Andrews Reath

Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant

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Autonomy, taking one's choices to be good, and practical law: Replies to critics

QGUHZV5HDWK Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 26, Number 4, October 1988, pp. 593-619 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/hph.1988.0098 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hph/summary/v026/26.4reath.html Access provided by University of California @ Riverside (10 Jun 2015 19:40 GMT)

Value and law in Kant's moral theory

Philosophical Books Vol. 49 No. 2 April 2008 pp. 125 –137 AUTONOMY, TAKING ONE’S CHOICES TO BE GOOD, AND PRACTICAL LAW: REPLIES TO CRITICS andrews reath The University of California, Riverside I Several essays in my book try to understand what Kant means by autonomy and how that concept figures in his foundational project. Since political and juridical terminology runs through much of Kant’s moral theory, I suggest that he models autonomy on a notion of sovereignty. I interpret autonomy not as a motivational capacity, but as the sovereignty of the will over itself: the rational will is not bound to any outside authority and it has the capacity to give universal law. I shall begin with an overview of some of these themes. Since Samuel Kerstein asks whether I am interpreting or defending Kant, let me first say something about my approach. My guiding aim is to reconstruct the underlying ideas and arguments so as to make them philosophically success- ful, where ‘reconstruction’ permits pushing an idea farther in a certain direc- tion than Kant did. My approach is interpretive, since I accept the constraint that the ideas that I develop should have a firm basis in the texts and the underlying arguments. Without claiming that there is a uniquely right reading, I want to get at the deep structure of concepts and arguments that animate the movements of thought in Kant’s texts. But I am also engaged in defending Kant, in that I am trying, as far as I can, to make the arguments work out. Thus a second constraint is that the ideas and arguments attributed to Kant turn out to be philosophically successful. These two constraints are not always compatible, and that is one reason why Kant is hard work (and sometimes frustrating). II To provide background for my responses, I begin with some remarks about the role of autonomy in the overall trajectory of the Groundwork that may clarify the senses in which Kant thinks that moral requirements are laws that the will gives to itself. (Here I am more concerned to lay out an overall picture of what goes on in the Groundwork than to defend it.) Kant thinks that it is part of common moral thought that moral requirements apply with absolute necessity and that we take them to be categorical imperatives. Once this feature of common moral thought is brought to our attention, the question that sets the problematic of the Groundwork naturally arises: how could there be normative requirements with this kind of necessity? Groundwork III attempts to ground the authority of moral requirements in a dual necessity. Greatly simplified, it argues that the Categorical Imperative [CI] is the constitutive or internal principle of a necessary self-conception. First, the CI is the constitutive principle of free Philosophical 2008 The Books Author. Vol. Journal 49 No. 2 compilation

Will, Obligatory Ends and the Completion of Practical Reason: Comments on Barbara Herman's Moral Literacy

Paul Guyer’s Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness is a collection of essays written over a period of ten years on the roles of freedom, reason, law, and happiness in Kant’s practical philosophy. The centrality of these concepts has always been acknowledged, but Guyer proposes a different way to understand their interconnections. Kant extols respect for moral law and conformity to moral principle for its own sake while at the same time celebrating the value of human freedom and autonomy. Guyer sees tensions between these two poles of Kant’s practical philosophy—obedience to law and the value of freedom. He argues: “A profound paradox can be avoided only if it can be shown that Kant intended obedience to universal law to be mandatory solely as the necessary condition for the realization of human freedom and through that freedom a systematic and unselfish distribution of happiness among all persons” and that “the sheer fact of adherence to universal law is not an end in itself but is rather the means to the realization of the human potential for autonomy or freedom in both choice and action” (p. 1). One guiding theme of Guyer’s book is that Kant’s practical philosophy is based on the fundamental, and hence indemonstrable, intrinsic value of freedom, which Guyer understands as a value that is prior to the moral law, providing both an end to be realized through conformity to universal law and the basis of the authority of moral principles. Conformity to universal law has no intrinsic value in itself; it is the means to the preservation, enhancement, and full realization of human freedom, and is required because of its instrumental connection to the prior value of freedom. As he says, “freedom of choice and its natural expression in action are what human beings value most, and the fundamental principle of morality and the rules for both po-

Book ReviewsStephen Engstrom, .The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 260.

This paper discusses three inter-related themes in Barbara Hermans Moral Literacy – the idea that, for Kant, the will is a ‘norm-constituted power’ whose activity is guided by its own internal norm, that the obligatory ends are reasonably viewed as the ends of all rational choice, and that morality ‘completes’ practical reason or rational agency.

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general principles that will provide them with legal grounds for developing the law in one direction rather than another. If judges violate their roles when they resort to morality, Edlin is in the paradoxical position of having no account of how a legal system could ever develop in a manner that is lawful so as to have sufficiently robust resources to enable judges to make decisions without recourse to morality. It would seem that it would take a great deal of judicial impropriety to ever acquire a sufficient corpus of laws to ensure that judges need engage in no impropriety in reaching decisions that are consistently just.