality is the highest degree of virtue that the human species can actually
expect. In this case, the degree of happiness that would be possible in and result from
such a political system and the imperfect exercise of further ethical duties would be
the greatest happiness that is actually possible for human beings, and the conjunction
of that degree of virtue with that degree of happiness would in fact be the highest
good properly speaking possible for human beings.

7. Conclusion
We thus reach the following conclusions about the relations among Kant’s several
conceptions of community. The concept of the realm of ends characterizes the goal of
our moral choice of maxims in the most abstract terms, by enjoining us to treat all
rational beings with whom we may interact as ends in themselves and to seek a
systematic union of the particular ends freely chosen by all such rational beings,
including of course ourselves, as a consequence of the moral status of those who
choose those ends. The idea of a moral world is the idea of the realization of the goal
of the realm of ends, in principle in any kind of world but in practice in the sensible
world. The idea of the highest good is the idea of the condition that would result from
the realization of a moral world and therefore of the realm of ends under ideal
conditions, in which virtue would not merely make those who have it worthy of
happiness but the virtue of all would make all happy as far as is possible consistently
with the demands of morality. Although Kant sometimes makes it seem that those
particular individuals who are worthy of happiness must be able to believe that they
will eventually become happy regardless of the moral failings of other agents, his
predominant view from the first Critique to the Religion is that the goal of the highest
good is that of the virtue of all combined with, indeed as the source of, the happiness
of all, and that each agent must be able to believe that the realization of this goal is
possible for the attempt to be moral to be rational and for the commitment to being
moral not to be undermined. In the first and second critiques, although for slightly
different reasons, Kant argues that we can only conceive of the two components of
the highest good as being fully realized in a future life, and on those accounts the
realm of ends and a moral world will only be fully realized in an intelligible rather
than a sensible world. In all of his writings of the 1790s, however, even including the
  

Religion, Kant argues that we must be able to believe that both components of the
highest good, and thus the moral ideals of the realm of ends and a moral world, can
be fully realized in the sensible world by the human species, at least over the course of
its existence as its species. This earthly conception of the highest good remains a
religious conception, however, because Kant continues to maintain that we must
postulate God as the condition of the possibility of its realization. Finally, although
the concept of the condition of global justice in the form of perpetual peace that
constitutes the highest political good is not equivalent to the concept of the greatest
happiness in exact proportion to the highest degree of virtue, the condition of the
highest political good cannot be produced without the virtuous motivation of at least
some human beings, namely moral politicians, and it may be that the degree of virtue
that would be represented by the highest political good and the addition of an always
imperfect fulfillment of ethical duties together with the degree of happiness that
would result from that may be the highest good that is possible for human beings, so
in that way the concepts of the highest political good and the highest good may be
almost intensionally even though not extensionally equivalent.
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Index

Achenwall, Gottfried 108n6, 224 Cicero 25

Action 90, 202–3 circle, in proof of moral law 140–1, 144, 151,
Allison, Henry E. 132n6, 137, 144n18, 148n2, 166–7, 169, 171, 173–4
155n10, 164n2, 168n7, 173–4n11 Clarke, Samuel 23
Ameriks, Karl E. 157n13, 164n2, 167n6, 169n7, Cleanthes 6
174n12 coercion 218
analytic vs. synthetic methods 128–30, 138–40, Collins, Georg Ludwig 239
142–3, 163–4, 166 Community, moral x, xiv–xv, 275–302
Anderson-Gold, Sharon 295n23 conscience ix, xiv, 95, 213, 230–1, 249, 252–4
Annas, Julia 70n1 consequentialism 75–6
Antinomy of Pure Reason, third 148–9 Cooper, John M. 70n2
apagogic proof 130–1, 133–4 Crusius, Christian August 5, 44n15, 185
Aristotle 70–2, 83, 186 custom 188
Arius Didymus 6 Cynicism 44
autonomy v–vi, x, xi, 3–18, 31, 77, 81, 167, 171
formula of 13, 89 Dean, Richard 91n9, 137
Denis, Lara xii, xiv, 107n4, 108n7, 115n17
Bader, Ralf M. 55n2, 70n1 Descartes, René 136, 185, 187, 215
Banham, Gary 79n9 determinism ix, 18, 146–54, 178
Baron, Marcia 70n1, 223–4n9, 256n17 Dialectic of Practical Reason 152, 176, 285, 287
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 37, 38, 71, DiCenso, James J. 180n17
81n11, 137, 232n25 dignity 38, 43, 205, 258
Beck, Lewis White 53n20, 174n12, 241n9 Diogenes Laertius 5–6
begging 117 domination 45–6, 59
Beiser, Frederick C. 284n17 duty xi, 163, 207, 220–1, 224–8, 262
belief 185–98 classification of 14
beneficence, duty of 103, 217, 254, 256, 263, derivation of 108–24
268, 279 ethical vs. duties of virtue proper 216–19
benevolence 41, 47, 102–4, 279 see also mind’s receptivity to concepts of ix, xiv, 213,
beneficence, duty of 230, 247–9
Bojanowski, Jochen 178n14 perfect vs. imperfect 39, 68, 87–8, 107,
Boleyn, Anne 271 108–9, 113, 115, 129, 232, 258, 266–7
borrowing 117 of right vs. of virtue 67, 90, 91, 92–4, 107,
Brandt, Reinhard 151n6 108, 115, 116–18, 216–18, 266–8
Brewer, Talbott 70n1 to others xii, 14, 93, 102–4, 112–13, 225–8,
232n26, 267
catechism, moral 264–5 to self xii, 14, 64, 92–3, 99–102, 112, 114, 210,
categorical imperative vi, vii, xi, 11, 14, 30–1, 225–7, 232–3, 267
36–53, 81–3, 88–90, 102, 129, 131–8, to be virtuous 216–34
163–4, 167, 172, 280, 283 see also
autonomy, formula of; humanity, formula education 121–2, 260–72, 296
of; realm of ends, formula of; universal law, egoism 58
formula of empiricism 186, 189
Chance, Brian A. 186n1 ends v, vii, x, 11, 87–104, 105–24
character, empirical vs. intelligible 165, 179, that are also duties xiii
237, 246 essential xi, 54–69, 105–7
children realm of; formula of realm of x, xiv, 13–15,
duty to 121–2 82, 89, 103, 276–80
education of 160–1, 263–72 Engstrom, Stephen 70n1
Christianity 33, 196 Enlightenment, the 3, 263n3
Chrysippus 6 Epicureanism 44
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Epicurus 80, 169n8 Herman, Barbara 123n21, 159n17, 169n8,

Euclid 24 214n33, 231n23, 256
evil heteronomy 167–8
possibility of ix, xii, xiii, 144, 165–6, 173, highest good x, xiv–xv, 55–6, 77, 83–5, 191–6,
179–84, 237 198, 279, 281–94
radical 181–2, 196, 244 Hill, Thomas E., Jr. 140n15, 147n1, 148n2, 169n8
examples in moral education xiv, 260–72 Hobbes, Thomas 80, 215
Hogan, Desmond 238n3
fatalism 152–4 holiness 229, 234, 268–9, 289
Firestone, Chris L. 33–4n22 humanity vi–vii, x, xi, xii, 14, 43, 57, 63–4, 68,
Fleischacker, Samuel 167n5 91–4, 95–6, 103, 105–7, 109–12, 131–2,
Forman, David 99n14 134–7, 138, 191, 211, 228, 266
fraud 87, 278 formula of, vii, xi, 11–13, 15, 82, 88–9, 106,
freedom 110, 129, 134–7, 210, 277
innate right to 93, 97 Hume, David x, xiii, 21–5, 34–5, 143, 146,
and passion 201–2, 206–15 185–91, 197–8, 201–6, 213, 215, 271n10
positive vs. negative conceptions of 3, 7, 9, Hunter, Ian 40n11
10–11, 15, 44–5, 46–7, 66, 138, 166–8, 211 Hutcheson, Francis 23–4, 26, 29–30, 80, 203n8,
to set ends 87–104 209, 238
as value v–vii, x, xi, xv, 3, 7, 10, 12–13, 36–53, hypothetical imperatives 36, 39–40, 42, 95,
54–69, 105–7, 115–24 116, 133
freedom of the will v–vi, viii–ix, xii, 31, 44, 58,
66, 83, 139–43, 146–62, 163–84, 237–9 imagination 187–8
Frege, Gottlob 145 immortality xiii, 190–8, 288–90, 292–5
friendship 122–4 impartial spectator 42
imputation 149–50, 160, 181
Garve, Christian 56, 192, 194, 195, 291n20 Incentives of Pure Practical Reason 242–7
generosity 39 inclination 8, 11, 45, 52, 58, 60–3, 67, 84n17,
Gilligan, Carol 276n5 133, 163, 180–1, 206–7, 221, 235,
God 243–4, 282
duty toward 224–8 incorporation 181
and moral law 5 Insole, Christopher J. 180n17
postulate of existence of xiii, xiv, 84–5, 139, Irwin, T. H. 70n1
185–6, 190, 191–4, 197–8, 253, 284, 286,
290, 292, 295–8, 300 Jacobs, Nathan 34n22
good will 41, 67–8, 90, 91n9, 139, 163, 262, 300 Johnson, Robert N. 91n8, 96n10
grace 283 Judaism 285n19, 295n22
gratitude 254 justice, sense of 26–7, 41
Gregor, Mary J. 67n7, 70, 141n16, 248, 277
Guevara, Daniel 236n1, 240n8, 241n9, 244n10 Kames, Henry Home, Lord x, 22, 25–6, 28–9,
Guyer, Paul 13n24, 30n20, 32n21, 36–7n2, 34–5
44n15, 53n19, 56n3, 67n7, 69n8, 78n7, Kant, Immanuel, works
91n8, 111n11, 113n14, 132n6, 136n10, Announcement of Programme of Lectures for
181n18, 211n31, 216n2, 221n8, 250n14, Winter Semester 1755–6 238n4
253n15, 261n1 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of
View 159n16, 207, 214
habit 70–1 Critique of Practical Reason v, vii, viii, ix, x,
Hamann, Johann Georg 187 xii, xiv, 17, 21–2, 32–3, 51, 53, 55, 65, 67,
happiness x, xiii, 8, 44–6, 55, 62, 83–4, 90, 95, 80–1, 84–5, 102n18, 107, 108, 134n8, 144,
102–4, 108, 109, 113–14, 120–1, 133, 152, 153–4, 156–8, 165, 174–80, 183–4,
191–5, 207, 281–95 see also highest good 185, 192–3, 198, 212, 235, 239, 240, 241–7,
Heath, Peter 238n5–6 251, 261, 268–72, 279, 282, 285–90
Helvetius, Claude 80 Critique of Pure Reason 12n23, 16, 17–18, 54,
Henrich, Dieter 53n20, 127, 157n13, 174n12, 55, 56, 69, 79–80, 85, 127, 130–1, 148–9,
210n29 153, 154, 156–8, 164, 165, 167, 170, 172,
Henry VIII 271 184, 185, 185–6, 191–2, 195, 212, 235, 242,
Herder, Johann Friedrich 5 275, 280, 281–5, 292, 301
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Kant, Immanuel, works (cont.) 84, 91n9, 136, 145, 160n20, 165, 180–4,
Critique of the Power of Judgment 3, 24, 56, 196–7, 220, 237, 240, 244, 261, 263, 268–9,
85, 95, 158, 185, 193–5, 250n14, 261n1, 275, 287–8, 292–8, 301–2
282, 290–1, 293 Toward Perpetual Peace 299–301
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals v, Kerstein, Samuel J. 263n4
vi, vii, viii, xi, xii, xiv, 3, 8, 10–14, 16–17, Kitcher, Patricia 158n15
21–2, 29–32, 36n2, 42, 43, 44n16, 51, 57–8, Klemme, Heiner x
64, 65–9, 70, 81–2, 84, 88–90, 95, 103, 106, Köhl, Harald 249n13
108, 109n8, 110–11, 118, 127–30, 132–6, Korsgaard, Christine M. viii, 34–5, 41n13,
138–44, 147, 151–2, 154–6, 158, 163–73, 58n5, 70n1, 110–11, 137, 147n1, 159n18,
176, 178, 183–4, 191, 195–6, 206–8, 169n8
210–12, 217, 220–1, 228, 235–6, 239–41,
262–4, 266, 275, 277–80, 285 legislation 93–4
“Idea for a Universal History from a Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 5, 40n11, 44n15,
Cosmopolitan Point of View” 299–300 186, 283
Inaugural dissertation (On the Form and Locke, John 136, 186
Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible Louden, Robert 70n1
World) 16, 30, 43, 170, 264 love, of others ix, xiv, 95–6, 104, 115, 120–1,
Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the 213, 249, 254–7
Principles of Natural Theology and lying 97
Morality 29, 36–7, 78, 209, 238n4
Lectures on anthropology 207–8, 214–15 Mandeville, Bernard 80
Lectures on ethics v, vi, xi, xii, xiv, 5, 39n9, marriage 123–4
54, 57, 64–5, 71, 80–1, 87–9, 91, 92, maxims 11, 13, 15, 42, 55, 89, 99, 133, 138, 167,
99–101, 103–4, 105–24, 149–50, 153, 221, 236, 246–7 see also universal law,
160–1, 210, 237–9 formula of
Lectures on logic 131, 136 fundamental 181–2, 196, 237, 246,
Lectures on pedagogy 266–7, 270 249, 287
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Mendelssohn, Moses 71, 77–9
Science 109n8 Menzer, Paul 37n3
Metaphysics of Morals vi, xii, xiv, 12, 39n9, merit 222
57–8, 66–7, 90, 91–4, 107, 108, 109n8, Michalson, Gordon E., Jr. 275n1, 284n18,
111n10, 128–9n2, 219–20, 239, 266, 293 295n23
Doctrine of Right 92, 97–8, 108, 197, 216, miserliness 100, 117–18
218, 299 Montaigne, Michel de 80
Doctrine of Virtue 70–1, 75, 82, 84, 88, moral feeling xiv, 36–7, 47, 50, 213, 230–1,
97n12, 102–3, 106, 109, 117n19, 118–19, 235–59 see also respect
120–1, 122, 136, 211, 213–14, 216–17, moral law vii–viii, xii, xiv, 4, 5, 21, 30, 44, 84,
222–3, 229–34, 236, 248–57, 264–5, 279 87, 108, 132–3, 139–40, 157, 163–5, 169,
Naturrecht Feyerabend vi, 10, 13, 105–6 172–7, 184, 212, 221, 262–3, 264–6 see also
New Exposition of the First Principles of categorical imperative
Metaphysical Cognition 7n13, 44n15 moral politicians 301
Notes in the Observations on the Feeling of the moral sense theory 238 see also moral
Beautiful and Sublime viii, x–xi, 7–10, sentiments
37–50, 59–61, 96, 143, 209 moral sentiments 22–9, 203–6
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful moral world 80, 276, 280
and Sublime x, 37–8 moral worth 207, 220–3, 235–6, 281–2
“On the Common Saying: That may be correct Morgan, Serriol 181n18
in theory but it is of no use in practice” 56, motivation ix, 47, 56, 84, 90, 93–4, 208,
84, 192–3, 195, 198, 275, 279, 291–2 213, 219
“On Optimism” 5 Munzel, G. Felicitas 262n2
Opus postumum 297 Musil, Robert 96
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics 176
Reflexionen 44n16, 50–3, 55, 61–4, 81n12, natural selection 34
144, 147, 209–10 nature, living in accordance with 5–6
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere non-contradiction viii, 8, 52, 60, 118, 132, 144
Reason ix, xii–xiii, 21–2, 33–4, 44n15, 56, Norris, Henry 271
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normative essentialism viii, x, 17, 49–50, 58, respect ix, xiv, 90, 201–2, 217, 235–6, 238–47,
65, 144 250–1, 257
noumena, contrasted to phenomena 16–17, 32 responsibility 159–62 see also imputation
right v, 10, 90, 93, 95, 96–8, 116–18, 216–18
obligation 216–34 see also duty see also duty
O’Neill, Onora viii, 41n13, 99n15, 144n18, universal principle of 97, 108
263n5 Rossi, Philip J. 276n4, 295n23
ostensive proof 130–1, 134 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 7, 45
Russell, Bertrand 145
Palmquist, Stephen R. 33–4n22, 180n17
parents, duties of 121–2 Schilpp, Paul Arthur 37n3
passions xiii, 3, 5–6, 99, 201–6, 208, 211–15 Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard 237n2
Pasternack, Lawrence R. 34n22, 180n17 Schmucker, Josef 37n3, 38
Paton, Herbert James 36n2, 133n7, 174n12 Schönecker, Dieter xii, 141n16, 151n6, 164n2,
peace, perpetual 299–301 167n6, 169n8, 172n10, 174n11
perfection xiii Schopenhauer, Arthur 7
of self 90, 93, 95, 101, 108, 111, 118–20, 279 Sedgwick, Sally 276n5
of will 9, 48, 51, 61 self, phenomenal vs. noumenal 164–5, 170, 173,
Wolff on 73–5 176–8
perfectionism xi, 40n11, 70–86 self-conceit 244–5, 259
phenomena, contrasted to noumena 16–17 self-control 45–6
see also character, empirical vs. intelligible; self-enslavement 116–17
transcendental idealism self-esteem ix, xiv, 213, 236, 257–9
philanthropy 41 self-knowledge 95, 233, 253
Pippin, Robert B. 67n7, 169n8 self-mutilation 92–3, 94, 116
Plato 3, 4, 5, 17, 70, 186, 265n7–8 self-possession 99, 100–1, 119
postulates Seneca 6
of pure practical reason xiii, 4, 83, 185, 187, Sensen, Oliver xii
191–8, 284–5, 286, 290, 292–8 sex 123–4
value of humanity as vii, 69, 136, 138–45 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third
proof 127–45 Earl of 4, 80, 238, 263n3
property 41, 93, 95, 97–8, 108 Shell, Susan x, 38
prudence 40 Sherman, Nancy 70n1, 256n17
Pufendorf, Samuel 40n11, 100, 104, 112–13, Sidgwick, Henry 155–6
211n30, 224–8, 232n25 Silber, John 114n16
Pütter, Johann Stephan 108n6, 224 sin, original 196
skeptical method 186–8
Quarfood, Marcel 141n16, 167n5 skepticism 186–8
Smith, Adam x, 22, 25, 26–8, 34–5, 42, 252
Rawls, John 4, 174n12, 275n2, 276n8, 278–9, sociability 43
280, 284 Socrates 5, 70, 265
reason vii, viii, xiii, 3, 5–6, 11, 23–4, 31, 79–80, spontaneity 49, 60, 142–3
142, 171–2 Stark, Werner 54n1
fact of viii, x, 17, 21, 32–3, 65, 157, 174, 261, Stobaeus 6
269 Stoicism 3, 5–6, 7–8, 16, 44
Hume on 202–6 Stratton-Lake, Philip 216n1, 217n3, 218n5,
ideas of 79–80, 191 223–4n9, 232n24
and passion 201–15 suicide 87, 92, 94, 100, 108, 116, 120, 211,
primacy of practical 177 232, 263
Wolff on 72–5, 79 Sussman, David 182n19
reasons, exciting vs. justifying 238 sympathy 26–7, 213–14, 217, 236, 254–7
Reath, Andrews 169n8, 236n1, 284n18 synthetic propositions 139, 163–4, 166, 168
reciprocity thesis 147–8, 157, 173–4
reflective equilibrium 4, 18 talents, duty to cultivate 90, 93, 95, 98, 101, 104,
Reich, Klaus 4n1 112, 114, 118–20, 211, 217, 227–8
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 155–6n11, 180, 237n2 taste, standard of 28
resentment 27 teleology 194, 290–1
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Thomasius, Christian 40n11 virtue ethics xi, 70–2

Timmermann, Jens xii, 132n5, 133n7, 141n16,
167n5, 175n13
tranquility x, xiii, 7, 9, 204–6
transcendental idealism vii, viii–ix, 58, 65, 69,
90, 141–2, 154–6, 164, 170–1, 175, 177–9,
182–3, 212–13, 239
transcendental proof, method of xii, 130–1
Ulrich, Johann August Heinrich vii, 137n14,
155, 180, 237n2
universal law, formula of 8, 11, 13, 82, 88–9,
113, 129, 132–5, 163–4, 167–8, 210, 266,
277 see also universalizability
universalizability 9, 11, 15, 42, 43, 44, 49–50,
55, 102, 132–4, 157, 168, 221
utility 46, 62
voluntarism 3, 5
Whiting, Jennifer 70n1
will see also freedom of the will
determination of 242–8, 251
as Wille or Willkür 220, 237
Williams, Bernard 276n6
Wolff, Christian xi, 4, 37, 40n11, 71,
72–9, 80–1, 83, 85, 186, 211n30, 224,
232n25
Wollaston, William 23
Wood, Allen W. 70n1, 82n13, 89,
91n9, 137, 163n1, 164n2,
167n6, 169n8, 172n10, 217n4,
275n3, 276n7, 276–7n9, 277,
295n23

Velkeley, Richard x Yovel, Yirmiahu 284n18

virtue v, 8, 46, 55, 60, 98–9, 268, 279
duties of xiii, 90, 216–34 Zeno of Citium 6