Obituary Ingeborg Maus (1937-2024).

Philosophers traditionally interpret Kant as a retributivist, but modern interpreters, with reference to Kant’s theory of justice and problematic passages, instead propose penal theories that mix retributive and deterrent features. Although these mixed penal theories are substantively compelling and capture the Kantian spirit, their dual aspects lead to a justificatory conflict that generates an apparent dilemma. To resolve this dilemma and clear the ground for these mixed theories, I will outline and reinterpret Kant’s penal theory by situating it in his broader moral and political philosophy. This move grounds the followability requirement, which is necessary to resolve the dilemma.

Although maxims are central to Kant’s ethical theory, his account of them remains obscure. We can make progress towards understanding Kantian maxims by examining not only their role as the object of moral judgement but also their connection to freedom of the will and causality. This requires understanding maxims as causal laws that explain the actions that we impute to agents. In this way, they are analogous to causal laws of nature, but they are limited in scope to the agents who are responsible for them. Understanding maxims in this way explains our limited epistemic access to them and helps to clarify Kant’s account of virtue and character as well as how they mediate the relationship between practical and theoretical reason.

A core feature of Kant’s Critical account of moral motivation is that pure reason can be practical by itself. I argue that Kant developed this view in the 1770s concerning the principium diiudicationis and principium executionis. These principles indicate the normative and performative aspects of moral motivation. I demonstrate that cognition of the normative principle effects the moral incentive. So, the hallmark of Kant’s Critical account of motivation was contained in his pre-Critical view. This interpretation resolves a controversy about Kant’s apparent eudaimonism in the first Critique and shows that he developed his account of moral autonomy in the 1770s.

It is widely claimed that the second Critique’s argument for the postulate of immortality is relevantly different from the first Critique’s argument for the postulate. It is also widely claimed that after the second Critique, Kant distances himself from its particular version of the argument, and even the postulate altogether. It is the purpose of this article to challenge these claims, arguing instead that (a) there is overwhelming textual evidence showing that Kant did not abandon the postulate; (b) the second Critique does not contain a substantially different argument for the postulate than how it is argued for in the first Critique; and (c) the philosophical objections levied against the second Critique’s argument, including its putative substitution of holiness for virtue, become moot once its argument is better understood.

There are two main meanings in Kant’s concept of moral certainty (moralische Gewissheit, certitudo moralis): first, it applies to the kind of certainty embodied in rational faith in the existence of God and a future life; second, it applies to the conscientiousness (Gewissenhaftigkeit) required of an agent in the practice of moral judgement. Despite the growing attention to Kant’s theory of conscience and his concept of conscientiousness, this article is the first to discuss ‘moral certainty’ as the aim of ‘conscientiousness’ and to highlight the relevance of both notions in regard to moral education and the purposes of Kant’s ethical doctrines of method.

There is an interpretative puzzle at the centre of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. The text presents the single principle of morality (G, 4: 392), but instead of providing a definitive statement of the principle, we find a three-step sequence of formulas. The puzzle concerns the formula relation: given the contrast between the moral law’s individuality and the plurality of formulas, how do the formulas relate to each other and the moral law? This paper takes the first step towards a new account by focusing on G, 4: 436, a passage in which Kant makes claims about the matter and form of the moral law. By understanding the hylomorphism entailed by these claims, it is possible to achieve new perspectives on common questions about Kant’s ethics, in particular, the role of the formulas in deriving or explaining duties and how the formulas are used in the argument of Groundwork II and its transition from popular moral philosophy to metaphysics of morals.

This article offers the first systematic investigation of the linguistic forms in which Kant expresses his transcendental idealism since Gerold Prauss’ seminal book Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. It is argued that Prauss’ own argument for the claim that ‘in itself’ is an adverbial expression that standardly modifies verbs of philosophical reflection is flawed and that there is hence very poor exegetical evidence for so-called ‘methodological two-aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. A comprehensive investigation of Kant’s adverbial uses of ‘in itself’ rather reveals that there are various groups of verbs that ‘in itself’ modifies, which can more or less all be reduced to a standard use in which ‘in itself’ modifies verbs of predicative being such as the copula. It is also discussed how these findings can be accommodated by the two main alternative kinds of interpretations, that is, two-object and ontological two-aspect interpretations.

Despite Rousseau’s acknowledged influence on Kant, the moral value of compassion (or pity) is regarded as a major difference between their theories of morality. Pity plays a fundamental role in Rousseau’s theory of moral relations, whereas Kant appears suspicious of compassion. I argue that Kant nevertheless accords compassion a significant moral value, not only because it provides an appropriate supplementary incentive when the incentive of duty is not sufficient to motivate action but also because of the role it plays in attuning individuals to the moral status of others. Rousseau’s account of pity in Emile helps to explain how compassion can play this role.

On the currently dominant reading of the Groundwork, Kant’s derivation of ‘imperatives of duty’ exemplifies a decision procedure for the derivation of concrete duties in moral deliberation. However, Kant’s response to an often-misidentified criticism of the Groundwork by G. A. Tittel suggests that Kant was remarkably unconcerned with arguing for the practicality of the categorical imperative as a decision procedure. Instead, I argue that the main aim of Kant’s derivation of imperatives of duty was to show how his analysis of the form of moral judgement is indeed presupposed in the four types of moral imperative that philosophers of his time recognized.

Most interpreters hold that Kant rejects actually infinite tota synthetica as conceptually impossible. This view is attributed to Kant to relieve him of the charge that the first antinomy’s thesis argument presupposes transcendental idealism. I argue that important textual evidence speaks against this view, and Kant in fact affirms the conceptual possibility of actually infinite tota synthetica. While this means the first antinomy may not be decisive as an indirect argument for idealism, it gives us a better account of how our ideas of the unconditioned generate the antinomies, and it allows us to see important and often overlooked elements in Kant’s account of the infinite.

In this article, I offer a novel and in-depth account of how, for Kant, free speech is the mechanism that moves a society closer to justice. I argue that the criticism of the legislator preserved by free speech must also be the result of collective agreement. I further argue that structural features of judgements of taste and the sensus communis give guidance for how we should communicate publicly to succeed at the aims Kant has laid out, as judgements of taste, like politics, belong fundamentally to a transitional sphere between nature and freedom.

To highlight the promise of Jordan Pascoe’s Kant’s Theory of Labour, my comments concern the diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions of the book’s excellent intersectional critique of dependent labour relations. The diagnostic dimension of Pascoe’s critique establishes that the organisation of dependent labour relations is a neglected problem of Kantian justice. The prescriptive dimension offers solutions to this problem but is underdeveloped. To enhance the book’s prescriptive dimension, I draw on the noted Africana philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois for guidance. For Du Bois, a constitutional republic ought to strive for the abolition of a ‘second’ slavery following the abolition of de jure black chattel slavery with the end of the American Civil War. Given Du Bois’ call for meaningful Emancipation, I argue that philosophers should reinterpret the Kantian normative ideal of freedom as universal independence to uproot the postbellum conditions of second slavery.

In this article, I argue that Kant’s real reason for rejecting a world state in practice is that a world state would be in greater danger of despotism than individual states. Kant hopes that public participation and self-enlightenment of the people in the public sphere could counter the despotic danger in individual states. However, in a world state, state affairs are too distant from the lives of individuals, making it difficult for individuals to maintain enthusiasm for public discourse and political enlightenment. Moreover, the absence of external competition and the risk of war would eliminate the incentive of the ruler to preserve freedom for the development of industry and commerce and, consequently, for the enlightenment of the people. These defects make it more difficult for a world state to resist despotic danger.

In a well-known essay, Thomas Pogge argues that Kant’s political philosophy is not comprehensive in Rawls’ sense, since it is independent of his moral philosophy. However, Pogge understands Kant’s comprehensive liberalism as the view that his moral philosophy entails his political philosophy. I question whether this is the best way to understand comprehensive liberalism, in Kant or in general. I argue that Kant’s comprehensive moral philosophy is not an independent argument for the moral truth of liberal ideals, but a liberal way of justifying an independent commitment to politically liberal values, given that we all have values that are not political.

I argue that Kant’s Categorical Imperative should be applied to individual maxim tokens rather than abstract maxim types. The article is divided into five sections. In the first, I explain my thesis. In the second, I show that my thesis disagrees with Rawls. In the third, I argue for my thesis on the basis of the wording of the Categorical Imperative and on the basis of considerations about autonomy. In the fourth, I argue for my thesis on the basis of considerations about the ‘ought implies can’ principle. In the fifth, I provide a summary of the main argumentative moves and also explain some of the philosophical advantages of my thesis.

I respond to a challenge raised by Jordan Pascoe: Kant’s conception of obtaining full citizenship through working oneself up necessarily condemns some people to passive citizenship. I argue that we should not focus on work to establish universal full citizenship. Rather, a Universal Basic Income, an income paid regularly to everyone and without conditions, can secure everyone’s full citizenship. Moreover, I argue that such a scheme is more Kantian in nature than hitherto assumed.

This paper offers a reading of the infamous mutual critique between Kant and Herder by criticising the standard account of their tense relation, which attributes a priority of reason to the former and a priority of language to the latter. As Kant thinks that judging can only be realised through its expression in language, and Herder conceives of a linguistic act as the self-conscious positing of meaning, they equally reject any sharp separation of thought from its expression in language. The central difference lies in their opposing accounts of the relation between reason’s striving for metaphysical knowledge and the latter’s linguistic guise.

Different from the autonomy of understanding in cognition and the autonomy of practical reason in praxis, the heautonomy in the judgement of taste is reflexive. The reflexivity consists not only in the fact that the power of judgement legislates to its own usage but also, and more importantly, it legislates to itself through its own operative process. This normativity, based on the self-referential structure of pure aesthetic judgement and the a priori principle of subjective, internal purposiveness, can be regarded as a self-discovering and self-flourishing principle that organically grows out of the aesthetic experience and, at the same time, regulates its growth in return. In this scenario, aesthetic freedom can be identified as a third kind of freedom different from Kant’s transcendental freedom and practical freedom – a flexible and living freedom with spontaneous legislation, but not bound by any determinate laws.