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6 results

  • Kant’s Duty to Make Virtue Widely Loved

  • Michael L. Gregory
  • Journal:
    Kantian Review / Volume 27 / Issue 2 / June 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 March 2022, pp. 195-213
    Print publication:
    June 2022
    • Article
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  • This article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a formal agreement with what morality demands of us, such that the social graces give the illusion of virtue. The existence of such a duty can answer Schiller’s persistent objection that Kant’s ethics scares away the Graces with Duty.

  • 8 - What is the enemy of virtue?

  • Edited by Lara Denis, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book:
    Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
    Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010, pp 152-169

  • Summary

    In the Doctrine of Virtue, the apparently unambiguous enemy of virtue is the inclinations, understood as a natural force. This chapter compares the two scenarios: inclinations, then a particular state of a free, rational being, as the enemy of virtue. It distinguishes Kantian and Aristotelian virtue more clearly. Inclinations are "impulses of nature", operating according to the laws of the natural world. The relationship of virtue to freedom can be best understood by exploring Kant's idea of "inner freedom". Kant suggests that vicious acts occur when the strength of one's natural inclinations overwhelms the strength of one's inner freedom. In the Groundwork, Kant describes a person tempted, through a process of rationalization, perversion, or corruption, to avert his eyes from the categorical demands of morality. Vicious acts are perverse realizations of freedom, a turning of the strength of freedom on its head as weakness.

  • 9 - Freedom, primacy, and perfect duties to oneself

  • Edited by Lara Denis, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book:
    Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
    Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010, pp 170-191

  • Summary

    Kant attributes primacy to duties to oneself in general and perfect duties to oneself (PDS) in particular. Kant describes morality as "based on the conception of the human being as one who is free but who also, just because of that, binds himself through reason to unconditional laws". For the relationship between freedom and perfect duties to oneself to explain the primacy of PDS, especially tight, deep, or otherwise significant relations must hold between them. This chapter explicates three accounts of perfect duties to oneself. Within all three, Kant equates violating PDS with degrading oneself, subordinating one's rational freedom to other objects, impairing one's agency, and treating oneself as a thing or mere means. Kant's lectures on ethics and the Doctrine of Virtue provide distinct accounts of perfect duties to oneself.

  • 10 - Duties to and regarding others

  • Edited by Lara Denis, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book:
    Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
    Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010, pp 192-209

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses Kant's views on the nature of the beings to whom we can owe duties. It also discusses views held by Andrews Reath and Allen Wood about what it means to have a duty to a person. The chapter discusses the relationship between duties to a person and the claims she may have on us as a result of such duties. In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant offers a principle that he regards as the foundation of the division between obligations toward oneself and obligations toward others. Kant evidently thought that the necessity of willing our happiness together with our individual inability to achieve it implied the proposition that we cannot rationally will that everyone refuse to adopt anyone else's happiness as his end. The latter is the proposition he would need in order to gain the conclusion that the happiness of others is an obligatory end.

  • 4 - Kant's innate right as a rational criterion for human rights

  • Edited by Lara Denis, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book:
    Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
    Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010, pp 71-92

  • Summary

    The idea of a single innate right rests, as does the entire first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, upon a double distinction. Kant differentiates between two fundamentally distinct basic questions - what is "laid down as right" and "what is right" - and two fundamentally distinct doctrines of right, an empirical and a natural one. Thereupon follows reflections concerning the moral concept of right and the moral law of right, the authorization to employ force, and the turn of phrase "by virtue of his humanity". The chapter analyzes how Kant clarifies his thesis of an innate right in four statements, which only appear to refute his singular use of "human right". The conclusion further sharpens the focus already brought to Kant's thesis by mentioning two quasi-human rights. Even though Kant considers there to be only one innate human right, two further pronouncements are relevant to human rights.

  • 12 - Kant's Tugendlehre as normative ethics

  • Edited by Lara Denis, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book:
    Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
    Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010, pp 234-255

  • Summary

    In The Metaphysics of Morals, especially the Tugendlehre or Doctrine of Virtue, Kant clarifies, develops, and extends ideas that he presented in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. This chapter reviews some features of normative ethics that distinguish Tugendlehre from science, metaphysics, metaethics, and theories of law. It discusses the role of the basic moral principles in Kant's theory and how they relate to more specific principles. The chapter considers Kant's idea of duties to oneself and their relevance to certain contemporary discussions. Then, it discusses second-order duties to oneself that anticipate our liability to errors in moral judgment, ulterior motives, and weakness of will. Finally, the chapter notes some ways in which the Tugendlehre is incomplete. It is incomplete partly because Kant's aim was only to present the first principles of "the doctrine of virtue".