Allen W. Wood

I–Allen W. Wood

Kant’s moral philosophy is grounded on the dignity of humanity as its sole fundamental value, and involves the claim that human beings are to be regarded as the ultimate end of nature. It might be thought that a theory of this kind would be incapable of grounding any conception of our relation to other living things or to the natural world which would value nonhuman creatures or respect humanity’s natural environment. This paper criticizes Kant’s argumentative strategy for dealing with our duties in regard to animals, but defends both his theory and most of his conclusions on these topics.

Rational theology, moral faith, and religion

BACKGROUND By the middle of the seventeenth century, Lutheran theology had become an ossified and sterile orthodoxy. It was challenged by two currents of thought that were to lead to the eighteenth-century German Enlightenment. The first was Pietism, founded by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705). The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of doctrinal propositions but a living relationship with God. They stressed above all the felt power of Gods grace to transform the believers life through a conversion of “born again” experience. Pietism was hostile to the intellectualization of Christianity. Like Lutheran orthodoxy it exalted scriptural authority above natural reason, but for Pietism the main purpose of reading scripture was inspiration and moral edification. The experience of spiritual rebirth must transform the believers emotions and show itself in outward conduct. Within the universities, the Pietists favored cultivation of piety and morality in life rather than theoretical inquiry. In religious controversy, they urged that the aim should be to win over the heart of ones opponent rather than to gain intellectual victory.

Ethics and embryonic stem cell research

by all human persons. Sometimes these claims take the form of saying that it is wrong to destroy “innocent human life” in any form. Taken literally, that would make it wrong to undergo surgery, maybe even to cut your hair or fingernails. What is probably meant, and sometimes made explicit, is rather the idea that it is wrong to ‘kill a human being’—where this last phrase is taken to be equivalent to “cause the death of any living entity that is numerically identical to what has the potentiality to become a fully functioning adult human being.” Then the claim is made that as every normal adult human being is numerically identical to the fetus and to the embryo from which he or she developed, it is just as wrong to destroy a fetus or an embryo as to kill a normal adult. To deal with these questions we must begin with an even more fundamental question: why is it wrong to destroy or kill an innocent human being? What is it about such a being that gives it a right not to be killed? The answer to this question is not obvious, and not something on which there is universal agreement.

The duty to believe according to the evidence

Abstract‘Evidentialism’ is the conventional name (given mainly by its opponents) for the view that there is a moral duty to proportion one’s beliefs to evidence, proof or other epistemic justifications for belief. This essay defends evidentialism against objections based on the alleged involuntariness of belief, on the claim that evidentialism assumes a doubtful epistemology, that epistemically unsupported beliefs can be beneficial, that there are significant classes of exceptions to the evidentialist principle, and other shabby evasions and alibis (as I take them to be) for disregarding the duty to believe according to the evidence. Evidentialism is also supported by arguments based on both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations.

Fichte's Intersubjective I

The challenge to philosophy of mind for the past two hundred years has been to overcome the Cartesian conception of mind. This essay explores the attempt to do this by J. G. Fichte, especially regarding intersubjectivity or the knowledge of other minds. Fichte provides a transcendental deduction of the concept of the other I, as a condition for experiencing the individuality of our own I. The basis of this argument is the concept of the “summons”, which Fichte argues is necessary for us to form the concept of an end of our own action.

Cross-Cultural Moral Philosophy: Reflections on Thaddeus Metz: “Toward an African Moral Theory”

Abstract My remarks on Metz’s project will focus on another angle than the one Metz uses. I am more interested in thinking about whether and how far ethical standards from different cultures really differ, how to understand those differences, and how to relate them to what is objectively good, independently of people’s opinions on the matter. Of course one widely circulating opinion on the topic is that cross-cultural differences somehow demonstrate that there is no such thing as objective good at all - that each culture has its own conception of what is good, right, permitted, forbidden, and so on, and the differences are so wide that anyone at all familiar with this, can no longer take seriously the idea that there could be any “objective” values underlying such varied systems.

The Objectivity of Value

is the value of the capacity to weigh reasons itself, which we find in ourselves, but also equally in every other member of the universal community of rational agents. This is the basis of moral reasoning. Its principle is to treat all rational agents as having an objective value that is fundamental, supreme and equal. It is solely through this moral value that happiness acquires its value, and the principle of prudence becomes binding on us; it is likewise solely through the value of happiness that more limited ends, and hence the means to them, acquire their value. Therefore, the three species of practical reasoning stand in a definite order of priority. Moral reasoning takes precedence over, and governs, prudential reasoning, and prudential reasoning takes precedence over, and governs, instrumental reasoning. The common dogma that all practical reason is instrumental is based on the false idea that all reason must begin with desire (for an end) and that the role of reason is merely to supply the means to the end. But apart from our conception of ourselves as capable of setting ends, and as having reasons to pursue the ends we set, there would be no reason for us to take the means to our ends apart from the momentary desire we might feel to perform the actions that count as those means. However, an agent who always felt that desire, apart from any reason to feel it, would not need instrumental reason. An agent needs instrumental reason at all only insofar as it must create in itself a desire to employ the means it realizes are necessary for its end. It creates this desire through its awareness of its value as a rational agent, and the consequent objective value of the ends it has set for good reasons. 25 David Hume, “The Standard of Taste,” in David Hume: Selected Essays, ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar (New York, 1993). 26 This is what Kant calls our “empirical interest” in the beautiful (Critique of the Power of Judgment, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, pp. 296–98).

Historical materialism and functional explanation

This paper is a critical examination of one central theme in Jon Elsters Making Sense of Marx; Elsters defense of ‘methodological individualism’ in social science and his related critique of Marxs use of ‘functional explanation’. The paper does not quarrel with Elsters claim that the particular instances of functional explanation advanced by Marx are defective; what it criticizes is Elsters attempt to raise principled, philosophical objections to this type of explanation in the social sciences. It is argued that Elsters philosophical critique of functional explanation rests on a caricature of this kind of explanation, just as his critique of Marxs use of teleology in the philosophy of history rests on a caricature of the kinds of teleological claims Marx is concerned to make. The paper ends with a brief discussion of a recently published passage from Marxs notebooks of 1861–1863, where Elster claims to have found Marx explicitly criticizing capitalist exploitation as an injustice to the workers.

Three Types of Speculative Religion

There were numerous reformist efforts in religion before and during the nineteenth century, particularly among religious liberals who rejected biblical literalism, institutional authoritarianism, and theological supernaturalism. But the most philosophically important types of liberal revisionism were “speculative,” in a specific sense of the term. Though it is often used more loosely, its precise sense rests on the metaphor of the mirror (Latin speculum ) reflecting and conforming its image to what enters its visual field. In speculative religion this visual metaphor is extended to the direct reflection of the divine in the human mind or will. Speculation is not just thinking about a putatively divine or absolute being. It is a reflexivity conforming thought and sensibility to what is divine. The metaphor of speculation was common in late classical and medieval thought, particularly in neo-Platonic philosophy and Augustinian theology, as the mirroring of a prototypical reality in the mind or God in the soul. The Spinozistic intuition of the one substance, or the intellectual love of God, is speculative in this sense. Hegel introduced speculation into nineteenth-century philosophy, and others, not necessarily using the term, employed recognizable types of such speculative thinking in their conceptions of religion. Speculative religion does not proceed from alleged revelatory or miraculous events in history, though it may inform an interpretation of traditional teachings. Neither does it employ inferential reasoning from natural phenomena in the manner of deistic “natural religion.” Its reflexivity distinguishes it from the epistemic dualism of subject and object characteristic of empiricism: hence the disdain of empiricists for “mere speculation.” It is admittedly not the aim of speculative thinking to provide information about the empirical world, but rather to reflect what may be of ultimate interest to human self-understanding.

Comments on Guyer

Paul Guyers paper “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kants Moral Philosophy” raises a set of issues about how Kantian ethics should be understood in relation to present day “philosophical naturalism” that are very much in need of discussion. The paper itself is challenging, even in some respects iconoclastic, and provides a highly welcome provocation to raise in new ways some basic questions about what Kantian ethics is and what it ought to be. Guyer offers us an admirably informed and complex argument, both historical and philosophical, that tangles with some of the most difficult problems in Kants moral philosophy. It begins with some ambitious and controversial claims about Kants moral philosophy prior to the Groundwork of 1785. It then offers an interpretation, and also a fundamental criticism, of the Groundworks attempt to establish the moral law based on the idea of freedom of the will. And finally, it raises – and expresses some opinions on – the large and vexed questions of the relationship between transcendental philosophy and philosophical naturalism, and whether Kantian ethics can be made consistent with a naturalistic philosophical outlook. In these comments I will have something to say on each of these three topics, without pretending (any more than Guyer does) to have exhausted what might be said about them.