In this paper I critically engage with Pauline Kleingeld’s ‘volitional self-contradiction’ interpretation of Kant’s formula of universal law. I make three remarks: first, I seek to clarify what it means for a contradiction to be volitional as opposed to logical; second, I suggest that her interpretation might need to be closer to Korsgaard’s ‘practical contradiction’ interpretation than she thinks; and third, I suggest that more work needs to be done to explain how a volitional self-contradiction generates both a ‘contradiction in conception’ and a ‘contradiction in will.’

The second part of The Doctrine of Virtue is the doctrine of methods that concerns moral education and the practice of virtue. This chapter elaborates Kant’s conception of moral education including the so-called catechism method of moral instruction. The methods of practicing virtue Kant refers to as “ethical ascetics,” in which he stresses the importance of striving to be both “valiant and cheerful” in carrying out one’s duties. Following this is Kant’s conclusion to the book, in which he explains why a metaphysics of morals does not include reference to God or religion. The chapter concludes with reflections on the outstanding tasks for the methods including how the pure laws of morality can gain access to one’s mind and how they can also influence one’s decisions.

This chapter provides a brief overview of certain elements of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology that are essential background for understanding certain features of his ethical theory. In particular, it presents Kant’s distinction between the ‘world of sense’ or ‘phenomenal world’ and the ‘world of understanding’ or ‘noumenal world’ as a basis for explaining the limits of theoretical cognition which rules out theoretical cognition and knowledge of God, immortality of the soul, and freedom of the will, yet allows Kant to affirm their reality on moral grounds, needed to explain how the highest good is possible. Of importance for understanding certain claims in his work on virtue is the distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world as it applies to human beings. The chapter concludes with reflections on the relation between Kant’s ethics and his metaphysical and epistemological commitments.

This chapter focuses on Section I of the general introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals in which Kant explains what a metaphysics of morals is, and why there must be one. To properly understand Kant’s views on these matters requires explaining Kant’s conception of philosophy and the place of metaphysics as a branch of philosophy. In spelling this out, the chapter discusses key distinctions between theoretical and practical cognition, empirical (a posteriori) versus rational (a priori) sources of cognition, and the analytic/synthetic distinction as Kant understood it. For Kant, a metaphysics of morals is that branch of philosophy concerned with those synthetic a priori propositions and principles fundamental to morality. The chapter also explains the role of anthropology in a metaphysics of morals.

This chapter situates Kant’s conception of virtue against the thesis of radical evil, according to which although human beings have a predisposition to virtue, they nevertheless have a propensity to moral evil. Section 1 of the chapter explains Kant’s conception of the “original predisposition to good” as presented in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Section 2 discusses the predispositions to moral feeling, conscience, love of humanity, and respect that Kant posits as presuppositions of being subject to moral requirements. The thesis of radical evil is explained in section 3. Kant’s concept of virtue is the topic of section 4, the propensities to evil (frailty, impurity, and depravity) are discussed in section 5, and in section 6 the task of acquiring virtue by overcoming affects and passions leading to moral evil is explained. The chapter ends with a brief comparison of Kant’s conception of virtue with Aristotle’s.

The notion of a secondary quality is usefully construed this way: sensory-perceptual experiences that present apparent instantiations of such a quality have intentional content - presentational content - that is systematically non-veridical, because the experientially presented quality is never actually instantiated; but judgments that naively seem to attribute instantiations of this very quality really have different content - judgmental content - that is often veridical. Color-presenting experiences and color-attributing judgments, for instance, are plausibly regarded as conforming to such a dual-content secondary-quality account. In this paper we address the comparative theoretical advantages and disadvantages of two alternative versions of compatibilism about agentive freedom. Illusionist compatibilism is a dual-content secondary-quality view asserting that free-agency experience has presentational content that is libertarian and systematically non-veridical, whereas free-agency attributing judgments have non-libertarian, compatibilist, content. Uniform compatibilism instead asserts that free-agency experience and free-agency attributing judgments have uniform, compatibilist, content. We argue that uniform compatibilism fully accommodates the directly introspectable features of free-agency phenomenology, and is more plausible than illusionist compatibilism.

This chapter explicates key ideas and concepts from Sections III and IV of the general introduction to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Section 1 of the chapter explains the concepts of freedom, practical law, imperatives, obligation, and duty. Section 2 explains the distinctions between moral personality, humanity, and human being, while section 3 explains Kant’s view that there is a single fundamental moral principle that serves as a basis for deriving a complex system of duties. Section 4 explains the difference between the legality and morality of actions according to Kant’s technical understanding of these concepts. Section 5 explains the basis for a division between the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue. Finally, section 6 presents some of the basic elements of the doctrine of right, for purposes of contrast with the doctrine of virtue. The chapter concludes with reflections on Kant’s conception of duty and lawgiving.

In his classic 1949 book, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy, H. J. Paton refers to Kant's kingdom of ends formula of the supreme principle of morality as "the most moving of all his principles" (p. 93). This remark reflects Kant's claim in the Groundwork that this formula (as well as the formula of humanity) can serve to help bring moral concepts "closer to intuition (according to a certain analogy) and thereby to feeling" (4: 436). How this formula can have this effect raises questions about Kant's moral psychology, including: How can the kingdom of ends formula figure in the psychology of individuals, and of what significance is it for community life? This chapter addresses the question about community by developing the symbolic relation in Kant's work between his conception of a kingdom of ends and that of a "visible church" whose role in communal moral life is described in Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in which the significance of religious symbols can figure importantly in one's psychology. It addresses the question about individuals by explaining some of the elements of Kant's Doctrine of Method as expounded in the Critique of Practical Reason.

This paper addresses an alleged paradox regarding gratitude—that a duty of gratitude is odd or puzzling if not paradoxical. The gist of our position is that in prototypical cases, gratitude expression falls under a distinctive deontic category we call morally expected —which has a corresponding contrary deontic category we call morally offensive . These categories, we maintain, need recognition in normative ethics to make proper sense of the moral status of gratitude expression and other morally charged restrictions on action, and likewise to make proper sense of the moral status of failures to abide by such restrictions. We argue for our view largely on phenomenological grounds.

This book is a reader’s guide to Kant’s final work in moral philosophy, The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals. The guide has five parts plus a conclusion. Part I, “Background,” includes two chapters: 1. “Life and Work” and 2. “Philosophical Background.” Part II, “General Introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals,” covers the introduction to the entire work and includes three chapters: 3. “On the Idea of and Necessity for a Metaphysics of Morals,” 4. “Mental Faculties, the Moral Law, and Human Motivation,” and 5. “Preliminary Concepts and Division of the Metaphysics of Morals.” Part III, “Introduction to The Doctrine of Virtue,” includes four chapters covering Kant’s dedicated introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue: 6. “The Doctrine of Virtue as a Doctrine of Ends,” 7. “General Ends that Are Also Duties,” 8. “Radical Evil and the Nature of Virtue,” and 9. “The Science of Ethics.” Part IV, “The Doctrine of Elements,” is devoted to Kant’s system of duties of virtue that represents his normative ethical theory. It contains six chapters: 10. “Perfect Duties to Oneself as an Animal Being,” 11. “Perfect Duties to Oneself Merely as a Moral Being,” 12. Imperfect Duties to Oneself,” 13. “Duties of Love to Other Human Beings,” 14. “The Vices of Hatred and Disrespect,” and 15. “Friendship.” Part V, “The Doctrine of Methods of Ethics and Conclusion,” includes chapter 16 “Moral Education and Practice.” The book’s conclusion reflects on the significance of The Doctrine of Virtue for understanding Kant’s ethics.

Normative ethics is a branch of moral philosophy that addresses moral (ethical) questions about what to do and how to be. This branch divides into applied ethics and moral theory. Applied ethics addresses specific questions about the morality of such issues as abortion, capital punishment, the ethical treatment of animals, euthanasia, and sexual behavior. It also addresses ethical questions that arise within the professions. Moral theory by contrast addresses very general moral questions – questions about which types of action are morally right or wrong and what kind of person is morally good and why. These specific and general questions about what to do and how to be are first‐order moral questions and they are contrasted with questions about morality – second‐order questions about the meaning, truth, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral thought, language, and discourse. Such second‐order questions are the subject matter of metaethics, the other main branch of moral philosophy. This entry focuses on moral theory and covers these topics: its basic notions, its aims, how principles figure in such a theory, the various structures moral theories might take, standards used in evaluating such theories, and finally some of the challenges to moral theory

AbstractMoral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that (i) is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and (ii) justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose distinctive phenomenological character includes categorical authoritativeness. Traditional versions of expressivism cannot easily accommodate the justificationally trumping aspect of categorical authoritativeness, because they construe moral judgments as fundamentally desire-like. Moral realism cannot easily accommodate the aspect of inherent motivational grip, because realism construes moral judgments as a species of factual belief.

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant claims that hypothetical imperatives are analytic and that categorical imperatives are synthetic. This claim plays a crucial role in Kant’s attempt to establish moral ‘oughts’ as categorically binding on all rational agents, for by classifying moral statements according to this distinction, Kant hopes to uncover the sort of justification required to establish such statements. However, Kant’s application of the analytic/ synthetic distinction to imperatives is problematic. For one thing, this distinction was developed by Kant in connection with indicative, subject-predicate statements, which would seem to cast doubt on the idea that imperatives can be either analytic or synthetic. Moreover, Kant’s claim that hypothetical imperatives are analytic and categorical imperatives are synthetic seems to conflict with other claims in his moral works. For example, in the Groundwork, Kant claims that hypothetical imperatives are (compared to categorical imperatives) unproblematic since they can be established on the basis of experience (G, 419-20, 49-50). But this is incompatible with the idea that hypothetical imperatives are analytic, since presumably all analytic statements are a priori — established independently of experience.

Error theory in meta-ethics is motivated by skepticism about the claim that there are properties and relations instantiated in the world of the kind supposedly posited in moral experience, moral thought, and moral discourse. It might then seem that non-naturalism and error theory are the only views that recognize the pertinent phenomenology of moral authority. This chapter focuses on Jean Hampton's characterization of moral-authority phenomenology. Her argument is phenomenological, focusing on introspectively salient aspects of moral experience. The argument proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, she offers what she says is a "minimalist and metaphysically neutral" initial characterization of how the normativity of moral reasons is experienced. In the second stage, she describes two metaphysically different ways of "embellishing" the initial characterization, and she argues that only the second way—a version of non-naturalist moral realism—comports with the phenomenology of moral-reasons experience.

Nos últimos anos, muito foi escrito a respeito das virtudes e das virtudes particulares expostas na ética de Kant, concentrando-se em particular no Tugendlehre, parte II da Metafísica da Moral (ver, por exemplo, Betzler 2008). Menos atenção foi dada ao que Kant tem a dizer sobre os vícios e sobre os vícios particulares. A própria discussão de Kant a respeito dos vícios escolhidos no Tugendlehre é bastante breve, pontuada por observações a respeito das fontes psicológicas de traços de caráter viciosos. Em contraste, o que encontramos em algumas das anotações de aula, é uma discussão consideravelmente rica sobre a psicologia de outros vícios relacionados envolvendo aquilo a que Kant se refere como emulação – um “impulso” implantado na natureza humana que inclina fortemente os homens a serem “iguais aos outros em cada aspecto” (V 27:695). Embora este impulso implantado tenha o bem do auto-melhoramento como seu propósito, sob algumas circunstâncias ele contribui para os vícios diabólicos da inveja, da ingratidão e da Schadenfreude. Nosso objetivo básico aqui é fornecer uma interpretação das ideias de Kant a respeito da psicologia dos vícios diabólicos – como indivíduos sucumbem a estes vícios – baseados em observações das Lectures. É de particular interesse em que medida estes vícios compartilham de uma unidade psicológica subjacente, uma afirmação sugerida por algumas das observações de Kant.

In his 2013 Theoria article, Unreliable Intuitions: A New Reply to the Moral Twin-Earth Argument, Jorn Sonderholm attempts to undermine our moral twin earth (MTE) argument against Richard Boyd's moral semantics by debunking the semantic intuitions that are prompted by reflection on the thought experiment featured in the MTE argument. We divide our reply into three main sections. In section 1, we briefly review Boyd's moral semantics and our MTE argument against this view. In section 2, we set forth what we take to be Sonderholm's master debunking argument, along with his proposed Boydian explanation of the semantic intuitions he seeks to debunk. Then in section 3, we mount our defence of the semantic intuitions under scrutiny, arguing on abductive grounds that, contrary to Sonderholm, the semantic intuitions generated by reflection on MTE scenarios are to be trusted in evaluating the plausibility of Boydian moral semantics. Section 4 is our summary and conclusion.

Psychological evidence detailing why we believe what we believe can provide a powerful basis for challenging the warrant of those beliefs. If psychology shows that a certain common belief derives from epistemically defective processes, then this threatens to undercut the epistemic authority of the belief. The canonical case of this sort of debunking argument is Freud’s critique of religion (1927). Freud argues that religious belief is a product of wish-fulfillment, not reason; as a result, he says, we should regard our religious beliefs as unwarranted. On the heels of psychological research on philosophically charged domains, these kinds of debunking arguments have been making a comeback. Debunking arguments have been advanced in the domains of metaphysics (e.g., Scholl 2007), metaethics (e.g., Nichols 2008), consciousness (e.g., Fiala et al. 2011), and normative ethics (e.g., Greene 2008; Singer 2005). In this paper, we use the problem of moral luck as a case studying, exploring how empirical work can inform normative ethics.

In the general introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals where Kant discusses the concept of obligation and its law, he remarks that “the simplicity of this law in comparison with the great and various consequences that can be drawn from it must seem astonishing at first…” (MS 6: 225). In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant sets forth a system of duties to oneself and to others in which he appears to derive them from the humanity formulation of the CI, thus illustrating the “great and various consequences” that follow from the moral law. Smit and Timmons understand Kant’s derivations in the Doctrine of Virtue as purporting not only to justify in the sense of proving or showing true various claims about the deontic status of various types of actions and associated attitudes, but they view the derivations as also purporting explain why the various actions and attitudes have the deontic status Kant claims they have. The aim of their contribution is to (1) provide an interpretation of the humanity formulation which, they argue, is rich in content, and then (2) examine the various derivations featured in the Doctrine of Virtue in order to evaluate their success in providing plausible explanations of the various duties to self and duties to others Kant discusses.