¹ I borrow this interpretation of Kant's term Tugendpflichten from Stratton-Lake, Philip, “Being Virtuous and the Virtues: Two Aspects of Kant's Doctrine of Virtue,” in Betzler, Monika, ed., Kant's Ethics of Virtue (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 101–21Google Scholar.

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 Timmons, Mark, ed., New Essays on Kant's Metaphysics of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24–64, reprinted in my Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

³ Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section II, 6:383Google Scholar; the translation in the text is from Kant, , Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Gregor, Mary J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 515Google Scholar. In subsequent notes, I provide page references to the translation, abbreviated as “Gregor.” All emphasis within quotations is in the original unless otherwise noted.

⁴ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section IV, 6:385–88.

⁵ See Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Gregor, Mary J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), section I, 3:400–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregor, pp. 55–56. For a similar emphasis on the formality of the general obligation to be virtuous, see Stratton-Lake, “Being Virtuous and the Virtues,” 105.

⁶ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section VI, 6:388–89; Gregor, p. 520.

⁷ By calling the distinction between formal and material “all-purpose,” I mean that every aspect of Kant's philosophy is organized around this distinction; for example, in the constructive theory of knowledge of the Critique of Pure Reason, the general distinction between intuitions and concepts is a distinction between the matter and the form of knowledge, but within each sphere the distinction between empirical and pure—between empirical and pure intuition, between empirical and pure concepts—is also, fundamentally, a distinction between matter and form. And so on.

⁸ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XVII, 6:410; Gregor, p. 537.

⁹ See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Right,” introduction, section C, 6:230–31.

¹⁰ For a brief discussion of this issue, see Stratton-Lake, “Being Virtuous and the Virtues,” 109–10. Stratton-Lake makes it sound as if Kant sometimes thinks 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 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Right,” introduction, section D, 6:231; Gregor, p. 388.

¹¹ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XVII, 6:410; Gregor, pp. 537–38.

¹² See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, introduction, section IV, 6:219–21; Gregor, pp. 383–85. For further discussion of this point, see Katja Maria Vogt, “Duties to Others: Demands and Limits,” in Betzler, ed., Kant's Ethics of Virtue, 219–43, at 226–31.

¹³ See Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Wood, Allen W. and Di Giovanni, George (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Book I, 6:36–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, introduction, section III, 6:226; Gregor, p. 380.

¹⁵ Kant, Groundwork, section I, 4:397; Gregor, p. 52.

¹⁶ As Allen Wood says, Kant's point in these examples is not “to assert that other performances of duty are devoid of moral value but only to distinguish what is central to morality from what is comparatively peripheral.” Wood, Allen W., Kantian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 149Google Scholar. This interpretation of the point of Kant's examples of the morally worthy performance of duty in section I of the Groundwork is also consistent with what Samuel Kerstein has called a “criterial reading” of Kant's derivation of the fundamental principle of morality. See Kerstein, Samuel J., Kant's Search for the Supreme Principle of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Kant, Groundwork, section I, 4:397–98; Gregor, pp. 52–54.

¹⁸ Numerous authors in recent years have argued that Kant's point in these examples is not to present a general theory of the moral evaluation of character, but rather to use indubitable examples of moral worth to derive the fundamental principle of morality or the necessary constraints on it that will, in turn, lead to its derivation. In addition to Allen Wood and Samuel Kerstein, already mentioned in note 16, see also Esser, Andrea Marlen, Eine Ethik für Endliche: Kants Tugendlehre in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2004), 329–30Google Scholar; and Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Kantian Virtue and ‘Virtue Ethics’,” in Betzler, ed., Kant's Ethics of Virtue, 29–59, at 36–37.

¹⁹ Kant, Groundwork, section I, 4:399–400; Gregor, pp. 54–55. 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 on an object of mere inclination, or that the moral law could command the realization of such a necessary rather than contingent object. I have also argued, however, 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 (4:427–29). See Guyer, Paul, “The Derivation of the Categorical Imperative: Kant's Correction for a Fatal Flaw,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 10 (2002): 64–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Kant, Groundwork, section I, 4:400; Gregor, p. 55.

²¹ Ibid., section I, 4:401–2; Gregor, pp. 56–57.

²² Ibid., section I, 4:398; Gregor, p. 53.

²³ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section VII, 6:390; Gregor, p. 521.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid., section IX, 6:394; Gregor, pp. 524–25.

²⁶ Ibid., section XIII, 6:405; Gregor, p. 533.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Allen Wood succinctly characterizes the response I will offer to the present objection: “It is not a duty to have virtue in general, because only by having some degree of virtue is it possible to be placed under the self-constraint of duty at all. But greater virtue is a perfection of our will, so we have a wide or meritorious duty to improve ourselves in that respect” (Wood, Kantian Ethics, 144).

²⁹ In pursuing this issue about the plausibility of Kant's conception of a general duty to be virtuous, I will sidestep an issue raised by Stratton-Lake, “Being Virtuous and the Virtues”; and Baron, Marcia, “Overdetermined Actions and Imperfect Duties,” in Klemme, Heiner, Kuehn, Manfred, and Schönecker, Dieter, eds., Moralische Motivation: Kant und die Alternativen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006), 23–37, esp. 27–29Google Scholar. This is the issue of 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) as being commanded by a general sense of duty rather than being recommended by prudence; I will not worry about how the obligatoriness of the policy is transmitted to particular actions on particular occasions.

³⁰ Wolff, Christian, Vernünftige Gedancken von der Menschlichen Thun und Lassen (1720), 4th ed. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1733), section 221Google Scholar.

³¹ Pütter, Johann Stephan and Achenwall, Gottfried, Anfangsgründe des Naturrechts (Elementa Iuris Naturae) (1750), ed. and trans. Schröder, Jan (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1995), sections 80, 82, p. 39Google Scholar.

³² As Kant makes clear in his Critique of Practical Reason, 5:40; Gregor, p. 172.

³³ This work was an abridgment of Pufendorf's De jure naturae et gentium libri octo (“On the law of nature and nations, in eight books”) of 1672. The Latin version was widely accessible, and the book was translated into English as early as 1691; the English edition, in turn, went through five editions by 1735. The latter edition of Andrew Tooke's translation has recently been republished as The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, ed. Hunter, Ian and Saunders, David (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003)Google Scholar. A modern English translation of the first edition of the work is Pufendorf, Samuel, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. Tully, James, trans. Silverthorne, Michael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. As the former includes some material not included in the latter, I will quote from both in what follows, distinguishing them by the different titles of the translations.

³⁴ Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Book I, chap. I, section 1, p. 17.

³⁵ Ibid., Book I, chap. II, section 2, p. 27.

³⁶ Ibid., Book I, chap. II, section 5, p. 28.

³⁷ Thus, the division of duties into those toward God, toward self, and toward others, was preserved in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Initia Philosophiae Practicae (Introduction to Practical Philosophy) published in 1760, and would, in turn, structure Kant's lectures on ethics, for which Baumgarten's book served as the text, at least as late as 1784–85, the date of the notes by Georg Ludwig Collins translated in Kant, Immanuel, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Heath, Peter and Schneewind, J. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (But note that the Collins transcription is largely identical to earlier transcriptions, such as that by Johann Friedrich Kaehler from the summer semester of 1777, published as Kant, Immanuel, Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, ed. Stark, Werner [Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004]Google Scholar, and may be a copy of an earlier set of notes rather than a transcription of what Kant actually said in 1784–85.) Of course, as we will see below, Kant denies that we have any duties directly to God.

³⁸ Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, Book I, chap. III, section 13, p. 37.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid., Book I, chap. III, section xiii, p. 60.

⁴¹ Here I quote from Tooke's 1735 translation: Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, Book I, chap. V, section ii, pp. 70–71.

⁴² Ibid., Book I, chap. V, section viii, p. 77.

⁴³ Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Book I, chap. V, section 3, p. 47.

⁴⁴ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section I, 6:379–80; Gregor, pp. 512–13.

⁴⁵ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, introduction, section IV, 6:220; Gregor, p. 384.

⁴⁶ Or nearly per impossibile: a human child who could be raised by wolves and never have contact with any other human beings is not among the empirical possibilities that have to be considered in a Kantian metaphysics of morals, which derives duties for human beings in the actual empirical conditions of their existence and not in imaginary conditions.

⁴⁷ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XIII, 6:405; Gregor, p. 533.

⁴⁸ Kant, Groundwork, section III, 4:446; Gregor, p. 94.

⁴⁹ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XVI, 6:409; Gregor, p. 537.

⁵⁰ Ibid., “Doctrine of Virtue,” section 22, 6:446–47; Gregor, p. 567.

⁵¹ Thus can the suggestion made by Wood in the passage cited in note 28 above be expanded.

⁵² Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XIII, 6:399; Gregor, p. 528.

⁵³ I have developed this interpretation of Kant's model of moral psychology at greater length in Guyer, Paul, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 4Google Scholar. Once again, Allen Wood puts the point succinctly: “Moral action proceeds from desires produced in us by rational choice” (Wood, Kantian Ethics, 183). Mary Gregor also wrote the following concerning “those inclinations which facilitate our fulfilment of duty”: “In so far as they have previously been cultivated with a view to this purpose they are, in part, the work of freedom.” See Gregor, Mary J., Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant's Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the “Metaphysik der Sitten” (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 175Google Scholar. But Gregor seems to have had in mind the cultivation of specific feelings such as feelings of sympathy, which Kant discusses under the rubric of duties of love to others, rather than the general moral feeling and tendency to conscience that he discusses in the introduction to the “Doctrine of Virtue.”

⁵⁴ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XIIa, 6:399–400; Gregor, pp. 528–29.

⁵⁵ 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 Herman, Barbara, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), chap. 4, pp. 73–93Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XIIb, 6:400–401; Gregor, pp. 529–30.

⁵⁷ Ibid., section XIII, 6:405; Gregor, p. 533.

⁵⁸ On Kant's distinction between affects and passions, see his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Book III, section 74, in Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Zöller, Günter and Louden, Robert B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 354Google Scholar. For commentary, see Wood, Kantian Ethics, 147–48.

⁵⁹ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” introduction, section XV, 6:408–9; Gregor, pp. 535–36.

⁶⁰ 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 Kant 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 (Stratton-Lake, “Being Virtuous and the Virtues,” 105). Stratton-Lake 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; instead, as we have already seen, it 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 to the “Doctrine of Virtue,” 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.

⁶¹ Note that Kant has reformed the entire Pufendorfian tradition (represented by Christian Wolff and his followers such as Alexander Baumgarten as well) of a tripartite distinction among duties to God, to self, and to others: Kant has already argued in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 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” (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” section 18, 6:443; Gregor, p. 564).

⁶² Part II of the “Doctrine of Virtue” is divided more simply, primarily into a section on “duties of love” toward others (the positive, imperfect duties of beneficence, gratitude, and sympathy) and a section 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, they are not perfect duties toward others included in the “Doctrine of Right.”

⁶³ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” sections 5–8.

⁶⁴ Ibid., section 19.

⁶⁵ Ibid., sections 9–12.

⁶⁶ Ibid., section 13, 6:437; Gregor, p. 559.

⁶⁷ Ibid., section 14, 6:441; Gregor, p. 562.

⁶⁸ Ibid., section 21, 6:446; Gregor, p. 566.

⁶⁹ Ibid., section 13, 6:438; Gregor, p. 560.

⁷⁰ Ibid., section 14, 6:441; Gregor, p. 562.

⁷¹ Ibid., section 15, 6:441; Gregor, p. 563.

⁷² Kant, Groundwork, 4:407; Gregor, p. 61.

⁷³ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, “Doctrine of Virtue,” section 21, 6:446; Gregor, p. 566.

⁷⁴ Ibid., section 22, 6:446; Gregor, p. 567.

⁷⁵ Although she does not directly discuss the obligation to be virtuous, Mary Gregor usefully distinguishes the imperfect character of striving to be virtuous—that there is no upper bound on how much one might strengthen the will to be moral—from the wide latitude of specific duties of virtue, such as the duty to cultivate one's talents. The latter duties leave one choice regarding whether or not to fulfill the duty in some particular fashion on some particular occasion, but cultivating the strength of our virtue is a task from which there is no remission. See Gregor, Laws of Freedom, 172–73.